So....imagine you are Admiral Parnell's staff officer

locarno24 wrote:Saying "Hit Manticore Straight-Off" is not a bad plan - the Manticoran Alliance won't be there yet - but you're still going to need something better than driving a large proportion of the People's navy into probably the toughest single-system defences anywhere outside the League, so you need to include how you plan to do that.

Thank you for the topic, locarno24. Sounds like an interesting what-if. Other thoughts in other replies, but I just wanted to address the above: the Manticore Binary System was probably the toughest single-system defence anywhere. Remember that the biggest SDF in the League was Beowulf and in 1922, they had about three dozen SDs. Manticore had 10x that.

Outside the League, the only navies of notice in 1900 were the IAN and the PRN. The IAN was smaller than the RMN (was probably surpassed in the last couple of decades of the 19th century), but unlike the SKM, the Andermani Empire actually had multiple systems to defend. The RMN in 1900/1901 had basically a single (albeit binary) system where to park its entire fleet.

Even after Second Fleet moved to Yeltsin's Star, the MBS was probably still the most heavily defended system.

Of course, holding the system is a different story. If you punched out the BSDF at Beowulf or the Capital Fleet at Haven, you'd still have to fight all the rest of the navies in question who'd be coming for you. If you punched the RMN out of the MBS, you've won.

This reminds me of Operation Medusa in the Castle Federation series. Without going into spoilers (it's a good series, 6 books only, worth a read), sometimes achieving temporary superiority is sufficient.

Somtaaw wrote:

cthia wrote:Did Haven have a significant enough advantage in ships to offset the RMN's tech and seriously threaten Manticore then?

from the conversations in OBS and HotQ; yes they did but they were more concerned with how much damage they'd take by simply absorbing the casualties instead of trying to be slick.


By the events of SVW, all the Legislaturalists realized they'd gained zero benefits and in fact lost much of their advantages, while Manticore had built it's Alliance and gotten stronger and stronger. So with hindsight, they looked back and realized they should have just gone full-hog from Basilisk onwards, and taken however many casualties it required.

And the interesting thing is that their decision to wait is completely understandable.

1. Without actually fighting the RMN, the tech edge estimation was just that: an estimation. The PN had veterans, admirals and commanders who had conducted compaigns, whereas none of the RMN's SDs had ever been bloodied. From the calculation I made a few months ago, in 1904, the RMN had all but 3 DNs it had ever built still in service.

2. Despite the embargo, the PN was receiving tech aid from the Solarian League. Solarian tech was still considered to be the best (and even later, after the Manticoran-Solarian war, we learn that the tech is good, but it's neither in the SLN ships nor does it have good software and doctrine to use them). Therefore, the PN was hoping to offset that tech edge.

3. At this point and during most of the war, the PRN is conducting a propaganda campaign in the SL showing it to be the good guy (a republic) resisting an imperialist and expansionist monarchy. To make a full-out attach against Manticore would erase all that. However, I should note that the victors write the history, so once they had secured Manticore and the path to Silesia, the SL public opinion would matter little.

4. The SKM government was divided. There was probably cash going from the PRN to the opposers of the build up, so the Legislaturalists were waiting to see if the build up was curbed. What's more, they were looking at it and figuring Manticore would run out of steam at some point. By my calculations, Manticore built 312 SDs and 113 DNs in just over 50 years. No one else did anything close to that. So the Parnell & staff may be wondering if those were not just paper tigers.

5. Internal reasons others have pointed out.

locarno24 wrote:in 1904 (post Basilisk and Grayson but pre-Hancock), the PN had 460 dreadnoughts and superdreadnoughts to the RMN's 309. Based on Amos Parnell's estimate of the RMN units having a '30% edge', that puts the RMN at an equivalent of about 400 "PN capital ship equivalents" to the PN's 460.

Quick note: the RMN had somewhere around 309 SDs in 1905, but not in service. According to the Fleet Strength in 1905 list, the RMN had only 186 SDs in service. Considering 312 of the 315 SDs it had ever built were less than 60 years old at the time, the rest was probably in the reserve.

