Solarian League Naval Strenght versus SLN Strength

Dilandu wrote:

Nico wrote:
If that was indeed the case, then Beowulf would already be years ahead of the curve where other Solarian SDF's are concerned. And since the only circumstance in which Beowulf would do so would be the current scenario of Beowulf seceding from the League to stand with Manticore (and allies) against the League, well, then it doesn't really matter, does it?

Basically this means that Beowulf sabotaged the League's military efforts long before the hostilities started, by downplaying the whole data about "what happened on the other side of termini", instead of urging to take this at least partially seriously.

No, Beowulf applied the DADT method basically the SLN didn't ask and BSDF didn't tell. According to textev some SDF's sent observers but the SLN down played them, filed and forgot or round filed them. Reread the conversations between Teague and al-Faudi. The SLN has a really, really bad case of NIH syndrome (Not Invented Here) remember Byng's comments about the RMN's compensator speed or missile ranges or drone stealth or etc etc.

Dilandu, an important part of all this is that few systems within the SL believed they had the need to spend money on a force capable of anything more than traffic control, and those that did are going to be a very mixed bag. You are going to have systems that last invested money in procurement and upgrades when they had a paranoid leader over a century ago all the way to the BSDF which can field very close to state of the art Haven sector stuff.

Systems whose only military forces are LACs are not going to be able to contribute anything to offensive operations and as things come apart are possibly going to become a drain of resources. Systems with hypercapable but very outdated starships may have a leg up on those systems with only LACs, but that depends on the maintenance status of the starships and how outdated they are.

Then there are the systems (e.g. Renaissance factor) who have invested money in military research and will have stuff that is improved on the SLN hardware in at least one aspect along with potential quirky and incompletely tested ideas of how it should be used. Numbers of ships from any one of these systems is likely to be fairly low compared to the RMN or RHN, but there are likely enough of them to make for very interesting times.

Somtaaw wrote:But Janacek had alot of his own blinders, particular in regards to White Haven, and since those blinders worked hand in hand with the false information he was getting from Jurgensen, it turned a bad situation even worse and he was living in a fantasyland with zero relation to reality.

You know how it is, first you insist on getting intel that only paints a favorable picture of your enemies, then you claim during a media interview that your enemies are really just some junior varsity team and not a real threat, and the next thing you know the "JV" has overrun half your allies nation when your allies entire military bolts and runs and leaves $10 billion worth of your equipment for the "JV" to use. Luckily this only happens in books....

kzt wrote:

Somtaaw wrote:But Janacek had alot of his own blinders, particular in regards to White Haven, and since those blinders worked hand in hand with the false information he was getting from Jurgensen, it turned a bad situation even worse and he was living in a fantasyland with zero relation to reality.

You know how it is, first you insist on getting intel that only paints a favorable picture of your enemies, then you claim during a media interview that your enemies are really just some junior varsity team and not a real threat, and the next thing you know the "JV" has overrun half your allies nation when your allies entire military bolts and runs and leaves $10 billion worth of your equipment for the "JV" to use. Luckily this only happens in books....

Yeah. Ouch. See my assumption on assumptions

Nico wrote:Well, that's the point I was making. Of all those League members whose SDF's include ships-of-the-line, only Beowulf had any inclination of what the Havenite wars meant for military tech.

We don't actually know anything about any of the SDFs with wallers other than Beowulf and (RF member) Mannerheim. Which are both atypical for different reasons.

drothgery wrote:

Nico wrote:Well, that's the point I was making. Of all those League members whose SDF's include ships-of-the-line, only Beowulf had any inclination of what the Havenite wars meant for military tech.

We don't actually know anything about any of the SDFs with wallers other than Beowulf and (RF member) Mannerheim. Which are both atypical for different reasons.

Well, we do know several things, mostly by inference.

1) No SDF was as large as Manticore's Navy in 1900. Manticore was the 3rd largest navy in ~1900 and had been for some years (Though not in 1850). We know Haven and the SLN were the larger navies, so all other navies (including the SDFs) were smaller than Manticore's ~275 Wallers and ~200 BCs in 1900.

So there are no 500 SD SDFs in the SLN that we do not know of. The Ceiling would probably be less that 250, and in reality much less than that.

2) Fewer than 20 SDFs can field more than squadron of Wallers. We already know of 6 navies which can field large #s of wallers (SLN,RMN,RHN,GSN,IAN,and ESN), 2 which probably can (Talbot and Asgerd), and one which no one knows can (MAlign Navy), in addition to the 2 SDFs we know have wallers. Assuming 1 or 2 other "large" navies exist in the verge, there is only room for another dozen to 15 heavily armed SDFs in the ~25 navies with squadrons of wallers.

3) Forts are not counted in Navy size. The RMN in 1905 had between 150 and 175 forts which massed between 12 and 20 Mtons. The average 16 Mton fort had the firepower of 3-4 comparable SDs at the time. While the PRH had some, it seems their "fixed" defenses were only found at major planets, and the RMN probably had 2-3x the number of forts. Yet this was not taken into account in the correlation of forces, due to it's fixed nature, even though, fixed forces take away assets from the mobile fleet, while freeing the mobile fleet to be... mobile.

Rincewind wrote:

Nico wrote:Well, that's the point I was making. Of all those League members whose SDF's include ships-of-the-line, only Beowulf had any inclination of what the Havenite wars meant for military tech. Everyone else suffers (suffered) from the general Solarian not-from-here syndrome. Everyone else deluded themselves that no 'neobarb' polity could possibly develop superior tech to that of the League, so they were confident that their current ships were top of the line.

