Attacking Darius:

Brigade XO wrote:A whole bunch of people have the names of senior Alphas. Like probably the leaders of the 12 initial RF members. Fortunately for the Detweilers and friends, very few people actually know where Darius is.
It's a bit tough to come calling on the head Alphas if they are in a place you can't get to. We 1st see them hiding on Mesa and running an entire Star Nation though trickery and misdirection and getting other people do do the messy work while - for hundreds of years- planning to just dump Mesa and help it burn to cover up their involvement.

Now they are off at Darius, the plans are "getting modified" and they just lost the arsenal system they had been using for mostly equipment production- and as another sacrificial decoy.

So where are they going to go next? The GA 1st has to figure out that the Alignment trail leads to the Felix System. Then they- a fast pass though it will show there is little to no activity in the system- so they will have to discover the wormhole. That does present a problem since it doesn't take all that much to turn the wormhole into a killing ground so the GA can't go at it that way. Of course that also means that the Alignment has to have at least one other way (other than just a longish hyperspace trip) to get people and ships from Darius to the rest of Human occupied space- at which time they will be vulnerable to the same problems that lead the GA to Galton.

If they were smart (and we keep being told they are very smart) they will probably end up starting the revised Oyster Bay operation about the time they have 20 to 30 LDs worked up with the required (if they think they need them) escorts and certainly a massive logistics train to resupply the LD as they move around destroying orbital infrastructure belonging to the rest of humanity. Break the capacity to maintain any serious naval presence by any Star Nations and you open them up for attack by other you have not so dealt with. Fairly soon people will notice that while systems A, B, C etc have been hit by the invisible ships but K, P, R, X and L have not but have been taking advantage of situations and taking over what has been trashed......and you have a lot of unhappy people looking to keep K, P, R, X, L and others from being the aggressors going after your own planet. See, right back to the bedrock of The Plan. Some "minor" hits on RF systems and PRESTO- the plucky RF is trying to save the day......

The Alignment has no difficulty killing millions of people just to advance their plan.

Were all of the head Alphas hiding on Mesa? I thought only one, maybe two, of the Detweilers were on Mesa. One would wonder who was at Darius. I don't think they would place all of their Alpha eggs in one basket.

Interesting post Brigade.

penny wrote:Were all of the head Alphas hiding on Mesa? I thought only one, maybe two, of the Detweilers were on Mesa. One would wonder who was at Darius. I don't think they would place all of their Alpha eggs in one basket.

All of the Detweilers had been at Mesa. It was a big deal when Albrecht Detweiler traveled to Darius to send away the Oyster Bay fleet.

By the time the Grand Alliance fleet arrived at Mesa, all the cloned sons had moved to Darius and only Albrecht Detweiler and his wife were left behind. Their suicide in the nuclear explosions was the emotional trigger for the bombs on Beowulf's orbitals.

tlb wrote:

penny wrote:Were all of the head Alphas hiding on Mesa? I thought only one, maybe two, of the Detweilers were on Mesa. One would wonder who was at Darius. I don't think they would place all of their Alpha eggs in one basket.

All of the Detweilers had been at Mesa. It was a big deal when Albrecht Detweiler traveled to Darius to send away the Oyster Bay fleet.

By the time the Grand Alliance fleet arrived at Mesa, all the cloned sons had moved to Darius and only Albrecht Detweiler and his wife were left behind. Their suicide in the nuclear explosions was the emotional trigger for the bombs on Beowulf's orbitals.

Thanks. Now that you mention it, I do seem to recall some of that. But it begs the question of who was minding the hen house. The Detweilers have always gave me the impression of being in total control of everything, and paranoid to boot. If all of the Detweilers were located on Mesa then someone else had to be in charge at Darius. An Admiral perhaps? Anyway, there had to be lots of activity communicating back and forth; which could have been risky.

But your statement that Albrecht sortied back to Darius to send off the Oyster Bay contingency, seems to imply that Darius is indeed their base of operations. And it also appears to dispell the notion that Darius is not militaristic.

penny wrote:But your statement that Albrecht sortied back to Darius to send off the Oyster Bay contingency, seems to imply that Darius is indeed their base of operations. And it also appears to dispell the notion that Darius is not militaristic.

Exactly, that is what all of us thought up to the point that Galton was thrown at us. But now we know, from the Deweiler who went to Galton in TEiF, that the plan is to make Darius seem pacific and Galton was the source of all the bad things that had happened.

So how is the author going to make that work?

penny wrote:But your statement that Albrecht sortied back to Darius to send off the Oyster Bay contingency, seems to imply that Darius is indeed their base of operations. And it also appears to dispell the notion that Darius is not militaristic.

The Detweilers appear to be functioning as managing CEO and Chiefs of Staff for the Alignment. On the other hand there is the Long Range Planning Board which is doing planning, operating the Star Line genetics project and implementation its decisions for ongoing experimentation and improvements to the Star Lines.

