Congratulations! The war is over! Now what?

Loren Pechtel wrote:Coast requires a powerplant capable of lighting off the next stage.

The wedge on a missile does not start in the launch tube. At least not more than once per ship. The capacitors bring up the wedge once it has appropriately separated form the launching ship.

HB of CJ wrote:David Weber will do what he will do. Remember that. And do not forget the Mesans. Whatever the Mesans have and did, consider the Sollies will be able to do. The GA does not have a chance in hell. Yep!. Less than 5 years.

Imagine 10,000, no, 100,000 small new construction high tech Mesan designed Sollie built death ships with Mesan stealthed kinetic impact weapons. One thousand per inhabited GA planet. Do the math. Yikes! Ouch!

You GA lovers need to burn through this pesky fact. The Sollies will roll over the Grand Alliance. The entire Manticore system will resemble a big burned out trash pile. Honor needs to consider a good bolt hole. Yep.

You don't need anything like that if you plan to win by Eridani violation. The GA can wipe the Sollie worlds with kinetic bombardment, also.

A pod of three-stage missiles that have their maximum run hits with an energy similar to the dinosaur killer. A ballistic missile isn't a meaningful threat to a warship due to the lack of maneuvering ability but planets don't have wedges and sidewalls--and even if you intercept the missile you might not remove the threat. A laser cluster doesn't do squat, a PD missile is only useful if it engages far enough out the dust cloud has time to disperse. If the firing ship gives them as much of a boost as possible they'll be coming in at over .9c and without a wedge the SLN is limited to lightspeed tracking. Max radar range against ships is about a million km, they'll only be 100,000 km out at most by the time the radar pulse returns. Don't fire past a fleet and I would expect zero successful intercepts.

I don't think even the Mandarins are so stupid as to go that route, while they clearly don't recognize how badly they are outclassed (data points: The don't know GA has more than two-stage missiles, nobody has seen GA EW missiles in action and managed to report back, they don't know about Apollo) they have to realize that the GA has the ability to hit Solarian worlds and thus MAD applies.

kzt wrote:

Loren Pechtel wrote:Coast requires a powerplant capable of lighting off the next stage.

The wedge on a missile does not start in the launch tube. At least not more than once per ship. The capacitors bring up the wedge once it has appropriately separated form the launching ship.

But they're very limited in how much drift time they have. Only missiles with microfusion plants have meaningful drift time.

Loren Pechtel wrote:But they're very limited in how much drift time they have. Only missiles with microfusion plants have meaningful drift time.

Really? Where does it say that? Why do you think that is the case?

munroburton wrote:Oh, it's probably in the second Torch book, then. Or maybe one of the short stories. Oh well.

The 4,000 number isn't directly dropped; it was painfully put together using multiple sources of textev put together and is therefore pure guesswork. I'm damned if I'm going to dig it all up again - just trawl through my post history, it's down there somewhere.

The important part is the League's real membership numbers, plus its protectorates official and unofficial. That doesn't really exceed what, two and a half thousand in total? Still means they should have way more ships than they do systems if they do have over ten thousand lighter units in Frontier Fleet.

I think I finally see what the problem is, we are thinking of two different things.

Yes, if manticore was to start trading with the SL again, the GA could put one DD or CL in each system for piracy patrol. Question: if there was a GA light warship stationed in system, do you think that the SL will leave it alone, or will it gather a bunch of ships and kill it. Keep in mind that most light warships don't have and can't fire DDM's.

I looked at the threads you referenced in a prior post. They both talk about the number of worlds in the SL and the GA, but neither has any guess as to the TOTAL number of inhabited systems. Per the threads you mentioned: The exact number of known systems is something RFC has never specified to my knowledge.

In a large are of space, variations in density are ironed out. 1,787 SL member systems, the SL extends beetween 300-400LY from SOL, lets call it an average 350 LY for an average distance of 31 LY between systems.

