Terms of Surrender (for the Mandarins)

Eagleeye wrote:Captain Gweon predicted ...

Capt Gweon is a MAlign agent, so the spin on his prediction is suspect. At the very least, he presented the worst possible case.

HB of CJ wrote:The USA and particular the USN in WW2 did just fine. We reduced the world's third, (3rd) largest modern navy, (Japan) in less than 4 years to scrap iron and that was just the stuff still afloat.

Yeah, we had a slight head start, (Two Ocean Navy Law) but the real war was in Europe and THAT one caught the USA flat footed. We all know how that war ended up; even quicker than the Pacific navy war.

Again, it is just running the numbers. How many systems does the GA have? How many are heavily industrialized? How many industrialized systems do the Sollies have? Divide the small number into the big number. The GA will not even begin to be able to keep up.

Everything the GA can do right now, the Sollies will be able to do 100 times better in LESS THAN THREE YEARS. Do the math. Now do the math for 5 years! Even with the Andes commenting suicide and joining up with the GA, the GA is doomed in the end. Yikes!

If I were the GA, the last thing I would want to do is piss off that sleeping giant, the Sollie League. I see no way to win this coming shooting match ... in the end all the equations indicated a total GA defeat. Total. Manticore slagged. Everybody dead and gone.

Respectfully.

The League worlds have a lot of latent industrial muscle that could be converted or built up to build a truely mind bogglingly large navy.

But I doubt they could fix the tech imbalance in 3 years - much less build the yards, then the ships, to use that new tech that fast.


WWII isn't a fair comparison because for the most part to US Navy equipment was roughly comperable to the Japanese (with notable exceptions like torpedoes). The US could have won the war (with admittedly somewhat higher, but not affordable, casualties) if the Navy was given nothing but a stream of ships and planes designs already available at the end of 1941. A flotilla of Yorktown-class carriers (flying Wildcats fighters and Dautless dive bombers), escorted by North Carlolina-class BBs, Atlanta-class AACLs, and Somer-class DDs could have crushed the IJN through attrition. (Though I admit they'd have been hard pressed to pull off the island hopping strategy without all the customized amphibious support / assault ships and landing craft designed after the start of the war)

An endless stream of Scientist-class SDs and Nevada or Indefatigable-class BCs (even equipped with Cataphracts) are little more than sitting ducks for most Manticoran formations.
Kind of like if the best the US had to crank out on Dec 8th 1941 was a stream of Indian-class pre-dreads (like USS Oregon from the Spanish American war) and repeats of the USS Langley (CV-1) flying biplane Goshawks fighters and Curtiss SBC Helldivers divebombers.


Given time, yes the League worlds will acquire Manticoran military technology, whether by reverse engineering, espionage, or just inventing better tech themselves. But I'd estimate more like 10-15 years than 3-5. Even Manticore, acknowledged as having the quickest and more efficient shipyards in known space took the better part of 2 years simply to build an SD(P) from known and vetted designs. The League worlds would take close to 3 to complete a new Scientist-class; giving exactly no time to research or steal better tech, make and vet a new design based around it, or build up their deliberately starved shipyards in order to hit your 3 year miracle.

Eagleeye wrote:Minor nit#2: It is much easier to change the mindset of a population of just a continent than it is to change the mindset of a population of - what? - 200 or so? worlds (if we only count the core worlds of the SL). Communication delay times come to mind; and the fact, that noone - not one, and not in the better part of a thousand years of recorded history - attacked the Solarian League in any serious way. Oh, there were some small wars with solarian forces involved (that simulated battle (based on a real one) that Harkness changed on board of PNS Tepes comes to mind), but never in their history the SL faced a contender with such an ability to hurt them. That has to sink in, first. (And that is only the one they know about. The Mesan Alignment isn't even acknowledged by the mandarins as a contender against the Solarian League)

But after the better part of a 1,000 years of peace (at least as far as the core worlds are concerned) you simply can't push a button and put a whole civilisation on a war footing from one day to another. Impossible. Not with all the corruption and all the "not here invented"-mindset, accumulated through these long years of peace.

