How was Haven supposed to fight the SL (Detweiler Plan)?

ThinksMarkedly wrote:
He opens communication to Manticore, that is over 12 light-minutes away. He gets a reply within 30 seconds relayed via a Hermes buoy. He's speaking to D'Orville, but Honor is listening in. He swears up and down that Haven was not responsible for that and as a show of good faith he sent most of his forces out of the hyperlimit. He wants to parley. Honor breaks through to D'Orville and gets the parley accepted. So Tourville advances with a single SD(P) to pinnace range of Home Fleet and then meets in person.

If 2nd Fleet showed up that close to OB, don't you think the SKM leadership wont believe them? If they come to the Manticore HS within a week of OB there is only 1 person in the system who will believe them and several billion who wont believe them including the queen.

tlb wrote:We agree on all of this, so why are you repeating it? What point are you trying to make? Are you arguing that the forward deployment meant the conditions for Camille were less likely to occur?

No, I am arguing that the following statement is false:

kzt wrote:Haven was GOING TO LOSE if they failed to defeat Manticore in the next few months.

When they made plans and started deploying their forces for Beatrice, they did not know they were losing the war, hell the MA didn't know they were winning the war, Apollo could have been a big'ol flop for all they knew.

My argument is that BEFORE Lovat the operation was too dangerous if the RHN had only 620 SD(P)'s.

Jonathan_S wrote:

Relax wrote:Why they are called TurboSUPERchargers. The Turbo charger is in addition to the supercharger.

Can you point to a source confirming that "TurboSUPERchargers" was used specifically to means a turbo charger in addition to asupercharger?

As pointed out GE called their turbocharger a turbo-supercharger; and appear to have done so as far back as their 1918 tests with a Liberty engine

But if you can point to documentation to the contrary I'd be glad to learn from it.

Took a while to find said GE document in online form. I had always previously read in books the term used when talking B17/B24/B29/P47/P38.
http://rwebs.net/avhistory/opsman/geturbo/geturbo.htm
"A supercharger located ahead of the carburetor in the induction system is called an external supercharger. An external supercharger is used primarily to obtain full-power engine performance at high altitudes, and is generally driven by an exhaust-gas turbine. A supercharger so driven is called a turbosupercharger. " They also call it a turbocharger in same document so... ???

Of course maybe my memory is just going off base documents such as: http://www.wwiiaircraftperformance.org/p-47/p-47.html Where they always refer to it as Turbo even though there is a mechanical supercharger attached to every engine with 2 speeds as well...

Appears all the books I had read all these decades were wrong... They took GE's pamphlet and simplified it. No surprise, why never trust something just because it is in a book instead of basic documents. Likewise never trust wikipedia as according to them, those airplanes only have a turbocharger...

Anyways, sorry, back to original subject, and how piss poor leadership with gigantic ego's really screw things up.

tlb wrote:We agree on all of this, so why are you repeating it? What point are you trying to make? Are you arguing that the forward deployment meant the conditions for Camille were less likely to occur?

Sigs wrote:No, I am arguing that the following statement is false:

kzt wrote:Haven was GOING TO LOSE if they failed to defeat Manticore in the next few months.

Sigs wrote:When they made plans and started deploying their forces for Beatrice, they did not know they were losing the war, hell the MA didn't know they were winning the war, Apollo could have been a big'ol flop for all they knew.

My argument is that BEFORE Lovat the operation was too dangerous if the RHN had only 620 SD(P)'s.

Most people would agree that Beatrice was too dangerous to execute before Lovat, because Haven still had the chance to win by attrition. I believe I can exclude KZT from this, because his argument has been that Haven's best chance to win would have been to execute something like Beatrice as the opening stroke of the war.

However we get there, everyone probably agrees that after Lovat, Haven's only chance to win was something like Beatrice; because the change in technology meant that attrition was no longer on Haven's side. That is the time frame of KZT's statement and at that point you agree with it.

So what is your real disagreement with most people on the forum? It appears that you object to Haven making a contingency plan (and RFC has made it clear that Haven would not have executed it unless/until forced by the results of Apollo at Lovat). I contend that any military leader should have contingent emergency plans, because if disaster strikes there is seldom time to do the planning necessary. So planning Beatrice, while the war seems to favoring your side, is not an act of madness; but an act of caution, not because they knew specifically about Apollo, but because they knew that Manticore had made advances before.

The peeps had no end-game. It was "We'll start a war and instead of executing the kind of sharp, overwhelming strike that our military is designed for, we are going to engage in a long-drawn out attritional campaign of a type we have never fought. And then, as we grind them down, Manticore will just accept their fate to ultimately lose."

Can you see some weaknesses in this plan? So either you need to win quickly or not go to war. And to win quickly against the MA you need to remove Manticore from the field.


The RH had much more limited aims, and a better starting place, so opening with a massive roll of the dice didn't make sense.

Sigs wrote:That's assuming the RHN is planning on 1)hiding, 2)trying to trick the RD's they don't know for sure are there and 3)take notice of the RD's. In Lovat it was mentioned that the RHN paid little attention to the RD's because they knew they couldn't catch them so they wasted very little effort trying. I don't see that changing this late in the game, at that point it becomes habit to ignore the frustrating drones. Plus sending ships in and out of the system means you run the risk of getting caught out of position in case of attack.

