SPOILER end of the MA

Regardless of what happens vis a vis the Protectorates and the Verge, the Core worlds will still need the imports those trans-stellars were raping the protectorates to obtain. They will miss the exports they can no longer force upon those systems. At the same time, those protectorates will miss the imports they had no way to switch from purchasing in the short run and the revenue they could have made in selling the resources that they were exploited to selling dirt cheap.

Those resources moving into and out of the Protectorates and the League were used and are STILL needed. There are incentives to move those goods. There are incentives to come to terms. There are incentives to have a honest broker mediate equitable terms for that continued engagement. Who pray tell will both sides agree to have as a mediator? If the Protectorates insist on the SEM, the transstellars have to accept it. Once the SEM proves they are honest, both sides will trust them.

Sigs wrote:snip-
So in 20 or 30 or 50 years the 50 systems of the SEM and 100 systems of Haven will be all equal in industrial capability as 400 core and shell systems?

Invest in a crash training program for the RMN recruits from Talbott and Silesia and go from there, if Grayson can help while demobilizing with some of those freed up members being seconded to the RMN for training purposes the RMN can incorporate people from their new territory quite quickly. Some in a better of months, others in a matter of decades. This would give the people of Talbott and Silesia a stake in defending their homes and relieve the pressure from the SKM to provide all of the crews.

This is a nice summary of your point in the post.

Nothing says that the RMN will be far weaker than it is currently. It will be smaller because they expenses to maintain it at current levels CANNOT be sustained. If it could be, then it would be.

Will they keep Saganami Island training the same number of naval officers? No, they won't. They will still keep training a large number of officers expecting many if not most will go the RMMM after a relatively brief stint in the service. They will still recuit many spacers and cycle most of them out to the RMMM. The populations of Talbott and Silesia will soak up that sort of training gladly. One wonders if Haven will also hire on ex-RMN crewmembers to improve their own personnel quality.

The trained personnel and the mothballed ships will remain available for when the MAlign is discovered. The cost of paying the full shot of all that while waiting won't be.

Sigs wrote:

n7axw wrote:
The MA became very interested once it became apparent that the game had changed in the Haven sector. However Roger very successful in concealing gram up to Buttercup. The MA has a very strong R&D of its own as the streak and the spider demonstrate. I suspect that they did underestimate the potency of the increase in missile range, numbers and accuracy diring the Haven wars.

Don

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You are right, but it still seems silly to me that they would not be trying to get intelligence sources on the ground when the war started. After all this was shaping up to be the first major interstellar war in a long time as both sides had combined over 1000 BB's, DN's and SD's. That alone represented 40% of the SLN's active wall. I understand why the SLN didn't care, I don't understand why the MA didn't do everything in it's power to monitor the war, the commanders and the technology etc... more closely. After all they were planning on pitting the People's Republic against the League if I am not mistaken which means a pretty significant fail on their part.

They did. You overestimate the number of boots they could put on the ground in that role.

The Onion has always been fairly small: the number of people they had to evacuate from Mesa during Houdini was in the low 5 figures, and most of them were not undercover intelligence types. People suitable for that role are always a very small proportion of any organization. It would not be too out of line to suggest that there was maybe one Onion member on Mesa for each known planet of interest - and most of those people were doing other things, like science research or technology.

They leveraged what they could: primarily Manpower and the always existing (dis)organized crime infrastructure that engages in smuggling, general corruption and detergent finance. The fact is, though, that those sectors are always being looked at by counterintelligence.

Given their chronic staff shortage, it's amazing they did what they did.

Sigs wrote:Or maybe if the RMN had dropped a drone from a Merchant ship at the outskirts of a system and let it come in under stealth it would have had the exact same effect. If I remember correctly the weapon that destroyed mistletoe was not dropped by one of the MA's invisible ships but it was dropped by a merchant ship the system authorities knew was there.

Do you think that you could fly an an RMN drone around inside the hyperlimit of Manticore or Beowulf for a month and nobody notice it? Can you provide some evidence of this?

Is there ANY reason to think that instead of taking out a multiple heavily defended defense sites spread across the system simultaneously that they couldn't have casually blown away all the fabrication platforms around Beowulf? No. Beowulf could have been looking for them and they wouldn't have seen them coming.

Oh, and where is the MAN's main industrial node? Oh, right, nobody knows. So it's kind of an asymmetrical problem, eh?

I suppose Beowulf and Manticore could ban all merchant traffic. There might be some issues with that...

Leaving aside the future of the RMN, the MA isn't in a horrible position. They've come close to achieving their objectives vis-a-vis the League. However, they have three problems:

1. The GA knows the Alignment exists and REALLY wants to kill them.

2. The League still exists, although it's likely that the new League will be much smaller, probably limited to the Core and parts of the Shell, and possibly still without Beowulf or her daughter colonies.