China after it's long isolation and then coming into contact with the west comes to mind.

In what way?

Although the exact route to power has changed, I'm not noticing any huge differences in mindset between, say, Tang China and Xi China.

Loren Pechtel wrote:

Eagleeye wrote:Minor nit#2: It is much easier to change the mindset of a population of just a continent than it is to change the mindset of a population of - what? - 200 or so? worlds (if we only count the core worlds of the SL). Communication delay times come to mind; and the fact, that noone - not one, and not in the better part of a thousand years of recorded history - attacked the Solarian League in any serious way. Oh, there were some small wars with solarian forces involved (that simulated battle (based on a real one) that Harkness changed on board of PNS Tepes comes to mind), but never in their history the SL faced a contender with such an ability to hurt them. That has to sink in, first. (And that is only the one they know about. The Mesan Alignment isn't even acknowledged by the mandarins as a contender against the Solarian League)

But after the better part of a 1,000 years of peace (at least as far as the core worlds are concerned) you simply can't push a button and put a whole civilisation on a war footing from one day to another. Impossible. Not with all the corruption and all the "not here invented"-mindset, accumulated through these long years of peace.

China after it's long isolation and then coming into contact with the west comes to mind.

China is in no way comparable to the Solarian League, except for a consistent belief throughout most of history that it was the centre of the known universe.

Yes, for most of history it had an enormous proportion of the global population, but at no point did the Chinese population come even remotely close to even half of the world population. TheLeague contains what, seventy to eighty percent of the total galactic population of humans?

Despite the Solarians' belief that they alone are civilized and everyone else are 'neobarbarians', they still have an avid interest in the major developments occurring in prominent non-Solarian star nations. The Chinese, for the most part, have always been utterly disinterested and disinformed about even their closest neighbours.

One area where the Chinese were similar to the Solarians is that for most of history they were net exporters of innovation.

However, the Chinese have had a millennia-old national identity that was built upon a shared philosophy and on the concept of service to the emperor. That concept was sacred to them. They regarded (and continue to regard) themselves as Chinese first and as Han or Hui or Zhuang, or from Jilin or Anhui or Hubei second.

The Solarians have no such deeply entrenched self-identity. They're citizens of their homeworlds first, and their identity as Solarians comes a very distant second and is extremely superficial.

That deeply-entrenched sense of themselves as Chinese in combination with their huge population and economic might have had some very interesting historical consequences for China. One major consequence has been that although China had suffered numerous successful invasions over the millennia, she had never experienced a successful conquest.

The League, on the other hand, is held together only by a very flimsy glue - that of the League Navy's reputation. The moment that glue dissolves the entire edifice will start coming apart.

Jonathan_S wrote:WWII isn't a fair comparison because for the most part to US Navy equipment was roughly comparable to the Japanese (with notable exceptions like torpedoes).

[...]

Also, the IJN had essentially no ability to attack American industry. Due to how hyperspace works, there's no system in the League that's safe from a GA battle fleet.

There are four fundamental points on which any comparison of the League's and pre-WW2 USA's situations collapse.
First, the relative tech imbalance. Oh, sure, the USA was a tech disadvantage in a lot of ways, but the differences were of degree, rather than kind - most of the tech differences were relatively incremental. They were at a point where quantity has a quality - they were close enough in quality that their massive advantage in quantity could and did overwhelm qualitative disadvantages. The SLN is years, if not decades, away from closing the technological gap to where their quantitative advantages can overcome their qualitative disadvantages. Even after that tech gap is closed enough, it's still another few years minimum to design and then build the first units utilizing that technology.
Second, the United States was never truly in serious danger of a major attack or invasion - it was too difficult for Japan or Germany to project more force than light raiding forces with limited time on station before needing to head home. And the US's industry was not seriously threatened. The GA can get to anywhere in the League it wants to get in whatever force it wants to send without any difficulties whatsoever.
Third, the United States was a unified nation-state, with a national identity, and a strong central government that had plenty of ability to raise funds. The League is not a nation, it is not united, its citizens identify with their home system/system of residence, and it does not have a strong central government. The League is in serious danger of fracturing and collapsing without anyone from the outside trying to make that happen, and both the MAlign and the GA are going to be putting a lot of effort into breaking up the League.
Fourth, the United States could send news, information, etc, anywhere within an extremely short period of time, and the information loop wasn't much longer - even for hardcopy documentation. The League takes weeks to months for one-way information travel, and the only shortcuts are the wormholes, which Laocoon II will have almost entirely closed off. Sol could get swallowed by a space monster tomorrow, and it would take months for the rest of the League to find out about it.




