GA-League War

cthia wrote:Why can't the systems that secede take as many of the orphaned SDs in storage as they can handle? The SL doesn't want them and they're still good for system defense. While they're building their own fleet.

They already have stock in them.

Depends on whether the remaining League feels like helping arm seceding state. Those were paid for, and owned by, the League government - not contributed to its use by the individual member systems. And grand theft warship from the country you're in the processor leaving, which it wold be it you took them without its permission, is a good way to get yourself into a war with it.

Maybe the League would be willing to donate or sell off obsolete SDs to departing members. But maybe they'd be spiteful and refuse; even though they had no real use for them either.

Jonathan_S wrote:

cthia wrote:Why can't the systems that secede take as many of the orphaned SDs in storage as they can handle? The SL doesn't want them and they're still good for system defense. While they're building their own fleet.

They already have stock in them.

Depends on whether the remaining League feels like helping arm seceding state. Those were paid for, and owned by, the League government - not contributed to its use by the individual member systems. And grand theft warship from the country you're in the processor leaving, which it wold be it you took them without its permission, is a good way to get yourself into a war with it.

Maybe the League would be willing to donate or sell off obsolete SDs to departing members. But maybe they'd be spiteful and refuse; even though they had no real use for them either.

The League doesn't want or need them. The seceding state could ask to buy them. When they get an agreement from the League to sell, then they can negotiate price. And since they got stock in them anyway... their taxes has paid for more than a few SDs for certain. Well.

Plus, it would ensure the League that everything seceding will be using their old garbage, as opposed to Manty hardware. The SL should be tickled pink at the prospect.

cthia wrote:The League doesn't want or need them. The seceding state could ask to buy them. When they get an agreement from the League to sell, then they can negotiate price. And since they got stock in them anyway... their taxes has paid for more than a few SDs for certain. Well.

Plus, it would ensure the League that everything seceding will be using their old garbage, as opposed to Manty hardware. The SL should be tickled pink at the prospect.

Any seceding system that has the finances to buy Manticoran or Havenite tech will do so, not buy obsolescent SLN crap. Everyone knows they're obsolete. So the SLN would need to offer them for barely above scrap metal value, like High Ridge did.

There's also a good reason not to arm the seceding systems, especially those angry with the central government: those obsolete ships may be no match for modern GA tech, but they are still a match to everyone else, including current SLN hardware. The SLN shouldn't sell them until they have their own SD(P)s with much upgraded missile defence in commission, and probably lots of them (minimum 400). You shouldn't arm the people who are angry with you with tools that could beat you.

At best, they could sell the most obsolete of the Reserve, the units still equipped with shotguns. If they didn't get destroyed by Honor in the Battle of Sol (in the real or this alternate timeline). In fact, if they sell "as-is, some assembly required", the system acquiring them might sink more money in de-mothballing them than they're worth. But I don't know how many of those ships there are: the SLN didn't upgrade all ships all the time, but neither were they stupid to leave too many un-upgraded.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

cthia wrote:The League doesn't want or need them. The seceding state could ask to buy them. When they get an agreement from the League to sell, then they can negotiate price. And since they got stock in them anyway... their taxes has paid for more than a few SDs for certain. Well.

Plus, it would ensure the League that everything seceding will be using their old garbage, as opposed to Manty hardware. The SL should be tickled pink at the prospect.

Any seceding system that has the finances to buy Manticoran or Havenite tech will do so, not buy obsolescent SLN crap. Everyone knows they're obsolete. So the SLN would need to offer them for barely above scrap metal value, like High Ridge did.

There's also a good reason not to arm the seceding systems, especially those angry with the central government: those obsolete ships may be no match for modern GA tech, but they are still a match to everyone else, including current SLN hardware. The SLN shouldn't sell them until they have their own SD(P)s with much upgraded missile defence in commission, and probably lots of them (minimum 400). You shouldn't arm the people who are angry with you with tools that could beat you.

At best, they could sell the most obsolete of the Reserve, the units still equipped with shotguns. If they didn't get destroyed by Honor in the Battle of Sol (in the real or this alternate timeline). In fact, if they sell "as-is, some assembly required", the system acquiring them might sink more money in de-mothballing them than they're worth. But I don't know how many of those ships there are: the SLN didn't upgrade all ships all the time, but neither were they stupid to leave too many un-upgraded.

