Honorverse ramblings and musings

There were actual arguments inside the UK government (and I think the Royal Navy) about launching the Dreadnaught, as it instantly made all the dozens of battleships in the RN obsolete. In the honorverse, they lost that argument.

R&D does continue in the SL, and somewhat in the SLN. It was the SLN that commissioned the first laserheads, and that fiasco had impacts on other such ideas.

SWM wrote:

cthia wrote:But the thing is, the League didn't produce anything worthwhile in so many centuries. Talk about resting on your laurels. The only worthwhile tech came from Technodyne, and now Technodyne has gone belly up.

That's a bit of an overstatement. Nobody had come up with anything really new in interstellar warfare for centuries. There were plenty of advances in other areas, but warfare was pretty much at a static point. You can't really blame the Solarian League when it was true across the entire galaxy.

You have to remember that even in 1922 P.D., the laser head is less than 90 years old, and has been in general distribution for only a little over 50 years. No major battles had yet taken place anywhere with laserheads until the Havenite wars. And the Solarian League only replaces or refits ships on a 100 year schedule. Since warfare had been static for several hundred years, it is not that surprising that almost no one recognized the tidal change represented by the laser head. War and preparations for war are huge incentives for military innovations, and the galaxy had largely been at peace for half a millennium.

Yes, the SLN failed to notice things in the last couple decades that it should have. But it is a bit of a stretch to blame them for not changing things for the previous several centuries.

Less than a few decades, really. An apologia for battle fleet works this out quite well.

viewtopic.php?f=1&t=4088

fester wrote:So the Solarian League has had 7 years to realize that a doctrine that has worked with 100% confidence for 400 years and with 95% confidence and some caveats for 410 years is obsolete.

cthia wrote:I certainly see your point. But I don't know. I'm a bit resistant to letting them off the hook so easily. I never imagined the League moving ahead of the warfare game by following what everyone else was doing. I imagined them to be the innovators. Several centuries that they could have set the precedent. We all know and have discussed their R&D might. It's gargantuan. And the League doesn't suffer the education leak that the Havenites bear. The laserhead should have been League designed long before anyone else. IMO

Now I know the argument. "Necessity is the mother of invention." The League didn't feel that it was necessary to continue reinventing themselves. In retrospect we see that that was wrong, so too does the League, now.

I'm just not quite so sure that they should be let off the hook so easily for their slackness. It's as if the US would stop innovating militarily if peace broke out in its areas of concern for several decades, or even centuries. I often think about that and I'd wager we'd still be paying $100 for a band-aid to fund covert military R&D.

It's just inexcusable to think you can remain top-dog without continuing to eat your Alpo. Inexcusable and a bit unrealistic. IMO. Especially since they were in the business of negotiating by browbeating and shoving missiles up the ass of most everyone in God's creation.

Cthia, I understand your bemusement at the SLN actions, but remember that as top dog (and with the largest fleet in Known Space by far-outnumbering all the other flets combined), the command structure would have been very conservative about changes, since that would upset the balance. (Heck, remember how Hamish was violenty opposed to the Pod-SD's and other changes before Honor read him the riot act inn IEH).

For a historical example, the British Navy in 1900 was the most powerful fleet in exsistence with battleships that were a match for any other nations. Then came the proposal for the HMS Dreadnought; a ship that would be faster, have more range, and most importantly, be an all big-gun ship (10 12" guns, IIRC). It would make all previous battleships....including the Royal Navy's obsolete.

But it would mean Great Britain, instead of having the lead in battleships, would be essentially even with the other Great powere, who would of course begin building their own Dreadnoughts. So a considerable number of senior British admirals did not want to see Dreadnought built or commissioned. They were happy with their superiority in the 'current' line of BB's and didn't want to 'rock the boat.' It was due to Jacky Fisher, First Lord of the Admiralty, that the design was pushed and steam turbine engines incorporated.

The SLN has heretofore lacked a Jacky Fisher...someone willing to push to boundaries and build the next generation of fighting ship. They were happy in thier overwhelming superiority and couldn't concieve that 'neo-barbs' would ever come up with anything better than what they had.

