kzt wrote: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.
I have found two quotes about the forts around the Manticore WHJ. The first makes clear the forts from the beginning of the war are decommissioned, never to come back, from
Shadow of Saganami in chapter 8:
A sizable chunk of Home Fleet was deployed out here, ready to dash through the Junction to reinforce Third Fleet at Trevor's Star at need, or to cover the Basilisk System against a repeat of the attack which had devastated it in the previous war. And, of course, to protect the Junction itself.
Once that protection would have been the responsibility of the Junction forts. But the decommissioning of those fortresses had been completed under the Janacek Admiralty as one more cost-saving measure. To be fair, the process had been begun before the High Ridge Government ever assumed office, for with Trevor's Star firmly in Manticoran hands, the danger of a sudden attack through the Junction had virtually disappeared. Perhaps even more important, decommissioning the manpower-intensive fortresses had freed up the enormous numbers of trained spacers to man the new construction which had taken the war so successfully to the People's Republic.
But now Manticore, and the diminished Manticoran Alliance, was once again upon the defensive, and threats to the home system—and to the Junction—need not come through the Junction. Yet there was no question of recommissioning the fortresses. Their technology was obsolete, they'd never been refitted to utilize the new generations of missiles, their EW systems were at least three generations out of date, and BuPers was scrambling as desperately for trained manpower as it ever had before. Which meant Home Fleet had to assume the responsibility, despite the fact that any capital ship deployed to cover the Junction was over nineteen hours—almost twenty-one and a half hours, at the standard eighty percent of maximum acceleration the Navy allowed—from Manticore orbit.
The second states that prior to the Battle of Manticore there were new style forts that made use of the latest technology from
At All Costs, chapter 62:
In effect, Home Fleet had been isolated from the rest of the inner-system's defenses, because any attacking fleet would be between D'Orville's ships and the fixed defenses which were supposed to support it. And that attacking fleet would have been able to begin building an acceleration advantage towards its objectives while Home Fleet was still getting itself organized.
Under those circumstances, an attacker without the strength to defeat both Home Fleet and the inner defenses together might well still have the strength to turn on Home Fleet—which would have no option but to pursue him—and crush it in a separate, isolated engagement.
Which was why D'Orville was so relieved the new forts were finally operational. Much smaller than the old prewar fortifications which had been decommissioned to provide the manpower to crew new construction, they were actually more powerfully armed, thanks to the same increased automation and weapons developments which had gone into the Navy's new warships. And each of those forts was surrounded by literally hundreds of missile pods, with the fire control to handle stupendous salvos. It would take an attack in overwhelming force to break those defenses, which had freed D'Orville to move Home Fleet closer to a more traditional covering position, locating his command in Sphinx orbit.
His new station provided Sphinx with badly needed, close-in protection. And with the planet of Manticore still trailing its orbital position, and so still deeper into the zone and (as always) further inside the hyper-limit, he was actually better placed to cover Manticore than he would have been anywhere else. Any least-time course to Manticore would require the attacker to get past his position at Sphinx, first, and he could easily intercept the opposing fleet short of its objective.
