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SPOILER SEASON IS OVER FOR TEiF!!!

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Re: SPOILER SEASON IS OVER FOR TEiF!!!
Post by cthia   » Sat Nov 27, 2021 10:13 pm

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Brigade XO wrote:Wait, what wormhole for Galton? I don't recall a wormhole nearby in getting to Galton. Nobody described getting Honor from anywhere to Galton. She more or less shows up with a large mixed fleet of GA and friends warships. I'm sure there was at least one wormhole transit (possibly getting everybody to Manticore area) but a wormhole that Galton has by it's star.....not so much.

And while Galton might have been worried about an attack (it was built as a fortress location) I doubt "pirates" would have been the problem unless you think that one of the nastier Transtellars had an actual fleet of ships in the Battleship to SD range or could field 10 to 15 BCs. You are talking a militarized system with significant forces both in fortresses and ships.

Who actually knew it was there and who- other than Galton crewed ships- would have been taking material out for delivery or bringing in items and what materials the system couldn't provide? We know that there is at least courier traffic from Darius (though the source was not known to more than apparently very few top officers) and we have seen that most pure Alignment crews stayed with their ships- no shore leave or trips to the ground or stations though their passengers and bodyguards would go out.

We can deduce from various scenes - like the Golden Butterfly ultimately running into trouble at Montana- that many. probably most- of the ships being operated as delivery or transport for many levels of Alignment operations were crewed by people who were esentially hired or subcontracted. Some were Jesyk or other transtellar shadow operations or just people who ended up owing too much or having past mistakes or crimes held over their heads to force their cooperation. We were told that the connection to Hole-In-The-Wall was as a labor source to allow the shipments of Catafracts to be loaded on what took them to the PRHN in Exile. That seemed to be because the ships that took the missiles to the 1st rendezvous - or perhaps the 2nd set that actually made the delivery and at least one set of ships didn't have adequate handling and transfer equipment to make the transfer so live bodies were required. Not sure how odd that is except that the transfer is including a lot of very large missiles and one would think that even those could be containerized for handling in large quantities. More Questions.!

Oops, I didn't make the part about the WH clear. I meant that any SDs produced at Galton couldn't have been used to protect the WH leading to Darius.

Son, your mother says I have to hang you. Personally I don't think this is a capital offense. But if I don't hang you, she's gonna hang me and frankly, I'm not the one in trouble. —cthia's father. Incident in ? Axiom of Common Sense
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Re: SPOILER SEASON IS OVER FOR TEiF!!!
Post by Robert_A_Woodward   » Sun Nov 28, 2021 2:36 am

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cthia wrote:
Jonathan_S wrote:.
.
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Actually "significant forces" is probably a charming understatement. About 60 SDs, 1/3rd of them pod laying, puts Galton solidly in the top 10 largest navies in the Honorverse. Too bad it was in a fight with the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 5th largest combined.

That's way more of an SDF than you'd need to drive off pirates :D

[To give some perspective, Galton's fleet was about 2/3rds the size of Manticore's Home Fleet at the time of the BoM; and backed by what seems like even more significant fortifications that Manticore had. Though, to be fair, the RMN's Home Fleet had more firepower than that ratio implies because they were 46% podlayers, rather than only 29%. And there's no indication Galton had self-tractoring pods to give their SDs truly vast pod external pod loads]

60 SDs? Did I miss something? There were only 20.


Well, you did miss something. From _To End in Fire_ (the May 1924PD section):

“One bit of good news—we’ve managed to confirm that most of their superdreadnoughts are pre-pod designs. Looks like they’ve got about three classes, so I’m guessing all of them were experimental. Or developmental, anyway. We’ve only IDed seventeen pod-layers, so far.”

"System Alpha" had 60 superdreadnoughts (less than a quarter being pod-layers). However, since System Alpha appeared to have only one gigantic fortress (Galton had 3), I suspect that Galton had more than 60 superdreadnoughts.
----------------------------
Beowulf was bad.
(first sentence of Chapter VI of _Space Viking_ by H. Beam Piper)
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Re: SPOILER SEASON IS OVER FOR TEiF!!!
Post by ThinksMarkedly   » Sun Nov 28, 2021 3:22 pm

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cthia wrote:It still doesn't add up. There were only 20 of them there. If they started building them when you guys suggest, they would have more than 20 built. If they began building them much later, who were they building them to fight? They didn't seem to need them for System defense, and they certainly couldn't have been planning an assault with them. And I doubt they would have been used to guard the gate. They were too inferior to guard their wormhole.


Sorry. I mixed things up.

