Attacking Darius:

penny wrote:It is difficult to prevent something from going wrong in a centuries old plan. The MA can't possible micro manage a centuries old plan without making mistakes.

-- snip --

To be sure, they made a strategic error when they prematurely unveiled their abilities and tech and attacked the MBS with Oyster Bay. But that was not their fault. It was plot driven.

Brigade XO wrote:Alpha's make mistakes. They misjudge things. They have demonstrated they can jump the gun (use Oyster Bay to try & cripple Manticore & Grayson but end up creating the GA) and exposing the existence if not the tech of their most advanced weapons.

penny wrote:Those were abstract mistakes, and, as far as the MA were concerned considering the situation they were in, it was more like "six of one, half dozen of the other." Or "damned if we do damned if we don't." Plus, it was plot driven. I am sure the author knew that if the MA saved the opening attack until they were ready, it would be the Detweilerverse. The author likes the HV.

They certainly thought they could micro manage a centuries old plan without making mistakes, even believing that anything unexpected could be corrected.

That specifically includes Oyster Bay, which was driven by their attempting to correct for their plan going horrible wrong. Manticore was about to conquer Haven (which was not their chosen opponent for the League) and was now much too close to Mesa, upsetting the timing of Houdini.

What exactly is an "abstract mistake", except another thing that the plan could not handle?

If the people of the Onion were so smart six hundred years ago, why didn't they know that "It is difficult to prevent something from going wrong in a centuries old plan. The MA can't possible micro manage a centuries old plan without making mistakes."? If they got even smarter as the years went on, then why didn't they revise the plan to something more achievable?

PS: You could say that everything that went wrong with their plan was "plot driven"; but they still thought that they could make the plan work, no matter what went wrong.

penny wrote:A Ghost is not a Shark and a Shark is not a Ghost. Why send a Shark to do a Ghost's job? If a Shark is detected, that is not the time to say, "We should've brought the Ghost, because they barely detected the Shark."

I'm arguing that those two are not the only two options.

It's the only two we can play with, but RFC's hands are not tied like ours.

tlb wrote:If the people of the Onion were so smart six hundred years ago, why didn't they know that "It is difficult to prevent something from going wrong in a centuries old plan. The MA can't possible micro manage a centuries old plan without making mistakes."? If they got even smarter as the years went on, then why didn't they revise the plan to something more achievable?

PS: You could say that everything that went wrong with their plan was "plot driven"; but they still thought that they could make the plan work, no matter what went wrong.

Let's not forget RFC has said that the MAlign would have practically won if they had just invested in marketing and countering the perception that genetic modification was bad, instead of investing on Manpower, Galton, Darius, and all their behind-the-scenes manipulation.

The Good Alignment is proof of that.

tlb wrote:The only reason why a Shark might be slightly less stealthy than a Ghost is that it is bigger, but it is bigger because it's armed; so there is your proper escort for an LD. Why waste sacrificing people on a ship that cannot fight back? Don't waste a Ghost when a Shark might make the enemy pay more.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:Maybe, but I think the escorts should be smaller; cruiser-sized, not battleship-sized. The Shark is a mini-LD: it serves the same role, but can't carry torpedoes on the inside. It's not an escort, it's just a poor main combatant.

An escort ship is meant to protect the capital ship and expand its reach. It needs to have plenty of counter-batteries, have a powerful EW suite, provide ECM, etc. It usually needs to exist at a greater quantity than the capital ship(s) it is protecting. And yes, it is meant to sacrifice itself if necessary so the capital ship survives.

For all of those reasons, I don't think the Shark is the correct design. I think we simply haven't seen yet what this ship will be.

The Shark is a podlayer, so what if the contents of the pod are smaller than the missile an LD could handle. The normal destroyer cannot shoot the same size shell as a battleship, but it still could escort it.

The only reason that there are more LD's in the works than Sharks is because that was the assigned priority. At this moment there are more LD's in the works than any other class, so that is not an argument for or against anything.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

tlb wrote:If the people of the Onion were so smart six hundred years ago, why didn't they know that "It is difficult to prevent something from going wrong in a centuries old plan. The MA can't possible micro manage a centuries old plan without making mistakes."? If they got even smarter as the years went on, then why didn't they revise the plan to something more achievable?

PS: You could say that everything that went wrong with their plan was "plot driven"; but they still thought that they could make the plan work, no matter what went wrong.

Let's not forget RFC has said that the MAlign would have practically won if they had just invested in marketing and countering the perception that genetic modification was bad, instead of investing on Manpower, Galton, Darius, and all their behind-the-scenes manipulation.

The Good Alignment is proof of that.

But they did know that tlb. That is why Houdini was planned way ahead of time.

But it is no way that they could have known that the two orneriest, angriest, warringest, stripes down the back, grudge holding, back stabbing navies would become friends. Even Tester did a double take on that one.

tlb wrote:If the people of the Onion were so smart six hundred years ago, why didn't they know that "It is difficult to prevent something from going wrong in a centuries old plan. The MA can't possible micro manage a centuries old plan without making mistakes."? If they got even smarter as the years went on, then why didn't they revise the plan to something more achievable?

ThinksMarkedly wrote:Let's not forget RFC has said that the MAlign would have practically won if they had just invested in marketing and countering the perception that genetic modification was bad, instead of investing on Manpower, Galton, Darius, and all their behind-the-scenes manipulation.

The Good Alignment is proof of that.

penny wrote:But they did know that tlb. That is why Houdini was planned way ahead of time.

