Would Dispersing Shipyards Blunt or Stop a Second Oyster Bay

Theemile wrote:because an SD(p) will tactically outrange them with MDMs, and an SD can bring them into energy range at will, and both can control the combat conditions once they engage. (The Spider drive ship cannot run away when the bubble is up, nor out-run (or run down) either ship under spider.)

So something is missing from the equation. some tech or use of tech we just don't know about.

Personally, If I was an SD(p) captain and I localized one of these, I'd fire off a steady, but low volume, stream of missiles at the LD, forcing it to keep the bubble up and not maneuver, while I maneuvered outside it's effective firecontrol range, then I'd pound it mercilessly, while maneuvering against any Gtorps it fired. (crud, you would have to be vigilant against those things pouncing on you for months after the attack....)

Why do you think they will outrange the LDs? Everyone will have MDM's in 5 years. And LDs have very large pod bays. Possibly with stealthy pods that can maneuver.

The MAN is very interested in the RMN operations and tactics, so they will have plans in place to counter the tactics used previously.

Given the current detection range of spiders is less than effective graser range, and I suspect that LDs have grasers, so an LD can cut you apart before you can target the LD I think this might not work out well.

Which means if you are a SD(P) who localized an LD you are basically knifefighting with a fortress-scale ship. With the defenses of a fortress and presumably also a whole bunch of deployed pods. Do you think this is going to end well?

ThinksMarkedly wrote:No one transits a wormhole by accident. The volume of the terminus is minute compared to the WH area itself. And for all we know, it's not about being at the right place, it's also the right vector. They don't spend months or years studying wormholes for no reason.

I never said someone would do it by accident. If Harvest Joy's mission had been kept quiet by the Leadership at Torch, and Manticore had not released any information about it by the time the MA finds out that someone came through they would be back in Torch sipping Pina colada's. Assuming that your enemy who doesn't know you exist is going to announce that they are sending a ship to survey the wormhole with enough notice for you to set up an ambush seems like a terrible way to secure your most important asset.

Before OB, there was no state of war between Manticore, Erewhon, Haven or the Andermani and the MAlign. There was no reason for the research to be rushed or kept a secret. And up until a year before, the entire system was under the control of the Mesan Space Navy anyway. So they did deploy a squadron of BCs once Harvest Joy left Manticore through the Junction to make sure it didn't return. And since it didn't return, now the researchers are even more worried about their data. No transits are expected soon.

No transits are expected, but that doesn't mean no transits will happen. I'm not saying that the GA will keep sending ships through the WH but just because they wont doesn't mean the MA can assume they wont and remove the defences. What if they leave and Manticore sends another Survey ship? Blow the location of your most important industrial system and secret base because you assumed the enemy wont send a second ship to figure out what happened to the first.

And there might be little reason to keep it secret, but at the same time there wasn't much reason to announce it either especially considering the fact that Manticore and Haven were involved in round two of the largest war in history. Assuming the other guy is going to give you plenty of warning is how people lose wars for stupid reasons.

There's still a risk that the the Cachat and Zilwicki get wind of the information that the other terminus was picketed. If that happens, then you're right, the GA will conduct the research in secret. I just don't know if they'll attempt a transit: even an SD is vulnerable when doing so. But the risk is minimal and don't forget that Torch is three transits from Darius: first to The Twins, then to Felix, and only from there to Darius.

Ok, but that's one step closer for the GA, they find someone picketed a system and destroyed one of their ships defending a WH, this to me would mean that WH has some sort of value. Find where the other end is, send ships to capture the system and fortify it. Find the next WH and you might bottle in the MA or make them take the long way around. It gets you 1 step closer to finding their base, puts crosshairs on the RF and forces the MA to react to the GA's moves rather than the GA reacting to the MA.

They may have stupendous resources to dedicate to the cause, but they aren't infinite. They have to allocate them carefully and they also have to limit the number of people who know about it. Anyway, my argument is simply that they could have planned with a nice, comfortable safety margin and had been executing to it.

Then they should have waited until they were ready to execute the plan not execute the plan and wait a decade or three for the ships you need to be build. This makes them look like the galaxies dumbest bad guys.

