The Misalignment of MA plans?

Kytheros wrote:The MAlign pulled the trigger on Oyster Bay way earlier than planned because Manticore had just used Apollo - which they believed broke the combat paradigm and balance of power about as much as Operation Buttercup did.

Apollo meant that Haven was completely and utterly screwed, despite having MDMs and Podnoughts of their own, which meant the war with Haven was basically over - and that meant that Manticore would be free to focus on the League - and the League would be even more screwed.
Specifically, the League might be sufficiently screwed that the Mandarins and the like wouldn't go the way the MAlign wanted, but even if they did, there wouldn't be any way for Manticore to get crushed in the fighting.

I still don't see how that would have been a problem in the long run. It simply would have painted a bullseye on a different target, same as what has happened now.

Continue to watch from the sidelines and allow Manticore to defeat Haven, then focus on Manticore. The thing that is nagging me, is that they allowed their timeline to be so rushed, that even if it was successful in destroying the League and even busting Manticore and Haven back to the Stone Age, there would have been enough time elapsed by the time they emerged out of their closets that there would have been a rebuilt RMN and/or RHN anyways.

If they would have gone and simply allowed nature to take its course, then there would only have been two Super Powers - the SLN and the mini-alliance of Manticore&Grayson. Then set those two against each other if that same type of plan still appealed to them. Two is one less variable therefore inherently less complicated than three. (counting RMN&Grayson as one - joined at Honor's hip)

It sure would be nice if we knew just how prematurely Oyster Bay was hatched. Textev?

Another thing that seriously bewilders me is the effort that the MA put in developing a fleet of ships that don't actually fight a traditional battle.

One of my Ro friends, during the "Economics of Piracy" thread asked me, "what is the purpose of MA ships if all they were going to do with them was act like mercenaries destroying infrastructure?"

That is loads of money, effort and much time poured into development and construction building high-priced mercenary ships. Because beyond that they seem to be as useless as Sonja's testbed after one use.

Why couldn't they have built the ships to defend their system after they were ready to emerge and jam their flag into Darius dirt and claim "We exist and we claim Darius in the name of MA science?" It isn't like they have prime real estate that anybody wants.


Edit: editing.

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cthia wrote:It sure would be nice if we knew just how prematurely Oyster Bay was hatched. Textev?

At least a year, probably two. The big spiders were still under construction when the Oyster Bay force got home.

The upper limit? Can't be much more than five years - Haven would possibly have won by then.

IMO, the MAlign plans went off track when the Lynx terminus was discovered. They thought it was the perfect opportunity to engineer a confrontation - and once Crandall was deployed on her cute training exercise, they couldn't abort or delay the Sol-Manticore war. Oyster Bay was rushed because without Haven on Manticore's back, the Solarians would collapse too quickly for the MA's plans.

Another thing that seriously bewilders me is the effort that the MA put in developing a fleet of ships that don't actually fight a traditional battle.

Who said they were incapable of fighting a naval battle?

cthia wrote:Another thing that seriously bewilders me is the effort that the MA put in developing a fleet of ships that don't actually fight a traditional battle.

If you know that everyone fights a certain way, that combat paradigms have become fixed and deeply ingrained in the mindset of every navy out there, looking for ways to wage an asymmetric war is the intelligent choice. If the Alignment had chosen to play the same game as everyone else, they would have needed to build an enormous amount of infrastructure that probably would not have been so easy to conceal.

One of my Ro friends, during the "Economics of Piracy" thread asked me what the purpose of MA ships is if all they were going to do with them was act like mercenaries destroying infrastructure?

That is loads of money, effort and much time poured into development and construction building high-priced mercenary ships. Because beyond that they seem to be as useless as Sonja's testbed after one use.

This is certainly true for the ships we've seen so far, but it's like looking at a WW2 diesel-electric submarine and wondering how submarines could ever be of strategic importance, given how hard it would be for one of them to sink a modern aircraft carrier. We do not know the capabilities of the larger ships, and more importantly, we don't know the tactical doctrines the MA has developed for them.

