Why don't they just give up?

The Detweiler brothers didn't now about Hasta. If they had known it was ready to deploy; they wouldn't have bothered deploying the Silver Bullets at Beowulf. They would had realized that the extreme long range it provided meant that the SLN taskforce didn't need to survive long enough to reach Cataphract range.

Robert_A_Woodward wrote:The Detweiler brothers didn't now about Hasta. If they had known it was ready to deploy; they wouldn't have bothered deploying the Silver Bullets at Beowulf. They would had realized that the extreme long range it provided meant that the SLN taskforce didn't need to survive long enough to reach Cataphract range.

What evidence do you have to support this? I would have thought that the Silver Bullets were an interesting idea that they would have tried in any case. Even with the Mycroft stations destroyed, over half of the SLN was also destroyed. The Hasta attack did not produce expected results at Beowulf, because of the wall of wedges set up as a defense.

tlb wrote:We are not having an argument as to whether "Galton had been developing stealth technology for a long time and this fact contradicts that", since I have not said anything about the stealth technology shown by Galton.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:I was referring to the fact of why I brought this up and it was in the context of penny's assertion that they're Alphas and had been developing stealth for centuries.

But (surprise!) we wandered into a different debate now. What a shocker!

So we have come to an agreement on Hasta.

The line I quoted from TEiF has been used by Penny elsewhere to indicate that the Malign is advanced in stealth. Generally on the question of stealth, it does seem that the Malign have put a lot of research into it and have made advances: consider the stealth coatings of the Ghost scouts or the cloth used to hide the island complex on Mesa.

However that does not mean that the spider drive was sought for a century or more. More likely it was the result of Serendipity from another line of inquiry in the last few decades.

tlb wrote:The line I quoted from TEiF has been used by Penny elsewhere to indicate that the Malign is advanced in stealth. Generally on the question of stealth, it does seem that the Malign have put a lot of research into it and have made advances: consider the stealth coatings of the Ghost scouts or the cloth used to hide the island complex on Mesa.

However that does not mean that the spider drive was sought for a century or more. More likely it was the result of Serendipity from another line of inquiry in the last few decades.

Agreed. I think everyone would research stealth. And an organisation that was interested in secrecy even more so.

But the spider must have been serendipity.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

tlb wrote:The line I quoted from TEiF has been used by Penny elsewhere to indicate that the Malign is advanced in stealth. Generally on the question of stealth, it does seem that the Malign have put a lot of research into it and have made advances: consider the stealth coatings of the Ghost scouts or the cloth used to hide the island complex on Mesa.

However that does not mean that the spider drive was sought for a century or more. More likely it was the result of Serendipity from another line of inquiry in the last few decades.

Agreed. I think everyone would research stealth. And an organisation that was interested in secrecy even more so.

But the spider must have been serendipity.

Every major Honorverse navy has stealth tech built into their ships - From smart skins to ecm to wedge masking. It would be odd if a major navy didn't invest in signature masking systems.

tlb wrote:The line I quoted from TEiF has been used by Penny elsewhere to indicate that the Malign is advanced in stealth. Generally on the question of stealth, it does seem that the Malign have put a lot of research into it and have made advances: consider the stealth coatings of the Ghost scouts or the cloth used to hide the island complex on Mesa.

However that does not mean that the spider drive was sought for a century or more. More likely it was the result of Serendipity from another line of inquiry in the last few decades.

I would agree with that.

The MAlign's naval R&D likely had a long-standing focus towards stealth - which has paid various dividends over the years (culminating with the coatings on the on the Ghosts); most of which we've probably never heard of - and plenty of which are probably obsolete by now.
For example I wouldn't be surprised if they'd also made improvements in stealthing wedges, before their breakthroughs on the spider drive. (It's just that other nations were also looking into how to make their wedges stealthier and so any MAlign advances would have been competing with everyone else's progress is reducing wedge signature and conversely detecting weaker and weaker wedge signatures).

After all focusing on stealth even more-so than other navies, would play into their long term strategy. It's never a bad thing to have an undetected asset able to nudge things the way you want them to go -- or collect intel the other side doesn't know you have. And they weren't expecting to be in naval combat any time soon; so they can afford to focus on stealth over firepower or defense in their R&D.

But a general focus on stealth isn't the same thing as a long term expectation of being able to find a revolutionary new ultra-low signature drive mechanism. (It'd be interesting if we every got the backstory of the inspiration of the invention of the spider drive -- because I suspect you might be right that it's more likely triggered by an unrelated development than getting picked as a likely mechanism for propulsion)

Clearly the Alignment had infiltration both military and industrial area of a number of systems. What they had at Haven suffered greatly with the overthrow of the government with Pierre taking power and vigor which the security forces under the PRH pursued anything they thought might be essentially counter-revolutionary or leaking anything.

