?

Brigade XO wrote:So very far afield.
If the Alignment puts something like the LD's into close enough to Manticore to engage the defences in orbit (including any forts and warships parked nearby) and issues a surrender demand on the Command Authority (the Queen) and she does not accept, do you really think that the Alignment is not going to crush Landing and the Palace by hitting them with something aready lurning in orbit? Or some truly large fusion device smuggled on-planet?

That's not a realistic scenario, but not for the reasons the others have said. If a force controlling the orbit can be bounced off in two hours, the rest of the Galaxy is not going to conclude that bombarding into surrender was a Violation. And therefore, if the MAlign do plan to go through with this bombardment, they won't even bother with issuing a demand for surrender. They know it'll be ignored and that it will have no effect in the perception others will have of the MAN anyway.

They, at that point, won't actualy care about EE violations.

Exactly. Since they don't, why bother with a half-assed measure?

ThinksMarkedly wrote: The Lancoön forts, on the other hand, must have been much smaller and must have been carried by freighters. The warp bridges were too far away from each other for a fort to reach in reasonable time, given its horribly slow acceleration, even if one has hyper generators.

The military ships go to higher bands than freighters (don't they?); so the slower acceleration is not a problem. Anyway the comparison has to be to a freighter's acceleration; not to a warship's. The Laocoön forts were described, I thought, as being assembled in place. If they were carried whole in a freighter, then would they even be s big as an SD(P)? If assembled on site then that imposes additional time before activation.

cthia wrote:I find it amusing that all of you continue to call this a drive-by. Two hours in Orbit, uncontested. And it's still a drive-by. Honor never entered orbit at all, in the Sol System. And likewise, as with Honor, all enemy warships in the system are still quite busy.

But she could have. And the SLN and Kingsford knew she could. It wasn't a bluff. It would have cost her a few thousand lives, but it would have cost the SLN a couple million spacers. And it would have made her angrier, which meant that the eventual surrender terms might be harsher. Kingsford accepting he was defeated saved lives, saved his own position if nothing else.

As in chess, you don't have to get to check mate. One opponent can say "I will mate you in 6 moves, regardless of what you do". The other player can accept that or can play it out.

There is one very important aspect I think we're missing. If the MA is smart - they ARE Alphas - and drop the personal grudge, they can come away from this with what they've always wanted.

"Our surrender demands are peace and the right to coexist as we are. Those are our demands."

Indeed, except that RFC has said and shown that the MAlign leadership exists in an echo chamber that fails to realise that they could have won by pouring money into marketing like you said. In fact, they can point to the slow uplift that has been done and say they had already won.

But no, they're too married to the Detweiler Plan and need to see it through. That will be their downfall.

cthia wrote:I find it amusing that all of you continue to call this a drive-by. Two hours in Orbit, uncontested. And it's still a drive-by. Honor never entered orbit at all, in the Sol System. And likewise, as with Honor, all enemy warships in the system are still quite busy.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:But she could have. And the SLN and Kingsford knew she could. It wasn't a bluff. It would have cost her a few thousand lives, but it would have cost the SLN a couple million spacers. And it would have made her angrier, which meant that the eventual surrender terms might be harsher. Kingsford accepting he was defeated saved lives, saved his own position if nothing else.

As in chess, you don't have to get to check mate. One opponent can say "I will mate you in 6 moves, regardless of what you do". The other player can accept that or can play it out.

Her first demand accepted was that the Solarian Navy surrender and once that happened then she had uncontested control of every point within the Solar System. Would it make people happier if she had sent a shuttle down to Earth orbit to broadcast surrender demands to the government?

PS. I do NOT think that the Edict is saying that surrender demands have to be issued from near orbit; rather it states the the planetary government has a duty to agree to a surrender demand issued from an uncontested force in near orbit. That leaves the government to determine its duty if a rescue force is on the horizon.

tlb wrote:

ThinksMarkedly wrote: The Lancoön forts, on the other hand, must have been much smaller and must have been carried by freighters. The warp bridges were too far away from each other for a fort to reach in reasonable time, given its horribly slow acceleration, even if one has hyper generators.

The military ships go to higher bands than freighters (don't they?); so the slower acceleration is not a problem. Anyway the comparison has to be to a freighter's acceleration; not to a warship's. The Laocoön forts were described, I thought, as being assembled in place. If they were carried whole in a freighter, then would they even be s big as an SD(P)? If assembled on site then that imposes additional time before activation.

What Laocoon forts? The wormholes taken in Laocoon were captured and held by mobile forces. No "permanent" forces were put in place for laocoon.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:However, because they do have wedges for some limited mobility, impeller ring requirements may dictate a different shape. They may look like a pear with two stems.

A single beta ring (like a pinnace of shuttle uses) seems not to have the hull shape restrictions that a full up starship's double rings of alpha and beta nodes do. (Of course the single ring offers lower acceleration - but that's not a problem for a fort since it has other limits on its acceleration)

cthia wrote:Certainly a particular design which allows the use of several compensators working in tandem has been discussed?

Is it one of those dead horses that keep getting out of the pasture?