Yes, assuming that, because the #1 Rule of Space Warfare: don't make it easy for the enemy to kill you. What you said means they stopped trying to catch the drones. That doesn't mean they made it easy for those drones to collate accurate information. Keep translating in an out of the system, never show your entire force, and the drone has a less-than-accurate picture of which ambush fleet is present, if any.

The advantage of outnumbering the enemy is that you can defend your vital systems, front line, have some ambush fleets and still have ships for offensive operations.

Indeed. It didn't seem to occur to anyone at ONI that the RHN had that many ships and yet wasn't attacking as strongly as they could have. We discussed this in the "What's wrong with AAC" thread.

Sigs wrote:If 2nd Fleet showed up that close to OB, don't you think the SKM leadership wont believe them? If they come to the Manticore HS within a week of OB there is only 1 person in the system who will believe them and several billion who wont believe them including the queen.

I'm sure lots of people will doubt. That's why he sends most of his forces away from the hyperlimit, thereby screwing up his chances of catching the Alliance forces by surprise. He then proceeds with a single SD(P) and make himself vulnerable.

He only has to convince them to hold off for another 2 or 3 weeks, until a courier comes from Haven with diplomats. Meanwhile, he's negotiating.

Relax wrote:Appears all the books I had read all these decades were wrong... They took GE's pamphlet and simplified it. No surprise, why never trust something just because it is in a book instead of basic documents. Likewise never trust wikipedia as according to them, those airplanes only have a turbocharger...

Anyways, sorry, back to original subject, and how piss poor leadership with gigantic ego's really screw things up.

I am also sorry about my part in this disagreement and in being slow to respond to you. I mistakenly believed that you were denying that there was a turbocharger, not that you were taking issue with what I incorrectly said about the supercharger. My focus was that I was concentrating on the high altitude performance of the P-38 in winter over Germany and its problems due to the interface with that turbocharger; because the Allison V-12 lacked the sort of supercharger possessed by the Merlin that could support high altitudes without any additional equipment. This is what Wikipedia actually says:

The V-1710 has often been criticized for not having a "high-altitude" supercharger. The comparison is usually to the later, two-stage, versions of the Rolls-Royce Merlin 60-series engines also built by Packard as the V-1650 and used in the P-51B Mustang and subsequent variants. The USAAC had specified that the V-1710 was to be a single-stage supercharged engine and, if a higher altitude capability was desired, the aircraft could use their newly developed turbo-supercharger as was featured in the XP-37(YP-37), P-38, and XP-39.

As a result of this misunderstanding, I had no interest in your evidence for a supercharger stage, because it had no bearing on what I saw as the problem under discussion.

kzt wrote:The peeps had no end-game. It was "We'll start a war and instead of executing the kind of sharp, overwhelming strike that our military is designed for, we are going to engage in a long-drawn out attritional campaign of a type we have never fought. And then, as we grind them down, Manticore will just accept their fate to ultimately lose."

Can you see some weaknesses in this plan? So either you need to win quickly or not go to war. And to win quickly against the MA you need to remove Manticore from the field.


The RH had much more limited aims, and a better starting place, so opening with a massive roll of the dice didn't make sense.

The PRH had never fought a war with a multiple system star nation prior to the opening war with Manticore. All of their conquests had been single system polities with no colonies or allied systems where they might​ have additional forces stationed. The PRH had also had vast numerical superiority over it's victims. The PRH had not spent centuries fighting pirates in Silesia where their captains could be refined by combat. The singular thrust to the system had been a perfect strategy.

Fighting the SKM and its allies presented them with the PRH with strategic and tactical complexities that were far beyond their experiences. The RMN was almost as inexperienced at fighting a multiple system, interstellar war. It wasn't until At All Cost that the RMN finally realized that most of its allies were actually liabilities that contributed nothing but "strategic depth" but had to be defended.

The liberation of Trevers Star dramatically altered the strategic balance in the RMN's favor. The Cutworm raids demonstrated that the RMN had superior strategic reach which multiplied the combat power of the fleet. Since the goal of the renewed RH was a negotiated peace rather than conquest, attritional warfare was a safer strategy that should have been successful. They didn't realize that they would just piss off Queen Elizabeth even more.

TFLYTSNBN wrote:The PRH had never fought a war with a multiple system star nation prior to the opening war with Manticore. All of their conquests had been single system polities with no colonies or allied systems where they might​ have additional forces stationed. The PRH had also had vast numerical superiority over it's victims. The PRH had not spent centuries fighting pirates in Silesia where their captains could be refined by combat. The singular thrust to the system had been a perfect strategy.

Fighting the SKM and its allies presented them with the PRH with strategic and tactical complexities that were far beyond their experiences.

Agreed completely. And given the lack of experience, they turned to the current BKM (Best Known Method) and that was the SLN's experience. Unfortunately, the SLN hadn't fought a multi-system war in centuries either so all of that information was stale. In fact, I doubt there had ever been a war where both sides fielded hundreds of capital ships (only RFC will know).

Plus their fondness for OFS-style tactics that would allow them plausible deniability in the Solarian press.

Since the goal of the renewed RH was a negotiated peace rather than conquest, attritional warfare was a safer strategy that should have been successful. They didn't realize that they would just piss off Queen Elizabeth even more.

Holy miscalculation, Batman!

IIRC, Eloise Pritchart's Administration didn't find out about the assassination of King Roger III until after the war had started, either.