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GA response to SL attempts to prevent seccessions

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Re: GA response to SL attempts to prevent successions
Post by lyonheart   » Tue Jul 25, 2017 7:09 am

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Hi Weird Harold,

Thanks for emphasizing these points.

If the RF campaigns on being what the SL was supposed to be while avoiding any guilty taint for destroying the SL, they may just get some support from the "Never the GA!" crowd. ;)

OTOH, they may indeed want claim some credit for at least helping to kill the SL in some systems, possibly even core worlds.

L


Weird Harold wrote:
PeterZ wrote:When will they secede? My thoughts are that they won't secede along with Beowulf and other first movers. If they do, they get tagged as part of the movement that killed the Solarian League. If they secede later, they may be able to spin it as trying to be like the Phoenix rising from the ashes.


Not in the first wave, but probably leading the second wave. I don't think they're particularly worried about being tagged as having killed the League.
Any snippet or post from RFC is good if not great!
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Re: GA response to SL attempts to prevent successions
Post by lyonheart   » Tue Jul 25, 2017 7:12 am

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Hi PeterZ,

This has been a fascinating progression, thanks for your contributions so far.

Looking forward to more,

L


PeterZ wrote:
Weird Harold wrote:quote="PeterZ"When will they secede? My thoughts are that they won't secede along with Beowulf and other first movers. If they do, they get tagged as part of the movement that killed the Solarian League. If they secede later, they may be able to spin it as trying to be like the Phoenix rising from the ashes./quote

Not in the first wave, but probably leading the second wave. I don't think they're particularly worried about being tagged as having killed the League.


Agreed. Second wave of secessionists that simply cannot stomach what the League as morphed into after critically wounded them.
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Re: GA response to SL attempts to prevent successions
Post by lyonheart   » Tue Jul 25, 2017 7:24 am

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Hi PeterZ,

"Fascinating."

I'm not sure the US would have lasted long enough under the articles of Confederation for any such collusion between companies and what passed for the federal government, especially given the several decades for such large companies and corporations to expand into such international monsters.

I'd expect more from some of the already large corporations of the British empire, which might use some American or local companies in Latin America or Canada as fronts, while preventing any mid 19th century reform movements that attempted to limit them from succeeding.

"Very interesting" indeed.

L


PeterZ wrote:
kzt wrote:I think they expect it will collapse like the USSR and Warsaw Pact did.


Is that the best analogue?

I view the League as more a wealthy United States of America bound by the Articles of Confederation. Each state is well off and its citizens prosperous. They maintained the only taxing mechanism for the federal government as foreign tariffs and services fees. The federal government then would be facilitating companies exploiting South America in exchange for services fees and tariffs for imported goods. Mexico and Canada would be the Protectorates and Shell respectively.
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Re: GA response to SL attempts to prevent successions
Post by lyonheart   » Tue Jul 25, 2017 8:08 am

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Hi LDWechsler,

Kudos! You have a couple of excellent points!

Given how even the Eridani Edict gives system governments cover to kill millions of their citizens as and whenever they choose, without any condemnation.

Rather, the most powerful nation in history approves, albeit quietly.

So over the last 500 years or so, far more people have been killed by those who were intended to prevent it, than even the original catastrophe.

Getting the average solarian citizen to recognize and accept what has been perpetrated in his name may be very difficult, but the vast evidence will eventually, like the great Greenland glaciers, dent if not depress even their continental refusal to admit the truth.

Hopefully it won't take eons.

While the white nations were considered almost equal with Great Britain, they were still rather secondary to Great Britain, in particularly in the perceptions of the greater home population and especially by England's leaders, and expected to follow orders, rather than from their own free will, only that didn't happen after world war one for some peculiar reason.

But then the British empire didn't have a vast incredibly powerful navy to enforce its will.

L


ldwechsler wrote:
PeterZ wrote:quote="kzt"I think they expect it will collapse like the USSR and Warsaw Pact did./quote

Is that the best analogue?

I view the League as more a wealthy United States of America bound by the Articles of Confederation. Each state is well off and its citizens prosperous. They maintained the only taxing mechanism for the federal government as foreign tariffs and services fees. The federal government then would be facilitating companies exploiting South America in exchange for services fees and tariffs for imported goods. Mexico and Canada would be the Protectorates and Shell respectively.