The mothballs are the ships I'm talking about. They are inferior to current SL warships. IINM, they can't even handle the Cataphracts. But they can handle pirates.

"Buy" is such a horrible word referring to something your taxes has already paid for. Sure they will rather purchase GA hardware. And I imagine they will. But that naval budget will be much higher than "crawling before walking."

I agree you don't want to arm possible enemies with weapons that could kill you (though the US constantly did it) but giving away your obsolete garbage to your enemies may ensure you have the edge. You certainly don't want them to shop in a GA Navy Surplus Store.

cthia wrote:The mothballs are the ships I'm talking about. They are inferior to current SL warships. IINM, they can't even handle the Cataphracts. But they can handle pirates.

Some of the mothball was actually quite modern. But I assume that whatever portion of it was modern would have been on Reserve One, which means that Honor took them off the table.

Anyway, the problem with that scenario is that you don't need an SD to fight off pirates. In fact, an SD is counterproductive in fighting pirates, since it has a max safe accel of 350 gravities, against a pirate that can pull 400-450. And for the price of one SD, you can operate half a dozen cruisers which can be in six different places at the same time. Or five, if one is down for maintenance, which you should do.

The only reason to have an SD is to defend against or attack someone who has BCs or bigger. That's other systems, not pirates. So the SLN selling SDs off means starting an arms race, which may devolve into war, which may spill back into SL territory and force the SLN to fight.

"Buy" is such a horrible word referring to something your taxes has already paid for. Sure they will rather purchase GA hardware. And I imagine they will. But that naval budget will be much higher than "crawling before walking."

Which is why they should buy destroyers, cruisers and at most battlecruisers instead. If we're talking about SDFs that already had those, then they're already well-defended against pirates and can afford to wait until they can buy non-obsolete designs.

As for taxes having already paid for, I have two arguments. First, it's the share of how much was paid. There are 2000 or so systems in the League. Shell systems would definitely not rate a single SD and the core systems that would rate at least one don't need to have them in the first place. So I don't think you can claim it's something already paid for.

Second is that it was paid by interstellar commerce tax, which means it was paid for transactions between systems. That's two parties. And more importantly, that also includes external parties. I don't think any legal scholar would agree that Manticore has a share in the SLN due to the commerce.

I agree you don't want to arm possible enemies with weapons that could kill you (though the US constantly did it) but giving away your obsolete garbage to your enemies may ensure you have the edge. You certainly don't want them to shop in a GA Navy Surplus Store.

I agree. But even if they can't hurt you too badly, squabbling players in petty wars can cause considerable damage that the SLN would then need to clean up. Plus the GA can consider them responsible for the havoc in the first place. I don't think it's worth the trouble.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

cthia wrote:The mothballs are the ships I'm talking about. They are inferior to current SL warships. IINM, they can't even handle the Cataphracts. But they can handle pirates.

Some of the mothball was actually quite modern. But I assume that whatever portion of it was modern would have been on Reserve One, which means that Honor took them off the table.

Anyway, the problem with that scenario is that you don't need an SD to fight off pirates. In fact, an SD is counterproductive in fighting pirates, since it has a max safe accel of 350 gravities, against a pirate that can pull 400-450. And for the price of one SD, you can operate half a dozen cruisers which can be in six different places at the same time. Or five, if one is down for maintenance, which you should do.

The only reason to have an SD is to defend against or attack someone who has BCs or bigger. That's other systems, not pirates. So the SLN selling SDs off means starting an arms race, which may devolve into war, which may spill back into SL territory and force the SLN to fight.

"Buy" is such a horrible word referring to something your taxes has already paid for. Sure they will rather purchase GA hardware. And I imagine they will. But that naval budget will be much higher than "crawling before walking."

Which is why they should buy destroyers, cruisers and at most battlecruisers instead. If we're talking about SDFs that already had those, then they're already well-defended against pirates and can afford to wait until they can buy non-obsolete designs.