But as an experienced admiral, Parnell knew it would take time to reactivate, crew, and provision those. The RMN likely did not have enough manpower to increase its SD fleet strength by 67% -- after all, the most manpower-intensive of the ship classes.

Theemile wrote:Excellent point about how the PRN's numerical advantage was compromised by their need to retain forces to hold themselves together. The People's Republic is an empire with many provinces that have been recently conquered. Internal revolts can obviously be crushed, but how many "Free Fleets" of DDs, CA's and may be BCs of their conquest victims are roaming around prepared to pounce? This is why the PRN retains Batleships. BBs can ream BCs and smaller which secures the conquests. The PRN does not use SDs or DNs for garrison duty for fear that the local Admiral will go rogue and make a system his empire. The DNs and SDs of Home Fleet are the Praetorian Guard that keep the local garrisons in line.

Given these presumptive realities, the BBs are not available to engage the RMN. This evens the odds. The PRN also needs to fear defeating the RMN at the cost of losing so many DNs and SDs that they can no longer deter the local commanders with BBs.

Likewise, the 75-100 Wallers in Haven's Home Fleet's "pretorian guard" would be unavailable for action - both to prevent Manticore from initiating it's own decapitation strike, and to prevent political disent.

Unfortunately, Haven also has 6-12 other shipbuilding centers/Fleet bases, that they need to cover with 1-2 dozen wallers to protect their infrastructure. This easily eats up another 150-200 wallers. This drops the available wallers for operations from 460 to 150-200 without compromising home defenses.

Haven was also very dependent on depot maintenance to cover for their education system, so 15-20% of their fleet was under maintenance at any time. Which drops the available ships to 110-170, Or about what was used in the initial attacks on Manticore in SVW (IIRC ~18 squadrons deployed for Hancock and Grayson attacks.)[/quote]

No you don't.

If you take Manticore nothing else matters. The RMN will be ordered to stand down, the odds that they are all going to decide to kamikaze themselves with a destructive act of piracy seems unlikely. And you will hunt them down and kill them if they do, and anyone who helps pirates will get stomped.

You can recover any systems that revolt. You can repair any damaged yards with the superior RMN tech.

And who is going to attack the Peeps? The only MA Navy with SDs is the RMN. And there isn't going to be a lot of them left once you get done with them and the odds that they will choose that two week window when they have a chance is very small. After all, they haven't done it yet and they have been poked at for years.

If you do a full scale assault and fail you are screwed. Worst of all would be to get very close to success and fail becuase you held back forces for a very unlikely threat. At most you leave some elements to reinforce the rather awesome fixed defenses around Haven.

Going to war is a risk. There is no way around it. And you can't win in a long attrition campaign, because you'll either be also fighting the Andies or more likely the SLN to take Manticore if you try.

So you have three choice. You launch a full scale out of the blue assault that has a high probability of success. You launch a war that will most likely fail after grinding up much of the Navy and damaging the the Peep image in the SL. Or you don't go to war.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

locarno24 wrote:in 1904 (post Basilisk and Grayson but pre-Hancock), the PN had 460 dreadnoughts and superdreadnoughts to the RMN's 309. Based on Amos Parnell's estimate of the RMN units having a '30% edge', that puts the RMN at an equivalent of about 400 "PN capital ship equivalents" to the PN's 460.

Quick note: the RMN had somewhere around 309 SDs in 1905, but not in service. According to the Fleet Strength in 1905 list, the RMN had only 186 SDs in service. Considering 312 of the 315 SDs it had ever built were less than 60 years old at the time, the rest was probably in the reserve.

<Snip>

Lorcano24 was counting Both the 121 Dreadnaughts and 186 SuperDreadnaughts, giving ~307 Wallers in service according to the Fleetchart. The only SDs Manticore had retired to that date were the SD-2 Sphinx and SD-3 Gryphon, with the SD-1 Manticore retiring in late 1905, just after the fighting started to give it's name and crew to a new Gryphon. At this point, Manticore had nothing in the reserve.

Theemile wrote:

ThinksMarkedly wrote:Quick note: the RMN had somewhere around 309 SDs in 1905, but not in service. According to the Fleet Strength in 1905 list, the RMN had only 186 SDs in service. Considering 312 of the 315 SDs it had ever built were less than 60 years old at the time, the rest was probably in the reserve.

