Maya Sector(SPOILER)

Sigs wrote:There was no way they could have seen the collapse of the League, it could have survived another 5 years or 5,000 years without the external pressure of the War with the SEM.

Honor saw it coming without being privy to all the information that a sector governor and FF sector commander would have. Why do you say they couldn't see the writing on the wall?

The Sepoy Option was (in theory) structured so that it could just remain a contingency plan until the League did self-destruct. If the League did NOT self-destruct, the contingency plan would never be used.

There were, in fact, external pressures before the war with the SEM; as well as during -- Remember the MAlign? Remember how they engineered the war with the SEM? Remember all the deep-cover star lines manipulating the League into stupid, counter-productive actions?

Remember the texev that the MAlign was priming many other sector governors to also secede?

There's no way the League was lasting more than a few decades, let alone 5000 years.

In the books it seems like the Maya Sector's Senior civilian and military leadership has been planning to secede from the League for a long time, enough time to infect recruit a large group of loyal supporters. Unless they had a magic crystal ball that told them that the RMN and SLN would be pushed into open conflict and knew the balance of power would be against the SLN their chances of success were slim to none. If the RMN and later the GA did not engage the SLN then no amount of planning and no amount of quality officers and crew would have overcome their their enormous disadvantage when compared the the SLN. The SLN had 2,300 SD's in commission as well as probably more then 9,000 lighter combatants, there is no way that Maya could have gotten anywhere near enough numbers to make the SLN sweat and the League was the biggest strongest nation which automatically would have meant no outside help for Maya as no-one would want to tangle with the SLN. So without the Technological revolution in the Haven sector their plans amount to nothing.

Just what the hell were they thinking if they started the planning before anyone even the RMN realized how dramatic the change in technology war. No matter what, they would have been swamped by the SLN without the SLN breaking a sweat.

I saw a documentation on TV about the cold war. There was mentioned that you need tree times more Troops as a attacker, because the defender has alot of things at his side (shorter logistic lines, for example)

In Honorverse you don´t need much people to Defend a star system. A few thousand pods with big missles and the invader gets a nice missle rain as a welcome. And remember: pods are no new invention. The new was to put them on a spaceship.

Sigs wrote:In the books it seems like the Maya Sector's Senior civilian and military leadership has been planning to secede from the League for a long time, enough time to infect recruit a large group of loyal supporters. Unless they had a magic crystal ball that told them that the RMN and SLN would be pushed into open conflict and knew the balance of power would be against the SLN their chances of success were slim to none. If the RMN and later the GA did not engage the SLN then no amount of planning and no amount of quality officers and crew would have overcome their their enormous disadvantage when compared the the SLN. The SLN had 2,300 SD's in commission as well as probably more then 9,000 lighter combatants, there is no way that Maya could have gotten anywhere near enough numbers to make the SLN sweat and the League was the biggest strongest nation which automatically would have meant no outside help for Maya as no-one would want to tangle with the SLN. So without the Technological revolution in the Haven sector their plans amount to nothing.

Just what the hell were they thinking if they started the planning before anyone even the RMN realized how dramatic the change in technology war. No matter what, they would have been swamped by the SLN without the SLN breaking a sweat.

Maldorian wrote:I saw a documentation on TV about the cold war. There was mentioned that you need tree times more Troops as a attacker, because the defender has alot of things at his side (shorter logistic lines, for example)

In Honorverse you don´t need much people to Defend a star system. A few thousand pods with big missles and the invader gets a nice missle rain as a welcome. And remember: pods are no new invention. The new was to put them on a spaceship.

Although it is true that a pod-layer warship is a recent innovation, you ignore the changes in pod design that made the new pods a major improvement in the Havenite war. This is from chapter 17 of The Short Victorious War:

The old pods' launchers had lacked the powerful mass-drivers which gave warships' missiles their initial impetus. That, in turn, gave them a lower initial velocity, and since their missiles had exactly the same drives as any other missile, they couldn't make up the velocity differential unless the ship-launched birds were stepped down to less than optimal power settings. If you didn't step your shipboard missiles down, you lost much of the saturation effect because the velocity discrepancy effectively split your launch into two separate salvos. Yet if you did step them down, the slower speed of your entire launch not only gave the enemy more time to evade and adjust his ECM, but also gave his active defenses extra tracking and engagement time.
-- snip --
But the point at hand was that the same improvements could be applied to parasite pods, and, despite Hemphill's objections, they had been. Of course, the new pods—with ten tubes each, not six—were intended for ships of the wall, which had plenty of redundant fire control to manage them, not battlecruisers. But it sounded like Turner was finding the answer to that, and their missiles were actually heavier than the standard ship-to-ship birds. With the new lightweight mass-drivers BuShips had perfected, their performance could equal or even exceed that of normal, ship-launched missiles, and their warheads were more destructive to boot. The pods were clumsy, of course, and towing them did unfortunate things to a warship's inertial compensator field, which held down maximum accelerations by twenty-five percent or so. They were also vulnerable to proximity soft kills, since they carried neither sidewalls nor radiation shielding of their own, but if they got their shots off before they were killed, that hardly mattered.

Sigs wrote:

TFLYTSNBN wrote:Australian independence.

https://www.australia.gov.au/about-gove ... federation

I counter with American Independence.Same empire, different time period different outcome.

The Revolutionary succeeded only because the British Empire was to preoccupied with confronting France to deploy enough troops to defeat the rebels. Such a scenario of an external threat to the SL was not plausible. General chaos as the SL disintergrated was plausible. A variation of the Sepoy Option would be to remain nnominally a part of thr SL but with more autonomy than allowed by OFS.

Sigs wrote:There was no way they could have seen the collapse of the League, it could have survived another 5 years or 5,000 years without the external pressure of the War with the SEM.

Weird Harold wrote:Honor saw it coming without being privy to all the information that a sector governor and FF sector commander would have. Why do you say they couldn't see the writing on the wall?

The Sepoy Option was (in theory) structured so that it could just remain a contingency plan until the League did self-destruct. If the League did NOT self-destruct, the contingency plan would never be used.

There were, in fact, external pressures before the war with the SEM; as well as during -- Remember the MAlign? Remember how they engineered the war with the SEM? Remember all the deep-cover star lines manipulating the League into stupid, counter-productive actions?

Remember the texev that the MAlign was priming many other sector governors to also secede?

There's no way the League was lasting more than a few decades, let alone 5000 years.

All the information about Malign and its covert manipulations was limited to the readers and was not known in universe until after Crown of Slaves.

What Honor knew was that the Solarian League might be vulnerable to fracturing and that was the only good way for Manticore to win a war with them. So both pressures on the League became open knowledge or operative long after the initial plans for the Sepoy Option. I think the statement that is highlighted above is the most important one and even if never implemented; the degree of independence that it gave the Maya Sector was a good thing in itself.

Looking back at the text, one reason Honor knew that the League could fracture was precisely because she knew about the Sepoy Option. This is from chapter 44 of Storm from the Shadows where she describes the way she thinks the League could be defeated:

And I'm seeing quite a few signs that the League is at or very near—if, in fact, it isn't already past—the tipping point. It's too decadent, too corrupt, too totally assured of its invincibility and supremacy. Its internal decision-making is too unaccountable, too divorced from what the League's citizens really want—or, for that matter, think they're actually getting! We were just talking about Governor Barregos and Admiral Roszak. Hasn't it occurred to any of you that what's really happening in the Maya Sector is only the first leaf of autumn? That there are other sectors—not only in the Verge, but in the Shell, and even in the Old League itself—that are likely to entertain thoughts of breaking away if the League's veneer of inevitability ever cracks?

ywing14 wrote:The Sepoy Option was specifically planned on the premise that the SL was going to come apart at some point. And the signs of this they were seeing we pretty accurate given the fact the MAlign was pulling the strings to make it fracture. It was the MAlign's stated goal. Their decision to plan for the SL's demise was completely reasonable. Given they way the SL is divided into sectors I'm not surprised Barregos had contingency plans for a time with out the league.

Of course, Barregos et al could have been at one point part of the MAlign and so gotten an insight into their long term plans. Coupled with visible signs of the fracturing, the Sepoy was more than a contingency plan. It was a plan to deal with a real threat. The time frame sped up with the technical ascendency of the RMN over the RHN. The Sepoy Option's contingency planning took advantage of the RMN's superiority over the SLN to begin their naval purchases from Erewhon. However, Sepoy was not a contingency should events arise, but a plan based an expected geopolitical event.

