Should the MAN attack if they knew the location of Bolthole?

The MA has sleepers on Manticore. Sleepers on Sphinx? Sleepers on Beowulf? I wonder if they have sleepers on Haven?

What if the MA came by the existence and location of Bolthole, would they attack? Should they attack? What if their previous consideration of a lack of meat for the grinder is no longer a concern?

If they did attack and completely destroyed the system's infrastructure and any unfinished ships, where would that leave the GA?

cthia wrote:The MA has sleepers on Manticore. Sleepers on Sphinx? Sleepers on Beowulf? I wonder if they have sleepers on Haven?

What if the MA came by the existence and location of Bolthole, would they attack? Should they attack? What if their previous consideration of a lack of meat for the grinder is no longer a concern?

If they did attack and completely destroyed the system's infrastructure and any unfinished ships, where would that leave the GA?

Without the Lenny Dets there's a risk of trying another attack with just Sharks. It wouldn't be a quick attack - given the location of the Bolthole system and the inability to use most wormholes to cut the distance - you're probably looking at least 3 months in just in hyper transit from Felix to Sanctuary (even in the Iota bands the Streak Drive gives access to).

Then to attempt to avoid any deep space sensor arrays you're looking at an insertion at least light-month out (as they did at Manticore) and a several month n-space run in.

So even with no pre-planning it's at least 6 months from the location being turned over until you could possibly put fire on target. Unless the MAlign got the info before the GA was formed that's enough time for Manticore to share what little they know about the Oyster Bay attack and Haven to put mitigating measures in place at Bolthole. Those are unlikely to prevent damage, but can fairly easily require the MAlign to apply far more force to achieve the same effect.

Hmm, and without any routine merchant traffic you can't slip the Ghosts in to pre-scout the way you did for Manticore and Grayson - so the attacking force either has to delay more while Ghosts slip in ahead to scout around or they have to attack 'blind' with only what intel and targeting info they can see themselves on the long run into the system.

So it's a long risky approach.

But lets say it's successful. I think the biggest impact to the GA is if the attack managed to wipe out both the native R&D teams Foraker had been running and the relocated ex-Weyland R&D group that Oyster Bay missed. Long term the loss of that many more R&D types is going to hamper future development.

But short term the loss of Bolthole actually isn't that big a blow to the GA.
Following Operation Thunderbolt Haven had already expanded construction of their modern designs to the rest of their shipyards -- no longer needing the secrecy of Bolthole to hid the fact they were building SD(P)s, CLACs, and modern LACs. So knocking it would would kill less than 1/5th their shipbuilding capabilities. And they already have a large number of modern units built - plus plenty of places capable of manufacturing their MDMs.
So the destruction of those yards is far less impact on their shipbuilding capabilities that losing the Manticoran and Grayson yards were to them.

Basically Haven would have all their existing ships, the ability to maintain and rearm them, and the ability to build more or to continue building the basic hulls to be outfit at Beowulf with Manticoran Keyhole II and Mk23 combat systems.


So a blow, but far from a crippling one, and you have to invest all your current offensive forces for the better part of a year to hope to pull it off.
I'd bet the the remaining Detwiliers will continue to judge further infrastructure attacks, against hardened targets, as not worth the risk at least until a significant number of Lenny Dets are worked up...

Beowulf would be a far better target.

Essentially you render useless all the new build ships that are expecting to get modern electronics and destroy, once more, the RMNs missile lines.

Jonathan_S wrote:

cthia wrote:The MA has sleepers on Manticore. Sleepers on Sphinx? Sleepers on Beowulf? I wonder if they have sleepers on Haven?

What if the MA came by the existence and location of Bolthole, would they attack? Should they attack? What if their previous consideration of a lack of meat for the grinder is no longer a concern?

If they did attack and completely destroyed the system's infrastructure and any unfinished ships, where would that leave the GA?

Without the Lenny Dets there's a risk of trying another attack with just Sharks. It wouldn't be a quick attack - given the location of the Bolthole system and the inability to use most wormholes to cut the distance - you're probably looking at least 3 months in just in hyper transit from Felix to Sanctuary (even in the Iota bands the Streak Drive gives access to).

Then to attempt to avoid any deep space sensor arrays you're looking at an insertion at least light-month out (as they did at Manticore) and a several month n-space run in.

