Remaining holes in SLN intel

Joat42 wrote:

kzt wrote:MDMs are a 5 year advantage before you face effective warships armed with them. Haven replicated them with significantly less tech than the core worlds have.

Apollo is harder, but not impossible. It’s probably 15 years at most. It’s also possible that people will go for other approaches to counter it once you get a research and manufacturing establishment bigger then the entire population of the SEM working on it.

So you just pull tens of billions people from thin air that will magically do all this?

Well, then they can just pull some fantasy tech out of thin air too and clobber the SEM at will (insert Lord Skimper idea here).

Haven was able to pull it off with basically just the people at bolthole. A pack of core worlds would have access to vastly more resources and a vastly greater population than Haven did. And the League core worlds would have a vastly better tech base. And a much better education base. Plus Darius can always leak choice bits of their research.

If the Solarian League was able to dedicate tens of billions of people (that's about one percent of their population if I remember right) they'd blow past Manticore so badly its not even funny. Manticore had like ten million build their entire fleet. They mostly all died at Yawata. Tens of billions would be thousands of times what Manticore managed.

quite possibly a cat wrote:Haven was able to pull it off with basically just the people at bolthole. A pack of core worlds would have access to vastly more resources and a vastly greater population than Haven did. And the League core worlds would have a vastly better tech base. And a much better education base. Plus Darius can always leak choice bits of their research.

If the Solarian League was able to dedicate tens of billions of people (that's about one percent of their population if I remember right) they'd blow past Manticore so badly its not even funny. Manticore had like ten million build their entire fleet. They mostly all died at Yawata. Tens of billions would be thousands of times what Manticore managed.

Not exactly, Haven had a little help from Erewhon and all the tech manuals they just happened to have in their possession when they were allies of Manticore. AND they did have some some actual tech examples that survived various battles. Ms. Foraker can still not duplicate Manticore's miniaturization processes.

Joat42 wrote:So you just pull tens of billions people from thin air that will magically do all this?

Well, then they can just pull some fantasy tech out of thin air too and clobber the SEM at will (insert Lord Skimper idea here).

There are 3 billion people in Manticore. The population of the SL is somewhere upwards of 5 trillion. They have a lot of people who can be redirected from widget mfg to missile mfg, and from designing a new video system to designing new missile guidance systems.

kzt wrote:

Joat42 wrote:So you just pull tens of billions people from thin air that will magically do all this?

Well, then they can just pull some fantasy tech out of thin air too and clobber the SEM at will (insert Lord Skimper idea here).

There are 3 billion people in Manticore. The population of the SL is somewhere upwards of 5 trillion. They have a lot of people who can be redirected from widget mfg to missile mfg, and from designing a new video system to designing new missile guidance systems.

The SL is only limited by its motivation to succeed. Part of the reason Manticore doesn't want to give them that motivation.

kzt wrote:

Joat42 wrote:So you just pull tens of billions people from thin air that will magically do all this?

Well, then they can just pull some fantasy tech out of thin air too and clobber the SEM at will (insert Lord Skimper idea here).

There are 3 billion people in Manticore. The population of the SL is somewhere upwards of 5 trillion. They have a lot of people who can be redirected from widget mfg to missile mfg, and from designing a new video system to designing new missile guidance systems.

The point is that when the League fractures they are going to have a lot of other problems to deal with for decades.

You have an internal market that's going to fracture too. Just because you have some systems that are showing a net profit it's well established that the League have been preying on the Verge to prop up the economy to some extent.

Couple that with Lacoon 1 & 2 a lot of systems are going to experience extreme economic upheavals. Sinking billions, if not trillions of credits into R&D, manufacturing and education to produce a navy that's on par with SEM and/or the GA is a very hard feat to accomplish.

Also, taking people out of existing industries in an effort to build up a navy is also going to impact the economy negatively. And if the economy tanks - who is going to pay for the effort?

You can't build a modern navy without a good economy unless you are intent on totally destroying whatever functioning economy you already have.

Remember, we are talking about what happens after the League has fractured.

kzt wrote:

Joat42 wrote:So you just pull tens of billions people from thin air that will magically do all this?

Well, then they can just pull some fantasy tech out of thin air too and clobber the SEM at will (insert Lord Skimper idea here).

There are 3 billion people in Manticore. The population of the SL is somewhere upwards of 5 trillion. They have a lot of people who can be redirected from widget mfg to missile mfg, and from designing a new video system to designing new missile guidance systems.

Yes. The people are there and the basic tech is there. It has not been weaponized or pressured by the Darwinian imperatives of war.

That is the real difference between the League and Manticore.. The League's difficulties are not lack of resourses or technology. They are political. It would be really hard to convince core world populations that Manticore is a threat if Manticore comes around and offers to be friends. That is the heart of the Harrington strategy.

Finally, war's winners are not the biggest or the best equiped. They are whoever can most effectively marshal their resources and bring those resourses to bear on the matter at hand.

As the League comes apart the old saw about all politics being local is going to become more and more applicable. Core worlds will be dealing with opportunities and threats in their own neighborhoods, not concerning themselves with what is going on half way around the galaxy.

Don

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kzt wrote:

Joat42 wrote:So you just pull tens of billions people from thin air that will magically do all this?