Sigs wrote: I never said someone would do it by accident. If Harvest Joy's mission had been kept quiet by the Leadership at Torch, and Manticore had not released any information about it by the time the MA finds out that someone came through they would be back in Torch sipping Pina colada's. Assuming that your enemy who doesn't know you exist is going to announce that they are sending a ship to survey the wormhole with enough notice for you to set up an ambush seems like a terrible way to secure your most important asset.

Sigs,

Where did you get any idea that the survey was a covert military op looking for the Malign?

You are condemning the characters in the book for not being omniscient; and ignoring the political realities which existed for the initial multi-stellar involvement in the survey. Which was sort of what ThinksMarkedly wrote.

That wasn't at all the way the book was written; your view of the current military situation is converting a civil expansion of infrastructure (1919)into a (botched) military operation (1922). The Hauptmann Cartel, which was doing the survey, is a civilian organization. The survey was arranged--publicly--before the Boys went on their Mission to Mesa; so before the existence of the Malign was even hinted at.

The existence of the "unexplored" wormhole "Junction" at Congo had been deliberately leaked to the press by the Malign.

Hauptmann's involvement in the survey --and the fact that the Cartel's stock is publicly traded--eliminates every bit of secrecy. Why should it be secret? Manpower never got started with it (as far as Manpower knows, anyway.)

Announcements would have been in the Financial Times or its equivalent. Manticore, Erewhon, and Maya (yes, that is the SL) would all have been invited to invest in the project--especially since the "Junction" was "never surveyed" by Jessyk according to the documented evidence found on Torch.

The existence of the terminus at Torch was touted by the Alignment as a 3-terminus Junction prior to any events in Crown of Slaves (so, circa 1917!!!) in order to put additional pressure on Erewhon; so it was disinformation, along with the increase in piracy,to put Erewhon in the market for a replacement for the Manticoran military support (which dried up under High Ridge).

It was intended by the Malign as a "political" maneuver that would give them access to the Manti -Lite tech Erewhon possessed. Losing the system wasn't in the plan. That someone would attempt to survey the "Junction" was inevitable once Manpower lost the system. Textev is in the meeting of the inner onion where Anisimovna had to explain to someone (Jessup?) what the intended operation had been.

The Malign would have deployed the ships to prevent transit as soon as the Congo System was lost to them (i.e., 1919 before the resumption of the Havenite War). They didn't have to get a telegram from Manticore. The Picket at the Twins closes off any possibility of the Ballroom or the RMN tracing the route back to Felix, and further to Darius --and prevents the knowledge of Mannerheim's involvement at Felix from getting any play in the public eye. And the Mannerheim connection to the Malign is still very covert.

So how would you get a secret transit by anyone?


Rob

kzt wrote:

Theemile wrote:because an SD(p) will tactically outrange them with MDMs, and an SD can bring them into energy range at will, and both can control the combat conditions once they engage. (The Spider drive ship cannot run away when the bubble is up, nor out-run (or run down) either ship under spider.)

So something is missing from the equation. some tech or use of tech we just don't know about.

Personally, If I was an SD(p) captain and I localized one of these, I'd fire off a steady, but low volume, stream of missiles at the LD, forcing it to keep the bubble up and not maneuver, while I maneuvered outside it's effective firecontrol range, then I'd pound it mercilessly, while maneuvering against any Gtorps it fired. (crud, you would have to be vigilant against those things pouncing on you for months after the attack....)

Why do you think they will outrange the LDs? Everyone will have MDM's in 5 years. And LDs have very large pod bays. Possibly with stealthy pods that can maneuver.

The MAN is very interested in the RMN operations and tactics, so they will have plans in place to counter the tactics used previously.

Given the current detection range of spiders is less than effective graser range, and I suspect that LDs have grasers, so an LD can cut you apart before you can target the LD I think this might not work out well.

Which means if you are a SD(P) who localized an LD you are basically knifefighting with a fortress-scale ship. With the defenses of a fortress and presumably also a whole bunch of deployed pods. Do you think this is going to end well?