The Solarian League was huge. That means the Fringe was even bigger. And the Fringe systems were exploited in ways that meant that *eventually* the pot was destined to "boil over".

Given the SL's overwhelming ability to crush a single revolt; that meant that once someone jumped *everyone* would follow - it's the only way that at least *some* of the rebellions might succeed.

From the texts; we know that the Maya Sector was a bit different from most of the others. It had been a voluntary association with the League; and it's sector governor had to be accepted by the sector's citizens; rather than just appointed and foisted off on them like in other sectors. So as long as Barregos had the approval of the Mayan citizenry; it would be difficult for the League to replace him. And if his underlings had his approval, probably likewise for them. The only problem would be if someone *wanted* to leave and graze in a pasture of their own.

We also know that he'd probably been the governor there for at most 10-20 years. The war between Manticore and Haven had lasted over that entire period; and he - being closer and apparently much smarter than the folks in Old Chicago had seen the results of the technological advances first hand. Once he managed to make an arrangement with Erewon; then Sepoy could become an actual operation rather than a contingency plan.

After all, if Manticore could basically hold off Solarian attacks mostly on it own despite the SLN's huge advantage in numbers of ships it could deploy (remember that 70+ superdreadnaughts were destroyed/captured using only cruisers and pods in Thimble) with only having a few star systems to build from; then what could an entire sector of resources do with access to similar technology?

OrlandoNative wrote:After all, if Manticore could basically hold off Solarian attacks mostly on it own despite the SLN's huge advantage in numbers of ships it could deploy (remember that 70+ superdreadnaughts were destroyed/captured using only cruisers and pods in Thimble) with only having a few star systems to build from; then what could an entire sector of resources do with access to similar technology?

The technology that Barregos had access to via Erewhon was end-of-first-war technology, and not all of it. He didn't know about Spindle when he started his own military buildup. Even so, end-of-first-war Manticoran technology is plenty good enough to give Solarian tech a really bad day. See the Battle of Torch - even with Cataphracts the combined obsolete Havenite and current Solarian ships were overmatched.

As far as Spindle is concerned, those were SD(P) pods with Mark 23 missiles and a Mark 25 control missile. They were also using Ghost Rider drones to cut the light-speed communication lag in half. Even so, they were probably limited by the number of control links they had, or they could have blown Crandall's entire formation into navigation hazards in one launch, rather than just a third of them.

As far as the MAlign connection is concerned, Barregos didn't need to know about it. All he needed was to be able to see the results off their manipulations. It didn't matter that he didn't see the manipulator behind the scene. He knew the wheels were coming off.

TFLYTSNBN wrote:Australian independence.

https://www.australia.gov.au/about-gove ... federation

Sigs wrote:
I counter with American Independence. Same empire, different time period different outcome.

TFLYTSNBN wrote:

The Revolutionary succeeded only because the British Empire was to preoccupied with confronting France to deploy enough troops to defeat the rebels. Such a scenario of an external threat to the SL was not plausible. General chaos as the SL disintergrated was plausible. A variation of the Sepoy Option would be to remain nnominally a part of thr SL but with more autonomy than allowed by OFS.

Before going down that rabbit hole, I'd suggest you familiarize yourself with the 80-year historical cycle (Strauss and Howe: Fourth Turning and John Xenakis: Generational Dynamics). The Revolutionary war was a Crisis War for the Americans, but a mid-cycle war for the British. They didn't have their next major Crisis War until the Napoleonic Wars.

The British public was, quite frankly, not behind the war. The best recent comparison is Vietnam. This was a Crisis War for the Vietnamese, but a mid-cycle war for the U.S. Similar position in the historical cycle, similar outcome.

JohnRoth wrote:
Snip...
Before going down that rabbit hole, I'd suggest you familiarize yourself with the 80-year historical cycle (Strauss and Howe: Fourth Turning and John Xenakis: Generational Dynamics).

...Snip

I'm glad I'm old enough that I will not be around when that cycle repeats itself in the not too distant future.