The Two General's Problem

Jonathan_S wrote:Sadly the forum rollback Duckk had to do wiped some posts including ones about the Peep's Argus Network.

On the positive side, we really don't need to retain a heated discussion over whether a disagreement on what to call a maneuver by the Malign, means that we think the Malign would not be allowed to perform that maneuver. Clearly an extended raid could still take place, even if we do not want to state that it might be called a form of basing.

Jonathan_S wrote:And I assume the destroyers that have to slip in to pick up the platforms' take also have to insert from at least that same 2 light-months out. So each data collection run takes ships out of service for months. And we also know that the data updates only get back to the Peep bases every 6 weeks or so (possibly implying that the collection runs are pipelines -- with one ship beginning its long n-space run-in weeks before the previous ship has made it far enough to collect the Argus data and slip away)

I don't think the destroyers' presence was stealthy. The RMN knew the system was being visited. What they couldn't do is chase the destroyers away, because they'd transition too far out and then move out of position. And they couldn't prevent the destroyers from getting the platforms' data even if they could locate the destroyer and send a force to deal with it: the destroyer would just transition to hyper and leave.

The RMN used the fact that system was being surveilled to feed misinformation to the Peeps. That's how they forced Parnell's plans to go before they were ready.

In terms of total time spend surveilling systems before an attack Argus beats the Ghosts of Oyster Bay all hollow. The ships had to have spend vastly more collective time in hostile territory, and are surveilling many more systems.

Even if I am right and they were transitioning much closer (a couple of light-hours instead of light-weeks), it's still true because the Peeps put a lot of systems under surveillance and for a much longer period.

The limitation of Argus, compared to the Ghosts, is that Argus can't see into the inner system -- so it's giving strategic and possibly operational intelligence. But it can't provide the kind of tactical targeting data the Ghosts left for the graser torps and cataphracts.

Why not? The platforms are very stealthy. Even SLN recon drones can't be seen from a couple million km away, so a larger platform with longer endurance could too if it were sufficiently far from anyone wandering by.

The RMN then improved on the same thing by making the Mistletoe, which the MAN unknowingly copied as the Silver Bullet. We don't know how long the Mistletoe could last before depleting its power reserves. We know the Silver Bullet could last weeks with its trickle-charging solar power collectors replenishing what they could. I presume they couldn't last indefinitely because the solar array would be detectable either because it's too large or too close to the star and thus passing traffic. Therefore, Mistletoe and the Silver Bullets were as small as they could be for the endurance they needed to be. I see no reason why that wasn't true for the Argus platforms either.

I don't think we heard about the Mistletoe providing a system update for Eighth Fleet, but I also see no reason why it technically couldn't. The Mistletoe unit was definitely still active, because it must have received a command to attack the Moriarty platforms. Whether it made tactical sense is another story: having the Mistletoe platform transmit in FTL might have revealed to the RHN that the system had been under surveillance. Even a narrow-beam laser could give away the position of the unit itself if its laser happened to be intercepted.

And we know, for example, that when Tenth Fleet arrived in New Tuscany, they reactivated the Ghost Riders that HMS Tristram left behind 3 weeks before. In this case, Gold Peak didn't mind that the SLN knew they had platforms much closer by... not that Byng cared either way to change his plans.

Jonathan_S wrote:And I assume the destroyers that have to slip in to pick up the platforms' take also have to insert from at least that same 2 light-months out. So each data collection run takes ships out of service for months. And we also know that the data updates only get back to the Peep bases every 6 weeks or so (possibly implying that the collection runs are pipelines -- with one ship beginning its long n-space run-in weeks before the previous ship has made it far enough to collect the Argus data and slip away)

ThinksMarkedly wrote:I don't think the destroyers' presence was stealthy. The RMN knew the system was being visited. What they couldn't do is chase the destroyers away, because they'd transition too far out and then move out of position. And they couldn't prevent the destroyers from getting the platforms' data even if they could locate the destroyer and send a force to deal with it: the destroyer would just transition to hyper and leave.

The RMN used the fact that system was being surveilled to feed misinformation to the Peeps. That's how they forced Parnell's plans to go before they were ready.

To the contrary, extreme stealth was used when getting the data from the platforms. From The Short Victorious War chapter 19:

PNS Napoleon drifted through blackness, far from the dim beacon of the system's red dwarf primary. The light cruiser's drive was down, her active sensors dead, and her captain sat tensely on her bridge as she coasted along her silent course, well inside the orbit of Hancock's frozen outermost planet. He could see two different Manty destroyers' impeller signatures in his display, but the nearest was over twelve light-minutes from Napoleon, and he had absolutely no intention of attracting its attention.

