Remaining holes in SLN intel

ywing14 wrote:

cthia wrote:
I don't think you could really blame the flight itself. While they don't specifically say who the mole/source is, Beowulf clearly has highly placed sources within the SLN. Since Beowulf is a part of the SL it's not surprising the information was available. We also don't even know where it was leaked. It may have nothing to do with the Military. Anyone of the Manderins' areas could have been the leak. OpSec is great to say but most countries have a ton of issues with it these days especially with modern cellular phones.

Even without Beowulf tipping them off I think it is unlikely the coalescing of so many SLN SDs fairly close to the SEM would have gone unnoticed. Especially given the lack of SLN exercises held that far from the core. I agree that Beowulf providing the plans made it easier to conduct the grand fleet ambush, but on the flip side I think more of the SLN fleet would have been destroyed when they ran into the system defense pods in the SEM didn't know the specific date the SLN was supposed to arrive.

It is clear that Beowulf has infiltrated the SL, not just the navy but everywhere. And I would bet that by this time there are some Manties involved there as well.

There will also be a lot of people who do not like what's going on and they will assist in getting information.

It was a source with contact to Beowulf that passed along the information about Operation Raging Justice. A source not identified in the book but one which was both very highly placed and apparently was not a regular contributor.
That raised the question of is this some version of an Alignment double agent sting. Ok, perhaps being paranoid but this was a trusted if very intermittent source and it did alow Manticore to crush Fillerta's fleet plus deflect the reenforcements that would have tried to come through the Sigma Draconis terminus. Though it would have been a lot tougher, Manticore alone probably could have stopped Fillerta. They would have burned through a lot more missiles and suffered a lot more casualties (and been much more greatly weakened) but the net effect would still have been the removal of the entire Fillerta battle fleet from the SL.
Even if Fillerta had been sucessfull as a tool on both sides of operations for the Alignmente- sort of -because if he had fought his way through to even the 1st of the Binary System planets he was attacking- he would have also have had to destroy much of the Manticore fleet in the system and would have been savaged at the same time. Having faced Honor with all that segment of the RMN and system defence pods, moving on to take the planet Manticore would have been a challange for Fillerta's surivors. Remember, he came in where he more or less had to and should his fleet gotten to beat down the defenders of the 1st planet they would have still had to go through fresh ships and shoals of defence pods (and LACs) to go for Manticore itself.

So was the source only working for Beowulf or was it yet another Alignment operation? We probably won't find out. The other question is what exactly is the SLN going to do about what MUST have been a fairly large and highly placed leak because not only did Fillerta walk into a prepaired enemy, the whole Beowulf side of the operation was clearly blown as well. That is more than your opponent collecting a crapload of tactical information on ship and supply movements and doing an Amazing Karnack routine figuring out what about a third of you active fleet is up to.
Think about it in terms of the US, having discovered the plan for the Pearl Harbor, (and the strikes against the British and Dutch forces) in the Pacific and the various contries involved had deployed packs of submarines about a day's sailing way from the air-launch points, plus the places the IJN would be landing troops in the Far East backed up by inbound aircraft carriers to go after the cripples and survivors.
Probably very messy for IJN and IJA.
Change the timing of the ship (and massive troop) losses plus probable lack of destruction on the Allies ships and bases in the intial time frame and things are going to develope very differently. Probably:)

Brigade XO wrote:It was a source with contact to Beowulf that passed along the information about Operation Raging Justice. A source not identified in the book but one which was both very highly placed and apparently was not a regular contributor.
That raised the question of is this some version of an Alignment double agent sting. Ok, perhaps being paranoid but this was a trusted if very intermittent source and it did alow Manticore to crush Fillerta's fleet plus deflect the reenforcements that would have tried to come through the Sigma Draconis terminus. Though it would have been a lot tougher, Manticore alone probably could have stopped Fillerta. They would have burned through a lot more missiles and suffered a lot more casualties (and been much more greatly weakened) but the net effect would still have been the removal of the entire Fillerta battle fleet from the SL.
Even if Fillerta had been sucessfull as a tool on both sides of operations for the Alignmente- sort of -because if he had fought his way through to even the 1st of the Binary System planets he was attacking- he would have also have had to destroy much of the Manticore fleet in the system and would have been savaged at the same time. Having faced Honor with all that segment of the RMN and system defence pods, moving on to take the planet Manticore would have been a challange for Fillerta's surivors. Remember, he came in where he more or less had to and should his fleet gotten to beat down the defenders of the 1st planet they would have still had to go through fresh ships and shoals of defence pods (and LACs) to go for Manticore itself.