The manticore colony ship jason left earth October 24, 775 PD. At 512 LY, there should have been enough colony ships leaving earth for 5,594 colonies as of more than a thousand years prior to the first haven maticore war. figuring a linear expansion, there should have been 13,714 colonies started as of 1900 PD.

We Know that the home planet of the andermanti empire is 750 LY from SOL. HAE mentioned gustove the 6th, is a prior emporer, now deceased, indicating that the andermanti empire has been in existence for at least 200 years, and probably longer. Since it's colony ship also traveled sublight, it had to leave the SOL system no later than 1,000 PD. Thus, enough colony ships have to have left earth in the first 1,000 years of colonization to colonize 15,000 worlds.

As multiple settled worlds have sent out daughter colonies, (haven, beowulf, and mesa are specifically mentioned) the growth rate would have become exponential in the last 1,000 years, after the warsawaski sail was invented, and particularly in the last 500 years. Potentially there exists the possibility for more than 200,000 inhabited systems.

Data showing that colonization speeding up has happened can be shown. Three times more colony ships were sent out in the 220 years after jason left earth than in the 774 years before the manticore colony ship left earth.

Personally, I suspect that there is somewhere on the order of 50,000 inhabited systems, but that is just the best estimate that I can make with available data.

What logic trail lead you to believe that there is only 4,000 total inhabited worlds? The 300 members of the GA and andy empire combined are just a tiny fraction of the sky arc. If the GA was to the galactic east, there is still the SE, S, SW, W, NW, N, NE, A,(above) AE, AS, AW, AN, B,(below) BE, BS, BW, BN. That works out to AT LEAST 5,400 inhabited worlds withing 750 LY of earth, and when you figure that there is colonies a lot further out than 750 LY, again you are looking at more than 10,000 colonies.

HB of CJ wrote:Yes, most of you have covered this before and I suspect you will covering it again. That however, does not ignore the pesky fact that there is no way the GA can take on and defeat the Sollies.

What you have here is an arms race. Yep the GA has the advantage right now. But do not forget the Mesans. Their job is to destroy both the Sollies and the GA. How will they do this? By being nice?

Nope. Mesan tech given to the Sollies. Vast new Sollie new construction. They will out build the GA at least 100 to one. Again, do the math. The graphs cross in about one year. After that?

It will be all over for the GA. It will be all over for Manticore. The new tech Sollie builds will overwhelm and destroy the GA. This goes against the fuzzy feelie notion of HH always winning.

She will for awhile. She will try the Harrington Plan. Probably will not work. All she will do is piss off the 1700 industrialized Sollie planets. Plus all the verge Sollie controlled systems.

Yes this goes again the grain and false consensus here. Lots of hand waving. My analysis is based on real world potentials. Not science fiction. David may do anything. Be fun reading it.

Respectfully. I love this Forum.

What Mesan tech?

Streak drive--it gets you there faster, it doesn't help you fight. Still nothing compared to the GA's wormholes.

Spider drive--stealthy but Oyster Bay was a one-shot. Now that they realize there can be a threat without wedges it's unlikely to get through.

The graser torpedoes--basically a super-warhead missile. To be of any use you have to get a missile through in the first place. The only time the SLN has scored on the GA was the attempted mousetrap at Manticore and that was only because the GA allowed them within range.

The mind control--you need to know too much about the situation for it to be of widespread use. The cats can detect it, they aren't likely to get any top people with it, either.

Hold your horses. I never said there were 4,000 total. Known total is a different thing.

munroburton wrote:1) The total number of known inhabited systems is about 4,000. 1800 of them are League members, with "hundreds" of protectorates in the Verge.

I refer to systems that are actively involved in the deeper interstellar community. Verge within reach of OFS, the SEM, AE, Haven(and its ex-conquests), Silesia and so on.

It does not refer to, for example, the systems far north of Basilisk and beyond that radius from Sol. Before HotQ, it wouldn't count Grayson/Masada. Tiberian may not count either, in the same way an insular, mostly agarian Caribbean island nation didn't count whenever two European navies or pirates showed up offshore for a fight.

