SLN Future

cthia wrote:I agree.

Here's what drives my thinking. You have to give the League the benefit of the doubt that they can change, like I need to get over my qualms with Haven's old stripes. The gorilla was a product of it's corrupted masters. I am certain many of the officers saw the writing on the wall, but what could be done other than to get with the program.

Actually, as I think someone already opined, the officers showed amazing loyalty; it reminds me of the officers who followed Elvis Santino into the afterlife.

I also don't think we should get ahead of ourselves. The RF may run amok in League space if there is no SLN to oppose it. And without a presence, piracy and disagreements will revert back to what it once was which produced the need for the OFS anyway. The SLN can't stand up to the GA, but it can certainly stand up to uppity factions cropping up in League space.

The bigger the entity, the more difficult it is to control. Haven fell to that fact as well. In her trimmed down fashion operating under a new Constitution, I think the SL can get it's act together. Especially since its citizens are no longer sleeping idiots, and the Galaxy's big brother is watching.

OFS can't do its job without the promise of its big brother at home.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

tlb wrote:That is an interesting point, but is it correct in Haven's case? Haven's fall was sealed when the Legislaturalists bribed common citizens with the Dole to produce a hereditary system of government. It was the increasing demands of the Dole, complicated by the reduced productivity of the workforce, that forced the government and the Navy to become conquistadors. So it seems that Haven had been significantly smaller at the time it took the wrong term than it was by the time of The Short Victorious War.

The size of the republic was never well established in any of the books. Maybe House of Lies will give us better information in the appendices.

House of Steel said that when it began annexing willing neighbours, it was composed of Haven itself and some daughter colonies. It doesn't say how many, though. My reading was that it was no more than 20 settled planets. At its largest expansion, by SVW, it seems to have got to 300, but that includes uninhabited systems like Seaford Nine where it had significant bases. And looking at how many different nationalities Honor met in Hades, there had to be a considerable number.

So let's say 120-150 member systems with civilian population. That means that from 1844 to 1905, it must have annexed more than one system per year on average.

The main question (for which I do not have an answer) is how does the size of the restored republic compare to the Peoples' Republic of Haven at the point when it was decided to begin conquering neighbors?

I think we can safely say it's a lot larger. Prichart managed to hold a lot of the members that had been conquered for more than a decade in the restored Republic. She only concedes that some of the most recent annexations were going to vote for independence. Pierre's economic reforms, which she continued, provided a real improvement to the population of those systems. Those that didn't have living memory of the time before annexation are likely to have stayed.

Remember that prolong wasn't as readily available in the PRH as it was in Manticore. Pritchart herself is only second-gen, if I'm not mistaken -- though she's about the same age as Hamish Alexander, as she was around 50 when she joined the Aprilists (need to re-read "Our Sacred Honor" for those details) -- and she did live in Nouveau Paris. The other systems of the PRH would have received later, probably no earlier than the 1860s. With poor medical help, with the Mental Hygiene propaganda, and with InSec and later StateSec pruning the troublemakers, the vast majority of the population of systems annexed before 1886 would only remember life under the PRH by the time of the vote in 1916-1917.

cthia wrote:What was frightening in UH is the speed in which the SLN implemented new systems. Now that their eyes are open to the new threat environment, we should be able to expect a leaner, meaner gorilla.

The Peeps stockpiled an abundance of BBs at Bolthole. If the SL can cut into the GAs range advantage and mostly concentrate on building one ship type, like the Peeps, thousands of them, can't they quickly get back on balance?

The SL can't have BBs coming out of Bolthole, but with their size, they can surely have BBs coming out of their butthole.

Quantity has a quality of its own.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:
They had centuries to infiltrate the SLN, but they didn't infiltrate the RMN or the other GA navies for centuries. That means they have little ability to get someone in command position now, especially with treecat-assisted vetting. Note I'm not saying any infiltration is impossible: I'm saying getting direct agents in command positions. And having just come out of three wars, the RMN roster doesn't have many corruptible people in the first place, at least not to the level the MAlign needs.

So I'm not worried about an agent making the GA do something to damage its reputation. Something like Operation Janus is far more likely (false flag operations).

Who's "they" here? The entirety of the SLN? Let's take Hypatia: do you mean all spacers, crewman and officers in 88 battlecruisers were in on it? That they all knew what their orders were and understood the context they were in? Not just a couple of admirals, their staffs and their flag captains?

What would you have a team of Lt (j.g.) and petty officers aboard Adm. Hajdu's flagship do? Mutiny to remove him from command? Adm. Gogunov would have assumed command, dispatched marines and put the mutiny down. That's assuming the marines aboard SLNS Camperdown didn't do it themselves.

Take Adm. Capriotti, who executed Buccaneer at Cachalot: he was worried about his own staff turning against him if he didn't follow his orders. So even though he had qualms, he had little freedom in his orders (though he managed to find some wiggle room). And he knew that if he didn't do it, the SLN would send a worse hardliner who could make things worse.

I agree with your characterisation, but Adm. Tsang didn't see it that way. She saw traitors to the League. As such, they were enemies and she was in her legal rights to blow them out of space. She was wrong, but it doesn't change how she, her staff and her deputies saw things.

In both cases, these admirals and their staffs were a product of their arrogance and operating under very strict, well-crafted orders designed to provoke mayhem.

