Scenario of War with the League

darrell wrote:
One thing that you are forgetting, in a 1910 PD world, the GA dosen't have as big a missile advantage as it does in 1922. Therefore all the objections about the SL replacing SD's has a fatal flaw, the reserve.

The SL looses half it's active SD's? it should be able to activate each reserve SD in a matter of weeks instead of the years that building a new SD would take.

Therefore, in a 1910 SL war, the GA has to do deep penetration raids to destroy the reserve ships.

The bulk of if not the whole Reserve is obsolete even by the SLN's own technology, many of the ships are 100+ years old which means that those ships would have to be heavily upgraded to be considered anything other than a death trap. Many were built before the laser head became a thing, missile combat was not as dominating and thus likely have ineffective PD and worse their EW is centuries out of date.


To make them effective combat ships they would require a lot of ship yard time and more importantly they would require a crew since I doubt that the SLN keeps 35+ million spacers in their pay just in case a war breaks out where they need the reserve.

Weird Harold wrote:

The E wrote:And, well. In every single one of those cases, even the SLN knows that an assault through a fortified wormhole is about the least survivable attack strategy imaginable.

The SLN certainly didn't act like they knew that when they tried to send 100 SDs through from Beowulf in "support" of "Raging Justice."

I do wonder why they tried that tactic, because you should be right.

If I remember correctly, that was intended to draw out Beowulf and draw attention to them supporting Manticore. The Admiral in charge of those SD's was supposed to withdraw graciously after Beowulf made it's position known rather than antagonize the situation.

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I will also just say that I do not recall ever having said that “the destruction of planets was the norm” before the Eridani Edict. The reason the Eridani Edict was created was, in large part, as the horrified response to a highly unusual situation in which direct, genocidal planetary attack(s) had occurred. It was the very unusualness of the attack which provoked the Edict to prevent any recurrence; this is not something which the galaxy is suddenly going to find acceptable as a routine tactic just because there’s no one left to enforce the Edict against the perpetrators, and anyone so frigging stupid as to try something like this is going to solidify opposition to his efforts pretty damned quickly. An awful lot of people seem appallingly willing to consider that Mesa is perfectly prepared to start knocking off planets ‘if only’ it can find a way to lay the blame for the attacks on the SEM, but I doubt very much that would be the case, if only because of the difficulty of doing that without it’s coming home to bite the people who tried it and because if they did manage to create a situation in which people started planet-busting, the SEM would --- with enormous regret but great rapidity --- start busting the planets of anyone who tried to give them the same treatment in retaliation . . . and the Grand Alliance is going to be able to do it better than anyone else for the foreseeable future.

We’re talking balance of terror here, people. The Edict took the terror out of the “mutual assured destruction” format because there was a third party --- the SL --- prepared to enforce the specified penalty against either side, but the knowledge that the other side (or its allies) will do the same thing to you and/or your allies if you try it should be pretty darned deterring, too.

EDIT:

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You can call it “author’s fiat” if you wish, but I don’t understand what the fascination with greater and greater atrocities really is. For some reason, some readers want to posit ever greater monstrosities and then argue that “it only makes sense” for them to happen.

I suppose I could treat it as an indication that people are sufficiently invested in my fictional universe to feel deeply and strongly and to explore all the options. In fact, however, it reminds me of a debate my friend Richard Earnshaw had with people who were so upset with Bernardus Van Dort for feeling horrified by the death inflicted on the terrorists attacked by Aivars Terekhov’s Marines in Shadow of Saganami. I’m not asserting that the cases are identical, but rather that they demonstrate a . . . detachment, perhaps, from the moral, philosophical, and empathic “realities” underlying my literary universe as they tend to underlie the world in which we live, as well.

Are there lunatics who would be so incredibly stupid and so horrendously lacking in both rationality and empathy as to embrace the sort of strategy being recommended here? There probably are. They aren’t the people running the Mesan Alignment, however. The empathy argument might not carry a lot of weight with them, but the rationality one certainly would, as I pointed out in my previous post. You may reject my reasoning, but that’s where that “authorial fiat” comes in. I know what the underlying political factors and public opinion factors are in the Honorverse. I know how long and how thoroughly the Eridani Edict has been internalized by the Solarian League and everyone else living in it. And I know how the polities of the Honorverse will react to an open and intentional Eridani Edict violation.

cthia wrote:Part of me still balks at the notion that hardcore, passionate, splintering League factions won't become bands of terrorists hellbent to make the GA pay in the worst conceivable way.

What's stopping new bands of Warnicke-like entities from deciding to splinter from the League with anti-GA ulterior motives in hand, in order to commit Eridani acts of violence as splinter cells that have no nation to attack in vengeance?

I don't think the League can call on any degree of loyalty from it's citizens.

Most bad guys will see the opportunity to create their own little empire whether in the protectorates, the shell or even the core. I doubt any ultra-nationalists will attack the GA unless the GA goes off the rails and starts to attack inhabited planets and destroy them.

