Verge Nations Post-Uncomprising Honor

kzt wrote:So you drop out of hyper, spend say 2 hours to get to the planet. You swat anyone who objects and tell them that you are going to come collect stuff and you'll blow up the town if anyone resists.

So it takes you 8 days to collect whatever really valuable but easy to resell stuff they have and the top 50 contestants from the Miss Planet contest and then you take off. Total time is under 10 days.

Is the 0.2% chance that some annoying busybody is going to interrupt you a serious deterrent to your nefarious plans?

You can do this 20 times and have about a 95% chance that no annoying busybody is going to stumble upon you.

How much security is the GA really providing here? How many raids will it take before they petition OFS to come back and keep them safe?

Wait, the OFS kept them safe? Only if you meant "make a deal with the devil" kind of protection: you're safe from pirate wannabes, but not from OFS itself. From all we've been told, Barregos in Maya was an extremely atypical case, no other OFS sector governor was doing that sort of thing.

Anyway, the protection isn't absolute: you can't prevent this pirate from getting away with it a couple of times. But after the second, he'll be hunted down and his long-term prospects of survival drop considerably. Keeping ahead of the pursuers means putting stress on the ships and on consumables, not to mention arriving in sectors they don't have a lot of intel on.

If I were the CO of this rogue unit, I'd set myself up as the protector. They don't even have to make it a protection racket: just arrive with that battlecruiser squadron in a moderately non-poor Verge system, offer your services and that of your highly experienced crew in exchange for being named Planetary Fleet Admiral (with corresponding salary and benefits). Yes, I'd be absconding with SLN property and officially going rogue, but I'd be one of Kingsford's least problems. By the time the situation settled down sufficiently for Kingsford to request his ships back, he wouldn't want them (obsolete) and the system may actually be able to give them back!

Sure, I wouldn't be absurdly rich and have a harem of slaves, but I'd actually have a cushy desk job and would still be rich (any FF Commodore would have enough corrupt behaviour to skim off the top anyway).

But I might not be representative of the run-of-the-mill FF Commodore and Rear Admiral. There's always the "getting caught is for suckers, it's not going to happen to me".

One of the questions is what is going to happen to all those now unemployed members of the SLN who were captured by RMN or the GA?

The 1st guess is that they will be repatriated to the SL but at SL costs but it's complicated by the massively reduced number of ships the SLN (both Battle Fleet and Frontier Fleet) currently has and the presumed massive shrinkage of the area/systems that the SLN has responsibility for.

Remember, the SLN lost all the ships involved with Byng, Crandall and Filerta. They have also lost a lot of FF ships in confrontations in Talbott and so many other places including some of the attacks in Operation Buccaneer. Then there is the destruction of every SLN warship and facility in the Sol system with the exception of Ganymede Base- which was evacuated and so far taken over by the GA to strip out information and equipment for research etc.

So there are a lot of SLN personal who are surplus to requirements.

We don't know if the SLN, SL 2.0 are going to want (or feel the need to for various reasons) bring in for trial under various violations of their own regulations.
The same goes for possible extradition of officers and crew to systems which were attacked under Buccaneer, and of course, what SEM (at least) is going to want for the actions against it.

Is it possible that the SLN would allow the POWs to be discharged without comming all the way back to the center of the SL. I say that because all the FF bases and government nodes are now immediately going away. It might be less expensive and more effective to allow separation from service (and pay them what they are owed & any retirement) and let them return to either the system of their birth or one which they have developed an attachment- if they will have them.

What is the likelihood that the SL (principaly the Navy) will be willing to work out arrangements with either former Protectorates or systems leaving the SL to sell them ships for SDFs and allow former SLN officers and crew -who wish to be part of the package- that to include a change of Citizenship) so that they get operational ships with experienced crew?
Yeah, essentialy nobody is going to either want or afford a former SLN SD, but in the short term (10yrs or more) ships at the BC level and smaller are going to be capable in the presnet enviornment where they are not going to come up against GA or comperable naval (Andemani, Erwhon etc) ships. If you want to deter or go hunting priates for your own system or commerce needs, a former SLN ship should work.

The various dictatorships and other totalitarian regimes are not going to be able to call on FF anymore- nor have the legal cover that a request to OFS had provided- to suppress their own people. They are going to have to foot the bill for their own SDF.

The same is going to happen with the Transtellars.

Any way you slice this, there are going to be an awful lot of unemployed and experienced former naval personnel looking for jobs.

FF had something like 10,000 ships in service.

BF had something like 2500.

There are a lot of poor wartime officers in both, that's how bureaucracies work, but most of them just need better tools.

Which the SL is perfectly capable of providing once the SLN stops suppressing innovation.

