Opening Phase of Havenite war

Haven would still have had to figure out how much in warships to comment to where and still maintain reasonable defensive (and suppressions for reluctant acquisitions) at home.

Possibley they could have gone with what would be moslty ships below-the-wall to harass the defenders, including forts, at various termini and a slightly heavier group going in to essentialy strafe the Junction and pin RMN warships there rather than heading in-system

Ultimately, Haven has to get into the orbitals around Manticore and force the surrender of the Queen and government. Once that is done they can deal with the scattered deployments of the RMN as other than combat forces screaming home to engage.
They have to get in and take Manticore and that means fighting through the Home Fleet and deployed system defence equipment. Remember- this is the OPENING of the war so they don't have all that equipmenet like the later LACs, the RMN version of pods, etc. They are also going to accept that they are going to have to get into energy weapons range to fight through and figure how to layer and organize the primary assault force to cut it's way into control range of the planet.
It is POSSIBLE that Haven could send a relatively lighter force against Manticore B, not particularly fully engage but to tie up/distract that portion of the Home Fleet so it could't go to the other part of the binary. Still, Haven would have to have sufficient logistics train and occupation troops avaliable in anticipation of takeing the system so it could solidify it's control
At that point they are going to want to keep everybody elec's(like the SL) warships out of the Junction till they are in firm control and a layer defence and security force in place at the Junction and the termini.

it's all or nothing. Win or Ruin.

You feel lucky?

As I said, I don't see how Haven wins without going for Manticore as the opening move. The correlation of forces doesn't improve over time during the war. To make it get better they have to take out the major building yards.

>80% of those are in Manticore A or B, so if you capture every other member of the MA you've only reduced the build rate by 20%.

As David has been "inconsistent" about the fixed defenses of Manticore I don't know how to even estimate the chance of success. It certainly is higher when they had home fleet based out by the junction. That gives you the chance to avoid a fight with the bulk of home fleet if you simply drive in at Manticore. Once you are between Manticore and the fleet it kind of limits what they can do. How many missiles are you going to fire if 0.1% or 0.001% are likely to hit the planet?

kzt wrote:it's all or nothing. Win or Ruin.

You feel lucky?

As I said, I don't see how Haven wins without going for Manticore as the opening move. The correlation of forces doesn't improve over time during the war. To make it get better they have to take out the major building yards.

>80% of those are in Manticore A or B, so if you capture every other member of the MA you've only reduced the build rate by 20%.

As David has been "inconsistent" about the fixed defenses of Manticore I don't know how to even estimate the chance of success. It certainly is higher when they had home fleet based out by the junction. That gives you the chance to avoid a fight with the bulk of home fleet if you simply drive in at Manticore. Once you are between Manticore and the fleet it kind of limits what they can do. How many missiles are you going to fire if 0.1% or 0.001% are likely to hit the planet?

Fixed defense inconsistency can mostly be explained by the tech revolutions. The 'first' generation of forts were presumably designed with a focus on energy range combat with gradual adoption of laserhead missiles and defenses against those.

The 'second' generation would possibly have been very short-lived - forts designed to control SDM missile pods and defend themselves against pod salvos, built and deployed before the podnought.

Then the subsequent generation would have been pod-laying MDM forts, like the ones built at Lynx Terminus after Manpower's Monica plot failed.

I imagine when White Haven took Trevor's Star, they stood down their 'first generation' type forts and started building pod-controlling forts all over the place(Trevor's Star, Basilisk). This stopped shortly after Operation Buttercup, when they had to decommission everything and start again with podlaying MDM forts. No doubt Janacek didn't build enough.

So when Theisman sent his Navy into the Manticore system, he knew it faced much lighter, proportionately, 'fixed' defenses than Parnell would have if he had hit Manticore in 1905.

munroburton wrote:So when Theisman sent his Navy into the Manticore system, he knew it faced much lighter, proportionately, 'fixed' defenses than Parnell would have if he had hit Manticore in 1905.

But he also knew that they would be proportionately more deadly then in 1905.

pnakasone wrote:

munroburton wrote:So when Theisman sent his Navy into the Manticore system, he knew it faced much lighter, proportionately, 'fixed' defenses than Parnell would have if he had hit Manticore in 1905.

But he also knew that they would be proportionately more deadly then in 1905.

But so were his superdreadnoughts (compared to 1905PD). Besides, this was a go for broke chance to win the war, because, otherwise, they were going to lose.

munroburton wrote:

kzt wrote:it's all or nothing. Win or Ruin.

You feel lucky?

As I said, I don't see how Haven wins without going for Manticore as the opening move. The correlation of forces doesn't improve over time during the war. To make it get better they have to take out the major building yards.

>80% of those are in Manticore A or B, so if you capture every other member of the MA you've only reduced the build rate by 20%.

As David has been "inconsistent" about the fixed defenses of Manticore I don't know how to even estimate the chance of success. It certainly is higher when they had home fleet based out by the junction. That gives you the chance to avoid a fight with the bulk of home fleet if you simply drive in at Manticore. Once you are between Manticore and the fleet it kind of limits what they can do. How many missiles are you going to fire if 0.1% or 0.001% are likely to hit the planet?

