cthia wrote:The Forts are forever ready to move in a well choreographed dance to rotate the fresh stock during battle.
Evasive manoeuvres and repositioning for a good shot is quite different from a 70-hour trip at max accel. And even then, not all forts are ready for this at all times. Given that there's sufficient warning from any of the termini and from local space, only a few of the forts have to be ready for battle.
cthia wrote:Unless Tsang had Forakerian-like surprises and was the real hammer.
That's irrelevant.
I don't mean that having a game-changer weapon is irrelevant. If Tsang did have something, she could indeed do a lot of damage, even turn the tables.
I meant that her possession or not of such a weapon is irrelevant in the calculation. As I said above, Tsang would have known on way or another that the attack started. The D.B. wasn't necessary. So if she had a weapon, she'd use it, whether the D.B. had transited or not. So allowing it to transit does not change the outcome. But it might lure her into thinking that the Manties are unprepared for her.
The only way to prevent that would be to make sure no one at the Junction knew that an attack was happening. The RMN and Astro Control could probably keep a lid on that for at most one hour, the time it takes a blabber-mouth ship to come from Manticore-A to the Junction via a dog-leg course around the RZ.
And for all we know, they did just that.
You're probably right. But Tsang could have flushed everything she had at the planet (Parthian Shot?) on the way out, which is part of the entire gist of my argument in the Karma thread that Tsang should have been allowed to transit. Beowulf's duty is to the lives of their own planet, first, founding second.
No, she couldn't, not from where she was. We don't know the exact distance, but she was multiple light-hours away from either planet in the Sigma Draconis system. We know that because wormholes are never closer than 1 light-hour to the primary they're associated with. She could fire her missiles, but those would take the better part of a day to arrive. And this is assuming the interlocks protecting against Dutchman missiles can be disabled, that their sensors in their cones won't be too ablated by a trip of 4+ billion km, and that their internal capacitors can last for 15-20 hours to light up the second stage.
As I said, she could into hyper, drop out, reorient to Beowulf and go back into hyper, for this attack. But this is no longer an action taken on a moment of anger. This is premeditated. She wouldn't do it without orders and there were no orders to that effect -- the SLN hadn't ordered Buccaneer and Parthian Shot yet and if they had, the BSDF would have likely known so. Morever, as I said, there the wormhole defenders would have time to catch up with her; plus a portion of the BSDF would have been in the inner system, possibly in position to intercept the missiles, and the tugs would have been ready.
And finally, again, the D.B. is irrelevant. If she was going to do this, she would do it either way. If the Beowulfan government thought this was a risk, the best way to mitigate it would be to let Tsang actually expend her ships on the Junction forts, like you said. Which would have meant allowing the D.B. to come through to pretend that the RMN wasn't ready. The problem is that this does put some RMN lives at risk, as there's a chance some transiting ships survive to fire at the forts, not to mention all the Solarian lives that would be lost. Tactically it might be good, bot politically it's not, since it would inflate the Solarian public opinion against the Manticoran butchers (never mind the SL leadership should have known a contested wormhole transit was sucide).
Your notion of whether Truman prepositioned ships between Tsang and Beowulf is interesting. Even so, those ships could only react in vengeance to a mass launch at the planet. Little consolation to Beowulf's dead. That IS what Parthian Shot is all about. Although no planet deserved it, Beowulf certainly came a lot closer to it than any.
What else did Beowulf NEED to do wrong, other than treason, to awaken the rage of an insane gorilla?
I don't think Truman prepositioned ships between TF 11.6 and the inner system. She was between TF 11.6 and the terminus. What I meant is that once Tsang hypers out, the BSDF First Fleet and a portion of Truman's ships (say, 20) should go into the inner system for defence. If Tsang does change her mind, she dies.
Even if she does commit suicide-by-cop, her mass launch at the planets is from the hyper limit, 200 million km away. There's sufficient time to get the tugs up and in blocking position to protect infrastructure. The defending ships also have enough time to accelerate into the missiles and fire CMs before those missiles bring up their second-stage wedges.
And neither do I think she'd do that -- premeditated genocide -- nor that her officers would go allow her to do it. The SLN and SL bureaucracy had rationalised the targetting of infrastructure, but I don't think they could have rationalised away shooting directly at the planet.