The end of the mesan alignement

Somtaaw wrote:Well, if Manticore learns that the Torch wormhole isn't a blackhole and that it leads to a hidden Mesan Alignment base, before the MAlign learns that Manticore knows it's doable.


Normally, you're entirely right attacking through a fortified wormhole is nothing more than a quick death, however Manticore's warfighting technology is so ridiculously far ahead of Mesan tech. As long as Mesa doesn't learn in time to reinforce the mere two battlecruiser squadrons (16 BC's), that 25-30ish Invictii with point defense on computer operated could force a beachead.

The Mesan battlecruisers are afterall, sitting out at missile range, not beam range, exactly as standard doctrine puts wormhole defenders. That coupled with much lower acceleration rates, they couldn't possibly get into beam range of a 30 SD Manticoran force in time to stop them from going fully combat effective.

The MAlign/Mannerheim BCs were in graser range during the Harvest Joy transit. I can't remember if DNs were within missile range or showed up later, but they're there now. That exit point is likely well-mined and seeded with missile pods by now.

Whatever the RMN sends, if anything, it couldn't be 25 SDs - that many would barely fit through the MWJ. The tonnage limit is probably significantly lower, since the Torch wormhole only has a single terminus.

Maldorian wrote:We don´t know if there is another hidden planet like darius, so, if DW want a backdoor he can bring darius down but show us a backup somewhere else who are stepping back into the planning Phase.

Remember the short story as ruth´s mother train to handle a space ship on a simutator? What is, if a slave do that, hide that, take over a corier ship whithout knowledge of everyone on Darius? If he appear in allied space the allice would have a working mesan hyperdrive and the Location of darius.

I think that is one of the keypoints, to find darius.

Masada had lots of people who were very pissed off at being oppressed. Darius, at least according to the author, doesn't.

Maldorian wrote:Another way would be the whormhole at torch. If the alliance imagine that the first ship could be destroyed by humqan Hands, they probably send a SD there and if such a ship pass the whormhole and find the second whormhole, the second one lead do darius, or? Or the capture one of the Guardian vessels at the whormhole almost intact to find astrogation data in their Computers.

As others have mentioned, this dead horse has been flogged to ribbons - it's not even useful to be skinned for leather now.

There are a number of ways of finding The Twins, Felix or Darius. All of them involve someone realizing that they have a critical piece of data, a lucky break or good old intelligence work.

Maldorian wrote:However DW will handle it, I can´t wait to read it!

Yeah, then we'll have something new to hash over rather than going over the same old questions, again and again and again.

Somtaaw wrote:Well, if Manticore learns that the Torch wormhole isn't a blackhole and that it leads to a hidden Mesan Alignment base, before the MAlign learns that Manticore knows it's doable.

The only way to learn that, though, is to take the other end of the wormhole, which would be far too late to affect the outcome of that particular battle. Even if they learn where the wormhole leads from a totally trustworthy source, the simple fact of the matter is that a wormhole assault will, at best be a pyrrhic victory.

Normally, you're entirely right attacking through a fortified wormhole is nothing more than a quick death, however Manticore's warfighting technology is so ridiculously far ahead of Mesan tech. As long as Mesa doesn't learn in time to reinforce the mere two battlecruiser squadrons (16 BC's), that 25-30ish Invictii with point defense on computer operated could force a beachead.

No, they couldn't. Even assuming that the mass ceiling for that wormhole is high enough to allow that many ships through in one go, all of Manticore's improvements have focussed on making its ships as deadly as they can be over very long ranges; they have, in essence, come to the conclusion that long-range artillery is the way to win battles, not hand-to-hand combat, and a wormhole assault is entirely hand-to-hand. Ironically enough, ships like the SLN Scientists are probably better suited to a wormhole assault, given that they were built with the expectation of eventually having to exchange energy-range broadside fire with their enemies.

And yeah, as stated by others above, there is little doubt that the picket forces have been upgraded substantially.

The Mesan battlecruisers are afterall, sitting out at missile range, not beam range, exactly as standard doctrine puts wormhole defenders. That coupled with much lower acceleration rates, they couldn't possibly get into beam range of a 30 SD Manticoran force in time to stop them from going fully combat effective.

They can, and will. They have up to a minute in which to pour fire into the SDs before their wedges come up, they can prepare the battlefield to their heart's content with mines, forts and other surprises.

The E wrote:They can, and will. They have up to a minute in which to pour fire into the SDs before their wedges come up, they can prepare the battlefield to their heart's content with mines, forts and other surprises.

I wonder what would happen if they took a page out of Starfire.

Build some wormhole assault craft. The core has near missile-grade acceleration (and like a missile burns out very quickly.) Around it is one layer of as many missile tubes as the firing arcs permit. Stacked above each missile tube is it's reloads.