Brigade XO wrote:One of the questions is what is going to happen to all those now unemployed members of the SLN who were captured by RMN or the GA?
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Is it possible that the SLN would allow the POWs to be discharged without comming all the way back to the center of the SL. I say that because all the FF bases and government nodes are now immediately going away. It might be less expensive and more effective to allow separation from service (and pay them what they are owed & any retirement) and let them return to either the system of their birth or one which they have developed an attachment- if they will have them.

Note that aside from Byng's force, which was just 17 BCs and was probably returned immediately to the SL (left in New Tuscany actually), everyone else was Battle Fleet. Those are not Verge spacers, but Core and Shell Systems people who will not feel any affinity with a Verge polity.

We don't know if the enlisted spacers were capable or not, but we know that they weren't trained very well. They lack a lot of institutional knowledge their Frontier Fleet counterparts will have acquired. And it's worse for the officers: BF officers were mostly dead weight, especially in comparison to the FF.

In a rapidly shrinking SLN, the able FF officers and spacers will be most sought after, both by the SLN itself and any Verge worlds looking to acquire experience through immigration. The Battle Fleet enlisteds will need to recycle and learn, or stop enlisting when their terms are up.

As for the officers, they'll be discharged or retired, then allowed to go home to their rich families. Those are the ones most likely to delude themselves on their skill level and attempt to go rogue, but also most easily caught.

kzt wrote:FF had something like 10,000 ships in service.

BF had something like 2500.

There are a lot of poor wartime officers in both, that's how bureaucracies work, but most of them just need better tools.

Which the SL is perfectly capable of providing once the SLN stops suppressing innovation.

I think the BF had probably a bit more, but not by much. We know they had 2000 SDs, a quarter of which was lost during the war. But just that number implies there need to have been active escort ships below the wall in the BF too.

In the event of a war, the SLN could call upon the FF to form the bulk of escort duties for the BF, but not even stupid political appointees would miss the fact that integration of forces that never trained together is not immediate. The BF needed a core of escorts of its own that is training with the SDs.

We can probably take Crandall's forces as a good cross-section. She had 71 SDs, 24 BC, 12 CA, 28 CL and 18 DD. If that ratio holds for 2000 SDs, that implies 675 BCs, 340 CAs, 800 CLs and 500 DDs (numbers rounded up and down), for a total of 4315 ships. Give or take several hundred, but I guess this is a good ballpark.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

kzt wrote:So you drop out of hyper, spend say 2 hours to get to the planet. You swat anyone who objects and tell them that you are going to come collect stuff and you'll blow up the town if anyone resists.

So it takes you 8 days to collect whatever really valuable but easy to resell stuff they have and the top 50 contestants from the Miss Planet contest and then you take off. Total time is under 10 days.

Is the 0.2% chance that some annoying busybody is going to interrupt you a serious deterrent to your nefarious plans?

You can do this 20 times and have about a 95% chance that no annoying busybody is going to stumble upon you.

How much security is the GA really providing here? How many raids will it take before they petition OFS to come back and keep them safe?

Wait, the OFS kept them safe? Only if you meant "make a deal with the devil" kind of protection: you're safe from pirate wannabes, but not from OFS itself. From all we've been told, Barregos in Maya was an extremely atypical case, no other OFS sector governor was doing that sort of thing.

Anyway, the protection isn't absolute: you can't prevent this pirate from getting away with it a couple of times. But after the second, he'll be hunted down and his long-term prospects of survival drop considerably. Keeping ahead of the pursuers means putting stress on the ships and on consumables, not to mention arriving in sectors they don't have a lot of intel on.

If I were the CO of this rogue unit, I'd set myself up as the protector. They don't even have to make it a protection racket: just arrive with that battlecruiser squadron in a moderately non-poor Verge system, offer your services and that of your highly experienced crew in exchange for being named Planetary Fleet Admiral (with corresponding salary and benefits). Yes, I'd be absconding with SLN property and officially going rogue, but I'd be one of Kingsford's least problems. By the time the situation settled down sufficiently for Kingsford to request his ships back, he wouldn't want them (obsolete) and the system may actually be able to give them back!

Sure, I wouldn't be absurdly rich and have a harem of slaves, but I'd actually have a cushy desk job and would still be rich (any FF Commodore would have enough corrupt behaviour to skim off the top anyway).

But I might not be representative of the run-of-the-mill FF Commodore and Rear Admiral. There's always the "getting caught is for suckers, it's not going to happen to me".

This is exactly the scenario that I was suggesting. Rather than use a hijacked SLN ship or ships to go raiding, you set yourself up as the system protector. The CO becomes King and the other officers become nobles, but your rule is intentionally enlightened. You might set up a Constitutional Monarchy that preserves your political power while granting enough political rights to the citizens that they support the system.