Commander Ogilve hadn't thought much of Operation Argus when he was first briefed for it. The whole idea had struck him as an excellent way to start a war and get his ship fried in the process, yet it had worked out far better than he'd expected. It was horribly time-consuming, and the fact that none of the ships involved had been caught yet didn't mean none of them ever would be, but it only had to go on working for a little longer. Just long enough for Admiral Rollins to receive the data he needed . . . and for PNS Napoleon to get the hell out of Hancock in one piece.

-- skip --

The bridge was silent as the com officer brought his communication lasers up from standby. Any sort of emission was extremely dangerous under the circumstances, but the relay's position had been plotted with painstaking care. The people who'd planned Operation Argus had known the perimeters of all Manticoran star systems were guarded by sensor platforms whose reach and sensitivity the People's Republic couldn't match, but no surveillance net could cover everything. Their deployment patterns and plans had taken that into consideration, and—so far, at least—they'd been right on the money.

Ogilve snorted at his own choice of cliché, for Argus had cost billions. The heavily stealthed sensor platforms had been inserted from over two light-months out, coasting in out of the silence of interstellar space with all power locked down to absolute minimum. They'd slid through the Manties' sensors like any other bits of space debris, and the tiny trickle of power which had braked them and aligned them in their final, carefully chosen positions had been so small as to be utterly indetectable at anything over a few thousand kilometers.

In point of fact, getting the platforms in had been the easy part. Laymen tended to forget just how huge—and empty—any given star system was. Even the largest starship was less than a mote on such a scale; as long as it radiated no betraying energy signature to attract attention it might as well be invisible, and the sensor arrays were tinier still and equipped with the best stealth systems Haven could produce. Or, Ogilve amended, in this case buy clandestinely from the Solarian League. The biggest risk came from the low-powered, hair-thin lasers that tied them to the central storage relays, but even there the risk had been reduced to absolute minimum. The platforms communicated only via ultra high-speed burst transmissions. Even if someone strayed into their path, it would require an enormous stroke of bad luck for him to realize he'd heard something, and the platforms' programming restricted them from sending if their sensors picked up anything in a position to intercept their messages.

No, there was very little chance of the Manties tumbling to the tiny robotic spies—it was the mailmen who collected their data who had to sweat. Because small as it might be, a starship was larger than any sensor array, and harvesting that information meant a ship had to radiate, however stealthily.

Note the author made an error a little bit later, with the Captain worried that they needed to get out of sensor range before transition to hyperspace, so their hyper footprint would not be seen.

I also made an error in stating that the data was retrieved by a destroyer.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:The RMN then improved on the same thing by making the Mistletoe, which the MAN unknowingly copied as the Silver Bullet. We don't know how long the Mistletoe could last before depleting its power reserves. We know the Silver Bullet could last weeks with its trickle-charging solar power collectors replenishing what they could. I presume they couldn't last indefinitely because the solar array would be detectable either because it's too large or too close to the star and thus passing traffic. Therefore, Mistletoe and the Silver Bullets were as small as they could be for the endurance they needed to be. I see no reason why that wasn't true for the Argus platforms either.

The Silver Bullets have Mistletoe as the starting point in their design, from Uncompromising Honor, just after the battle at the Prime-Ajay Hyper Bridge, discussion in Daniel Detweiler's office in Darius:

Exactly. And there’s also some information on that chip that I got Benjamin’s people to pull up for me — a fairly detailed description of something the Manties came up with against Moriarty. They called it ‘Mistletoe,’ and Benjamin thinks that might be a good starting point for some of that brainstorming you mentioned a few minutes ago.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:And I assume the destroyers that have to slip in to pick up the platforms' take also have to insert from at least that same 2 light-months out. So each data collection run takes ships out of service for months. And we also know that the data updates only get back to the Peep bases every 6 weeks or so (possibly implying that the collection runs are pipelines -- with one ship beginning its long n-space run-in weeks before the previous ship has made it far enough to collect the Argus data and slip away)

I don't think the destroyers' presence was stealthy. The RMN knew the system was being visited. What they couldn't do is chase the destroyers away, because they'd transition too far out and then move out of position. And they couldn't prevent the destroyers from getting the platforms' data even if they could locate the destroyer and send a force to deal with it: the destroyer would just transition to hyper and leave.

