The Alamo Contingency has already failed

ThinksMarkedly wrote:Unless they're either desperate (close to losing) or so assured of victory soon that the loss of the strategic advantage won't hurt their plans. Since we know the latter won't happen, I don't think we see such extremely risky missions until the last book, if at all.

penny wrote:I just can't agree with that.

You yourself pointed out, rightfully so, that a lot of their tech may not get to be used but once. Sonja and Shannon both live in the garage.

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They can't afford to be timid if it is going to be a short victorious war. The MA needs short! They cannot launch a campaign of attrition by destroying infrastructure from the edge of the system until someone gets a read on their tech.

An LD can't be captured if the enemy is dead.

It's not a disagreement in tactics as much as a disagreement on conditions, or perception of conditions. We're in agreement that if you expect the war to be long, you can't afford to lose your advantages early on. That would make it short, but with an unsuitable outcome.

I don't see the Plan calling for a Short Victorious War either. So the LDs wouldn't have been designed for a short war. All the doctrine the MAN would have been preparing for the last decade would call for a long war and less risky uses of those capital ships. I think you'll agree with me so far.

And I'll agree with you that they may find themselves in a condition where they need a short war. They may indeed realise that Sonja and Shannon (who are at the top of the Colin's Must Assassinate ASAP list) will find counters to any technological advantages that the MAN may possess, so they can't afford a long war and be assured of victory. If that is the conclusion of the Inner Onion, then I do agree with you that they may risk the capital ships in ways they weren't designed for.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

ThinksMarkedly wrote:Unless they're either desperate (close to losing) or so assured of victory soon that the loss of the strategic advantage won't hurt their plans. Since we know the latter won't happen, I don't think we see such extremely risky missions until the last book, if at all.

penny wrote:I just can't agree with that.

You yourself pointed out, rightfully so, that a lot of their tech may not get to be used but once. Sonja and Shannon both live in the garage.

[cut]
They can't afford to be timid if it is going to be a short victorious war. The MA needs short! They cannot launch a campaign of attrition by destroying infrastructure from the edge of the system until someone gets a read on their tech.

An LD can't be captured if the enemy is dead.

Thinksmarkedly wrote:It's not a disagreement in tactics as much as a disagreement on conditions, or perception of conditions. We're in agreement that if you expect the war to be long, you can't afford to lose your advantages early on. That would make it short, but with an unsuitable outcome.

I don't see the Plan calling for a Short Victorious War either. So the LDs wouldn't have been designed for a short war. All the doctrine the MAN would have been preparing for the last decade would call for a long war and less risky uses of those capital ships. I think you'll agree with me so far.

And I'll agree with you that they may find themselves in a condition where they need a short war. They may indeed realise that Sonja and Shannon (who are at the top of the Colin's Must Assassinate ASAP list) will find counters to any technological advantages that the MAN may possess, so they can't afford a long war and be assured of victory. If that is the conclusion of the Inner Onion, then I do agree with you that they may risk the capital ships in ways they weren't designed for.

You are correct. The original plan did not call for a short victorious war. But they were simply being Alphas, by formulating a plan to make the superpowers of the galaxy kill each other. Work smart, not hard. I didn't see anything wrong with that plan. Then they were going to ride in on a white horse (ironic) and save the galaxy.

But they couldn't expect to be able to impose their will upon the galaxy without a big hammer. They had to expect that they would have to demonstrate their ability. And I don't think such a centuries old plan did not plan for the worse case scenario of being discovered.

Galton proved that. It didn't just grow overnite. It was a cutout. TEiF also has Adebayo rambling on about the fact that the GA's arrival doesn't seem to be because of a systematic infiltration. That was one of his first comments that made me go... hmmm. So being discovered has always been a major concern. And they would have prepared for it.

So, the LDs had to have been built to take the war to the enemy in all their glory. Surely you don't think the LDs will be timid when the GA finally attacks Darius?

Galton had experimental, or developmental Honor corrected, wedge based ships and pod layers. It seems that Galton's war machine was wholly decided by the MA. I shudder to think what wedge-based ships Darius has. They have to. They needed to test their tech in the Darius system, not the Galton System. It is like the Navy's Fighter Weapon's school using ships as close as an analogue to Migs as they could get.

tlb wrote:So you are talking about Detweiler's {complex} hidden on the island in a nature preserve. That was in UH, well after MoH and probably is closer to most nation's smart paint.