So even with no pre-planning it's at least 6 months from the location being turned over until you could possibly put fire on target. Unless the MAlign got the info before the GA was formed that's enough time for Manticore to share what little they know about the Oyster Bay attack and Haven to put mitigating measures in place at Bolthole. Those are unlikely to prevent damage, but can fairly easily require the MAlign to apply far more force to achieve the same effect.

Hmm, and without any routine merchant traffic you can't slip the Ghosts in to pre-scout the way you did for Manticore and Grayson - so the attacking force either has to delay more while Ghosts slip in ahead to scout around or they have to attack 'blind' with only what intel and targeting info they can see themselves on the long run into the system.

So it's a long risky approach.

But lets say it's successful. I think the biggest impact to the GA is if the attack managed to wipe out both the native R&D teams Foraker had been running and the relocated ex-Weyland R&D group that Oyster Bay missed. Long term the loss of that many more R&D types is going to hamper future development.

But short term the loss of Bolthole actually isn't that big a blow to the GA.
Following Operation Thunderbolt Haven had already expanded construction of their modern designs to the rest of their shipyards -- no longer needing the secrecy of Bolthole to hid the fact they were building SD(P)s, CLACs, and modern LACs. So knocking it would would kill less than 1/5th their shipbuilding capabilities. And they already have a large number of modern units built - plus plenty of places capable of manufacturing their MDMs.
So the destruction of those yards is far less impact on their shipbuilding capabilities that losing the Manticoran and Grayson yards were to them.

Basically Haven would have all their existing ships, the ability to maintain and rearm them, and the ability to build more or to continue building the basic hulls to be outfit at Beowulf with Manticoran Keyhole II and Mk23 combat systems.


So a blow, but far from a crippling one, and you have to invest all your current offensive forces for the better part of a year to hope to pull it off.
I'd bet the the remaining Detwiliers will continue to judge further infrastructure attacks, against hardened targets, as not worth the risk at least until a significant number of Lenny Dets are worked up...

They haven't and it would get much tougher to do it in the future. The Manties have already been working on defenses against the Spiders. They have spotted some of the evidence and once you have that, you can do some engineering to locate the ships and warn of them more precisely. Add to that, they will be getting more evidence from the Mesan scientist. The streak drive was more in his realm but I would guess he would know more than a bit about the spider drive. Not all the key elements but enough to give a real lot of hints.

Foraker's people working with Hemphill's may make even more progress. And the most important element is that there can be no survivors on the ships. They could give away too much.

As I said in another thread. If the MAN attacks Bolthole, I'm willing to bet they'd find themselves as fortunate as did the American fighters found themselves when they caught Vice Admiral Chūichi Nagumo's flagship, Akagi, commanded by Captain Kiichi Hasegawa with its pants down and with weapons and fueled planes on deck with 28 American dive-bombers bearing down. Completely bent over and naked with fuel on deck as the KY jelly. Please pass the jelly!

If Bolthole is naked and complacent, I wouldn't be surprised.

However, with the enlightening post shared by kzt, I doubt it'd be worth it. More like a day late and a Bolthole short.

kzt wrote:Beowulf would be a far better target.

Essentially you render useless all the new build ships that are expecting to get modern electronics and destroy, once more, the RMNs missile lines.

Could this be the motive of why Beowulf suffers a disaster? A strategic disaster of MAlign content?

ldwechsler wrote:They haven't and it would get much tougher to do it in the future. The Manties have already been working on defenses against the Spiders. They have spotted some of the evidence and once you have that, you can do some engineering to locate the ships and warn of them more precisely. Add to that, they will be getting more evidence from the Mesan scientist. The streak drive was more in his realm but I would guess he would know more than a bit about the spider drive. Not all the key elements but enough to give a real lot of hints.

Foraker's people working with Hemphill's may make even more progress. And the most important element is that there can be no survivors on the ships. They could give away too much.

You can't detect ships a light month out. Not in enough time to do anything. It's trivially possible to totally saturate the search capability of any viable defensive force. A single DD squadron can run 4 fake insertions every few hours, which each requires multiple squadrons to investigate.

How much force are they going to have to respond to insertion 32 - 35?