It seems far more like the UN. There seems little control over the member planets except in terms of trade. When the planets involved in the planning for the Mesalliance are described, each one is different.

Also, taxing power is tiny...only on interplanetary trade.

In some ways it might be compared to the British Empire a century ago. Some places were treated as equals and others as protectorates.
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Re: GA response to SL attempts to prevent successions
Post by lyonheart   » Tue Jul 25, 2017 8:36 am

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Hi Weird Harold,

Great points again. :)

Yup, that veto power was quite a reference to Poland's Achilles heel, and a dead giveaway as to how weak the SL was intended to be and in some ways still is.

It might be considered an example of disruptive innovation in how Warshawski upset the SL's constitutional limits on its power, like how Whitney's cotton 'gin' made slavery profitable again when even southerners thought it would die out because it was getting too expensive.

Of course, about all you can do about disruptive innovation is expect the unexpected. ;)

Especially when its named Manticore. 8-)

L


Weird Harold wrote:
ldwechsler wrote:It seems far more like the UN. There seems little control over the member planets except in terms of trade. When the planets involved in the planning for the Mesalliance are described, each one is different.


A closer analogy would be the League Of Nations after WWI -- with a touch of Polish Confederation Parliament in the "everyone has a veto" element.
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Re: GA response to SL attempts to prevent successions
Post by Jonathan_S   » Tue Jul 25, 2017 10:48 am

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Thanks for the kind words lyonheart. I'm going split up parts of your post to reply directly to each, but it was interesting to consider your points. And I do look forward to what BuNine has in store for us in House of Lies.
lyonheart wrote:The cruiser bow and stern walls were only suspected by the RMN in SoS, expected only because the RHN had copied so much else, it being a fairly simple improvement.
Hmm, interesting. I'd always interpreted the quote as Mantie Intel knowing that some Havenite ships had been upgraded with bow walls, but rereading it I guess it could be taken as a hypothetical.
Here's the text:
Shadows of Saganami: Ch. 22 wrote:True, but if we're headed toward them, we've got our bow wall, and a ship as old as Bogey One doesn't. There's no way they could've refitted a bow wall without completely gutting her forward impeller rooms, and that brings us back to those fusion rooms of hers. If they were going to invest the time and money to refit bow wall technology, they'd've refitted those power plants at the same time, so without the one, they don't have the other
Terekhov didn't actually say any Havenite ships were known to have bow walls; he could have been saying that whether or not they had the tech it clearly wasn't present on this old Mars-class CA.

lyonheart wrote:We don't know the performance of RHN counter-missiles, but the lack of any discussion of a 'counter-missile gap' [ ;) ] has yet occurred in all the textev inclines me to believe this may be relatively moot, that one way or another Shannon Foraker has come up with another 'good enough' solution.
I though I recalled the PSN CMs were still ~1.5 million km birds; and then remembered I'd made a cheat sheet of text-ev on various missile performance. The quote was from War of Honor "Shannon Foraker's best efforts, even with reverse-engineered Solarian technology, had a maximum intercept range of little more than one and a half million"

And that's surprisingly low as the CM's the Starknight-class had before the 1st war were 60 seconds @ 900 KPS^2 = 1.6 million km range. But either is far short of the just over 2 million km Honor's fleet had at Sidemore during Thunderbolt or the 3.6 million km range the Mk31/Viper had a half year (or so) later.

So unless things changed significantly between Thunderbolt and now Haven does have a CM range gap.

lyonheart wrote:A dual drive missile at the RHN's known velocity capabilities would have a powered range of just over 27 million kilometers, almost 92.5% of the Mk-16; generally close enough I think given RHN numerical superiority, until the RMN discovered that fact.
They certainly could build a DDM. But remember that, last we heard, their MDMs were so large they only pod launched them - they didn't build broadside tubes for them. These are big capacitor powered beasts; and Haven's capacitors seem less energy dense than Manticores so they need more volume to store the same power.

Even a DDM built on that tech might be too big for anything but maybe a BC (or a Roland style spinal launch on, say, a CA) to lug around. But yes, it's certainly possible that Bolthole did develop and build at least a few DDM BCs even with the size penalties you'd pay for their missile tech.
Last edited by Jonathan_S on Tue Jul 25, 2017 11:08 am, edited 2 times in total.
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Re: GA response to SL attempts to prevent successions
Post by PeterZ   » Tue Jul 25, 2017 11:03 am

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lyonheart wrote:Hi PeterZ,

"Fascinating."