Actually, that is not necessarily true. From the text we know that several SDFs did send observers to both sides & they did report on the new weapons they had seen. Whilst their reports to the SLN might have been filed it does not mean that their reports to their own SDFs had been. Remember, in Shadow of Victory Michelle Henke specifically refers to several of the larger SDFs being more innovative than the SLN. Also, later on in the text RFC refers to the SLN being inferior to the SDFs. So it is possible that some of them have started their own R&D programmes.

Sure, some of the SDF's sent observers, but so what? They still had to convince their superiors of the validity of their observations, and those superiors had to convince their political masters - the real decision-makers.

And it is THERE that what amounted to a truly anemic effort to bring the advances of the Haven Sector navies' tech and doctrine to the larger League's attention hit an impenetrable barrier. Those local politicians had no more inclination than their federal bureaucratic counterparts to believe that any 'neobarb' polity could possibly surpass the League.

Nor did they have Beowulf's centuries-old close relationship with Manticore to inform them of exactly how wrong the League's not-from-here attitude is. Remember, for all intents and purposes Beowulf and Manticore are separated by only a few light-hours' comms delay time. Astrography encouraged, if not dictated, that kind of close relationship between Beowulf and Manticore.

Moreover, even if Beowulf had chosen to share some or all of its observations with the rest of the League, I'm not sure that the info would have been widely accepted. Beowulf's interstellar reputation and prominence is based upon biosciences, not military hardware. Sure, that prominence had made Beowulf one of the wealthiest star nations anywhere, and has enabled her to build one of the strongest SDF's in the entire League, but it has its downside as well. After all, too much of a good thing is too much. The admirals and bureaucrats in charge of the SLN would essentially have turned around and asked what a bunch of geneticists and medical practitioners knew about military tech.

The SLN Admiral, moving to effectivly seize the Sigma Draconus Terminus was amazed and annoyed that the BSDF even attempted to stop her....even to the extent of telling her that Beowulf would not allow her to use the terminus.
Clearly the SLN did not consider the BSDF SD's a serious threat. She even told the BSDF commander that, that she would NOT impede the SLN Task Forces with the Beowulf ships. Then, of course the RMN Fleet dropped their stealth and surprized the hell out of the the SLN. At that moment, the SLN Admiral had the very queasy feeling that just perhaps the BSDF SDs were perhaps a LOT more than she "knew" and the Manticor fleet not only massivly changed the numbers deployed against there but the tech advantage just displayed promised a lot more in the way of nasty surprises should she continue with her mission. At that point, she had to consider that she might not survive to get close enough to the wormhole to make a transit and even if she did, there probably wasn't going to be a lot left to take through the wormhole.

How in the hell could she even consider a hostile transit through what was probably the best known defended terminus in Human Space? Did the SLN have ANY information about what Manticore had waiting there?

Brigade XO wrote:The SLN Admiral, moving to effectivly seize the Sigma Draconus Terminus was amazed and annoyed that the BSDF even attempted to stop her....even to the extent of telling her that Beowulf would not allow her to use the terminus.
Clearly the SLN did not consider the BSDF SD's a serious threat. She even told the BSDF commander that, that she would NOT impede the SLN Task Forces with the Beowulf ships. Then, of course the RMN Fleet dropped their stealth and surprized the hell out of the the SLN. At that moment, the SLN Admiral had the very queasy feeling that just perhaps the BSDF SDs were perhaps a LOT more than she "knew" and the Manticor fleet not only massivly changed the numbers deployed against there but the tech advantage just displayed promised a lot more in the way of nasty surprises should she continue with her mission. At that point, she had to consider that she might not survive to get close enough to the wormhole to make a transit and even if she did, there probably wasn't going to be a lot left to take through the wormhole.

How in the hell could she even consider a hostile transit through what was probably the best known defended terminus in Human Space? Did the SLN have ANY information about what Manticore had waiting there?

IIRC David said something about how they assumed (illogically to my mind) that Oyster Bay must have trashed all the defenses of Manticore - so the wormhole wouldn't be all that fortified.

Of course that's about the easiest thing to check, even a freighter with perfectly average civilian sensors could see whether or not massive forts still surrounded the terminus.


Plus I'm assuming there was an large element of egotistical belief that Manticore wouldn't dare fire on the transiting Battlefleet units -- especially when their system was being simultaneously threatened by the much larger forces Fileretta brought to bear.
Mind you, I wouldn't have taken that bet. Too risky that someone would panic and blow all those SDs away even if the system was in the process of surrendering.


But yeah, there's no way the SLN was thinking clearly when they set up that side of the op. Insane from start to finish.

Brigade XO wrote:The SLN Admiral, moving to effectivly seize the Sigma Draconus Terminus was amazed and annoyed that the BSDF even attempted to stop her....even to the extent of telling her that Beowulf would not allow her to use the terminus.
Clearly the SLN did not consider the BSDF SD's a serious threat. She even told the BSDF commander that, that she would NOT impede the SLN Task Forces with the Beowulf ships. Then, of course the RMN Fleet dropped their stealth and surprized the hell out of the the SLN. At that moment, the SLN Admiral had the very queasy feeling that just perhaps the BSDF SDs were perhaps a LOT more than she "knew" and the Manticor fleet not only massivly changed the numbers deployed against there but the tech advantage just displayed promised a lot more in the way of nasty surprises should she continue with her mission. At that point, she had to consider that she might not survive to get close enough to the wormhole to make a transit and even if she did, there probably wasn't going to be a lot left to take through the wormhole.

How in the hell could she even consider a hostile transit through what was probably the best known defended terminus in Human Space? Did the SLN have ANY information about what Manticore had waiting there?

Which, on the face of it is rediculous. All the SLN had to do was send a db through to Manticore and back with above average sensors and it should be appearent that the junction defenses were not horribly compromised, as the SLN would have needed for a successful assult. An exact count of the platforms and their scans is not necessary.