Duckk wrote:

Another thing that seriously bewilders me is the effort that the MA put in developing a fleet of ships that don't actually fight a traditional battle.

Who said they were incapable of fighting a naval battle?

I got that feeling from a few posts. Things like, "The MA can't go toe to toe with the RMN." "They aren't interested in a traditional war, they want to do it politically," yatta yatta yatta.

Yet, if there are traditional war fighting ships on the horizon, then my question becomes even more zealous. Why not wait until all of the tech was complete without having made enemies of navies, then emerge as a new polity as the RF with all of their tech and tactics thus far (nanites, ships, Anisimovna, sleepers, Houdini) ready to unleash on whatever overweight gorilla that held the big banana - daring them to oppose your political stance and ready to defend your borders? Then they would have been free to slowly incorporate their perfected genetic designs onto the galaxy at large. And free to legally attempt to impose their political will as well. Eventually the galaxy has to accept a new kid on the block if he isn't attacking you militarily. There's no law against staking out an unclaimed region of the galaxy, especially if the MA gene mods are the only species capable of occupying said system(s).

And if they had stand-up ships on the assembly line then they must have had a target planned as well. Who was the original target - if they had planned for the League to have long since been gone and for Haven and Manticore to have destroyed each other?

And who shall be their target now? Which all comes back to, why jump the gun with any of their original plans until all construction and peripheral plans were complete. Then they could have kept the heat on after an Oyster Bay, sent their bigger ships in immediately on the heels of Oyster Bay to clean up.

Can you imagine if those big ships had come over the hyperwall while tugs were trying to save the planet?

Eagleeye wrote:To seize Lynx Terminus, the MA had to do that in the short timeframe between the discovery of the Terminus and the petition of the Talbott cluster worlds to get incorporated into the Star Kingdom. That would be impossible to do without a coming out of the Alignment itself, because any pawns in the region wouldn't be able to attack. After all, even the RMN of the High Ridge era would probably eat the Monican Navy (for example) for breakfeast.

No, the BCs Monica had were perfectly capable of defeating what tiny forces were covering the Terminus. They also had minelayers to keep the RMN away while they stole lots of packaged for transport parts. And it was Manpower and Technodyne, not OFS or the MAN that would have been shown to back this. It's all very carefully laid out in the book. But David had them stopped.

kzt wrote:No, the BCs Monica had were perfectly capable of defeating what tiny forces were covering the Terminus. They also had minelayers to keep the RMN away while they stole lots of packaged for transport parts. And it was Manpower and Technodyne, not OFS or the MAN that would have been shown to back this. It's all very carefully laid out in the book. But David had them stopped.

Yeah, but that plan was banking on Manticore's willingness to let a challenge of ownership over a wormhole terminus stand.

The E wrote:

kzt wrote:No, the BCs Monica had were perfectly capable of defeating what tiny forces were covering the Terminus. They also had minelayers to keep the RMN away while they stole lots of packaged for transport parts. And it was Manpower and Technodyne, not OFS or the MAN that would have been shown to back this. It's all very carefully laid out in the book. But David had them stopped.

Yeah, but that plan was banking on Manticore's willingness to let a challenge of ownership over a wormhole terminus stand.

Monica's plan had that, they were going to be disappointed. One would assume Technodyne and the MA's secret plan did not expect that. But with several fortresses worth of Apollo hardware, full technical docs, and thousands of pods one would assume that the R&D guys on Darius would be able to somewhat speed up certain MAN R&D efforts. Not to mention they would have obtained huge amounts of other systems and documentation. Having a working version of the RMN EW warheads, countermeasures, PDLC trackers, missile launchers, CMs etc makes it a lot easier to fully understand how to fight the RMN effectively.

What they did not anticipate was an RMN Captain by the name of Terekhov launching a a preemptive strike against Monica without getting permission from higher authorities.