Would Dispersing Shipyards Blunt or Stop a Second Oyster Bay

kzt wrote:No, David has flat out stated that MdM guidance cannot discriminate planets from ships. You’ll have to ask him about that. .

This makes no sense--ships have wedges, planets don't and missile seeker heads understand wedges in a fair amount of detail. (A missile flying past a wedge has to fire it's warhead with an accuracy of a few microseconds. Even Apollo doesn't provide a control loop remotely good enough to do this, that capability is on board.)

It makes much more sense if what's really going on is that missiles can't see planets and can simply run into them if they're in the way.

Loren Pechtel wrote:

kzt wrote:No, David has flat out stated that MdM guidance cannot discriminate planets from ships. You’ll have to ask him about that. .

This makes no sense--ships have wedges, planets don't and missile seeker heads understand wedges in a fair amount of detail. (A missile flying past a wedge has to fire it's warhead with an accuracy of a few microseconds. Even Apollo doesn't provide a control loop remotely good enough to do this, that capability is on board.)

It makes much more sense if what's really going on is that missiles can't see planets and can simply run into them if they're in the way.

I also think not being able to tell a planet apart from a ship and wedge is far-fetched. But even then there are other problems: how do you tell an enemy warship from a civilian freighter, yacht, or an SAR cutter? As you say, they have microseconds to make the decision to attack or not once they're in range.

Jonathan_S wrote:If every member of the Grand Alliance threw in 48 SD(P)s, that'd be nearly 200 right there (Haven, Manticore, Grayson, Andermani) and by then Erewhon would probably be willing and able to throw in a squadron or three of their own. (48 so they'd sending whole squadrons, whether the classic 8-ship ones, or Manticore's new 6-ship capital ship squadrons)

That's would be great but 200 SD(P)'s is not that much in the grand scheme of things. The GA doesn't know where the MA is, how strong it is and they have no idea who is with the MA or their technological capabilities. For all the GA knows the MA can have 1,000 SD(P)'s of their own with comparable technology to Manticore or they could have 2,000 SD's they stole from the SLN reserve which would make them targets. When you don't know the goals of your enemy, their capabilities, fleet size or even where they are err on the side of caution and have the biggest fleet you can get away with without going bankrupt.


What's more, with that plan you are expecting Manticore, Haven the Andermani and Grayson to throw equal forces. The IAN throwing in 50 SD(P)'s for the Grand fleet it would represent 25% of their fleet if not more, 50 SD(P)'s would be 20% of the RMN, while 50 SD(P)'s would be close to 50% if not more of the GSN and only 10% of the RHN. This is the problem, you are suggesting that a 1 system Nation field equal forces to those of the SEM(~60 systems), Haven(~90-100 systems), and the Andermani which are probably 60-80 systems. If the 200 SD(P)'s Grand Fleet meets opposition it cannot overcome there is only one logical place to draw reinforcements from and that would be the RHN which they might not be all to pleased with.

The GA MUST defend a number of important systems at all costs and then there are close to 230 other systems within GA territory that would require protection as well. That is a lot of territory to protect with so few SD(P)’s. Even if we take the number of RMN SD(P);s to being 250 that would leave the GA’s fleet strength at 1,400 SD(P)’s with close to 50% of those ships belonging to the RHN. Not really all that conductive for long term alliance stability if one member is pulling all the weight while the others aren’t willing to pull their weight proportionally. Just like it will embitter Grayson if they have to field the same number of ships as Manticore and Andermani when they are 1/60th the size of either one.

That's a pretty darn substantial Grand Fleet to attack any single system - yet doesn't require any of them to strip their homeworld's defenses.