They were wrong. Manticore had Hemphill and Honor and Haven Foraker and Theisman, and they were ready and willing to 'push the envelope.' under the pressure of war..something the SLN hadn't experienced in centuries.

IMHO as always. YMMV.

ETA: Wrote this before I saw kzt and munroburtons congent points.

cthia wrote:

SWM wrote:That's a bit of an overstatement. Nobody had come up with anything really new in interstellar warfare for centuries. There were plenty of advances in other areas, but warfare was pretty much at a static point. You can't really blame the Solarian League when it was true across the entire galaxy.

You have to remember that even in 1922 P.D., the laser head is less than 90 years old, and has been in general distribution for only a little over 50 years. No major battles had yet taken place anywhere with laserheads until the Havenite wars. And the Solarian League only replaces or refits ships on a 100 year schedule. Since warfare had been static for several hundred years, it is not that surprising that almost no one recognized the tidal change represented by the laser head. War and preparations for war are huge incentives for military innovations, and the galaxy had largely been at peace for half a millennium.

Yes, the SLN failed to notice things in the last couple decades that it should have. But it is a bit of a stretch to blame them for not changing things for the previous several centuries.

I certainly see your point. But I don't know. I'm a bit resistant to letting them off the hook so easily. I never imagined the League moving ahead of the warfare game by following what everyone else was doing. I imagined them to be the innovators. Several centuries that they could have set the precedent. We all know and have discussed their R&D might. It's gargantuan. And the League doesn't suffer the education leak that the Havenites bear. The laserhead should have been League designed long before anyone else. IMO

That's reasonable. On the other hand, one might say that the static nature of warfare was to the League's advantage.

Up until the laserhead, battle between fleets followed a simple pattern. Ships would approach and fire at each other (primarily with beams). Whichever side decided they couldn't win would turn wedge and fly away. Only a relatively few people would die, the bigger fleet would almost always win, and everyone would go home to live another day.

The Solarian League Navy was the biggest in the galaxy, outnumbering all other navies put together by an order of magnitude. The old paradigm was perfect for the League. No one could challenge them. It was to the League's advantage that there were no significant developments in military technology for so long. SLN R&D did continue, as evidenced by the laserhead, advances in stealth techniques, improving armor, early failed attempts at missile pods, invention of the PDLC, and the research that produced HALO and AEGIS. The Solarian League was the galactic leader in military R&D for the last five hundred years. Up until maybe 40 years ago, SLN research was responsible for most of the advances in naval warfare. But there was no reason for the SLN to push that R&D fast, and in fact it would have been detrimental to the Navy. A major change in military tech would change the balance of power in the galaxy. There was no reason to look for revolutionary tech, and lots of reasons to deliberately go slow.

The fact that the SLN had been the leader of military R&D for hundreds of years is one reason they were so skeptical of advances in Manticoran tech. I can see your point, but I think the Sollies were the innovators. Until Haven pushed Manticore into a fight for its life.

cthia wrote:I certainly see your point. But I don't know. I'm a bit resistant to letting them off the hook so easily. I never imagined the League moving ahead of the warfare game by following what everyone else was doing. I imagined them to be the innovators. Several centuries that they could have set the precedent. We all know and have discussed their R&D might. It's gargantuan. And the League doesn't suffer the education leak that the Havenites bear. The laserhead should have been League designed long before anyone else. IMO

Now I know the argument. "Necessity is the mother of invention." The League didn't feel that it was necessary to continue reinventing themselves. In retrospect we see that that was wrong, so too does the League, now.

I'm just not quite so sure that they should be let off the hook so easily for their slackness. It's as if the US would stop innovating militarily if peace broke out in its areas of concern for several decades, or even centuries. I often think about that and I'd wager we'd still be paying $100 for a band-aid to fund covert military R&D.

It's just inexcusable to think you can remain top-dog without continuing to eat your Alpo. Inexcusable and a bit unrealistic. IMO. Especially since they were in the business of negotiating by browbeating and shoving missiles up the ass of most everyone in God's creation.

