Building the BSDF into the Beowulf Space Navy

kzt wrote:The SL doesn't seem to do commerce protection. They don't need to. There are basically no threats to commerce in SL space. When was the last time a ship was pirated in US/EU waters?

In the form of OFS, the SL were the pirates in SL space. There was no need to worry about anyone else because they were forced out by the bigger business.

kzt wrote:The SL doesn't seem to do commerce protection. They don't need to. There are basically no threats to commerce in SL space. When was the last time a ship was pirated in US/EU waters?

cthia wrote:In the form of OFS, the SL were the pirates in SL space. There was no need to worry about anyone else because they were forced out by the bigger business.

The Verge was where OFS and the transtellar corporations ran wild. Although it was treated as the private backyard of the Solarian League, it was not officially part of the League. Note that Honor's terms allow the SLN to operate in Solarian territory, but not the Verge.

tlb wrote:

kzt wrote:The SL doesn't seem to do commerce protection. They don't need to. There are basically no threats to commerce in SL space. When was the last time a ship was pirated in US/EU waters?

cthia wrote:In the form of OFS, the SL were the pirates in SL space. There was no need to worry about anyone else because they were forced out by the bigger business.

The Verge was where OFS and the transtellar corporations ran wild. Although it was treated as the private backyard of the Solarian League, it was not officially part of the League. Note that Honor's terms allow the SLN to operate in Solarian territory, but not the Verge.

Not exclusively. TEiF testified to the fact that most of the Leagues' own acquisitions were made unwittingly. And the unions rarely resulted in any economic benefit to anyone else but the SL. They were RobbingHoods, robbing from the hoods and giving to the greedy. That is how the League was built, under the guise of protection, from the SL.

Manticore evolved it's navy from local defense and protection to a combination of Home Fleet for defense of the Binary System and the Junction plus the several termini plus the Commerce Protection (and not segregated the way SLN had Battle Fleet and Frontier Fleet).

As the merchant marine grew, the need to provide protection in places where the locals would nor or could not do anything to keep shipping safe. Inside the League it probably wasn't too much more than doing Show the Flag missions to keep various government officials honest but Shell & Verge plus Silesia it was very different

FF has clearly been depicted as being used as an enforcer for OFS and it's clients in systems it doesn't (yet) control. I have said before that it would seem that OFS/FF sort of treated pirates as illegal competitors and the local system governments or business that dealt with pirates of shook-down merchants (without giving OFS a cut) were treated just as harshly. But actually patrolling for commerce protection ,.......not so much

So Manticore was sending mostly DDs through HCs out doing commerce protection (and anti-slavery enforcement) to almost any place MMM went on a regular basis. This is also how RMN trained up it's offices and crews. Real world experience. There could be combat, there was boarding and inspections in potentially dangerous situations, diplomacy to be done, knowlege to be gained in ship operations/handing, explorations, etc.
Silesia was a very seperate case. A failed multi-system Confederation with lots of infighting, active piracy almost openly supported by both local (and SC) governments plus businesses and lots of unrest on various planets. It has been suggested that the problems in Silesia were manufactured and encouraged by the Alignment. That would be one way of keep another entity such as the original Republic of Haven from forming and growing. We know that the Andermani did do commerce protection- at least for their own merchant marine- but they don't seem to have been extending that very far outside the boarders of the Empire on a regular basis unless there were perhaps larger problems in one area or another.

Remember that we have been treated to more than two battle descriptions between RMN forces and squadron sized pirate fleets. That's why you need BCs in commerce protection or at least the ability to put together escorts or patrols that can deal with that level of coordination of threat. For the most part, normal pirates are- in the Honorverse- clandestinely armed merchant ships. The kind that is the former naval warship, a marauding Silesian Confed Navy ship, some system government / strongman with a couple of warships,an enforcer ship for a Trasnstellar or an actual pirate (or mercenary) fleet, needs more power to destroy or at least beat off.
And DDs, particularly, up through HCs are a much less expensive and so you can get more ships for the Credit that some Dreadnought or SD. So if you need to be in a lot of places and cover a lot of ships at one time and scattered across perhaps 1/4 to 1/4 of known space.....DD through Cruisers are the way to go.

The US has a laws and regulations that hurt competition for US flagged vessels vs those of other countries. Part of that goes back to various tariff and protections schemes. The net effect is that it's more beneficial to register your ships with other places even if your are a US company. It depends....big smile.

cthia wrote:Not exclusively. TEiF testified to the fact that most of the Leagues' own acquisitions were made unwittingly. And the unions rarely resulted in any economic benefit to anyone else but the SL. They were RobbingHoods, robbing from the hoods and giving to the greedy. That is how the League was built, under the guise of protection, from the SL.

Please point out the text, because that certainly was not true for the core worlds. If it was where the Navy was looking for a mission for which it could be proud, I took it to mean compared to the activities in the Verge and Protectorates. Frontier Fleet operations were almost exclusively on the fringes of Solarian space. This is from Pearls of Weber in "How is the Solarian League organized?":

The League can actually be thought of as a sort of vast association of smaller political units. Many of those smaller units are multi-system in nature: three or four or a dozen systems united by common astrography, political concerns, economic ties, etc. Others--like Old Earth herself, Beowulf, and many of the other oldest "core worlds" lying within a couple of hundred light-years of Sol--are single-system political entities whose individual power make them forces to be reckoned with. The frontiers of the League tend to be somewhat amorphous, and the planets/systems in those regions are much more in the nature of dependencies/protectorates than actual "members" of the League. As a general rule, the League is not truly expansionist, but there are always forces and individuals within the League (and especially within its huge bureaucracy) with views of their own. For the UK citizens in our audience, think in terms of Mr. Rhodes and Africa. Thus many of the smaller/weaker/poorer systems on the borders of League space tend to find themselves being "assisted" into "accepting" League protection whether they want it or not, and very few people on the core worlds even realize it's happening.

But protection is not automatically membership.