Hello RFC!
Again, any post from RFC is good, regardless of how much I or another poster get reamed, scolded or worse.
I believe the discussion at the bar was around ten years ago, but doubt there's a way to check now.
Definitely one way to put it into an important perspective, but given the apparent free discussion in War of Honor that made the nature of SDP's and CLAC's obvious to the manty public as well as the Havenite, which included Tom Theisman going public with the announcement of Bolthole and the RHN's first SDP's, etc should have gotten some attention from other navies.
Given that the three Haven sector powers had collectively built almost a thousand SD's in the roughly fifty years before the war, or about half the actual BF active force [with ~300 in the yards for repairs, refits or upgrades] should have gotten some attention from the SLN when it came to fighting for their annual budget.
There was a time early on when we first met Rajani that I wondered if Rajani wasn't just a Malign agent but one of the deep star lines', given his age and how he was so critical to suppressing or covering things up, but a very critical actor too important to leave to simple bribery.
While he was reinforcing the institutional arrogance of the SLN,under the claim of improving morale etc would certainly explain the 3.6 billion he'd squirreled away over the last 40-50 years or so, he now seems to willingly have lead the SLN leviathan into a narrow cave or tunnel it couldn't turn around when it began to realise it was trapped and unable to defend itself.
To be so willing to destroy one's apparent life's work, to let so many he was ultimately responsible for get killed [~2 million combined] makes him one of the legendary worst traitors of all time.
One wonders again if his secret files will be found by the various investigators we now know are trying to find out what's really going on.
Regarding Japan, it's prewar merchant marine was in the 6-7 million ton range, relying on around 4 million tons of outside [allied] shipping, which it managed to capture around 600,000 tons when the war began in its ports, China, Indochina and Hong Kong etc, which was quite a boon since it was more than their own construction in the past two years [1940 & 1941] and wasn't exceeded by their own production until 1943, when it was too late.
What I think RFC was referring to was the relative amount of traffic in and out of Japanese ports, which was still considerable, if not as high as major European and American ports.
So if Japan was then around 2% of the world's population, can we scale those numbers to get some basis for 'normal' verge traffic?
Definitely interesting times,
L
runsforcelery wrote:quote="lyonheart"Howdy LDWechsler,
Kudos for being spot on with how the official explanation overwhelming any inconvenient facts.
I don't know how many remember the discussion at the bar many moons ago regarding how the military tech fans, modelers, NTM wargamers would have been all over the Manticore-Haven wars, collecting and passing all sorts of details that eventually would start adding up to important conclusions and comparisons with the SLN etc.
RFC had to respond that no, there were not such organised or coordinated groups that would cooperate to find what they could and share it.
He was the author, so it was "Yes sir, three bags full" time.
But I still mumble about it when I can.
L
My father often mentioned how model companies would hire senior retired Intel sergeants from the various services, who knew or had copies of the public information that was the basis of most of their briefings etc, as a considerable addition to their retirement pay, for however long they could spin out sharing all they knew.
ldwechsler wrote:It's like how there wasn't a single person in the entire SL who read the publicly available documentation, news reports and memoirs to track the developments and battles in the Haven Sector. I'm pretty sure I could find more then one hobbyist in the US who could discuss at great length the history and details of the multi-sided conflict in Somalia, but nobody of the several trillion in the SL was interested in the RMN?
quote
I am sure there were those hobbyists, the only problem is that they were basically unknown in the halls of power. I suspect that most people in the US with an indepth interest in the minutiae of the dealing of Somali warlords are if not in an intelligence agency, viewed as having an odd but basically harmless hobby. How hard is it for the decision makers to find these people if their area of interest becomes strategically important? i.e. potential intervention in a Chad-Democratic Republic of Congo Border dispute.
Let us keep in mind that the leadership was not interested in hobbyists. They had their story and were going to keep to it.
Also, the top people were being blocked from a lot of reality by MAlign. We saw how those who suggested that Manticore was really advanced were punished.
When a government wants one point of view, it can make certain no other views, even if those other ones are correct, are not really heard.
[/quote]
I do not recall the exchange at all.
You need to bear in mind, thought, that we are not talking about someplace with an internet you can just plug into any time you want. You also need to remember that the modelers and hobbyists in question were up against the best military security in the galaxy. And you also need to remember that I never said there was no flow of information about what was happening in the Haven sector to the rest of the galaxy; I said the Solarian League
ignored it because it manifestly
did no matter and, besides, the neobarbs were probably lying.
I don't quite understand why people find this so difficult to grasp.
In 1938, Japan was a heck of a lot closer, and a lot more accessible, from the United States of American and Great Britain (and Australia) than the Haven Sector is from 99.9% of the human race in the Honorverse. Yes, the shipping lines are there, and, yes, there's a lot of commerce (most of it carried in Manticoran bottoms), but there the shipping traffic to and around the Japanese Home Islands in 1938 was denser (in relative terms) than most Solarian star systems experience in Honor's day.
Despite that, the USN had no idea of the caliber of the guns the Japanese were planning to use for their new battleships, didn't know that the
Nagatos were a good four knots faster than they thought they were, didn't know the demilitarized
Kongos had been put back into commission, and didn't have a clue about the Long Lance torpedo
or the range and maneuverability of the Zero or the Betty bomber (despite the fact that the Zero was actually being used against our Chinese allies
and the American Volunteer Group was already flying brutally outclassed P-40s against them. All of this despite the fact that Japan
had been identified as our most probable foe in any Pacific War.So you're suggesting to me that somehow the SLN --- which knows it has 10,000 SDs in commission while the Manties and Peeps between them have less than
1,000 --- and which has the institutional arrogance of
700 years of unchallenged naval supremacy would be worried not about what their equivalent of Japan might be doing fighting their equivalent of China but what Nepal might be up to in its war against Bangladesh?
No, the situations are not, in fact, parallel,
but the SLN thinks they are and I find it difficult to believe that there's going to be some highly visible hobbyist organization putting together accurate models of Havenite or Manticoran ships which will somehow magically give the SLN the wake up call it needs.
The USN and RN docked at the same
wharves as Japanese cruisers which exceeded treaty mandated tonnage limitations by 20% and carried Long Lances and their various intelligence organizations either never guessed it or else knew all along and simply failed to pass it along to their superiors, for goodness sake! And unlike the SLN, neither the USN nor the RN thought for a minute that its warfighting technology was supreme in all the world based on
seven centuries of absolute naval domination not of a single ocean or even a single plant but an entire damned
galaxy.
So, yeah, I don't find it at all unreasonable for a willfully blind
institution like the SLN (and its affiliated intelligence organizations) to completely ignore information that very well may have been there but which wasn't beating down their doors and windows. Please note that Daud al-Funadhi, among others,
was aware there was something Very Strange going on out there in the Fringe. The Alignment knew. Even Technodyne had an inkling. But none of them were able to get to the classified nitty-gritty, and even reports which made it clear that Haven Sector warfighting technology was increasing in capability by leaps and bounds (which is exactly what Luis Rozak and Oraville Barregos were reporting prior to the emergence of Torch) were
suppressed by career bureaucrats in uniform who declined to see their rice bowls tipped over on the basis of clearly unfounded, wild, fact-free rumors of impssible new technologies.
Sorry if that seems unreasonable.[/quote]
