Why don't they just give up?

Jonathan_S wrote:

penny wrote:I can hear the conversation a century or two ago.

“OK then. If you think you can cajole them into fighting each other and yadda yadda yadda. But if all else fails, the LDs ride.”

Come on. Ultimately the plan was a smash and grab all along. Did we really ever doubt that? LoL



The LD Contingency

That much I'm sure we can say didn't happen. The breakthroughs that led to the spider drive aren't a century or two old (more like a decade old; at most).

So they wouldn't know known back then that they'd have ultra-stealthy ships when the main plan went into its active phase.

I'm way ahead of you Jonathan. I am allowing for what must have been a long, grueling, frustrating and exhausting research constantly coming up empty and taking a long time before it finally came to fruition. I am betting that the research into the spider drive itself was centuries old.

How long after King Roger's vision did Project Gram really start producing? And the MBS is a system that is already established, pretty much. In comparison to the hidden colonies of the MA.

At any rate, there are Alphas involved. And Alphas may have been more ahead of the curve than usual in their concepts. Thus, the spider-drive was simply a concept drawing on the blackboard. Looking nothing like what it finally became.

Galton had -that was shown or that we might suspect that they could have built in-house- none of the Spider Drive ships or the one sd weapon -the Gtorp- that they could use.

What we have seen is that they provided the equipment supplied to the PRN- in Exile for the planned genocide at Torch. They built a lot of "conventional" starships but it is not clear how many-if any- were supplied to various Alignment operations such as shipping arm etc to groups to destabilize systems.

We don't know where Mannheim acquired its SDF fleet including the squadron that butchered the Harvest Joy Lt cruiser/wormhole search & survey ship. It is possible that some of their ships were built "for export" at Galton and then washed though a lot of paperwork to see to Mannheim since they were theoretically SLN level tech and systems plus weapons. We have no idea of the SLN or anybody else have even looked at the MSDF for sourcing of ships.

As I recall the original of The Plan (that we were presented for taking over Human Space (not what Leonard D envisioned ), there were three components of which two where spoken about when it was unveiled to us. 1) The SL/SNL was infiltrated and corrupted turning many of its things - like Office of Frontier Security, Frontier Fleet and the rest of the military. Just plain corruption became business as usual and molding so many of the regular course of government to prey up on the citizens and anybody under the protection othe league.
2) was creating the shift of the Republic of Haven from it's original high ideals to the miserable and broken system that had to size other systems just to keep it's awful dole system and Oligarch rule in place using it's navy to take places and then keep them crushed down.
Haven was the intended hammer to shatter the League. Manticore - under the leadership of King Roger- understood the danger that Haven had come to represent and, having watched Haven swallowing systems, set about to create a navy and economy that could defend itself.

The 3rd piece shows up later in the cesspool that was much of Silesia and we see hints that this was yet another long term (and sucessfull) plan but the Alignment to create a fragmented coalition (the Confederation) that was deeply riddled by corruption and wasn't going to get in the Alignment way.

Much later we see Mannheim and the RF being brought in as the way to sweep up the fragments of the SL including the rebuilding of of the populations that survive under a differnt (and Alignment constructed) philosophy of how humans should be organized. The RF would be a controlling layer operating under Alignment direction in the Alignment in the roll of Puppet Masters. Not clear to me is what was supposed to happen to Haven after it caused the shattering of the League other than perhaps be so worn down that it too fragmented

The Alignment is going back to it's usual operations of screwing with systems and people to bend them to the corrupt practices that allow them to be taken down.

penny wrote:I'm way ahead of you Jonathan. I am allowing for what must have been a long, grueling, frustrating and exhausting research constantly coming up empty and taking a long time before it finally came to fruition. I am betting that the research into the spider drive itself was centuries old.

Possibly. But even if that is true -- especially if that is true -- it would never have been their only plan. Maybe they did have a menu of options, "if we have a very stealthy ship, we go with Plan A; if we don't, we go for Plan B for Brute Force." They couldn't have counted on succeeding at creating ships stealthy enough to perform the task they require.

In fact, I don't think that super stealth was required at all. All they needed was to create chaos when Haven and the SL were fighting, with sufficient doubt as to who did what that the war would escalate instead of find a diplomatic solution and that no third party would support either. Some stealth sure and the more the better, but nearly invisible ships were probably nothing more than a pipe dream.