It’s a substantial fleet to attack any League system, but it might not be all that substantial to attack a MA system and there would be nowhere to draw ships from but the important systems. Would 200 SD(P)’s be enough to overwhelm the defences of Grayson or Haven? Assuming the enemy is poorly defended is asking for trouble. Realizing that your 200 SD(P) Grand Fleet is inadequate means you have to start drawing ships from the member navies and when the RMN and IAN are both deploying 20-25% of their ships in the Grand Fleet and the GSN is deploying close to 50% if not more there are few places to draw from and at that point Haven will ask why they have to weaken their defences in order to reinforce the Grand Fleet that’s assuming they can weaken their defences since if it were me I would make sure that Bolthole had a significant fleet assigned to it and never go below 150 SD(P)’s since without Bolthole the GA may be in trouble.

And just because Manticore is just aiming for a couple hundred capitol ships right now (presumably to let them focus funding on rebuilding infrastructure and integrating their new Silesian protectorates and Talbott and San Martin territories) doesn't mean that they'll stick with that target once that initial investment expenses are wrap up and they start picking up increased economic returns from their new territory.

Problem is that they are not working on their own timetable, they are working on the pace that the MA has set, pace that they have no idea about. By the time they are ready to start expanding the RMN it might already be too late. My point is that they don’t have the luxury of time because they don’t know when the MA will strike next.

In the cold calculus of war; where you can't afford to be strong everywhere, as systems become more economically important they are both worth investing in additional defenses for but also able to contribute more to building and sustaining defenses and the mobile fleet that backs those defense.

[/quote] There are systems that must be defended, losing one of them damages the war effort, there are several that spell disaster if they are lost, they must be strong in those systems and have a significant reserve to reinforce threatened systems as well as be able to hit the MA if/when they find it’s base(s).

ThinksMarkedly wrote:
The thinking behind the conclusion was pretty sound. You don't set up a military operation where everything has to go right if you have any choice. The discussion after Oyster Bay concluded that they had way too many points of failure and they didn't deploy enough forces -- Andermani and Haven shipyards left intact, no attack in Trevor's Star, etc. That's what they used to reasonably conclude the unknown enemy was strapped for resources. If the enemy had enough to arm SDs at the time, they wouldn't have deployed from freighters.

1) They didn’t deploy from Freighters. They(MA) deployed BB’s.
2) Manticore was at war with Haven, even the League would have taken notice if both sides had their industry trashed.
3) The MA’s goal was to weaken Manticore and Grayson without breaking their will to fight. If they had hit everything at once and destroyed every bit of warfighting capabilities it would have meant the League would stroll in and take over the Manticore home System and they would be in square one except now they have to engineer an incident with Haven and the League.
4) Going after 2 systems close together geographically is hard enough, trying to coordinate an attack over hundreds of LY’s in 4 maybe 5 systems would have meant disaster because if one attack was discovered early the whole strategy goes out the window. Especially when the target has internal lines of communication.
5) The MA might have 1,000 SD(P)’s, they may have 1,000 SD(P)’s under construction or they may have two guys and a canoe as a navy. The GA doesn’t know and guessing wrong could spell death for them.
6) There could be a handicap with the spider drive that keeps the MA from incorporating it in all their ships, so if it allowed those ships to be completely stealthy but they were limited in ship to ship combat I wouldn’t build a lot of them either. Building hundreds of ships that are potentially a one trick doesn’t really make sense. The spider drive could verywell be easy to spot once you know what to look for so why build all that many ships if you can only use them once or twice.

Yes, quite oppposed that. Outside of the Kuiper Belt, the war was barely felt by League members, aside from those targeted by Operation Buccaneer (and those are far more likely to become GA friends and allies than not). Their SDFs were not involved in battle, their infrastructure is still present. The only complaint they have is against Operation Lancoön, which may have brought a period of economic downturn.

They may not be physically involved but they know that the SLN and their own ships suddenly became 10,000 targets. They know they are defensless against the GA and that means they are defenceless against the one enemy they truly know about. They also lost somewhere in the neighbourhood of 30% of their wallers and probably half of their BC’s, in once case 100 ships were lost fighting a BC and 3 lighter combatants.

The League is hardly defenceless. The SLN may have turned out to be a joke compared to the Haven Sector navies, but it can still hold its own against anyone else, like for example the Mannerheim Republic Navy (now Renaissance Factor Navy).

