Attacking Darius:

kzt wrote:How likely is it that they have really good details on what happened? The station lost a reactor miliseconds after the weapon started firing. And it's a graser, so there isn't any way you can see the beam unless you are the target. Delicate sensors tend to be overloaded and damaged by gigaton class fusion bottles exploding and then dozens of fusion bombs going off.

I would assume they were only able to tell it was a graser when they got pieces of the station to a lab and saw damage on the atomic scale that is is typical of what really intense gamma ray bombardment does to material.

Given the multiple fusion reactors and missiles exploding it's probably essentially impossible to determine exact or even order of magnitude of the beam strength. Range and focus and how far the piece of irradiated but not destroyed material was from the beam are all needed to know that, and I suspect they know none of those.

Every single ship, minor station and satellite around Manticore, Sphinx, Gryphon and their moons had passive sensors recording constantly, like some cars nowadays collect footage from as many as seven cameras and stores it for a period of time before overwriting the oldest. Black box stuff.

Thomas Caparelli, MoH wrote:"I've already spoken with Admiral Hemphill. Her people have been systematically examining every recorded sensor reading from every surveillance platform and ship in the entire binary system. She began with the moment of the attack and she proposes to go back for at least six T-months."

And because of FTL communications, almost anything further away than a few light-minutes would be alerted to turn everything on and watch it happen in "real-time" as lightspeed slowly brings them non-grav sensor data.

They have way too many angles of view to not be able to figure out the power levels of those grasers as they carved through their targets like short-lived lightsabers. Same goes for the graserhead attack on Grand Fleet at Galton; they definitely got way better data there.

By the end of Manticore's post-Yawata debriefing, White Haven is confident enough to go on the record as stating that he considered the Yawata Strike to have been performed on an extremely tight and inflexible budget.

"... the people behind it can't have a very large navy."
<snip>
"If they'd had more resources to commit to the attack, we'd have seen overkill, not just 'exactly enough to do the job if everything works perfectly.'"

That whole conclusion implies they do have some really good details on what happened.

cthia wrote:Could it be the GA assumes OB was carried out by traditional ships hurling deadlye ballistic weapons? Weapons that were prototypes and scarce as Apollo once was and the data lost in the self-destruct sequence of the Galton space station.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:There's the fact that the torpedoes used during OB could not have used the Hasta body like they did at Galton, because the Hasta didn't exist and there's a perfectly accurate paper trail of its development in the captured Technodyne files.

Then there's the stealth, which again was much better during OB and Fabius than what Galton had.

There are also the three slaver ships that never made back to Mannerheim.

Each one of those, individually, could be dismissed as an unexplained inconsistency due to failure to properly interpret data or loss of data somewhere, or prototypes that never made into production, etc. But there are just too many of them.

It may well be that the development of Hasta by Technodyne and its demonstration to the League Navy was very well documented; but the idea it is based on has been around since the first use of Mistletoe. Therefore Galton could have had something like Hasta before Oyster Bay (we will have to see what is tn Galton's records) and leaked the design to Technodyne to jump start their development.

We also know that Technodyne was in bed with Manpower. So the MAlign was probably feeding Technodyne with ideas and designs...

Don

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Admiral Tsang?

So lets discount the Alignment screwing around with both SLN Naval Intelligence, Strategic Analysis and a bunch of the senior military command staff.

Sending a fake newsie courier through the Junction to Beowulf makes more sense than having an equal bogus (no way you are going use a SL diplomatic courier dropping in from hyperspace ouse the Junction given Lacoon II in force.) since the PLANNING had Tsang's Fleet coming in after Filiaarta starts in at MBS. Of course the havingTsang's Fleet come and sit relatively near by the Beowulf end of the wormhole- after" SLN" sent an officer to tell Beowulf what they intended to do- only makes sense from the perspective of attempting to get as many SLN & BSDF people killed and whittle down the numbers of ships in favor to creating more havoc on the part of the Alignment. If you are going to attempt (are they just stupid or gullible or idiots) to force the transit, why not send Tsang's Fleet to park in hyper near the terminus with very specific coordinates and have your courier boat go to meet it there? Avoid the initial confrontation with BSDF and the probability that somebody (oh, I don't know, BSDF, the government of Beowulf, the Astro Control officer of the day for the terminus) sending it's own courier -or a coded message via "mail" through the wormhole to the Astro Control on the others and -forawrd -after -read-to RMN HQ- a "memo" that SLN intends to assault the Junction through the terminus?

