n7axw wrote:We know that both the sharks and the Lenny Dets are spiders. Further we know that the sharks were active in Manticore and Grayson. I'm not sure about Beowulf. So far they are avoiding contact with conventional forces, relying instead on stealth.
In terms of numbers, we don't have enough info to guess, although I am inclined to speculate that the numbers would be low rather than high.
Don
Theemile wrote:We know exactly what they had at the time of OB - They used EVERY active ship in the MAN had to pull off OB; fewer than 30 sharks, and about a dozen and a hslf Ghosts. At most 60 ships.
Not 100, not 1000 and surely not 10,000.
What's being built, of course, is another matter.
George J. Smith wrote:We the readers know, but the GA, Andies & SL don't.
The RMN was able to determine, to a high degree of accuracy, the approximate numbers of the Mesan Alignment Navy ships used to carry out the Yawata strike, in their report to Queen Elizabeth:
Mission of Honor, Chapter 30 wrote:Elizabeth started to speak, but White Haven raised an index finger, requesting attention. She looked at him for a moment, then nodded.
“I’d just like to add something to what Tom’s said, Your Majesty,” he said. “First, I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if the people who did this did it in hopes that either the League or the Republic will finish us off before we can recover. Frankly, I don’t know how likely they are to succeed, if that was their intention; there are too many political and diplomatic elements tied up in that kind of decision tree for me to offer any kind of meaningful opinion. But, secondly, the one thing that’s struck me about this—in addition to what Tom and Sonja have said about new drive technologies—is that the people behind it can’t have a very large navy.”
“What?” Grantville blinked at his brother, and most of the other people around the table looked either surprised or downright skeptical. Caparelli, on the other hand, nodded firmly.
“Think about it, Willie,” White Haven said. “If someone had anything like the number of capital ships we have, and if all of them had this kind of technology, they wouldn’t have had to raid our infrastructure. They could have simply arrived, demonstrated their invisibility, and demanded our surrender, and we wouldn’t have had any choice but to give it to them. If they’d gotten a couple of dozen capital ships with this new drive of theirs as far in-system as they got their pods before launch, what other option would we have had? Even if we’d wanted to bring in Home Fleet—every single ship at Trevor’s Star, for that matter—they’d already have control of the planetary orbitals long before we could get into position. For that matter, they’d’ve been into missile range of the planets before we could even bring the system-defense missiles online to nail them! And even under the Eridani Edict, they’d be fully justified in bombarding the planets if we refused to surrender under those circumstances. But instead of going for the jugular, they attacked our arms and legs.
“Not only that, but the nature and pattern of the attack strongly suggest that whoever planned and launched it was operating with strictly limited resources. Yes, it was extraordinarily well planned and executed. From a professional perspective, I have to admire the ability, imagination, and skill behind it. But successful as it was, it was essentially a hit-and-run raid, albeit on a massive scale, and its success—as Tom has just pointed out—derived entirely from the fact that it achieved total strategic and tactical surprise. If any significant percentage of the weapons committed to it—either those graser platforms or the missile pods—had failed, or been detected on their way in, or even if we’d only suspected something was coming in time to alert the stations and activate their sidewalls and get the tugs deployed to interpose their wedges against potential attacks, the damage would have been much less severe. Give us fifteen or twenty minutes’ warning, and we’d’ve had a good ninety-five percent of our personnel off Hephasteus and Vulcan, for that matter, not to mention getting a lot of our ships out of the station docking slips! The people who put this together had to be as well aware of those possibilities as I am, and they have to know the axiom that anything which can go wrong, will go wrong. True, they seem to have pretty much avoided that this time around, but they damned well knew better than to count on that. So if they’d had more resources to commit to the attack, we’d have seen overkill, not just ‘exactly enough to do the job if everything works perfectly.’ ”
He shook his head.
“All of it points to the same conclusion. They’ve got this revolutionary new drive technology, but they don’t have it in large numbers. If they had the numbers, they’d either have been able to follow through with an outright knockout blow or have at least been able to deploy enough additional weapons to give them the sort of redundancy factor any competent planner would be looking for.”
Italics are the author's, boldface is my emphasis.