So was the source only working for Beowulf or was it yet another Alignment operation? We probably won't find out. The other question is what exactly is the SLN going to do about what MUST have been a fairly large and highly placed leak because not only did Fillerta walk into a prepaired enemy, the whole Beowulf side of the operation was clearly blown as well. That is more than your opponent collecting a crapload of tactical information on ship and supply movements and doing an Amazing Karnack routine figuring out what about a third of you active fleet is up to.
Think about it in terms of the US, having discovered the plan for the Pearl Harbor, (and the strikes against the British and Dutch forces) in the Pacific and the various contries involved had deployed packs of submarines about a day's sailing way from the air-launch points, plus the places the IJN would be landing troops in the Far East backed up by inbound aircraft carriers to go after the cripples and survivors.
Probably very messy for IJN and IJA.
Change the timing of the ship (and massive troop) losses plus probable lack of destruction on the Allies ships and bases in the intial time frame and things are going to develope very differently. Probably:)

There were probably multiple leaks about Filareta's mission on Earth. After all, when moving a fleet of millions of people there are a lot of things that have to be done. Think personnel and logistics.

Easy to learn about it.

Note that the people running the War and Navy Departments for the US at the start of WWII openly said they did not believe in opening other people's mail.

Because of racial differences, human intelligence inside Japan was difficult. But no attempts were made at all.

On the other hand, the Sollies are like the UN. The UN can not really keep secrets. A lot of the press keeps some things from the public but spies can find out just about everything.

Theemile wrote:But he was right in that whatever it was which was used on Crandall wasn't portable. Sag-Cs can only carry 40 pods before their accel starts to degrade, so 12 Sag-Cs can only invade a system with a single salvo of 4800 missiles, then another follow-up with 1440 missiles every 54 seconds.

And according to some tidbits dropped by David in the last year or so they'd probably need to bring a freighter or something to haul the pods for most raids.
Towed pods don't have strategic endurance - you can't expose towed pods to a ship's drive emissions for more than a week or two before they require major refurbishment. (A slow motion version of the issue that precluded practical DDMs prior to the invention of the 'baffle').

And as an aside I'm not sure triple stacking your double broadsides would be the most effective way to use a Sag-C's still somewhat limited magazine capacity -- you burn through missiles real fast that way and a bunch are likely to be wasted overkilling individual targets.

Jonathan_S wrote:

Theemile wrote:But he was right in that whatever it was which was used on Crandall wasn't portable. Sag-Cs can only carry 40 pods before their accel starts to degrade, so 12 Sag-Cs can only invade a system with a single salvo of 4800 missiles, then another follow-up with 1440 missiles every 54 seconds.

And according to some tidbits dropped by David in the last year or so they'd probably need to bring a freighter or something to haul the pods for most raids.
Towed pods don't have strategic endurance - you can't expose towed pods to a ship's drive emissions for more than a week or two before they require major refurbishment. (A slow motion version of the issue that precluded practical DDMs prior to the invention of the 'baffle').

And as an aside I'm not sure triple stacking your double broadsides would be the most effective way to use a Sag-C's still somewhat limited magazine capacity -- you burn through missiles real fast that way and a bunch are likely to be wasted overkilling individual targets.

Quite true, 10 Triple Doublebroadside launches are all a SAG-C has. But it is nice to know that 1 platform can throw enough missiles to penetrate just about any reasonable defense - if necessary.

ldwechsler wrote:
Easy to learn about it.

Note that the people running the War and Navy Departments for the US at the start of WWII openly said they did not believe in opening other people's mail.

Because of racial differences, human intelligence inside Japan was difficult. But no attempts were made at all.

It was Secretary of State Henry L. Stimson who said, in 1929, that "Gentlemen do not read each other's mail."
He said this when the US State Department withdrew its half of the funding from the "Black Chamber" code breaking group. The US Army, at that time, declined to pay for the whole thing and it was shut down.

I've heard it said that Stimson's objection was specifically to the department in charge of Ambassadors, embassies and diplomacy running the code breaking -- that it should be done by people not so tightly linked to diplomacy.

Still, by the time WWII started a decade later the US military had some pretty robust code breaking efforts underway against a variety of Japanese ciphers and codebooks[1]. (Humint was a different problem and, yes, one the US had real problems with in Japan)

[1] The Emperor's Codes by Michael Smith is the book I can remember that covers this; but it's only an okay book.

Jonathan_S wrote:

ldwechsler wrote:
Easy to learn about it.

Note that the people running the War and Navy Departments for the US at the start of WWII openly said they did not believe in opening other people's mail.

Because of racial differences, human intelligence inside Japan was difficult. But no attempts were made at all.

It was Secretary of State Henry L. Stimson who said, in 1929, that "Gentlemen do not read each other's mail."
He said this when the US State Department withdrew its half of the funding from the "Black Chamber" code breaking group. The US Army, at that time, declined to pay for the whole thing and it was shut down.