Well, then they can just pull some fantasy tech out of thin air too and clobber the SEM at will (insert Lord Skimper idea here).

There are 3 billion people in Manticore. The population of the SL is somewhere upwards of 5 trillion. They have a lot of people who can be redirected from widget mfg to missile mfg, and from designing a new video system to designing new missile guidance systems.

n7axw wrote:Yes. The people are there and the basic tech is there. It has not been weaponized or pressured by the Darwinian imperatives of war.

That is the real difference between the League and Manticore.. The League's difficulties are not lack of resourses or technology. They are political. It would be really hard to convince core world populations that Manticore is a threat if Manticore comes around and offers to be friends. That is the heart of the Harrington strategy.

Finally, war's winners are not the biggest or the best equiped. They are whoever can most effectively marshal their resources and bring those resourses to bear on the matter at hand.

As the League comes apart the old saw about all politics being local is going to become more and more applicable. Core worlds will be dealing with opportunities and threats in their own neighborhoods, not concerning themselves with what is going on half way around the galaxy.

Don

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Do pardon my boldness to call attention.

Plus! the fact that the Manties' reputation has preceded them wherever they go. That fact is also what enabled Harahap's plan of setting the Manties up with ill-founded promises of alleged help to forlorn systems. Oppressed systems counted on the Manticorans' reputation and the Harahap Plan capitalized off of both facts.

Time ! Time is the biggest and most overwhelming obstacle if Manticore was to press the issue.

Let's use this world as the example, using the EU. You could substitute the US, China, or Russia for the EU. Let us assume the EU really hasn't needed to make any new tanks, jets, bombers, or warships for decades. They have models that are 100+ years dated. The basic infrastructure and supply chain is missing, along with the skills sets and raw materials. Now an 'enemy' ship, of a small nation, is found with extensive diagrams and test results on cutting edge weapons with the caveat that 'enemy' action can start at any time, anywhere. The 'enemy' also controls the majority of transportation shipping and can stop long distance shipping by others.

The EU would be screwed. It would need to start with manufacturing the smallest parts first before they could be built into the final working product. No one country unit would want to let another country solely make a key component. Chaos!

Another example is the US Space Shuttle. It was built on late 60's early 70's technology. If we asked the US to put a new one safely in orbit in 1 year, with the knowledge and plans from then, it would be difficult to impossible. You'd need the skilled workers, boosters, shuttle, launch facilities, ...

If Manticore and Haven push, the Solarian League fractures into small, economically competing blocks. The ones who can build reliable ships, and not threaten Manticore, Haven, the IAN, or other established military kingdoms, will become the nidus of a new peaceful league.

The best response is to discuss peace. A war pressed on the Solarian League would be devastating to them.

It has been well established, by David, that you can lose your entire industrial infrastructure and it only takes 2 years to fully build out SD shipyards from scratch.

The Renaissance Faction was and is the Alignment's answer to how to rebuild a power structure from the former League with the Alignment in charge. They have an intrenched and incharge cadre of Alpha Line at the top of the existing political (and at least in Mannheim, the powerful SDF) structures and have been for possibly centuries.

Manticore and Haven don't have that in the area covered by the League and the Protectorates but at least Haven does have the present Republic of those systems which were either part of the early members of the old republic and those who have elected to stay within Haven's assemblage of systems after the Republic was restored.

Manticore had the Manticore Alliance and now has the SEM though both the Talbott and Silesia groups are new at it and Silesia is likely to have more difficulty sorting itself out into the SEM format.

As far as peace breaking out as the League shatters, I would't hold my breath nor invest a lot in a unicorn and rainbow themed assemblage of smiling trading partners for Manticore, Haven, and their friends (that are part of the GA or not) as there is way too much in the way of ambition and manuvering for power going on in the SL and Protectorates and just the universe at large. We have talked about the probabl rise of Warlordism from the remains of the League and elsewhere, both withing the League dominated sphere and outside it. That is going to start showing up soon.

Eventualy, both Lacoon operations are going to end. That is primarily because Manticore is going to need that merchant fleet out and trading to build the relationships it needs (and generate the income from both taxes and transit fees) in order to have at least civil relationships with a lot of individual systems or multi-system political entities.
The Lacoons are going to open slowly because it is going to be both dangerous to flood various areas with MMM shipping and Lacoon II will be a carrot/stick approch to systems who are dangerous to the GA and probably to their own neighbors.

I would expect that political maps of the Honorverse are going to change faster over the next 40 years than the political maps of Europe, the Near East and Africa did in the 20th century. Those changes will be driven very much by the same factors. Wars, rise of warlords, changes in regime -and the attendent expansion or shift of focus- and formation of trade grouping that also fold together such as we currently see with the EU. Of course, we are also seeing that the EU has plenty of it's own problems and it's members also have a lot of differences poking through the veneer of rainbows and unicorns of unity. That happen when individuals either don't pull their own weight, get themselves into trouble or diverge (ususaly for "rational" self-interest" from whoever is in charge at the moment.
And then the there is the Alignment. Tough to cut the head off the snake when you can't find the snake and it can litteraly clone replacements (though it takes a lot longer to educate and train the replacments as well endoctrinated leaders and followers).