Post-Yawata Strike Survivors in Grayson

kzt wrote:And yeah, you won't get the hulls. Good luck using them without fusion reactors, hyperdrives or missiles.

tlb wrote:Except for the missiles, the rest of those parts can be cannibalized from non-Apollo ships being decommissioned. In fact, you could cannibalize the captured SLN ships for some (but they do not have the new compensator nor the beta-squared nodes); so we may have come up with another use for them.

kzt wrote:I dare (you) to figure out how to run a Ford with the power plant from the Enterprise. And who is going to be writing all the extensive code needed to try to glue the disparate systems together, once you get some (one) to manufacture all the needed interfaces?

The difference between even a SLN fusion plant or a hyperdrive and the RMN item are not going to be anywhere near the difference between a Ford engine and the Enterprise power plant. Both are mature technologies that may be close to identical.

Anyway, even if you are right about the differences between SLN and RMN manufacture, there will be next to no differences between that equipment from non-Apollo to Apollo ship.

tlb wrote:
Anyway, even if you are right about the differences between SLN and RMN manufacture, there will be next to no differences between that equipment from non-Apollo to Apollo ship.

Unless you want to actually use the weapons. There are huge amounts of additional FC and tactical equipment that an Apollo ship has that a non-Apollo ships simply doesn’t have.

And minor things like being set up for (iirc) different generations of PDLCs and CMs.

tlb wrote:Anyway, even if you are right about the differences between SLN and RMN manufacture, there will be next to no differences between that equipment from non-Apollo to Apollo ship.

kzt wrote:Unless you want to actually use the weapons. There are huge amounts of additional FC and tactical equipment that an Apollo ship has that a non-Apollo ships simply doesn’t have.

And minor things like being set up for (iirc) different generations of PDLCs and CMs.

Yes, I accept that there is Apollo specific instrumentation that would not be available in the non-Apollo ship; but you were saying hyperdrive and fusion plants, which I expect are the same. And if equipment is lacking because of the destruction of the manufacturing lines, then you would have to accept the previous generation PDLCs and CMs with their controlling equipment.

This means they can prioritize the newly built assembly lines to create the pieces that cannot be obtained through cannibalization.

Im not at all sure the hyperdrive works like that. If it’s the same ship class with Apollo then probably, but there are some indications that things like the impeller and hyperdrive are pretty carefully designed for each ship class. So there isn’t a generic SD drive, it’s for that class.

kzt wrote:Im not at all sure the hyperdrive works like that. If it’s the same ship class with Apollo then probably, but there are some indications that things like the impeller and hyperdrive are pretty carefully designed for each ship class. So there isn’t a generic SD drive, it’s for that class.

I do not know, but if true that still leaves fusion plant and environmental gear.

This would be another priority item for the newly built assembly lines.

Pulling the environmental gear might well require disassembling the entire ship. Not just gutting it to get the reactors. And I’m not at all sure the build yards would even have the right gear to remove the reactors. I’m sure they could improvise something, but there is probably a reason why they don’t use 2 meter grasers to do that in the repair facilities. Like it killing anyone around by the primary and secondary radiation, and the huge amount of shock damage.

tlb wrote:Possible lessons from the Yawata Strike.

There is an entity, with stealth weapons, that did not like the Manticoran side of the war. Is that because they favor Haven, or more malignantly wish to prolong the war? Who that might be would not become clearer until the return of Zilwicki and Cachet. That would also make clear they favor war in general.

There is a trade off between building important facilities close to the defense forces guarding population centers versus building them farther away. If there is no good early warning of these stealth weapons, then for now it is better to put them farther away. In either case, important facilities need bubblewall protection (which they had, but were not active for Manticore - we do not know about Blackbird).

If anyone can determine how the Beowulf orbitals were attacked, then a possible solution might be the total segregation of industrial from residential blocks: perhaps connected by transport tubes, like a cartoon dumbbell.

Can Mycroft be built with bubblewalls, leaving communication portals to Keyhole stations?

They may have even realized the need to shift OpSec regarding Bolthole back into high gear, like it was when it was imperative to prevent the RMN from getting a whisper of it. There's no time for complacency just because they're friends with the Manties. The same protocol for OpSec that was in effect then, should be in effect now.

If the MA get even a whisper of the whereabouts of Bolthole, the Lenny Dets are going to ride like the Valkyries. Especially now that the GA are on the ropes, trying to figure out their tech. The GA have found themselves at the same point in space where they need time, just as once the Peeps needed time, just as once the RMN needed time, just as once the SLN needed time. The MA will strike whole-hog before the RMN get its feet under itself, again, in the sense Haven had to act before Apollo was put into full devlopment. This is the window in which the MA should strike. I don't mean to burst any bubbles. . . 'pop pop pop', but when the Valkyries ride for all the marbles, I don't anticipate the timeline to have moved much.

cthia wrote:They may have even realized the need to shift OpSec regarding Bolthole back into high gear, like it was when it was imperative to prevent the RMN from getting a whisper of it. There's no time for complacency just because they're friends with the Manties. The same protocol for OpSec that was in effect then, should be in effect now.

If the MA get even a whisper of the whereabouts of Bolthole, the Lenny Dets are going to ride like the Valkyries. Especially now that the GA are on the ropes, trying to figure out their tech. The GA have found themselves at the same point in space where they need time, just as once the Peeps needed time, just as once the RMN needed time, just as once the SLN needed time. The MA will strike whole-hog before the RMN get its feet under itself, again, in the sense Haven had to act before Apollo was put into full devlopment. This is the window in which the MA should strike. I don't mean to burst any bubbles. . . 'pop pop pop', but when the Valkyries ride for all the marbles, I don't anticipate the timeline to have moved much.

