Why don't they just give up?

tlb wrote: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.

But if destruction of the SLN fleet at Beowulf was the goal, why destroy Mycroft at all? Destruction of Mycroft was to give the SLN strike a fighting chance.

tlb wrote: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.

Theemile wrote:But if destruction of the SLN fleet at Beowulf was the goal, why destroy Mycroft at all? Destruction of Mycroft was to give the SLN strike a fighting chance.

My communication skills need work. I believe that they were trying to save the SLN fleet, because they did not want an immediate surrender. At that they failed, because only saving 10% of the fleet is not enough better than total destruction to give the SLN commanders hope.

Sidebar Apropos of Nothing:
This reminds of a word that causes me to cringe: "decimate". Ever since reading a rant by Donald Hamilton in one of the Matt Helm books, I have been offended when someone uses it as a synonym for annihilate or destroy. It comes from the Roman practice, after subduing a rebellious town, of lining the men up and putting every tenth one to death: literally to kill one out of every ten. In the American Civil War there were commanders who won a battle and would be lucky if their force had only been decimated.

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.

To be fair, longer ranged attacks are less accurate. And the SLN had zero experience making them.

We'd certainly seen during the 2nd war with Haven fleets closing to well inside their max powered range, much less their max theoretical range, before launching. And the SLN had no first-hand information on the range or long-range accuracy of the system defense missiles.

So the MAlign likely didn't have a solid read on how cautious the SLN attack was going to be and/or how badly they'd misjudge the defenses; and if the BCs had pushed in deeper in an effort to increase hit percentages then Silver Bullet would have been critical.

As it was, even with the SLN BCs making a very long ranged attack and quickly breaking for the hyper limit, Silver Bullet was probably the only reason any of the BCs escaped. The MAlign also appears to have seriously underestimated how good Apollo was once stripped of FTL control. However; the delay caused by having to switch over to back-up lightspeed systems to distribute the launch order gave just enough time for some of the SLN force to make it into hyper before being torn apart by the autonomous Apollo strike. If Silver Bullet hadn't been there, or hadn't struck until just after Apollo launch, I think the League losses would have been basically total.

I don't think that the goal of the Silver Bullets was to destroy the SLN fleet at Beowulf. It only slowed down the targeting updates to the missile pods because Beowulf had to work around the missing FTL coordination and and the SLN still suffered a catastrophic amount of damage and losses. It was just to give the SLN more time. I don't recall the SLN firing off a second or third launch of missiles But losing Mycroft had the defense forces scrambling to get the return fire going out and looking to what caused the grazier fire and what was going on. Nobody mentions if Mycroft was also tied into the counter missile defense. If the Alignment thought that the same system would also be used to control the counter missile defenses in system then taking out Mycroft would have also disrupted the targeting of incoming missiles and hopefully increase the amount of damage to the Beowulf industrial capacity...more SLN weapons would have gotten through. However, the more solid component of the Beowulf defense as all those fighters positioned to use their wedges as screens- it sounded like the SLN weapons were targeted beyond that screen of freighter and the wedges obliterated a lot of the missiles even though some did find themselves diverted to new targets and engaged the fighters instead of ignoring them.
The Silver Bullets were possibly meant to be taken as new SLN capability which would allow their missiles to get through the defenses. At which point the signal to trigger the habitat station bombs was sent with the expectation that the SLN was blamed for the resulting loss of life. It didn't work that way although we saw that the GA still hasn't seemed to tell the SLN that it wasn't their weapons that destroyed the habitats.

Brigade XO wrote:The Silver Bullets were possibly meant to be taken as new SLN capability which would allow their missiles to get through the defenses. At which point the signal to trigger the habitat station bombs was sent with the expectation that the SLN was blamed for the resulting loss of life. It didn't work that way although we saw that the GA still hasn't seemed to tell the SLN that it wasn't their weapons that destroyed the habitats.

But if the Silver Bullets had been an SLN weapon, then the SLN assault and the Hasta attack never would have been needed, because the Silver Bullets could have directly attacked the SLN targets. Instead the signature of the weapons that destroyed Mycroft was exactly the same as the weapons that killed the orbitals at Manticore (which were not from the League). The failure of the attack made it clear that the bombs in the orbitals at Beowulf were from the Malign, which the Grand Alliance knew about by then. However the Solarian League was being used by the Malign and so it had to be taken down quickly before it could trigger more damage.

