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

ThinksMarkedly wrote:Indeed, we don't know how big Haven's fleet is at this time. We know they had a much bigger fleet and tradition of shipbuilding in Travis' time, but with the discovery of the Junction, the RMN may have caught up. We don't know what the parity was for the peaceful years of the 17th and 18th centuries. Clearly Haven began a build-up when it became expansionist with the DuQuesne Plan. Until Roger's build-up, the PRN must have been much bigger.

But during the Trevor's Star incorporation? We don't know the force levels. It's possible that Haven noticed the build up and began one of their own too. That means a self-reinforcing cycle of both powers building up, with Haven having a higher starting point but with a shallower curve.

Haven can be assumed to have had most of their battleships in commission by this time. Thing is, if they had few or no superdreadnoughts at all - as you speculate, they probably started building them in response to Manticore's dreadnoughts - then they did need to bring more than 300 to overcome the ~100 SD/DNs Manticore(plus the real unknown - their forts) had built by this time.

Wait a minute... Fourth Yeltsin showed us that Havenite-built SDs can annihilate four times their number of Havenite-built BBs with moderate losses. That DuQuesne-class has 12L & 12G in its broadside.

Royal Winton DN Broadside: 18L, 16G, 6ET
Gladiator DN Broadside: 18L, 24G, 1GL, 8ET
King William SD Broadside: 19L, 21G

Sheesh. It appears they didn't have enough BBs.

However, given that the San Martin Navy managed to evacuate some civilians from the system, it's clear Haven invaded the system on a budget(hence assassinating KR3 to keep the RMN out of it).

Now... the next question to me, is what does Parnell do in 1906, assuming the Pierre Coup never happened and the PN's command teams remain intact? Does he handle the fighting retreats to Trevor's Star better, perhaps holding it, or gamble by sending a fleet to seize the Junction and bring in reinforcements via Trevor's Star?

I think Parnell would have continued executing the war as he had planned. The initial defeats at Hancock and Third Yeltsin notwithstanding, the PRN was bigger and was getting help from the League contractors. He had no reason to rethink it all. And without Pierre's self-decaptiation of his own fleet, Parnell might have been able to actually bring the RMN to its knees before Project Gram produced enough goodies (namely, Medusa and Shrike classes) to turn the tide. Remember that the PRN was headless between Parnell and McQueen. If it had used that time to prosecute the war sensibly, it might have won.

Or it might not. The admiralty and commands under Parnell might have been ossified and unwilling to learn. There wouldn't have been a Theisman, a McQueen or a Giscard as leaders who actually learned.

Well, I think Parnell would have fired the worst incompetents or assigned them somewhere far, far away. McQueen, Giscard, etc., were already senior enough that they could potentially break through the non-legislaturalist glass ceiling with a bit of luck.

The command team shakeup - and especially the policy of shooting failed admirals - cost the PN heavily in these first years, with mistakes at Fourth Yeltsin(detaching Theisman's BBs early) and that Nightingale ambush which jumped at White Haven too early. Tweak just those two battles the other way and...

Both White Haven and Harrington are dead or captured. The Manticoran Alliance is down 30 wallers instead of just 12. Grayson won't be building SDs.

One other variable to consider is that Manticore wouldn't dither so long about going to war if Parnell was regrouping and would press him harder than they did Citizen what'shisface. Very difficult to balance that time to repair and rearm versus the loss of experience and confidence.

munroburton wrote:Haven can be assumed to have had most of their battleships in commission by this time. Thing is, if they had few or no superdreadnoughts at all - as you speculate, they probably started building them in response to Manticore's dreadnoughts - then they did need to bring more than 300 to overcome the ~100 SD/DNs Manticore(plus the real unknown - their forts) had built by this time.