I was wrong about UH, I have found the text in the hardback version of TEiF (as you said it would be) on page 45. I have to type this by hand, so I might not get it exactly right.

"Heavy, isn't it?" she added, looking up at him.

"It is. And what it is, Milady, is a very advanced piece of smart fabric. When it is attached to a power source, it's completely transparent to light and every other form of radiation... from one side. The other side, however, becomes what's effectively a highly flexible, easily configured flat screen. An HD screen, one might say. I never saw anything quite like it before, so I don't have any idea how expensive it might be, but the mere fact that they have it - and that no one else does, to the best of my knowledge - and chose to use it here -" he jutted his chin at the holo of the island "- certainly seemed to underscore how important they thought the place was."

tlb wrote:

tlb wrote:So you are talking about Detweiler's {complex} hidden on the island in a nature preserve. That was in UH, well after MoH and probably is closer to most nation's smart paint.

I was wrong about UH, I have found the text in the hardback version of TEiF (as you said it would be) on page 45. I have to type this by hand, so I might not get it exactly right.

"Heavy, isn't it?" she added, looking up at him.

"It is. And what it is, Milady, is a very advanced piece of smart fabric. When it is attached to a power source, it's completely transparent to light and every other form of radiation... from one side. The other side, however, becomes what's effectively a highly flexible, easily configured flat screen. An HD screen, one might say. I never saw anything quite like it before, so I don't have any idea how expensive it might be, but the mere fact that they have it - and that no one else does, to the best of my knowledge - and chose to use it here -" he jutted his chin at the holo of the island "- certainly seemed to underscore how important they thought the place was."

Bingo! That is the one! You factoters are amazing.

IINM, it goes into detail how close they flew to it for months and never saw it. It was actually a snippet that galvanized my thinking that the LD will be able to crawl into your pants. Or, well, in the humor thread, Sneak up on a skunk and steal his stink.

penny wrote:IINM, it goes into detail how close they flew to it for months and never saw it.

But you are wrong if you mean military ships. That page goes on to say that no Park Service ship has overflown that spot for two hundred years. So he had to look into imagery from private vehicles, since no commercial transport flies over that spot. There he found one image from five years ago that shows half of a luxury air car as it enters the shielded area.

More imagery may have existed before the Malign started erasing things with nuclear explosions that occurred as the GA fleet arrived.

penny wrote:

tlb wrote:I was wrong about UH, I have found the text in the hardback version of TEiF (as you said it would be) on page 45. I have to type this by hand, so I might not get it exactly right.

"Heavy, isn't it?" she added, looking up at him.

"It is. And what it is, Milady, is a very advanced piece of smart fabric. When it is attached to a power source, it's completely transparent to light and every other form of radiation... from one side. The other side, however, becomes what's effectively a highly flexible, easily configured flat screen. An HD screen, one might say. I never saw anything quite like it before, so I don't have any idea how expensive it might be, but the mere fact that they have it - and that no one else does, to the best of my knowledge - and chose to use it here -" he jutted his chin at the holo of the island "- certainly seemed to underscore how important they thought the place was."

Bingo! That is the one! You factoters are amazing.

IINM, it goes into detail how close they flew to it for months and never saw it. It was actually a snippet that galvanized my thinking that the LD will be able to crawl into your pants. Or, well, in the humor thread, Sneak up on a skunk and steal his stink.

Ah yes - the downside of the kind of keyword searches I tend to do through the ebooks. If the concept is there but the exact searched text isn't it doesn't show up in the search.
Good job tlb on finding this.


Though before we get too excited about the stealth capabilities of this smart fabric nano-material, the only sensors it was described as hiding the complex from were civilian sensors that might have incidentally observed that area while flying over/past. Maybe it would have been equally effective against RMN warship passive sensors parked overhead in orbit, or their active lidar or ground mapping/penetrating radar should they have reason to specifically focus on the area -- and maybe it wouldn't have been.

Now the technology of how they did the hiding is clearly extremely advanced - though that may be more in the way it didn't interfere with the occupants view of the sky. We aren't given any benchmark of how well it hid them from observation compared to more widely available tech that would have to block their view to be effective.

penny wrote:

tlb wrote:I was wrong about UH, I have found the text in the hardback version of TEiF (as you said it would be) on page 45. I have to type this by hand, so I might not get it exactly right.

