Battle of Manticore

During the planning for the Battle of Lovat didn't anyone on the RMN's side try to figure what Haven's options were? I mean isn't it pretty simple to place yourself in the other side's mind? You have the Alliance which has estimated ~270 SD(P)'s plus another say 300 SD's while Haven has ~800 SD(P)'s in service or working up. What did the Admiralty think will happen when they demonstrated the power of their new weapons? Did they actually think Haven will surrender or did they think they will crap their pants and wait for the onslaught of attacks? I think it would have been simple to figure out that Haven had only a three real options, 1)surrender, 2) do nothing and watch their numerical advantage evaporate and eventually lose and 3) make a winner take all move. And for a winner take all move, they had only 3 real targets 1) Manticore, 2) Grayson or 3)Trevor's Star. And the only devastating target would be Manticore since if it falls the others will quickly follow suit.


When all of this is considered why was 8th Fleet in Trevor's star at all? Why did the Admiralty consider sending 8th Fleet on a mission and why did it not recall it to the home system immediately after Sanskirt? The RMN showed Haven that their position was hopeless in the long term and likely only had a short time where their numerical advantage would have been effective so wouldn't anyone with half a brain see the possibility of an attack on Manticore?



If I am fighting a war with someone, I have a numerical advantage and suddenly something happens to show me that the numerical advantage were to disappear seemingly over night I would look at any chances to end the war on favourable terms, so why didn't the RMN leadership consider this and take it seriously?

If they had considered the options that Haven would face once Apollo was demonstrated, they would have realized that out of all of them the only chance of victory would have been to attack the biggest, juiciest target around that would stop most of the flow of Apollo missiles and Apollo capable ships from coming into the Alliance arsenal.



Basically to me it boils down to this, why has the RMN been portrayed as a competent, farsighted institution throughout both wars and even before, only to be damn near destroyed because they didn't think about the consequences after unleashing Apollo on Haven and wiping out their advantage.


They should have seen that the only realistic possibility is a do or die attack, and kept 8th Fleet in the Home System with Home Fleet Where it would have given them probably close to Parity in terms of Firepower with anything short of the entire Republican Navy.

Plot. And to point out that it isn't just the MA and the SLN that gets all overconfident about how clever they are.

kzt wrote:Plot. And to point out that it isn't just the MA and the SLN that gets all overconfident about how clever they are.

I am not talking about overconfidence, I am talking about criminal stupidity.

Sigs wrote:

kzt wrote:Plot. And to point out that it isn't just the MA and the SLN that gets all overconfident about how clever they are.

I am not talking about overconfidence, I am talking about criminal stupidity.

That whole book is stuffed with criminal stupidity.

What was going on is explained in excruciating detail here: http://infodump.thefifthimperium.com/en ... gton/111/1

If you find that inadequate, well, the Weber-is-too-stupid-to-poor-piss-out-of-a-boot-without-pulling-rabbits-from-hats-so-we-should-be-in-charge-of-the-plot gang meets down there on the lower left.

Sigs wrote:During the planning for the Battle of Lovat didn't anyone on the RMN's side try to figure what Haven's options were? I mean isn't it pretty simple to place yourself in the other side's mind? You have the Alliance which has estimated ~270 SD(P)'s plus another say 300 SD's while Haven has ~800 SD(P)'s in service or working up. What did the Admiralty think will happen when they demonstrated the power of their new weapons? Did they actually think Haven will surrender or did they think they will crap their pants and wait for the onslaught of attacks? I think it would have been simple to figure out that Haven had only a three real options, 1)surrender, 2) do nothing and watch their numerical advantage evaporate and eventually lose and 3) make a winner take all move. And for a winner take all move, they had only 3 real targets 1) Manticore, 2) Grayson or 3)Trevor's Star. And the only devastating target would be Manticore since if it falls the others will quickly follow suit.


When all of this is considered why was 8th Fleet in Trevor's star at all? Why did the Admiralty consider sending 8th Fleet on a mission and why did it not recall it to the home system immediately after Sanskirt? The RMN showed Haven that their position was hopeless in the long term and likely only had a short time where their numerical advantage would have been effective so wouldn't anyone with half a brain see the possibility of an attack on Manticore?



If I am fighting a war with someone, I have a numerical advantage and suddenly something happens to show me that the numerical advantage were to disappear seemingly over night I would look at any chances to end the war on favourable terms, so why didn't the RMN leadership consider this and take it seriously?

If they had considered the options that Haven would face once Apollo was demonstrated, they would have realized that out of all of them the only chance of victory would have been to attack the biggest, juiciest target around that would stop most of the flow of Apollo missiles and Apollo capable ships from coming into the Alliance arsenal.



