Attacking Darius:

Come on. We know the RMN was given a vacation when they faced what storyline billed as the 800 lb gorilla. Another break for the RMN.

Even at 800 pounds, we know the SLN was somehow hitting above its weight limit. What?

Adding insult to injury, it was even outclassed in strategy and tactics. Of which they showed a grasp of neither. And as far as Intel??? What Intel? So Manticore was given a complete pass with this enemy.

It does beg the question of how the SLN would have fared if they had the Intel, trusted the intel, and decided to go to war anyway with all of their disadvantages - like Galton - but put the responsibility of exercising the war in the hands of someone actually capable - like at Galton.

And... if the strings were not being pulled by the MA.

Haven's Intel included the fact that Manty missile production had been snipped. Had the SLN had the same Intel like any bonafide invested navy with two brain cells to rub together, and still decided to prosecute the war, they may have used different tactics.

The SLN had a lot of ships in the reserve. They could have thrown a huge number of ships at Trevor's Star in hopes of getting the RMM to dillute their forces at Home. Or even used yet another fleet to throw at the MBS.

At any rate, the SLN could have thrown even more ships at the problem. Yes, the butcher's bill would have been insanely horrendous, but if you are going to prosecute a war, do you give yourself the best chance of winning? At all costs?

All of the missiles the RMN had was what was in their magazines. Without Haven's help, that may have affected how they fought the battle. Could they afford huge salvos wasting missiles?

I have no doubt the RMN had enough missiles to deal with anything the SLN threw at them. But at what cost? The blood of RMN officers? With Haven's help, Honor didn't have to be frugal, or fight smart.

None of those extra prizes and cheat sheets will be available when tackling Darius.

tlb wrote:

cthia wrote:That dispatch boat should have been traveling with Filareta. Heck, the SLN acted as if this was their first rodeo.

How would that have worked? Filareta's fleet arrives and demands surrender; then says "Do you mind if I send this dispatch boat through the wormhole? I promised my mom that I would let her know that I arrived okay."?

Filareta's fleet would have remained in hyper. The dispatch boat would have come across the wall, proceeded to transit the junction after any necessary niceties and met with Tsang's Fleet at a secure location to summon it to Beowulf to proceed to kick ass at "X" hours from now.

In that case, the dispatch boat wouldn't have tipped their hand and telegraphed the entire operation.

But frankly, if the SLN was acting like a serious navy prosecuting a war, no dispatch boat would even have been used. Tsang's Fleet would have traveled with Filareta's and not bothered with planning to commit suicide thru the junction. The SLN should have thrown everything they could scrounge up against an RMN with depleted missile stocks.

The one advantage the SLN had was the weight advantage. And they didn't even use it! Yet another pass in the form of a break issued to the RMN. They could have thrown several more fleets at the problem to soften the Manties up before Filareta and Tsang even hypered in.

The SLN lived by the creed of "Quantity is its own quality" for centuries. They screamed it all through the series. Yet, when attacking Manticore they magically developed amnesia.

Yes yes, because they couldn't get a formal declaration of war. Another RMN pass. Darius won't have to worry about no stinking declaration of war. They write theirs on the tips of g-torps. BTW, here is your declaration of war.

Late edit: As a matter of fact, where was the SLN's Home Fleet when attacking the MBS? Why did they need to leave it at Sol to protect the henhouse. It isn't as if they actually believed neobarbs would attack the Sol system. The Mandarins could have used Home Fleet as well without a declaration of war. In the guise of some sort of war games. The MA could have written them an excuse.

cthia wrote:That dispatch boat should have been traveling with Filareta. Heck, the SLN acted as if this was their first rodeo.

tlb wrote:How would that have worked? Filareta's fleet arrives and demands surrender; then says "Do you mind if I send this dispatch boat through the wormhole? I promised my mom that I would let her know that I arrived okay."?

ThinksMarkedly wrote:tlb was being humorous above, but if the DB had dropped out of hyper an hour before Filareta did and OpSec had held, then it could have legitimately asked for and been granted permission to transit. Then it would hyper out in Beowulf and advise Tsang, who would still be in hyper herself too.

Of course, this wouldn't have happened because Filareta did have more than two neurons. He'd have known it was suicide.

First, because said DB would have done the minimum necessary and looked at the forts still alive and well at the Junction. He'd have known there was no way a single file of SDs, transiting 3 minutes apart, would have survived.

cthia wrote:Filareta's fleet would have remained in hyper. The dispatch boat would have come across the wall, proceeded to transit the junction after any necessary niceties and met with Tsang's Fleet at a secure location to summon it to Beowulf to proceed to kick ass at "X" hours from now.

