Battle of Manticore

Scuffles wrote:

cthia wrote:
Moreover, I wonder about Haven's decision to attack Manticore before eliminating Grayson. Grayson would have been filleted — its backbone removed! So what, if Manticore would have been warned of a Case Zulu; what could it have done differently? Recall Honor to fulfill Home Fleet's job?

I'm not going to get into a discussion of what I think of AAC because I'm sure that's been done to death a dozen times before, but I will have a go at this point. I think attacking Grayson first is a terrible idea.

Sure, you can take Grayson. No doubt about that. But it's going to cost you. I don't know what sort of weight the Grayson version of Home Fleet is, but you can bet that it's a pretty solid block of SDs. I don't think you get out of there without losing somewhere between 50-100 SDs of your own (properly killed or sent home for repairs, doesn't matter) and that sort of loss significantly affects your ability to take Manticore at all.

Plus you'd lose both your strategic surprise (holy carp there's 400 SDs in a fleet that just pasted Grayson!) plus your tactical surprise (AND they fired a billion missiles at once!) which is going to make actually finishing the job way harder.

Taking Grayson out doesn't end the war. It's not worth the cost / risk. Grayson will sign your peace treaty without too much fuss if you can force Manticore to surrender.

Um, there really oughta be a white flag waving emoticon for those of us who wish to, need to surrender/resign. Scuffles, my niece had already torn me a new anal orifice for this part. She said "remember how I allow you to destroy one side of my defenses on the chessboard Uncle? To no avail? Okay then, nuff said." Then I read this.

I am waving the white flag. Laying down my King.

DarkEnigma wrote:In fact, a better question would be why didn't Haven launch Beatrice sooner? (RFC has said that Beatrice could have been the first offensive of the war after all) Or, after the Battle of Manticore, with the RHN in ruins and the RMN once more virtually unstoppable, why did Elizabeth send Pritchart an olive branch instead of a laser-head?

Well, logically the Peep fleet should have opened the war with a massive strike on Manticore....

kzt wrote:Well, logically the Peep fleet should have opened the war with a massive strike on Manticore....

That did seem like a big missed opportunity. If Haven wanted to send a message and force Manticore to negotiate in good faith than having control of their system would be the best way to accomplish that. It was weird that they just took back all the systems that they lost in the first war when they were going to hold plebiscites to determine their sovereignty anyway.

With the benefit of hindsight, and from a purely military perspective, not going straight for the throat does seem like a mistake. However, I think that's ignoring some factors:

1) At that point, this kind of strike right at your enemy's capital was still alien to the prevailing strategic paradigms of the galaxy. Those paradigms had started to shift in the aftermath of the First Havenite War with the move toward deep strikes and away from system-by-system advances, but even at the time of Operation Beatrice it was still a radical departure. It was only considered because it was the only possible chance for victory or a negotiated peace before Apollo entered fleetwide service and Manticore dictated terms from Haven orbit.

2) The RHN had no actual idea how their new equipment and tactics would fare against the RMN. They had computer, sims and wargame results, but until they actually started to exchange fire they didn't actually know what they were in for. Throwing an untested fleet straight into the teeth of the Manticore system's defences would be a huge strategic gamble. This is complicated further by:

3) Mounting that strike would commit a huge proportion of the available RHN wall of battle for an extended period. I believe Thiesman's on record in War of Honor as saying that the balance of forces isn't what he'd like before resuming hostilities, so if the strike on Manticore failed, or Manticore launched a strike of their own while the fleet was in transit (not an unthinkable idea, given the tone of the diplomatic correspondence Haven was receiving), the Havenite defenders would be caught very short.

4) Diplomatically, attacking Manticore at the outset would be a bad move. Haven was trying to rehabilitate its image as an honest player in the eyes of the galaxy at large, with some success. The way Thunderbolt played out strengthened that hand - Haven took back the occupied systems (one of the biggest points of contention in the pre-war dispute) and then held the plebiscites on those systems' futures - exactly as they'd promised to do. That painted Manticore as the bad guys in the piece and increased the foreign relations damage High Ridge's policies had caused. On the other hand, using Beatrice as the opening move would be the most aggresive move possible and exactly what the rest of the Haven Quadrant had learned to expect from the People's Republic. It might win the war, but the damage to Haven's reputation would be incalculable.

Amaroq wrote:

kzt wrote:Well, logically the Peep fleet should have opened the war with a massive strike on Manticore....

That did seem like a big missed opportunity. If Haven wanted to send a message and force Manticore to negotiate in good faith than having control of their system would be the best way to accomplish that. It was weird that they just took back all the systems that they lost in the first war when they were going to hold plebiscites to determine their sovereignty anyway.

Peep, not Havenite. I think kzt is talking about the first Havenite war.

Indeed, it's one of the major discontinuities in the HV, IMO. SLN doctrine has been established as "Attack the enemy's capital with the heaviest force you can muster, then deal with any other systems - if they still resist." Given that the SLN provided the starting template for most star navies, I'm curious as to why the People's Navy abandoned that doctrine, particularly as it should have worked excellently for their conquests up to that point.