The RMN used the fact that system was being surveilled to feed misinformation to the Peeps. That's how they forced Parnell's plans to go before they were ready.

In terms of total time spend surveilling systems before an attack Argus beats the Ghosts of Oyster Bay all hollow. The ships had to have spend vastly more collective time in hostile territory, and are surveilling many more systems.

Even if I am right and they were transitioning much closer (a couple of light-hours instead of light-weeks), it's still true because the Peeps put a lot of systems under surveillance and for a much longer period.

The limitation of Argus, compared to the Ghosts, is that Argus can't see into the inner system -- so it's giving strategic and possibly operational intelligence. But it can't provide the kind of tactical targeting data the Ghosts left for the graser torps and cataphracts.

Why not? The platforms are very stealthy. Even SLN recon drones can't be seen from a couple million km away, so a larger platform with longer endurance could too if it were sufficiently far from anyone wandering by.

The RMN then improved on the same thing by making the Mistletoe, which the MAN unknowingly copied as the Silver Bullet. We don't know how long the Mistletoe could last before depleting its power reserves. We know the Silver Bullet could last weeks with its trickle-charging solar power collectors replenishing what they could. I presume they couldn't last indefinitely because the solar array would be detectable either because it's too large or too close to the star and thus passing traffic. Therefore, Mistletoe and the Silver Bullets were as small as they could be for the endurance they needed to be. I see no reason why that wasn't true for the Argus platforms either.

tlb already found the relivant quote on showing the the ships making Argus pickups were being very stealthy. The Peeps were separately also making various incursions into some of those same systems -- as provocations prior to the official start of the war (and to encourage the RMN to disperse more and more of its fleet). And the book also, has the Peep's Captain Holcombe say "After all, one of Argus' primary objectives was to cut down normal scouting ops to make Manty commanders overconfident" [SVW] So they were being deliberate about which systems they provoked incidents in and which they left seemingly poorly observed; while Argus was keeping an eye on nearly the entire set of Frontier systems.

But they seemingly wanted to keep the routine Argus pickups separate because if ships were seen repeatedly visiting the same area of supposedly empty space the RMN might investigate closely enough to find the Argus platforms. (As they eventually did after getting lucky and having a ship end up close enough to pick up the tight beam that was being used to link a pick-up ship with the Argus platform)


As not covering the inner system -- the Peeps kept the Argus platforms pretty far out; with them all out beyond the system's hyper limit. Though we're told that the network does "cover the entire system periphery" [SVW]. That distance stance may have been out of an overabundance of caution; concern that the RMN might be more capable of seeing though even League stealth than the Peeps or the League thinks they can. It might have been so the routine pick-up ships, which aren't as stealthy, didn't didn't to penetrate as deeply. Either way unlike the later Silver Bullet and Ghost Rider RDs the Argus platforms appear to be holding stationary orbit; and not moving around to get better or closer views -- possibly to help avoid detection but probably also to use as little power as possible for something that likely needs to operate for at least a year.

That said, rechecking the text I appear to have been conflating statements that Rollins' fleet stopped at Hancock to query the Argus net) where "No shipboard sensor could see Hancock's inner system from that range". It doesn't actually say Argus can't see that far. I'm not finding any statement one way or the other about how far those platforms can see -- though it implies that they can see further than Rollings' SDs can...

That said, the Peeps shouldn't have been concerned about having full periphery coverage to detect Parks' possible return if if the Argus network could see any ships moving around in the inner system; so that seems to put a bit more evidence in the column of they can't see that far. (OTOH the Peeps may not have been thinking rationally, or might have had an unarticulated fear that if Parks came back he might try to move his ships under stealth; which would presumably cut the range the network can see them from)

tlb wrote:To the contrary, extreme stealth was used when getting the data from the platforms. From The Short Victorious War chapter 19:

PNS Napoleon drifted through blackness, far from the dim beacon of the system's red dwarf primary. [b]The light cruiser's drive was down, her active sensors dead, and her captain sat tensely on her bridge as she coasted along her silent course, well inside the orbit of Hancock's frozen outermost planet. He could see two different Manty destroyers' impeller signatures in his display, but the nearest was over twelve light-minutes from Napoleon, and he had absolutely no intention of attracting its attention.

I'm not disputing the stealth while they were in-system. If the Argus platforms could not be queried from too far -- and there are many good reasons why they shouldn't be -- then the ship needs to manoeuvre close and needs to do so under stealth.

