cthia wrote:munroburton wrote:Grand Fleet lost about 20 capital ships in order to take the only star system fortified more heavily than Manticore's own Binary System.
Do pardon this snip from another thread.Say what??? Is this validation from a peer? And that was Galton.
ThinksMarkedly wrote:There's no way Galton deserves that comparison. Manticore, even before the 4-stage system defence missiles with Mycroft was defended by hundreds of SDs and LACs, with MDMs. Given that Galton did have MDMs (even if 2 stages only), there's no point in Manticore's history where Galton's defensive capabilities could be equated. At best, it's the few months while the technology existed and was being rolled out in 1911.
And, of course, there are other systems heavily defended like Manticore, just probably not as strongly: Haven, Yeltsin's Star and New Berlin, to name three.
I was perhaps exaggerating, but not by much.
Two instances of "fortified" from TEiF:
Every time he visited the system, Detweiler thought of the peculiar logic that had led to Galton’s creation. No, not to its creation, but to its…repurposing. It was simultaneously the crudest—and yet, perhaps, the most cunning—of the Alignment’s strategies. Build one of the most powerfully fortified star systems in the human-occupied galaxy, make it the Alignment’s primary industrial and command node outside the Mesa System itself, central to all of its goals and purpose…
<snip>
They knew, for example, that the system which had been dubbed “El Dorado” had over thirty orbital fortresses, the smallest of them as large as the fortresses covering the Manticoran Wormhole Junction. They knew there were at least fifty superdreadnoughts to support those fortresses, although the drones, confined to the outer reaches of the star system in the name of stealthiness, had been unable to tell them how many—if any—of them were pod-laying designs. Those same drones had observed what looked like exercises by multiple squadrons of LACs, and they’d also detected at least one clump of missile pods. That had been purely fortuitous—and statistically highly improbable—because the drone in question had passed close enough to spot the pods visually. Which raised the question of exactly what pods which looked suspiciously like the Solarian League Navy’s Hastas were doing that far out-system.
One thing they could be certain of was that there had to be thousands of pods the drones hadn’t detected.
They also knew they were looking at a system that was even more heavily industrialized than they’d anticipated. The drones had confirmed Exploratrice’s initial estimate: there were almost a dozen massive industrial platforms, served by an entire fleet of asteroid extraction ships and orbital smelters, spaced around the outermost asteroid belt, while gas-mining tankers shuttled back and forth between the inner system and El Dorado-V, a super-giant barely short of a brown star.
Under the circumstances, they were fortunate El Dorado wasn’t fortified even more heavily, and all of them knew it. Unfortunately, there were still all too many things they didn’t know.
Despite Oyster Bay sparing them, and two massive fleets trying to conquer the Manticore system in short succession, its forts haven't seen action yet. That's because the RMN was usually powerful enough to maintain a strong defense whilst also carrying out offensive operations.
The Galton Navy appears to have been large enough to enter the top 10 of navies. It's just too bad for them that they got attacked by the 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 5th largest navies simultaneously.