In that case, the dispatch boat wouldn't have tipped their hand and telegraphed the entire operation.

But frankly, if the SLN was acting like a serious navy prosecuting a war, no dispatch boat would even have been used. Tsang's Fleet would have traveled with Filareta's and not bothered with planning to commit suicide thru the junction. The SLN should have thrown everything they could scrounge up against an RMN with depleted missile stocks.

The one advantage the SLN had was the weight advantage. And they didn't even use it! Yet another pass in the form of a break issued to the RMN. They could have thrown several more fleets at the problem to soften the Manties up before Filareta and Tsang even hypered in.

The SLN lived by the creed of "Quantity is its own quality" for centuries. They screamed it all through the series. Yet, when attacking Manticore they magically developed amnesia.

Yes yes, because they couldn't get a formal declaration of war. Another RMN pass. Darius won't have to worry about no stinking declaration of war. They write theirs on the tips of g-torps. BTW, here is your declaration of war.

Late edit: As a matter of fact, where was the SLN's Home Fleet when attacking the MBS? Why did they need to leave it at Sol to protect the henhouse. It isn't as if they actually believed neobarbs would attack the Sol system. The Mandarins could have used Home Fleet as well without a declaration of war. In the guise of some sort of war games. The MA could have written them an excuse.

Yes, you and ThinksMarkedly are both correct about how the dispatch boat could have been used (of course I was being facetious; there is is no way I would not have seen that myself, was there?). Also you are both correct in the the different ways things could have gone better.

As others have mentioned, the real purpose of Tsang's fleet was to prove the treason of Beowulf; not specifically to assist Filareta.

But how many more fleets could they actually have thrown at Manticore? Particularly after whoever shows up first is mauled? I believe it has been stated that it would require a major expansion of the League navy to begin to man the reserve fleet.

cthia wrote:All of the missiles the RMN had was what was in their magazines. Without Haven's help, that may have affected how they fought the battle. Could they afford huge salvos wasting missiles?

I think that's a bit of an exaggeration. Yes, OB blew up the orbital missile construction factories, and presumably the missile reloads stored around Sphinx, Manticore, Gryphon, and Grayson/Blackbird.

But in addition to the missiles in the ships' magazines you'd have missiles in the missile colliers, missiles in various forts' magazines; likely reloads in warehouses out by the Junction, there would have been substantial missile reloads stored at fleet bases like Trevor's Star.

So, yes, Manticore had a finite number of missiles. But that number should have been far in excess of just the magazine capacity of their ships.

tlb wrote:But how many more fleets could they actually have thrown at Manticore? Particularly after whoever shows up first is mauled? I believe it has been stated that it would require a major expansion of the League navy to begin to man the reserve fleet.

It's also not clear that they had the fleet train to support additional large fleets. Remember that if you can't use the Junction then it's a multi-month flight from Sol to Manticore.
Also remember that, prior to Crandall's doomed task force (of about 100 of the wall) that "it's been over ninety T-years since Battle Fleet has deployed more than a single squadron all the way out to the frontier, and there's been some question as to whether or not it still has the logistics capacity to support its own operations outside the Old League's established system of bases."

Now some of that might just be the excuse for putting their Battle Fleet puppets where the MAlign wanted them - and the concern is overblown. But the 90+ years part pretty much has to be true -- and Filareta brought a lot more than 100 of the wall.

So it probably was a massive stretch of the SLN's logistics fleet train to operate even that large a force so far beyond their supply base network.

It probably would have taken them even longer to line up the support vessels, spare parts, supplies, etc. to send additional large fleets out that far. And that's just discussing their remaining active fleet. I seriously doubt they had any support or logistics ships in their reserve -- so in addition to having to recruit and train the personnel to man those ships if they wanted to send them out into the Verge along with the active fleet they'd need to build or convert additional support and supply ships and come up with even more personnel to man those.

And then there's the question of how much of their supply of Cataphracts the MAlign was willing to turn over. Do they have 5, or 10, times as many just ready to go without stripping their defenses around Galton or Darius?
And even if they do, even the League might start asking questions if "Technodyne" just happens to have quite a few million multi-stage missiles in their inventory, that nobody had heard a hint of until now and, for which they don't seem to have any buyers lined up.

"Oh, yes, of course we decided to sink many years' annual profits into a totally speculative missile production measure without ever bothering to solicit interest, or pre-orders from any potential customer, or even to sell a single one until now. That's a totally normal thing for a regular company to do"

cthia wrote:The SLN lived by the creed of "Quantity is its own quality" for centuries. They screamed it all through the series. Yet, when attacking Manticore they magically developed amnesia.