Castenea wrote:

darrell wrote:One thing that you are forgetting, in a 1910 PD world, the GA dosen't have as big a missile advantage as it does in 1922. Therefore all the objections about the SL replacing SD's has a fatal flaw, the reserve.

The SL looses half it's active SD's? it should be able to activate each reserve SD in a matter of weeks instead of the years that building a new SD would take.

Therefore, in a 1910 SL war, the GA has to do deep penetration raids to destroy the reserve ships.

Actually this is where many of us see the SLN Plans falling apart. While in this scenario the GA likely does not survive to see the SL fall apart, the SLN would be forced to leave most of the League naked. While the cat's away the mice will play.

The SL has no realistic plan for activating their reserve, possibly no plan for this at all. Thus while the first 10 to 100 SDs might be activated in under a year, they will then run into the twin problems of training the spacers to man them, and shortages of key parts due to them being missing from the stored ships due to graft.

If I remember correctly, 3/4 of the reserve still uses auto cannons so even if the other 1/4 was more modern it would still require massive upgrades to their systems. An SD from 1910 is significantly more advanced than an SD from 1810 the may or may not have received much in the way of an upgrade.

To upgrade those ships the SLN would need to put them in shipyards that they desperately need for new construction.

darrell wrote:That assumes that you can even find the pods. Pods are stelthed, solly recon drones are C**P, the pods can be offset up to 5MKM of the straight line, and they don't have to evenly spaced, some can be 3 minutes travel time apart, others can be 5. That gives a BIG volume to search for a stealthed pod in. Sure, if they knew what they were looking for and they had good recon drones and manticore didn't eliminate their drones they could find the majority of the.

Add to the fact that a balistic missle has to be aimed precicely to be able to kill a pod.

Not that precisely. All pods towed outside the wedge were apparently rendered inoperable as a side effect of laserheads engaging the ships towing them. That means that the nuke on a laserhead was able to take out a pod from at least 30,000 km away.

You need to guess fairly well where the pod is, relative to it's range. But not that well; nor do you have to actually spot it with your RD. Close counts when you're talking about nuclear weapons

SDMs really changes the calculus about pods compared to the later MDMs.

Jonathan_S wrote:the nuke on a laserhead was able to take out a pod from at least 30,000 km away.

You need to guess fairly well where the pod is, relative to it's range. But not that well; nor do you have to actually spot it with your RD. Close counts when you're talking about nuclear weapons

SDMs really changes the calculus about pods compared to the later MDMs.

I like math. It puts a rough box on a problem. Shall we indulge?

A 5MT nuc here on earth is good for roughly a radius of 10km to destroy a structure(using nice even pwr of 10 numbers). Of course that is in air which hugely magnifies the destructiveness. Warheads are 50Mt in Honorverse on their laser heads. Another nice even ~10 multiplication factor.

What cone factor percentage does one have to achieve to kill something at 30,000km if we assume the above numbers. Yea they are BS, but hey.

Pwr of 1(5Mt) = 10km radially
pwr of 10(50Mt) = 2.15*10km or a mere 20.1km

Lets turn a radial blast into quadrant. Increase pwr of 8
Cube root of 8 = 2 This obtains a "whopping" 40.2km range for destructive power.

We need 30,000km... Uh.... You have got to be kidding me... But, what the hell, lets solve it.

30,000/10 = 3000 x distance. Power drops by the cube of distance so, 3000^3 = 27 BILLIONth of a radial blast must a nuclear bomb be focused into... for a 5Mt. 2.7Billiont of radial blast of a 50Mt nuclear warhead.

So, 360 degrees x 360 degrees = 129,600 singular "nodal points" on a iterive sphere.
2.7BILLIon/129,600 = 1/20,000 of a degree.....

1/20,000th degree..... Uh, said focus cone just completely missed its laser heads...

Loren Pechtel wrote:
The problem is you are looking only at shipboard firepower. At the specified time Manticore has pods, the SLN does not. The SLN is going to behave according to doctrine--they're going to go for Manticore. They'll probably meet half of Manticore's fleet (a fight I think they would win) and a whole bunch of pods seeded in space. The SLN eats salvo after salvo from empty space. They might choose to shoot back at best they kill empty pods. By the time the fleets engage the SLN has been ravaged.

Pods are a well understood technology. Notice how everyone had them in ASVW? Notice how the SLN was able to mount them to attack Manticore? Everyone has them everywhere.

munroburton wrote:ONI has treecats available. Wholesale counter-penetration on that scale that isn't going to happen!

Sure. They work so well that Mesa planted an agent as a government minister. As recent events have shown in the real world, anyone at that level has access to enormous piles of secrets only vaguely connected to the conduct of foreign policy.

kzt wrote:Pods are a well understood technology. Notice how everyone had them in ASVW? Notice how the SLN was able to mount them to attack Manticore? Everyone has them everywhere.

Common kzt. We all know perfectly well none of those pods the SLN used at BOMA II came from SLN stocks.