<Snip>

Lorcano24 was counting Both the 121 Dreadnaughts and 186 SuperDreadnaughts, giving ~307 Wallers in service according to the Fleetchart. The only SDs Manticore had retired to that date were the SD-2 Sphinx and SD-3 Gryphon, with the SD-1 Manticore retiring in late 1905, just after the fighting started to give it's name and crew to a new Gryphon. At this point, Manticore had nothing in the reserve.

I don't expect the RMN re-activated the other 126 SDs in such a short period of time. Even a very-efficient RMN would take many months to bring them back. They probably had to wait for a lot of the smaller ships to return home from Silesia and other patrols so the senior crew could be promoted to fill slots vacated by shifting DN crews to SDs.

The number may be a bit less than 126 if some of the older SD classes were transferred to Alliance members, like Erewhon (House of Steel only comments on the drawdowns and doesn't mention Grayson operated RMN-sold SDs, but built their own).

locarno24 wrote:It's 1900 PD, and Admiral Parnell asks for concepts for taking on Manticore.

We know that in the book series the Legislaturists go with Operation Odysseus, which is supposed to take over Basilisk in a fairly bloodless fashion where they actually look like "the good guys".

It's appealing because it's perceived as a low-risk plan - aside from the risk of galvanising manticore, who right now appear to be comfortably napping and not doing much aside from building ships (which they're doing at an alarming rate but still aren't that close to quantitative parity with the PN).

But as is noted by Canning's unnamed superior, a plan which is very complex and fundamentally relies on your opponent being stupid is not a great plan - hindsight's a wonderful thing but the PN did have some extremely competent veterans in it after decades of conquest, who in the version of history we see in the novels clearly either never got consulted or got overruled.

In this version, though, when the 'draft' for Odysseus lands on your desk, your response is "Jenkins, you're fired" and you substitute your own plan for kicking off hostilities with Manticore instead.


What would they be?




Note:

Obviously, something akin to Beatrice probably has a good chance of working - but equally obviously, given that this isn't yet a war for survival and the PRH relies on the fleet to keep itself together, no-one is going to sign off on a death-ride on that scale for such a huge proportion of the fleet without a well-thought-out plan.

Saying "Hit Manticore Straight-Off" is not a bad plan - the Manticoran Alliance won't be there yet - but you're still going to need something better than driving a large proportion of the People's navy into probably the toughest single-system defences anywhere outside the League, so you need to include how you plan to do that.

Nice thread!

Going after Basilisk was a good plan, because of the added pressure it put on the RMN -- two prongs of attack, yatta yatta yatta. Especially since it was known that a flunkie was tasked with holding Basilisk (I'll never accept any reason as competent for Pavel Young being tasked to hold such an important terminus, gees!).

In light of that and the fact that the Havenite government suffered so much instability from economic distress at the time, suggesting such a strike then, might not have gone down well at all, and Parnell's flag officer would have been concerned for his CO. So, I always thought scooping up Basilisk was a precursor to submitting such a plan. The RMN just got lucky with Harrington on station to be the fly in the ointment.

At any rate, I never understood, if Haven wanted a short victorious war, why they didn't just go for the heart. How the heck can any journey to the center of Manticore be shorter with time consuming concentric circles on the periphery instead of boring straight in.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:Quick note: the RMN had somewhere around 309 SDs in 1905, but not in service. According to the Fleet Strength in 1905 list, the RMN had only 186 SDs in service. Considering 312 of the 315 SDs it had ever built were less than 60 years old at the time, the rest was probably in the reserve.

<Snip>

Theemile wrote:Lorcano24 was counting Both the 121 Dreadnaughts and 186 SuperDreadnaughts, giving ~307 Wallers in service according to the Fleetchart. The only SDs Manticore had retired to that date were the SD-2 Sphinx and SD-3 Gryphon, with the SD-1 Manticore retiring in late 1905, just after the fighting started to give it's name and crew to a new Gryphon. At this point, Manticore had nothing in the reserve.