And I don't think that research into what led to the spider drive is centuries old at all. There was none of it in Galton, which was meant to be the industrial powerhouse of the Alignment. That strongly hints that the breakthrough came unexpectedly. Moreover, if they had been researching stealth that deeply, one would expect that Galton would have something better than a Hasta III when Honor came calling. No, they had barely no stealth developed in-house; the Hasta design was stolen from TIY and the SLN.

How long after King Roger's vision did Project Gram really start producing? And the MBS is a system that is already established, pretty much. In comparison to the hidden colonies of the MA.

The only Black Swan event out of Project Gram was the quantum baffle. Everything else was evolution on previous concepts or research done by third parties, which the brains behind Gram put to good use. King Roger wasn't planning on winning the war with MDMs -- he didn't know what would. All he could do was double, triple and quadruple down on what he knew could work: lots and lots of ships of the wall, highly-educated, competent, and dedicated people, producing and operating the best hardware money could buy.

As to your question on timeline, think about this: the time between Honor noticing the different design of Grayson compensators and the beta squared nodes was less than a decade. No one was researching improved nodes, and yet when they noticed they could, they ran with it. That's also true for the fission plants that power the LACs: another unexpected revelation by putting the obsolete technology of Grayson to new uses.

At any rate, there are Alphas involved. And Alphas may have been more ahead of the curve than usual in their concepts. Thus, the spider-drive was simply a concept drawing on the blackboard. Looking nothing like what it finally became.

Alphas can't predict the future. They may have had a menu of options, like I said above, depending on which research avenues panned out.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:And I don't think that research into what led to the spider drive is centuries old at all. There was none of it in Galton, which was meant to be the industrial powerhouse of the Alignment. That strongly hints that the breakthrough came unexpectedly. Moreover, if they had been researching stealth that deeply, one would expect that Galton would have something better than a Hasta III when Honor came calling. No, they had barely no stealth developed in-house; the Hasta design was stolen from TIY and the SLN.

I have wondered about this, we know that the Cataphract was a Galton design and was the clue that led to the discovery of Galton. The Hasta was just the idea of using a recon drone, instead of a regular missile, as the first stage; so similar to Mistletoe (of which we know that the Malign was aware) and the Cataphract. So isn't it more likely that Technodyne got the idea from the Malign (and Galton), rather than Galton getting the idea from Technodyne?

Obviously the Grand Alliance learned of it from its use at Beowulf by the SLN and the material captured from Technodyne.

penny wrote:I'm way ahead of you Jonathan. I am allowing for what must have been a long, grueling, frustrating and exhausting research constantly coming up empty and taking a long time before it finally came to fruition. I am betting that the research into the spider drive itself was centuries old.

How long after King Roger's vision did Project Gram really start producing? And the MBS is a system that is already established, pretty much. In comparison to the hidden colonies of the MA.

From the first time we know he articulated a need for more R&D, in his letter to proceedings in 1844 PD until the first known fruits of it? 59 years.

(When Honor had RDs at Grayson with the early, and very classified, FTL signaling capability)

Though that's arguably overstating and understating the timeline .
It's overstating it because in 1844 he wasn't yet King (that didn't happen until 1857) and was "just" an RMN officer serving as an XO. So he had no authority to get anything moving and his early call was a long way from the idea of a covert "Project Gram" R&D effort. It's a long, long, way from saying the RMN needs to focus more on defense of the MBS and to that end needs an "innovative approach to weaponry and war-fighting technologies" to conceiving of a new covert R&D program to achieve that, and even further from figuring out what paths to send that R&D program down.
But it's understating it in a way because most of the fruits we know of from Project Gram (by way of its spin-off development project Ghost Rider) didn't materialized until around 1912 when BuWeaps and BuShips were able to draw up the final plans for the microfusion powered RDs and free flying decoys, and the MDM equipped SD(P)s.