As for taxes having already paid for, I have two arguments. First, it's the share of how much was paid. There are 2000 or so systems in the League. Shell systems would definitely not rate a single SD and the core systems that would rate at least one don't need to have them in the first place. So I don't think you can claim it's something already paid for.

Second is that it was paid by interstellar commerce tax, which means it was paid for transactions between systems. That's two parties. And more importantly, that also includes external parties. I don't think any legal scholar would agree that Manticore has a share in the SLN due to the commerce.

I agree you don't want to arm possible enemies with weapons that could kill you (though the US constantly did it) but giving away your obsolete garbage to your enemies may ensure you have the edge. You certainly don't want them to shop in a GA Navy Surplus Store.

I agree. But even if they can't hurt you too badly, squabbling players in petty wars can cause considerable damage that the SLN would then need to clean up. Plus the GA can consider them responsible for the havoc in the first place. I don't think it's worth the trouble.

They don't need SDs to fight pirates, but there are many more benefits of a quickly made navy. AND, the SDs will help to fight piracy in a more "subtle" fashion. In the sense that I should have included "pirates" in quotation marks.

It's a matter of what my personal preference would be. I would rather arm to protect my home and heart before my vehicles and refrigerator. That way, when a stronger force jumps my fence (made up of neighboring thugs who also split from the League and is building their navy too) I can face them off.

The pirates will usually pick on a less powerful foe. Besides, the money you save building your navy buys you a couple units of Manty obsolescence that CAN handle pirates.

Interesting, what did King Roger decide to arm against first? Pirates or invasions?

BTW, whether or not a planet thinks it rates an SD or three from the "actual" value of the taxes extorted out of it for centuries -- which was a sizable amount of it's GNP, therefore worth immeasurably more than the SL going rate at the time -- is another matter entirely.

cthia wrote:They don't need SDs to fight pirates, but there are many more benefits of a quickly made navy. AND, the SDs will help to fight piracy in a more "subtle" fashion. In the sense that I should have included "pirates" in quotation marks.

It's a matter of what my personal preference would be. I would rather arm to protect my home and heart before my vehicles and refrigerator. That way, when a stronger force jumps my fence (made up of neighboring thugs who also split from the League and is building their navy too) I can face them off.

Ok, so "pirates." But where did these "pirates" get SDs in the first place? It's not like there's a proliferation of SDs out there in the Verge in the hands of rogue states. Even during the Havenite Civil war (in the original timeline), nothing bigger than a BC went missing. As we've argued in some thread, an SD is quite distinguishable and can be traced. There are maybe 50 navies in the known Galaxy that field one, so you can trace back every single attack using SD. Some close-by system coming to attack with an SD would set off all kinds of alarms.

I know, it's cold comfort for the system that did get attacked. But an attack with an SD isn't a raid, it's a conquest. And given that this hypothetical rogue system did manage to get an off-the-books SD without being caught, my guess is they don't have a lot of other ships to avoid attracting attention. Therefore, this SD-led invasion probably let at least one ship escape to hyper and cry for help. The rogue SD-fielding system won't like the repercussions.

If it's a legitimate acquisition, above board and all, then that's what I am saying sets off an arms race. So long as no one has an SD, no one needs an SD to protect against.

Even in your analogy of arming your household before investing in some necessities doesn't hold completely true. You'd buy hand guns, rifles, automatic weapons. You wouldn't splurge for a $10k sniper rifle with night vision (I have no idea how much one costs) before you had those. They're not very good for close-quarters combat and the round will probably go through the assailant and do damage to your property on the way out.

The pirates will usually pick on a less powerful foe. Besides, the money you save building your navy buys you a couple units of Manty obsolescence that CAN handle pirates.

Yeah, buy cruisers and battlecruisers!

Especially since the FF is downsizing and their designs are not as obsolete as their SDs.

Interesting, what did King Roger decide to arm against first? Pirates or invasions?

BTW, whether or not a planet thinks it rates an SD or three from the "actual" value of the taxes extorted out of it for centuries -- which was a sizable amount of it's GNP, therefore worth immeasurably more than the SL going rate at the time -- is another matter entirely.

