The mandarins

George J. Smith wrote:Isn't Visigoth one of the pro RF systems?

If it is I would be surprised if they normally had warships at the wormhole to interdict ships coming from Mesa, and depending on how quickly Michelle (if it is 10th fleet) can get a DB or DD through the Mesa end of the bridge, they may not have time to get anything to the Visigoth end to interdict the DB or DD before it clears the exit lane and accelerates off into the wild black yonder.

On the other hand because they are RF, and the RF is publically against genetic slavery, I could equally see them having a public display of military force positioned at the wormhole to enforce their nicely publicized anti-piracy inspections of every ship arriving from Mesa.

We know the RF worlds take public stances designed to show them as good citizens and no friends of Mesa (despite being controlled behind the scenes by the same group that's pulling the strings on Mesa)


RFC would seem to have the freedom to plausibly write it either way.

As to the question of the quintet pushing it all onto Rajani and his Mesan friends, perhaps bringing in a few others, it cannot be done, because of the question of how did they pull it off will go onto the table. No matter how the question is, even premeptively, phrased it will come out to requiring an unsurvivable answer or rather the inevitable deduction from it: the League is nonfunctional as designed and the work arounds that have been developed amount to letting treason prosper, considering the inherient tensions in the league any fix requiries a defacto dissolution, in the form of a massive constiutional modification, which will cause the league to at least shed some systems for a time.

Loren Pechtel wrote:

Maldorian wrote:The most economic solution would be peace with manticore.

For the big solarian companies patriotism is patriotism and Money is Money.

I think the Mandarins should have a great amout of pressure from the People who cout in their eyes: "The rich and the mighty ones"!

What you are missing is that accepting such a military defeat at the hands of a neobarb nation means there will be plenty of other neobarbs now standing up to the SLN. The Solarian League has survived only because it was considered militarily invincible.

A failure to stomp hard on Manticore means a death by a thousand cuts. Thus the 1000# gorilla is desperately looking for how to stomp on the 100,000# bird that just showed up.

Makes sense. That ratio is about right, even before Sonya reaches Bolthole. (I would dearly love a short story from Bolthole covering some of their work!) Engineer nerd

Didn't someone have a post on one of these threads about the chance of one or more mandarins escaping with his life at full speed away

Loren Pechtel wrote:

Maldorian wrote:The most economic solution would be peace with manticore.

For the big solarian companies patriotism is patriotism and Money is Money.

I think the Mandarins should have a great amout of pressure from the People who cout in their eyes: "The rich and the mighty ones"!

What you are missing is that accepting such a military defeat at the hands of a neobarb nation means there will be plenty of other neobarbs now standing up to the SLN. The Solarian League has survived only because it was considered militarily invincible.

A failure to stomp hard on Manticore means a death by a thousand cuts. Thus the 1000# gorilla is desperately looking for how to stomp on the 100,000# bird that just showed up.

On the other hand, the SLN actually is functionally invincible against anyone without Haven Sector or MAlign tech. The League could defeat anybody else who got "uppity" without significant difficulty.


The question is the price of being publicly humbled before Manticore/Haven/the GA, in the short term at least, one that the League is willing to pay - no matter the longer-term benefits? Sure, the long term benefits are substantial if the League could back away from a confrontation. But I don't thing that most of the League would see it as worthwhile, nor do I believe that the League can effectively back away at this point.

Kytheros wrote:On the other hand, the SLN actually is functionally invincible against anyone without Haven Sector or MAlign tech. The League could defeat anybody else who got "uppity" without significant difficulty.


The question is the price of being publicly humbled before Manticore/Haven/the GA, in the short term at least, one that the League is willing to pay - no matter the longer-term benefits? Sure, the long term benefits are substantial if the League could back away from a confrontation. But I don't thing that most of the League would see it as worthwhile, nor do I believe that the League can effectively back away at this point.

1) The GA has shown that it's possible to develop tech to give the SLN a very bloody nose. You don't need the full GA setup to accomplish this, either.
1a) There's a hidden bonus in Apollo that not even Haven has noticed--the control missile. Control a pod of missiles with one control channel. There was no point to it in the old days of tube-launched missiles but it can be a great force multiplier for pod-launched birds as we saw at Spindle. Anyone who builds control missiles for their pods (minus all the Apollo stuff--something the Sollies could do now) can punch way above their weight so long as their supply of pods holds out. And if those pods are deployed between your fleet and the attacker (a maneuver that's really only possible on defense) you can smash him up without taking return fire.

Not everyone who decides to tech up and tell the Sollies to go pound sand would succeed but if a bunch did so the Sollies would find it impossible to stop the fire.

2) We have a bunch of GA warships sitting around with no real mission. (And this would be even more so if the GA goes hunting the SLN fleet.) Would not a good use for some of that firepower be to patrol systems breaking away from the Sollies? (Attention SLN fleet. This is GA podnaught <name>. I note you have 100 wallers within my missile envelope. Your options are to hand your fleet over to the planetary government or see how many I can destroy before my magazine is empty. Flagship <name> will be double-targeted in the first salvo.)