3. They've lost a LOT of resources and people with the fall of Mesa and the execution of Houdini.

With all that in mind, I think the smart move for the Alignment is to do their best impression of a hole in space for a few decades. They should cease all covert operations save intelligence gathering and relations with the Renaissance Factor, and they should use the RF for as much of their operations as possible. As much as they can, they need the galaxy to forget about the Alignment. In the meantime, they need to drastically revise their plans to account for the above problems, especially #1.

PeterZ wrote:This is a nice summary of your point in the post.

Nothing says that the RMN will be far weaker than it is currently. It will be smaller because they expenses to maintain it at current levels CANNOT be sustained. If it could be, then it would be.

Will they keep Saganami Island training the same number of naval officers? No, they won't. They will still keep training a large number of officers expecting many if not most will go the RMMM after a relatively brief stint in the service. They will still recuit many spacers and cycle most of them out to the RMMM. The populations of Talbott and Silesia will soak up that sort of training gladly. One wonders if Haven will also hire on ex-RMN crewmembers to improve their own personnel quality.

The trained personnel and the mothballed ships will remain available for when the MAlign is discovered. The cost of paying the full shot of all that while waiting won't be.

The RMN is not that big to begin with, their SD(P)'s have somewhere in the neighbourhood of 1/5-1/6 of the crew of an SLN SD. even if we assume they have 1,000 other ships with 1,000 are members per ship which they don't but lets assume that they do this would add up to about 1.2 million people. If we were to use the SLN model of 84% of their navy personnel in support roles and only 16% in ships that means that the RMN's total strength would be in the neighbourhood of 7.5 million which might be accurate because they still have Forts. So the RMN has 7.5 million people or less out of a total population of 3.5 billion in the old SKM. And I am not suggesting they immediately grab those ships and man them, there would obviously be a need for expansion which would allow them to incorporate the Talbott militaries and bring up some people through the training pipeline.

The ships that they would be manning are already build or being build, the maintenance would be done by Haven where it might even be cheaper to do it than on Manticoran or Grayson yards.

Having 150 SD(P)'s defending a one system nation might be a tad bit of an overkill but having 150 SD(P)'s defending a 60 system nation in the middle of a war with an enemy of unknown strength, location, industry, intentions or capabilities seems reckless to say the least.

JohnRoth wrote:

Sigs wrote:
You are right, but it still seems silly to me that they would not be trying to get intelligence sources on the ground when the war started. After all this was shaping up to be the first major interstellar war in a long time as both sides had combined over 1000 BB's, DN's and SD's. That alone represented 40% of the SLN's active wall. I understand why the SLN didn't care, I don't understand why the MA didn't do everything in it's power to monitor the war, the commanders and the technology etc... more closely. After all they were planning on pitting the People's Republic against the League if I am not mistaken which means a pretty significant fail on their part.

They did. You overestimate the number of boots they could put on the ground in that role.

The Onion has always been fairly small: the number of people they had to evacuate from Mesa during Houdini was in the low 5 figures, and most of them were not undercover intelligence types. People suitable for that role are always a very small proportion of any organization. It would not be too out of line to suggest that there was maybe one Onion member on Mesa for each known planet of interest - and most of those people were doing other things, like science research or technology.

They leveraged what they could: primarily Manpower and the always existing (dis)organized crime infrastructure that engages in smuggling, general corruption and detergent finance. The fact is, though, that those sectors are always being looked at by counterintelligence.

Given their chronic staff shortage, it's amazing they did what they did.

Boots on the ground could be as little as 3 people with the right capabilities and almost unlimited funds. We know that the RMN is not immune from dishonourable people and Manticoran Society in general is also not immune so you don't need thousands of people to do the job, all you need is a handful of capable individuals who don't need to be in on the onion as it is.


Plus here is my other problem with the MA. They have a timetable, they have a system no one knows about and something like 3 billion people in it and they consistently come up short on important people? For Gods sake they can grow the damn people... how hard is it to plan ahead and be prepared even if the timetable calls for execution 50 years in the future?

kzt wrote:Do you think that you could fly an an RMN drone around inside the hyperlimit of Manticore or Beowulf for a month and nobody notice it? Can you provide some evidence of this?

Do you think it flew around for a month? Or did it stay in one position in the system, gather intel and once its target criteria was met it was able to target that object and did not necessarily come in under power the whole way, if mistletoe was stationary it wouldn't need to. Besides I don't think a RMN drone would have that much of a problem doing the same thing if it was unpowered and on a ballistic path, I doubt anyone would see it unless it did something to draw attention to itself or someone bumped into it.

