Attacking Darius:

penny wrote:But alerting the enemy that you know it is working on new technology is not the same thing as alerting the enemy you have specific details about that technology.

In the same vein, if Rafe Cardones had listened to the CO on the spot and not let the cat out of the bag that the crippler could be defeated, would the RMN have allowed Sims to exist about how to do it? Maybe they would have included it in any war games in the Home system, but would they have disseminated the information in any kind of data banks or SIMS if they had classified it?

Fair - but I think if the RMN's sims (which would be classified - at least their contents and data would be) got stolen they'd be more concerned about the info that would leak about the exact capabilities of cutting-edge RMN systems (Apollo, Lorelei, Ghost Rider RDs, etc.) than they would about it telling their enemy what the RMN might know about the enemy's systems.

Giving the enemy a solid basis to practice countering the RMN's systems would be more damaging.

But we know the RMN distributes sims containing their cutting edge tech information to the wider fleet because we've had scenes of those sims being used. So if they consider the security around those sims and their distribution good enough to protect their highly classified systems they probably think it's good enough to protect the intel they include on enemy systems.

Jonathan_S wrote:

penny wrote:But alerting the enemy that you know it is working on new technology is not the same thing as alerting the enemy you have specific details about that technology.

In the same vein, if Rafe Cardones had listened to the CO on the spot and not let the cat out of the bag that the crippler could be defeated, would the RMN have allowed Sims to exist about how to do it? Maybe they would have included it in any war games in the Home system, but would they have disseminated the information in any kind of data banks or SIMS if they had classified it?

Fair - but I think if the RMN's sims (which would be classified - at least their contents and data would be) got stolen they'd be more concerned about the info that would leak about the exact capabilities of cutting-edge RMN systems (Apollo, Lorelei, Ghost Rider RDs, etc.) than they would about it telling their enemy what the RMN might know about the enemy's systems.

Giving the enemy a solid basis to practice countering the RMN's systems would be more damaging.

But we know the RMN distributes sims containing their cutting edge tech information to the wider fleet because we've had scenes of those sims being used. So if they consider the security around those sims and their distribution good enough to protect their highly classified systems they probably think it's good enough to protect the intel they include on enemy systems.

Mostly I agree with this post overall, but served with a caveat.

Something that is highly classified, I do not think there is any information about it included in any databases aboard ship until there has been a chance to unleash that tech upon the galaxy. IINM, that is what happened with Apollo. ISTR that information about Apollo or that the RMN was even working on such a project wasn't even shared with any of the officers. It was only shared with specific officers, aboard certain ships, who would be using it.

Apollo put the need to know in NEED TO KNOW.

In the case of the crippler, I don't think knowledge of how it can be defeated would have been included in any databases before the tactic could be utilized by sending out specific ships configured to defeat it. After the cat has been let out of the bag, then there wouldn't be any choice but to include secure details about it in the databases fleet wide.

After all, that is the whole notion surrounding operational security.

It would have been a disaster to spread news about how to defeat the crippler before its time. Some idiot of an officer, Pavel Young or Elvis Santino, might have let the cat out of the bag prematurely to simply save his own ass or that of a light cruiser. A waste. When the Admiralty was planing a major fleet on fleet engagement for bigger stakes, like taking back an entire system.

In a nutshell, that is what Rafe did. So, I circle back around to questioning whether it would be a tactical error for the GA to risk alerting the MA about any specific data they have on the spider drive. Especially whether it can be detected, and definitely not any offensive or defensive tactics that are formalized to deal with it.

Manticore knows there is something out there in the way of ships that they can not yet detect with current gear and practices.
What we don't know is how far along are they on working on that and what -if anything- they have gleaned from the surviving sensor records of the Oyster Bay attack and then what happened when the the grazer fire took out the new orbital command nodes for the Beowulf defensive pods system.

From a certain perspective this starts to move in the direction of how soon the Alignment finds themselves needing to use the LDs to massively cut back the GA and allies ability to continue building ships and weapons. The Alignment has their LDs and theoretically is cranking out weapons such as the grazer corps and the other stuff they used for Oyster Bay. We don't know when the 1st LDs will enter active service (as in combat ready) and then how long it will take to build up the fleet and stocks of munitions to set about devastating the ability of the GA and others to build and replace ships, weapons and orbital infrastructure.

Galton was found and the Alignment (that we know of) doesn't have another decoy or fallback position to expend to protect itself.