"Heavy, isn't it?" she added, looking up at him.

"It is. And what it is, Milady, is a very advanced piece of smart fabric. When it is attached to a power source, it's completely transparent to light and every other form of radiation... from one side. The other side, however, becomes what's effectively a highly flexible, easily configured flat screen. An HD screen, one might say. I never saw anything quite like it before, so I don't have any idea how expensive it might be, but the mere fact that they have it - and that no one else does, to the best of my knowledge - and chose to use it here -" he jutted his chin at the holo of the island "- certainly seemed to underscore how important they thought the place was."

Bingo! That is the one! You factoters are amazing.

IINM, it goes into detail how close they flew to it for months and never saw it. It was actually a snippet that galvanized my thinking that the LD will be able to crawl into your pants. Or, well, in the humor thread, Sneak up on a skunk and steal his stink.

Jonathan_S wrote:Ah yes - the downside of the kind of keyword searches I tend to do through the ebooks. If the concept is there but the exact searched text isn't it doesn't show up in the search.
Good job tlb on finding this.


Though before we get too excited about the stealth capabilities of this smart fabric nano-material, the only sensors it was described as hiding the complex from were civilian sensors that might have incidentally observed that area while flying over/past. Maybe it would have been equally effective against RMN warship passive sensors parked overhead in orbit, or their active lidar or ground mapping/penetrating radar should they have reason to specifically focus on the area -- and maybe it wouldn't have been.

Now the technology of how they did the hiding is clearly extremely advanced - though that may be more in the way it didn't interfere with the occupants view of the sky. We aren't given any benchmark of how well it hid them from observation compared to more widely available tech that would have to block their view to be effective.

I agree with the sentiment in the passage. The fact that they chose to use it there is frightening. Actually, the fact that they risked it getting captured is frightening. Mostly because since they did risk it, as paranoid as the MA is, you have to ask yourself whether it is military grade tech.

And, it brings us back to my original thought that the Ghost class that we saw was rushed. Since RFC dropped that snippet on us in TEiF.

And yes, tlb, thanksabillion! The Admiralty should have you search for the MA.

The pieces included in book text about Oyster Bay, the GTs, Ghosts, Sharks and the LDs all seem to point to being almost invisible cats knocking things out of orbit (vs shelves and tables) as part of destroying the ability of systems and Political Entities to build or maintain manufacturing in space. That would also include striking military targets but shipyards, commercial fabrication, orbital habitat (on a massive scale like Beowulf and others- which include all sorts of light fabrication and communications).

The Plan was also to kick off the nominal End Game by forcing the destruction and fragmentation (over the course of hundreds of years with a big push by triggering a war between the already messy SL and Haven to make everybody's militaries shread each other and then mold the ruins to the Alignment version of a Utopia with the Alpha's on top and at least one step removed from harm by playing puppet masters from (we are eventually given the location) Darius.

Everything used by the Alignment in Oyster Bay is essential ambush/stealth weapons, including the delivery systems like the soon to be start being completed LD. Spider Drives. Sneak in, devastate systems orbital industry and military, and sneak out with nobody actually seeing or knowing who is doing the killing. And this done by a Political/Cult that essentially nobody (much less than perhaps 0.0000001% of humans actually knows anyting about. That is till Oyster Bay and then all the goings on at Mesa and Monica and moles in the SL &SLN and Torch.
That cat is wrigglilign out of the bag as the Detweilers keep shifting plans on the fly to "solve" things that didn't go totally as planned.

Thing is......if they didn't run Oyster Bay as a limited and premature version of what was supposed to be the opening round of use of all the nice new Spider tech and related weapons, they would have been much better off. They didn't have enough capacity to hit everything in the Manticore Star Empire (though they got most of the military related at Grayson and then had apparently NOTHING left to even try to start hitting targets in the Repubic of Haven.

Why do I think they would have done better not to run Oyster Bay then? Because even if Manticore "won" against Haven, the League was still being set up and almost ready to be pushed into taking on the victor of Haven vs Manticore and the slaughter would still have been massive enough that sending in the LD and other ships AFTER the SL actually started to blow apart would have accomplished what they wanted to do. With 100 LD...heck. hit every major system allied to Manticore &/or Haven plus Technodynes yards, The Andermani, Erwhon, and even 50 major systems in the League. Havoc, catastrophe, massive loss of orbital capacity for anything plus horrendous loss of life (just what the Alignment wants) and then send in their RF "saviors" to mold the survivors to the Alignment way of being slaves- or you resist and die.

