runsforcelery wrote:Brigade XO wrote:All sorts of questions come to mind about what was happening in the Mesa System from the time that the combined GA fleet showed up till the Albrect Clean Up was triggered.
1st. We haven't see what (other than sending a single DD in as advance stealth scout) the GA did right as it droped out of hyper IN A MASSIVE CLUMP. At the very least, I would have expected some contingent- of BC or other ships, possibly to include one or two SDs- to come out of hyper in an attack/blocking move at the Mesa end of the Mesa-Visagoth wormhole. At the very least, that would have stopped- shortly- any ships comming in from Visagoth from having an impact on the developing situation as even a DD parked relative to the opening of the inbound lane would be able to kill anything other than a freighter that came through. We also don't know what Visagoth has in the way of a SDF even if it decided it wanted to send forces to Mesa. Based on all the previous discussions in the boards, the last thing they would have wanted to try would be throwing a squadron of anyting through what they have to presume is a wormhole defended on the other end. If they send something, it is going to be through hyper.
Tenth Fleet’s objective was the inner system. The terminus wasn’t going anywhere. They had no quarrel with neutral shipping. They weren’t worried about the (nonexistent) Visigoth System-Defense Force because, it was, well . . . nonexistent. All of the military potential of the system was pretty much inside the hyper-limit. When they dropped out of space just outside the limit, they were between Mesa and the terminus. No one was getting to it from the system without getting past them, but unless they wanted to simply open fire on anything already in the transit queue, they couldn’t have stopped those already in the queue from leaving the system before they got there anyway. And anything in transit
between the limit and the terminus was already able to hyper out the instant anyone came after it, so not even Manticoran LACs could have run a slow, plodding freighter down before it simply vanished. (Intercepting a ship outside the hyper-limit and "forcing it to heave to" in the Honorverse isn't as simple as a revenue cutter overtaking a Liberian-flagged freighter off Sandy Hook and compelling it to stop. There's a reason pirates operate inside the limit rather than
outside it.)
It is, indeed, true that Mike and Lester could have deployed smaller forces to different places in and around the system. Their objectives, however, were pretty handily met by the deployment they used. For that matter, I somehow don’t recall telling you at any point that a destroyer flotilla wasn’t detached to head for the terminus after the fleet made its alpha translation. I didn’t tell you it
was because that decision wasn’t really germane to the focus of the action which truly mattered: i.e., the stand down (in an act of unbridled sanity) of the MSN as the biggest damned fleet they’d ever seen barreled straight in on the planet.
Did I really need to show you all the mechanics of the military installations in orbit being occupied by Manticoran and Havenite Marines as Tenth Fleet entered Mesa orbit? Did you really need to see the ships’ crews using their life pods and small craft to take everyone but a tiny caretaker crew off (as we’ve seen done before) even before the ships are boarded? Did I need to break down for you where every pinnace was at any given moment?
This is a pair of highly experienced navies doing something both of them have done many, many times, and given that
Shadow was already running long. Because of that I opted not to go through all the details between the time at which Tenth Fleet arrived in system, the MSN abandoned ship, the system government officially surrendered, the initial landing parties were dispatched from the ships in orbit, and the explosions occurred.
Brigade XO wrote:
2nd. There are always going to be the possibilities of merchant shipping being too far out within the hyperlimit to intercept either on a course where the GA comes into the hyperlimit from or by comming out of hyper somewhere else on the sphear of said hyperlimit. While a lot of traffic will have been from or to the wormhole, a lot (possibly a very lot) will be on course in or from other directions. Mike and the GA TF came "generally" from the direction of Meyers to get to Mesa even of the roundevous location would probably not have been on a stright line.
Mesa in relativly close to Talbot Quadrant and we can presume some volume of traffic which would use the wormhole to get to Mesa would then probably even skip the Mesa System unless it had cargo it must take directly there instead of dropping at a freight transhipment platform by the wormhole. "Just passing through" without stopping usually means you don't have to pay customs duties or be boarded for inspection- you pay your transit fee and head on the best economical course to where you need to be next. There is also all that lovely Manpower and Alignment traffic which may not want to use the wormhole in any case and just be comming in from or going to almost anywhere else. At the very least, a bunch of those ships may have played with the actual direction they appear to have come out of hyperspace from to mask last port of call, same with heading out-system at one heading but changing once in hyperspace.
I’m not sure exactly what the point you're making in this course is.
