Alexrod

munroburton wrote:Putting all those pieces together, I just don't see the ~1550pd League being able to justify to itself the outright conquest of a prosperous star system which had just proven it could defend itself, had a track record of keeping pirates out of the local region and had never committed a hostile act against the League.

Add to that being in very good terms with the Republic of Haven, the most prosperous system outside the League, and Beowulf after the wormhole was opened. Plus being in good terms with and possibly in debt of Gustav Anderman himself.

Can we take a step back and consider WHEN Axelrod was going after Manticore?

Nobody that we know of other than Axelrod (and the relevent crew of the ship that found the readings outside the Manticore System) and no one was looking for it from Manticore.

SKM was not a prosperous Star Nation, they were not dirt pour but they were importing all sorts of things- including spare parts for the warships they bought from somewhere elce- and were not what you would call a commercial hub. If memory serves, they didn't have much if any in the way of star capable merchant shipping operating out of it and there wasn't all that much traffic. Haven was the major player in the region.

If Axelrod had been successful in taking Manticore with the cover of working for the Dutchy that claimed to be hunting pirates that had raided it, it would have been a lot more than months before anybody outside of Manticore that mattered (other than Axelrod, the mercenaries and the Dutchy) even heard that Manticore had changed ownership and the new owners would have been sitting in orbit with at least a few warships and by that point nobody from the aristrocracy who objected would probably have been alive unless they were being held up as puppets or had gone over to the new regime.

Was Haven then later supposed to mount a rescue mission to free Manticore? Not likely. The Andermani are even further away and would be more likely to -after they heard- study what they could of what happend to avoid it from comming to bite them.

The League is nowhere in the picture. Oh, there are companies in the League with Manticroan business as customers or possibly supplies of things but no diplomatic relationships. It's essentialy another Verge type system with a monarchy that got tangled up in some inter-system squabble and lost.
There is NO relationship with Beowulf that we know of other than perhaps some commercial contacts fulfilled through 3rd parties and indepent shipping companies managing the routing of any goods through various locations.

How many years, decades, would go by before Axelrod is able to do more than study the anomaly (and dam few of the former citizens of the SKM would be knowing about that let alone be involved in it) and they would send a ship through the wormhole---and pop out near Beowulf, which would probably be interested in making some treaty with whatever the then governent of the Manticore Binary System is called.

Now, if the Axelrod attack and conquest of Manticore came AFTER Manticore had opened the wormhole to Beowulf and had asked for help, it is quite possible that Beowulf would have requested League assistant if it responded to that request for aid. But if Axelrod had possession of the system under the the then current rules of engagement there might not have been much the League would have been able to do....unless it cut a deal with Beowulf and set up an OFS operation to "help"Manticore which might have already lost most of it's governmenet and other difficulties.

Ah well....history

Brigade XO wrote:SKM was not a prosperous Star Nation, they were not dirt pour but they were importing all sorts of things- including spare parts for the warships they bought from somewhere elce- and were not what you would call a commercial hub. If memory serves, they didn't have much if any in the way of star capable merchant shipping operating out of it and there wasn't all that much traffic. Haven was the major player in the region.

The SKM at the time was probably much more prosperous as you could expect from a Verge nation (I don't think the term even existed then). They'd suffered from the Plague within living memory, but at this time they were still paying for immigrants to come. The Manticoran Trust Ltd. still existed and had a lot of money in the bank, which set Manticore apart from 99% of all colonies founded. The only other, notable exception seems to be Haven itself. I'm really looking forward to House of Lies or whatever the name is going to be to explain how Péricard managed to found a colony way past Manticore and keep it prosperous.

But you're right that it was nowhere as prosperous as it was going to be. It was, indeed, a backwater system. There wasn't a home-born merchant shipping force, since Manticore couldn't yet produce all the components for a hypercapable ship -- or even interplanetary. IIRC, from the Manticore Ascendant books, they didn't have the industry to produce impellers. Those were imported from Haven.

It's also confusing whether they built the other parts of the ships. In one part of the books, they make it seem like they have no local industry. Elsewhere, HMS Casey CL-01 seems to be a complete local build. It's possible that Casey was the first ship they ever built or rebuilt, between 1535 and 1545. But either way, they wouldn't have built many merchant ships yet.

Was Haven then later supposed to mount a rescue mission to free Manticore? Not likely. The Andermani are even further away and would be more likely to -after they heard- study what they could of what happend to avoid it from comming to bite them.

Not at the time of the Volsung Invasion, no. The relations between Manticore and both Haven and the Andermani were only beginning to improve at this time -- they're chronicled in MA2 and MA3 books, actually. We'll see if it sufficiently progresses in the next couple of decades to warrant a rescue. It's possible, but not a given.

But my point was that Haven and the AE would complain if they saw the SLN invading. If the Duke of Barca had become King of Manticore, it might be difficult to prove it was a front. SLN battleships are much harder to hide. No rescue by force would be forthcoming, but the Solarian public opinion might have a say.