The big difference between an MDM and a G-torp is flight time. When two forces are engaged at any given distance and velocity vectors, the weapon with the highest acceleration will reach the target first, if fired at the same time. I've made the argument that a spider-driven G-torp should have an acceleration similar to that of a Ghost Rider RD: in the range of 3500 G. Possibly less. Without a wedge, there's no gravity sump for compensators, so they're limited by gravity plates. Those take energy and generate heat, so you can't have something very big in the torpedo if you want it to be stealthy. And you can't rack up acceleration even for a solid-state technology without compensating somehow.

You're right that the big problem is finding the LD and locking on to it and you don't want to get into knife-fighting range with it. Its biggest advantage is the stealth. The whole argument is that if that is compromised, the opponent can easily move out of range of the LDs grasers, since it has higher acceleration, and can lob missiles with relatively[*] impunity.

[*] Relatively: the LD can launch a bunch of G-torps, but those won't do it much good against 50x that many missiles arriving sooner than the torpedoes can reach te opponent. The opponent would then kill LD and then have to deal with G-torps with no control link any more.

Sigs wrote:I never said someone would do it (transit) by accident. If Harvest Joy's mission had been kept quiet by the Leadership at Torch, and Manticore had not released any information about it by the time the MA finds out that someone came through they would be back in Torch sipping Pina colada's. Assuming that your enemy who doesn't know you exist is going to announce that they are sending a ship to survey the wormhole with enough notice for you to set up an ambush seems like a terrible way to secure your most important asset.

No transits are expected, but that doesn't mean no transits will happen. I'm not saying that the GA will keep sending ships through the WH but just because they wont doesn't mean the MA can assume they wont and remove the defences. What if they leave and Manticore sends another Survey ship? Blow the location of your most important industrial system and secret base because you assumed the enemy wont send a second ship to figure out what happened to the first.

As Rob wrote, there was no reason for them to think they needed to do the survey in secret. But you're right that the MAlign probably didn't simply assume and had the picket ready to go the moment they lost control of the Congo System. They just didn't have to guess because the Harvest Joy departed Manticore probably with a lot of fanfarre. Thus the MAlign even had a minimum deadline for when the picket must be on station.

And remember: the MAlign at this time did have spies on Torch. Remember those "ex-slaves" with duplicate barcodes? So they were likely keeping tabs on the research. They probably still are.

So the risk exists and it's a huge vulnerability if it gets lost, but the risk is manageable. Remember that there are three transits. The Mannerheim / RF Navy probably pickets Felix round the clock (in stealth, just in case the owners of the system show up), so it's one transit away from The Twins, in case they need to. The crews can probably be trusted with that part of the mission.

Ok, but that's one step closer for the GA, they find someone picketed a system and destroyed one of their ships defending a WH, this to me would mean that WH has some sort of value. Find where the other end is, send ships to capture the system and fortify it. Find the next WH and you might bottle in the MA or make them take the long way around. It gets you 1 step closer to finding their base, puts crosshairs on the RF and forces the MA to react to the GA's moves rather than the GA reacting to the MA.

The only way to find out where the other end is is to transit. And given that one ship has been destroyed by a picket, they'd have to force a transit, so push something like 10 or 20 SD(P)s. That's hardly something you hide for long, but it can be done (just ask Protector Benjamin).

The problem is that they have no clue what's on the other side. It can be a single destroyer on picket or there could be a pair of forts, which can can make mincemeat of 20 SD(P)s. We have yet to be told of a successful, non-suicidal forced wormhole transit.

That first transit is only going to get you to The Twins. If the MAlign loses that, no big deal: it'll have to heavily picket Felix, with off-the-books units likely, but it can prevent its main line of communication from being lost. It also has a warning because even if the GA takes over The Twins, it's another 3 months with a survey ship to find out the vector for the second wormhole.

If they lose Felix, they lose the main gateway to Darius, but they don't yet lose Darius. Felix is a junction, so it has 3 more termini besides The Twins. There's no telling how quickly the survey from Felix can detect those vectors. But at this point, the MAlign surely will have forts in Darius, so any forced transit is suicide, for no gain.