And they have to be thinking that anyone who can get through the defenses of Manticore and Grayson would have no problem disassembling the SLN and the SDF’s bolt by bolt at their leisure.

My expectation is that the GA will do everything it can to keep the revanchism down to a minimum in the New League, while simultaneously encouraging important Core Worlds to secede and form regional blocs.

And in the Meantime the MA will be building a fleet of unknown size in an unknown location with unknown capabilities and unknown targets.

Right, we only have Grayson to look at to see how that can turn out.

Still, even Grayson couldn't do much without Manticoran help. Those League systems have a steep climbing curve ahead of them.

Grayson had to build it’s industry while building a fleet which was at the end of the war with Masada all of 2 CL’s, 1 DD and 11 LAC’s. I’m sure that many of those systems can find some service personnel from Battle Fleet and FF to assist in a build up.

No doubt. They have different advantages than Haven did. The problem we're highlighting is that they're missing some pretty crucial ones that Haven did.

The League could dump money and resources into 500 different projects while the GA can fund 1/10th of that. Hell 10 Core systems might be able to fund significantly more research projects then the GA. When the technological gap is closed, quantity becomes a decisive advantage.

I maintain that it was quite different. The SLN in 1923 was still top-heavy, lazy, far more corrupt than the PRN was under the Legislaturalists in 1905. The PRN might have thought itself invincible and had a doctrine set on stone at the start of the first war, but Pierre saw to it that any such thinking went away quickly. They lost a lot of institutional knowledge, but it did get rid of the REMFs that weren't contributing. The purges opened up the way for people like Theisman, Tourville, Giscard, Diamato and McQueen to rise to the top.

And the SLN will no experience purges because? They just got their collective asses handed to them in such a spectacular way that if there is one good thing for the SLN from the war it is that they will start eliminating the their Deadwood and reorganizing their manpower according to needs. They now know what definitely doesn’t work, they know that there was a third party interfering with them and a motivated a competent leadership that is clean from foreign influence. They will work on cleaning the rest of the SLN and rebuilding.

I don't doubt that the SLN and newly independent SDFs can catch up. I'm saying that they have a longer and steeper hill to climb than Haven did, even if they have some advantages that Haven didn't to mitigate that.

But their advantages vastly outweigh their disadvantages. Their basic technology, industrial size, financial wealth and their fear will outweigh their disadvantages and lack of intelligence.

Galactic Sapper wrote:If your notional attacker is willing to just fling missiles in-system without being overly concerned about accidentally sterilizing the planet, sure. And if they're willing to do that, even standard SDs with single drive missiles could do that. Space stations and such don't move much, missiles in ballistic flight are extremely hard to stop, and in either case you're committing Eridani Edict violations for destroying civilian infrastructure without giving time to evacuate. So even if you do luck out and not punch a c-frational missile into the planet's mantle, you're still an interstellar war criminal.

What is anyone going to do about it? The SLN cannot do a thing to anyone that violates the EE and what's more even if they could they would have to find their home government first.

The battle cruiser fleet sent to Beowulf could have taken out most of the infrastructure in the system that wasn't covered by block ships and there would have been absolutely nothing the Alliance could have done to stop them once the missiles launched. There's a reason that style of warfare is forbidden in this universe and only the worst of the worst do anything that even comes close to what you suggested.

They don't seem to be too bothered by genocide.

Galactic Sapper wrote:If your notional attacker is willing to just fling missiles in-system without being overly concerned about accidentally sterilizing the planet, sure. And if they're willing to do that, even standard SDs with single drive missiles could do that. Space stations and such don't move much, missiles in ballistic flight are extremely hard to stop, and in either case you're committing Eridani Edict violations for destroying civilian infrastructure without giving time to evacuate. So even if you do luck out and not punch a c-frational missile into the planet's mantle, you're still an interstellar war criminal.

The battle cruiser fleet sent to Beowulf could have taken out most of the infrastructure in the system that wasn't covered by block ships and there would have been absolutely nothing the Alliance could have done to stop them once the missiles launched. There's a reason that style of warfare is forbidden in this universe and only the worst of the worst do anything that even comes close to what you suggested.