Other possible significant date are:
1850 when Rodger got himself assigned to BuWeaps and ended up working for the semi-banished Rear Admiral Adcock in the grandiloquently dubbed Concept Development Officer, where they were already trying to quietly push Manticore's naval research under the radar from the more conservative Space Lords. (No development work -- to expensive and visible; but at least research and collection and collation of open source technical intel from throughout the League and elsewhere)

1857, as mentioned, when he became king and got a bit more power over the Space Lords (though hardly unlimited power and there would still be reactionary elements who honestly believed that this was the wrong approach and they should do whatever was in their power to keep the navy focused on what they perceived was the correct path)

It was early 1877 before we first hear of Project Gram, established out of the way over in Manticore-B at Wayland. But we know know how new it was.


So, depending on how you want to count, you could put a timeline of somewhere between 26 and 68 years between Roger's inspiration and seeing the fruits of Gram.

Thought it's not like Project Gram started with the specific goals of microfusion power, multi-drive missiles, beta-squared nodes, FTL comms, and super-LACs. Even as late as 1877 PD they couldn't have been making plans based on getting specific new techs out of Gram and its spinoffs. Heck as late as 1903 when the early FTL signaling was in service they couldn't have known they'd crack microfusion and MDMs, even if they might have narrowed down increased power and range as targeted research goals; and as far as we know the podlayers concept came much later. So even at that point they couldn't have had a plan B based around the emergence of that technology package.

tlb wrote:I have wondered about this, we know that the Cataphract was a Galton design and was the clue that led to the discovery of Galton. The Hasta was just the idea of using a recon drone, instead of a regular missile, as the first stage; so similar to Mistletoe (of which we know that the Malign was aware) and the Cataphract. So isn't it more likely that Technodyne got the idea from the Malign (and Galton), rather than Galton getting the idea from Technodyne?

Without further information, I'd agree. It would be likely.

However, we have direct information that the plans for the development of the Hasta were turned over from Ganymede Naval Station and the Technodyne installations around there too. It was developed in the Solar System.

Maybe the MAlign had agents there feeding ideas to make it happen, because the MAlign had seen the Mistletoe. After all, knowing such a thing is possible is 80% of the work. But at this stage the SLN had already clued in it needed more information and the MAlign was hindering some of that... so how much credit can we give them when all they did was not stop what the SLN should have known all along?

tlb wrote:I have wondered about this, we know that the Cataphract was a Galton design and was the clue that led to the discovery of Galton. The Hasta was just the idea of using a recon drone, instead of a regular missile, as the first stage; so similar to Mistletoe (of which we know that the Malign was aware) and the Cataphract. So isn't it more likely that Technodyne got the idea from the Malign (and Galton), rather than Galton getting the idea from Technodyne?

ThinksMarkedly wrote:Without further information, I'd agree. It would be likely.

However, we have direct information that the plans for the development of the Hasta were turned over from Ganymede Naval Station and the Technodyne installations around there too. It was developed in the Solar System.

Maybe the MAlign had agents there feeding ideas to make it happen, because the MAlign had seen the Mistletoe. After all, knowing such a thing is possible is 80% of the work. But at this stage the SLN had already clued in it needed more information and the MAlign was hindering some of that... so how much credit can we give them when all they did was not stop what the SLN should have known all along?

I mentioned that the Grand Alliance did see the SLN use Hasta at Beowulf and did get the information on its development from Technodyne files (at Ganymede). But now you give additional information that "the SLN had already clued in it needed more information and the MAlign was hindering some of that", which I was not aware when it came to the Cataphract and Hasta development. Isn't it a fact that Galton was the source for the Cataphract design and the Hasta was just a development of that with inspiration from Mistletoe? So it what way did the Malign hinder the development of the Hasta? Naturally the information found at Ganymede would not mention Galton, but I do not see how Hasta could be built in the timeframe that it was without the information from Malign agents that we know are embedded in Technodyne.

tlb wrote:I mentioned that the Grand Alliance did see the SLN use Hasta at Beowulf and did get the information on its development from Technodyne files (at Ganymede). But now you give additional information that "the SLN had already clued in it needed more information and the MAlign was hindering some of that", which I was not aware when it came to the Cataphract and Hasta development. Isn't it a fact that Galton was the source for the Cataphract design and the Hasta was just a development of that with inspiration from Mistletoe?

Yes. What I meant is that the SLN realised it was losing every battle and that out of just not knowing the capabilities of the RMN. There was no way the MAlign infiltrators at this stage could have said "nothing to see here, you'll win if you show up." Oh, they still manipulated things: they (Gweon) fed information on Mycroft to the SLN Admiralty to cause Operation Fabius to be launched, but interestingly this was feeding near-accurate information (though some of it was actually just good guesswork).