Manticore was apparently much better with the military side of counter-inteigence but the biggest hit to their spies and moles quite possibly happened with Oyster Bay and the destruction of so much of the industrial and civilian side of the big stations and the yards. The Detweilers mentioned the lost a lot of sources.

The SL was also riddled with graft as well as plagued with Alignment spies.

One large question is how much of a spy operation (even if it was "just" industrial espionage in manufacturing and military related equipment and software) in places like the Aldermani or Beowulf, let alone any of the smaller star nations that were also working on their own improvement? Look what they did with acquiring knowledge of things like wormholes. Some small system which is working at innovating its way into export and manufacturing can come up with good idea -which the Alignment could quietly steal and run their own projects and applications. It's not like they worry about such things as patents or classified projects that nobody is likely to recognize in something an Alignment agent is using ten years and a hundred lightyears as component in a starship.

You also go have to go back to the part about the Alignment not having much in the way of a conventional navy. They seem to have some pirate operations working for them without knowing who the clients were but until we see the Republic Mannerheim curser squadron butcher the Harvest Joy we see almost nothing of any actual Alignment direct connected warships. Mesa SDF was though a joke- we have heard- and nobody mentioned them doing anything other than protecting Mesa.
So just exactly were the Alignment going to use BEFORE they came up with the Spider Drive to devastate systems etc and push the SL into falling? Before Haven became the Peoples Republic they were not going around destroying systems to seize their resources. You could think that the Alignment would use what are essentially terror tactics and slip Q-ships merchant shipping with really good passive systems into SL etc systems to do servalence and then run the Oyster Bay operation of ballistic pods being dropped into target systems from ships transiting out of hyper way beyond the system's detection range and devastating both the orbital assets and selected targets on the surface of the planet. How do you enforce an EE response if you have no idea who is doing it. The Spiders just give them better stealth and an ability to get in close and loiter longer to acquire targeting data. The ships sending in the weapons don't ever have to encounter another ship before they coast back out into the darkness and hyper away beyond detection range.

Brigade XO wrote:So just exactly were the Alignment going to use BEFORE they came up with the Spider Drive to devastate systems etc and push the SL into falling? Before Haven became the Peoples Republic they were not going around destroying systems to seize their resources. You could think that the Alignment would use what are essentially terror tactics and slip Q-ships merchant shipping with really good passive systems into SL etc systems to do servalence and then run the Oyster Bay operation of ballistic pods being dropped into target systems from ships transiting out of hyper way beyond the system's detection range and devastating both the orbital assets and selected targets on the surface of the planet. How do you enforce an EE response if you have no idea who is doing it. The Spiders just give them better stealth and an ability to get in close and loiter longer to acquire targeting data. The ships sending in the weapons don't ever have to encounter another ship before they coast back out into the darkness and hyper away beyond detection range.

If THE PLAN had worked as expected, then they were not going to need extensive military forces to do anything that was bad. They thought that it would be sufficient to get Haven and the Solarian League into a war and if both sides were evenly matched then the war would drag on and ruin both. But both sides were not evenly matched and neither was stupidly bellicose. So the internal process of making Haven expansionist and the Solarian League stupid began.

That this plan would have the result of making both sides break into small enough pieces; such that the worlds of the Renaissance Factor could gather them up and rule them all seems so unlikely, that you wonder whether this could really have been the plan. Looking at it now, it seems as likely as starting World War 1 with the expectation that Switzerland would end up ruling from the Atlantic to the Urals.

I disagree. I think there is a big possibility that the stealth ships were one of the early concepts of the MA. Stealthed ships must have been central to their plan to topple the SL by using the Peeps as the tool. Stealth ships had to have been part of the design. Not only are stealth ships a sure-fire way to start a war and make it appear as if some other navy in the area did it, but it is the ONLY way to do it. The method seems to be trending since it is so effective. It worked for the Romulans during the Khitomer Conference too.

From concept to prototype must have taken at least a century. At least. They had the time. They weren't pressed by war.

penny wrote:I disagree. I think there is a big possibility that the stealth ships were one of the early concepts of the MA. Stealthed ships must have been central to their plan to topple the SL by using the Peeps as the tool. Stealth ships had to have been part of the design. Not only are stealth ships a sure-fire way to start a war and make it appear as if some other navy in the area did it, but it is the ONLY way to do it. The method seems to be trending since it is so effective. It worked for the Romulans during the Khitomer Conference too.

From concept to prototype must have taken at least a century. At least. They had the time. They weren't pressed by war.

Prior to the introduction of the Spider drive in Storm from the Shadows (which makes clear that they were very new, just out of testing), they were doing everything with streak drive ships without stealth. Everything accomplished before then had been the work of covert agents (which work fine when trying to start a war).

The stealthy ships were only introduced to try and nudge events back to what was needed by the plan.