I don't think a multi-compensator designs been asked about enough to be a dead horse. But RFC has indicated that no you can'd do that. Nor can you stack the effects of compensators and grav plates, not any other tricks anybody's thought to ask to get around the grav plate / compensator limits.

tlb wrote:One thing that bothers me about the forts constructed as Manticore took control of various wormhole junctions. Clearly they cannot be built from scratch, so they must be built in sections that are the largest that can fit into the largest cargo ships and then snapped together on site. Does that sound right? How long should it take to put together (and take apart when no longer needed). I wondered at the time if it would be simpler and more economical to build forts with a hyper generator and then fly them into place as needed; with the ability to fly home as well.

PS. I agree with ThinksMarkedly: if it could be done, then it would have been done. But this the first the question has come up, so far as I know.

Seems kind of a waste for a one-way trip. There are ship transporters that can carry disabled ships through hyper or wormholes. If you need to move a full up fort through a wormhole just rent one of those to haul the fort rather than paying the cost in money and volume for a hyper generator the fort is planned to never use again.

cthia wrote:I find it amusing that all of you continue to call this a drive-by. Two hours in Orbit, uncontested. And it's still a drive-by. Honor never entered orbit at all, in the Sol System. And likewise, as with Honor, all enemy warships in the system are still quite busy.

Honor also didn't demand that they surrender upon pain of bombardment.

The Edict doesn't say when you can demand surrender. You're free to show up in your unarmed luxury yacht and issue a demand for planetary surrender as soon as you're within communication range. And the defenders are free to refuse and direct defensive forces against you. All the Edict says is you can't being planetary bombardment to compel surrender until you control the system (have defeated the defenders).

So Honor is free to demand surrender from outside the hyper limit. But if the Mandarins had refused she'd have been in violation of the Edict to launch an MDM strike on the League HQ in New Chicago from where she was out near Jupiter. She'd have had to advance to Sol, defeating any other forces that contested her approach, and reiterate her demand from orbit before she could legally start dropping KEWs to compel surrender.
Of course the Mandarins - finally - realized how hopeless their possession was and refused to waste lives in a pointless bid for time by forcing Honor to do what her fleet was so manifestly capable of doing. So they surrendered "early".

ThinksMarkedly wrote:Either in pieces, carried by humongous freighters, or it can actually trasverse the wormhole. Unlike hyperspace, it doesn't need a hyper generator. All it needs is a pair of Warshawski sails, which its impellers could be able to generate. Do sails require alpha nodes, or can beta generate them too?

To traverse a wormhole you need both a pair of sails and a hyper generator.

Only alpha nodes can produce a sail (that's the main difference between them and Beta nodes. Alpha nodes also contribute more to a wedges strength than classic Beta nodes. Though Beta Squared nodes largely eliminate that power gap; but still lack the ability to create a sail)

So a fort isn't taking itself through a wormhole unless it went with a less efficient starship-style hull shape, instead of the fatter classic fort shape, and also wasted the volume and cost of Alpha nodes and a hyper generator.

Now someone, somewhere, over the years probably has built a strategically deployable low mobility ship and a self-deploying fortress. But it hardly seems like a good common approach.

Theemile wrote:What Laocoon forts? The wormholes taken in Laocoon were captured and held by mobile forces. No "permanent" forces were put in place for laocoon.

I was about to ask the same thing. We saw permanent modular forts out in to defend the Lynx terminus. But that's a permanent part of the core SKM (not even just a member of the SEM like the rest of Talbott). But yeah, we never saw anything but mobile forces holding the termini seized during Case Lacoön.

tlb wrote:One thing that bothers me about the forts constructed as Manticore took control of various wormhole junctions. Clearly they cannot be built from scratch, so they must be built in sections that are the largest that can fit into the largest cargo ships and then snapped together on site. Does that sound right? How long should it take to put together (and take apart when no longer needed). I wondered at the time if it would be simpler and more economical to build forts with a hyper generator and then fly them into place as needed; with the ability to fly home as well.

Jonathan_S wrote:Seems kind of a waste for a one-way trip. There are ship transporters that can carry disabled ships through hyper or wormholes. If you need to move a full up fort through a wormhole just rent one of those to haul the fort rather than paying the cost in money and volume for a hyper generator the fort is planned to never use again.

-- snip --

So a fort isn't taking itself through a wormhole unless it went with a less efficient starship-style hull shape, instead of the fatter classic fort shape, and also wasted the volume and cost of Alpha nodes and a hyper generator.

Now someone, somewhere, over the years probably has built a strategically deployable low mobility ship and a self-deploying fortress. But it hardly seems like a good common approach.

Theemile wrote:What Laocoon forts? The wormholes taken in Laocoon were captured and held by mobile forces. No "permanent" forces were put in place for laocoon.

I was about to ask the same thing. We saw permanent modular forts out in to defend the Lynx terminus. But that's a permanent part of the core SKM (not even just a member of the SEM like the rest of Talbott). But yeah, we never saw anything but mobile forces holding the termini seized during Case Lacoön.