To summarize, Mike came generally from the direction of Meyers, true, but as I suggested above, her actual hyper translation was made between the Mesa Terminus and the Mesa hyper-limit expressly to get between the planet and anything that might have tried to flee to the terminus. She then detached a flotilla of destroyers with orders to secure the space around the terminus. As I also said above, she couldn’t prevent anything already in close proximity to it from making transit before those destroyers arrived. Had she dropped a separate force out of hyper directly on the terminus, she might have been able to, but — frankly — it was, ah . . .
extraordinarily unlikely. We've seen how difficult it is to cut a hyper translation that fine in the vicinity of a terminus, so the odds were very, very, very,
very high that any force detached to the terminus would have arrived too far out to do anything except fire missiles at merchantships that refused to heave to and went ahead with their transits.
Because of that, seizing the terminus itself wasn’t very high on her list of
immediate priorities. Ultimately,
of course she needed control of the it! But in the short term, that was a non-issue, and she had no reason to believe that the question of who might have had sensors seeing what was going to be particularly important. At any rate, she
had taken control of the terminus well before any bombs started going off anywhere on Mesa. In fact, she'd shut the terminus down completely by that time.
As an aside, while there was a fair amount of merchant traffic in the Mesa System when Tenth Fleet turned up, there wasn't as much as I think you are suggesting. The Manticore System sees a
ton of traffic pretty much every day; Mesa, not so much, and remember the size of the Honorverse freighters.
Let’s remember that the port of San Diego handles about 2,800,000 tons of cargo per year and is one of the US’s 30 top container ship ports. So, let’s be generous and assume that
all 30 of them handles 2.8 million tons a year
each, and you get 84,000,000 tons, which works out to about 16.8 moderate-sized Honorverse freighters. Some of them are going to be smaller than that, and an entire star system is going to have a lot more consumers (like about 15 times the total population of the United States). So even if an equivalent tonnage per capita is being shipped in and out, the total of those moderate-sized freighters which would be required rises to only about 250
per year and the year is 365 days long. That works out to about 0.69 ships a day. Now, anyone of those ships is likely to be in-system for several days (aside from the ones simply dropping off a few hundred thousand tons of cargo at the terminus for transshipment elsewhere).
Because of this, Mesa probably sees no more than four or five really big merchies arriving or departing each day. In addition to those which are departing there are the ones which are already in-system unloading, or loading, or a combination of the above. So the total shipping in-system on any given day is probably two or three times that. Call it 15 hyper-capable ships in Mesan space at any given time, including the ones who are simply transshipping cargo at terminus warehouses or whatever. Hence my comment about the volume of shipping into and out of the system.
The point of this diversion is that there really aren’t as many hyper-capable potential sensor platforms as some people appear to be assuming, on the one hand, and there isn’t that huge a herd of antelopes for Tenth Fleet’s wolves to chase down, on the other. And since chasing down freighters came about 19th on Mike Henke’s top 10 list of Things to Do, and since her initial placement meant that anything inside the hyper-limit was highly unlikely to evade her, no matter how hard it tried, she didn’t waste a lot of effort worrying about it. This means that most ships which were underway and close to the terminus got out before she shut it down and that nothing that
wasn’t already at the terminus or between it and the hyper-limit when she arrived got out. Not until she chose to
let it out.
Brigade XO wrote:
3rd. While the GA brought a stupendous number of SD to bear on the Mesa system, I believe it also had a lot of lighter ships. It would make a great amount of sense if some of those would have been tasked to various places around the system hyper limit as stoppers for several scenarios. One would be to catch merchant shipping already comming into to the system (inside the hyper limit) or either try to run from orbit or are already heading out. How many of said merchants would have been Manpower or related controled plus ships beloinging to various Transtellars which at minimum might be carrying slaves. It also fits with the change in tactics of taking SL flagged shipping -which might have totaly ligitimate (non-slave) business there but are now just prizes. The other is to put combat ships closer to any number of MSN/MSDF ships than the primary GA force (of SDs) such that the GA lighter ships would be positions to "distract or dissuade" any MSDF ships from running (away to to the wormhole) or othewise interfearing with the hoped for surrender of the MSDF.
We have only seen a tiny bit of what happens so perhaps we will get to see a bagging of merchant ships such as Mike did at Meyers. Every little bit helps...big smile
Why is Tenth Fleet interested in catching all these ships? Oh, yeah, as you say, every little bit helps, but the only ones in which they would have a burning interest would be the slave transports, and there really aren’t a whole heck of a lot of those at any given time. Mike and Lester aren't here as part of the commerce raiding strategy; they’re here to conquer a star system. Capturing merchant traffic comes way lower in priority than that. Besides, at the risk of redundancy, they
did capture all the merchant shipping which hadn't already cleared the hyper-limit.