Now the Alignment is running light roaches when a light has been turned on and trying to make sure thy are not found,
Fun times.

Brigade XO wrote:Why do I think they would have done better not to run Oyster Bay then? Because even if Manticore "won" against Haven, the League was still being set up and almost ready to be pushed into taking on the victor of Haven vs Manticore and the slaughter would still have been massive enough that sending in the LD and other ships AFTER the SL actually started to blow apart would have accomplished what they wanted to do. With 100 LD...heck. hit every major system allied to Manticore &/or Haven plus Technodynes yards, The Andermani, Erwhon, and even 50 major systems in the League. Havoc, catastrophe, massive loss of orbital capacity for anything plus horrendous loss of life (just what the Alignment wants) and then send in their RF "saviors" to mold the survivors to the Alignment way of being slaves- or you resist and die.

Now the Alignment is running light roaches when a light has been turned on and trying to make sure thy are not found,
Fun times.

They forced Oyster Bay, because with the Talbott Quarter in Manticoran hands, Mesa was in too much danger and Houdini would have to be rushed. Perhaps they thought that Haven would take the opportunity to attack and in the confusion OFS could grab the Talbott Quarter and that end of the wormhole. But the whole problem of a malignant outside force could (and did) unite those intelligent enough to see the danger, particularly when added to the information brought back from Mesa (which the Malign had no way of factoring into their plans).

Basically the war fighting ability of either party that was accustomed to massive missile pod exchanges (with or without Apollo) was too much for the SLN to handle. The Malign had gone much too far in incapacitating the Solarian League; to the extent that it could not manage the sort of war that would be needed to wreck both sides and allow the Renaissance Factor to pick up the pieces. The Malign really needed to have the Solarian League fight the Peoples' Republic of Haven before Honor Among Enemies.

Otherwise it needed to go back into hiding for another couple hundred years and figure out a new plan.

penny wrote:But they couldn't expect to be able to impose their will upon the galaxy without a big hammer. They had to expect that they would have to demonstrate their ability. And I don't think such a centuries old plan did not plan for the worse case scenario of being discovered.

Galton proved that. It didn't just grow overnite. It was a cutout. TEiF also has Adebayo rambling on about the fact that the GA's arrival doesn't seem to be because of a systematic infiltration. That was one of his first comments that made me go... hmmm. So being discovered has always been a major concern. And they would have prepared for it.

Good point. I don't know exactly what their worst-case scenario, Gone To Hell plan is in case of discovery. We know that the Alamo Contingency was for Galton being sacrificed so Darius could continue. Darius was founded soon after Galton that the Alamo Contingency was practically "always there" for Galton.

But the plan for Darius discovery? We don't know.

So, the LDs had to have been built to take the war to the enemy in all their glory. Surely you don't think the LDs will be timid when the GA finally attacks Darius?

Galton had experimental, or developmental Honor corrected, wedge based ships and pod layers. It seems that Galton's war machine was wholly decided by the MA. I shudder to think what wedge-based ships Darius has. They have to. They needed to test their tech in the Darius system, not the Galton System. It is like the Navy's Fighter Weapon's school using ships as close as an analogue to Migs as they could get.

I agree that LDs were designed for taking the war to the enemy. Before TEiF, we had speculated they were the only means of delivery. After the advent of Galton, we have to revise our understanding of the Plan and think that Galton would probably have contributed the most to that chaos. It would be a type of warfare that the Galaxy understood, even if they couldn't know who it was and why the fighting was happening.

The LDs are a much more recent innovation, with a necessary modification of the Plan too. I personally expect it called for the LDs to sit far from the fighting and lob stealth weapons at warring parties, or destroying critical infrastructure. That is, they'd come in to tip the balance of the warring parties... to be precise, they'd tip an imbalance back to balance, so the fighting would last longer. This is shown in their thinking of what Haven would do: they would capitalise on any unexpected change in circumstances of their enemy and not look too closely at why said change happened.

Note that at this point, it would be impossible to hide from Galton that someone else was out there.

As for the defence of Darius, I repeat I don't know what the plans might be. As I said before, if Darius is discovered, it's game over for Darius and only a matter of accounting.

They may have a Plan C, then, as you've suggested they would.