Im wondering about desertion and mutiny in the solarian navy

pnakasone wrote:

WeirdlyWired wrote:He did sound like a guy tired of seeing marines dropped into the crapper through idiotic "intelligence" and/or graft & corruption yet willing to go in anyway. Kinda 'we'll do our job, we just want to be sure we know what the job really is going in.'

That dos not even touch what they feel about the OFS bully boys the Solarian Gendarmerie. One wonders how often there have "friendly fire" indents between the two.

IIRC it was stated in one incident that a OFS intervention battalion suffered 60%+ casualties in a friendly fire incident from SLMC battalion.

When discussing this topic it is important to keep in mind that a great deal of the pace of desertion from the SLN will have a lot to do with how the Alliance treats said deserters and defectors. If Manticore is Realpolitik enough to give aid and comfort to those SLN spacers who are willing to step aside watch the League's institutions collapse under their own weight. This process could be sped up if Manticore makes treaties with various system governments to repatriate SLN personal who are captured. If spacers know that surrender or defection can get one a ticket home (or a homestead on one of Manticore's new frontier worlds) while fighting is practically a death sentence, crews are going to be a lot more amenable to the idea of turning against there superior officers at the 11th hour. This would be especially true if the Manties can figure out a way to disseminate their propaganda to the enlisted ranks.

saber964 wrote:IIRC it was stated in one incident that a OFS intervention battalion suffered 60%+ casualties in a friendly fire incident from SLMC battalion.

Also have to ask the question how often has the SLMC been slow to aid a Gendarmerie unit that was under heavy attack?

GabrialSagan wrote:When discussing this topic it is important to keep in mind that a great deal of the pace of desertion from the SLN will have a lot to do with how the Alliance treats said deserters and defectors. If Manticore is Realpolitik enough to give aid and comfort to those SLN spacers who are willing to step aside watch the League's institutions collapse under their own weight. This process could be sped up if Manticore makes treaties with various system governments to repatriate SLN personal who are captured. If spacers know that surrender or defection can get one a ticket home (or a homestead on one of Manticore's new frontier worlds) while fighting is practically a death sentence, crews are going to be a lot more amenable to the idea of turning against there superior officers at the 11th hour. This would be especially true if the Manties can figure out a way to disseminate their propaganda to the enlisted ranks.

That is why you treat POWs very well. It is also why you treat civilian populations well as it encourages other worlds not to want to fight you.

pnakasone wrote:
That is why you treat POWs very well. It is also why you treat civilian populations well as it encourages other worlds not to want to fight you.

You have to go one step beyond that. You have to go to each of the Solarian Systems and say to them that if you sign a treaty with the Alliance that should any of your citizens get captured during hostilities between the SLN and The Alliance that those citizens will be returned with all due haste. It would also be prudent for them to have a policy of using Solarian defectors as seed population for settling their new frontiers. As RFC has said, there are lots of big empty spots in the Talbott Cluster waiting for a population boom. http://infodump.thefifthimperium.com/entry/Harrington/47/1

Now you have a situation where the League spacers have three choices: settle down on a nice plot of land on a virgin world, go home, or most assuredly die at the hands of Manticoran laser heads. Under those circumstances it would be hard to suppress mutiny aboard a warship ordered to attack a Manty system or convoy.

munroburton wrote:It's conceivable that this has already happened. The circumstances of Sandra Crandall's death is still a mystery to us readers. One of the possiblities include her expressing an intent to keep charging towards Spindle and being killed for it.

While we don't know *exactly* what happened, the likely explanation is that someone on her bridge crew was "adjusted" to kill her in the event the flagship got clobbered but not destroyed, so that she couldn't reveal why her task force "just happened" to be in the Madras sector at the time. Just like the contingency plan for Filereta if he decided to surrender rather than attack the Manticore home system.

While the Alignment probably knew it couldn't stay entirely invisible; it did try to at least remove as much *proof* it was involved as it possibly could.

Weird Harold wrote:There is still the problem of other ships in a squadron or task force objecting to the non-participation of a ship.

In order to survive a rebellion, either by officers or crew, it's going to require some means of escape. I don't foresee a lot of "noble self-sacrifice" as suggested by munroburton.

Well, if the ship's captain was in on it, all that would need to be said is that there was some severe malfunction that either needed to be fixed at the closest repair point, or else the ship had to either stop or slow down to fix it while underway. I'm sure that even military vessels with "triple redundancy" occasionally had failures that rendered them non-combat-ready.

It's unlikely a task force consisting of 400+ ships - especially one hastily assembled in the first place - is going to stop and wait if one - or even a few - ships appear to have developed problems severe enough to affect their combat effectiveness while en route.

phillies wrote:Certainly after the fleet assembled at Tangerine becomes a mixture of plasma and metal chips -- whether at Manticore, Haven, or Beowulf remains to be seen -- without inflicting significant losses on the enemy, there is likely to be a mutiny. Alternatively, SLN fleets will surrender very very quickly.

Originally, the SLN wouldn't surrender because of institutional arrogance - they couldn't believe any non-SLN navy could possibly stand up to them; especially one from a single-system polity.

With what has consistently happened to increasingly larger task forces at the hands of significantly smaller opposing forces - and the time that has passed allowing such information to percolate through the SLN - I suspect that arrogance is mostly gone - at least in the part of the navy that's actually aboard the ships themselves. Some "armchair warriors" may yet have not changed opinion, but we know that at least the very top commander of the SLN knows better.

OrlandoNative wrote:

munroburton wrote:It's conceivable that this has already happened. The circumstances of Sandra Crandall's death is still a mystery to us readers. One of the possiblities include her expressing an intent to keep charging towards Spindle and being killed for it.

While we don't know *exactly* what happened, the likely explanation is that someone on her bridge crew was "adjusted" to kill her in the event the flagship got clobbered but not destroyed, so that she couldn't reveal why her task force "just happened" to be in the Madras sector at the time. Just like the contingency plan for Filereta if he decided to surrender rather than attack the Manticore home system.

While the Alignment probably knew it couldn't stay entirely invisible; it did try to at least remove as much *proof* it was involved as it possibly could.

Yes and no, on the adjusted person. Speculation has run either way on one of her bridge crew or whether she was nano-ed. As to Crandall wanting to keep charging in, IIRC her flagship was hulked and communications knocked OOC.

OrlandoNative wrote:

phillies wrote:Certainly after the fleet assembled at Tangerine becomes a mixture of plasma and metal chips -- whether at Manticore, Haven, or Beowulf remains to be seen -- without inflicting significant losses on the enemy, there is likely to be a mutiny. Alternatively, SLN fleets will surrender very very quickly.

Originally, the SLN wouldn't surrender because of institutional arrogance - they couldn't believe any non-SLN navy could possibly stand up to them; especially one from a single-system polity.

With what has consistently happened to increasingly larger task forces at the hands of significantly smaller opposing forces - and the time that has passed allowing such information to percolate through the SLN - I suspect that arrogance is mostly gone - at least in the part of the navy that's actually aboard the ships themselves. Some "armchair warriors" may yet have not changed opinion, but we know that at least the very top commander of the SLN knows better.

I don't think enough time has passed for the information to get out to all of the far-flung SLN forces, especially with wormholes being closed by the Star Empire slowing down the flow of information (as of the end of Cauldron of Ghosts). And then it will take multiple incidents of SLN forces being defeated for the individual SLN officer's to begin to get through the inclination to not believe them, and only then will their arrogance begin to erode.