But it is no way that they could have known that the two orneriest, angriest, warringest, stripes down the back, grudge holding, back stabbing navies would become friends. Even Tester did a double take on that one.

No, they did not know THAT. Houdini was planned for what they knew, but they could never know about a wormhole from Manticore to the Talbott Quarter nor about spies finding a disaffected member of the Onion.

Then there are the things that they should have known, but ignored: specifically the advancements in military power that made the SLN ineffectual.

All these are just more examples of the truth of what you said earlier:

penny wrote:It is difficult to prevent something from going wrong in a centuries old plan. The MA can't possible micro manage a centuries old plan without making mistakes.

PS: You could say that everything that went wrong with their plan was "plot driven"; but they still thought that they could make the plan work, no matter what went wrong.

phillies wrote:For straight numerics, an organic brain cannot compete with silicon.

If all else were equal Phillies, I'd certainly agree. Enter the malignant Alignment and the Frankenstein syndrome. Even for straight numerics, if the MA can harness the power of a savant - who may be able to see in the "quantum realm" ... where certain tricks can yield results sooner, like humans learn to do to some degree with experience - then I disagree.

But it is a moot point because a certain poster that rhymes with Thinksmarkedly proposes augmenting the brain with a computer chip. How is that monstrosity labeled?

penny wrote:But it is a moot point because a certain poster that rhymes with Thinksmarkedly proposes augmenting the brain with a computer chip. How is that monstrosity labeled?

How about "a phone that you cannot lose"?

Brigade XO wrote:Using impeller drive warships as escorts for spider drive ships negates the primary advantage of the spider drive ships........nobody can yet detect them.

If you bring even one conventional drive starship to ride escort on your spider drive ship, you have started waiving a big obvious flag that says "Here I am, come get me" which means that your spider drive ship has a finite amount of time to get off it's payload and vanish before warships come looking.

Ok, you could be setting up an ambush a couple of light hours or days out from the star but, really, why? After Oyster Bay and whatever happens next using "invisible warships" you would expect to find any system that has somebody pop in at such range to be involved in a ballistic or "invisible attack and it will go on alert. They might even start picking up interesting data that lead to identifying the operation of "invisible starships" and POOF, the advantage starts to dissipate like fog on a sunny day.

I don't think anybody was advocating that. I'd understood people to say that if LD's need escorts build a class of spider powered destroyers or cruisers to be that escort. Something that's at least as stealthy, but capable of contributing meaningfully to the formation's defense.

(While acknowledging that any spider formation that's required to actively engage missiles is likely to come to a bad end unless they massively outgun the force that trapped them (and all other forces that could vector in on them before they're able to flee back into hyper)

If LDs were ever used with impeller powered warships they'd likely be acting as long ranged detached snipers, or minelayers. Dropping off cataphract pods along the course the conventional ships intent to lure the defenders down - or lobbing in long range g-torps to attrit the enemy fleet or the system defenses before the conventional forces engage each other.

tlb wrote:At this moment there are more LD's in the works than any other class, so that is not an argument for or against anything.

Just because the LDs are the only class we're explicitly told are under construction doesn't mean that the MAlign isn't building anything but LDs. Sure, they're almost assuredly the only strategic units, capable of internally firing g-torps, but we only know about them because the Shark commanders were lamenting their lack of the same capability. The Sharks weren't in a position where their commanders would be lamenting the lack of some potentially also under construction escort class - so we'd have no reason to know about them.

It's not like RFC laid out the "here is the MAligns naval building strategy for the next 10 years" for us -- we're working with basically the random musings of a couple of captains and admirals.

Still, I tend to doubt they're building more Sharks. But the Ghost formation commander wished for more of those - and I'd be surprised if at the very minimum the MAlign wasn't cranking out some more of those stealth scouts. After all, they hardly compute with the ginormous LDs for construction slips But they could also be working on a whole range of other spider warships that just haven't been mentioned "on screen". Or not.

We'll just have to wait and see

penny wrote:But it is a moot point because a certain poster that rhymes with Thinksmarkedly proposes augmenting the brain with a computer chip. How is that monstrosity labeled?

How about "a phone that you cannot lose"?

Note that Elon Musk's Neuralink has already been approved for human trials. I might sooner trust the Malign to put a chip in my brain, than Elon Musk.

Honor has electronic nerves and eyeball, which therefore have some interface to the brain.

In the author's "Path of the Fury" series the main character is a woman who is a CARC, a "Computer Assisted Reflex Commando". The computer is more integrated than just improving reflexes. Oddly I cannot find that in the expanded version In Fury Born, but there is this:

Chapter 9 wrote:Like all Marines who were Recon-qualified, he was (like Alicia) one of the sixty-plus percent of the human race who could tolerate and use a direct neural computer feed. And, also like Alicia, his surgically implanted receptor was currently locked into the computer built into his combat helmet. It linked him to the helmet's built-in sensors, drove the HUD which it kept centered in his mental field of view, managed the free-flow com link, and connected him to his M-97's onboard computer. In his case, it wasn't a full-scale synth-link, the ability to actually interface directly with a computer. It still had to work through the specially designed and integrated interfaces, but the effect was to provide him with continuous access to all of his equipment. That gave him a huge "situational awareness" advantage over any nonaugmented foe, and after so many years of experience, all of that extra reach was as much a part of him as his heart and lungs . . . which didn't keep him from using his own booster-augmented vision and hearing to supplement his other senses.
Alicia, on the other hand, was synth-link-capable. Only about twenty percent of all humans fell into that category, but that was enough to give the Empire a tremendous advantage over its Rish-athan opponents, none of whom could handle neural receptors, at all.