What is the |value| of captured enemy systems?

cthia wrote:Tlb reminded me of an unintended consequence of capturing a system that I forgot to mention. Although, I can't understand why capturing the system would be necessary to capture enemy units to add to your own order of battle.

Flag in Exile Ch. 1 wrote:"In the war's first six months," he said, "Manticore captured nineteen Havenite star systems, including two major fleet bases. Their total capital ship losses during that time were two superdreadnoughts and five dreadnoughts, against which they destroyed forty Havenite ships of the wall. They also added thirty-one capital ships to their own order of battle—twenty-six captured units, exclusive of the eleven Admiral White Haven gave us after Third Yeltsin, and five more from new construction. That put them within roughly ninety percent of the Peeps' remaining ships of the wall, and they had the advantage of the initiative, not to mention the edge the People's Navy's confusion and shattered morale gave them.

So, although it is no way written in stone, there is an added possibility of acquiring enemy vessels to add to your own inventory and possible trade secrets contained inside those ships. Though gathering up enemy systems isn't a prerequisite to capturing enemy vessels.


@ Kael Posavatz, nice post!

In the early part of the war as the quote you give explains, Manticore would reuse the captured ships. Haven probably could do that throughout the war. But once the technology advantage became pronounced, the captured ships were nearly useless to Manticore; except to the extent that they were no longer available to the enemy. Witness all the discussions about uses for captured Solarian SD's (we were surprised when a snippet indicated that some equipment was being salvaged from them).

Given the nature of Honorverse hyperdrive technology, the idea of strategic depth as described in theearly books perplexed me. Then as Weber fleshed out his thinking on ship FTL speed and ship endurance being not quite as unlimited as the Warasawki sail implies, it becomes apparent that effective combat radius is limited to a few hundred lightyears unless you have fleet logistics ships. Even then, the logistical support requirement will scale exponentially with the combat radius.

The above consideration applies to freighters as well as warships, which is why the MWJ is of such profound economic as well as military importance.

As to taking inhabited, industrialized systems, the potential economic benefit is obvious. Assume a population of one billion people with a productivity of $50,000 per year per capita. Economic productivity of the system is then $50 Trillion per year. Biblical level tax rate is 10% yielding revenue of $5 Trillion and rapidly growing because you are leaving the people with 90% which enables reinvestment and encourages compliance without to much armed force. Republican level tax rate might be 10% yielding tax revenue is $10 Trillion per year but less economic growth and need for more force to get compliance because of less money available for reinvestment.. Democrat level tax rate is 40% yielding tax revenue of $20 Trillion per year and stagnent and totalian force needed to compel compliance. PRH tax rate 80% yields or $40 Trillion per year but imploding because there is no money for reinvestment and people have no incentive to be productive or even reproduce.

Setting aside the above political rant, assume the economic benefit of system conquest is $5 Trillion per year. Weber has stated that missiles cost about $1 million each and the missiles on an SD(P) cost about as much as the SD(P). An SD(P) with a full ammo load out costs about $20 Billion. Assume that you need 100 SD(P)s to take a system, expending all ammo and with 20% losses. You have just spent $1.2 Trillion to conquer the system.

Even with a Biblical level tax rate of only 10%, you are going to make a 400% profit in the first year!

Dont worry about compliance. Empires have been extracting taxes from conquered peoples for 5,000 years. The techniques are well understood. The Honorverse societieswill not have forgotten how to tax the feces out of conquered peoples in 2,000 years.

This of course explains why Haven and Manticore would fight hard enough to force the winning side to blow up industrial infrastructure or blow it up themselves.

Of course there are the SEX SLAVES. Don't forget the SEX SLAVES not to mention the opportunity for the conquerers to inseminate the conquered population. The Darwinian logic of raping as well as pillaging a village will be just as valid 2,000 years ago as it was back when the Babylonians were conquering the Israelis and castrating all of the males so that King Xeres could add Esther to his vast harem. Ghengis Kahn and his sons were so successful at inseminating China that one half of all Chinese males have the same Y chromosone.

cthia wrote:

noblehunter wrote:It seems that their value is mostly what is lost to the enemy. It may be possible for some industrial value to be captured but not if the platforms are scuttled or destroyed during capture.

It was believed at the start of the war that they had moderate value as positions for basing or logistics but that's now questionable. The burden of picketing system might outweigh any benefits of location, wormholes aside.

If it's mostly because of its value to the enemy, then wouldn't it be simpler to just destroy said infrastructure instead of gathering it up - which would infer all kinds of additional headaches and lost of tonnage (destroyed and drawn down from other areas) needed to support it to hold onto it?