We don't really know who is running the day to day operations and so many of the programs at Darius. Big gap in what we know.
How, for instance, is the non-slave non-Star Line (general population) of Darius governed?

Who and what is operating the equivalent of Bureau of Ships for the nascent Alignment Navy along with who and what is doing the selecting and training of the personal of that Navy. I say nascent because, if you don't count the Mesa SDF (which has constantly referred to as a comic opera force rather than a highly functioning SDF on the order of Beowulf, Grayson, Erwhon, etc) and the navy now being built (we presume) at Darius is primarily capital ships but without a large core of experienced officers and NCOs.

Galton was clearly a militaristic society but also clearly subservient to the direction of the Detweilers- or at least with the Detweilers as the messengers, visiting Inspectors Generals if you will- of the central political structure of Darius and the Alignment.

Someone or some group must have been at least managing Darius and its various components for the Alignment with the Detweilers living on Mesa. On the other hand, Mesa had been the central location for the Alignment since Leonard moved the operations and Mesaformed the planet.

And the Alignment appears to have a lot of highly compartmentalized and yet independent operating sections that run stuff but we don't really have a clue how that function except that there is clearly a very high level of "concern" that stepping outside the limits of your warrant-which do carry a bunch of latitude- to operate can get really ugly (and fatal) really fast. Lots of confidence, background knowledge that your life is not your own if you screw up badly.

Heck, there are the nanites that will kill you very effectively and quickly if, apparently, you step over some set of parameters encoded in the nanites. This is also the Philosophy that regularly "culls" individuals (or whole genome projects) that are failed experiments or are becoming too dangerous to have around. You are ok until you are judged defective (not the right result or not developing in the right direction) or become a liability to some part of the Alignment plan.

Wonderful management style. (sarcasm intended)

tlb wrote:

penny wrote:But your statement that Albrecht sortied back to Darius to send off the Oyster Bay contingency, seems to imply that Darius is indeed their base of operations. And it also appears to dispell the notion that Darius is not militaristic.

Exactly, that is what all of us thought up to the point that Galton was thrown at us. But now we know, from the Deweiler who went to Galton in TEiF, that the plan is to make Darius seem pacific and Galton was the source of all the bad things that had happened.

So how is the author going to make that work?

I am not going to place the blame, or credit, for this on your head tlb, because I have heard it before.

But I do not understand the sentiment because the misdirection is already working! The GA does not know about any spider-drive ship. They might suspect there may be plans for something, depending on what Simoes told them. But Oyster Bay was not dependent on a spider-drive, because that operation could have been conducted by a regular warship from the far edge of the system after having crept in for days. Even the g-torp would not be suspected after Galton because the GA might think the Hastas were used as the Hastas would have been undetectable as well in peacetime while not at general quarters. Since the space stations were destroyed, then the GA will simply conclude that their production facilities and evidence was destroyed as well. Their versions of Hephaestus, if you will.

So, it is already working, unless the GA moves to DEFCON 2, at the very least.

penny wrote:I am not going to place the blame, or credit, for this on your head tlb, because I have heard it before.

But I do not understand the sentiment because the misdirection is already working! The GA does not know about any spider-drive ship. They might suspect there may be plans for something, depending on what Simoes told them. But Oyster Bay was not dependent on a spider-drive, because that operation could have been conducted by a regular warship from the far edge of the system after having crept in for days. Even the g-torp would not be suspected after Galton because the GA might think the Hastas were used as the Hastas would have been undetectable as well in peacetime while not at general quarters. Since the space stations were destroyed, then the GA will simply conclude that their production facilities and evidence was destroyed as well. Their versions of Hephaestus, if you will.

So, it is already working, unless the GA moves to DEFCON 2, at the very least.

Since you had heard it all before, why state "seems to imply that Darius is indeed their base of operations. And it also appears to dispell the notion that Darius is not militaristic" as if it were new to you?

We do NOT know that it is working. The GA has only begun to examine the evidence that is intended to "prove" that Galton is the sole source of the trouble. We do not know that it is consistent with the facts. I am sure that the GA is convinced that Galton was the source of some of the troubles, after all it was the track of the weapons deliveries that pointed to Galton's location. But that does not exclude the possibility of other such sites.

What is more interesting is what happens if the Ga ever arrives at Darius? Will all the spiders and arms manufacturing have been moved somewhere else; along with the various people that have guilty knowledge?

penny wrote:I am not going to place the blame, or credit, for this on your head tlb, because I have heard it before.

But I do not understand the sentiment because the misdirection is already working! The GA does not know about any spider-drive ship. They might suspect there may be plans for something, depending on what Simoes told them. But Oyster Bay was not dependent on a spider-drive, because that operation could have been conducted by a regular warship from the far edge of the system after having crept in for days. Even the g-torp would not be suspected after Galton because the GA might think the Hastas were used as the Hastas would have been undetectable as well in peacetime while not at general quarters. Since the space stations were destroyed, then the GA will simply conclude that their production facilities and evidence was destroyed as well. Their versions of Hephaestus, if you will.

