First Havenite war

ThinksMarkedly wrote:This means they concluded their worst case scenario they wouldn't conquer Manticore and would have to re-fight in 10 years, but they would have added several systems, got that much closer to Manticore, weakened the Alliance, and obtained samples of the Manticore matériel. Though truth be told, I don't think Parnell told Harris this.

We also never got to see how well the Legislaturalist officer corp might have adjusted their doctrine from the lessons their learned from the opening engagements of the war.

Generally in war nothing teaches so well as a tactical defeat. But they weren't given any change to implement adjustments to doctrine now that they had real world counterexamples to their theory based wargames. Hell, they don't even appear to have gotten the chance to get properly debriefed so wider lessons could be learned and new doctrine war gamed out. Instead it seems they were immediately scapegoated and disappeared or shot.


If not for Pierre's coup it's possible that they might well have adjusted to the initial setbacks and been able to push through to a reasonably quick (if far bloodier than expected) victory -- given their still significant numerical advantages.

I will point out that the US did not plan for a war to start in late 1941. That was the other guys. And the US strategy was catastrophically flawed, if we had sailed out the fleet to meet the IJN like Kimmel planned the entire pacific fleet would have been lost.

I've always wondered why war planners in the RMN never planned for a quick striker at RH either. Given the interior lines movement KM enjoyed via the junctions, naturally Haven has to defend both Haven and Trevor's star with enough fleet strength to match Manticore's full strength, hence RHN is just about 2 times as big (not counting BBs). However, using this knowledge and good pre-war intelligence gathering, surely RMN would understand a concentration of its fleet can beat equal size RHN, plus a pre-emptive strike would catch the enemy with their pants down. Knowing Haven is a highly centralised state, striking at Haven or Trevor's star early would seem a very enticing strategy to take? Basilisk looks like its equidistant to Trevor’s star and Haven, so say if a large enough RMN fleet goes to Basilisk and heads towards middle distance between Haven and Trevor, Havenite scouts do their best do shadow, but have no clue whether RMN will go left or right, so RHN has to keep both fleets where they are until RMN strike fleet makes a turn, and say the strike fleet turns right at the midpoint towards Trevor's star, even with Havenite scout ship going to Haven to inform and Haven's home fleet goes straight to Trevor's star, it will never make up the distance and by the time it arrives RMN controls Trevor's star and its junction which means reinforcements and supplies could come over immediately. Or RMN goes left, knock out fleet in Haven before Trevor's star fleet comes and win the war there anyhow.

SW88 wrote:I've always wondered why war planners in the RMN never planned for a quick striker at RH either. Given the interior lines movement KM enjoyed via the junctions, naturally Haven has to defend both Haven and Trevor's star with enough fleet strength to match Manticore's full strength, hence RHN is just about 2 times as big (not counting BBs). However, using this knowledge and good pre-war intelligence gathering, surely RMN would understand a concentration of its fleet can beat equal size RHN, plus a pre-emptive strike would catch the enemy with their pants down. Knowing Haven is a highly centralised state, striking at Haven or Trevor's star early would seem a very enticing strategy to take? Basilisk looks like its equidistant to Trevor’s star and Haven, so say if a large enough RMN fleet goes to Basilisk and heads towards middle distance between Haven and Trevor, Havenite scouts do their best do shadow, but have no clue whether RMN will go left or right, so RHN has to keep both fleets where they are until RMN strike fleet makes a turn, and say the strike fleet turns right at the midpoint towards Trevor's star, even with Havenite scout ship going to Haven to inform and Haven's home fleet goes straight to Trevor's star, it will never make up the distance and by the time it arrives RMN controls Trevor's star and its junction which means reinforcements and supplies could come over immediately. Or RMN goes left, knock out fleet in Haven before Trevor's star fleet comes and win the war there anyhow.

The situation you describe could only be achieved after Third Fleet retook Trevor's Star, at a great cost. Before that point, the MA did not enjoy interior lines via the Junctions. The MWHJ's closest, open terminus to Haven was Basilisk; all the others led to much further away or in the wrong direction completely. Via Terre Haute-Henessy and Erewhon, they would get to the other side of the PRH, but the extant maps make it sound like it's actually further than Basilisk. This is corroborated by the travel time that Pritchart would have needed to get to the Congo System for the Torch Summit, which is close to Erewhon: six weeks.

I agree with you that the PRH was a highly centralised system. For that reason, we can expect that the Capital Fleet defending the Haven System was a much tougher formation than whatever detachment of the PRN was defending Trevor's Star. And we know that retaking of Trevor's Star was a very costly affair. We only get after-the-fact discussions because this all happened off-camera, but we've been told it was a series of back-and-forth, with both sides rearming and re-attacking. My guess is that the MA did attack Trevor's star as early as possible, because that had enormous benefits: see the discussion between Honor and Adm. Lucien Cortez, Fifth Space Lord, about how demobilising those forts that defended the Junction would free up enormous amount of personnel and matériel that would aid in the war effort.