I wonder if there's a strategy here: can you transit and quickly translate to alpha? I guess not, since you probably exit in the Resonance Zone. Maybe some dedicated ships or drones that transit and immediately reverse course, after taking some snapshots of the stellar vicinity. Bring the data back for number-crunching. With proper ECM / ECCM, it might be possible to fool the picket long enough to survive.

Then they should have waited until they were ready to execute the plan not execute the plan and wait a decade or three for the ships you need to be build. This makes them look like the galaxies dumbest bad guys.

Once again, my argument is that the plan could have called for construction of capital ships at a certain amount of time T before the time they went out to the galaxy. Who's to say that they weren't executing to plan?

We know the plan derailed, but you can't hold that against the planners before derailment.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:
You're right that the big problem is finding the LD and locking on to it and you don't want to get into knife-fighting range with it. Its biggest advantage is the stealth. The whole argument is that if that is compromised, the opponent can easily move out of range of the LDs grasers, since it has higher acceleration, and can lob missiles with relatively[*] impunity.

[*] Relatively: the LD can launch a bunch of G-torps, but those won't do it much good against 50x that many missiles arriving sooner than the torpedoes can reach te opponent. The opponent would then kill LD and then have to deal with G-torps with no control link any more.

The LDs have pod bays. They are filled with missile pods. Lots and lots of missile pods, possibly very very big pods.

There are also interesting concepts like building an mdm-like missile by just miniaturizing normal drives and boosting a torpedo.

kzt wrote:

ThinksMarkedly wrote:
You're right that the big problem is finding the LD and locking on to it and you don't want to get into knife-fighting range with it. Its biggest advantage is the stealth. The whole argument is that if that is compromised, the opponent can easily move out of range of the LDs grasers, since it has higher acceleration, and can lob missiles with relatively[*] impunity.

[*] Relatively: the LD can launch a bunch of G-torps, but those won't do it much good against 50x that many missiles arriving sooner than the torpedoes can reach te opponent. The opponent would then kill LD and then have to deal with G-torps with no control link any more.

The LDs have pod bays. They are filled with missile pods. Lots and lots of missile pods, possibly very very big pods.

There are also interesting concepts like building an mdm-like missile by just miniaturizing normal drives and boosting a torpedo.

The problem with firing regular missiles is that they can be seen from tens of millions km away. And the rules of the universe say those missiles need control links directed at their tails, so you can direct RDs along the probable vector. Firing regular missiles or raising side- or bubblewalls means saying goodbye to the stealth.

If those are spider-driven missiles or torpedoes, we go back to the range problem. The LD needs to overwhelm the enemy before they can fight back.

Armed Neo-Bob wrote:

Sigs,

Where did you get any idea that the survey was a covert military op looking for the Malign?

I am not saying that it was aimed at the MA, what I am saying is that the SEM was at war, they had bigger fish to fry and they could have wanted to keep it quiet, or on the flip side one of the other powers that support Torch could have send a ship to survey the WH. If they send ships to survey the WH without giving notice they could have been on the other side, did their thing and been back to torch before anyone even knew they were there. At the time they didn't know anything about the MA, but they may very well have been really curious after OB, second BoM and formation of the GA.

You are condemning the characters in the book for not being omniscient; and ignoring the political realities which existed for the initial multi-stellar involvement in the survey. Which was sort of what ThinksMarkedly wrote.

I am condemning characters from making assumption they had not enough facts to make. If you don't know what the enemies goal was you cannot make an assumption on their capabilities based on wild guess. The character's assumption might very well be true but it is based on flawed reasoning. Like I have explained my point previously the why is the most important question to answer before you make assessment on the enemies fleet strength, making an assumption that the enemy didn’t have enough ships to destroy RMN and GSN Home Fleets, Third Fleet and the industry at the WH and Trevor’s star without knowing the actual goal of the attack is extremely dangerous.

It’s not about being omniscient, its about not making guesses and directing policy based on those guesses if they are just a guess. Might as well go to a fortune teller and use their Christal ball to make your decisions.