I already agreed with you that there are far, far more out there. The point at discussion I was trying to make was that as far as the League is concerned, those places are below the dignity of even being noticed. The SEM may be less insensitive(or not - "manty arrogance" is a recognised stereotype), but even its merchants doesn't go where there is no profit to be made.

HB of CJ wrote:Yes, most of you have covered this before and I suspect you will covering it again. That however, does not ignore the pesky fact that there is no way the GA can take on and defeat the Sollies.

What you have here is an arms race. Yep the GA has the advantage right now. But do not forget the Mesans. Their job is to destroy both the Sollies and the GA. How will they do this? By being nice?

Nope. Mesan tech given to the Sollies. Vast new Sollie new construction. They will out build the GA at least 100 to one. Again, do the math. The graphs cross in about one year. After that?

It will be all over for the GA. It will be all over for Manticore. The new tech Sollie builds will overwhelm and destroy the GA. This goes against the fuzzy feelie notion of HH always winning.

She will for awhile. She will try the Harrington Plan. Probably will not work. All she will do is piss off the 1700 industrialized Sollie planets. Plus all the verge Sollie controlled systems.

Yes this goes again the grain and false consensus here. Lots of hand waving. My analysis is based on real world potentials. Not science fiction. David may do anything. Be fun reading it.

Respectfully. I love this Forum.

So the Mesan master plan is to arm and strengthen the League to a point where it cannot be defeated? Are you sure we are discussing the same series? I mean it would explain a lot.

Loren Pechtel wrote:Spider drive--stealthy but Oyster Bay was a one-shot. Now that they realize there can be a threat without wedges it's unlikely to get through.

The graser torpedoes--basically a super-warhead missile. To be of any use you have to get a missile through in the first place.

Using a DD squadron I can tie down at least 1/2 of the RMN by sending them out to respond to events a few light months out. And if the RMN isn't willing to dedicate many hundreds of light to heavy warships to perimeter control then they will get their head handed to them again.

Let's say I have a freighter that exits hyper heading for the WHJ. It takes 4 hours to reach it, during which time the crew unloads 20 graser torps. Which very slowly head in the direction of the main fleet anchorage...

kzt wrote:Ok, I'll buy that.

Though it has been mentioned by several different PoV characters at different times that in theory you could just bolt full sized missiles together to produce a totally impractical MDM. Which raises the question about how impractical something is when it's the only solution you have.

I'm kicking myself. I also should have checked my cheat-sheet file of RFC posts; many good ones never made it over to the pearls site. (Just found it now while looking to see if he'd ever happened t0 post anything about using them with a coast phase)

He made one that covered Cataphracts in the thread SD(P) vs. SD(P) combat, back in 2012, that talked in more detail about the Cataphract.

The relevant part appears to be.

runsforcelery wrote:Once Manticore recognized the laser head's potential to inflict decisive damage in missile combat, the decision-making process changed. Extended range suddenly became a highly desirable commodity, but it turned out to be a very, very difficult thing to achieve. In fact, there's a very specific reason Mesa/Technodyne went with the "piggyback" missile approach in the Cataphract rather than the multidrive approach adopted by Manticore. That reason is that Manticore solved the problem of how to squeeze additional drives into the same missile body and Mesa still hasn't. The Cataphract is effectively two missiles being launched out of the same tube, with the smaller missile body sufficiently separated from the drive nodes of the main missile body to avoid the problems Manticore overcame in its development process. The nature of the primary difficulty is one of the reasons the Sollies so persistently refused to accept that Manticore could possibly have genuine multidrive missiles, and it's going to take quite a while for them [the Sollies] to figure out how it's done unless they manage to get their hands on a few specimens and/or their intelligence agencies manage to get sufficient penetration to steal the specifications.

And another one in "The GA needs to go on the offensive against the SL and SLN" (sorry for not digging up the link to this one as well)
"There is a reason Technodyne's approach in the Cataphract was to put what amounts to an entirely separate missile on the nose of the main missile."