You need to preserve and enhance the system's industrial base so as to have the means to maintain, update and replace your ships. As a result, you don't waste resources on stupid stuff like Gold Plated toilets. Most of your personal wealth would be productive assets that produce income for you but also nurture the industrial development of your vassals.

I do like KZT's comment about the top 50 contestants in this Miss Planet Contest. Set yourselves up as the local protectors and you get the girls without having to coerce them.

Crandall had some people, at least on staff, that were from FF.
Fillerta had at at least a few people on staff from FF
The people captured, at least on the ships and probably some on orbital facilities and on the ground by Mike at Meyers were FF
At Saltash, the SLN ships involved were FF.
At Mobius System, Terekhov persuaded the FF force that acompanied Gen Yucel to abandon ship and scuttle.
I could be wrong but I thought that the Buccaneer forces had a lot of FF ships assigned, mostly because they were the BC and smaller.

At this point, FF (and OFS) have a lot of people scattered around and outside of what the GA defines as actual SL member systems. How fast the SLN and OFS can recall them is a question.
Of course, with OFS, prying local sector governors etc out of their nice comfortable positions might be harder than just ordering them home. That is one of the problems that can come up, that the local govenor decided that they are the defect ruler of at least the sector capital system with enough control over local military (though perhaps not the FF attached) and just become stay with whatever story he wants to use.

Barregos is a very different situation. Not only was the Maya sector initialy structured differently, Barregos was re-elected a couple of times (reguardless of what you think of the deal with OFS) and he already has his own Navy which he co-opted from FF and is now crewed and commanded by people who look to Barregos and Maya for leadership.

The larger problem with OFS will be those people who OFS had propped up in power and may or may not currently be facing major problems if not outright rebellion by their subjects.

Any FF (or BF) ship who's commander etc decide to just leave the SLN and take thieir ship(s) with them are going to be at least Trators to the SL, will have committed mutiny by disreguading their recall/reassignment orders, and are going to be hunted by the SLN and the GA.

We are also going to have a lot of OFS Intervention Battalion people to deal with. They may find employment with whaterver System leadership they were assigned to to support but the rest are going to come out from under the protection they had by working for OFS and might just find themselves on trial for crimes commiteed but for which OFS kept them from being prosecuted. Going mercenary is also an option but they will have to get somewhere that they can find an employer.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:.[/Note that aside from Byng's force, which was just 17 BCs and was probably returned immediately to the SL (left in New Tuscany actually), everyone else was Battle Fleet. Those are not Verge spacers, but Core and Shell Systems people who will not feel any affinity with a Verge polity.

IIRC, Mike tripped the self-slag command on all of the SLN ships she left in New Tuscany orbit. The Sollies May have been able to reclaim them, but they weren't going anyplace without months in the body and fender and molycurcuit shop. Each.

TFLYTSNBN wrote:This is exactly the scenario that I was suggesting. Rather than use a hijacked SLN ship or ships to go raiding, you set yourself up as the system protector. The CO becomes King and the other officers become nobles, but your rule is intentionally enlightened. You might set up a Constitutional Monarchy that preserves your political power while granting enough political rights to the citizens that they support the system.

You need to preserve and enhance the system's industrial base so as to have the means to maintain, update and replace your ships. As a result, you don't waste resources on stupid stuff like Gold Plated toilets. Most of your personal wealth would be productive assets that produce income for you but also nurture the industrial development of your vassals.

Ethical question: is that bad?

This is probably a case of "the ends justify the means" and has no single answer.

Brigade XO wrote:Crandall had some people, at least on staff, that were from FF.
Fillerta had at at least a few people on staff from FF
The people captured, at least on the ships and probably some on orbital facilities and on the ground by Mike at Meyers were FF
At Saltash, the SLN ships involved were FF.
At Mobius System, Terekhov persuaded the FF force that acompanied Gen Yucel to abandon ship and scuttle.
I could be wrong but I thought that the Buccaneer forces had a lot of FF ships assigned, mostly because they were the BC and smaller.

Right, sorry, I had forgotten about the conquest/liberation of the Madras sector. But note that the biggest unit they had was a BC and they had few of them anyway. So all the SLN personnel captured at Madras pales in comparison to the 250+ SDs worth of crews that became POW after Spindle and Second Manticore.

Also, most likely, this became SEP (Someone Else's Problem): the personnel captured in Madras probably remained in Mandras.

Barregos is a very different situation. Not only was the Maya sector initialy structured differently, Barregos was re-elected a couple of times (reguardless of what you think of the deal with OFS) and he already has his own Navy which he co-opted from FF and is now crewed and commanded by people who look to Barregos and Maya for leadership.

Indeed, the situation in Maya was quite different and it's not because of Barregos, but it did flourish under him. He ran with the plan when he found out about it. I don't know whether he had a say in Roszak being assigned to his sector, but it helped too.