Reading Reading... Honor Amoung Enemies

Fireflair wrote:As a side note, what sort of traffic is coming through this junction at this time? I doubt that Haven is allowing Manticore's shipping through, and certainly not their war ships. Maybe just neutral party shipping? Andies and Sol stuff that transships in the Manti side of the WHJ?

Fireflair wrote:So, like Rose, I do periodic rereads of the series. I'm sure many of the MWW's fans do. We find stuff we'd missed before, or jog our memories about things we find later in the stories.

Over and over again we hear about how it's suicidal to come through a wormhole that's hostile to you. Mines will be deployed during wartime, forts are there, etc. We don't get a clear accounting of the battle for Trevor's Star, but we know that White Haven accomplishes it by pulling the admiral in charge of Trevor's star out of position then launches a simultaneous assault through the junction and at from a fleet that hypers into Trevor's star.

We are also given plenty of textev that Trevor's star is heavily re-enforced and that it's considered crucial to both sides. So why wouldn't the RHN have deployed mines around the worm hole junction, have forts in place, etc, to stop an attack through the junction? Basically, why did White Haven's plan succeed when we've been told so often how it's a bad plan.

As a side note, what sort of traffic is coming through this junction at this time? I doubt that Haven is allowing Manticore's shipping through, and certainly not their war ships. Maybe just neutral party shipping? Andies and Sol stuff that transships in the Manti side of the WHJ?

Fireflair wrote:More than the mines, no matter how much White Haven has pulled the Peeps out of position wouldn't they still have left a few ships to cover the worm hole locale? I mean a couple of tin cans, maybe some light cruisers, can take out almost anything that comes through without sidewalls and impellers. Well not anything, literally, but they could certainly handle a lot with the help of mines, and maybe some sort of wormhole forts.

runsforcelery wrote:In the case of Trevor's Star, the Peeps hadn't put any forts on the terminus. They hadn't needed to. If anyone started any wars between them and the SKM, they intended for it to be them, which meant that --- unlike the SKM --- they didn't have to worry about a sneak attack in peacetime. Therefore, it made more sense to use the immensely less expensive option of mining the single transit lane to a fare-thee-well. That strategy came back to bite them when White Haven managed to convince the Admiralty to let him go after the terminus from both directions at once, but please do note how long it took him to convince Admiralty House to let him try that even with the enormous strategic edge Trevor's Star's was going to give the RMN. Had the PR been able to find the resources to put forts on the terminus to protect it against an attack through hyper-space, White Haven's plans probably wouldn't have worked because there would have been something in place to back up the mines, but the PN didn't have all those big nasty forts and was under the impression that a sufficient number of SDs ought to do the trick

runsforcelery wrote:Moreover, there hasn't been -- and isn't going to be -- an actual unassisted assault through a heavily defended terminus (see my comments on Trevor's Star below). And because I didn't fight the Battle of the Trevor's Star Terminus on stage, all of this debate really constitutes what happens when I share details with the readers and they aren't what the readers thought they were because the aforesaid readers had made certain assumptions. It's enough to make me sometimes reconsider whether I want to tell people anything that isn't already in the books because every time I do someone squawks that I'm "changing everything" when, in fact, what's really happening is that they're getting a look deeper into what was going on all along and it just happens not to be what they thought was going on.

[major snip about wormhole assults in general; and the impact of the transit physics]

In the case of White Haven's attack on Trevor's Star, there were no Havenite fortresses covering the Trevor's Star Terminus. The Peeps had never built any because if anyone was going to do any attacking through the terminus, it was going to be them (even though they never actually intended to do anything of the sort), and partly because they didn't care if they blew away the occasional merchant ship by relying on minefields and/or laser heads. So White Haven's problem was to deal with a mobile force as well as the Junction itself. Note that no one at any time on Manticore's side even thought about proposing an unassisted assault through the terminus. In addition, the transit lane for Trevor's Star is way shorter than the transit lane for the Junction; it's a single terminus, without the "focusing" effect of the Junction. An attacker coming through from the Manticore side finds himself in a transit lane which is about 12,000 kilometers across (not 9,000) and which extends only about 10,000 kilometers from the terminus itself. This means that a Manticoran superdreadnought with a 1910 compensator would spend only about 90 seconds trapped in the transit lane inbound to Trevor's Star, as opposed to the 4.5 minutes of an assault into the Junction.

Now, 90 seconds is more than enough time for a thicket of laser heads to take out a superdreadnought, but what White Haven did was to attack with a sufficiently powerful force to draw the defending wall of battle into engaging him out of its own range of the terminus utself. San Martin and its orbital infrastructure were also highly important to the People's Republic of Haven (that's where the actual Trecor's star fleet base was located), and he was in a position to choose an attack vector which threatened both the terminus and San Martin at a time when the Peeps, due to losses (in those preliminary approach operations of his) and lack of maintenance, could not afford to put two powerful fleets in place to defend each objective separately.

Once he had the defensive fleet units drawn out of effective range of the terminus in order to engage him, he sent a waiting destroyer into hyper to the force of battlecruisers he'd tucked away there. Those battlecruisers then dropped out of hyper almost on top of the terminus, headed directly away from the defending fleet units accelerating towards White Haven. Their function was to "sweep" the mines covering the transit lane. White Haven knew they wouldn't get all of them, but he anticipated that they would be able to inflict sufficient damage on them to make it possible for the single scout ship being sent through from Manticore to survive, return home, and bring back reinforcements. In the event, they didn't send the courier through at all; one of the battlecruisers came through the Junction from the Trevor's Star side, and the additional fleet units immediately made transit. The purpose of the transit was not to suddenly bring a massive weight of fire to bear on the defenders' rear and flanks; it was to hugely reinforce White Haven's fleet (already almost strong enough to take Trevor's Star on its own) directly from Home Fleet. If it was possible for the reinforcements to catch the defenders between themselves and White Haven's wall of battle, that would be wonderful. In the far more likely case that it wouldn't be possible for them to do that, however, they would still constitute such a powerful increase in combat power that the defenders would have no choice but to abandon both San Martin and the Trevor's Star Terminus.

I apologize for not having fought the battle out in all its gory details, but I was sort of concentrating on HMS Wayfarer and Silesia at the time the attack actually went in. I will also concede that not having actually fought the battle out in the books -- simply knowing how it was fought, if you take my meaning -- means that I hadn't refined all of the details as thoroughly as I would have if I'd actually shown you the tactics. It didn't occur to me that there was any need to do so, since it was all going to happen "offstage," and so there are a few touches and tweaks I would have added/made to White Haven's battle plan -- and the way he described it to Caparelli in Honor Among Enemies -- which don't appear in the books and probably contribute to this entire furor. (For example, I would probably have gone ahead and omitted the whole "send a courier through" portion of his initial battle plan because I would have realized how much more sense it would make to send the BC through from the Trevor's Star end. There critics of the battleplan as described to Caparelli probably have a valid criticism.) The fact that I didn't show you the battle step-by-step and blow-by-blow doesn't mean that the battle plan didn't conform to the way junction transits actually occur, however.

Fireflair wrote:So why wouldn't the RHN have deployed mines around the worm hole junction, have forts in place, etc, to stop an attack through the junction?

Fireflair wrote:I'd considered that they hadn't built forts for financial reasons, but the notion of not mining for financial reasons I dismissed as mines are reportedly very cheap to make and are standard defensive weapons that are frequently employed. The idea that they didn't build forts because they knew the RHN wouldn't attack and start the war doesn't hold much water at the time of HAE, after all they're at war already.