Basically to me it boils down to this, why has the RMN been portrayed as a competent, farsighted institution throughout both wars and even before, only to be damn near destroyed because they didn't think about the consequences after unleashing Apollo on Haven and wiping out their advantage.


They should have seen that the only realistic possibility is a do or die attack, and kept 8th Fleet in the Home System with Home Fleet Where it would have given them probably close to Parity in terms of Firepower with anything short of the entire Republican Navy.

In particular, not only has this been explained in great detail by Weber, I'd like to quote what I said *last* time I responded on this topic, regarding 'the RMN should have anticipated Beatrice' in light of a particular portion of Weber's explanations:

MuonNeutrino wrote:Regarding the whole 'should have anticipated Beatrice' debate, Weber has a good point in one of the pearls that I haven't seen brought up yet (italics original):

Weber, in the pearls wrote:Thomas Theisman responded to the discovery that Apollo existed far more rapidly than anyone in the Alliance anticipated that he could. That's in no small part because he'd already done all of the basic planning for Operation Beatrice before he found out Apollo existed... Theisman didn't have to stop, analyze what had happened, pull together a response plan, redeploy his assets, and go. He'd already put together what he used as a response plan and redeployed his assets to carry it out, which cut at the very minimum weeks, and quite probably months, from the time which would otherwise have been required to get something like Beatrice off the ground and into Manticoran space. By which time Eighth Fleet would have been even more heavily reinforced with additional Apollo-capable SD(P)s and the system defense variant of Apollo, despite the bottlenecks, would have been deployed in strength.

...The fact that Honor was off the terminus drilling her new ships threw a spanner into the timing of the response for Trevor's Star... [but] one of the reasons she felt secure in carrying out routine training operations was that, as I mentioned above, any massive offensive against the Manticoran home system specifically in response to Sanskrit couldn't be mounted that soon...

In other words, even if we accept that the Manties should have realized that Haven would launch an all-out do-or-die attack in response to learning of the existence and effectiveness of Apollo, they had no reason to expect Haven would be able to launch such a devastating attack so quickly. From everything they could have been reasonably expected to know or extrapolate, the defensive assets they had in Manticore should have been adequate against any immediate response from Haven, and by the time Haven should have been able to organize and launch the kind of massive attack necessary to overwhelm those defenses, the system-defense Apollo birds would have been ready. Basically, they thought they had adequately prepared for the possibility. I don't think it's reasonable to expect them to be clairvoyant enough to anticipate Haven pre-planning and pre-positioning such a gigantic chunk of its wall for instant attack.

Not that I expect this to actually *work*, in terms of deflecting the usual dead-horse-beating on the part of some posters, but there you go, an explanation why the RMN isn't actually full of incompetent idiots.

There is the fairly obvious question:
So they have somewhere between 600 and 1000 SD(P), probably 800. A few hundreds are committed to offense and (given that even their most senior COs are running forces of a few squadrons defensively) 100-200 to defense. That either means we are overestimating their force and they only have 500 or less, or they have a significant force in some sort of strategic reserve. What can they do with a force of 300(+-200) SD(P)s that would most effectively hurt us?

Louis R wrote:What was going on is explained in excruciating detail here: http://infodump.thefifthimperium.com/en ... gton/111/1

If you find that inadequate, well, the Weber-is-too-stupid-to-poor-piss-out-of-a-boot-without-pulling-rabbits-from-hats-so-we-should-be-in-charge-of-the-plot gang meets down there on the lower left.

That was not convincing at all... the speed with which the attack was mounted shouldn't have been a surprise at all unless Manticore suffered a complete intelligence breakdown and forgot how to think.

Let me explain why:

1)The Alliance at the time of the BoM had ~390 SD(P)'s plus a substantial but somewhat irrelevant number of old style SD's. Of which there were 132 SD(P)'s in Trevor's Star and Manticore Home System plus ~50 old SD's.

My Assumptions:

i)Grayson would maintain a similar Home Fleet of 50-70 SD(P)'s call it middle at 60 SD(P)'s.

ii)Andermani would maintain a somewhat smaller Home fleet of 30-50 SD(P)'s. Again call it in the middle at 40 SD(P)'s.

iii) ~15% of the Alliance wall would be in yard hands, maybe a little more so call it approximately 20%. So approximately 78-80 SD(P)'s.

iv) The total so far would be Aproximatly 312 SD(P)'s deployed so far out of ~390 SD(P)'s in service.

v)The remainder[~80 SD(P)'s] would be deployed to cover Silesia, Talbott, the Andermani Empire and all other minor allies.

How I arrived at this set of assumptions is that at the beginning of the war, the discussion that the leadership of Manticore had stated they would have ~420 SD(P)'s within 18 months. Theisman stated that 336 SD(P)'s represent somewhere around 80% or a little over that of the alliance strenght. So I assumed the total was 420 and subtracted 30 SD(P)'s for losses suffered up to that point.