I'll check on SDs when I get home, but my guess is that Haven had a reasonable fleet of SDs far before the RMN. However I think it was stated in the text that the BBs were basically just old front line ships that had proved effective for their second career.

munroburton wrote:

ThinksMarkedly wrote:Indeed, we don't know how big Haven's fleet is at this time. We know they had a much bigger fleet and tradition of shipbuilding in Travis' time, but with the discovery of the Junction, the RMN may have caught up. We don't know what the parity was for the peaceful years of the 17th and 18th centuries. Clearly Haven began a build-up when it became expansionist with the DuQuesne Plan. Until Roger's build-up, the PRN must have been much bigger.

But during the Trevor's Star incorporation? We don't know the force levels. It's possible that Haven noticed the build up and began one of their own too. That means a self-reinforcing cycle of both powers building up, with Haven having a higher starting point but with a shallower curve.

Haven can be assumed to have had most of their battleships in commission by this time. Thing is, if they had few or no superdreadnoughts at all - as you speculate, they probably started building them in response to Manticore's dreadnoughts - then they did need to bring more than 300 to overcome the ~100 SD/DNs Manticore(plus the real unknown - their forts) had built by this time.

I wasn't making specific statements about what I thought they had (but now that you gave me the idea, I'll let the imagination go). I was merely stating that the PRN might not have been nearly as big in 1850 as it got to 1905. It did not have hundreds of wallers to conquer mostly undefended systems, though it probably had more than a couple of squadrons. It may have only decided to build a lot more up after Roger did. Another point could be that they got the economic wherewithal to build them only after the initial conquests.

Anyway, to the speculation.

We know the SMS Vergeltung was the first battleship and the next run would have been Solarian. Haven of the 1550s was probably capable of building one if it wanted to. After all, Manticore did in the 1590s and it had barely built any ships in its home shipyards in 1550.

So let's say Haven did begin building battleships in the mid-16th century. Like the Andermani and the Manticorans later, it had no reason to build explosively, but unlike the RMN, it probably did continue the build up.

Manticore built its 11 Ad Astra-class DNs in 1630s. Assuming Manticore was on par with Haven technology at this time, Haven would have built at the same time, but again in more numbers.

Finally, Manticore built the 3 Manticore-class SDs in 1750, but this was already in a period of isolationism. So let's say the SD type became available decades earlier and Haven had begun building them then.

By 1905, we know the PRN had 374 BBs, 48 DNs and 412 SDs. So here's my speculation of its force progression:

• 1600: 24 BBs, compared to Manticore's 16
• 1650: 32 BBs + 16 DNs, compared to RMN's 16 BB + 11 DN
• 1680: Economic Bill of Rights approved
• 1700: 48 BBs + 20 DNs, RMN unchanged
• Early 18th century: DuQuesne Plan adopted
• 1750: 120 BBs + 40 DNs + 16 SDs, RMN adds 3 SDs
• 1800: 250 BBs + 48 DNs + 40 SDs, RMN unchanaged
• 1850: 420 BBs + 60 DNs + 60 SDs, RMN has 0 BBs + 20 DNs + 5 SDs
• 1875: 400 BBs + 60 DNs + 200 SDs, RMN has 42 DNs + 10 SDs

My rationale is that until the DuQuesne Plan, they didn't need a large force. After that, they build up their battleships in preparation for expansion but don't go overboard on DNs and SDs. They only begin conquering unwilling systems in 1840-1850s, which is when they need those battleships to hold restless systems. This is also when the BB total peaks, seeing as everyone else has begun decommissioning theirs. The extra 12 DNs were either lost in operations or decommissioned. I'm also saying they built 350 SDs in 55 years, which is probably doable with 6 large shipyards and building no BBs or DNs.

To the original question, I had concerns about the ops plan as it was introduced the first time I read the books. Their quantative advantage was significant and they really didn't know how much further ahead the SEM was against Haven's tech. They knew they were ahead but were spitballing the real amount.