But that doesn't mean the defenders were clueless that a ship had transited a couple of hours or days ago. As Jonathan said, arriving close to where the platforms were would cause the defenders to investigate. The captain of PNS Ogilve might have been thinking he hadn't been noticed, but he had been.

Also, 12 light-minutes might seem a lot, but when you consider he must have been 4 to 5 light-hours from the primary ("well inside the orbit of Hancock's frozen outermost planet"), that's actually very close.

tlb wrote:To the contrary, extreme stealth was used when getting the data from the platforms. From The Short Victorious War chapter 19:

PNS Napoleon drifted through blackness, far from the dim beacon of the system's red dwarf primary. [b]The light cruiser's drive was down, her active sensors dead, and her captain sat tensely on her bridge as she coasted along her silent course, well inside the orbit of Hancock's frozen outermost planet. He could see two different Manty destroyers' impeller signatures in his display, but the nearest was over twelve light-minutes from Napoleon, and he had absolutely no intention of attracting its attention.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:I'm not disputing the stealth while they were in-system. If the Argus platforms could not be queried from too far -- and there are many good reasons why they shouldn't be -- then the ship needs to manoeuvre close and needs to do so under stealth.

But that doesn't mean the defenders were clueless that a ship had transited a couple of hours or days ago. As Jonathan said, arriving close to where the platforms were would cause the defenders to investigate. The captain of PNS Ogilve might have been thinking he hadn't been noticed, but he had been.

What is your source for that? The Argus platforms and ships getting data from them were not noticed until chapter 27, when a misaligned laser was detected by destroyers engaged in an exercise in the Yorik System. The PNS cruiser Alexander got away, but the platform was located. The warship was ONLY found after the signal was detected.

tlb wrote:What is your source for that? The Argus platforms and ships getting data from them were not noticed until chapter 27, when a misaligned laser was detected by destroyers engaged in an exercise in the Yorik System. The PNS cruiser Alexander got away, but the platform was located. The warship was ONLY found after the signal was detected.

None, I'm just trying to remember things. But absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. If the RMN had detected the ships transiting but could do nothing to run them down, it might have elected not to give away the fact that they had the ability to detect them.

tlb wrote:What is your source for that? The Argus platforms and ships getting data from them were not noticed until chapter 27, when a misaligned laser was detected by destroyers engaged in an exercise in the Yorik System. The PNS cruiser Alexander got away, but the platform was located. The warship was ONLY found after the signal was detected.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:None, I'm just trying to remember things. But absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. If the RMN had detected the ships transiting but could do nothing to run them down, it might have elected not to give away the fact that they had the ability to detect them.

It appears that the ship came in from outside sensor range and traveled about 4 days to get to the platform at Hancock, then talked about about another 4 days to get out of sensor range before making the transit to hyperspace (which is an error, since the sensors do not see a transit out of normal space).

PS: Sorry, the part about the entry is something I surmised, because that chapter only talks about the time to get away. But it seems reasonable, because why be detected coming in and then insist on getting out of sensor range before getting out; reasonably both should be done at the same level of stealth.

.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

tlb wrote:What is your source for that? The Argus platforms and ships getting data from them were not noticed until chapter 27, when a misaligned laser was detected by destroyers engaged in an exercise in the Yorik System. The PNS cruiser Alexander got away, but the platform was located. The warship was ONLY found after the signal was detected.

None, I'm just trying to remember things. But absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. If the RMN had detected the ships transiting but could do nothing to run them down, it might have elected not to give away the fact that they had the ability to detect them.

But that seems contradicted by the inline quote I provided in my follow-up post (here's the expanded version)

Short Victorious War wrote:I think it's another indication he doesn't know about Argus, Ma'am," Captain Holcombe offered. She raised an eyebrow at him, and he shrugged. "If he's not in Hancock, he almost has to be picketing the Alliance systems in the area. Assuming that to be the case, I believe he uncovered Hancock precisely because he feels we can't know he's done it. After all, one of Argus' primary objectives was to cut down normal scouting ops to make Manty commanders overconfident in hopes they'd make mistakes just like this."

I don't think that a steady stream of Peep ships detected probing the outer system is consistent with the statement that a primary objective of Argus was to lure the RMN into a false sense of security by reducing the scouting they were seeing.

The text we have seems to all lean heavily on the idea that neither the platforms nor the ships that were picking up their data were intended to be seen; and further that nobody on the RMN side did see them until a lucky destroyer out on stealth wargame maneuvers ended up close enough to pick up the tight beam communication between an undetected ship and an undetected platform.