The Two General's Problem

tlb wrote:As it happened the scout was not discovered and the attack was as successful as hoped and was still a failure, because Apollo was already too widely in use. They did destroy the production line, but Beowulf could build enough missiles to replace usage.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:And the Python Lump was out of the yards and working up.

I thought at least some of the ships were caught in the yards; so part of the lump was hit, but not all. They certainly were not empty.

tlb wrote:But suppose that after Oyster Bay, Haven had turned around and conquered Manticore (which was very unlikely, but what the Malign hoped would happen). How does this help the Detweiler Plan? Now Haven has Apollo and all of Manticore's goodies which could be built in Bolthole where they were safe from any attack.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:Had the MAlign already known that Bolthole existed? I don't think they could have missed that hundreds of capital ships had shown up from no known yard...

I do not recall mention of Bolthole from any Malign discussion, but as you say they should have been aware of the discrepancies. Then when the fighting restarted and all the new ships appeared, it should have been obvious. The Secretary of State Giancola and his brother, who knew about Bolthole, were not assets, but there was a Malign asset (Colonel Nesbitt) that worked closely with them and made Yves Grosclaude fly into a cliff.

tlb wrote:

ThinksMarkedly wrote:And the Python Lump was out of the yards and working up.

I thought at least some of the ships were caught in the yards; so part of the lump was hit, but not all. They certainly were not empty.

Unclear.

My understanding is that the "Python lump" is shorthand for all the (surviving) ships that were under construction when the new High Ridge took power and signed the ceasefire with Saint Just; causing Janacek/High Ridge to pause their construction. (So less the ones lost when Thunderbolt overran Grendelsbane)

It seems clear that many, likely a majority or even a large majority, of those ships had recently gotten out of the yards and were working up at Trevor' Star when OB hit.

But yes, Manticore did lose ships under construction. It's just unclear whether those were:
1) remaing ships of the Python Lump that were very nearly finished.
2) additional hulls that were laid down shortly after the resumption of the war (roughly 2 years before OB) -- so at a guess 75% finished for the large ones
3) hulls started across those 2 years as pre-ceasefire hulls were completed and their slips became available for new construction.

What Moh tells us is that:
"In effect, we’ve lost every ship under construction"
"fifteen of [dispersed yards]—none of which had units under construction—are undamaged"
"another eight [dispersed yards] are probably repairable, although the ships under construction have been so badly damaged we’re probably going to have to break them up and start over rather than trying to repair and complete them"

But it doesn't tell us how many were lost or how complete they were. Just that with the rebuilding of yards their first estimate is that Manticore won't be able to complete any new ships for at least two T-years and it'll be more like four T-years for any new capital ships.

Still, given how quickly Manicore had been able to complete a capital ship prior to OB I would expect, even with inevitable delays caused by having to resume long paused work, that nearly everything that had been laid down prior to the ceasefire would have been finished by OB. (And many of those that finished earlier presumably gave up their slips to IAN SD(P)s for their Apollo/Keyhole refits -- which also seem to have completed prior to OB)

So my guess is that most of the ships that were lost were post-Python Lump designs. Of course that means it was the newest and most modern designs that Manticore mostly lost -- more Invictus-class SD(P)s; or possibly even some 3rd generation SD(P) & CLAC classes; which we never got names of.

Jonathan_S wrote:So my guess is that most of the ships that were lost were post-Python Lump designs. Of course that means it was the newest and most modern designs that Manticore mostly lost -- more Invictus-class SD(P)s; or possibly even some 3rd generation SD(P) & CLAC classes; which we never got names of.

The problem with the Python Lump is that they were all ships that needed nearly the same amount of time to complete. That means I don't think a lot of slips had been freed significantly before OB so new ships could be laid down and work progress on them meaningfully. But if the Python Lump was out, then new ships were begun in all of those slips, so indeed maybe 100-150 capital ships were destroyed with OB... only those were likely less than a quarter complete.

That's at least for capital ships. For smaller ships, BC sized and lower, there may have been nearly-complete ships that were lost. As a point of fact, during UH we keep hearing that there's a shortage of the most modern escort ships: there are hardly any Saganami-Cs and the Nikes are few and far between - that's why Task Force 110 was only made up of Sag-A and B plus HMS Phantom and Vukodlak.

The bigger problem is likely that the freed slips were used to service damaged ships from the fighting with Haven, like we saw with HMS Hexapuma.