I'm not sure the US would have lasted long enough under the articles of Confederation for any such collusion between companies and what passed for the federal government, especially given the several decades for such large companies and corporations to expand into such international monsters.

I'd expect more from some of the already large corporations of the British empire, which might use some American or local companies in Latin America or Canada as fronts, while preventing any mid 19th century reform movements that attempted to limit them from succeeding.

"Very interesting" indeed.

L

That's why I thought of the Articles of Confederation. It too was unworkable from the outset. If the Founders decided to force it through with whatever practical traditions were required to keep the federal government functioning, it may well have ended up like the SL. The States retained sovereignty within their borders and the Federal government exercised its authority and collected taxes elsewhere.
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Re: GA response to SL attempts to prevent seccessions
Post by Loren Pechtel   » Tue Jul 25, 2017 10:53 pm

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It occurs to me another strategy the GA could use:

When it looks like a system is going to break away, send out a warship. At first it would be at least a cruiser, later it could be any warship, with as many pods attached to the hull as it can carry. It leaves hyper far out and slips in in stealth, well away from the travel lanes.

If the Sollies show up it announces it's presence, but not it's class, by Hermes bouy--they don't even know where it's hiding.

"Attention targets: This is a warship of the Grand Alliance, we do not wish interference with this system's right of self determination. You are currently within the range of my missiles, you do not even know where I am. As we do not enjoy killing the defenseless you are being given the option to surrender your forces to the government of this system. In case your superiors have failed to inform you of our capabilities beware that our missiles have a powered range of 30mkm, arrive at half the speed of light, hit harder than your capital ship missiles and you have a minimal chance of intercepting them. The only way you can 'win' a battle is if I run out of missiles. <Flagship> will be target #1."

After a Sollie fleet or two gets savaged this way think they'll be interested in trying it any more? And even if the Mandarins want to, will captains commit suicide that way?
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Re: GA response to SL attempts to prevent seccessions
Post by Jonathan_S   » Wed Jul 26, 2017 1:29 am

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Loren Pechtel wrote:It occurs to me another strategy the GA could use:

When it looks like a system is going to break away, send out a warship. At first it would be at least a cruiser, later it could be any warship, with as many pods attached to the hull as it can carry. It leaves hyper far out and slips in in stealth, well away from the travel lanes.

If the Sollies show up it announces it's presence, but not it's class, by Hermes bouy--they don't even know where it's hiding.

"Attention targets: This is a warship of the Grand Alliance, we do not wish interference with this system's right of self determination. You are currently within the range of my missiles, you do not even know where I am. As we do not enjoy killing the defenseless you are being given the option to surrender your forces to the government of this system. In case your superiors have failed to inform you of our capabilities beware that our missiles have a powered range of 30mkm, arrive at half the speed of light, hit harder than your capital ship missiles and you have a minimal chance of intercepting them. The only way you can 'win' a battle is if I run out of missiles. <Flagship> will be target #1."

After a Sollie fleet or two gets savaged this way think they'll be interested in trying it any more? And even if the Mandarins want to, will captains commit suicide that way?

I like understating the missile capabilities (I'm assuming those pods are full of MDMs: 65 million km and 0.8c) but I'd claim a bit more performance - 30 million km is close enough for someone carrying Cataphracts to think they've got a fighting chance with a ballistic coast phase thrown in.

I don't think it's a real secret anymore than GA MDMs had that 3rd drive - but you could claim 44 million km and (if you kept to that) you might make SL Intel think your final drive was, like their Cataphract 2nd stage, a fixed accel CM derived 75 second burn)
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Re: GA response to SL attempts to prevent seccessions
Post by kzt   » Wed Jul 26, 2017 1:59 am

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It's like the chinese navy sending a warship to every island in Indonesia that is thinking about seceding.

There are 17,000 islands in Indonesia, and the PLAN combat fleet consists of:
1 aircraft carrier
4 amphibious transport docks
32 landing ship tanks
31 landing ship medium
29 destroyers
49 frigates
34 corvettes
109 missile boats
94 submarine chasers
17 gunboats
29 mine countermeasure vessels
68 submarines
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