The flip-side of that is that you want to be careful about innovating to much, or you might obsolete your existing huge investment in ships (active and reserve)
Which I see kzt was the first to touch on. (But since I basically had this written up I'll post it anyway)


I'll expand a bit on what he already brought up, HMS Dreadnaught. As he said, there's an arguments that HMS Dreadnaught wasn't a great idea -- because it basically obsoleted every existing pre-dreadnaught and reset the naval arms races.
As the navy with the most pre-dreads that obsolescence hit the RN hardest; and conceivable the fresh start encouraged Tripitz and the Kaiser in their desire to build a navy of similar power.

Now, in actuality, the RN weren't the first to come up with the idea, just the first to get it completed. So in that case waiting wouldn't have preserved the usefulness of their pre-dreads for more than a couple years and at the time the Royal Navy could build battleships cheaper and faster than anyone else on the planet -- so if allowed the money they were well positioned to win this fresh building race (as historically they did)


But with an even bigger investment in ships, and a unfathomable numeric edge, I can see why the SLN wouldn't be aggressively looking into disrupting technology (because unlike the RN, they knew damned well that they wouldn't get the money to rapidly build radical new ships/technology even if their current designs became grossely outclassed).
That said, even within their existing paradigm, they were lazy and didn't push to have optimize their existing hardware to the best of it's ability.

cthia wrote:

SWM wrote:That's a bit of an overstatement. Nobody had come up with anything really new in interstellar warfare for centuries. There were plenty of advances in other areas, but warfare was pretty much at a static point. You can't really blame the Solarian League when it was true across the entire galaxy.

You have to remember that even in 1922 P.D., the laser head is less than 90 years old, and has been in general distribution for only a little over 50 years. No major battles had yet taken place anywhere with laserheads until the Havenite wars. And the Solarian League only replaces or refits ships on a 100 year schedule. Since warfare had been static for several hundred years, it is not that surprising that almost no one recognized the tidal change represented by the laser head. War and preparations for war are huge incentives for military innovations, and the galaxy had largely been at peace for half a millennium.

Yes, the SLN failed to notice things in the last couple decades that it should have. But it is a bit of a stretch to blame them for not changing things for the previous several centuries.

I certainly see your point. But I don't know. I'm a bit resistant to letting them off the hook so easily. I never imagined the League moving ahead of the warfare game by following what everyone else was doing. I imagined them to be the innovators. Several centuries that they could have set the precedent. We all know and have discussed their R&D might. It's gargantuan. And the League doesn't suffer the education leak that the Havenites bear. The laserhead should have been League designed long before anyone else. IMO

SWM wrote:That's reasonable. On the other hand, one might say that the static nature of warfare was to the League's advantage.

Up until the laserhead, battle between fleets followed a simple pattern. Ships would approach and fire at each other (primarily with beams). Whichever side decided they couldn't win would turn wedge and fly away. Only a relatively few people would die, the bigger fleet would almost always win, and everyone would go home to live another day.

The Solarian League Navy was the biggest in the galaxy, outnumbering all other navies put together by an order of magnitude. The old paradigm was perfect for the League. No one could challenge them. It was to the League's advantage that there were no significant developments in military technology for so long. SLN R&D did continue, as evidenced by the laserhead, advances in stealth techniques, improving armor, early failed attempts at missile pods, invention of the PDLC, and the research that produced HALO and AEGIS. The Solarian League was the galactic leader in military R&D for the last five hundred years. Up until maybe 40 years ago, SLN research was responsible for most of the advances in naval warfare. But there was no reason for the SLN to push that R&D fast, and in fact it would have been detrimental to the Navy. A major change in military tech would change the balance of power in the galaxy. There was no reason to look for revolutionary tech, and lots of reasons to deliberately go slow.

The fact that the SLN had been the leader of military R&D for hundreds of years is one reason they were so skeptical of advances in Manticoran tech. I can see your point, but I think the Sollies were the innovators. Until Haven pushed Manticore into a fight for its life.

I think I'm going to wave my white flag SWM. The way you've laid it out here makes a heckuva lotta sense. Your post makes me consider the sentiment, "Keep Pandora in her box, because you can never know who she'll side with."

One of my brothers used to say that about my niece.

