ThinksMarkedly wrote:Puidwen wrote:A question about oyster bay. Hamish points outs that it had be an operation on a shoe string budget. However Galton had all those great big forts, so they obviously have some industrial capacity and their budget whatever it is, is not shoestring. How do you square these two?
I had to go back to MoH to see why they were coming to that conclusion. The only instance of the word "shoestring" in the book is not directly by Hamish, but by Oversteegen talking to Khumalo and relating the conclusions of the Admiralty, in Chapter 36. Going back to the actual discussion for his reasoning, he said:Mission of Honor, Ch. 30 wrote:"[...] But, secondly, the one thing that's struck me about this—in addition to what Tom and Sonja have said about new drive technologies—is that the people behind it can't have a very large navy."
"What?" Grantville blinked at his brother, and most of the other people around the table looked either surprised or downright skeptical. Caparelli, on the other hand, nodded firmly.
"This about it, Willie," White Haven said. "If someone had anything like the number of capital ships we have, and if all of them had this kind of technology, they wouldn't have had to raid our infrastructure. They could have simply arrived, demonstrated their invisibility, and demanded our surrender, and we wouldn't have had any choice but to give it to them. If they'd gotten a couple of dozen capital ships with this new drive of theirs as far in-system as they got their pods before launch, what other option would we have had? Even if we'd wanted to bring in Home Fleet—every single ship at Trevor's Star for that matter—they'd already have control of the planetary orbitals long before we could get into position. For taht matter, they'd've been into missile range of the planets before we could even bring the system-defence missiles online to nail them! And even unde the Eridani Edict, they'd be fully justified in bombarding the planets if we refused to surrender under those circumstances. But instead of going for the jugular, they attacked our arms and legs.
"Not only that, but the nature and pattern of the attack strongly suggest that whoever planned and launched it was operating with strictly limited resources. [...] But successful as it was, it was essentially a hit-and-run raid, albeit on a massive scale, and its success—as Tom has just pointed out—derived entirely from the fract it achieved total strategic and tactical surprise. If any significant percentage of the weapons committed to it—either those graser platforms or the missile pods—had failed, or had been detected on their way in, or even if we'd only suspected something ws coming in time to alert the stations and activate their sidewalls and get the tugs deployed to interpose their wedges against potential attacks, the damage would have been much less severe. [...] The people who put this together had to be as well aware of those possibilities as I am, and they have to know the axiom that anything which can go wrong, will go wrong. True, they seem to have pretty much avoided that this time around, but they damned well knew better than to count on that. So 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 perfectli.'"
(italics from the source, bold mine)
So what he's claiming is that this attack did succeed but only because nothing going wrong for the attackers and thus achieved total surprise. He gave a number of reasons why a little going wrong for the attackers would have given enough notice for the defenders to thwart the attack anywhere from mildly to fully. Whether that would have actually happened based on the fact that this was entirely unprecedented is besides the point: his argument is that the attackers couldn't count on everything going right the way it did. So he concludes that the lack of overkill implies that it used absolutely all the resources that could be dedicated to the task.
He goes further by claiming that if they did have more resources, the tactics would have been different and could have demanded surrender. This, of course, while logical is actually not correct, because it was not the objective. The objective was not to capture and control Manticore, but to cause either Haven or the League to do so while remaining hidden.
So, back to your question: how does this now work with the realisation that the Galton Navy did have dozens of capital ships? The important bit is actually when he says "all of them had this kind of technology" and that remains true: none of the ships at Galton had this drive technology. So when he says "the people behind it can't have a very large navy," what he said is strictly incorrect because the MAlign did have one of the Top 5 navies in the Galaxy, but he's what he meant is qualitatively correct because they didn't and still don't have a large navy equipped with this stealth technology.
This is also a retcon for all we can tell, but remains correct.
At the time of Oyster Bay we had NO information about Galton so we (the readers) also had no clue as far as the actual size or makeup of the Alignment Navy.
Then there is the failure to mention the Galton Navy Ships going anywhere other than within or perhaps close to the star system containing Galton. No warships were anywhere from Galton. Oh, perhaps, if the freighters that delivered to equipment and weapons to the Haven't Exiles (or to the ships that made most of the trip to where the former PRH ships were refitted or working up) were Auxiluaries - freighters primarily- they were still NOT anywhere near Torch. The same situation for the deliveries of updated Cataphracts to the Raging Justice fleet.
The Mannerheim SDF- so far- is also clearly at a tech level comparable to much of the SLN gear but not any further, that we have been told. The MSDF also has not been listed as having on anywhere and engaging in any conflict we have been told about---excpt the one squadron that was sitting on the other end of the wormhole bridge from the Torch Wormhole to butcher the Harvest Joy.
We were, however, told that the Sharks were the "testbed" ships to confirm basic tech integration and train the crews of the still in construction LD and that was all the Alignment had beyond the Ghosts in spider drive ships. Funny, absolutely no mention of Alignment warships.
There is also the bits about Oyster Bay was rushed (and so the cascade of the plan beginning to get badly off course) because the Detweilers were horrified that Manticore might shortly remove Haven as a viable instrument in the The Plan as far as bleeding the SLN down to scraps while the SL was disintegrating from corruption and internal politics. They couldn't launch the 1st round (not much fleshed out as how many systems would have been targets or which ones) but there were only enough Ghosts and Sharks to go after all of Manticore's orbital and much of it's resource collection industry and (just as important) ONLY after the Blackbird yard and facilities at Grayson. The Alignment put this together with what it had because they feared they would loose the chance to keep The Plan on target with their chosen hammer (Haven) as the blunt instrument to batter the SLto the point where the SL fragmented and much of it would have been involved in civil war as the fragments fell to warlordism etc.
As best we know, Nobody from Galton ever commanded a warship anywhere other than near the Galton System. While the Alignment probably has in interesting fleet of freighters and ships such as were taking Firebrand and the people who presented the deal to Monica to take the Talbot Terminus, the rest of the starships being used by the Alignment have been, at best, 3rd party hired ships working for Manpower or various Transtellars, not actual part of an Alignment Navy.
Unless we see differently fairly soon (in the next two books or so) it sounds very much like the Alignment Navy will be primarily their capital ships (the LDs) and such mission driven smaller ships like the Ghosts and a good collection of freighters to serve as logistics train - operating at a fair distance from targets- to support the LDs I don't see the Alignment popping up with their own (alignment built) spider or streak drive ships in the hundreds. They also won't be sending official Alignment Diplomats out. Not their style at all. Everything is perhaps two removes from direct contact with anybody that could do them harm. The RF, as well, is the same thing. It's a cover, acting under its own cloak of respectability but not "We are the Alignment". Big secret, always a big secret.