To win, the Hereditary President needed to control Haven, Trevor's Star and Manticore. Any systems raided or seized by remaining RMN fleet elements are of no consequence in the long run, as once the MBS shipyards are gone, the RMN's expansion is immediately halted.

Amaroq wrote:

kzt wrote:Well, logically the Peep fleet should have opened the war with a massive strike on Manticore....

That did seem like a big missed opportunity. If Haven wanted to send a message and force Manticore to negotiate in good faith than having control of their system would be the best way to accomplish that. It was weird that they just took back all the systems that they lost in the first war when they were going to hold plebiscites to determine their sovereignty anyway.

What am I missing? I was under the impression that Bolthole had its own bottlenecks and was part and parcel why Shannon was shifted there. Did the Havenites actually have the numbers early enough on? Seems I remember a conversation from Theisman stating they were short of the numbers he thought they needed.

cthia wrote:What am I missing? I was under the impression that Bolthole had its own bottlenecks and was part and parcel why Shannon was shifted there. Did the Havenites actually have the numbers early enough on? Seems I remember a conversation from Theisman stating they were short of the numbers he thought they needed.

A good CNO will always want more. Parnell, McQueen and Theisman all knew they'd have a tough time fighting the RMN with numerical parity. There was another conversation involving Theisman stating that Giscard should've engaged Third Fleet, despite the Grayson reinforcements, though this conclusion was reached only after analysis of Thunderbolt's other battles were completed. For a bad CNO, see Rajampet.

Shannon's assignment was more to do with her innovative abilities, IMO. Once she had developed the prototypes and built the core of Haven's SD(P) fleet, production began at other shipyards after Theisman was forced to announce the existence of Haven's new ships. At that point, construction of SD(P)s likely became the responsibility of the RHN's equivalent of BuShips, while Shannon went on to R&D more equipment and tactics, like improved Cimeterres, Moriarty and the Donkey.

I just wanted to double check a question I had brought up in an earlier thread:

So D'Orville, Kuzak et al did not fire the system defense pods deployed around planetary orbit because they were worried about retaliatory fire hitting the planets.
Okay, I'll accept that.

Why didn't the defense planners for the Manticore system deploy the pods away from the planets (maybe at a nearby Lagrange point)?

That way the pods - which would only be used in the event of a major attack on the Manticore System - would be ready to fire without concerns about accidental Eridani violations from return fire.

On the other hand, if it was not reasonable to assume there was any possibility of such a problem, them why did the fleet commanders decline to use every resource at their disposal?

BobfromSydney wrote:I just wanted to double check a question I had brought up in an earlier thread:

So D'Orville, Kuzak et al did not fire the system defense pods deployed around planetary orbit because they were worried about retaliatory fire hitting the planets.
Okay, I'll accept that.

Why didn't the defense planners for the Manticore system deploy the pods away from the planets (maybe at a nearby Lagrange point)?

That way the pods - which would only be used in the event of a major attack on the Manticore System - would be ready to fire without concerns about accidental Eridani violations from return fire.

On the other hand, if it was not reasonable to assume there was any possibility of such a problem, them why did the fleet commanders decline to use every resource at their disposal?

I think at least part of the problem is light-speed lag - if the pods are separated from the control facility, there will be a significant delay while the launch signal travels to the pods. To avoid that you have to keep a control platform close to a pod cluster. If the control platform is positioned in a different orbit than the thing it's defending, it'll orbit at a different rate so their positions will diverge. That means you need multiple platforms covering the whole of the defended object's orbit, which disperses your firepower.

This is all pre-Apollo of course. Once Mycroft is up and running, you can use FTL fire-control to coordinate multiple pod clusters launching timed salvos to converge on the target from multiple vectors at the same time... Good luck rolling ship to interpose the wedge against that.

cthia wrote:In war, there are risks, risks that must be borne. These risks are weighed, 'possible gains against possible loss.' Risking Trevor's Star is acceptable. Risking Grayson, is possibly acceptable. Risking the Home system, is not acceptable.

The problem with such a stand on the defensive strategy is that it will inherently result in Manticore losing! The RHN is bigger at the time in question, and it's growing faster and they're closing the technological gap. So any plan which devolves down to "No Manticoran unit may be deployed outside the home system unless the home system has sufficient power to stand off the maximum conceivable RHN strike" is going to fail. The RHN will continue growing (thus requiring you to dedicate any future construction you make to countering that), they'll keep closing the technological gap, they'll choke off your commerce (wormholes excepted) and since they won't have to worry about any rear area raids they can concentrate more forces against you!

Which is not to say that I think deploying Apollo with 8th Fleet was a good idea. I think the chances of any enemy assuming what Haven did, namely "We have to win before they can get that widely deployed" are far too high. But sending out 8th Fleet was the thing to do. Get Haven reacting to you, damage their economy, hurt both military and civilian morale and force them to redeploy forces in response to domestic politics (thus meaning those forces can't be deployed against Manticore itself).