Hyperspace Combat and the Solarian Leauge Navy

n7axw wrote:I, for one, do not doubt that the League can outbuild its opposition, BUT... there are two major qualifications that must be observed that usually are left out when League v GA capabilities are compared.

The first is political. Can the League hold itself together long enough to exploit its resourse advantages? They probably need a minimum of five years that they may well not have. Golng along with this, will the wealthier core worlds agree to some form of taxation to support the war effort? The League government has been largely financed by ripping off OFS protectorates in the shell worlds and the verge that to a major extent is cut off by lacoon 2. If the League cannot muster its resourses, it doesn't matter how much greater they are than the G A.

The second consideration has to do with R&D. Projects like Gram took decades of persistent work to bear fruit in the breakthroughs that gave Manticore its current edge. By way of contrast, the Leagues R&D is currently politicized and moribund as far as coming up with fresh results are concerned. That means that they would have to start from scratch to build the institutional support for serious R&D. Then after they have managed that to gather the minds needed for the job and get started. Even then results will not be instantaneos. Meanwhile GA R&D keeps crankimg out new results.

Does the League have the time to deal with all of this? Probably not.

Don

Please note that it took haven no more then 5 years to reproduce most of what manticore spent 40 years working on.

kzt wrote:Please note that it took haven no more then 5 years to reproduce most of what manticore spent 40 years working on.

Haven had the advantage of seeing RMN equipment in operation and had some captured hardware to examine -- not necessarily post buttercup hardware, but some late pre-buttercup hardware.

Haven also had the St Just/North Hollow cease, which let them survive long enough to have five years to reproduce RMN tech.

I don't expect the Solarian League to survive five years, and, to date, they have no captured hardware to examine.

Weird Harold wrote:

kzt wrote:Please note that it took haven no more then 5 years to reproduce most of what manticore spent 40 years working on.

Haven had the advantage of seeing RMN equipment in operation and had some captured hardware to examine -- not necessarily post buttercup hardware, but some late pre-buttercup hardware.

Haven also had the St Just/North Hollow cease, which let them survive long enough to have five years to reproduce RMN tech.

I don't expect the Solarian League to survive five years, and, to date, they have no captured hardware to examine.

*Cough* Erewhon *Cough*

It took Haven several years just to get missile pods working. If it wasn't for Erewhon getting ticked off and handing information to Haven they wouldn't have made the leap.

Given that haven was noted for having crippled their educational system, I tend to suspect that the SL has a rather significant edge on the appropriate scientists and engineers. So duplication might not take that long. This assumes they can buy the tech from one of the very large number of people who know critical details, which is not a safe assumption.

kzt wrote:So duplication might not take that long. This assumes they can buy the tech from one of the very large number of people who know critical details, which is not a safe assumption.

Technodyne and the MAlign have both expressed regret and frustration that they haven't been able to get their hands on even what Erewhon had access to.

The main problem the League will have is production -- getting production started, to be specific. They don't have that many shipyards -- they have relied on Manticore's Merchant Marine and others to the extent that there just isn't a very big market for Solarian Built freighters; The SLN has kept three or four shipyard in business just to preserve the skills needed for building warships (Including TIY, which is soon to be toast because Manticore has specific grudges against Technodyne.)

What civilian shipbuilding capacity the League has is committed to replacing the carrying capacity withdrawn by Case Lacoon. What SLN shipbuilding capacity the League has is going to be high on the GA target lists.

IF the League stays intact (which it won't, 'cause systems and sectors are already leaving) ANDIF They can find the revenues to replace that lost to Lacoon I's withdrawal of the MMM and Lacoon II's blockade and commerce raiding, ANDIF they can build and hide a military shipyard ANDIF they can invent/design effective counters to GA Tech advantage, ...

THEN the League might survive in recognizable form.

Given that the MA managed to have agents who were the Foreign Minister of Manticore and the chief of security for the Haven Foreign Ministry I find the total lack of success kind of puzzling. Doesn't the foreign minister have a security clearance? Is it not reasonable for the Foreign Minister to get access to classified data on military capabilities, which presumably includes the idiots guide to how these things work?

You also don't need to suborn a designer, a guy with access to the depot maintenance documents would give you the core. Or a low-level tech. For example, a David Greenglass.

The MA in particular are kind of constrained in how openly they can be in trying to buy tech. The SL does not have this limitation.

kzt wrote:Given that the MA managed to have agents who were the Foreign Minister of Manticore and the chief of security for the Haven Foreign Ministry I find the total lack of success kind of puzzling. Doesn't the foreign minister have a security clearance? Is it not reasonable for the Foreign Minister to get access to classified data on military capabilities, which presumably includes the idiots guide to how these things work?

You also don't need to suborn a designer, a guy with access to the depot maintenance documents would give you the core. Or a low-level tech. For example, a David Greenglass.

The MA in particular are kind of constrained in how openly they can be in trying to buy tech. The SL does not have this limitation.

There's a huge difference between how something works and being able to reverse engineer it. Idiot guides will mention X does Y, but not why X works in the first place, never mind how to build it.

Hi KZT,

Actually?

Given how much the SL was despised before and during the wars by the Haven quadrant in general, I doubt they'd have a much better chance than Mesa.

Rationally speaking, why provide the foreign secretary even the idiot's guide to top military tech secrets?

The foreign secretary surely doesn't need that much of a security clearance when it comes to them.

A simple non-technical explanation should be more than satisfactory.

Regarding security for such things for example, just how many people really need to know where Bolthole is?