The longer the Alignment can stay hidden and if/when it can rebuild something close to the former level of spy network they can think they are still able to control the situation and rot their adversaries systems and will by subterfuge as in the use of the RF to move words in to adopting much of their philosophy. That doesn't go all the way to giving them control, it just makes it easier.
So ask yourself how long Japan would have had to delay the Pearl Harbor and the other strikes they conducted in the month following it in order to have made a greater difference in what happend after the attacks on Hawaii, the Philipinses , and the Dutch & British bases and cities in the South Pacific and SE Asia? Your balances on a knife edge between needing materials, being committed in China, not wanting to give away your plans and working on the need to "discourage" your planned advisories from immediately start coming after you by crippling their nearest fleet and buying your self to have space and time to accomplish the immediate goals of capturing all the resources and crushing local to Asia military forces before expanding further.

The day a GA fleet comes out of hyper relative to Darius the GA has best have already established another headquarters. If the LDs are the way the Alignment is planning on gutting any system that can seriously hurt it's assault on the rest of Human space now then they had best get them out away from Darius and into positions to actually deliver all that destruction while they are still undetectable. How long can Darius take before it's ability to stop the GA erodes to the point where they might loose that system too before they make enough inroads to remain outside of the GA's reach?

penny wrote:It would have been a disaster to spread news about how to defeat the crippler before its time. Some idiot of an officer, Pavel Young or Elvis Santino, might have let the cat out of the bag prematurely to simply save his own ass or that of a light cruiser. A waste. When the Admiralty was planing a major fleet on fleet engagement for bigger stakes, like taking back an entire system.

Um, the Crippler was inherently ineffective against anything with a warship's double wedge (no need for special circuit breakers to add protection) -- and even the Peeps aren't going to be dumb enough to rely on a secret weapon against an enemy fleet if they've never tested its effect against a warship.

Yes, at the time of the story Charles had stage managed things enough to hide that fatal flaw from the Peeps, hoping to make the sale and disappear before they realized they'd bought something only useful against unescorted merchant ships.


(In fact in the story the Peep captain was anxious to try the Crippler against an RMN warship. Though why the Peeps would agree to try that before testing it against one of their own old warships is a mystery to me. Even if the Mantie doesn't notice the Crippler going off, simply flying your warship within a million km of another country's warship in neutral space is a pretty hostile act. And if the failed Crippler attempt is noticed it's an act of war! Why risk that before having confidence it works against warships?)

Jonathan_S wrote:

penny wrote:It would have been a disaster to spread news about how to defeat the crippler before its time. Some idiot of an officer, Pavel Young or Elvis Santino, might have let the cat out of the bag prematurely to simply save his own ass or that of a light cruiser. A waste. When the Admiralty was planing a major fleet on fleet engagement for bigger stakes, like taking back an entire system.

Um, the Crippler was inherently ineffective against anything with a warship's double wedge (no need for special circuit breakers to add protection) -- and even the Peeps aren't going to be dumb enough to rely on a secret weapon against an enemy fleet if they've never tested its effect against a warship.

Yes, at the time of the story Charles had stage managed things enough to hide that fatal flaw from the Peeps, hoping to make the sale and disappear before they realized they'd bought something only useful against unescorted merchant ships.


(In fact in the story the Peep captain was anxious to try the Crippler against an RMN warship. Though why the Peeps would agree to try that before testing it against one of their own old warships is a mystery to me. Even if the Mantie doesn't notice the Crippler going off, simply flying your warship within a million km of another country's warship in neutral space is a pretty hostile act. And if the failed Crippler attempt is noticed it's an act of war! Why risk that before having confidence it works against warships?)

Thanks for refreshing my memory. A lot of the details are fuzzy. But yeah, I thought the Peeps did think it would work against warships, and the RMN determined that it would not work against warships and that freighters were the only ship vulnerable.

But the RMN, Captain Sanders I believe I posted upstream, wanted to keep the fact -- that it was useless against a warship and it could be circumvented on freighters -- a secret. I am sure your refresher is correct, it sounds correct anyways. But that still does not change the notion. You do not want to alert the enemy that you have figured out how to counter their tech until you get a chance to use that fact to really bite them in the ass.

BTW, as you said, it really didn't make any sense that the Peeps wouldn't know that the crippler didn't work on a warship. I vaguely recall thinking that perhaps it did work on their warships because of some critical fundamental difference in some design component. My mind always has to rationalize certain things on the fly.

