--snipping self--
fallsfromtrees wrote:SharkHunter wrote:...
Lotta thoughts in many threads about what the LennyDets (MAlign superdreadnoughts, likely pod-dispensing) are going to do, stacked up against Grand Alliance hardware. Ultimately they obviously HAVE to do that but with Manticore already strangling the Solarian League bureaucratic money source, and with the GA in "missile preservation mode" temporarily, what's to stop the LennyDets or even the Sharks from trashing/destroying most or all of the bigger and known SLN fleet bases and mothballed fleet(s) and just blaming it on Manticore?
Seems like a decently nasty/evil and efficient political approach to making things much, much worse...
It's not clear, at least to me, that hte Lenny Dets are pod layers. They were designed before the pod layer concept came out. It was stated that they could handle the graser torps internally, but I have always assumed that that meant they were fired from missile tubes.
The argument against the second is that unless you kill everyone in those fleet bases, the shapes and sensor patterns of the Sharks Lenny Dets are sufficiently different from the standard warship, that even the SLN will realize that someone has just hit them with the same weapons that trashed Manticore, and give credence to the GA belief that there is someone out there out to get both of us.
I think you're right about the impeller sig problem, but you could fake a huge impeller arrival with Manpower freighters hypering in at the appropriate time. Drop in thirty freighters or so to simulate a "mass fleet arrival"; once the graser torps and missiles are ready to fire, move them towards the hyper limit, and at the equivalent long range attack time, ka-boom, then hyper the freighters back out.
Not sure if the LDs's are pod layers either, but given that the Technodyne pods in Filerata's Folly came from somewhere nearby, I'd think that they'd at least have the ability to drop limpeted Cataphract-C based pods.
The rest of my thinking is that We already know that Manticore doesn't really want to attack the whole league, they just want to make sure they don't piss off enough of the systems to cause a Bolthole development process, and Balkanizing the SL is the best way to accomplish that. The MAlign wants the balkanization, but with themselves in charge.
Whether it makes sense to trash the SLN mothballed fleet as part of that process or not is the primary question. At least in the near term, the GA is in "missile preservation mode", so the previous plan of counter commerce raiding went --pffft--, and presumably that includes instructing the forces holding the wormholes,etc. to not go hog-wild using their missiles. Likely the Mandarins wouldn't mind nothing happening for a while so they can get the SLN's heads out of their butts / ostritch-in-sand mode into active R&D and smarter defense mode.
So my logic is that both waiting-game situations make the MAlign's problems much much worse, and even though the wheels are coming off Albrecht's current plans, destabilizing things even further "right now" is the only chance for the RF to take over.