Another point is that we've been told about Frontier Fleet and Battle Fleet. So what patrolled inside SL space? The FF might have been on the fringes of the Shell (frontier), but not in the inner side and the Core. Battle Fleet was designed for battle, not patrol. Who who patrolled? My guess is that this is where SDFs came in, with ships all the way to BCs but few with larger. Navies like the Mesan Space Navy and the Silesian Confederacy's.

I'm going to take a wild guess here and say that there were something around 1000 SDFs out of 1700 member systems. The BSDF was the largest, at three dozen SDs.

Not all of those 50 first-rate navies are in the League. Just that we know of, we have to remove Haven's, Manticore's, Andermani, Grayson's, Erewhon's and Mannerheim's (and the Maya Sector's, though their SDs hadn't commissioned yet by the end of UH). There are probably a handful of others elsewhere around the League. So maybe 30 "first rate navies" are SDFs in the League.

I came to a few more than "a handful". If there are 30 members that have first-rate navies, it's likely 35 of those are Core systems.

kzt wrote:I'm pretty sure that after the verge turns into pirate conquest city that the occupants will be very thankful to the GA for evicting those 10,000 SLN vessels.

Very thankful indeed. Like that planet where someone dropped by and stole their orbital infrastructure, prior to their requesting the SL to help them out.

I'm sure that quadrupling the RMN budget and recruiting another 20 million spacerswill easily pass, because everyone in Manticore just loves their fellow man that much that they will agree to police the galaxy for free.

kzt wrote:Very thankful indeed. Like that planet where someone dropped by and stole their orbital infrastructure, prior to their requesting the SL to help them out.

Sigs wrote: Sorry you lost me here.

Sigs wrote:I am not saying that they will make the GA do something, I am saying that they will make an SLN ship do something which will quickly appear as the GA is nothing different than the SL. If the SLN is operating somewhere under the authority of the GA the GA is ultimately responsible and to blame because they placed them there.

Guilt by association, every time someone in the core thinks of the Navy, they will link them to Hypatia, Beowulf, half a dozen different operations, willingness to commit warcrimes of the highest order complete disregard for SL citizens, their lives and the lives and property of neutrals.
Nobody is going to sit and ask you if you were in Hypatia or not, and if you had a choice or not. Hell the guy could have been a pay clerk in the capital and it still wouldn't absolve him in the eyes of the public because they judge the navy...the uniform.

I agree with your characterisation, but Adm. Tsang didn't see it that way. She saw traitors to the League. As such, they were enemies and she was in her legal rights to blow them out of space. She was wrong, but it doesn't change how she, her staff and her deputies saw things.

But that is the problem, she KNEW she was in the wrong, they were just enforcing their constitutional right and she was willing to ignore right and wrong just to accomplish her mission, she had orders, she followed those orders knowing they were going against the laws of the nation she had sworn an oath to protect...she had a choice and she chose wrong.

This is why the SLN would have to be disbanded once a new navy comes into existence, their entire culture is just built on ignorance, nepotism, arrogance, culture of corruption, culture of xenophobia, incompetence, a massive superiority complex and an impressive ability to make the wrong choice and ignore their own governments written law.

You might have a point on this one, this could explain where the light units would come from for anti-piracy. But for that purpose they don't need SD's.
Again, you might have a point but they would still be lacking SD's and a lot of those SDF's might be nothing more then some LAC's for system control especially in the core where the majority of the SLN is based, the SLN would have to have a lot of their own light combatants as well and they would have to do something other than sitting around the base.

My point was that those were systems that wanted an SDF with wallers but likely didn't need wallers, whereas now they might need wallers as opposed to just wanting them.

Depends how many neutrals there are that have wallers. In the books on numerous points the characters rank Grayson as third in size in the Haven Quadrant, so either there are other areas with regional powers maybe not to the same level but could be, otherwise there are some might powerful SDF's in the League if the GSN in 1911 is only the 3rd largest in the Quadrant because if we have seen all the major players then the GSN in 1911 would be the 5th strongest in the Galaxy which is much more impressive.

1. SLN
2. PRN/RHN
3. RMN
4. GSN
5. IAN

tlb wrote:KZT is referencing one of the stories of the planets that were struggling under corporate control in a recent book. Pirates actually came in and stole all of the orbital industry, as a result they had to request assistance from OFS. The pirates were named, so it was not a covert operation by FF.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:
Why would the SLN be operating under the authority of the GA in the first place?

Ah, you're talking about public opinion. I was talking about the law. Just like the Nuremberg trials after WW2, like what Honor did in Hades and what Theisman and Pritchart did after they restored the Constitution, the officers in charge need to be tried and judged. Those who are found guilty under the eyes of the law shall suffer the appropriate punishment. There's no way they're going to try 150 million people, not least because 149.5 million of those would not be found guilty anyway.

But if you're talking about the image of the Navy, I have to partially agree. I still think there's a way to restore it, but you could be right too. The idea you posted above of starting the SLN 2.0 with a different culture, formed from a core of decent officers and a powerful set of standards and an NCIS that actually works is a good one.

But is this not redeeming the SLN image?

I've just said she didn't think she was wrong. We can disagree on our interpretation, but if we do the argument goes nowhere.

Agreed, only 35 member systems would have an waller squadron (that's SD and DN), 30 of which are Core systems. Maybe another 20 to 50 had SDs or DNs but not sufficiently many to form a squadron. As discussed in the other thread, I can't speculate why they'd have SDs if they can't form a wall.

All of the systems that do leave the League will need navies of their own too. But those are far more likely to adopt a model like all the navies seen so far, since their new navy won't be the SLN.