Honor's rescue of Marsh, nearly fatal?

Relax wrote:
Beyond building anything at Grendelsbane, the MAJORITY of their SDP are being built there. WTH?... They lost 100 capital ships not including 50 small fry being built. They had a mere 36? Invictus being built at home... Off to go look at the numbers.... Okay, remembered about right. Close enough.

Anyways... Logic wormholes you could stuff an entire galaxy through on this one.

Jonathan_S wrote:

Relax wrote:
Beyond building anything at Grendelsbane, the MAJORITY of their SDP are being built there. WTH?... They lost 100 capital ships not including 50 small fry being built. They had a mere 36? Invictus being built at home... Off to go look at the numbers.... Okay, remembered about right. Close enough.

Anyways... Logic wormholes you could stuff an entire galaxy through on this one.

Where there actually more slips at Grendelsbane than at Manticore? I don't think so.

Letting a repair yard that's being underutilized morph into one that does upgrades and then into one that's doing construction is poorly thought out. But it's wasn't Manticore's primary SD(P) and CLAC yard.

IIRC the events went something like this:
- The second wave of SD(P) and CLAC are under construction a majority at Manticore a sizable minority at Grendelsbane.
- Before their completion the Cromarty assassination happens and the new High Ridge government accepts St Just's cease fire request.
- Shortly after they order all SD(P) and CLAC construction halted (to free funding for their cherished domestic programs)
- Eventually High Ridge is pressured to resume construction and he picks the more politically beneficial work in Manticore, leaving the large minority of ships at Grendelsbane alone.
- As the slips are cleared in Manticore no new construction is started.
- Some panic occurs when Pritchart reveals that Haven has a non-trivial number of SD(P) of their own.
- The paused construction at Grendelsbane is restarted to boost Manticore's numbers, but no new hulls are laid down in Manticore -- High Ridge thinks Haven is more or less running a bluff and isn't willing to disrupt his precious domestic programs by restoring war funding to military construction.


So at the time of Thunderbolt, yes, all Manticore's current SD(P) and CLAC construction was a Grendelsbane . But only because someone who viewed military construction through the lens of vote buying and refused to worry about security of the yards.

TFLYTSNBN wrote:The Grendelsbane yard and other bases in minimally inhabited systems never made sense to me. Assets to defend systems are limited. Each new base established represents a system that must be defended unless you are willing to sacrifice it. The absence of a habitable planet and established space industries increases operating costs. Everything has to be shipped in.

Once you have countergrav and impeller drive, space based mineral resources became nearly infinite by Honorvese standards. Asteroid belts are essentially a planet that has been dissassembled to make mining more convienient. One cubic kilometer of Nickel Iron asteroid equals one billion tons of mostly high grade oar. A ten kilometer diameter asteroid equals half a TRILLION TONS of goodies that can be transformed into SD(P)s, missiles, LACs ect. Manticore's entire Navy masses less than 10 billion tons. Even if only 1% of the asteroid is elements that you need, that one, ten kilometer diameter asteroid is suffecient to meet your needs.

Manticore does not need to establish a shipyard to Hell and Gone to have mineral resources to build ships.

Chapter 1 wrote:The Manties are already there. They had eighteen of the wall under construction in the Star Kingdom itself from prewar programs; those units are now proceeding on a crash priority basis to commission over the next six months, and their new war program will start delivering additional units within ten months. Our own yards will complete our first home-built SD about the same time, and the Manty yards in Grendelsbane and Talbot will do the same. Once we hit our stride, we'll be turning out four or five of the wall a month.

Chapter 15 wrote:Minette wasn't exactly of vital strategic importance. It served as an advanced picket, helping the enormous Grendelsbane fleet base cover the Alliance's southern flank against the Peep bases in Treadway and Solway, but those systems had been stripped of mobile elements as White Haven's offensive headed for Trevor's Star, and their immobile fixed defenses posed no threat.

The Grendelsbane Yard's Vulnerability wrote:The Grendelsbane yards originally came into existence as a repair/refit facility for the extreme flank of the Manticoran Alliance. They were established not simply as a Manticoran facility, but to provide support for other navies operating in the area at a centralized location where economies of scale could be practiced. Remember that this logistics node was established initially during time of peace, before the war turned hot, and represented a perceived (and quite real) need to have an advanced repair and support complex in a critical region of the defensive glacis the SKM was building up. It was also the primary support base for the very powerful fleet which the SKM had stationed to cover that flank of its defensive perimeter. That both increased the need for capacity and put a powerful defensive force in position to cover it. Think of it as the equivalent of the Brits' Singapore, at least conceptually. (And if you think the similarity between what happened to Singapore in 1942, and what happened to Grendelsbane in War of Honor was sheer coincidence, I have some bottom land in Florida I'd like to sell you.)

As time progressed, more and more capacity was concentrated there. It made sense to the Powers That Were to put in fabrication nodes so that critical components could be produced on-site. And as the base became increasingly important, the commitment to its defenses — in both mobile and fixed units — grew to protect the investment. The fact that the defending fleet at the time of the actual attack was insufficient to the task says nothing at all about the capability of the defenses which had been in place earlier in the war. In particular, the base was defended by very powerful fixed fortifications — more powerful, in fact, than those being erected to cover the Trevor's Star terminus of the Junction. Unfortunately, those forts had been built with pre-Ghost Rider technology, and they hadn't been upgraded before the cessation of hostilities. Worse (and one of the reasons Janacek committed suicide), the Janacek Admiralty hadn't even assigned priority to getting large numbers of MDM pods to the forts there, which is the reason the Manty system CO didn't even consider trying to use them to defend the base when the Havenites turned out to have MDMs of their own. In Janacek's mind, however, Grendelsbane's location made it a "safe" sector, one which a covering force with a relatively small number of SD(P)s (with MDMs, which he didn't think the Havenites had) could easily protect. Even when he began to think in terms of a possible Havenite attack, his attention was fixed primarily on Trevor's Star because of the political consequences of an attack there.

