munroburton wrote:Not very much. Any ships the PRH puts in Basilisk to keep it is unavailable elsewhere. They still have to assault the wormhole Junction through hyperspace to clear out the minefields and such before any wormhole transits can be usefully performed, the same way White Haven took Trevor's Star.
Once that part's done, possessing Basilisk does allow them to transit twice as many ships(either sequentially or simultaneously), but at the cost of pre-positioning those ships. Meaning they're not available for the attack on the Junction defenses or to defend Trevor's Star against a counter-attack - without the Junction itself, they can't imitate White Haven's emergency reinforcement of Basilisk from Trevor's Star.
IMO for the PRH, grabbing Basilisk was mainly about gaining the terminus revenue from the Silesia Triangle(Manticore-Gregor-Basilisk) traffic. At the time, this was a high-risk strategy, but one requiring comparatively little investment to achieve given the messy position Manticore's anti-annexationists had forced.
Interesting take on the benefit of taking Basilisk.
I do not believe that capturing Trevor's Star was an strictly offensive move in the eventual attack on Manticore. Given how emphatic RFC is about the futility of an assault through a wormhole against forts and minefields, I believe that Trevor's Star was intended to shut a door against raiders into Haven's interior regions if the war on Manticore became extended.
The problem, as you state, is that Basilisk and Trevor's Star then require sufficient defense forces to prevent Manticore claiming them through a hyperspace assault. These forces cannot support each other and seriously weaken the force available for a direct attack on Manticore from Haven. It might be possible to coordinate a simultaneous 3-prong attack, but that opens the way for complications - unless they could first consolidate someplace that was a short hop to the objective.