Immediately upon making transit it streaks away wherever it might happen to be pointed, shedding missiles as it goes. The missile tubes are simply to get the missiles beyond fratricide range before their drives light off. When a missile is kicked out the next is shoved into position and as soon as the shover has retracted another missile drops into that slot. This should produce a firing rate much faster than conventional missile tubes, albeit at the expense of an awful lot fewer total missiles. (I'm picturing something similar to how bullets are loaded into a semi-automatic or automatic gun, except the bolt retracts as soon as it loads a round as there's no backblast that needs to be contained.

Of course the defenses will get this in pretty short order (it mounts no defenses of any kind) but it will have tossed a lot of missiles into flight before it's destroyed. We've seen how an unguided missile storm at very close range can be very nasty even against Havenite defenses, the Alignment defenses should be devastated by this.

Missiles seem to be able to bring up their wedges extremely fast and this thing is basically a glorified MIRV, it should be able to bring up it's drive nearly as fast as a missile can.

Since it's just a skeleton in space the mass should be low. A mass transit as heavy as the wormhole can take should leave the defenders facing a storm of thousands of missiles.

That's Skimper levels of not going to work, really. Word of God says that in order to make transit, you're going to need a ship big enough to require a crew, which means that whoever you're going to send out has to be ok with being sent on a kamikaze mission. That sort of thing makes it a no-go for most star nations. Even assuming that you could somehow make it work without that drawback, while a mass of missiles may sound impressive at first, the fact that they're going to start with a very low speed and aren't going to have good targeting info makes them rather easy to intercept.

Ultimately, as with many Skimper concepts, it's a solution in desperate need of a problem; it's easier to mine your end of the wormhole and deny it to the enemy than to try to assault through it (and if you do need to take it, well, going the long way around is certainly a better, less costly option than to build throwaway weapons for the sole purpose of performing one specific mission that will only come up once in a blue moon).

It's also got the minor drawback that it simply won't work at all.

You kick the missile out and it is instantly destroyed by the grav shear in the egress lane. You have to actually get out of the egress lane (which takes double digit seconds) before you can successfully launch missiles. And no, that isn't what you would think from internal dialog Honor had about the fortresses and missiles in OBS. But it is what it is.

We really have talked about this a lot.

Loren Pechtel wrote:Missiles seem to be able to bring up their wedges extremely fast and this thing is basically a glorified MIRV, it should be able to bring up it's drive nearly as fast as a missile can.

Since it's just a skeleton in space the mass should be low. A mass transit as heavy as the wormhole can take should leave the defenders facing a storm of thousands of missiles.

IIRC there is more than 100K km between where a ship emerges and where it is safe to power wedges. when A ship first arrives, it can't bring up it's wedge. if it does, the wedge is destroyed.

when a ship first arrives, it can't fire missiles. missiles fired will be destroyed, probably by the fact that they are solid matter inside a pocket of grav wave energy without a warsawaski sail. Best case scenario, they will be destroyed when they start their wedges.

Another one that undoubtedly won't work, but might be amusing to shoot down.

As soon as your drones transit, throw out a blizzard of radar corners, tuned to the frequencies used in grazers.

Wonder how much the grazers would get back in their faces before they blew the corners to plasma.

With regard to taking Darius, which would come after taking the high orbitals (however the MWW decides to do that) the which would most likely come after taking control of the wormhole (however he decides to do THAT), it would be useful to go back and reread H. Beam Piper's story about the Empire reclaiming the planet of slaves: Aditya. I found the story in the collection "Empire", the name of the story is: "A slave is a slave", my copy of which was published by Ace in 1981. It is frequently fun to read how the Old Masters did it in the Golden Age.

I don't know if we're heading in the right direction with this thread. We're focusing on finding and exposing Darius and I suspect that that misses the mark.

When I look at the problem that the Alignment faces and their actions with regards to the Republic (pre Duchene era) and I wonder if they can reveal Darius any time soon.

The entire reason for the Duchene plan was to discredit the only polity that was a fully functional government. Their concern was that an intact Republic of Haven would inevitable dilute their efforts to have the League reconstitute itself around the Factor.

With the Republic restored and allied with Manticore and Beowulf how does that change the dynamic? Posters have pointed out that Darius is how Mesa was supposed to work and therefore wouldn't be a victim of rebellion within the slave ranks. Not so fast.

The Alignment won't be able to open up about Darius until they have won. To expose the population of Darius (70% slaves IIRC) to the outside universe and its media and general population could very well expose them to the kind of ideas that could lead to social upheaval.

Therefore they will have to keep Darius buttoned up until the outside society can support the existence of slaves as a class within their society. As it stands today Mannerheim et al, don't have an official, constitutionally established slave class. Even within the RF they don't have the systems in place for these slaves to interact with anyone outside the slave-holding society that is Darius or Mesa. They certainly don't want to show their slave class how the rest of the slave-holding societies of the time treat their counterparts.

To sum up, the Alignment is trapped by the continued existence of free societies.

Just my $0.02