I will accept the correction, but the thing I wonder is whether that is because RMN doctrine dislikes specialty warships. There is the question of how much is wasted in volume and cost and cost by adding Alpha nodes and a hyper generator. Note that it would not be just for a one-way journey, because there could be a slow rotation of forts returning to Manticore for upgrades. By building them at Manticore and flying them into position there would be no period where a fort at Basilisk or Lynx was waiting to be completed.

I do think that you very seldom want to take a fort through a wormhole (either in a transporter or independently), because the mass penalty might shut the junction down for hours.

So the junctions taken over in Case Laocoön were guarded by mobile units; but that is less efficient than a fort, if one could be put in place. The is what RFC said when discussing forts:

Fortresses in the Honorverse have always been more manpower-efficient for their firepower than mobile units. That disparity has always existed; following Manticore's enthusiastic adoption of manpower-reducing technologies, it's become far, far more pronounced, however. The crew of one of the "new-model" fortresses which have been built to cover the Junction and the Lynx Terminus is about the same size as that of a Nike-class battle cruiser, exclusive of any LAC personnel assigned to them. That's not a very big manpower investment in a 15-16 megaton platform, I think, especially when the platform in question is so much bigger, tougher, and generally kick-the-hell-out-of-you nastier than any superdreadnought ever built.

Form the following thread: Defending a wormhole junction/terminus

Jonathan_S wrote:Of course the Mandarins - finally - realized how hopeless their possession was and refused to waste lives in a pointless bid for time by forcing Honor to do what her fleet was so manifestly capable of doing. So they surrendered "early".

Quick correction: they didn't accept the surrender. Fleet Admiral Kingsford and then placed the Mandarins under arrest, as the surrender terms demanded. The Grand Alliance did not consider the mandarins legitimate government of the people, since they weren't elected and weren't working towards the good of the people.

Including clauses in the surrender terms to turn over certain people -- ostensibly for execution, with or without a show trial -- could be a violation of the Deneb Accords, though. But that's not what the GA did: they ordered arrest and I assume it was under Solarian Law, since there was no mention of extradition.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:Including clauses in the surrender terms to turn over certain people -- ostensibly for execution, with or without a show trial -- could be a violation of the Deneb Accords, though. But that's not what the GA did: they ordered arrest and I assume it was under Solarian Law, since there was no mention of extradition.

The Deneb Accords deal mostly with treatment of captured military personnel as POW's.

The Eridani Edict specifies that government officials that direct an EE violation are to be tried; so it is possible that they were arrested for some of the Case Buccaneer attacks under Solarian Law.

tlb wrote:I will accept the correction, but the thing I wonder is whether that is because RMN doctrine dislikes specialty warships. There is the question of how much is wasted in volume and cost and cost by adding Alpha nodes and a hyper generator. Note that it would not be just for a one-way journey, because there could be a slow rotation of forts returning to Manticore for upgrades. By building them at Manticore and flying them into position there would be no period where a fort at Basilisk or Lynx was waiting to be completed.

I do think that you very seldom want to take a fort through a wormhole (either in a transporter or independently), because the mass penalty might shut the junction down for hours.

So the junctions taken over in Case Laocoön were guarded by mobile units; but that is less efficient than a fort, if one could be put in place. The is what RFC said when discussing forts:

Fortresses in the Honorverse have always been more manpower-efficient for their firepower than mobile units. That disparity has always existed; following Manticore's enthusiastic adoption of manpower-reducing technologies, it's become far, far more pronounced, however. The crew of one of the "new-model" fortresses which have been built to cover the Junction and the Lynx Terminus is about the same size as that of a Nike-class battle cruiser, exclusive of any LAC personnel assigned to them. That's not a very big manpower investment in a 15-16 megaton platform, I think, especially when the platform in question is so much bigger, tougher, and generally kick-the-hell-out-of-you nastier than any superdreadnought ever built.

Form the following thread: Defending a wormhole junction/terminus

Adding the ability to self-transit wormholes forces a sub-optimal hull shape onto the fort. That's probably a bigger problem than the size of cost of the nodes and hyper generator.

I'd assume the Lacoön termini were covered by mobile forces for two reasons.
1) Manticore didn't expect to hold them long term. Their seizure was a temporary expedient to attempt to cause the SLN to stand down through economic hardship -- without entering a full shooting war. Once tensions calmed down Manticore was planning to release control of those termini. So no reason to invest in extensive heavy permanent defenses for them.
2) The mobile forces could flee if overwhelming force showed up to reclaim the terminus. A fort would have little choice but to stand and fight - but the light units used could run away - preserving RMN lives. Similarly, since this was a short term expedient there was no need to waste lives attempting to hold any given terminus. The SLN would have to spend months and much of its battle fleet chasing cruisers off of all the captured termini. And then keep those forces there to prevent the cruises from just coming back and closing the routes again. (Leaving Battle Fleet scattered into small packets far out of mutual support distance - a suicidal option when facing even a near-peer enemy; much less one whose heavy units can steamroll yours)

Still, if someone built a self deployable fort I doubt it'd close a wormhole down for hours. To close it down for even a single hour would require a fort massing 48 metatons - almost six and a half times an Invictus-class SD(P)!!!