But earlier than that, as both the capacity and the (then) toughness of the defenses grew, it also made sense to the Mourncreek Admiralty (this is one of the arguably poorer reasons, based on prewar logic, without the experience of actual, sustained operations) to spread out the SKM's production bottlenecks. Remember that the SKM was a single-system polity which had fought pirates and a few minor wars, but had never taken on an opponent of the PRH's size in a sustained war. One of the major concerns of the prewar Admiralty was the vulnerability of the RMN's yard capacity compared to that of the PRH, which had its capacity divided between multiple (well defended) systems. A single lucky PRH attack that managed to get into missile range of Hephaestus and Vulcan, for example, could have taken out something like 75% of the total building capacity of the SKM. By spreading out the targets, the RMN increased its defensive problems, but also put fewer of its eggs into a single basket.

Jonathan_S wrote:

Relax wrote:
Beyond building anything at Grendelsbane, the MAJORITY of their SDP are being built there. WTH?... They lost 100 capital ships not including 50 small fry being built. They had a mere 36? Invictus being built at home... Off to go look at the numbers.... Okay, remembered about right. Close enough.

Anyways... Logic wormholes you could stuff an entire galaxy through on this one.

Where there actually more slips at Grendelsbane than at Manticore? I don't think so.

Letting a repair yard that's being underutilized morph into one that does upgrades and then into one that's doing construction is poorly thought out. But it's wasn't Manticore's primary SD(P) and CLAC yard.

IIRC the events went something like this:
- The second wave of SD(P) and CLAC are under construction a majority at Manticore a sizable minority at Grendelsbane.
- Before their completion the Cromarty assassination happens and the new High Ridge government accepts St Just's cease fire request.
- Shortly after they order all SD(P) and CLAC construction halted (to free funding for their cherished domestic programs)
- Eventually High Ridge is pressured to resume construction and he picks the more politically beneficial work in Manticore, leaving the large minority of ships at Grendelsbane alone.
- As the slips are cleared in Manticore no new construction is started.
- Some panic occurs when Pritchart reveals that Haven has a non-trivial number of SD(P) of their own.
- The paused construction at Grendelsbane is restarted to boost Manticore's numbers, but no new hulls are laid down in Manticore -- High Ridge thinks Haven is more or less running a bluff and isn't willing to disrupt his precious domestic programs by restoring war funding to military construction.


So at the time of Thunderbolt, yes, all Manticore's current SD(P) and CLAC construction was a Grendelsbane . But only because someone who viewed military construction through the lens of vote buying and refused to worry about security of the yards.

cthia wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:Where there actually more slips at Grendelsbane than at Manticore? I don't think so.

Letting a repair yard that's being underutilized morph into one that does upgrades and then into one that's doing construction is poorly thought out. But it's wasn't Manticore's primary SD(P) and CLAC yard.

IIRC the events went something like this:
- The second wave of SD(P) and CLAC are under construction a majority at Manticore a sizable minority at Grendelsbane.
- Before their completion the Cromarty assassination happens and the new High Ridge government accepts St Just's cease fire request.
- Shortly after they order all SD(P) and CLAC construction halted (to free funding for their cherished domestic programs)
- Eventually High Ridge is pressured to resume construction and he picks the more politically beneficial work in Manticore, leaving the large minority of ships at Grendelsbane alone.
- As the slips are cleared in Manticore no new construction is started.
- Some panic occurs when Pritchart reveals that Haven has a non-trivial number of SD(P) of their own.
- The paused construction at Grendelsbane is restarted to boost Manticore's numbers, but no new hulls are laid down in Manticore -- High Ridge thinks Haven is more or less running a bluff and isn't willing to disrupt his precious domestic programs by restoring war funding to military construction.


So at the time of Thunderbolt, yes, all Manticore's current SD(P) and CLAC construction was a Grendelsbane . But only because someone who viewed military construction through the lens of vote buying and refused to worry about security of the yards.

It was probably also easier to hide or keep the status of Grendelsbane in the dark, seeing it isn't located right there in the Home System where High Ridge's informants can easily feed him up to date info.

The chances one of his stooges getting up off of his well-fed, sorry, lazy ass and leaving the system to visit Grendelsbane was probably nil.

cthia wrote:Anyone care to throw their hat into the pot who was really running things at that time as best he could? Had to have been running things? Micromanaging damage control all along the way.

TFLYTSNBN wrote:The Grendelsbane yard and other bases in minimally inhabited systems never made sense to me. Assets to defend systems are limited.

Weird Harold wrote:

TFLYTSNBN wrote:The Grendelsbane yard and other bases in minimally inhabited systems never made sense to me. Assets to defend systems are limited.

1) the establishment, expansion, and maintenance of remote/regional bases was a consequence of pre-war and first war strategic thinking. Both sides engaged in building dispersed nodal forces.

2) Establishing bases in uninhabited systems avoid a multitude of political problems; especially for Manticore. The attack on Zanzibar where the local's commander countermanded the Manticoran commander to use the out-system LAC bases is a prime example of why an empty system is preferable.

3) If the only thing in the system is your military base, there is no problem declaring the entire system a military reservation.

4) Dispersed nodal forces are no longer mainstream strategic thinking. There's no need to establish an extended perimeter defense if the enemy is going to use deep penetration raids against "home" systems.