Someone mentioned that Tsang's Fleet was a political move.......well, yes. How do you screw with the SL relations of an original member of SL and (smell the Alignment yet?) create a massive problem for Beowulf? Tsang and her fleet dying is of no matter beyond they will be off the board as the League depends into chaos, the real point is polarize the factions and governments of the League Members and push the start of that level of disruption.

There is NO WAY the Junction side of the Beowulf Wormhole is going to allow SLN warships to exit into the Junction. What was not even touched on was exactly how Tsang was going to make the transit unless it was on her own without the help and information of Astro Control. Send marines and techs etc to take over the terminus Astro Control? Ignore Astro Control, order any ships in the queue to get the hell away from there, and just transit? If she had already been engaged with BSDF, would Astro Control have locked down and evacuated the facility? Would she order that non-compliance of Astro Control personal be subject to more than being "placed in custody" (like shoot a couple as examples) ?

Besides, at the point where Admiral Tsang's fleet shows up there is already somebody else lurking around Beowulf and the terminus. This is post Oyster Bay and Beowulf is running production lines full steam to crank out missiles and other equipment for Manticore including, we presume, components for the replacement of the major stations and other infrastructure. So that is that "little" fleet from the RMN hanging around in full stealth on the Beowulf side (with full knowledge of Beowulf) at protection against strikes against that movement of shipping (both ways) with the terminus and production at Beowulf. Exactly what the deployment looks like before Tsang actual moves on the terminus we are not told but I can imagine that some of the ships are "near" the terminus and others positioned in defensive posture just outside Beowulf's hyper limit and ready to be pulled in in the event of an attack. Nobody mentioned any actual protection deployment against an OB style attack on Beowulf though it is interesting to wonder if the Alignment had decided that doing that at this point would be counter-productive and hadn't thought up a way to (by proxies) hit the Beowulf fabrication sites.
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Missile stockpiles. How many of them would be kept on-board the lighters used for resupplying (or for unloading weapons before taking ships in to yard spaces for heavy work) or in warehousing other than at the 3 major stations? Do you keep missile storage on orbital platforms in the system well outside of such large targets as the major stations? We already know that ballistic weapons can be used to hit orbital facilities and remote storage locations -if located- can be hit with powered weapons so what's your protection. Of course you might keep stocks of weapons on colliers and or ammunition ships plus shift the vessels round on a random basis so no one can get a clean long term orbit location. Just curious

munroburton wrote:

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.

That is true. It is essentially what Hamish assured Beth when Beth enquired about the state of the war on two fronts? But as I recall, Hamish added a qualifier. Paraphrasing, "I assure you Elizabeth, we can handle anything the Mandarins send at us, until we run out of missiles." Am I mistaken about that?

Upstream when I said that things may have turned out differently if the SLN had the proper intel and still decided to prosecute the war with someone who belonged in the War Room, I should have clarified that. I meant, if they had been given the task at a point where there was no turning back and they had to follow their orders. The Mandarins had gotten the League in a real mess. The writing should have been on the wall that the League might be attacked. After OB, there seemed to be an opening that could not be refused. The fact that their defenses were still intact might have taken more time for the SLN to find out.

BTW, someone brought up Battle Fleet. Battle Fleet didn't have any Cataphracts, no. But I always wondered if they would have been thrown in with Operation Raging Justice had there been a declaration of war. It seems the Constitution should have had provisions to allow for their emergency acquisition.