The existence of the "unexplored" wormhole "Junction" at Congo had been deliberately leaked to the press by the Malign.

Hauptmann's involvement in the survey --and the fact that the Cartel's stock is publicly traded--eliminates every bit of secrecy. Why should it be secret? Manpower never got started with it (as far as Manpower knows, anyway.)

I’m not talking about Secret, I’m talking about sending a ship to Torch without announcing it and waiting for a result before making an announcement. You don’t have to announce every decision you make, they could have announced the survey upon completion or they could hve announced the survey once it has started.

Announcements would have been in the Financial Times or its equivalent. Manticore, Erewhon, and Maya (yes, that is the SL) would all have been invited to invest in the project--especially since the "Junction" was "never surveyed" by Jessyk according to the documented evidence found on Torch.

Ultimately they announced it but designing your defence based on the assumption that the enemy will announce all of their moves regarding the WH well ahead of time so you can mount a defence seems kind of stupid. The way Torch is being right between the Manticore Alliance and the Republic politically, anything could have happened including an announcement too late to do anything about it.

It was intended by the Malign as a "political" maneuver that would give them access to the Manti -Lite tech Erewhon possessed. Losing the system wasn't in the plan. That someone would attempt to survey the "Junction" was inevitable once Manpower lost the system. Textev is in the meeting of the inner onion where Anisimovna had to explain to someone (Jessup?) what the intended operation had been.

My thinking is that when Congo was lost they quickly stood up picket without waiting for Manticore, Haven or Erewhon to announce survey. By the time they announced it, even with the MA’s speed advantage they could still be too late to stop the survey and once the location of the system is known any subsequent losses could have been met with a division of SD(P)’s when available to visit that system the long way around.

The Malign would have deployed the ships to prevent transit as soon as the Congo System was lost to them (i.e., 1919 before the resumption of the Havenite War). They didn't have to get a telegram from Manticore. The Picket at the Twins closes off any possibility of the Ballroom or the RMN tracing the route back to Felix, and further to Darius --and prevents the knowledge of Mannerheim's involvement at Felix from getting any play in the public eye. And the Mannerheim connection to the Malign is still very covert.

So how would you get a secret transit by anyone?


Rob

My entire point was that they had to set up a picket in the system as soon as they lost Congo. At which point they would have had to maintain a constant picket since 1919 which was the whole argument because maintaining a picket for 2 years required rotating ships out by 1923 its 4 years which means that they have to rotate ships at least 2 times more likely 4 times and missing 8 BC’s in most navies would have been enough to raise some questions when the GA eventually got around to searching. Unless they made the arrogant assumption that there would be no one around to investigate then they are leaving a lot of breadcrumbs in terms of ships missing for months/years on a secret mission requiring several thousand crew members to be either all reliable or somehow kept in the dark. The SLN can get away with deploying 8 BC's in a system and rotate them for decades without anyone noticing because they had somewhere in the neighbourhood of 3-4 thousand BC's but anyone with less then 200 BC's will have a heck of a time keeping it quiet especially if the entire crew of each and every ship was not 100% in on it and kept from talking.

Sigs wrote:I am not saying that it was aimed at the MA, what I am saying is that the SEM was at war, they had bigger fish to fry and they could have wanted to keep it quiet, or on the flip side one of the other powers that support Torch could have send a ship to survey the WH. If they send ships to survey the WH without giving notice they could have been on the other side, did their thing and been back to torch before anyone even knew they were there. At the time they didn't know anything about the MA, but they may very well have been really curious after OB, second BoM and formation of the GA.

The SEM was at war with the other power backing Torch. There was no way to keep the survey expedition a secret: you can't survey in the Congo System without the Torch Government knowing about it (not if you still want their trust) and you can't keep the Havenite government from knowing about it since they were also part of that government. Namely (literally!) Victor Cachat.

So the only way any survey could have been done was in the open, with both Manticore and Haven (and Erewhon) knowing about it.