Tenth Fleet had nowhere near the number of units that would have been necessary to establish some kind of perimeter security all the way around the hyper-limit. Nor was there any tactical reason it should have attempted to, so it didn’t try. Actually pouncing on the terminus would have been a neat flourish, but Mike wasn’t interested in neat flourishes. Especially flourishes that wouldn't have accomplished anything, since (as I've said) any merchie already in the queue would have had time to make transit out before her ships could reach it, and anything which had
already crossed the hyper-limit headed for the terminus but not yet reached it would have been impossible to intercept, even with Manticore’s acceleration advantage, before it hypered out.
Brigade XO wrote:
4th. I earlier suggested that the MSN/MSDF, while having stood down in the surrender to the GA, was unlikely to have shut down their passive sensors and would have been able to see any impeller signatures -or launch signatures- from the GA ships. That would include the Mesan System tactical sensor net and local Astro Control. The GA DID NOT damage or destroy ANYTHING in orbit or even in-system (that we know of yet). So, while it is probable that the Mandarins's tame press and other new services my carry the Alignment version of Manticore committing an EE violation on Mesa, there WILL be good sensor records (not made by the GA) to show it didn't happen.
What makes you think that if those sensor records exist anyone inclined to suspect Manticore won’t point out that by the time anyone but the Grand Alliance saw those records they’d already been in the Grand Alliance’s possession? Ergo, they cannot be trusted, since the people they purport to clear of wrongdoing have had ample opportunity to doctor them.
I’m not saying that such records do or don’t exist, although most of the MSN ships in the system had been completely stripped of their crews, as per Mike’s directions, and all of the merchant traffic still inside the hyper-limit had surrendered as well, well before the explosions began. In addition, a star system is big. Things that don’t want to be found are difficult to find, and there are very large stretches of its volume that aren’t being particularly closely monitored at any given moment. Nobody spends a lot of time watching shipping patterns in the South Atlantic. They watch shipping movement in known shipping lanes and in the approaches to major ports. Weather satellites may be interested in what’s happening out there in hurricane alley, but they’re not the best platforms for monitoring ship movements. So the probability that one of those 15 or so merchantships (less, of course, any already in the transit queue or between the terminus and the limit who simply hypered out) was watching the critical volumes out-system from Mesa is not nearly as high as I think you have assumed.
What I’m saying is that even if sensor records do exist, they may or may not actually have a window on where the explosions occurred. Moreover, even if they exist,
they prove nothing in the eyes of anyone not already strongly inclined to take Manticore and the Grand Alliance’s word for what happened. (After all, whether or not the records are believed will depend on whether or not the someone in question is inclined to take Manticore and the Grand Alliance's word
that the records in question are genuine. If you don't trust them already, you won't be.) And, for reasons which will become apparent in the book, even if those records existed, and even if they were trusted, they wouldn’t make a whole lot of difference.
Brigade XO wrote:
One of those things that will not ring true from the timing and placement of all those nuclear explosions is where they happened. Remote "weather stations", an remote-uninhabited -nature reserve out in some ocean, etc. Sure, the screaming and finger pointing and beating the drum of "murderous neo-barbarians" will go on, but some people are going to have to wonder why a bunch of experienced and apparently otherwise extremly precise people who are using sophistocated targeting systems and weapons would be shooting at such odd places- and doing a really good job of hitting ONLY those really odd places along with a lot of other targets that don't have any conceivable value even if the planet hadn't surrendered.
This is NOT FF acting on the orders of OFS or the local political despot punishing rebelling subjects.
But, then, when does logic and reason enter into a lot of political rhetoric and propaganda?
Of course there are going to be tons of questions about why explosions occurred where they occurred!
The problem is that arguing that “experienced and otherwise extremely precise people who are using sophisticated targeting systems and weapons” wouldn’t be shooting at such odd places doesn’t really solve anything.
Somebody blew them up, and for your argument to do Tenth Fleet any good, there’d have to be a countervailing explanation for why
anyone else would be interested in blowing up such odd places. Even if you accept the Grand Alliance’s contention that there is something called the “Mesan Alignment” out there, why is the
Mesan Alignment killing millions of
Mesans? What motive would it have? Coming up with an alternate reason for the explosions is going to be a nontrivial exercise . . . unless you expect to convince the galaxy at large that this "Alignment" is so malignant that it would cheerfully kill millions of citizens of the system in which it originated simply to cast suspicion on the Grand Alliance.
There
is an alternate explanation, and Anton Zilwicki has already put a finger on it. Even his reasoning is still highly speculative at this point, however, and once they get into the actual situation on the ground it’s going to be even harder for the Grand Alliance to convince the galaxy at large that he isn’t a raving lunatic than anyone in the GA ever dreamed in their worst nightmares.
I could tell you why that is, but then you wouldn’t have to buy the book!