PS: I think your first sentence is a misprint, since the Silver Bullets were intended to give the SLN fleet breathing room by slowing "down the targeting updates to the missile pods" (as you state later).

It is my impression that the reason that the Detweiler brothers were pushing the SLN to activate Operation Fabius was to frame the SLN for a major Eridani Edict violation when several Beowulf orbital habitats are destroyed.

To tlb, Fully agree about decimate. One in ten is different to completely destroy. A bug bear of mine as well.

Robert_A_Woodward wrote:It is my impression that the reason that the Detweiler brothers were pushing the SLN to activate Operation Fabius was to frame the SLN for a major Eridani Edict violation when several Beowulf orbital habitats are destroyed.

If you reread the musing by Capriotti, you will see that the Malign knew that everyone would recognize their interference and so added some more. The only thing more was the bombs and when you look at how little the SLN attack accomplished, it is difficult to blame them. You are right in the sense that there might have been some confusion if the bombs had exploded together at the correct time, but they were late and not due to missiles. And the time delay sequence built into the three explosions, was clearly an act of extreme personal hatred.

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)

tlb wrote: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.

Considering what the plan originally was, some modest research into ships and weapons seemed prudent to give the RF an edge. Investing heavily into stealth research seems like a no-brainer for a covert organization who does everything from the shadows. The streak drive seems like a nice addition for a covert organization which allows them to have a much short communication loop than everyone else. And wasn't it mentioned somewhere that the spider-drive grew out of something that had to do with the streak-drive research (if I remember correctly)?

We have to remember that Malign practiced industrial espionage or controlled Transtellars through proxies, so any kind of research or technical papers that caught their attention would be available to them.

Compare that to what Manticore did as an extension to Project Gram, they asked all their merchant Captains to gather information about any new technology or research they ran across or just the rumors about new technology.

It's clear that the MAlign never intended to go on the offensive like they did with Oyster Bay, everything they did before that was to make sure the RF would succeed and then after the fall of the SLN they would go on the offensive to crush their "enemies" (Operation Prometheus). That ended when the war between Haven and Manticore started and it became clear after a while that Manticore had significantly pushed the technological envelope, and that is something that is mentioned a couple of times by the Detweilers.

And brings us to Galton, which I spent some time thinking about. The reveal of Galton and it's subsequent defeat always felt like a retcon, but I have come to the realization that Galton was the boogeyman MAlign was going to use to crush their enemies while the RF was going to be the victors who ended the Galton threat cementing their position as the leaders of the civilized space.

Just think about that, Galton was going to be the bad guy the RF rescued everyone from. Any military research the MAlign did was entirely geared towards a couple of goals, making sure a Galton navy had an edge over other navies, making sure a RF navy had an edge over Galton and everyone else, making sure they could clandestinely engineer events through stealth to their benefit, making sure they always were inside others communication loop.

Manticore's technological breakthroughs made some of those goals unattainable unless Manticore was taken out, which is why the MAlign sicced the SLN on them even though the plan was firmly off the rails at that point.

Joat42 wrote:The streak drive seems like a nice addition for a covert organization which allows them to have a much short communication loop than everyone else. And wasn't it mentioned somewhere that the spider-drive grew out of something that had to do with the streak-drive research (if I remember correctly)?

The only connection that I remember between the two was that Herlander Simões was working on improvements to the streak drive and had a little knowledge of the spider drive (maybe just enough to know it existed). So, between him and the capture of Galton, the Grand Alliance should soon have working models of their own. But unless he knew just a little bit more about the spider drive, the GA is still left with that puzzle.

What little we know of the Renaissance Factor, it is not clear that they had anything more advanced than the Solarian League did. It seemed to me that their main attraction in the planned war between Haven and the League was that they were neutral, so as planets became disenchanted with the never ending war they could drop out of the League and join the Factor. How that allows the Factor to eventually impose genetic controls is beyond me (unless that is another multi-century phase).