I am condemning characters from making assumption they had not enough facts to make. If you don't know what the enemies goal was you cannot make an assumption on their capabilities based on wild guess. The character's assumption might very well be true but it is based on flawed reasoning. Like I have explained my point previously the why is the most important question to answer before you make assessment on the enemies fleet strength, making an assumption that the enemy didn’t have enough ships to destroy RMN and GSN Home Fleets, Third Fleet and the industry at the WH and Trevor’s star without knowing the actual goal of the attack is extremely dangerous.

You are condemning them for failing to make an assumption based on facts they had not yet had. In other words, you're expecting them to be omniscient or at least clairvoyant.

At the time the survey was started, soon after the liberation of Congo, they only thought that Manpower was a particularly unscrupulous company that did control Jessyk via shady deals and influence. They had not yet put together the necessary data to show that Manpower wasn't operating like a company, but instead like a nation-sate. And they certainly had not yet gone to Mesa to collect more data, much less come back from it. There was no reason to suspect there was a fleet strength to be taken into account, that the other side might be picketed round-the-clock by something heavy enough to deal with a cruiser.

They did certainly think it was weird that Manpower had not exploited the wormhole. Any wormhole is an economic boon, so it would stand to reason a company would want to extract every bit of profit from it, by getting traffic through it. That Manpower had not done so meant it either had not yet surveyed it (weird, unlikely, but possible) or that it had but had not found anything that would be of interest to its bottom line, so they downplayed the utility of the wormhole (the likely scenario), or a third option, that which it was a good connection for slave trade but they didn't want the galactic powers to now where it led to. The third option, which is the closest to reality, is a possibility but again unlikely for a company.

It’s not about being omniscient, its about not making guesses and directing policy based on those guesses if they are just a guess. Might as well go to a fortune teller and use their Christal ball to make your decisions.

You can only make decisions based on the facts you do have. You cannot make decisions based on pie-in-the-sky wild guesses. Anyone who in 1921 had suggested that there was a 600-year-old conspiracy behind Manpower to overthrow the Solarian League and rule mankind by way of genetic supermen would have been laughed out of court. The Sollies did laugh when the GA proposed that very thought in May 1922.

Ultimately they announced it but designing your defence based on the assumption that the enemy will announce all of their moves regarding the WH well ahead of time so you can mount a defence seems kind of stupid. The way Torch is being right between the Manticore Alliance and the Republic politically, anything could have happened including an announcement too late to do anything about it.

Again, who's the enemy here? If you're referring to the Kingdom of Torch's enemy, until mid-1921, they only thought the enemy was a corporation that made profit by exploiting genetic slavery. All decisions and predictions fall from the decision-tree leading to profit motive. Yes, it was a flawed assumption, but they didn't have any reason to suspect it was flawed. Only around that time did they start to suspect there was something rotten in the State of Mesa, but they didn't know what. Either way, that was already too late: the Harvest Joy was on-station and doing survey before Operation Rat Poison.

If you're referring to Manticore and its enemy (Haven), see above for the impossibility of conducting the research in secret.

My thinking is that when Congo was lost they quickly stood up picket without waiting for Manticore, Haven or Erewhon to announce survey. By the time they announced it, even with the MA’s speed advantage they could still be too late to stop the survey and once the location of the system is known any subsequent losses could have been met with a division of SD(P)’s when available to visit that system the long way around.

I agree they either got the picket on-station or ready to go there. Mannerheim had been picketing Felix for a decade or two already. Getting a ship to transit from Felix to The Twins is a 5-minute job. A BC squadron probably took a day to craft orders and select the right squadron.

But it could not have been too late. There was an absolute minimum amount of time that the Harvest Joy would have spent surveying in Torch. And given that the MAlign knew that they would find the anomalous gravitational data, they also knew it would be an extended survey.

