kzt wrote:It's like the chinese navy sending a warship to every island in Indonesia that is thinking about seceding.
There are 17,000 islands in Indonesia, and the PLAN combat fleet consists of:
1 aircraft carrier
4 amphibious transport docks
32 landing ship tanks
31 landing ship medium
29 destroyers
49 frigates
34 corvettes
109 missile boats
94 submarine chasers
17 gunboats
29 mine countermeasure vessels
68 submarines
Refining KZT's point, let's define the players. The League has just under 1800 members, and an unknown number of protectorates (probably somewhere between 200 and 500). With wormholes, double planet systems, military bases, etc, we could easily say that there are 2500 major "targets" in the League.
Assuming the RMN has retired or sold off most of the light and legacy fleet units seen in the 1920 fleet list and extrapolating from HOS's build numbers ( as well as figuring in known losses) we can figure that the active Manty fleet is probably smaller than 2000 units, with ~25% being capital ships. Grayson's fleet is insanely top heavy, with capital ships being over half of it's ~500 ships.
We don't know Haven's build numbers yet, but the 1920 fleet list shows Haven's small fraction of light units. The massive losses at Manticore really hurt their light forces ( 100 CA and BCs were destroyed) in addition to the losses from Honor's raids. Unless they kicked up their light construction, we can extrapolate their 1923 fleet to be ~2000-2500 ships, with a capital fraction over 50%.
So the GA has ~4500-5000 warships from it's 3 major players to defend itself, it's convoys AND take the fight to the opposition.
And then there comes the problem of how the GA will know what anyone in the SL is doing. The major information gathering arm, the MMM, has been pulled from SL space, and some planets are still a month or more from a wormhole via DB; unless you send a ship to every target, you don't know what they are doing. And doing so will stretch the GA fleets too far.