Again, if the SLN would have thrown everything they could scrounge up against a navy with depleted missile stocks, the RMN could have gotten hurt badly. And when I say gotten hurt, I mean key personnel lost. Even if there was no missile shortage, in that size conflict there is no time to rearm. But there was a shortage. I think.

Why would the SLN think 437 SDs wasn't enough? Intel... and overkill. And the pains of previously being curb stomped. Again, their attack was to take advantage of a gift in the form of Oyster Bay.

cthia wrote:BTW, someone brought up Battle Fleet. Battle Fleet didn't have any Cataphracts, no. But I always wondered if they would have been thrown in with Operation Raging Justice had there been a declaration of war. It seems the Constitution should have had provisions to allow for their emergency acquisition.

Again, if the SLN would have thrown everything they could scrounge up against a navy with depleted missile stocks, the RMN could have gotten hurt badly. And when I say gotten hurt, I mean key personnel lost. Even if there was no missile shortage, in that size conflict there is no time to rearm. But there was a shortage. I think.

Why would the SLN think 437 SDs wasn't enough? Intel... and overkill. And the pains of previously being curb stomped. Again, their attack was to take advantage of a gift in the form of Oyster Bay.

Not sure what you mean here. Although Byng had been put in charge of ships from Frontier Fleet; both Crandall and Filareta were in command of ships from Battle Fleet.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:As for what it would mean if Darius is forewarned, I can't tell. I should point out that Galton did not it was going to eventually be invaded, but I don't see that there was anything that they could have done to change the outcome, or even nudge it significantly.

I think the picture has fundamentally changed with Apollo. Now the attacker can stay beyond the hyper limit and blow up pretty much anything they want to.

Loren Pechtel wrote:

ThinksMarkedly wrote:As for what it would mean if Darius is forewarned, I can't tell. I should point out that Galton did not it was going to eventually be invaded, but I don't see that there was anything that they could have done to change the outcome, or even nudge it significantly.

I think the picture has fundamentally changed with Apollo. Now the attacker can stay beyond the hyper limit and blow up pretty much anything they want to.

I've been wondering why it was assumed that Darius would be less exposed than Galton. It seems to me more the luck of the draw. Some survey ship could have stumbled across Darius
just as Ruth managed to notice something odd out on that dwarf system that the Alliance decided to investigate. What makes Darius less likely to be found?

Don

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Jonathan_S wrote:No, I don't see Filareta surviving making any hostile action even without the heads up. All he'd be able to do is force Manticore to simply crush him rather than deterring him. His ships were just that outclassed.

This. What they did at Spindle would have worked just as well at Manticore--except they didn't even need the cruisers to provide fire control.

Even if 90% of the pods she showed were actually Havenite there were still plenty of Apollo missiles to utterly destroy his fleet without a single ship even being involved.

Somehow I think he wouldn't have surrendered to "This is Manticore Control. You are within range of 500,000 pod-launched missiles that your defenses will be nearly helpless against as you saw at Spindle. Surrender or be destroyed."

tlb wrote:It may well be that the development of Hasta by Technodyne and its demonstration to the League Navy was very well documented; but the idea it is based on has been around since the first use of Mistletoe. Therefore Galton could have had something like Hasta before Oyster Bay (we will have to see what is tn Galton's records) and leaked the design to Technodyne to jump start their development.

Yes, it's entirely possible for the Galton Navy to independently develop the same solution. But that wasn't the case: the Galton Navy was using actual Hastas, because the Darius infiltration into Galton had to get them something fast. They didn't have time to feed bits and pieces of information so Galton would "independently develop" a solution that was noticeably different than a Hasta but based on the same idea.

Meanwhile, the graser torpedoes that did come into the MBS and Yeltsin's Star weren't Hastas (because Hastas didn't exist yet). So where is the research for those? And if those existed by late 1921, the time when the ships that took part in OB had to have launched, why did Galton have to use Hastas in 1923? Especially since the stealth in those 1921 weapons appears to be better?