My entire point was that they had to set up a picket in the system as soon as they lost Congo. At which point they would have had to maintain a constant picket since 1919 which was the whole argument because maintaining a picket for 2 years required rotating ships out by 1923 its 4 years which means that they have to rotate ships at least 2 times more likely 4 times and missing 8 BC’s in most navies would have been enough to raise some questions when the GA eventually got around to searching. Unless they made the arrogant assumption that there would be no one around to investigate then they are leaving a lot of breadcrumbs in terms of ships missing for months/years on a secret mission requiring several thousand crew members to be either all reliable or somehow kept in the dark. The SLN can get away with deploying 8 BC's in a system and rotate them for decades without anyone noticing because they had somewhere in the neighbourhood of 3-4 thousand BC's but anyone with less then 200 BC's will have a heck of a time keeping it quiet especially if the entire crew of each and every ship was not 100% in on it and kept from talking.

Both Bob and I agree that they probably set up a picket. But I don't think 8 BCs would have been immediately noticeable nor would they need to set up immediately after losing the system. See above why it any transit would have taken considerable time from the loss of the system.

And once the survey expedition was publicised, keeping tabs on it became that much easier. Its research was probably shared with at least 5 different governments and the MAlign did have spies on the ground on Torch. So they only needed to detach a squadron once the risk of transit crossed a certain threshold.

To minimise the chance of discovery, the Mannerheim Navy probably deployed picket squadrons to multiple termini of the Felix Junction (it has 4 in total, including Darius). That way, any crew who asked wouldn't know why The Twins was particularly singled out, because it wasn't. Mannerheim had already been picketing Felix for a decade, so any operations and logistic people back on their homeworld would not ask weird questions why either.

Mannerheim had one of the biggest SDFs in the League, so making a couple of squadrons of BCs disappear from the public eye shouldn't be too difficult. If we assume they had two dozen SDs, then they probably had at least 4 times as many BCs. At any point in time, half of them are deployed somewhere, the rest either in their Home Fleet or laid up for refit and maintenance. And there are thousands of BCs flying around, so the MA could certainly slip Mannerheim a few more from Darius using those shipyards you argued they must have had. A bit of creative accounting by an MA plant in the Mannerheim Navy and no one knows their actual force strength.

That doesn't mean it went out without a hitch. We just haven't been told if something did happen.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:
As Rob wrote, there was no reason for them to think they needed to do the survey in secret. But you're right that the MAlign probably didn't simply assume and had the picket ready to go the moment they lost control of the Congo System. They just didn't have to guess because the Harvest Joy departed Manticore probably with a lot of fanfarre. Thus the MAlign even had a minimum deadline for when the picket must be on station.

My point was that they had a picket in the system the second they found out Congo had been lost. But that brings me to the problems I mentioned earlier, where do you get the reliable crews when by 1922 the RF would have to have rotated 2-3 squadrons of BC’s from one of their member navies quietly with reliable crews and no questions. Can’t rotate them through the RF navies lest someone find out that the RF was defending objectives before they were a nation/alliance. Then the question that the GA would ask as soon as it becomes apparent that the RF was guarding a system before the RF existed is why and I definitely wouldn’t be putting industry in the system because that is more eyes in the area.

And remember: the MAlign at this time did have spies on Torch. Remember those "ex-slaves" with duplicate barcodes? So they were likely keeping tabs on the research. They probably still are.

Doesn’t matter one bit if you cannot get the intelligence in time. That’s why I believe they had a picket in system from the start.

So the risk exists and it's a huge vulnerability if it gets lost, but the risk is manageable. Remember that there are three transits. The Mannerheim / RF Navy probably pickets Felix round the clock (in stealth, just in case the owners of the system show up), so it's one transit away from The Twins, in case they need to. The crews can probably be trusted with that part of the mission.

My point is that the RF/MA has to make sure their end of the WH is secure from the first opportunity they have after hearing about the takeover at Congo. They cannot wait and hope they have enough heads up about a survey mission in order to picket the system. This brings me to the problem I mentioned, having 8 BC’s on a continuous picket with a peacetime navy will be noticeable unless that navy was the SLN. Anyone else whether the RHN, RMN, GSN, IAN or MSDF would be noticeable. It’s not just noticeable but its crew reliability as no matter what you still have thousands of people confined to 8 ships for 6 months or a year, someone will hear something and it will get out, it doesn’t have to be big but it can be one more piece of the puzzle for the GA. What’s worse is that you have to have significant number of trusted officers and enlisted to man the sensitive areas in case something like Harvest Joy’s survey happened, otherwise it will get out that the MSDF just blew out an RMN cruiser. They cant rotate with the other RF navies because this was before the RF became a thing which would raise more questions if/when it gets out that between 1919 and 1922 the navies of what would become the RF were taking turns picketing a secret system of unknown value. It might not paint them as MA automatically, and it might not lead to Darius but it sure as hell would put them really high on the list of things to worry.