I would have advocated a first strike on the home system. My goal would have been a C-frac strike with missiles launched from well outside any expected launch point. Come in on the gentlest possible translation far out from the system. Bring along a couple hundred SDs. Use the velocity generated by the tube launch of the missiles to get them on target then wait and watch.

My target would be the forts not currently online, the shipyards, system defense missiles/installations and any RMN ships at anchor. A lot of this data could probably be gotten through any number of means to include espionage, drones, q-ships, etc.

Basically unprotected targets. No one is going to expect the attack at this time so they won't be moving the offline forts around very much. The ships at anchorage will remain there and shipyards don't move all that much either.

Shipyard targets may be risky because of a missed strike and potential to hit the planet, and the concern of civilians on board though that may be mitigated by shipyards being a legitimate military target. You could always put that one off and just strike the forts and ships at anchorage.

The missiles come coasting in over a long period of time, unexpected and silent. Drives power up at the last possible moment and slam into the unprotected vessels. The watching Havenite ships get lightspeed answers back. If everything went well they fire up their systems and come in hard on Gryphon.

Hopefully they've put a real dent in the Mantie home fleet and defenses. After Gryphon they move on to the rest.

If something went sideways while the missiles were coasting in, like hitting something by accident or some random person noticing the incoming flight of a thousand missiles, they could always just turn tail and translate out without anyone the wiser about them having been there.

No one knows Haven was involved and if they suspect it they certainly can't prove it.

In service Haven capital ship classes at the start of the war are:

SD
Duquesne 1879, successor to the Hempstead class

DN
Nouveau Paris 1869, successor to the Chevalier class

BB
Triumphant 1823 (most common haven capital ship), successor to Fouchart class

GloriousRuse wrote:While military strategy must fit political ends, it is the PN's duty to point out when the political ends cannot be reasonably achieved with the means at hand. If you win a major war with the SKM, the fleet is shredded, the system falls apart, and you won't be able to keep the happy days of easy conquest up.

If you lose, well, you lost and the system falls apart.

Instead the strategic objective of our war, if so needed, is to gain a concession on being able to transit the Basilisk area en-route to Silesia where we can win an easy conquest.

From a national decision making view, the BLS policy was a gambit for initial stability (well, really just so we could see how rotten-bad people who aren't manties are, even though the manties will in later books be shown ro undertake extensive social welfare and universal income policies that would have BLS like effects, but work with me), but we need to recognize that our ability to expand outwards easily is reaching a culminating point. If we win a limited war to gain Basilisk passage, we have one good fight with Silesia that can redress the system...but the system will need to change.

Or, even if it is inconclusive, war with a peer power provides the justification for slashing the bloated social services and affecting long change. Better to do that while bleeding a few screen ships a month than watching a decade of GDP disappear in thirty minutes.

Internal to our organization, a dust up with a power that can actually challenge us will likely help persuade the politicians to release additional finances and human capital to modernizing the fleet - which as your staff officer, seems like exactly where we should be sending some of that excessive social spending.

As he began to sell foreign language editions, Weber felt compelled to modify the SKM from a capitalist, Constitutional Monarchy into a socialist democracy so his books would be more acceptable to Eurotrash.

But then, in 1901-1905, NO ONE had ever done what we're talking about here. And especially since it's not just "biggest concentration of force they'd ever have to face", but the biggest concentration of force that anyone had ever had to face, anywhere. It's understandable that they would be reticent to launch that attack.

So a rationalization of defensive needs should free up significant forces. It's just Haven never went up against anybody that required them to take major risks and uncover even tertiary systems in order to have the forces to go on the offensive - so they're being overcautious.

Completely agree. But - and I realise this is one of those "hindsight is 20/20" moments - you're not going to take Manticore without having that fight.

I guess that was the whole thing about Odysseus; IF they could take Basilisk without a war, then you get access to the Silesian region without then passing Manticoran territory. So it's an awfully attractive option, but it relies on that horrible and almost never correct assumption politicians love of "Don't Worry, We Won't Really Have To Fight And It'll All Be Over By Christmas".