If Trevor's Star was only liberated in 1910-1911, 5 years into the war, it goes to show that retaking it earlier simply wasn't possible. Before the conditions for its retaking were met, the PRH still enjoyed massive advantage in hull numbers, even if one-to-one they were of lesser quality than the MA, principally RMN counterparts. That was still close enough that the MA couldn't a lower ship type to defend a system, like the GA was routinely doing against the Solarian League a decade later. This means they had a lot of systems to defend and therefore had to disperse a lot of their units. And unlike the PRH, they weren't decentralised. Granted, the MBS was The System That Must Be Defended (to use Starfire terminology), but politically it couldn't leave the allies in a lurch to attack Trevor's Star. If it failed, the remainder of the PRN would capture the entire sector, even if it fell short of the MBS.

And if they couldn't capture Trevor's Star any earlier, they couldn't attack and succeed in the Haven System itself. It would just gut the Alliance's fleet formations for little to no gain, opening the door for the PRN to claim the remains.

After Trevor's Star, we know why it couldn't go on the offensive that soon again. First, because of the losses incurred during the liberation; second, because all new construction was hidden behind the products of Project Gram and Anzio: SD(P)s, LACs, CLACs, which the Alliance had to keep secret until the right time to launch. Once those were ready, they did launch an offensive and gave that the random-generated name of Operation Buttercup.

Without MDMs battles were often inconclusive. You’d pretty much need the entire Manticore Alliance Fleet to have a shot at the capital system, and even then it would be bloody. Next to worst case - they commit everything, Haven holds the system with heavy losses after a week of combat, but the MA fleet is ripped up with almost every surviving ship damaged and many combat ineffective and needs to spend almost three months limping home.

What will they find?

kzt wrote:Without MDMs battles were often inconclusive. You’d pretty much need the entire Manticore Alliance Fleet to have a shot at the capital system, and even then it would be bloody. Next to worst case - they commit everything, Haven holds the system with heavy losses after a week of combat, but the MA fleet is ripped up with almost every surviving ship damaged and many combat ineffective and needs to spend almost three months limping home.

What will they find?

I don't think they'd spend three months limping home. The transit time is spent mostly at cruise speed, in the top band of hyperspace. Assuming you can translate up and down at all, even a puny 100 gravity acceleration will get you to your top speed in reasonable time. The transmit might be longer on the way back than on the way over, but not by that much.

Meanwhile, the PRN would need to send couriers to its detached, front-line units, in order to marshal them for an attack. So call it an extra 2 to 4 weeks minimum. Given that neither side has a speed advantage, the retreating fleet should arrive before any PRH counter-attack.

However, beating the enemy back home is not enough. Those ships would not be an effective fighting force, even with 4 weeks of repairs. If the problem was impellers and nodes, those aren't quickly replaced and a ship that can't keep acceleration in n-space can't keep up with the wall and its consorts for defence. Either that or you have a much more slowly-moving wall, which gives the manoeuvrability advantage to the Peeps.

Unless, of course, they disengaged at Haven before too much damage crept up. As you said, those battles between similarly-sized opponents would have been inconclusive.

Oops, I forgot one very important detail: Haven doesn't need to wait for the battle to be over to send couriers out.

If the sensors in Haven can count the number of SDs coming to attack, they can deduce how many are left defending the MBS. And since the attacking fleet doesn't have a speed advantage in hyper, this courier could go to Seaford Nine or another base, deliver an attack order, and those ships ship out before the attacking fleet could go back home.

How fast can you go in hyper without particle screens? Or with half your nodes gone? Or when towing an even more shot-up SD? Or just sufficient engineering damage that you can’t safely get to the top bands.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:Oops, I forgot one very important detail: Haven doesn't need to wait for the battle to be over to send couriers out.

If the sensors in Haven can count the number of SDs coming to attack, they can deduce how many are left defending the MBS. And since the attacking fleet doesn't have a speed advantage in hyper, this courier could go to Seaford Nine or another base, deliver an attack order, and those ships ship out before the attacking fleet could go back home.

Manticore's survivors don't necessarily need to return to Manticore as a cohesive force. Ships with little to no damage can expedite their return to Manticore, while ships that need serious patching would rendezvous with the fleet train in deep space and push through their repairs.

So while there might not be a lot of ships that return to Manticore promptly, Haven can't necessarily determine how many surviving ships can return directly. Any good military planner will expect a high figure can return directly, and plan for that.

kzt wrote:How fast can you go in hyper without particle screens? Or with half your nodes gone? Or when towing an even more shot-up SD? Or just sufficient engineering damage that you can’t safely get to the top bands.

Node damage limits your acceleration, not your top speed. Ditto for towing other ships. The top speed is limited by the particle screens and we haven't seen anything about those being too sensitive -- damage to them has never been the subject of discussion in the books. If they are repairable, then the limitation to your top speed is just how quickly you can get there. As the ships will be spending 6-8 weeks at that speed anyway, it doesn't matter much if you can achieve it in 1 day or 3.

If you can't get to the top bands, then that's a big problem. But again I don't expect that to be a major problem: they appear to be able to get to any band in hyper or not at all. The hypergenerator doesn't appear to be a distributed component susceptible to damage. I could be wrong here, because it would make more physical sense if it were distributed (using the nodes, perhaps) because it needs to envelop the ship.

Or, as Theemile says, they can return the fastest ships first and the more damaged ones limp home, or to a closer port.