ThinksMarkedly wrote: I don't expect the RMN re-activated the other 126 SDs in such a short period of time. Even a very-efficient RMN would take many months to bring them back. They probably had to wait for a lot of the smaller ships to return home from Silesia and other patrols so the senior crew could be promoted to fill slots vacated by shifting DN crews to SDs.

The number may be a bit less than 126 if some of the older SD classes were transferred to Alliance members, like Erewhon (House of Steel only comments on the drawdowns and doesn't mention Grayson operated RMN-sold SDs, but built their own).

The OP is talking about 1905 here, prior to the first war. Manticore had no Wallers in the reserve, nor had sold any to other alliance members. No wallers went into the reserve or sold off until after the first war was over. At this point (1905), Grayson had no Wallers, Erewhon has a few dozen DNs, Talbot has a handful of SDs, with more under construction, and the Andermani are sitting on the sidelines.

You seem to be discussing the inter war period; Parnell was safe in his retirement on Earth in 1919, not controlling the PRN juggernaught.

Correct - and at this point it's also worth noting that whilst we're talking 'total number of the wall', the relative proportion of DN/SDN class ships is also heavily skewed in favour of Haven. With a dreadnought being about 80% of the size - and for the sake of argument about 80% of the fighting power - of an equivalent fleet's superdreadnought, that pushes the 1904 balance of power to 370 "PN SDN equivalents" for manticore and 450 "PN SDN equivalents" for Haven, or about a 20% numerical edge.

At any rate, I never understood, if Haven wanted a short victorious war, why they didn't just go for the heart. How the heck can any journey to the center of Manticore be shorter with time consuming concentric circles on the periphery instead of boring straight in.

Especially given their prior strategic doctrine of short, sharp shock assault. As noted, it would represent the biggest concentration of force they'd ever have to face but it's one of those situations where I'm not sure anything you can do makes it dramatically better.

Convoluted stuff like Oyster Bay is fine but relies on technology no-one knows exists at this point.

'Paul Revere' style manoeuvres do work fine, and prior to a surprise attack with no declaration of war, havenite merchant ships can move freely through the junction, allowing - at most - a 1 day or so communications lag between Trevor's Star, the Manticore Junction and the basically undefended Basilisk, so clever plans aren't impossible. But they need to be clever plans that - as noted - have at most a few week timeline, ending with "and this is when the fleet jumps in and goes weapons-free..."

An ideal situation is to have havenite task forces sat on both remote termini, jump in in real space and blow away the junction forts, and then you can feed in reinforcements (without worrying about wormhole transit limits) far faster than home fleet can reach the junction to respond. The problem is that the casual statement "blow away the junction forts" is one of the most overoptimistic simplifications imaginable.

Unlike Grayson forts, with ~ 100g acceleration, you're not going to kill them by pratting about with ballistic launches, for example, and each one is implied to have be of DN/SDN level combat power.

Theemile wrote:The OP is talking about 1905 here, prior to the first war. Manticore had no Wallers in the reserve, nor had sold any to other alliance members. No wallers went into the reserve or sold off until after the first war was over. At this point (1905), Grayson had no Wallers, Erewhon has a few dozen DNs, Talbot has a handful of SDs, with more under construction, and the Andermani are sitting on the sidelines.

You seem to be discussing the inter war period; Parnell was safe in his retirement on Earth in 1919, not controlling the PRN juggernaught.

I was talking about 1905 too, but I made a mistake in my argument. I took the numbers from HoS that Manticore built 312 SDs of classes Samothrace, Anduril, Victory, King William, Sphinx and Gryphon, but applied them to 1905 instead of 1921, which is when HoS is current at. The Medusa class didn't roll off the line until 1914, so Manticore must have been producing Gryphons and possibly Sphinxes all the way to that date.

Worse is that my own post about the numbers, which I referred to, had this:

Given that, we can probably assume that all SDs were in service, except for SD-02 and SD-03 that we know were decommissioned. To reach 188 by the start of the war, we need 105 Gryphons and Sphinxes out of the 230. That seems totally reasonable that 115 more (which could be all Gryphons) were built until the Medusas entered service in 1914.