Why don't they just give up?

tlb wrote:Prior to the introduction of the Spider drive in Storm from the Shadows (which makes clear that they were very new, just out of testing), they were doing everything with streak drive ships without stealth. Everything accomplished before then had been the work of covert agents (which work fine when trying to start a war).

The stealthy ships were only introduced to try and nudge events back to what was needed by the plan.

To be fair we don't know how stealthy their conventional wedge powered ships were relative to, say, Manticore's.

(They'd still be way, way, less stealthy than a spider -- but might, or might not, be able to hide their wedges at closer ranges and/or higher power settings than other folks' ships)

tlb wrote:Prior to the introduction of the Spider drive in Storm from the Shadows (which makes clear that they were very new, just out of testing), they were doing everything with streak drive ships without stealth. Everything accomplished before then had been the work of covert agents (which work fine when trying to start a war).

The stealthy ships were only introduced to try and nudge events back to what was needed by the plan.

Jonathan_S wrote:To be fair we don't know how stealthy their conventional wedge powered ships were relative to, say, Manticore's.

(They'd still be way, way, less stealthy than a spider -- but might, or might not, be able to hide their wedges at closer ranges and/or higher power settings than other folks' ships)

Possibly, but all the stuff in the Talbott Quadrant was done without indicating that stealth was needed. In fact the freighter that connected some of the events there was doing nothing more than changing identifiers. So perhaps stealth was available, but we did not see it used.

penny wrote: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.

Carefully considering how many blunders they produced, partle even outright bullsh*t, I honestly think you consistently overestimate Alphas.

tlb wrote:

Robert_A_Woodward wrote:The Detweiler brothers didn't now about Hasta. If they had known it was ready to deploy; they wouldn't have bothered deploying the Silver Bullets at Beowulf. They would had realized that the extreme long range it provided meant that the SLN taskforce didn't need to survive long enough to reach Cataphract range.

What evidence do you have to support this? I would have thought that the Silver Bullets were an interesting idea that they would have tried in any case. Even with the Mycroft stations destroyed, over half of the SLN was also destroyed. The Hasta attack did not produce expected results at Beowulf, because of the wall of wedges set up as a defense.

I say this because of the following sentence in _Uncompromising Honor_ (during the Beowulf attack):

“Unfortunately, Benjamin Detweiler and his planners hadn’t known how the original Fabius plans would be modified once Winston Kingsford realized what Hasta could do, and so they’d expected the attackers to require all the help they could get on their run in to the target.”

markusschaber wrote:

penny wrote: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.

Carefully considering how many blunders they produced, partle even outright bullsh*t, I honestly think you consistently overestimate Alphas.

Here's the thing. It has been suggested quite a bit that I overestimate the brain power of an Alpha. Yet, take an Alpha. Place him in command of an LD.

I overestimate him. You underestimate him.

Nature and nurture. Studies involving identical twins separated at birth (highly unethical, but now it has been done it shouldn't be wasted) show that the adult individual is about 50/50 from each.
A potentially top Olympic athlete stil has to exercise and practice.
Having a theoretical potential for a high IQ, doesn't mean that they end up with one. Posibly been told all of their lives that they are an elite, and being cossetted will not eventuate with them being the smartest in the room. Plus you may end up wth group speak, where similar individuals from similar backgrounds all come up with the same erroneous conclusion.

Robert_A_Woodward wrote:The Detweiler brothers didn't now about Hasta. If they had known it was ready to deploy; they wouldn't have bothered deploying the Silver Bullets at Beowulf. They would had realized that the extreme long range it provided meant that the SLN taskforce didn't need to survive long enough to reach Cataphract range.

tlb wrote:What evidence do you have to support this? I would have thought that the Silver Bullets were an interesting idea that they would have tried in any case. Even with the Mycroft stations destroyed, over half of the SLN was also destroyed. The Hasta attack did not produce expected results at Beowulf, because of the wall of wedges set up as a defense.

Robert_A_Woodward wrote:I say this because of the following sentence in _Uncompromising Honor_ (during the Beowulf attack):

“Unfortunately, Benjamin Detweiler and his planners hadn’t known how the original Fabius plans would be modified once Winston Kingsford realized what Hasta could do, and so they’d expected the attackers to require all the help they could get on their run in to the target.”

Thank you, I did not remember this statement; but it is possible to have a different interpretation. The statement does not say that the Detweilers did not know about Hasta, instead it says that they did not know how the operations plan might be changed based on its capabilities. With the Malign's penetration of Technodyne, it is unlikely that Hasta was unknown. Not knowing Hasta existed would be a failure of intelligence, whereas not exactly how it would be used was more of a timing error considering how far ahead that the Silver Bullets had to be in place.

When Capriotti is thinking about the embellishments added because the Malign contribution could not be hidden, is he thinking about the bombs in the orbitals?

tlb wrote:That this plan would have the result of making both sides break into small enough pieces; such that the worlds of the Renaissance Factor could gather them up and rule them all seems so unlikely, that you wonder whether this could really have been the plan. Looking at it now, it seems as likely as starting World War 1 with the expectation that Switzerland would end up ruling from the Atlantic to the Urals.

That's the thing.....We first hear about Oyster Bay and then we find out that the ships actually intended for whatever the opening of the of the opening attacks of The Plan were, they are in the future and that what is being used to carry out the strikes against Manticore and Grayson are a - for Manticore: one Spider Drive Stealth Recon ship and a small fleet of "test bed" ships that were proof of design (but not full scale since they could't carry the G-torps in bays. The G-torps are spider drive weapons, the rest of the weapons are sent in ballistic mode to be ejected/launched just before they get to the various targets. Nothing about exactly went to Grayson but the total was the maximum the Alignment could field at the time.

