Jonathan_S wrote:Though I suppose it's not impossible for this passage to be a combination of slightly sloppy speaking plus very different communication lags.
By sloppy speaking I mean when he said "we haven't seen them yet" he might not literally have meant that intelligence had lost track of them; just that they hadn't been seen on the front lines. That no reports of them had come back from his fleets.
I don't think he'd be that imprecise when briefing the president about launching Beatrice. He's talking about a major risk to the operation here. If he had knowledge on where they had been a few months ago, he probably would have said so.
If, say, it takes 8 months* for updates from the Peep's HUMINT to covertly make their way from Manticore to Haven, but dispatches from the fleets arrive in 3-6 weeks, then it's possible that Theisman had intel on them going into known yards 9 or 10 months ago. Intelligence estimated that the major refit would take, say, 4 months, so he'd have expected to start seeing dispatches sent from his fleets 4-5 months ago (so received roughly 3-4 months ago).
Another passage from AAC is that the refit takes 8 to 10 weeks (answering to penny's question about the GA members knowing where this yard is: Manticore likely knew it before, there's no reason not to share with Haven now).
At All Costs, ch. 52 wrote:"Why is that?" Grantville asked. "I thought the pods were the same dimensions?"
"They are, but only the ships built with Keyhole capability from the outset can handle the Mark Two platforms, and they're essential to making the new missiles work. We can refit with Keyhole II—in fact, the decision to build that in is part of what's delayed the Andermani refits—but it requires placing the ship in the yard hands for at least eight to ten weeks."
There are two data points in that passage: 1) the refit of existing ships takes 8 to 10 weeks, and 2) the new ships are being built with Keyhole II from the start, but that delayed their construction (presumably for less than that amount of time).
The discussion follows that only Eighth Fleet is equipped to handle Apollo and has had time to train with them. That implies the IAN ships aren't ready yet and their formations haven't trained much with them either (I think that's what Honor was doing out of the Trevor's Star terminus when the Battle of Manticore started).
So your Maths doesn't work that well. Moreover, the Andermani wouldn't have had
all their ships inside closed-door yards for this entire period. Some of them would be out of the yards and working up; some others would be near the yards and waiting on their turn to go in. So I find it hard to believe his HUMINT didn't see those ships.
There might still be HUMINT reports that the Andie wallers are still in those (known) yards but they're still making their way through the slow covert communication channels between Manticore and Haven. So Theisman is caught by information lag -- he potentially knows which yards were doing the work, has reports from agents of when the ships entered the yards, based on that has an estimate from Peep Intel on when a major refit should be done, but his latest received HUMINT reports predate Intel's estimate of completion, and the faster** reports from his fleets don't include any mention of them.
Possible. You're saying that he's telling Pritchart "we think they're out of the yards and therefore could be making an appearance in Manticore when Giscard comes to visit?"
I still think that if that if he thought this was likely, he'd have said so. He'd have said that there could be 120 wallers more that his NavInt would have estimated to be ready for deployment. His phrasing sounds like he doesn't know when they'll turn up at all.
Is he telling Pritchart what he thinks she should know in order to make the decision he thinks she should make? It doesn't sound like him -- he wants the president to make such a momentous decision, not the military -- but it could be subconscious bias of his.
Sure those SD(P)s might still be stuck in the yards, something he mentions as a possibility (and something we know is true), but without having current intel that they are he has to consider the possibility that they're combat ready but being readied for some major surprise (and the Peeps are probably still a bit gun shy over Buttercup; biasing him into that concern)
Indeed and he is actually briefing her on the dangers of uncovering so much of the Republic by moving so many ships of theirs. He's briefing her that the other danger is not that the Andy ships will be in Manticore, but that they will not and thus will not be destroyed, thus will be free to attack the Republic.
Though this actually removes Manticore-B as the place they could be being refit at. He's just briefed Pritchart that if Giscard can face Home Fleet, Third Fleet, and Eighth Fleet separately, he can defeat them in detail, and thus take out the infrastructure in the MBS and/or force an immediate surrender. In that case, he wouldn't worry about the IAN ships, because they'd be captured.
But that's just speculation. It's possible this work was done at some yard the Peeps are unaware of (or at least can't get reports from). I'm just saying that his phrasing doesn't necessarily require that to be true.
"Can't get report from" might be sufficient, actually. If it's in a system that sees very little civilian / commercial traffic, it would be hard to plant spies in.
* And IIRC it's still nearly a month with a dispatch boat that's able to use Trevor's Star as a shortcut. So 8 times that for communications that need to be covert doesn't seem unreasonable.
It's only about 2-3 months via hyper from Manticore to Haven. There are diplomatic DBs going around at this time.
One more datum: when Honor deployed to Silesia and set up shop in the Marsh system, her ships were constantly being harassed by the IAN, like the encounter of HMS Jessica Epps with IANS Hellbarde. Those IAN ships had heretofore unseen capabilities that only the RMN and GSN had had.
It comes as no surprise that the Andermani were spying on the RMN and had quickly adopted everything they could get their hands on. But the RMN had not expected it this soon and had not seen the ships being built.
Of course, during the first war, the Alliance intel would not be focusing on the Andermani -- just enough to make sure they didn't attempt to expand at the expense of Manticore. And after the war, Jurgensen was Second Lord and in charge of the RMN ONI. If he had had reports from the Andermani, he did not share with Honor, but I don't think he even had that, because Janacek and High Ridge wanted Honor out of the way, not starting a war with the Andermani.
The Grayson spies had not known this either, and Protector Benjamin was plugged in enough to have sent the Protector's Own in "exercises" that happened to be very close to Marsh.
Either way, whether known or unknown, the IAN has access to at least two major yards.