As enormous as the SLN may have been, they actually didn't have enough quantity to overcome Manticore's quality. Not after 1915pd. A first-generation SD(P) loaded with first-generation missile pods could mission-kill as many as twenty-five old-style SDs.

A second-generation SD(P) with second-generation pods can achieve closer to fifty mission-kills. And all utterly beyond these SDs' missile range, never mind energy range.

I think White Haven's Eighth Fleet during Operation Buttercup - a mere thirty first-gen podnoughts - had enough missile power to deal with Filareta's fleet. A Home Fleet with "only" fifty Invictuses could handle 2500 SDs - more than the SLN's entire active battle fleet.

The sixty SD(P)s detached to Sigma Draconis under Alice Truman's command could have done that by themselves. The SLN truly had no idea how utterly outclassed it was and its ignorance ran so deeply that the GA's main difficulty at Second Manticore was amassing enough wallers to convince Filareta and Tsang that they were indeed hopelessly outgunned.

Any scenario with fewer ships for Manticore or significantly more for the SLN therefore leads to a forced engagement in which the RMN will be fighting at maximum effort, rather than the easy trap they laid for Filareta. This does not improve the scenario's outcome for the SLN.

Jonathan_S wrote:But in addition to the missiles in the ships' magazines you'd have missiles in the missile colliers, missiles in various forts' magazines; likely reloads in warehouses out by the Junction, there would have been substantial missile reloads stored at fleet bases like Trevor's Star.

So, yes, Manticore had a finite number of missiles. But that number should have been far in excess of just the magazine capacity of their ships.

When does a navy have it’s ammunition storage areas? In my experience people who are responsible for very deadly and expensive weapons want have them stored on facilities that is owned by them protected by their armed guards, not stored in random u-store storage warehouses scattered around the countryside. Have you ever seen the episode of Storage Wars where they opened up the door and found it was full of FGM-148 Javelin missiles the Army forgot to pay the bill on? Me neither.

So when you blow up the three largest and most important naval bases of the RMN…

Jonathan_S wrote:But in addition to the missiles in the ships' magazines you'd have missiles in the missile colliers, missiles in various forts' magazines; likely reloads in warehouses out by the Junction, there would have been substantial missile reloads stored at fleet bases like Trevor's Star.

So, yes, Manticore had a finite number of missiles. But that number should have been far in excess of just the magazine capacity of their ships.

kzt wrote:When does a navy have it’s ammunition storage areas? In my experience people who are responsible for very deadly and expensive weapons want have them stored on facilities that is owned by them protected by their armed guards, not stored in random u-store storage warehouses scattered around the countryside. Have you ever seen the episode of Storage Wars where they opened up the door and found it was full of FGM-148 Javelin missiles the Army forgot to pay the bill on? Me neither.

So when you blow up the three largest and most important naval bases of the RMN…

Also the system defense variety of Apollo cannot be stored in ships' magazines and would unlikely to be in colliers except as actually needed to transport them between systems. Finally you cannot remove most of those at forts or Basilisk or Trevor's Star, because there is still an ongoing war.

cthia wrote:It does beg the question of how the SLN would have fared if they had the Intel, trusted the intel, and decided to go to war anyway with all of their disadvantages - like Galton - but put the responsibility of exercising the war in the hands of someone actually capable - like at Galton.

That's not answerable because then the whole premise changes.

If the SLN had had intel, they wouldn't have been caught with their pants down and a fleet of obsolete SDs. They'd have begun constructing their own SD(P)s as early as 1915. And given the six years between "what's that" and "I christen thee first podnought" that would mean they would have had at least some SD(P)s by 1922. However, that wouldn't have been enough to take on the RMN or the GF just yet. Haven had begun stockpiling parts to build new SDs early in the first war, which is why they could move quickly to building SD(P)s at Bolthole. Even then, with Haven's first-hand technical knowledge of the issue at hand, the first Sovereign of Space-class SD(P)s only launched in 1919 and the RHN didn't have enough of them to defeat the Manticore Alliance as late as 1921.

So if the SLN had had the intel, they wouldn't have launched the attack in the first place. They'd have known it was suicide. They'd have known when they could have caught up, whenever that may be.

I don't see a capable SLN, not under Rajampet and not infiltrated by the MAlign, yielding to the Mandarins' pressure. That's true whether they had SD(P)s in construction or had just come across one.

At worst, they would have sent Filareta and Filareta would have surrendered once he did realise that the defences around the MBS were intact. Without MAlign infiltration, there would be no uncoordinated launch. It would have been a huge loss of face for the SLN, but in actual war-fighting capabilities not a big loss, because they'd know those 10000 SDs they had were obsolete. So might as well contribute to the Manticore ship-scrapping business.