At one point in Flag in Exile the RMN captured nineteen systems. Which would seem to automatically translate into lots of other warships, officers and ordnance dispersed - drawn down from their already taxed inventory and current assignments, sometimes pulled from Home Fleet - to support systems that are of little to no value to them?

You've hit exactly why the first and second war were so different. In the first, Manticore was taking systems because the strategic thinking was that one took out systems around a major objective as a means of isolating and weakening that objective. Mostly in terms of denying the enemy bases to launch a counterattack from or to repair ships from a previous battle. Their strategic thinking was that the surrounding bases ("outworks" as mentioned previously) significantly contributed to the defense of a major base and they had to be reduced and captured as a step to taking the major base. And to a degree that was true.

The second war started with Haven retaking all the occupied systems - all the major bases and outworks supporting them from the first war - because returning those populations to Haven's administration was a major strategic goal in its own right, while the significant attritional losses inflicted on the RMN was a second major strategic goal. Some attacks served one goal but not the other - there was never any indication that Haven wanted to occupy Marsh, for instance, just eliminate a good chunk of the RMN while it was isolated from support. Grendelsbane also served to eliminate part of the serving navy and prevent building new ships, but there wasn't much of a permanent population to conquer, and certainly not one that had ever belonged to Haven for them to reclaim. Thus there was no real reason for Haven to capture the system other than to prevent Manticore from rebuilding it.

After Operation Thunderbolt, there was no real reason for either side to capture systems. Manticore, with its severe deficit in ship numbers, could not afford to garrison any more systems than they already had. Haven wasn't trying to forcibly annex new territory, they just wanted to force a favorable resolution to the war. Thus there was never an attempt to capture Zanzibar even after they'd destroyed the defenses; they didn't want it and did want Manticore to have to rebuild it, with all the industrial and naval effort that would take.

Thus both sides started raiding for both the counter force and counter value goals. Any ships eliminated during a raid was just that much less the enemy had to defend themselves, and raiding infrastructure paid off twice. First, you eliminated the means of building new ships and ammunition to directly reduce the enemy's ability to continue the war. Second, rebuilding that infrastructure cost time, money, and resources that could have otherwise been used to build ships and missiles.

Operation Beatrice was the same thing on a massive scale. It was planned such that it could take the Manticore system but wasn't really expected to do so. Instead, it was expected to crush half the Alliance wall of battle in a single day and to do as much infrastructural damage as they could before relief forces could arrive from anywhere other than Trevor's Star (and presumably Basilisk and the Lynx terminus). Even if the attack had been successfully driven off by fresh ships coming from other stations, the destruction of the shipyards and missile production lines would have prevented Manticore from resisting a second Beatrice-sized attack.

Oddly enough, for all the derision heaped on the SLN for its backwards thinking and practices, both Crandall and Filareta adopted more Beatrice-type strategies than the attrition tactics seen in the first war.

TFLYTSNBN wrote:Given the nature of Honorverse hyperdrive technology, the idea of strategic depth as described in theearly books perplexed me. Then as Weber fleshed out his thinking on ship FTL speed and ship endurance being not quite as unlimited as the Warasawki sail implies, it becomes apparent that effective combat radius is limited to a few hundred lightyears unless you have fleet logistics ships. Even then, the logistical support requirement will scale exponentially with the combat radius.

The above consideration applies to freighters as well as warships, which is why the MWJ is of such profound economic as well as military importance.

This particularly true of Haven, as one of the early books points out, because of the way their maintenance worked. They were built for quick victories, followed by maintenance layovers where parts were replaced from the depots. They did not have the technical expertise on ship to effect repairs; they needed to replace a defective board that would be sent someplace to be refurbished.

cthia wrote:Tlb reminded me of an unintended consequence of capturing a system that I forgot to mention. Although, I can't understand why capturing the system would be necessary to capture enemy units to add to your own order of battle.

Flag in Exile Ch. 1 wrote:"In the war's first six months," he said, "Manticore captured nineteen Havenite star systems, including two major fleet bases. Their total capital ship losses during that time were two superdreadnoughts and five dreadnoughts, against which they destroyed forty Havenite ships of the wall. They also added thirty-one capital ships to their own order of battle—twenty-six captured units, exclusive of the eleven Admiral White Haven gave us after Third Yeltsin, and five more from new construction. That put them within roughly ninety percent of the Peeps' remaining ships of the wall, and they had the advantage of the initiative, not to mention the edge the People's Navy's confusion and shattered morale gave them.

So, although it is no way written in stone, there is an added possibility of acquiring enemy vessels to add to your own inventory and possible trade secrets contained inside those ships. Though gathering up enemy systems isn't a prerequisite to capturing enemy vessels.