But you are right, the explanation in the story didn't make any sense.

Jonathan_S wrote:

penny wrote:Again, the LDs are going to be as successful and destructive as the day that submarines first came onto the scene.

Um, that's not the ringing endorsement you seem to think it is.

I think Honor and the GA would be vastly released if spider ships were only as successful as the first generation of proper submarines - the Holland boats of which the first prototype began testing in the late 1870s. (Those early subs were basically stealthy harbor defense craft. Slow, short ranged, with often questionably effective weapons, and in many ways were as dangerous to their crew as their opponents)

The first really successful subs were the WWI subs which were the results of over 3 decades of major iterative development. And even those subs were largely impotent against a warship underway - and pretty short ranged; the U-boats of WWI were mostly a threat to merchant ships in the Channel or a little ways into the Western Approaches -- the RN didn't even bother convoying further into the Atlantic because the subs of the era couldn't patrol out that far.

I agree that it isn't as stated without a few qualifiers. I have a weakness for documentaries. And a particular documentary on subs stated that they sent a lot of metal to the bottom of the sea, and sent the allies scrambling to counter them. Convoys were at their mercy. There was an account of a sub commander who surfaced right in the middle of a fleet? Ballsy SOB!

At any rate, whatever point in history they were the most problematical will be mirrored in the HV. I really can't understand why anyone would doubt that, since absolutely nobody in the forum disputes what their main strategy will be. Infrastructure destruction.

Blowing shit up!

Or, as kzt preferred to call it ...

Flaming datum

penny wrote:We still disagree on that. Remember, I got what I personally think is inside intel from the author that you had better not count on them not being ready. I know everyone disputes that post from the author as meaning what I read into it. But you just had to be there. And I know that everybody fails to take stock in my midnight ride, same as what happened to Paul Revere, when I tried to warn everyone that The Lennys are coming! The Lennys are coming! Over in the thread with that name.

We know from two characters' own internal musings that the LDs were not complete as of 1919 (Capt. McGowan) and 1921 (Albrecht Detweiler himself). This is not inside knowledge, it's fact. Oyster Bay was launched early with the Sharks because the LDs weren't ready.

So I repeat: the question is how long the MAlign and the MAN are allowed to construct those ships. We don't know the timeline of future books.

The MAN could be building a lot of ships simultaneously. I find that reckless, because you usually build a prototype or two of any ship class so you can find out what's wrong with them before you commit the design. The MAlign do not lack for arrogance, but they're also hyper-rational. The Sharks have proven the concept of a spider-drive major combatant, but the LDs are at least three times again their size, possibly much more.

There's a question of time. Those are huge ships, so even if we assumed the MAN can build them as fast as the RMN could build an SD (24 months), it would still take something like 3 or 4 years per ship. No one can build quickly their first prototypes because they are prototypes. But we don't know what state those ships that Albrecht saw were in.

There's also a problem of logistics: given a finite supply of resources, you can build a few ships faster than you can build lots of them. Not to mention you need to build the shipyards and industries supporting them in the first place, which take resources that could instead be used to building those ships. Those yards couldn't have started before the discovery of the spider drive and it would be reckless to build dozens of LD-size yards before the Sharks had proven the concept.

The LDs are just being worked up in their acceptance trials, and they are fine-tuning their spinnerets. They are simply waiting for the opening phase of the war. As far as what will transpire at the end of the day. Someday. Some day.

That they are. I'm not doubting it will happen or have happened.

My question is how many of them will have been built by the time the action resumes.

Naval intelligence makes mistakes as well.

Shannon consistently dropped the ball about "the latest iteration" of RMN tech. She constantly had to browbeat herself, "I should have known that that tech would sooner or later lead to this." For example, I think that happened with the RMN's stealthy drones being affixed with warheads.

Sonja dropped a few balls as well. And the SL's ONI dropped every ball.

SL Intel is not a good comparison. We know the RMN ONI and the RHN NavInt were much, much better. And the IAN intel services seem to be uncannily good.

My argument is that they know something stealthy is out there. They may not know how the spider drive works or how to detect it, but they know something exists. They may hedge against trusting Simões' debrief, but they can't dismiss it completely. Even the SL couldn't deny things when they were staring them in the face, like the improved acceleration of the GA ships once they saw them accelerating, or the FTL comms.