Sigs wrote:They don't seem to be too bothered by genocide.

What is anyone going to do about it? The SLN cannot do a thing to anyone that violates the EE and what's more even if they could they would have to find their home government first.

First: hitting a planet with a fractional C missile would be an EE violation, but hitting an orbital structure with one is NOT.

Second: missiles in a ballistic phase are easy to stop, not hard. In UH several flights were killed by just rerouting the active missiles going in the other direction. The only hard part, if you have not made notes of the trajectory when they when ballistic, is that you have to use light speed targeting. But on the plus side they are not protected by wedges so any laser hit will kill them; and of course the blocking ships covered everything (in orbit, but I would expect that to be true of the planet also).

Third: If I remember correctly, about two thirds of the attacking SL force was hit at Beowulf by the system defense Apollo missiles. The only reason that many survived is the destruction of the Mycroft stations by the Silver Bullets.

tlb wrote:Haven managed to keep the locations of both Bolthole and Hades secrets for years, by limiting access to need to know. No un-vetted civilians nor any civilian ships is a minor inconvenience.

A wormhole lane with only naval traffic is a curiosity when known, but is not a secret breaker.

If I remember correctly that wormhole was out of the public's eye and they had the advantage of forcibly moving people to Bolthole and keeping them there for extended period of time, but either way there is a shelf life on the location of a secret base especially in a democratic society.

tlb wrote:Haven managed to keep the locations of both Bolthole and Hades secrets for years, by limiting access to need to know. No un-vetted civilians nor any civilian ships is a minor inconvenience.

A wormhole lane with only naval traffic is a curiosity when known, but is not a secret breaker.

Sigs wrote:If I remember correctly that wormhole was out of the public's eye and they had the advantage of forcibly moving people to Bolthole and keeping them there for extended period of time, but either way there is a shelf life on the location of a secret base especially in a democratic society.

Bolthole already had a population and is still a secret. Hades' location only became known because of the escape.

There may be an expiration date on a secret like that, but we do not yet know what it is.

tlb wrote:
I realize that I have advocated a ship class that would be an extension of Wayfarer, which would be a combination LAC tender/base and pod controller for defense of small star systems; but that was more of an intellectual exercise, not expecting RFC to accept it.

You would have to do something along those lines at least in the short term(5> years). Since if the GA has to provide security for the Verge and many/most verge systems would be sufficiently protected by a handful of LAC's sending a maintenance module along will be useful. It would be even better if that purpose build module can be used by the GA as a core for spaceborne naval bases for verge systems. Since many of the verge systems will be following a similar path in terms of naval growth a planned expansion based on pre deployed LAC maintenance module will make any expansion easier. Once they reach a level add more to that module in a planned and logical manner which means that training and repairs would be easier throughout the verge.

tlb wrote:First: hitting a planet with a fractional C missile would be an EE violation, but hitting an orbital structure with one is NOT.

What does it matter? EE violations are worthless since there is no one willing to enforce it or even able to enforce it. The GA can take over enforcement of the EE but if the MA does the violation no one really knows where their government is so they cant do anything to the MA until they find them and then they would have to hunt down their leadership because the civilians at Darius are innocent.

Second: missiles in a ballistic phase are easy to stop, not hard. In UH several flights were killed by just rerouting the active missiles going in the other direction. The only hard part, if you have not made notes of the trajectory when they when ballistic, is that you have to use light speed targeting. But on the plus side they are not protected by wedges so any laser hit will kill them; and of course the blocking ships covered everything (in orbit, but I would expect that to be true of the planet also).

If I'm not concerned about the edict, firing missiles at industry and a planet wouldn't be that much of a problem. If I'm willing to kill all life on an entire inhabited planet I wouldn't care if I come in the long way and fire from outside sensor detection range. A couple of SD(P)'s coming in the long way from outside detection range can take out pretty much anything you want them to.