If you start with "we need to take Manticore", which WAS Parnell's objective as of the briefing at the start of On Basilisk Station, then pretty much every option other than "a direct assault" is almost always provably worse by pretty simple logic.

It took under a day for them to take San Martin IIRC. Basically, if you don't have force already in the system or at least ready to go at the junction you are not going to influence the outcome. At worst you get destroyed in detail by the peeps sitting at the terminus.

And it really doesn't matter what someone without multiple SD squadrons thinks about Haven, they can't really hurt Haven. And Haven can squash them like a bug when they get around to it.

Yeah. I think you're probably right. I'm sure that there were junction forts at that point too, but essentially, the best, most logical approach was essentially to take Trevor's Star in 1883 and just keep going. Manticore would have been a huge, painful fight, but at that point it could have been knocked over.

On the other hand, I guess at that point we don't know how much of the Havenite Wall is committed to other fronts on the DuQuense Plan at the same time. If it's engaged in a dozen pacification operations it might not have been able to concentrate force (which would explain the 'invade on the cheap' plan).

Or, even if it is inconclusive, war with a peer power provides the justification for slashing the bloated social services and affecting long change. Better to do that while bleeding a few screen ships a month than watching a decade of GDP disappear in thirty minutes.

Well, that was essentially what Rob Pierre did, wasn't it. He never really saw the effects of his reforms, but it's implied they really did start the economic change rolling (slowly!), but as noted, it was only the 'ideological crusade' Cordelia Ransom started that gave him the clout to do that. At a fundamental level, though, Parnell - and anyone working for him - can't change that. Short of launching the coup Pierre accused them of carrying out, they can execute a political objective however they like but other than recommendations and advice, can't actually change them.

The command team shakeup - and especially the policy of shooting failed admirals - cost the PN heavily in these first years, with mistakes at Fourth Yeltsin(detaching Theisman's BBs early) and that Nightingale ambush which jumped at White Haven too early. Tweak just those two battles the other way and...

Both White Haven and Harrington are dead or captured. The Manticoran Alliance is down 30 wallers instead of just 12. Grayson won't be building SDs.

I'm not convinced Nightingale would necessarily have resulted in White Haven's removal from the board, but at the very least his fleet would have been gutted and the odds are good enough.

In Yeltsin the error isn't detaching Theisman's ships - if he'd been in the initial assault he'd be dead too; when you put battleships in energy range of superdreadnoughts the numerical odds don't matter much - but the fact that Thurston didn't try to confirm what he was seeing with recon drones. Yes, Flag in Exile says pushing drones past the GSN's point defence would have been hard, but that's the point - the very act of forcing the ex-PN SDNs to employ their awesome point defence would have been a signal flare of "holy beep what just happened! That was NOT a battlecruiser!". Given that the whole plan is not supposed to be subtle and rests on THERE ARE NO NASTY SURPRISES HERE, you'd think the PN formation would be spawning drones from the moment it left hyper.

He also - as Theisman says - doesn't try to hold the range open when for once the PN has the superior numbers of heavier missiles (it thinks).

At the same time....yeah. It's a balancing act, I guess.
I don't know how much they would have lost from not having the competent non-legislaturist officers get command posts, but the opening stages of the war were a bloody massacre for the PN; with 77 ships of the wall destroyed or captured in exchange for 7 RMN ships. How much of that could have been prevented without the command decapitation we don't have the detail to know, but even a tithe of those loses is still close to enough extra SDs in the PN order of battle to take Grayson in a fair fight.

I would have advocated a first strike on the home system. My goal would have been a C-frac strike with missiles launched from well outside any expected launch point. Come in on the gentlest possible translation far out from the system. Bring along a couple hundred SDs. Use the velocity generated by the tube launch of the missiles to get them on target then wait and watch.