The only way to find out where the other end is to transit. And given that one ship has been destroyed by a picket, they'd have to force a transit, so push something like 10 or 20 SD(P)s. That's hardly something you hide for long, but it can be done (just ask Protector Benjamin).

Or you get evidence that MSDF was picketing a top secret WH and on or about x day of x month in 1921 they were engaged in a “battle” and destroyed an unknown/pirate ship that was transiting the wormhole. You get this information from one of the 16,000 people on board those 8 ships. Start more in depth investigation and find out that MSDF BC’s have disappear for 12 month deployments since Torch declared independence. At that point the GA intelligence services have their breadcrumbs and they focus on the RF because it becomes more likely and more likely that they worked with Manpower to hide where the Torch WH goes.

The problem is that they have no clue what's on the other side. It can be a single destroyer on picket or there could be a pair of forts, which can can make mincemeat of 20 SD(P)s. We have yet to be told of a successful, non-suicidal forced wormhole transit.

Once they find out that the other end potentially lies in RF space, they don’t need to actually find the other end. They found something better, the potential frontman of the MA or one of them since they cant be sure that the RF would be the one and only.

That first transit is only going to get you to The Twins. If the MAlign loses that, no big deal: it'll have to heavily picket Felix, with off-the-books units likely, but it can prevent its main line of communication from being lost. It also has a warning because even if the GA takes over The Twins, it's another 3 months with a survey ship to find out the vector for the second wormhole.

The Felix system is 10 LY away from Mannerheim, and it leads directly to Darius. If that is true it makes any sucpisious activities by Mannerheim and the RF that much more dangerous since once the GA zero’s in eventually they will find Felix.

If they lose Felix, they lose the main gateway to Darius, but they don't yet lose Darius. Felix is a junction, so it has 3 more termini besides The Twins. There's no telling how quickly the survey from Felix can detect those vectors. But at this point, the MAlign surely will have forts in Darius, so any forced transit is suicide, for no gain.

If they lose Felix they might strand Darius 400 LY in the absolute wrong direction for all we know, even with their speed advantage their communication and coordination will suffer greatly.

Once again, my argument is that the plan could have called for construction of capital ships at a certain amount of time T before the time they went out to the galaxy. Who's to say that they weren't executing to plan?

We know the plan derailed, but you can't hold that against the planners before derailment.

Sure I can, they executed a plan and their plan B was decades little progress and inaction if plan failed. Even without the intelligence that was brought via mesa the Republic might have sat the war out, think about it, someone attack Manticore and Grayson right as the Republic is on it’s knees. Republic quickly moves to make peace and return prisoners because at this point they get a little nervous because an unknown entity just attacked their enemy. It’s not even love for manticore but more of if the RHN was reasonably certain that it wasn’t the SLN and it definitely wasn’t them they would be weary especially after they get blamed for 3 assassinations they definitely did not carry out. It wouldn’t have led to an alliance but it might have kept them out of the war. With attacks conducted upon your enemy by parties unknown I would be very weary to attack my enemy because well someone keeps setting me up for something and now they handed the enemy to me in a platter. The MA’s planners needed the SEM to behave in a certain fashion after the attacks, and the SLN to respond in a specific way and the Republic to also respond in a specific way. If Haven jumped the gun and attacked Manticore they could have taken out a lot of RMN ships with their close to 700 SD(P)’s right at a time when the SEM can ill afford to lose ships, if they forces the SEM to retaliate that would have spent the RMN and GSN’s reserve munitions and then 400 SLN SD’s waltz into manticore against a large force with limited ammunition. League gets back to normal and both Manticore and Haven are gutted, except the League takes over the Manticore WHJ.