Aethor wrote:At the risk of sounding negative, Desnairian commerce raiders capturing a ship with M96s sounds... well, it sounds as if the level of common sense in Charisian Navy is the same (low) as in an average company nowadays, filled with managers and other assorted idiots.
Please bear in mind that this is a ship carrying the very latest tech available to ICA, tech that the enemy did not yet have a chance to see, and thus should be protected by all means, until the time it's used for the first time.
- No scuttling charges? Come on? A few barrels of gunpowder would send this ship to the bottom before Desnairians could capture it. That a number of the crew would die (or even all of them) is a moot point, since Desnairians killed them anyway, and any captured alive would suffer Question and Punishment.
Scuttling charges are a >>cheap<< way to prevent your weapons from being captured by the enemy.
(ICN, the #1 navy of Safehold, doesn't know about scuttling charges? Ok, maybe Merlin didn't think about it... but come to think of that, Merlin/Nimue was a naval officer in the Terran Federation Navy. Not likely that he never heard of the idea)
- No better escort for ships carrying the latest tech? I understand that the ICN does not have enough hulls to escort >>every<< transport properly. But it sure has enough to escort >>any specific one<< of them, and M96s would rate high enough, at least in my book, to have a double or triple the usual escort.
- In fact, why not carry them in whatever stowage space is available on serious warships? Save transports for anything that the enemy already knows of - gunpowder, shells, artillery such as was already used in battle, food, whatever.
Put those 5000 M96s on a couple of serious war galleons. No commerce raider in his sane mind is going to attack them anyway. They will go for the transports. Hell, take 1/3 to 1/2 of the shells and round shot out, if there really isn't enough space, and put crates with M96 in their place.
- Keep in mind that ICA did the complex maneuver in Siddar City just to convince Temple spies that a large chunk of ICA that just arrived is going to stay there, while they instead went elsewhere. So, they're quite capable of tricks. So... my idea with putting crates with M96 onboard warships shouldn't be that foreign to them.
- I could think of these ideas in an hour, and yet the whole set of ICN admirals could not, in all the weeks and months? No way.
I'm sorry you feel the ICN is run by idiots. Of course, you have the advantage of a little insight no one on Safehold has, don't you?
The Inner Circle was aware that the threat of commerce-raiders was growing, but the ICN's convoy tactics had been fully adequate over the last several years. You do not go around planting explosives aboard your own vessels "just in case" under those circumstances, nor do you ask your personnel to blow themselves up to prevent capture. They may choose to blow themselves up if something catastrophic happens, but that's rather a different proposition.
Look, the Desnarians have been building their privateers for a while. At the time the convoy sailed, however, they'd never adopted the "swarming" tactic they adopted against it --- certainly not in anything remotely like that strength. So what you're saying is that a navy which has successfully swept all other organized naval opposition from the seas, which has demonstrated again and again that it knows how convoy tactics work, and whose convoy escorts have succeeded against almost every attack (losses have been overwhelmingly concentrated against ships sailing alone, not in convoy) is run by idiots because it hasn't drawn up plans for its own ships to suicide just because they're carrying important cargos.
Why should they? Aside from denying the enemy the opportunity to experiment with a few thousand rifles, what would they accomplish? And what good will it do the other side to experiment with them in the dozen weeks or so they have before they get real, hands-on field experience with that those rifles can do?
Is there a single chance in hell that the Church isn't going to find out about these weapons' existence the first time they're used against it? No, there isn't. Is there a single chance in hell that they're going to be able to duplicate them in any significant numbers? No, there isn't. Is there any chance in hell that having examples of them to play with is going to allow them to envision ways in which they could be used against them which aren't already going to be demonstrated to them by BGV in the next month or so? No, there isn't. Will it break the inner circle's hearts if the bad guys are given yet another example of the reasons Charisian tech is kicking their asses on the battlefield? No, it won't. Will it be a bad thing if people like the Dohlarans (or even the Desnarians) who are already worried that ths jihad may be lost get direct, personal, hands-on confirmation that it is . . . and why? No, it won't. I'm not suggesting that the Charisians deliberately set out to hand those rifles over to the enemy. I'm simply pointing out that the "Ohmigod! What a catastrophe! thinking I seem to be seeing out of some people may be just a tad . . . excessive.
As for using galleons to ship them, please! This isn't USS Indianapolis delivering the atomic bomb to the Enola Gay. This is a bulk shipment of infantry weapons (admittedly of new and novel design) to the front for mass use against the enemy in the field, where examples are bound to be captured anyway. Efficiency of shipment is a whole hell of a lot more important than maintaining some sort of Top Secret mystery that's going to go away the moment they're used in combat anyway.
As for the vulnerability of the convoy, see my first paragraph above. The attack came as a complete surprise to the convoy commander, and the strength of the attack came as a surprise to the inner circle, and no navy has enough warships lying around to go assigning double or triple overkill to counter threats that are outside their intelligence appreciations.