Granted there's a prestige factor or law requirement that gets some congress type idiots briefed on it, but the number who need to know the actual coordinates of where it is, is a pretty small handful that doesn't happen to include any MAlign agents.

Although given how tricky Anton and Victor were in CoG, that might better described as yet.

Not being an astrogator, how much does it really help Eloise to know its coordinates?

I expect she does, just in case to avoid letting it get caught in something else quite innocently.

Theisman should know, though he'll never actually use it personally he does need to provide security near it etc.

Ditto for his top staff, and those crews who deliver them after they're commissioned, plus Sharon and her staff, but darn few others.

Do you think they're really going to share that with the RMN soon?

L

kzt wrote:Given that the MA managed to have agents who were the Foreign Minister of Manticore and the chief of security for the Haven Foreign Ministry I find the total lack of success kind of puzzling. Doesn't the foreign minister have a security clearance? Is it not reasonable for the Foreign Minister to get access to classified data on military capabilities, which presumably includes the idiots guide to how these things work?

You also don't need to suborn a designer, a guy with access to the depot maintenance documents would give you the core. Or a low-level tech. For example, a David Greenglass.

The MA in particular are kind of constrained in how openly they can be in trying to buy tech. The SL does not have this limitation.

Hi N7AXW,

The answer is no.

The SLN is far less able to fight GA LAC's than the PRHN 8 years and 2-3 LAC generations ago.

If you check MoH where Crandall attacks Spindle, a LAC wing commander muses on the same knowledge, ie that SLN sensors are worse than the peep's during Buttercup, so LAC's should have an even better free run than they did eight years ago, to which she looks forward to with gusto.

So the idea GA LAC's are all that vulnerable to the SLN is another considerable stretch by the ever hopeful, who think destroying the SLN will be boring.

When has a David Weber story ever been boring?

Please guys, have a bit more faith in your favorite author, please.

First, we won't see all that much of it [the destruction of the SLN], David being David; second since the commerce raiding is a MAlign strategy to get the FF heavy units away from their duties, NTM simple political expediency on the part of the mandarins [being seen as impotent is far worse than incompetent] success isn't to be expected, especially at the campaign level, thus I expect to see very little, in fact far less than we've seen in all these posts.

The fact that RFC hasn't responded isn't a good sign; if Alizon etc were onto something, RFC might have clarified a false impression, or further cleared up why hyper fleet actions weren't possible, since the peep's didn't bother considering it after Buttercup; OTOH, RFC might be hoping the fuss will go away since it is pertinent.

Regarding Mistletoe's, if RD's can be used in hyper save gravity waves, then Mistletoe's make more sense than LAC's for recon and attack [though they'd still have some use]; besides being easily launched from freighters and passenger-liners, given their 500 megaton warhead NTM maneuverability, they ought to be quite effective as a standoff laser-head, given that the early first war laser-heads were only in the megaton range with a 38,000 km standoff range.

L


[quote="n7axw"][quote="kzt"]**quote="n7axw"**
I am not sure about using the recon drones. How do they function in hyper? You probably face the same problem getting them across the hyper wall as you do lacs. The advantage would be that you could deploy them quicker than lacs. The draw back is that unless we are talking about mistletoe style drones, they have no way of bloodying the bad guy's nose.
**/quote**
Unless you send forth LACs in the hundreds they just going to die if they encounter anyone who will stand and fight. A shell deployment means each recon group is out of support range of every other group. How many LACs do you think you need to take on a BC squadron that knows you are coming?[/quote]

This is an honest question rather than an argument. Are current sln bcs capable of countering a modern lac attack? My presumption is that they aren't even in n-space. In hyper the lacs are tiny targets to start with and stealthed to boot. I don't think they even find the lacs, let alone successfully counter them. Presumimg pre-buttercup tech, am I mistaken on this?

Don[/quote]

kzt wrote:

n7axw wrote:I, for one, do not doubt that the League can outbuild its opposition, BUT... there are two major qualifications that must be observed that usually are left out when League v GA capabilities are compared.

The first is political. Can the League hold itself together long enough to exploit its resourse advantages? They probably need a minimum of five years that they may well not have. Golng along with this, will the wealthier core worlds agree to some form of taxation to support the war effort? The League government has been largely financed by ripping off OFS protectorates in the shell worlds and the verge that to a major extent is cut off by lacoon 2. If the League cannot muster its resourses, it doesn't matter how much greater they are than the G A.

The second consideration has to do with R&D. Projects like Gram took decades of persistent work to bear fruit in the breakthroughs that gave Manticore its current edge. By way of contrast, the Leagues R&D is currently politicized and moribund as far as coming up with fresh results are concerned. That means that they would have to start from scratch to build the institutional support for serious R&D. Then after they have managed that to gather the minds needed for the job and get started. Even then results will not be instantaneos. Meanwhile GA R&D keeps crankimg out new results.

Does the League have the time to deal with all of this? Probably not.

Don

Please note that it took haven no more then 5 years to reproduce most of what manticore spent 40 years working on.

Hi kzt,

Haven didn't dup Mantie tech. What they did accomplish was to somewhat narrow the tech gap and come up with counters for some of worst disadvantages. They still haven't mastered mimaturation, ghost rider, or lac advantages. They did manage a mdm with Erhwon's help along with clacs and sdps.

But even more importantly, they came up with a rational government and a r&d team that while not up to Manticore's standards is still quite competent.

No one doubts that the League has the resourses and the brains. What's at doubt is whether given its current political disadvantages, the League can get its act together in time to do any good.

Don