Loren Pechtel wrote:

Kytheros wrote:On the other hand, the SLN actually is functionally invincible against anyone without Haven Sector or MAlign tech. The League could defeat anybody else who got "uppity" without significant difficulty.


The question is the price of being publicly humbled before Manticore/Haven/the GA, in the short term at least, one that the League is willing to pay - no matter the longer-term benefits? Sure, the long term benefits are substantial if the League could back away from a confrontation. But I don't thing that most of the League would see it as worthwhile, nor do I believe that the League can effectively back away at this point.

1) The GA has shown that it's possible to develop tech to give the SLN a very bloody nose. You don't need the full GA setup to accomplish this, either.
1a) There's a hidden bonus in Apollo that not even Haven has noticed--the control missile. Control a pod of missiles with one control channel. There was no point to it in the old days of tube-launched missiles but it can be a great force multiplier for pod-launched birds as we saw at Spindle. Anyone who builds control missiles for their pods (minus all the Apollo stuff--something the Sollies could do now) can punch way above their weight so long as their supply of pods holds out. And if those pods are deployed between your fleet and the attacker (a maneuver that's really only possible on defense) you can smash him up without taking return fire.

Not everyone who decides to tech up and tell the Sollies to go pound sand would succeed but if a bunch did so the Sollies would find it impossible to stop the fire.

2) We have a bunch of GA warships sitting around with no real mission. (And this would be even more so if the GA goes hunting the SLN fleet.) Would not a good use for some of that firepower be to patrol systems breaking away from the Sollies? (Attention SLN fleet. This is GA podnaught <name>. I note you have 100 wallers within my missile envelope. Your options are to hand your fleet over to the planetary government or see how many I can destroy before my magazine is empty. Flagship <name> will be double-targeted in the first salvo.)

One problem is at the moment they have only a limited supply of their missiles. They have to choose their fights with care as to what will have the most return for the expenditure of the ordnance. Then there is very good odds that you will get the SLN admiral that will think he can win the fight or you are bluffing.

I would assume that Manticore used only a fraction of those 2 million or so system defense missiles against the invading Sollies.

What did White Haven say? That it would take approximately 6 months to get the missile production lines back online?

So Manticore should have enough to defend at the least the home system against any invasion for the immediate future.

Nico wrote:I would assume that Manticore used only a fraction of those 2 million or so system defense missiles against the invading Sollies.

What did White Haven say? That it would take approximately 6 months to get the missile production lines back online?

So Manticore should have enough to defend at the least the home system against any invasion for the immediate future.

That assumed they would be converting repair facilities to missile production, but thanks to the miracle of Honorverse production they have hordes of new and improved missiles made on completely new equipment by people who had never even seen one before, and they will just reliably work without needed any of that messy testing stuff. This of course means that anyone who steals the plans will be able to just as reliably produce endless waves of Mk23s too.

kzt wrote:

Nico wrote:I would assume that Manticore used only a fraction of those 2 million or so system defense missiles against the invading Sollies.

What did White Haven say? That it would take approximately 6 months to get the missile production lines back online?

So Manticore should have enough to defend at the least the home system against any invasion for the immediate future.

That assumed they would be converting repair facilities to missile production, but thanks to the miracle of Honorverse production they have hordes of new and improved missiles made on completely new equipment by people who had never even seen one before, and they will just reliably work without needed any of that messy testing stuff. This of course means that anyone who steals the plans will be able to just as reliably produce endless waves of Mk23s too.

Why so sarcastic, kzt? First of all - they still have some people who know the bells and whistles of missile production. First, there are the survivors of Weyland; second, the repatriated people from Grendelsbane. Ok, the "Grendelsbaner" were more occupied in building vessels, but at least a small missile production line should have been there, too - if only to have some missiles for live-fire-tests of the new vessels And Weyland was more for research and development, but even there should have been some missile production lines (aside the prototype-construction). And there are repair facilities at Trevors Star to convert ... so, the 6-month-range is not impossible. They will not be able to produce the same number of missiles as they did before Oyster-Bay; not for some time. But a limited production can be online at that time.

pnakasone wrote:One problem is at the moment they have only a limited supply of their missiles. They have to choose their fights with care as to what will have the most return for the expenditure of the ordnance. Then there is very good odds that you will get the SLN admiral that will think he can win the fight or you are bluffing.

There isn't a shortage of Havenite missiles. One of the planks of Pritchart's offer to Manticore was that Haven would supply missiles for use against the SL, allowing the RMN to preserve its current supply of Apollo missiles.

Granted, there are some logistical problems in that their missiles won't fit into RMN magazines and launchers and their pods won't fit into RMN pod rails. But every one of those missile pods Honor used could have been Havenite - we weren't told what they actually fired at Filareta.