All that may be true, but what the Malign really needs to do is to put some very long hard thought into what they can repair about the Detweiler Plan, now that it is in shreds.

They engineered the war between the Solarian League and the Haven Quadrant and it now seems over with both sides much stronger than the Renaissance Factor that was intended to sweep up the pieces, Their agents of influence in the League are being neutralized and the secret of their existence is out.

There is still Darius and the Lenny Dets; but with the retreat to their secret stronghold, they have lost most of their web of corrupt influence through the Manpower pleasure centers and the ties to the interstellar corporations.

They can still come out of their stronghold and spread destruction, but to what effect? Without a roadmap to a desired future, they are lost. If and when a detection system is developed for the spider drive, then they will lose.

tlb wrote:Using a cargo or ship explosions would only get the space station near Manticore. Because of its size and the resulting distance between the civilian and military sections, the ships being built (the real target of the strike) might not even be scratched.

[snip]

Is it possible that the time pressure and the need to hit all of Manticore's space stations and the additional ship building sites and Blackbird at Grayson meant that this plan was the easiest to plan and execute? Although it meant revealing the existence of a hidden enemy, the hope and expectation was that either Haven or the SLN would take advantage to attack (without thinking too much about who or how).

I don't think it's a time pressure thing. Remember that that the Ghosts and Sharks spent a few months silently slipping from their n-space emergence point into the systems. The entire attack, including transit time, was probably at least 9 months. You could toss a major nuke into a shipping container and get it to Manticore in much less time. And we'll assume that you can smuggle in a big enough bomb to kill the entire station, and all docked ships, from wherever the commercial side is.

Even so it seems to me you'd still have a major problem of access to all your targets. Yes Hephaestus, and probably Vulcan were major freight points and had lots of commercial and industrial work and traffic that wasn't related to their shipyards. So they seem quite vulnerable to a smuggled or suicide-ship bomb.

But you've also got the dispersed construction slips which would be too far away to reach - but must be somewhat outside the normal traffic areas to provide a defensive zeon around them. And even more importantly Weyland presumably isn't accessible to general shipping. Certainly during the first war Manticore had blocked the entire Manticore-B system to foreign flagged freighters and generally treated it, and Weyland, as much higher security zones. So I suspect you'd have trouble getting an exploding shipment to it. And because Blackbird was a pure shipyard, totally unconnected with servicing any planet it would be, quite possibly, even more shipping restrictive than Weyland.

So it looks liked you'd still have to break out the secret weapons to get your entire target list. That being the case there seems little reason to complicate the operation by trying to mix covert sabotage with overt attack - there's too much risk of the coordination going wrong or one half of the attack alerting your targets well enough to blunt or block the other half.

tlb wrote:

cthia wrote:They may have even realized the need to shift OpSec regarding Bolthole back into high gear, like it was when it was imperative to prevent the RMN from getting a whisper of it. There's no time for complacency just because they're friends with the Manties. The same protocol for OpSec that was in effect then, should be in effect now.

If the MA get even a whisper of the whereabouts of Bolthole, the Lenny Dets are going to ride like the Valkyries. Especially now that the GA are on the ropes, trying to figure out their tech. The GA have found themselves at the same point in space where they need time, just as once the Peeps needed time, just as once the RMN needed time, just as once the SLN needed time. The MA will strike whole-hog before the RMN get its feet under itself, again, in the sense Haven had to act before Apollo was put into full devlopment. This is the window in which the MA should strike. I don't mean to burst any bubbles. . . 'pop pop pop', but when the Valkyries ride for all the marbles, I don't anticipate the timeline to have moved much.

All that may be true, but what the Malign really needs to do is to put some very long hard thought into what they can repair about the Detweiler Plan, now that it is in shreds.

They engineered the war between the Solarian League and the Haven Quadrant and it now seems over with both sides much stronger than the Renaissance Factor that was intended to sweep up the pieces, Their agents of influence in the League are being neutralized and the secret of their existence is out.

There is still Darius and the Lenny Dets; but with the retreat to their secret stronghold, they have lost most of their web of corrupt influence through the Manpower pleasure centers and the ties to the interstellar corporations.

They can still come out of their stronghold and spread destruction, but to what effect? Without a roadmap to a desired future, they are lost. If and when a detection system is developed for the spider drive, then they will lose.

But, is it really in shreds? Perhaps the part in shreds is no longer needed. The Alignment should be nearing its END GAME right about now. Especially since the author hinted that the Lennys are complete. Yes, their agents are being rolled up wholesale (though we really don't have a clue about the full extent of that), but that part of the plan has served its purpose. It would be nice to retain agents, yes, and they still might have some in key areas. However, the mighty gorilla has been defeated. What's the MA to do, wait for the gorilla to go into the weight room and put on some real muscle? Neither you nor I believe the MA are going to give the League or the GA the time they need to get back on balance.

It would be nice to know whether the MA caught wind of the GA's efforts to detect the Spider drive. The MA should know the GA are trying to detect the Spiders, any navy would. But I'm wondering if they have gotten wind of specifics, jump started by Simoes.

I think the only real problem is that the Universe knows about them. But they had to know that would happen sooner or later. The Universe can't do anything about it if it doesn't know where to find them.