2)The Republic of Haven navy was at a strength of 336 SD(P)'s plus ~590 SD(P)'s as stated by Theisman when he answered that launching 335 SD(P)'s would leave them with approximately 620 SD(P)'s and counting for those lost in battle between that statement and the BoM. For a total of ~920 SD(P)'s. Plus a few hundred old SD's.

My assumptions:

i) Capital Fleet was between 200-300 SD(P)'s. In 1922 when Prichard showed up to talk peace she brought 2/3 of Capital fleet with her which amounted to ~190 SD(P)'s if we assume that the 60 Captured Havenite SD(P)'s were released and manned for the Second BoM. So if 2/3 of Capital Fleet is 190 SD(P)'s then Capital Fleet was 285 SD(P)'s if on the other hand the full 250 SD(P)'s came from Capital fleet only and the 60 Captured SD(P)'s were not counted because they were assumed to be to rusty to fight then Capital fleet would amount to 375 SD(P)'s. So for the moment I will take the lower of the two numbers and say Capital Fleet is 280 SD(P)'s.

ii) I also assumed that 3rd Fleet was not the only formation set up to trap 8th Fleet when they went on a raid. To give themselves any chance of success they would have to cover dozens of systems so ideally they would have 4-5 such covering Nodal forces. If we assume 4 after the destruction of 3rd Fleet then that would be ~200 SD(P)'s.

iii)I am assuming that there are 100-150 SD(P)'s in various stages of workup training and therefore not combat ready. Call it 100 SD(P)'s

iv) Also 7.5% of the ships of the wall would be in yard hands. So 70 SD(P)'s. I used 7.5% because the majority of the ships are no more than 4 years old.

v)The remaining ~270 SD(P)'s would be deployed in Bolthole, and other Havenite systems plus picketing frontline systems.



3) Comparing the Fleets in 1921:

Alliance: ~ 390 SD(P)'s
Haven: ~ 920 SD(P)'s

With these number, Haven was beginning to have an overwhelming numerical advantage against the Alliance and they were closing the technological gap. So when 8th Fleet went and wiped out one of the covering forces(3rd Fleet) why were they surprised that Theisman reacted so quickly? Why were the surprised with a do or die plan to attack Manticore? Didn't they have one of those to attack Haven? They were at war with Haven, what did they expect? That he was planning surprise parties instead of contingencies like that?


So when Theisman got the news about Lovat, he had ~280 SD(P)'s in Capital Fleet and ~200 SD(P)'s in various covering forces that just became nothing but moving targets for 8th Fleet. So he would go through the motions of trying to figure out what happened. Once he realizes the scope of the defeat and the change in the strategic picture he would be faced with 3 options:


1)Surrender-you lose but no one get's hurt. You
assume that they managed to arm all of their
warships with those weapons and that you are
therefore done for.

or

2) You wait and see so you don't overreact which
means that Haven loses the war when the Alliance
equips their whole fleet or even a large % of
their fleet with the new weapons.

or

3) Go for a winner takes all, do or die attack with
the hopes that the alliance does not in fact
have their new weapon in general deployment.


So once he is faced with those 3 options he either surrenders thereby eliminating the need for any more attacks by 8th Fleet, he waits to see what happened which would give Manticore to deploy more of the system defence pods and upgrade their fleet or he throws the dice using a plan he has worked on previously.

So Manticore is faced with some pretty serious questions that they failed to ask or anticipate:

1) Can we afford to have 8th Fleet conducting more raids and be out of range if Haven takes a gamble and pulls out the 200+ SD(P)'s from covering forces and adds some from Capital fleet to form an attack force of overwhelming numbers?

2) Is the risk of having 8th Fleet weeks away from Manticore while 300+ SD(P)'s attack Home Fleet outweigh by the reward of destroying a large number of Havenite SD(P)'s and yards?

3) How the hell would Apollo look from the other side and what would their probable reaction be?


So say that it takes a week for news to travel to Haven and another week for the news to sink in and orders to be issued. If he goes for winner takes all option he send 100 SD(P)'s from Capital Fleet and sends orders for all the covering forces to concentrate in one system. So say that takes two months to accomplish, they are now 2 and a half months after Lovat with a concentration of 300 SD(P)'s ready to attack.

He might need time to workup the fleet but not as much time as he was putting together whole units rather than individual squadrons and ships.


There should have been no surprise whatsoever, they knew that:
*there were a number of covering forces and after Lovat they knew that the probably resembled those deployed by 3rd Fleet.

*they ought to have known that Apollo coming at Haven cold like that would shock them to the core, and once they realize their numerical advantage just evaporated they would do something to end the war here and now.

*Once they demonstrated what happens when a fleet tangles with 8th Fleet, Theisman should recall all covering forces to avoid sending all of those ships to the slaughter house.