Fixed defense inconsistency can mostly be explained by the tech revolutions. The 'first' generation of forts were presumably designed with a focus on energy range combat with gradual adoption of laserhead missiles and defenses against those.

The 'second' generation would possibly have been very short-lived - forts designed to control SDM missile pods and defend themselves against pod salvos, built and deployed before the podnought.

Then the subsequent generation would have been pod-laying MDM forts, like the ones built at Lynx Terminus after Manpower's Monica plot failed.

I imagine when White Haven took Trevor's Star, they stood down their 'first generation' type forts and started building pod-controlling forts all over the place(Trevor's Star, Basilisk). This stopped shortly after Operation Buttercup, when they had to decommission everything and start again with podlaying MDM forts. No doubt Janacek didn't build enough.

So when Theisman sent his Navy into the Manticore system, he knew it faced much lighter, proportionately, 'fixed' defenses than Parnell would have if he had hit Manticore in 1905.

Exactly how does Haven know about the status of the forts at any time? Unless the Manticoran government is fighting about it in the faxes.

At any rate, what exactly is the fate of a decommissioned fort? Are they put in "mothballs" too? Is there a reserve fleet of forts out there, somewhere?

Budget bills, if nothing else.

I suspect that most decommissioned forts are stripped and recycled into new ships or forts. It is possibl that you might sell some off to allied systems though that depends very much on what your allies need/want and what they intend to use them for.

How many are going to be putting them on wormhole termini? Probably not a lot.
System defence infrastructure would mean that they had mobility (some), they are tough, and they give you potential for nodal point defenses. The problems run the same way. They could become missile sponges (well they are tough and can mount a lot of CM gear and EW) if the enemy stands off and sends in a lot missile on ballistic courses with DDM etc.

Mostly they seem to have been upgraded with bigger/more powerful and longer ranged weapons as they became available with the addition of things like LAC bays and their own LAC squadrons for force projection. They also can deploy and support recon drones. Depending on what you need, a fort could make a really formidable AstroControl facility even if it had less than the current MDM capacity. They work, they are set up to support a fair sized crew/staff and can supprt all sorts of auxillary vessels.

Mostly though, with the seeming fast obsolescens of juntion forts, the old ones are just sources of new construction.

pnakasone wrote:

munroburton wrote:So when Theisman sent his Navy into the Manticore system, he knew it faced much lighter, proportionately, 'fixed' defenses than Parnell would have if he had hit Manticore in 1905.

But he also knew that they would be proportionately more deadly then in 1905.

I'm not sure that's the case. A fort should generally be comparable to two SDs built at the same time, so an energy fort is roughly equivalent to two SDs built at the same time and a MDM fort is roughly equivalent to two SD(P)s.

Scraping every warship the PRH had up, Parnell could have brought a force massing only ~50%(4.7Gt vs 3Gt) more than Tourville+Chin's fleets. If he had to consider how to defeat 250 or more forts whilst the latter pair only had to worry about 50 to 100... in both cases only after all RMN warships had been demolished(along with a portion of Havenite invaders).

cthia wrote:Exactly how does Haven know about the status of the forts at any time? Unless the Manticoran government is fighting about it in the faxes.

At any rate, what exactly is the fate of a decommissioned fort? Are they put in "mothballs" too? Is there a reserve fleet of forts out there, somewhere?

Manticore is one of, if not the, most heavily trafficked systems in the universe. Spying on forts isn't difficult when many of them are close to the Junction...

The obsolete forts were probably completely scrapped and rightly so. After the MDM/podlayer mix was deployed, they became completely useless mass coffins for however many crew are needed to operate each.

munroburton wrote:I'm not sure that's the case. A fort should generally be comparable to two SDs built at the same time, so an energy fort is roughly equivalent to two SDs built at the same time and a MDM fort is roughly equivalent to two SD(P)s.

I don't claim to understand this, but the Great Weber has said its more like 20 SDs per fort:


Although the Star Kingdom had opted not to reactivate the fortresses around the Junction's central terminus, there were at least a dozen of them under construction at the Lynx Terminus. They wouldn't be as big as the Junction forts, but they were being shipped in in prefabricated chunks, and unlike the Junction forts, they were being built with the latest in weapons, sensors, and EW systems. And they were also being built using the same manpower-reducing automation which was a feature of the most recent Manticoran and Grayson warship designs. When finished, each would mass about ten million tons, significantly larger than any superdreadnought, and with far less internal volume devoted to impeller rooms. Bristling with missile tubes and LAC service bays, they would constitute a most emphatic statement of the Star Kingdom's ownership of the wormhole terminus.
...
"Your Majesty, at the risk of sounding immodest, the only real question would be how long it took us to blow all seventy-one of them out of space. Those forts were designed to hold that terminus without any outside support against the attack of two hundred and fifty of our own pre-Apollo podnoughts. Now that they have Apollo, their defensive capability's been multiplied many times. We still aren't sure by exactly how much, but it's got to be at least a factor of four."