@ Kael Posavatz, nice post!

tlb wrote:In the early part of the war as the quote you give explains, Manticore would reuse the captured ships. Haven probably could do that throughout the war. But once the technology advantage became pronounced, the captured ships were nearly useless to Manticore; except to the extent that they were no longer available to the enemy. Witness all the discussions about uses for captured Solarian SD's (we were surprised when a snippet indicated that some equipment was being salvaged from them).

Glad you brought that up. While rereading FiE, I recalled the many discussions I encountered in those Captured Solly Junk threads and wondered why Honor's repurposed captured flag ship Terrible was able to be, well . . . repurposed. And so quickly. It seems she had lots of custom interior decoration done, which I thought that alone was difficult, therefore impractical to do. In fact, Grayson's ability to match Manticore in that endeavor was one thing that thwarted the Peeps.

At any rate, thanks for ironing out some of my wrinkles in understanding why Terrible and the other acquired SDs was so different.

One thing to remember is that Naval construction and tactics had stagnated by the time Manticore-Haven Prt 1 kicked off.

It isn't a stretch to say that strategic thinking had likewise stagnated.

tlb wrote:In the early part of the war as the quote you give explains, Manticore would reuse the captured ships. Haven probably could do that throughout the war. But once the technology advantage became pronounced, the captured ships were nearly useless to Manticore; except to the extent that they were no longer available to the enemy. Witness all the discussions about uses for captured Solarian SD's (we were surprised when a snippet indicated that some equipment was being salvaged from them).

cthia wrote:Glad you brought that up. While rereading FiE, I recalled the many discussions I encountered in those Captured Solly Junk threads and wondered why Honor's repurposed captured flag ship Terrible was able to be, well . . . repurposed. And so quickly. It seems she had lots of custom interior decoration done, which I thought that alone was difficult, therefore impractical to do. In fact, Grayson's ability to match Manticore in that endeavor was one thing that thwarted the Peeps.

At any rate, thanks for ironing out some of my wrinkles in understanding why Terrible and the other acquired SDs was so different.

Thinking about I realized that I was wrong to think that Haven could reuse enemy ships throughout the war. The ability to reuse requires that technology be just about equal, but also requires that you rip out anything that you do not have parts to fix and replace with something you can repair. If the effort to make the ship repairable is too much or the hull configuration is obsolete, then you park the ship in a junkyard.
In the case of the SD's in Flag in Exile, just replacing the electronics and converting to RMN missiles would be justified, but with Solarian ships not so much.
Sometimes you might have to rip out and replace equipment, even though you could repair it, because it is different from whatever your crews have used in training and on other ships.

Am I right to presume that all systems do not have any sort of base? Out of those nineteen previously mentioned captured systems in the Honorverse, I am assuming all of them not have existing bases.


Another different aspect of war in the Honorverse is seemingly able to operate deep in an enemy's rear area, perhaps not with impunity, but certainly without the same pronounced difficulties.

1) There is no front line in space in HV
1a) Unless one literally has over 500light years of territory to your core system and even then an audacious attack force could still attack without enough fuel to get home. Of course if they bring equipment to suck up hydrogen from a gas giant.... well, then ultimately the range of an attacking force is near infinite even if refueling is a bit slow.

So, there is no front line in space in DW's universe as sensors cannot cover the gaps between.

2) In flat earth war, you have no option other than to pacify the conquered population be they friend or foe. If you have to use manpower and materials anyways, it therefore behooves the conqueror, benign or malignant, to at least get SOMETHING in return.

So, there is NO value of a captured system unless the captured system wishes to join your side and then there is still NO value until the captured system can defend itself from an overwhelming force as it is the front lines. This requires the investment of FAR MORE capital into a system to make it profitable for your side than in a flat earth 2d war of captured territory.

You can hope that by showing examples of when a system joins you they may achieve the vast investment to make you safe, but there is no way you could actually afford to do so to all systems. You just hope your goodwill gesture to a few systems is enough to not have other systems nearby go over to the bad guys. So, outside of PR purposes, there is no value. Outside the need for a few nodal bases(a-la how frontier security operates)

In short, in HV, you can only hope the local system is willing to join and help. If not, then you take and destroy so they cannot willingly help the other side. Or at minimum severely prune back their capabilities for the next several years. A conqueror in the HV could literally become hedge arborists. Come in, prune back capabilities before they get too big and continue to do so every couple of years until an outside forces you to do otherwise.

The best analogy is islands in the Pacific.

Prior to the invention of aircraft fleets could operate in an enemy rear area with near impunity as long as they stayed out of range of shore batteries. Even during WW2, taking an island was not needed unless the enemy garrison had aircraft.

Remember McCarthur island hopping?