Where the hell did they think those covering forces will go? To the breakers? They became nothing but moving targets over night so if he sees even a slim chance of victory he would take it and he would have a concentrated fleet of ships that he could call on.

I don't see why anyone was surprised, least of all the militaries of Grayson and Manticore, supposedly the two most experienced and best led navies in existence.

No, you pull out the capital fleet and order the other covering forces to haven to become capital fleet.

It's a risk, but you will lose if you don't act now. They can leave without delay and you are using a single formed unit whose senior leadership had already wargamed out this scenario and could get their subordinates read into and start working up the details.

Sigs wrote:...With these number, Haven was beginning to have an overwhelming numerical advantage against the Alliance and they were closing the technological gap. So when 8th Fleet went and wiped out one of the covering forces(3rd Fleet) why were they surprised that Theisman reacted so quickly? Why were the surprised with a do or die plan to attack Manticore? Didn't they have one of those to attack Haven? They were at war with Haven, what did they expect? That he was planning surprise parties instead of contingencies like that?
<snip>
So say that it takes a week for news to travel to Haven and another week for the news to sink in and orders to be issued. If he goes for winner takes all option he send 100 SD(P)'s from Capital Fleet and sends orders for all the covering forces to concentrate in one system. So say that takes two months to accomplish, they are now 2 and a half months after Lovat with a concentration of 300 SD(P)'s ready to attack.

This is a perfectly reasonable chain of events that the Manties might indeed have been expected to anticipate. Note, however, that this series of events has the the response fleet not even leaving havenite space until 2.5 months after the Battle of Lovat. Meanwhile, in the actual timeline, the Battle of Manticore took place on July 24, 1921 - *less* than two and a half months after Lovat, which happened May 15.

In other words, the plausibly anticipatable scenario you sketched out, once you account for travel time, doesn't have the Havenites possibly being able to attack the Manticore system until at least a month or two after the battle actually took place! This is the entire point of Weber's explanation about Theisman's pre-planning and pre-deployment throwing off the Alliance's planning. For clarity, let me repeat the pertinent part of that pearl (italics original):

Weber, in the pearls wrote:Thomas Theisman responded to the discovery that Apollo existed far more rapidly than anyone in the Alliance anticipated that he could. That's in no small part because he'd already done all of the basic planning for Operation Beatrice before he found out Apollo existed... Theisman didn't have to stop, analyze what had happened, pull together a response plan, redeploy his assets, and go. He'd already put together what he used as a response plan and redeployed his assets to carry it out, which cut at the very minimum weeks, and quite probably months, from the time which would otherwise have been required to get something like Beatrice off the ground and into Manticoran space. By which time Eighth Fleet would have been even more heavily reinforced with additional Apollo-capable SD(P)s and the system defense variant of Apollo, despite the bottlenecks, would have been deployed in strength.

...The fact that Honor was off the terminus drilling her new ships threw a spanner into the timing of the response for Trevor's Star... [but] one of the reasons she felt secure in carrying out routine training operations was that, as I mentioned above, any massive offensive against the Manticoran home system specifically in response to Sanskrit couldn't be mounted that soon...

In other words, the alliance was *not* blind to the possibility that Haven might launch an attack on the Manticore system in response to the Battle of Lovat. They simply did not believe that any attack could be launched *that soon*, because they did not expect Theisman to not only have already planned an all-out attack (and not just a generic contingency plan, which would definitely be expected but which also would have to have been updated and drilled for before being used, but a plan specifically prompted by and devised for to the current war situation), but also to have *pre-concentrated and pre-positioned his forces* for the attack. It was *that* which cut literally months off of any response time the alliance could have reasonably anticipated.

The alliance had what they quite reasonably believed to be a comfortable margin before any attack could have possibly reached them in response to Lovat. Not just before an attack could have plausibly reached them, not just before Haven could plausibly have planned an attack, but before it should have been *physically possible*, given the travel times involved, for an attack to get there. They had every reason to believe that their existing defenses would be more than adequate against any attack Haven could have launched *immediately*, and by the time Haven *should* have been able to launch an attack capable of overcoming those existing defenses, the Apollo system defense pods would be ready.

They didn't fail to anticipate that an attack could be coming. They thought they *were* prepared for the possibility. They simply didn't anticipate that Theisman to have *already* concentrated an enormous fleet in a forward position, already drilled and ready to go on a moment's notice, cutting months off of how quickly it was *physically possible* (not just plausible) for him to launch the sort of overwhelming attack needed to overcome the Manticore system's defenses. Honestly, whatever gripes might be made about other parts of the book, I personally think that *this* part of it is a pretty reasonable way for Manticore to have miscalculated severely enough to leave themselves vulnerable *without* it representing some sort of colossal stupidity on their part.