Honor awakened a sleeping GIANT

SLEEPING GIANT AWAKENED

IINM, Honor's decree demanded that the SLN not be found outside of its jurisdiction? How will that deter them from a ravenous build rate? Essentially, Honor's demands will simply enable/force/motivate/inspire [...] the Solarian League to be all it can be.

The SL does not need to exceed its boundaries to rebuild, as fast as ever, unencumbered, and unhindered. And I argue that their budget will be the same as it once was, in absence of bad management which equaled graft, greed and stupidity.

But, my point, if Grayson could surprise Haven and Manticore with its build rate, then what can an awakened giant do? Their build rate should be absolutely shocking. The pain of intellectually knowing how large an entity is is not the same experience as seeing it, and feeling it.

I can't see an entity as large as the League requiring more than 3-5 years to rise from the ashes.

I know. I know. Designs. Still.

—cthia



PS honor did too.


.

ATTACHMENT:

IF YOU DON'T THINK YOU CAN GET IT DONE IN THREE TO FIVE YEARS THEN FIND HALSEY AND SEND HIM BACK TO PEARL!!!

Yes. The SLN can outbuild everyone if they decide to. It will take about as long to construct 50 SLN shipyards as it does for the RMN to build their new shipyard. Ship design is more complex, but they can build dozens of new designs and see what works.

cthia wrote:IINM, Honor's decree demanded that the SLN not be found outside of its jurisdiction? How will that deter them from a ravenous build rate?

It won't -- and wasn't intended to.
Telling the SLN to stay within the League's boarders wasn't an attempt to limit its size.

It was to keep it from continuing to occasionally play pirate or otherwise be the OFS's bully in the verge. Or rather it was a statement than the GA would view an SLN warship being outside the League's boarder as prima facie evidence that it was engaged in such illegal piratical activates.

The whole point of the Harrington Plan was that if the SL or whatever tatters and successor states arose from its ashes could each outbuild the GA if they had revanchism on their minds. That's why the Plan called for not creating that mindset in the population, but instead blame only the Mandarins and the corrupt OFS, in addition to being the best friends forever of any systems that peeled off the League, by investing in them and protecting them until they could do so themselves.

Given TEiF and what we've seen of Kingsford's actions, I think the Plan is succeeding. Kingsford and Chuck Gannon were talking about how they'd lost a third of their active force and there wasn't a single member of the SLN who didn't know someone who'd been lost. He showed he understands the issue and he did exactly what I thought the SLN ought to do -- find an action honourable enough to engage in, still within its borders, to focus everyone's minds. I just guessed wrong which action that would be: I guessed piracy and warlordism; it turned out to be anti-slavery.

So Honor may have awakened a sleeping giant. The whole plan was to ensure the giant would be friendly.

kzt wrote:Yes. The SLN can outbuild everyone if they decide to. It will take about as long to construct 50 SLN shipyards as it does for the RMN to build their new shipyard. Ship design is more complex, but they can build dozens of new designs and see what works.

They are the largest system in the Galaxy with the largest Navy. I don't think the largest collection of planets having the largest Navy but yet the weakest Navy is natural. Especially in light of the SL's lone history of dominance. Mother nature will take its course.

The fact that these spin off polities can each outbuild the GA also gives their previous master pause. If each spinoff polity join together to form their own Block of Successor States (BOSS) then they could challenge the League. This is essentially what the MA had in mind with the RF. There is no reason something like that can not form on its own naturally. And if they do form a BOSS, their revanchism could be directed towards their former League of oppressors.

If that happens, then a space race will have been fueled in the Sol Sector and the Salamander's efforts will have been the catalyst.

I would sure like to see how these new variables change the MAlign's master spreadsheet analysis of long-term strategy.

cthia wrote:They are the largest system in the Galaxy with the largest Navy. I don't think the largest collection of planets having the largest Navy but yet the weakest Navy is natural. Especially in light of the SL's lone history of dominance. Mother nature will take its course.

It wasn't the weakest. It was the strongest for all of its history, except the last quarter century (and didn't realise it).

The problem is the metric you're applying. Yes, it can't dedicate as many ships per system as other polities and navies can. But in their thinking that was the wrong measurement. And I have to agree with them. They had 2000 to 2500 superdreadnoughts in service, which was more than 4x as many as the next biggest navy, the PN. And probably bigger than all the other navies combined too. The SLN Battle Fleet was a deterrent fleet: strong enough to punish anyone who would be foolish enough to attack a League system or protectorate. That meant no one in their right mind would.

That's cold comfort for the poor system that did get attacked, I agree. And I don't doubt that many of them will now clamour to be better protected against this kind of attack that has never come from an enemy anyway. And I do think the SLN will rebuild itself to become again the biggest navy, attempting to compensate the GF's technological headstart (quality) with numbers (quantity). But it won't be a 50:1 disparity.

The fact that these spin off polities can each outbuild the GA also gives their previous master pause. If each spinoff polity join together to form their own Block of Successor States (BOSS) then they could challenge the League. This is essentially what the MA had in mind with the RF. There is no reason something like that can not form on its own naturally. And if they do form a BOSS, their revanchism could be directed towards their former League of oppressors.