Standing in the salle, I see your point and yield to its touch. Touché!

n7axw wrote:We do need to remember that both halo and aegis were developed in ignorance of the actual threat level. There is no good excuse for that. Had the League's ONI been paying attention to what was going on during the Haven sector wars, they could have passed their findings on to people who could have designed ships capable of surviving in that threat environment. What happened is the League is falling victim to its own institutional arrogance.

Don

It's probably worth remembering that SLN intelligence was being systematically sabotaged by enemy agents. A fair number of people knew or strongly suspected something interesting was going on in the Haven sector. Almost all of them kept quiet after seeing what happened to the first people who brought it up.

SWM wrote:The Solarian League Navy was the biggest in the galaxy, outnumbering all other navies put together by an order of magnitude.

Nitpicking here, but unless we want to count the reserve that the SLN was completely incapable of activating, the SLN certainly did not outnumber all other navies put together by an order of magnitude. At least not in wallers, anyway; both Manticore and Haven had more than 10% of Battle Fleet on their own for the past forty years or so (the RMN may have briefly dropped under 250 active wallers after first Manticore, but didn't stay there long; the RHN had over 600 prior to first Manticore). The People's Navy was at least at one point in the series noted as being roughly a quarter of the size of the SLN on its own.

drothgery wrote:

SWM wrote:The Solarian League Navy was the biggest in the galaxy, outnumbering all other navies put together by an order of magnitude.

Nitpicking here, but unless we want to count the reserve that the SLN was completely incapable of activating, the SLN certainly did not outnumber all other navies put together by an order of magnitude. At least not in wallers, anyway; both Manticore and Haven had more than 10% of Battle Fleet on their own for the past forty years or so (the RMN may have briefly dropped under 250 active wallers after first Manticore, but didn't stay there long; the RHN had over 600 prior to first Manticore). The People's Navy was at least at one point in the series noted as being roughly a quarter of the size of the SLN on its own.

I was talking about the period up to 40 years ago. I mentioned that later in that paragraph; I should have put that statement earlier in the paragraph. I was also including the Reserve, because neither the SLN nor the galaxy at large was aware that it was nearly impossible to activate the Reserve. The existence of the Reserve counted toward the apparent strength of the SLN as long as everyone thought it was a viable threat. Thanks for pointing out the need for clarification.

drothgery wrote:

SWM wrote:The Solarian League Navy was the biggest in the galaxy, outnumbering all other navies put together by an order of magnitude.

Nitpicking here, but unless we want to count the reserve that the SLN was completely incapable of activating, the SLN certainly did not outnumber all other navies put together by an order of magnitude. At least not in wallers, anyway; both Manticore and Haven had more than 10% of Battle Fleet on their own for the past forty years or so (the RMN may have briefly dropped under 250 active wallers after first Manticore, but didn't stay there long; the RHN had over 600 prior to first Manticore). The People's Navy was at least at one point in the series noted as being roughly a quarter of the size of the SLN on its own.

When we're talking about explaining SLN behavior, it matters that they counted the Reserve. And they did. If they'd come to terms with how much combat had changed, how far behind their ships in service, much less the Reserve, truly were, they'd've quit counting it.

But even then, it was imperative to maintain the reputation of the SLN since they were spread too thin to stomp every neobarb who got ambitious if they all regarded it as a paper tiger. So even if they did realize the Reserve was a waste for combat and the ships in service not so much better, they had to maintain the image of the SLN as invincible and the Reserve as an integral, available, effective part of it, precisely because they could not afford anyone to call their bluff. Serious, visible upgrades to it that would jeopardize its image as already massively dominant over all conceivable threats would be positively dangerous.

Fleet 2000 was first of all for more funding, second to display the SLN as still dominant and more and more so, and third - somewhere down the list - a genuine effort to improve capability in recognition that missiles fire lasers nowadays. ("Nowadays" being the entire career of almost any officer still serving in space....) For the SLN, given what they knew and believed, that was entirely rational. Unfortunately, what they knew and believed was the result of institutional arrogance and a multiple level approach to concealing unpleasant reality from decision-makers. They've been the R&D leaders for generations in manufacturing fatal mistakes.