There is NO relationship with Beowulf that we know of other than perhaps some commercial contacts fulfilled through 3rd parties and indepent shipping companies managing the routing of any goods through various locations.

Not yet. I was talking about after the wormhole is opened, answering cthia's question of why the SLN didn't grab it after it became known. Beowulf was given very generous terms, which placed it squarely on Manticore's side. In fact, it might have been part of the Manticoran strategy to win over a founding Core World to their side, thus preventing the SLN from taking military action.

cthia wrote:Now that we have come full circle, why didn't the SL follow up on taking the MWJ? Surely the young Star Kingdom couldn't have stood up to them at the time.

Only luck prevented it the first time. Murphy ain't ALWAYS around.

Probably the good luck that the League terminus was at Beowulf - who were friendly to the idea of having Manticore next door.

Also even after the initial discovery it wasn't clear that it would become the economic powerhouse that it became. Remember that the initial discoveries were only the Beowulf terminus. Discovery and transit of the legs to Hennessy, and Trevor's Star were a few years later. Without the other termini and without the interlocking wormhole network the Junction, as it was known in 1585 PD, was of little benefit as a shortcut for League shipping. So the only traffic would be trade from the League to the relatively poor systems out in the Haven Section, or settlers headed that way.

The transit fees for that traffic would be a very nice income to Manticore, and would have been nice modest bump to the bottom line of a transtellar (more-so if spun up a colonization division to leverage their access the traffic). But that revenue would be nearly unnoticeable to the bottom line of the League bureaucracy (much less the League GDP).

It was over 50 years until the next terminus was discovers, the Gregor terminus, and that was just a short hop further into the Verge. Yes it brought the Andermandi a several dozen LY closer to the Core. But back then they weren't a massive market either. House of Steel isn't specific about when Matapan terminus was discovered by it seems to be roughly a century after Gregor (and of course Basilisk and Lynx to round out the known termini were quite recent, at least another century past Matapan). Sadly HoS is silent on when the critical interlocking junctions and bridges (like the Erewhon junction that interlocked so neatly with Henessy and providing a major shortcut from Beowulf to Joshua) ThinksMarkedly covered this, but I'd go farther as say that it wasn't just the League overlooking the value. I'd say everyone, including Manticore, was unaware of its true value for probably 150 years after its discovery; until enough additional wormholes had been found for it to start providing a shortcut to some League to League shipping.

So initially the Junction wasn't anywhere near as tempting a target as it later became. And Manticore was way the hell beyond anything the League was paying attention to back then. If Beowulf had wanted to annex the Junction I doubt the League would have cared; but since they didn't the League didn't seem to care to to through or around them to try to grab it themselves. (That's also far enough back to be before the majority of the rot had gotten into the League and before OFS really got into the game of taking over Shell systems to feed to Mandarin's coffers - so the League bureaucracy wasn't looking so hard for quasi-legal additional funding)

ThinksMarkedly wrote:Beowulf had been settled since 100 PD, though no one would have noticed the RZ until some time between 753 and 800 PD, which is when Beowulf would have performed the first hyper translation. Still, that's 800 T-years to note that the RZ was there, so like Manticore, I'd say they certainly knew it was there.

Though you're normally only interested in interference near hyper limits, since that's where most ships want to enter or leave hyperspace. (Though there may be some hyper travel associated with outer asteroid belts which would be pretty far from a hyper limit of any size. (Technically the larger asteroids probably have a detectable hyper limit - but it's probably barely beyond their surface (if that).

So they might not have plotted the dangerous zones far eough from the hyper limit it narrows into a squashed cone pointing towards something potentially interesting.

Also individual termini have fairly weak RZa, and smaller junctions have RZs significantly less powerful that Manticore's. So the "rough area" caused by the RZ of Beowulf's termini might have been mapped along with everything else but it might not be rough enough to have much impact near the system's hyper limit; and therefor not draw much attention. (If it's not a ship eater then it can be fairly easy to simply file it away a a known, but ultimately trivial, issue)

Jonathan_S wrote:Also individual termini have fairly weak RZa, and smaller junctions have RZs significantly less powerful that Manticore's. So the "rough area" caused by the RZ of Beowulf's termini might have been mapped along with everything else but it might not be rough enough to have much impact near the system's hyper limit; and therefor not draw much attention. (If it's not a ship eater then it can be fairly easy to simply file it away a a known, but ultimately trivial, issue)

This all depends on what RFC meant by "complicated way to commit suicide" in AAC Ch. 62 when he introduced the concept of RZs. Did he mean that translating from hyper into normal space in the RZ volume always failed, for any terminus? Or that it was only true for specially strong RZs, like Manticore's? If it isn't, what actually happens to ships performing this translation?

Either way, on the Manticoran side of the wormhole, the statement from AAC applies: translating from hyper to normal space was almost always fatal. This effect would have been noticed within a decade or two of Jason's arrival in the MBS.