Ok, we are also told that (anything about the SL being deliberately compromised and subverted to it's present corrupt self sort of comes later) Haven was the intended hammer for breaking up the SL in what should have been a long and bloody destructive fight but Haven wasn't really far enough along (they are basically using SL/SLN tech that they can steal or smuggle out as the base of they navy power) and that the Alignment was very taken by surprise when Manticore not only survived the opening of the war but -once the declaration was actually made- Manticor was doing the hammering with Haven losing ground. So Oyster Bay is run to cripple Manticore (and it's major allied system Grayson) by wiping out their orbital industry as well as kill all those people both on the big stations and in the dispersed shipyards. This in the anticipation that the now PRH would storm in, take Manticore and the Junction and acquire all that new Manticore tech. PRH would need that tech boost because it was still going to have to rebuild its navy in order to go after the League. Remember, the Alignment literally had NO OTHER SHIPS that could send anywhere else beyond what was used at Manticore and Grayson in Oyster Bay.
We can only speculate that the Alignment would have done something to provoke a war between PRH and the League, but AFTER Haven stabilized it's hold on the Junction, set out proper defensive plans at the termini and coopted what was the Manticorian Merchant Marine into it one of it's new resource and income producing engines.

At that point we did not know about Galton. But we did not see much of any actual military warships in the Alignment. They didn't have them. Oh, they had pirates working for them (some of those operations relative to Torch) but no squadrons of warships. The Spider ships were so new that the full-up LDs were still building and they had to try and keep the plan on track so Oyster Bay.
How long does it take to -after you develop an idea- build test beds (which we never saw being tested, that's all behind the curtain) and once you say Yes they work, finish the designs on your several million ton LDs with the entirely new propulsion systems and whatever other new weapons systems you are going to put on them? How long before you have a shooting war between SL and Haven such that it becomes practical and useful to start doing stuff like deviating League and other systems and make it look like the SLN or PRN are committing EE attack on the other's systems? Part of that question is do you try to -now that you have them building and may have them operational in a couple of years (little challenges like working them up with functioning crew etc and then sending them off to target) do figure out if you are just going to have them strike out of the dark like a series of nighttime sneak attack from long distance agains systems who have no idea anything is coming till stuff starts blowing up? Or you orchestrate (having infiltrated both SLN and PRHN operations and know who's going to strike where and THEN make it look like the attacking force is deliberately doing EE attacks?
So many questions........because the Alignment is essentially operating on the fly here and should understand that "invisible space ships" just don't fit with any of the SLN or PRHN (or RMN) tech nor operations.

tlb wrote:

Robert_A_Woodward wrote:The Detweiler brothers didn't now about Hasta. If they had known it was ready to deploy; they wouldn't have bothered deploying the Silver Bullets at Beowulf. They would had realized that the extreme long range it provided meant that the SLN taskforce didn't need to survive long enough to reach Cataphract range.

tlb wrote:What evidence do you have to support this? I would have thought that the Silver Bullets were an interesting idea that they would have tried in any case. Even with the Mycroft stations destroyed, over half of the SLN was also destroyed. The Hasta attack did not produce expected results at Beowulf, because of the wall of wedges set up as a defense.

Robert_A_Woodward wrote:I say this because of the following sentence in _Uncompromising Honor_ (during the Beowulf attack):

“Unfortunately, Benjamin Detweiler and his planners hadn’t known how the original Fabius plans would be modified once Winston Kingsford realized what Hasta could do, and so they’d expected the attackers to require all the help they could get on their run in to the target.”

Thank you, I did not remember this statement; but it is possible to have a different interpretation. The statement does not say that the Detweilers did not know about Hasta, instead it says that they did not know how the operations plan might be changed based on its capabilities. With the Malign's penetration of Technodyne, it is unlikely that Hasta was unknown. Not knowing Hasta existed would be a failure of intelligence, whereas not exactly how it would be used was more of a timing error considering how far ahead that the Silver Bullets had to be in place.

When Capriotti is thinking about the embellishments added because the Malign contribution could not be hidden, is he thinking about the bombs in the orbitals?

I did some more checking and I found reason to believe that the Detweilers did know about Hasta; thus, I will now argue that this is another example of Malign stupidity. The Hasta allows very long range attacks; attacks that can be launched long before the SLN taskforce could be attacked itself. Perhaps, my assessment is a bit harsh, but they had to be assuming that the SLN leadership was too stupid to realize that. A dangerous assumption considering the amount of spanking that the Grand Alliance had been inflicting.

Robert_A_Woodward wrote:I did some more checking and I found reason to believe that the Detweilers did know about Hasta; thus, I will now argue that this is another example of Malign stupidity. The Hasta allows very long range attacks; attacks that can be launched long before the SLN taskforce could be attacked itself. Perhaps, my assessment is a bit harsh, but they had to be assuming that the SLN leadership was too stupid to realize that. A dangerous assumption considering the amount of spanking that the Grand Alliance had been inflicting.

Or perhaps they were thinking that the SLN would decide that surrender was the only option if the fleet was 100% destroyed at Beowulf? The extra fifteen minutes granted to the ships by the destruction of Mycroft only allowed less than 10% of the fleet to escape, so basically that was the message delivered anyway.

Yes, there was Malign stupidity; but the biggest example of that was in pushing the war to begin after they corrupted the Solarian League and its Navy into a position of crippling ineptitude. Oyster Bay was a desperation move to allow Haven to defeat Manticore, but that still would have left the League at a disastrous disadvantage. Perhaps if they had allowed the League to remain stronger than Manticore and Haven, then used something like Oyster Bay to knock them down into an even fight, the results would have been closer to the plan.