I've heard it said that Stimson's objection was specifically to the department in charge of Ambassadors, embassies and diplomacy running the code breaking -- that it should be done by people not so tightly linked to diplomacy.

Still, by the time WWII started a decade later the US military had some pretty robust code breaking efforts underway against a variety of Japanese ciphers and codebooks[1]. (Humint was a different problem and, yes, one the US had real problems with in Japan)

[1] The Emperor's Codes by Michael Smith is the book I can remember that covers this; but it's only an okay book.

The Codebreakers: The Comprehensive History of Secret Communication from Ancient Times to the Internet by David Kahn also mentions it (as well as Stimson's later acceptance of codebreaking), and is also an excellent read about codes and codebreaking throughout history.

Vince wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:[qote="ldwechsler"]

Easy to learn about it.

Note that the people running the War and Navy Departments for the US at the start of WWII openly said they did not believe in opening other people's mail.

Because of racial differences, human intelligence inside Japan was difficult. But no attempts were made at all.

It was Secretary of State Henry L. Stimson who said, in 1929, that "Gentlemen do not read each other's mail."
He said this when the US State Department withdrew its half of the funding from the "Black Chamber" code breaking group. The US Army, at that time, declined to pay for the whole thing and it was shut down.

I've heard it said that Stimson's objection was specifically to the department in charge of Ambassadors, embassies and diplomacy running the code breaking -- that it should be done by people not so tightly linked to diplomacy.

Still, by the time WWII started a decade later the US military had some pretty robust code breaking efforts underway against a variety of Japanese ciphers and codebooks[1]. (Humint was a different problem and, yes, one the US had real problems with in Japan)

[1] The Emperor's Codes by Michael Smith is the book I can remember that covers this; but it's only an okay book.

The Codebreakers: The Comprehensive History of Secret Communication from Ancient Times to the Internet by David Kahn also mentions it (as well as Stimson's later acceptance of codebreaking), and is also an excellent read about codes and codebreaking throughout history.[/quote]


Another good read on code braking is Inside the Black Chamber by Yardley.

drinksmuchcoffee wrote:You can go a long ways with this approach. For a long time in the States cryptography wasn't generally "classified" but finding nuts-and-bolts information on how to actually implement crypto systems was pretty challenging. Similarly, in the 80's if you were doing anything fancy with signal processing (especially if you were making custom hardware to do it) you would be discreetly checked out, usually by people from the Department of Commerce.

Funny enough, even in the dark days between the closing of the Cipher Bureau (Aka The Black Chamber) and the build up to WW2, the Army SIS still was acting as the adults in the room regarding Cryptography. William F. Friedman has patents sat on for 60+ years from secrecy orders. See https://patents.google.com/patent/US6097812A/en? for US Patent 6,097,812, filed July 1933, issued, August 1, 2000.

The Coast Guard was also doing the same thing with the Coast Guard Cryptanalytic Unit, and William's wife Elizebeth S. Friedman was the public face of cryptography, as her work was focused on breaking smuggler's codes.

drothgery wrote:And when MDMs were just a secret Manty research project, that makes sense. However, they were the decisive weapons in the final battlese of the First Havenite War seven years ago. And were thrown around in immense numbers by both sides in the Second Havenite War. They could easily be skeptical of exact performance numbers, but not realizing Manticore had made some major improvements in missile tech at the end of the first war, and that Haven had largely matched it by the second... I don't think even the SLN would have failed to notice it without active Alignment meddling.

It's actually worse then that. The key development the SLN never felt in its bones was the Laser Head. The SLN hasn't fought a battle with a Waller using laser heads. The result of this is the SLN didn't understand how much more lethal missile combat became.

You see this in their ships. Their SD's are about the size of the last generation of Haven Quadrant DDs. Comparing the Scientist Class to the King William Class, the KW has 8 more tubes per broadside, nearly 4 times the counter missile tubes, and more than double the PD stations.

The King William was built early in the life of the Laser Head, but the RMN actually had a radical design in the King William, with the vast increase in Missile emphasis. Even then, we still had the Senior Leadership as of OBS thinking in terms of energy engagements.

The SLN has only an intellectual appreciation for Laser Heads. To them, its not much different than one of Hemphill's experiments that 'of course we can over come if we see it coming' ala the Thing We Must Not Mention. The Senior Admirals of the SLN like Rajampet are all pre-laser head admirals. Hamish, despite being head of the historical school, worked on Project Gram with Hemphill and actually understood it. Still, it wasn't really until the first war got rolling that the jeune ecole could make its point.

Because the SLN is so much more rigid with Rajampet being frankly, an old man whose still used to doing things how he was a young officer, those making decisions in the SLN don't view Laser Heads as the ship killer they are.

The missile ranges of MDMs, and everything else flows from that. Eg. 'who cares what range a missile has when it really can't kill a waller'.