And you don't have to scout the system to kill thing in predictable places. Orbital platforms don't just vanish, they move in extremely predictable paths. In addition you can jump in a lot closer and unload 6 MT of grader torpedos and bolt faster than you can get a reaction force there. The junction transiting freighter trick will still work just fine.

kzt wrote:

ldwechsler wrote:They haven't and it would get much tougher to do it in the future. The Manties have already been working on defenses against the Spiders. They have spotted some of the evidence and once you have that, you can do some engineering to locate the ships and warn of them more precisely. Add to that, they will be getting more evidence from the Mesan scientist. The streak drive was more in his realm but I would guess he would know more than a bit about the spider drive. Not all the key elements but enough to give a real lot of hints.

Foraker's people working with Hemphill's may make even more progress. And the most important element is that there can be no survivors on the ships. They could give away too much.

You can't detect ships a light month out. Not in enough time to do anything. It's trivially possible to totally saturate the search capability of any viable defensive force. A single DD squadron can run 4 fake insertions every few hours, which each requires multiple squadrons to investigate.

How much force are they going to have to respond to insertion 32 - 35?

And you don't have to scout the system to kill thing in predictable places. Orbital platforms don't just vanish, they move in extremely predictable paths. In addition you can jump in a lot closer and unload 6 MT of grader torpedos and bolt faster than you can get a reaction force there. The junction transiting freighter trick will still work just fine.

Junction transiting freighter doesn't work at Bolthole - there is no legitimate civilian traffic through it's wormhole and any unknown freighter showing up is going to be impounded and it's flight path scrubbed looking for invisible little ships / missiles.

The graser torps still seem to need targeting info - which in Oyster Bay the Ghosts and their free flying fire control relays provided. But it'll be harder to sneak those into Bolthole than it was to Manticore or Grayson.


And while you can saturate the response capabilities through microjumps that definitely should put the system on alert. So now your stealthy ships have to try to dodge a lot more active sensor sweeps within the hyper limit - not to mention that if the yards and stations didn't have sidewalls and block ships up and active before you shenanigans they assuredly will for quite a while afterwards.

None of that is likely to completely stop such an attack, but a lucky sensor hit might cause you to lose an attacking ship or two. And the active sidewalls and impellers of block ships will limit the damage compared to what the graser torps (and laserheads) achieved during Oyster Bay. Despite the unprecidented power of the graser torps grazer - for a drone sized weapon - its still weaker than what a DD would carry. A sidewall will significantly blunt it's effect. It'll still do damage but it won't be slicing clean vast swaths clean through the station.


So like I said in an earlier post I suspect they could significantly damage Bolthole, but it'd take more force to achieve it that they needed for either half of Oyster Bay.

cthia wrote:As I said in another thread. If the MAN attacks Bolthole, I'm willing to bet they'd find themselves as fortunate as did the American fighters found themselves when they caught Vice Admiral Chūichi Nagumo's flagship, Akagi, commanded by Captain Kiichi Hasegawa with its pants down and with weapons and fueled planes on deck with 28 American dive-bombers bearing down. Completely bent over and naked with fuel on deck as the KY jelly. Please pass the jelly!

If Bolthole is naked and complacent, I wouldn't be surprised.

However, with the enlightening post shared by kzt, I doubt it'd be worth it. More like a day late and a Bolthole short.

Snort. Bolthole is probably better defended than any other system. It's got Forraker and it's where Moiarty was developed. While I doubt if it's on the high priority schedule for Mycroft, they've most likely got a development version up and running. It's never going to be the production version: Bolthole doesn't have the ability to build micro-fusion plants, for example, but there are too many people in the Republic of Haven navy and government that are paranoid - with good reason.

Bolthole is a very hard target because you know nothing. You don't know where things are, you don't know what is going on, you don't even have orbital data. Are you going to send your entire strike force on a >4 month long trip based on what?

So do you send a probe in first to see what the heck is going on, or do you roll in everyone and see if you can just obliterate them, but take the risk that there is nothing there worth the firepower deployed and weapons expended?

However, that isn't true for Beowulf. You know exactly where every rock is in the system. You have agents in the system and the the overall internal security posture has traditionally been sleepy, shading into bored. So you know where the military plants are, you know where the critical defensive nodes are, you pretty much know everything about Beowulf. (They didn't spot a entire team of well-known manpower operatives carrying out a kidnapping and extortion operation, and the manpower guys had no real fear they they would.) So yeah, I think dumping 6MT of graser torps from a freighter transiting could yield quite spectacular results in a month or so.