Is there ANY reason to think that instead of taking out a multiple heavily defended defense sites spread across the system simultaneously that they couldn't have casually blown away all the fabrication platforms around Beowulf? No. Beowulf could have been looking for them and they wouldn't have seen them coming.

The same could be done by firing missiles from light days away... make it come in ballistic and fire off second stage when they get close and no-one would be wiser until they come in for the final approach.

Oh, and where is the MAN's main industrial node? Oh, right, nobody knows. So it's kind of an asymmetrical problem, eh?

So what? Wait until you find the enemy to build up? What do you do then? Call a time out and ask for 5 to 10 years to build up your fleets to attack the enemy?

The whole point of being prepared is to be able to hit the enemy when you find him. If the GA's SD(P)'s are so outclassed then so are the fixed defences so why bother with them at all? Broadcast your surrender and be done with it.

I suppose Beowulf and Manticore could ban all merchant traffic. There might be some issues with that...

Or and this might be an insane suggestion they try to figure out how to avoid that from happening in the future rather than essentially disarming at the first sign of trouble.

Meshakhad wrote:Leaving aside the future of the RMN, the MA isn't in a horrible position. They've come close to achieving their objectives vis-a-vis the League. However, they have three problems:

1. The GA knows the Alignment exists and REALLY wants to kill them.

2. The League still exists, although it's likely that the new League will be much smaller, probably limited to the Core and parts of the Shell, and possibly still without Beowulf or her daughter colonies.

3. They've lost a LOT of resources and people with the fall of Mesa and the execution of Houdini.

With all that in mind, I think the smart move for the Alignment is to do their best impression of a hole in space for a few decades. They should cease all covert operations save intelligence gathering and relations with the Renaissance Factor, and they should use the RF for as much of their operations as possible. As much as they can, they need the galaxy to forget about the Alignment. In the meantime, they need to drastically revise their plans to account for the above problems, especially #1.

The SLN and at least some parts of the future government of the League know the MA exist as well...

PeterZ wrote:This is a nice summary of your point in the post.

Nothing says that the RMN will be far weaker than it is currently. It will be smaller because they expenses to maintain it at current levels CANNOT be sustained. If it could be, then it would be.

Will they keep Saganami Island training the same number of naval officers? No, they won't. They will still keep training a large number of officers expecting many if not most will go the RMMM after a relatively brief stint in the service. They will still recuit many spacers and cycle most of them out to the RMMM. The populations of Talbott and Silesia will soak up that sort of training gladly. One wonders if Haven will also hire on ex-RMN crewmembers to improve their own personnel quality.

The trained personnel and the mothballed ships will remain available for when the MAlign is discovered. The cost of paying the full shot of all that while waiting won't be.

Sigs wrote:The RMN is not that big to begin with, their SD(P)'s have somewhere in the neighbourhood of 1/5-1/6 of the crew of an SLN SD. even if we assume they have 1,000 other ships with 1,000 are members per ship which they don't but lets assume that they do this would add up to about 1.2 million people. If we were to use the SLN model of 84% of their navy personnel in support roles and only 16% in ships that means that the RMN's total strength would be in the neighbourhood of 7.5 million which might be accurate because they still have Forts. So the RMN has 7.5 million people or less out of a total population of 3.5 billion in the old SKM. And I am not suggesting they immediately grab those ships and man them, there would obviously be a need for expansion which would allow them to incorporate the Talbott militaries and bring up some people through the training pipeline.

The ships that they would be manning are already build or being build, the maintenance would be done by Haven where it might even be cheaper to do it than on Manticoran or Grayson yards.

Having 150 SD(P)'s defending a one system nation might be a tad bit of an overkill but having 150 SD(P)'s defending a 60 system nation in the middle of a war with an enemy of unknown strength, location, industry, intentions or capabilities seems reckless to say the least.

I agree that they will need more ships eventually. Heck, they'll need more light hulls right now. Between the RHN and RMN, there will be barely enough lighter hulls to cruise the Protectorates and try to keep chaos from running rampant. Things will still explode in many places, but not nearly in as many places as there could be.

So the RMN will expand their DDs, CLs and CAs. Of course there will be constant expansion of the Nikes, but not nearly at the same pace as the lighter units. The SDPs will be mothballed until the rest of the galaxy proves they can build something that can take out a Nike with ease. At that point ONI will assume the MAlign can as well and begin expanding the SDPs in service. By then the Quadrant will have begun contributing a greater number of personnel to the RMN. The greater population pool will make the expansion much less stressful both on the population and the economy of the Empire.

Given what the Graysons did with Manty investments, I would guess the Quadrant would approximate that growth on average. Likely less than Grayson achieved on average, but places like Dresden could well exceed Grayson's economic growth rates. Even 2-3 more Graysons would make a significant contribution to the RMN.