Haven's Intel included the fact that Manty missile production had been snipped. Had the SLN had the same Intel like any bonafide invested navy with two brain cells to rub together, and still decided to prosecute the war, they may have used different tactics.

The MAlign was passing them selective information that supported the conclusion they wanted the SLN to arrive at. They passed the information that some infrastructure had been indeed destroyed, so the SLN knew, like the RHN, that production capabilities had been curtailed. But the MAlign failed to pass information that the rest of the system's defences were intact, including the entire Python Lump of ships that had been launched before OB struck. They instead allowed the SLN to conclude that any attacker would have had to gut those defences to reach the space stations, therefore the system had to be undefended now.

Without MAlign interference, the SLN might have concluded not only that the defences were there, but that Haven couldn't have been responsible for the attack in the first place, since Haven had been defeated and was at the negotiating table (remember: Honor and the entire Eighth Fleet were in the Haven system!). Which would have led to the uncomfortable conclusion that The Other Guys were afoot.

The SLN had a lot of ships in the reserve. They could have thrown a huge number of ships at Trevor's Star in hopes of getting the RMM to dillute their forces at Home. Or even used yet another fleet to throw at the MBS.

Addressed elsewhere in terms of manpower.

But a couple more details: Trevor's Star is even farther from the League than Manticore is. It was already a monumental effort to get enough ships at Tasmania to launch the attack on the MBS. Throwing them at Trevor's Star would have increased the timeline for an attack because of the distance and because I'm assuming you meant that the SLN should have brought in more ships, instead of dividing Eleventh Fleet. Dividing would have been the worst of both worlds, because the RMN had the interior lines and could easily shift reinforcements between the two, while the two prongs of the attack could not communicate with each other.

Remember that the MAlign had been prepositioning ships with Filareta at Tasmania for a long time, at least as late as the operation at Monica. Both Filareta and Crandall were mentioned early in Storm from the Shadows:

Storm from the Shadows, Ch. 10 wrote:"Well, Monica's not that big a loss," Albrecht observed. "It was never more than a cat's-paw in the first place and I'm confident we can find another one of those if we need it. Having Verrochio go all gutless on us, now... That's more than a little irritating. Especially after all the investment we made in Crandall and Filareta."
... "Both of them had the authority to choose their own training problems and deploy their squadrons where they wanted for their exercises, so that's not a problem. But now that the entire Talbott operation's gone sour on us, we can't have anyone wondering­—or worse, actually asking—why both of them chose such obscure locations. Locations that just happened to move their task forces so close to Talbott and Manticore itself just when things were coming at a head at Monica... almost as if they knew something was going to happen ahead of time."

This is basically the chapter where we're introduced to the Alignment. BTW, note how SftS was published in 2009 and Second Manticore didn't happen until ART, published 2012. With MoH published in-between too.

At any rate, the SLN could have thrown even more ships at the problem. Yes, the butcher's bill would have been insanely horrendous, but if you are going to prosecute a war, do you give yourself the best chance of winning? At all costs?

NO ONE had so far sent 437 SDs in any attack, ever. Why would the SLN not think that was enough?

But if they did think it wasn't, then they wouldn't have launched in the first place. Or they'd have had to wait another year to collect enough forces, time which the Mandarins didn't have and the MAlign didn't allow them. Lacoön was already in operation at this point.

None of those extra prizes and cheat sheets will be available when tackling Darius.

No, but whoever takes on that will have an effectively unlimited supply of Apollo missiles and Ghost Rider drones.

tlb wrote:Also the system defense variety of Apollo cannot be stored in ships' magazines and would unlikely to be in colliers except as actually needed to transport them between systems. Finally you cannot remove most of those at forts or Basilisk or Trevor's Star, because there is still an ongoing war.

Right, remember that OB happened while Honor was in Nouveau Paris negotiating with Pritchart, which means:

1) the war with Haven wasn't over, only at cease-fire. Production of war matériel hadn't stopped since First Manticore, in May 1921 (this is Feb 1922).

2) Eighth Fleet was deployed, which means they had a fleet train of some sort. Probably not enough for sustained operations, because that was not the intention. But they were facing the RHN Capital Fleet, so if battle did break out, they would have wanted to have resources at hand to conflict right then and there.

3) Trevor's Star was still the premier launching spot for fighting Haven, so the ammunitions and supplies would have been deployed forward there. That system was also closed to foreign civilian traffic, so it was more secure than the MBS. Spies can tell what's at the Junction, but not at Trevor's Star.

4) Eighth Fleet existed again, which means Home Fleet had been reincorporated, which means they were stocked.

So OB did definitely destroy a lot of the stocked supplies that were aboard the stations. But it didn't touch anything stored elsewhere, which means the GA definitely had more stock than just what was in the magazines.