That's sophistry. King Roger didn't arm against pirates because he didn't need to: his navy had been perfectly well armed against pirates for centuries. Before him, the RMN already fielded hundreds of destroyers, a handful of CLs and CAs and up to a hundred battlecruisers. It also already had 11 DNs and 3 SDs (more, by the time he took the throne).

King Roger decided to arm against a very aggressively expansionist neighbour that had been conquering systems for a couple of decades and did have hundreds of SDs. In fact, that was the second largest navy in the known Galaxy. That's not a situation that's going to be seen often.

I can see some neighbours of Mannerheim and Maya deciding that since those have SDs, they should too.

Anyway, I agree that the systems will think they're worth an SD, for some reason. What I am saying is that the SLN should not part with theirs in spring-cleaning sales. Flooding the known Galaxy with SDs is recipe for trouble and the SLN knows it. By not selling at cut-throat rates, that already limits the number of governments that will have one. It also bottlenecks their acquisitions to the throughput that the shipyards can produce and the SLN can pay better to have the first run (if they don't invoke national security reasons).

cthia wrote:The pirates will usually pick on a less powerful foe. Besides, the money you save building your navy buys you a couple units of Manty obsolescence that CAN handle pirates.

Interesting, what did King Roger decide to arm against first? Pirates or invasions?

Pirates will hunt in places that are safe enough for them to do so, but rich enough for sufficient ships to plunder. A system with a couple SDs sucking up their entire naval budget is actually a safer system for pirates to hit than one that bought 8 DDs instead. The DDs are actually useful at patrolling near the hyper limit where pirates lurk in wait.

And King Rodger, depends on which one you're talking about. Beth's dad, King Rodger III inherited a navy quite capable of anti-piracy work. Even before being crowed he was advocating changing focus on building a navy able to stand up against invasion; even at the expense of building as many lighter units as others would like (mostly desired for additional patrolling in Silesia). If you're talking about Rodger I, the founder of Manticore, he inherited 4 hyper frigates purchased by the Manticore Colony, Ltd. of Earth and employed to protect the system from hyper equipped claim jumpers while the sub-light colony ship was still in transit.

Even after the colony begin those frigates would have remained focused on invasion defense because it was a long time before there was any noticeable level of merchant traffic for pirates to prey on. I'm sure as commerce picked up, and the system was thought reasonably secure, that focus shifted more towards acquiring lighter units for piracy suppression.


Basically, you build a navy for the unaddressed threats you feel most pressing. If you lack invasion defense and anti-piracy defense; but find pirates far more likely that invasion then you'd probably put your initial resources into anti-piracy. But if you think pirates rare, then you'd focus on building system defense. And of course if you feel you have one or the other covered already then new ships would tend to be focused towards the one that you felt wasn't adequately covered.

cthia wrote:Why can't the systems that secede take as many of the orphaned SDs in storage as they can handle? The SL doesn't want them and they're still good for system defense. While they're building their own fleet.

They already have stock in them.

Because I doubt the SLN is built any different then most modern national militaries, so there are bound to be system with very few representatives in the SLN. There may be systems that are heavily represented in the SLN, SLN Marines and as such when they decide to form their own fleet they could offer their citizens a chance to serve in a navy to protect their home system. If a system has enough to form the core of a fleet then by all means grab whatever they can, but if they don't have many people or any people they have to start from scratch which means from the bottomed of the food chain (LAC's,DD's, CLs and then up). Example is Torch, they have an inventory of 5 CA's,6 CL's and 16 DD's but only operate a handful of FF's. It comes down to trained manpower, better to have a small professional navy that you expand consistently rather than a large, untrained navy that is more a danger to your people than an enemy.

cthia wrote:
Plus, it would ensure the League that everything seceding will be using their old garbage, as opposed to Manty hardware. The SL should be tickled pink at the prospect.

Even if they are using the SLN's old garbage it doesn't mean much, something is better than nothing and they know they will upgrade the second they get the chance. A seceding system with the proper manpower might buy 8 SD's from the League or the League reserve and operate them for 3-4 years while their new warships are under construction in the GA, or they might by FF ships to operate until their new construction becomes available.