This is what resulted in the development of the Hasta: a weapon with a longer range than even the Cataphract and stealthy for most of the way.

But the fact is that Ganymede developed the Hasta, not Galton. The argument we were having was whether Galton had been developing stealth technology for a long time and this fact contradicts that. More importantly, whether stealth was a key requirement for The Plan. They didn't come up with the Hasta.

So it what way did the Malign hinder the development of the Hasta? Naturally the information found at Ganymede would not mention Galton, but I do not see how Hasta could be built in the timeframe that it was without the information from Malign agents that we know are embedded in Technodyne.

They had been hindering before. We know the SLN knew nothing about the wars in the Haven sector and doubted any reports that came out of there. They didn't send any observers. I don't recall if this is explicit in the text, but the evidence points to the MAlign hiding and distorting information sufficiently (and playing to the SLN's arrogance) that caused that.

As for whether it could be built on time, I don't think there's a problem. Bolting a CM on an RD chassis is not very difficult and they already had the knowledge of how to bolt a CM to a regular shipkiller. We also had a test of the Hasta months before they actually got used.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:Yes. What I meant is that the SLN realised it was losing every battle and that out of just not knowing the capabilities of the RMN. There was no way the MAlign infiltrators at this stage could have said "nothing to see here, you'll win if you show up." Oh, they still manipulated things: they (Gweon) fed information on Mycroft to the SLN Admiralty to cause Operation Fabius to be launched, but interestingly this was feeding near-accurate information (though some of it was actually just good guesswork).

This is what resulted in the development of the Hasta: a weapon with a longer range than even the Cataphract and stealthy for most of the way.

But the fact is that Ganymede developed the Hasta, not Galton. The argument we were having was whether Galton had been developing stealth technology for a long time and this fact contradicts that. More importantly, whether stealth was a key requirement for The Plan. They didn't come up with the Hasta.

You position seems to be that knowledge of the Cataphract did not in any way assist in the development of the Hasta. That is all in which I am interested. My claim is that knowledge of Mistletoe (which the Malign had) and the technology of the Cataphract (which the Malign developed) are sufficient to create Hasta, so it seems reasonable to assert that Technodyne was fed (by way of embedded agents) the beginning of the Hasta program.

We are not having an argument as to whether "Galton had been developing stealth technology for a long time and this fact contradicts that", since I have not said anything about the stealth technology shown by Galton. But as to that, page 640 of the hardback version of To End In Fire states the following after talking about the stealth of GA drones:

The Alignment's stealth technology might be even better, It was certainly better than anything the Solarian League ever had

tlb wrote:You position seems to be that knowledge of the Cataphract did not in any way assist in the development of the Hasta. That is all in which I am interested.

No, that's not what I meant. I think they benefited from having the Cataphract and the plans to it when developing the Hasta. So the MAlign's infiltration did contribute significantly to the Hasta's existence, if you consider this.

My argument is that the MAlign had the same information that the SLN did and for longer and yet they didn't develop the Hasta.

My claim is that knowledge of Mistletoe (which the Malign had) and the technology of the Cataphract (which the Malign developed) are sufficient to create Hasta, so it seems reasonable to assert that Technodyne was fed (by way of embedded agents) the beginning of the Hasta program.

I think that's a reasonable assumption, but is not required. It would make sense that the MAlign agents embedded in the SLN and TIY did feed the information to get the process started.

And yet it's entirely possible that TIY, when not constrained by the MAlign corrupting things, are not totally incompetent. With the amount of money the SLN was throwing at them at this point and the headless chicken mode they had been in, they were probably throwing all sorts of ideas at the wall to see what stuck. The Hasta could have been one of those.

We don't know which way it was. All we know is that, if the MAlign kickstarted it, all they did was provide the initial idea. The plans didn't come ready-made from Galton.

We are not having an argument as to whether "Galton had been developing stealth technology for a long time and this fact contradicts that", since I have not said anything about the stealth technology shown by Galton.

I was referring to the fact of why I brought this up and it was in the context of penny's assertion that they're Alphas and had been developing stealth for centuries.

But (surprise!) we wandered into a different debate now. What a shocker!