Because they don't know how the technology works, they can't make many assumptions on its limitations. Oh, they have to draw a line somewhere, because they can't draw tactics against an invincible enemy who has indistinguishable-from-magic technology in the first place. But they do have to take the possibilities to the next two or three next logical steps.

If I were them, I'd conceive of a full SD-sized ship that had similar accelerations to GA-quality SDs and the ability to switch to wedges on a whim.

However, I will grant you that they may make or have made mistakes. I will grant you that I am biased because I know, therefore I may think it's obvious in hindsight, but it actually isn't. So those two or three next logical steps may not be what actually happened.

Granted. But there are officers -- even Admirals -- who are only average. And some who are below average like Elvis Santino, and some who will simply make mistakes, like Bachfish. Not to mention the Admirals who are Admirals by cronyism. Like Young.

Granted, but I will also point out that two decades of active operations have weeded out the incompetent fools. Though in this case time is also an issue: the more time passes, the more some people will get promoted and the existing good admirals retire.

See above. Even Admirals are average, or less.

Yes, on average admirals are average. And fully 50% of them are below the median in abilities!

The Nasty Kitty can show her claws all she wants, but she can't claw what she can't see! Nobody in the GA has been up against these things or have been up against the kind of tactics they will use. Honor is a gal who can think on the fly. And I imagine Megan might survive an initial encounter. But the LDs are going to unleash a completely new paradigm in strategy and tactics. And it will be a...

"SURPRISE! GUESS WHO HAS COME TO DINNER!" Regardless of what the GA thinks it knows.

My argument was exactly this, but in opposite. What happens if the GA captain gets lucky and does nail down an LD? Even scratching its active paint by accident may be sufficient to give the competent CO on the scene the upper hand, if the LD doesn't realise its stealth is compromised. Heck, this almost happened during the Yawata Strike, when one of the graser torpedoes nearly collided with one of the ships in the MBS. It wasn't early enough to take any action before the attack is over, but that thread is still hanging on whether the RMN collected data on the spider drive from very up close.

The MAN has to take the Law of Averages into account as well, in the sense that over a long run, it will eventually get unlucky. The more rear-area operations it runs, the more data it gives to the GA.

So I think the MAlign has to go for the jugular as its first act. And yet I don't see how that could succeed... at least not without the story taking more books than we know RFC has planned.

penny wrote:Let me reiterate. Darius' defenses will make the MBS look like a Boy Scout Camp.

I'd not take any bet on that. Galton has always been the more militaristic system, by design.

penny wrote:Yes it was. I agree. The SLN certainly couldn't have taken Galton. But do consider that Galton still retained that distinction after being brutally raped; even much worse than Fearless was raped of her armament. Galton was gang raped. Darius' virginity and hymen will still be intact.

Why do you think Galton has been "raped of her armament"?

As far as I remember, there has been some technologies (especially the spider drives) which were not available to Galton to begin with, but nothing has been "taken away" from Galton which they had before. They produced as much of the newest generation weapons as their infrastructure could sustain, including FTL and rather good stealth. It's just cutting edge technology, and only a single star system, so their production capacity has been limited and still ramping up.

markusschaber wrote:As far as I remember, there has been some technologies (especially the spider drives) which were not available to Galton to begin with, but nothing has been "taken away" from Galton which they had before. They produced as much of the newest generation weapons as their infrastructure could sustain, including FTL and rather good stealth. It's just cutting edge technology, and only a single star system, so their production capacity has been limited and still ramping up.

There's also no proof that the extra MAlign technology would have helped. Well, literally, because they haven't been in use against an enemy.

But I will say that the spiders and the full MAlign package could not have saved Galton. First, at least at this point in the timeline, there's no way that Galton could have produced enough hardware to even come close to what I imagine penny imagines the Darius system will be protected with. There would be no LDs available; the biggest ships would be Sharks and those can't fire torpedoes internally. The torpedoes would have been a nasty surprise and would have taken some toll on the GF, but it would be a matter of time until the GF found a workaround and the Galtonians ran out of them anyway.

Second, Gail was right: even if Galton managed to stop the GF short by inflicting debilitating losses, the Galton infrastructure would be gone but the GA's wouldn't. The GF would reform and come back in a few months. Meanwhile, Galton wouldn't have anything new (if suddenly new hardware appeared, then the existence of Darius would be obvious).

Third, because I don't think even Darius can withstand the determined GF. It may take multiple battles, but once the lair is found, the GA wins due to its superior navy and industry sizes and quality.