My target would be the forts not currently online, the shipyards, system defense missiles/installations and any RMN ships at anchor. A lot of this data could probably be gotten through any number of means to include espionage, drones, q-ships, etc.

Basically unprotected targets. No one is going to expect the attack at this time so they won't be moving the offline forts around very much. The ships at anchorage will remain there and shipyards don't move all that much either.

Since we're saying no to firing at anything in immediate planetary orbit, that's basically going to be 'stood down forts' - not a bad thing to take out, and would make seizing the terminus a heck of a lot easier. There's no specific indication that outside combat the forts shifted position on a regular basis - so whilst C-fractional strikes from a known target is going to be dodged, an unknown incoming strike might well catch a load of the 'reserve' forts in the outer ring. Which if you're going to follow up with a comparatively conventional engagement to seize the terminus is a big shot in the arm to your relative combat potential.

As he began to sell foreign language editions, Weber felt compelled to modify the SKM from a capitalist, Constitutional Monarchy into a socialist democracy

In fairness, Manticore is essentially akin to Panama - yes, it has an aggressively competitive merchant fleet, and yes it's technologically progressive and all that good stuff, but frankly by the simple fact of being sat on the Manticore Junction the amount of wealth it can generate with relatively little effort compared to its population means it could go a long way to affording whatever social structure it wanted.

There's also a difference between a sensibly designed social security system and an ideologically designed one; the former, whilst supporting you if you're out of work, should always try to make finding work and/or helping you train in new skills to allow you to find work more attractive than just sitting there on benefits (on the understanding that 'carer' and 'parent' are work, even if they're not always recognised as such). That latter point about up-skilling becomes more pronounced the more high-tech your society is.

But on changing from the RoH to the PRH, Haven had simultaneously buggered its education system, so it couldn't do that. Manticore, on the other hand, is always shown as having a pretty first-class educational system.

locarno24 wrote:But on changing from the RoH to the PRH, Haven had simultaneously buggered its education system, so it couldn't do that. Manticore, on the other hand, is always shown as having a pretty first-class educational system.

Given there was only a million people who produced every piece of military gear in the SKM, an most of the non-military stuff too, you really don't need a great general education system.

Most of your citizens can, and do, spend their days rehearsing their band for their big break, watching or making porn or doing choreography for their interpretive dance troupe.

locarno24 wrote:

But then, in 1901-1905, NO ONE had ever done what we're talking about here. And especially since it's not just "biggest concentration of force they'd ever have to face", but the biggest concentration of force that anyone had ever had to face, anywhere. It's understandable that they would be reticent to launch that attack.

So a rationalization of defensive needs should free up significant forces. It's just Haven never went up against anybody that required them to take major risks and uncover even tertiary systems in order to have the forces to go on the offensive - so they're being overcautious.

Completely agree. But - and I realise this is one of those "hindsight is 20/20" moments - you're not going to take Manticore without having that fight.

I guess that was the whole thing about Odysseus; IF they could take Basilisk without a war, then you get access to the Silesian region without then passing Manticoran territory. So it's an awfully attractive option, but it relies on that horrible and almost never correct assumption politicians love of "Don't Worry, We Won't Really Have To Fight And It'll All Be Over By Christmas".

If you start with "we need to take Manticore", which WAS Parnell's objective as of the briefing at the start of On Basilisk Station, then pretty much every option other than "a direct assault" is almost always provably worse by pretty simple logic.

It took under a day for them to take San Martin IIRC. Basically, if you don't have force already in the system or at least ready to go at the junction you are not going to influence the outcome. At worst you get destroyed in detail by the peeps sitting at the terminus.

And it really doesn't matter what someone without multiple SD squadrons thinks about Haven, they can't really hurt Haven. And Haven can squash them like a bug when they get around to it.