Right. And BTW, nice acronym.

One of the most effective deterrents against being a bully is to have a peer power. The new SLN won't be able to operate in a vacuum (metaphorically, of course, because they do operate in space) because the eyes of all the other navies will be on them. Conversely, the SLN's eyes will be on each individual navy from those splinters and the GF. If none of them can take on ALL the other ones at the same time, then none of them can get away with bullying their way around without consequence.

Which, indeed, goes against the MAlign plans.

cthia wrote:They are the largest system in the Galaxy with the largest Navy. I don't think the largest collection of planets having the largest Navy but yet the weakest Navy is natural. Especially in light of the SL's lone history of dominance. Mother nature will take its course.

Why not? There was quite a while after the US passed the UK economically when the US had a weaker fleet because it viewed other things as more important. The UK viewed safety of oceanic commerce as vital to its security and so had a greatly outsized navy. Even in the interwar period where by treaty the US and UK were capped to the same size navy the UK built up to their treaty limits and the US didn't much much of that time. And the US fleet was even weaker than it looked on paper because the UK's Grand Fleet concentrated most of their firepower in UK waters, while the US split their fleet about 50/50 between the Atlantic and Pacific coasts -- meaning an attacker could defeat them in detail by hitting one coast or the other as it would take nearly two weeks to consolidate the fleet.

But going back to original principles it doesn't make any sense to arbitrarily built a navy to X% of GDP, or for X ships/system. First you define the goals you wish your navy to achieve, then you figure out the tasks they need to do in order to achieve those goal, and finally from that should fall out the number and types of ships you need to do so. You then compare the costs of that to the budget you can get, and inevitably then start scaling back while also screaming for more money.


Also, basically no multi-system entity can afford a large enough navy to defend strongly everywhere. Kind of like Napoleon reportedly commented on a plan to spread the army evenly across France's boarders by responding that it would only be good for deterring smugglers -- by dispersion it would be strong nowhere and weak everywhere. Even at the height of their power the RMN strongly defended Manticore, and to a slightly lesser extent Sphinx; but Gryphon over in Manticore-B did not have an equivalent defensive fleet. They essentially accepted that an strong enough attacker could likely seize the Gryphon orbitals before Home Fleet could move from Manticore-A and engage them.

The League looked at what they wanted to achieve, and it was originally piracy suppressing within their space -- best accomplished by small system defense forces in each system -- and deterring attacks via threat of overwhelming retaliation. In order to achieve the later that required enough power to defend their main 'anchorages' and a large enough force to ram straight through anybody else's navy to seize their home system. It does NOT require having a fleet capable of defending significant numbers of systems (whether Shell or even just the Core) while also having enough ships for overwhelming offense.
Individual members who felt that deterrence was an insufficient defense where allowed (and possibly encouraged) to build up system defense fleets to any strength they felt reasonable.

And in part that 'defend by deterrence and retaliation' goal may have been driven by looking at the League government's limited funding stream and dismissing the very idea of a fleet capable of defending many of their systems as an utterly hopeless idea. So, rather than dispersing the fleet in a hopeless attempt to defend many systems they didn't even try; simply kept it concentrated so they'd be able to respond with an overwhelming attack.

Jonathan_S wrote:
The League looked at what they wanted to achieve, and it was originally piracy suppressing within their space -- best accomplished by small system defense forces in each system -- and deterring attacks via threat of overwhelming retaliation. In order to achieve the later that required enough power to defend their main 'anchorages' and a large enough force to ram straight through anybody else's navy to seize their home system. It does NOT require having a fleet capable of defending significant numbers of systems (whether Shell or even just the Core) while also having enough ships for overwhelming offense.
Individual members who felt that deterrence was an insufficient defense where allowed (and possibly encouraged) to build up system defense fleets to any strength they felt reasonable.

And in part that 'defend by deterrence and retaliation' goal may have been driven by looking at the League government's limited funding stream and dismissing the very idea of a fleet capable of defending many of their systems as an utterly hopeless idea. So, rather than dispersing the fleet in a hopeless attempt to defend many systems they didn't even try; simply kept it concentrated so they'd be able to respond with an overwhelming attack.

While today we see only a handful of systems with a significant SDF, that might not have been as true in the past. When the SL first formed, Probably every system/polity had a moderately sized SDF, and the fights that formed the SL probably exhausted many systems. Post SL formation, many SDFs probably drew down their SDFs - or at least the offensive arms, over time. Then as centuries of SLN protection passed(and an absence of piracy and inner armed conflict [remember the 2nd rule of Space League Fight Club - league members don't fight each other.]), SDF funding crept lower and lower in each system's budgets, until it only addressed that system's minimal security concerns, no more. 350 years later, most systems are felt little more than a space life boat service and customs patrol, while a very few, with borders on active war zones or merchant fleets with piracy concerns, still field functional hyper navies of a size necessary to deal with their particular security need. Virtually none will have the ability for true force projection baked into their navy, regardless of their actual firepower, because there is no envisioned need for it.

David used his slingshot to smite the mighty giant.

David, now the god of the HV, created Apollo to shoot his deadly arrows to kill the mighty giant.

Goliath was only sleeping.



PS Life imitates art.