Rereading I noticed you asked about where the Streak drive ships were built. I answered about the Spider drive ships. So let's reset.

Darius definitely built its own Spider drive ships. There's not likely to be another shipyard anywhere else that can build them. And as I said, we know when they started getting built and when they weren't even half-ready yet.

I think Galton would have built the Streak Drive ships. I don't remember now if they took that into account for flight times to and from Galton and Hole-in-the-Wall, because that could mess up the calculations. But it's also possible this is another secret held back from Galton... though an even bigger hole in the Alamo Contingency plan if so. Simões knew exactly what the streak drive is, so if that isn't in Galton's databases, it would raise very big suspicions.

Galton definitely built its own SDs and SD(P)s.
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Re: SPOILER SEASON IS OVER FOR TEiF!!!
Post by ThinksMarkedly   » Sun Nov 28, 2021 3:30 pm

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Jonathan_S wrote:Actually "significant forces" is probably a charming understatement. About 60 SDs, 1/3rd of them pod laying, puts Galton solidly in the top 10 largest navies in the Honorverse. Too bad it was in a fight with the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 5th largest combined.

That's way more of an SDF than you'd need to drive off pirates :D


So why did they have that big a force?

Because the Galtonians had been told all along they were meant to take over the Galaxy. That's what they were building for. The fact that such a large force was sacrificed is a huge thing, meant to make any sane person doubt it is a sacrifice, but is exactly what it was.

Another aspect is that until the Spider drive was perfected in the last 10 T-years, that force was probably what the MAlign was planning on actually using to take over the Galaxy. Or, at a minimum, the testbed for such, if the Darius shipyards built even more of the same classes once the teething issues got solved. My guess is that Darius has shipyards to build the very same classes and therefore has SD(P)s in commission too. What force mix the MAN will have is a complete toss up, though.
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Re: SPOILER SEASON IS OVER FOR TEiF!!!
Post by cthia   » Mon Nov 29, 2021 10:00 am

cthia
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ThinksMarkedly wrote:
Jonathan_S wrote:Actually "significant forces" is probably a charming understatement. About 60 SDs, 1/3rd of them pod laying, puts Galton solidly in the top 10 largest navies in the Honorverse. Too bad it was in a fight with the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 5th largest combined.

That's way more of an SDF than you'd need to drive off pirates :D


So why did they have that big a force?

Because the Galtonians had been told all along they were meant to take over the Galaxy. That's what they were building for. The fact that such a large force was sacrificed is a huge thing, meant to make any sane person doubt it is a sacrifice, but is exactly what it was.

Another aspect is that until the Spider drive was perfected in the last 10 T-years, that force was probably what the MAlign was planning on actually using to take over the Galaxy. Or, at a minimum, the testbed for such, if the Darius shipyards built even more of the same classes once the teething issues got solved. My guess is that Darius has shipyards to build the very same classes and therefore has SD(P)s in commission too. What force mix the MAN will have is a complete toss up, though.

I still think a lot of warships could have been requisitioned for other parts unknown, just as weapons and ordnance seem to have been. The RF and people at Darius also had to train with something. They can't just enter the picture wet behind the ears.

Son, your mother says I have to hang you. Personally I don't think this is a capital offense. But if I don't hang you, she's gonna hang me and frankly, I'm not the one in trouble. —cthia's father. Incident in ? Axiom of Common Sense
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Re: SPOILER SEASON IS OVER FOR TEiF!!!
Post by ThinksMarkedly   » Mon Nov 29, 2021 11:49 am

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cthia wrote:I still think a lot of warships could have been requisitioned for other parts unknown, just as weapons and ordnance seem to have been. The RF and people at Darius also had to train with something. They can't just enter the picture wet behind the ears.


I've made the argument of why it couldn't have been a known shipyard. I haven't heard counter-arguments.

That only leaves another, hidden shipyard. There's one in Darius. But Galton is not allowed to know that Darius exists, so ships couldn't have shown up out of the blue coming from Darius. In fact, that pretty much rules out any shipyard outside of Galton itself, because it would now be revealed to the GA.
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Re: SPOILER SEASON IS OVER FOR TEiF!!!
Post by cthia   » Mon Nov 29, 2021 12:01 pm

cthia
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ThinksMarkedly wrote:
cthia wrote:I still think a lot of warships could have been requisitioned for other parts unknown, just as weapons and ordnance seem to have been. The RF and people at Darius also had to train with something. They can't just enter the picture wet behind the ears.


I've made the argument of why it couldn't have been a known shipyard. I haven't heard counter-arguments.