Yeah. I think you're probably right. I'm sure that there were junction forts at that point too, but essentially, the best, most logical approach was essentially to take Trevor's Star in 1883 and just keep going. Manticore would have been a huge, painful fight, but at that point it could have been knocked over.

On the other hand, I guess at that point we don't know how much of the Havenite Wall is committed to other fronts on the DuQuense Plan at the same time. If it's engaged in a dozen pacification operations it might not have been able to concentrate force (which would explain the 'invade on the cheap' plan).

Or, even if it is inconclusive, war with a peer power provides the justification for slashing the bloated social services and affecting long change. Better to do that while bleeding a few screen ships a month than watching a decade of GDP disappear in thirty minutes.

Well, that was essentially what Rob Pierre did, wasn't it. He never really saw the effects of his reforms, but it's implied they really did start the economic change rolling (slowly!), but as noted, it was only the 'ideological crusade' Cordelia Ransom started that gave him the clout to do that. At a fundamental level, though, Parnell - and anyone working for him - can't change that. Short of launching the coup Pierre accused them of carrying out, they can execute a political objective however they like but other than recommendations and advice, can't actually change them.

The command team shakeup - and especially the policy of shooting failed admirals - cost the PN heavily in these first years, with mistakes at Fourth Yeltsin(detaching Theisman's BBs early) and that Nightingale ambush which jumped at White Haven too early. Tweak just those two battles the other way and...

Both White Haven and Harrington are dead or captured. The Manticoran Alliance is down 30 wallers instead of just 12. Grayson won't be building SDs.

I'm not convinced Nightingale would necessarily have resulted in White Haven's removal from the board, but at the very least his fleet would have been gutted and the odds are good enough.

In Yeltsin the error isn't detaching Theisman's ships - if he'd been in the initial assault he'd be dead too; when you put battleships in energy range of superdreadnoughts the numerical odds don't matter much - but the fact that Thurston didn't try to confirm what he was seeing with recon drones. Yes, Flag in Exile says pushing drones past the GSN's point defence would have been hard, but that's the point - the very act of forcing the ex-PN SDNs to employ their awesome point defence would have been a signal flare of "holy beep what just happened! That was NOT a battlecruiser!". Given that the whole plan is not supposed to be subtle and rests on THERE ARE NO NASTY SURPRISES HERE, you'd think the PN formation would be spawning drones from the moment it left hyper.

He also - as Theisman says - doesn't try to hold the range open when for once the PN has the superior numbers of heavier missiles (it thinks).

At the same time....yeah. It's a balancing act, I guess.
I don't know how much they would have lost from not having the competent non-legislaturist officers get command posts, but the opening stages of the war were a bloody massacre for the PN; with 77 ships of the wall destroyed or captured in exchange for 7 RMN ships. How much of that could have been prevented without the command decapitation we don't have the detail to know, but even a tithe of those loses is still close to enough extra SDs in the PN order of battle to take Grayson in a fair fight.

I would have advocated a first strike on the home system. My goal would have been a C-frac strike with missiles launched from well outside any expected launch point. Come in on the gentlest possible translation far out from the system. Bring along a couple hundred SDs. Use the velocity generated by the tube launch of the missiles to get them on target then wait and watch.

My target would be the forts not currently online, the shipyards, system defense missiles/installations and any RMN ships at anchor. A lot of this data could probably be gotten through any number of means to include espionage, drones, q-ships, etc.

Basically unprotected targets. No one is going to expect the attack at this time so they won't be moving the offline forts around very much. The ships at anchorage will remain there and shipyards don't move all that much either.

Since we're saying no to firing at anything in immediate planetary orbit, that's basically going to be 'stood down forts' - not a bad thing to take out, and would make seizing the terminus a heck of a lot easier. There's no specific indication that outside combat the forts shifted position on a regular basis - so whilst C-fractional strikes from a known target is going to be dodged, an unknown incoming strike might well catch a load of the 'reserve' forts in the outer ring. Which if you're going to follow up with a comparatively conventional engagement to seize the terminus is a big shot in the arm to your relative combat potential.

