cthia wrote:If there isn't something equal to BuWeaps and someone equal to a Shannon or Sonja, how could the SLN ever have hoped to dissect and digest the information coming in about super missiles? No wonder they couldn't grasp the new threat environment.
I didn't think Project Gram was located on Weyland or either of the space stations. So, I wouldn't expect BuWeaps to be located on Ganymede. Although I could be wrong about Gram's physical location.
At any rate, I don't recall a BuWeaps in Grayson or RHN space either.
But out of the long history of the SL, Technodyne would not have been their major supplier of R&D or hardware. That's impossible and ludicrous in the face of classified information. So, where does the brunt of SL R&D occur? And who heads it up? The possibility of Manty superweapons was never passed by a SL version of Sonja.
FWIW the US dissolved its version of BuWeaps, the US Navy's Bureau of Ordnance, in 1959. That didn't stop it Navy from running various weapon development trials, nor from it acquiring a whole host of new weapon systems over the last 60-odd years. And, just as one example, didn't cause them to close the Naval Ordnance Test Station (NOTS), now known as Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake where a number of weapons have been developed over the years (probably best known the Sidewinder family of heat seeking air-to-air missiles and Shrike anti-radiation [aka radar-killing] missile)
It just means that organizationally the navy no longer concentrated all weapons/ordinance development into a single Bureau. Instead, after some separation and merging, responsibility is a bit more dispersed and often time the navy now doesn't develop the weapons themselves -- instead they tell industry what kind of capabilities they'd like and lets the design teams of the various competing companies figure out different ways to meet, or exceed, the navy's demands.
(And even during WWII, when BuOrd was definitely a thing, some of the best weapons designs and improvements came from outside it and were sometimes adopted over their objections)
From a narrative point of view it's compelling to have a singular genius with her fingers in all weapons development; or at least a singular organization doing all the development work. But in reality it probably makes more sense to run the more distributed approach where you can better leverage the knowledge and skills of folks in industry and academia who aren't part of the navy's bureaucracy)
And on something the scale of the League there are simply too many places from which new research or weapons design could come from (now that they're sufficiently motivated, and the navy is looking for that) to run through just one person.