That only leaves another, hidden shipyard. There's one in Darius. But Galton is not allowed to know that Darius exists, so ships couldn't have shown up out of the blue coming from Darius. In fact, that pretty much rules out any shipyard outside of Galton itself, because it would now be revealed to the GA.

But, Galton is like radio-free Europe. They are force-fed crap. Galton does not know how Oyster Bay was carried out. Although, it can be argued that they may not even be aware of Oyster Bay. At any rate, they could have been lied to about a need for warships for fake purposes. Like Oyster Bay. I got the feeling that all of the senior leadership at Galton were of the Darius persuasion. Need to know. Missions of the utmost concern.

Son, your mother says I have to hang you. Personally I don't think this is a capital offense. But if I don't hang you, she's gonna hang me and frankly, I'm not the one in trouble. —cthia's father. Incident in ? Axiom of Common Sense
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Re: SPOILER SEASON IS OVER FOR TEiF!!!
Post by munroburton   » Mon Nov 29, 2021 12:29 pm

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cthia wrote:But, Galton is like radio-free Europe. They are force-fed crap. Galton does not know how Oyster Bay was carried out. Although, it can be argued that they may not even be aware of Oyster Bay. At any rate, they could have been lied to about a need for warships for fake purposes. Like Oyster Bay. I got the feeling that all of the senior leadership at Galton were of the Darius persuasion. Need to know. Missions of the utmost concern.


TEiF wrote:“You don’t live here in Galton, the way Guenther and I do. Sometimes, I think, even you don’t fully appreciate the differences between here and Darius. Galton is a warrior society, Benjamin. When word hit that Beowulf’s three largest orbital habitats had been destroyed, there were celebrations all over the system. Almost as big as the ones after Oyster Bay!
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Re: SPOILER SEASON IS OVER FOR TEiF!!!
Post by Theemile   » Mon Nov 29, 2021 12:45 pm

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ThinksMarkedly wrote:
Jonathan_S wrote:Actually "significant forces" is probably a charming understatement. About 60 SDs, 1/3rd of them pod laying, puts Galton solidly in the top 10 largest navies in the Honorverse. Too bad it was in a fight with the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 5th largest combined.

That's way more of an SDF than you'd need to drive off pirates :D


So why did they have that big a force?

Because the Galtonians had been told all along they were meant to take over the Galaxy. That's what they were building for. The fact that such a large force was sacrificed is a huge thing, meant to make any sane person doubt it is a sacrifice, but is exactly what it was.

Another aspect is that until the Spider drive was perfected in the last 10 T-years, that force was probably what the MAlign was planning on actually using to take over the Galaxy. Or, at a minimum, the testbed for such, if the Darius shipyards built even more of the same classes once the teething issues got solved. My guess is that Darius has shipyards to build the very same classes and therefore has SD(P)s in commission too. What force mix the MAN will have is a complete toss up, though.


Maybe not SD(p)s, They were only conceived in ~1910, and first fielded in ~1913, so no one would have been building one prior to that. Darius, knowing they would be building Spider drive ships (or knowing that the spider drive was nearing a usable form) probably did not build (or complete building) wedge SD(p)s, instead building the 27 Sharks. BB/DN sized warships still take 24-40 months to complete, so having 8-10 years to build them isn't inconceivable.

So I'd agree that Darius probably has some SDs, I doubt they built many (or any) wedge SD(p)s.
******
RFC said "refitting a Beowulfan SD to Manticoran standards would be just as difficult as refitting a standard SLN SD to those standards. In other words, it would be cheaper and faster to build new ships."
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Re: SPOILER SEASON IS OVER FOR TEiF!!!
Post by ThinksMarkedly   » Mon Nov 29, 2021 12:59 pm

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cthia wrote:But, Galton is like radio-free Europe. They are force-fed crap. Galton does not know how Oyster Bay was carried out. Although, it can be argued that they may not even be aware of Oyster Bay. At any rate, they could have been lied to about a need for warships for fake purposes. Like Oyster Bay. I got the feeling that all of the senior leadership at Galton were of the Darius persuasion. Need to know. Missions of the utmost concern.


The people would still know those ships showed up from somewhere. Even if they didn't, the fact that so many ships were there but the industry to build them wasn't would point to them having been imported from somewhere. Since you have not provided counter-arguments as to why it couldn't have been a known shipyard, that rules them out and it must therefore have been from an unknown one. And that would mean the MAlign's industry is not all taken and their support base not all eliminated.

That would mean the entirety of the Alamo Contingency went down the drain, because there's a huge gaping, hole, even wider than that of a lack of spider ships and spider torpedoes. More than that, this would have been a known gap in the plans, known for decades.
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