So, it is already working, unless the GA moves to DEFCON 2, at the very least.

Regular warships wouldn't have been able to clear their emergence area undetected before DesDiv 265.2 "The Silver Cepheids" showed up to investigate the possible sensor ghost that was the Shark's sneaking in. Only the spider drive let them accelerate hard enough, and stealthily enough, to get outside the search pattern while still staying off Manticore's hypersensitive long range grav sensors.

That said, it's possible that a similar attack could have been pulled off with freighters dropping off ballistic pods -- but it'd be very hard to get the necessary time on target coordination to hit every target before any had time to react.

Still, the GA's definitely knows about the spider drive, and that some kind of vessels using it were used for Oyster Bay. They specifically, and publicly, talked about spider and streak drives in their Press, and those stories were even getting some distribution in the League

A Rising Thunder - Ch. 17 wrote:“Oh, it gets better, Father,” Benjamin said harshly. “I don’t know how much information McBryde actually handed Zilwicki and Cachat, or how much substantiation they’ve got for it, but they got one hell of a lot more than we’d want them to have! They’re talking about virus-based nanotech assassinations, the streak drive, and the spider drive, and they’re naming names about something called ‘the Mesan Alignment.’

And a bit earlier (chapter 11) Honor says that from what Simões told them of the Spider drive "dovetails entirely too neatly with what happened to us". However, they likely have no details on the exact size(s) designs(s) and capability of the spider ships (other than the obvious that the ships used at OB, which seem to have been spider ships, had to have been capable of managing the pods of Cataphracts used in that half of the operation. Simões isn't likely to have that information, and there's no indication that the Green Pines data that Jack gave them before the place blew would have had naval construction details.

So while they know of the existence of ships with spider drives they likely don't know anything than that about them.

And they also may not specifically know that the g-torps also carried spider drives (not seeing text-ev either way); but they definitely knew that the graser weapons used during Oyster Bay were significantly more powerful than the ones used at Galton. (Which is suspicious enough to keep them digging away at inconsistencies between what their reading from OB say vs what they were hit with, or recovered data about, at Galton)

Jonathan_S wrote:Regular warships wouldn't have been able to clear their emergence area undetected before DesDiv 265.2 "The Silver Cepheids" showed up to investigate the possible sensor ghost that was the Shark's sneaking in. Only the spider drive let them accelerate hard enough, and stealthily enough, to get outside the search pattern while still staying off Manticore's hypersensitive long range grav sensors.

BTW, this only makes sense if the gravitic arrays that detected the emergence from hyper could also detect active wedges. The Silver Cepheids took 12 hours to reach the emergence location because that's how long the signal would take to arrive at 62c. A non-GA warship pulling 400 gravities would cover 3.4 light-hours before having to shut down to hide, which is way beyond what a ship-borne sensor could hope to detect and any fleet could hope to search in reasonable time.

So they'd send someone back and get a new reading from the array, which confirms, "yes, there's a wedge and it's moving towards the inner system." That would give them a vector to search. But if whoever this was is intent on staying hidden, they'd use thrusters to move laterally. With the 12-hour delay in getting any information from the array, it's highly unlikely the Desron could catch up with the invader before the invader shut down the wedge anyway at around 17 hours, when they'd reached 0.8c.

However, this still means the defenders know someone is coming and roughly when they'll arrive.

And don't forget the other end of this attack: deceleration. If the gravitic arrays could see a wedge a light-month out, then they definitely can see one a light-day or so when the attacker decelerates to make a firing pass.

This is unlikely to be possible with thrusters. You'd need a 1.6c delta-v in thrusters to do that. And without wedges, this is rocket science and Einstein & Tsiolkovsky would like to have a word.

The problem is that this capability has never been hinted at. I suppose it's never been needed in discussion, but it still sounds like a big omission.

RFC may have decided to retcon this by dividing it by 4, as TEiF talks about light-weeks instead of light-months. With a mere 4-hour headstart (3 plus the Desron travel time), a 400-gravity ship would have travelled less than 23 light-minutes, which is far more reasonable to search. The target would be coasting at only 0.19c, trying to outrun a search of recon drones capable of over 0.5 c/hour of acceleration. In fact, inserting only a light-week out would be a better misdirection, because the defenders would far more likely conclude that there was no ship there to be found because it just translated back up to hyperspace.

And yet, if the gravitic arrays could track emergence only but not an active wedge, then penny is right that anyone could have perpetrated those attacks with wedge-drive ships, without the need for a spider.

If I was running the MAN I’d cripple the RMN by having a DD squadron or two weaving in and out of hyper and forcing them to respond to multiple events per day. And when they got all comfortable with responding to ghosts and my very stealthy buoys had figured out SOP, maybe they would come out of hyper and find something waiting just for them? What does the RMN do when their patrol never comes home?