As he began to sell foreign language editions, Weber felt compelled to modify the SKM from a capitalist, Constitutional Monarchy into a socialist democracy

In fairness, Manticore is essentially akin to Panama - yes, it has an aggressively competitive merchant fleet, and yes it's technologically progressive and all that good stuff, but frankly by the simple fact of being sat on the Manticore Junction the amount of wealth it can generate with relatively little effort compared to its population means it could go a long way to affording whatever social structure it wanted.

There's also a difference between a sensibly designed social security system and an ideologically designed one; the former, whilst supporting you if you're out of work, should always try to make finding work and/or helping you train in new skills to allow you to find work more attractive than just sitting there on benefits (on the understanding that 'carer' and 'parent' are work, even if they're not always recognised as such). That latter point about up-skilling becomes more pronounced the more high-tech your society is.

But on changing from the RoH to the PRH, Haven had simultaneously buggered its education system, so it couldn't do that. Manticore, on the other hand, is always shown as having a pretty first-class educational system.

Just FYI, I am extremely cognizant of below replacement Total Fertility Rates that lead to societal extinction. I favor generous child tax credits and parental leave policies that encourage the most productive people to procreate rather than just fornicate.

Fireflair wrote:I would have advocated a first strike on the home system. My goal would have been a C-frac strike with missiles launched from well outside any expected launch point. Come in on the gentlest possible translation far out from the system. Bring along a couple hundred SDs. Use the velocity generated by the tube launch of the missiles to get them on target then wait and watch.

My target would be the forts not currently online, the shipyards, system defense missiles/installations and any RMN ships at anchor. A lot of this data could probably be gotten through any number of means to include espionage, drones, q-ships, etc.

That's not a c-fractional attack. If all you give your missiles is the tube launch speed, it's a very low fraction of c.

And I don't think that will work due to the distances involved. The shortest distance would be a on-the-limit translation closest to Sphinx, only 15.3 million km (ref: At All Costs). Since we're talking about a pre-MDM attack, the shortest distance that the missiles would need to coast through would be 15.3 million km minus the 3 minutes of a full stage at half acceleration. I don't remember PRN performance at the time, so let's say 40000 G: that's 6.35 million km powered, so 9 million km coasting.

9 million km with just the speed imparted by the tube launch is practically nonsense. We don't exactly what it is, but let's give it a 10 km/s speed. The travel time for the 9 million km is 10.4 days. And that's if you give the defenders 3 minutes to bring defences up. If you're trying to sneak an attack, you want to get maybe as close as 30 seconds.

What's more, you have to translate so far that the defenders wouldn't notice you, so you can't do it on the hyperlimit. You'd have to do it light-hours away, at a minimum. Crossing 2 light-hours at even 100 km/s is nearly 250 days. You can hit your targets, since the missiles will be in powered mode at that point, but you've given the defenders so much time that they might see the missiles. And you can basically target only fixed targets and targets of opportunity.

Even then, we know this plan would have failed (though Parnell wouldn't know): Manticore could have detected a soft translation from much further out.

The missiles come coasting in over a long period of time, unexpected and silent. Drives power up at the last possible moment and slam into the unprotected vessels. The watching Havenite ships get lightspeed answers back. If everything went well they fire up their systems and come in hard on Gryphon.

There are no Havenite ships waiting for answers back, not with the time scales involved. Translating in, firing and translating out has a small but non-zero chance of hitting targets and avoiding being caught by the patrol destroyers who will come to investigate the translation. If you stick around, they'll find you and then the whole system goes to alert.

Hopefully they've put a real dent in the Mantie home fleet and defenses. After Gryphon they move on to the rest.

You're not going to hit the Home Fleet at all, not without knowing where they'll be tomorrow, much less in 250 days.