cthia wrote:Indeed. That part about the LACs should have been parenthesized. It was more for MY edification, and simply a throwaway statement. The point being, the idiots should have known the junction would be defended with SOMETHING, even if with only Grayson's baseball bats. Which would have been more than adequate for these gorillas.
Well, to take your hyperbole, this is probably what the Sollies were thinking: the neobarbs would defend the wormhole with baseball bats, clubs and laser pointers. There would be nothing to stop Tsang from completing her transit, if she needed.
I don't quite understand the rest of your post. I was under the impression just one or two SD(P)s could defend the junction against even that many ships coming through piecemeal and naked.
Non-hyperbolically: the point is that between defending the home system where the Queen (now Empress) lives and the Junction, the home system takes precedence. Lose it and game over. Lose the Junction and you can still live to fight another day. So even if there had been a division or squadron of SD(P)s at the Junction, by the time Filareta showed up, the SLN expected them to go to the inner system to help defend it. All hands on deck. That would leave the Junction undefended against transit, which would give Tsang a window of opportunity to get a beachhead in the Junction. Once she had a squadron of her SDs (12 minutes of transit), she could defend locally against being retaken.
We know that's a flawed conclusion. And THEY should have known it too. First, the aforementioned forts: those can't contribute to the defence of the home system even if they wanted to. Moving such a giant is a work of at least a week, probably longer. As I said before, forts are overt defences and anyone who transited the Junction in the last 3 months would have seen them.
Second, it ignores the fact that the RMN didn't need an SD(P) to defend the Junction from transit. Terekhov had shown that he could defeat 73 SDs with just cruisers. However poor the SLN thought of the RMN, they knew RMN cruisers in Talbott could control pods, so even if the RMN hadn't scaled that capability down to CLs, destroyers or frigates or LACs, they could just leave a single lone cruiser to defend the Junction from transit.
Even if the Silly Sols got every ship, Filareta and Tsang, in-system, what could they do with their... good fortune??? They were not only counting on the keepers of the castle to be gone, but for their magazines to be empty as well. If the mags were empty, they didn't need Tsang anyway.
Indeed. If 431 SDs couldn't do it, what would an extra 100 help?
With Apollo and the RMNs advantage in missile range, the junction can be left wide open.
ENTER AT YOUR OWN RISK
Gone is the need to even fortify the junction from Beowulf, now, it seems, certainly as long as Paul Revere has a relative living on Beowulf.
You need to have someone there to prevent a hostile force from doing what the GA did with Lacoön: block traffic. Once that someone is there, you can't dislodge them via transit. You'd have to send a force via hyperspace the long way around to do that, which takes time while you're losing commerce and fees.