You can't really compare the League politically to any modern nation. The League is perhaps more of a loose alliance or confederation of city-states (representing individual systems) than anything else. A citizen of the League thinks of themselves first as a citizen of their homeworld/home system, the League second. Primary loyalties are not to the League.

Kytheros wrote:You can't really compare the League politically to any modern nation. The League is perhaps more of a loose alliance or confederation of city-states (representing individual systems) than anything else. A citizen of the League thinks of themselves first as a citizen of their homeworld/home system, the League second. Primary loyalties are not to the League.

You mean like the loyalty of southerners to their state rather than to some newly thrown together confederacy? Remind me what percentage of the male population of the CSA was killed or wounded in this war?

kzt wrote:

Kytheros wrote:You can't really compare the League politically to any modern nation. The League is perhaps more of a loose alliance or confederation of city-states (representing individual systems) than anything else. A citizen of the League thinks of themselves first as a citizen of their homeworld/home system, the League second. Primary loyalties are not to the League.

You mean like the loyalty of southerners to their state rather than to some newly thrown together confederacy? Remind me what percentage of the male population of the CSA was killed or wounded in this war?

Not exactly, no.
In the American Civil War, the CSA had a clear and obvious "external" enemy they could point to in the Union and Lincoln and what they said he and his supporters wanted to do to the South. And the average southerner believed it, or mostly did. And, before the secession, there was something of a national identity that got transferred to the Confederacy. There was a unifying concept and ideals for the CSA.
The League points to Manticore, Haven, the GA as a whole, and says, what? These neo-barbs are an existential threat to the League and the League needs to unify and reform itself in order to crush them before they can crush us? Most of the Solly public isn't going to buy that Manticore and Haven, even combined with Beowulf, are seriously capable of threatening the League.


Another problem with comparing the League and the USA circa WW2 is that there hasn't been anything like a Pearl Harbor for the League. Every (or almost every) significant incident has been in Manticoran or third-party space. It's hard to sell Manticore as the aggressor in blowing up hundreds of SLN SDs when they were in Manticoran space. Oh, sure, you can say Manticore shot first and "ambushed" the SLN ships, but I suspect that even most Sollies will be somewhat skeptical, or at least cynical, about the reasons for a major SLN detachment to be that far out and in Manticoran space in the first place.



Actually, I'd probably compare the League to either the Italian city states or the Classical Greek city states. The Italians generally didn't agree on much at all - mostly that they were all Italians and most of them were opposed to the Germanic Holy Roman Empire taking over, and of course religion.
And the Classical Greeks ... they'd really only rally together for a clear and unquestionable outsider, be it a threat like the Persians, or an outsider who insulted one or more of them, like Troy.

Weird Harold wrote:

Eagleeye wrote:Captain Gweon predicted ...

Capt Gweon is a MAlign agent, so the spin on his prediction is suspect. At the very least, he presented the worst possible case.

Fifteen year projection? I suspect he presented it exactly as the data suggested, since he knows that the SL isn't going to be around in its present form for that long. After all, he's the one that suggested taking Frontier Fleet off the job of keeping the iron boot on the Protectorates neck and putting them on commerce raiding instead.