Post by deowllPost by deowllPost by deowllNo a lot of stations got hit. Some of them were pretty low and some
were God knows how far out.
Multiple stations? �I thought it was basically one great, sprawling
station.
The parts where the attack was described: One was �research only. The
other
was a navel yard. Do you actually see either being used to make
smart
phones
for the public?
No. �The cell phone manufacturing stations got left alone. �The attack
was concentrated on three stations specializing in Naval work.
I think you need to reread the attack. �If HMSS Hephaestus is a military
reservation with no civilian component, why are civilian starships and
civilian tourists passing through it? �I think Weber is using the same
notion that a lot of SiFi writers do and have some of his stations as dual
use, both a civilian and a governmental components. �So the cell phone
manufacturers are in one (or more) electronics module that are largely
accessible by everyone and the governmental secure cell phones are
made
in
one (or more) electronics module that are only accessible via the few
choke points with Marine Guards to control the coming and going from the
Governmental Reservations Modules.
Its possible that the purely civilian stations, that had no military use,
or could not be easily converted to military use, were not targeted to get
a missile in the second wave.
But there is the notion of "Better safe than sorry." to consider. �If
there was sufficient coverage of the available missiles, they may have decided
to put some of the overkill on the civilian structures, "Just to make sure
they were not converted". �Plus the problem of the missiles not finding
the Primary or Secondary targets and settling for what they could find.
HMSS Weyland, HMSS Vulcan may have been "military reservations only" as
they are all in the Sub-System, which is entirely closed to foreign
traffic.
--
Terry FitzSimons
If you go back and check Manticore characters noted that there was a lack
of over kill and that the attack had contained just enough missiles to get
I think it is a understandable lack of type being wasted actually. �Why
list the multi-million of people being killed just to show where they died.
You aren't getting what I said at all. After reviewing the data collected
the Characters in the story at Manticore noted that only enough missiles had
been used to get the job done if everything went right and nothing went
wrong. The Characters that launched the attack noted they had the same
problem.
Post by deowllthe job done and no more if everything went right which they did which in
turn suggested to the people at Manticore that who ever had launched the
attack didn't have the resources to do an over kill at the time or they
would have done it. Of course the Mesan characters launching the attack were
constantly worrying about did they have enough missiles in the attack.
"There was time for their targets-or some of them, at least-to realize they
were under attack. To see the impossible impeller signatures of missile
drives swarming away from the pods' ballistic tracks. Some of those
missiles were effectively wasted because of targeting decisions made by
officers who hadn't felt justified in relying solely upon the efficacy of
the as yet untested torpedoes. Those laser heads either never fired at all
or else used themselves up picking off chunks of wreckage large enough to
satisfy their targeting criteria."
Apparently they had enough to do the job.
Yes but only because they managed to get total �surprise which isn't going
to happen again and because they were attacking soft targets that were
completely unprotected. A Pearl Harbor kind of event if you will.
Post by deowllHow many named targets were attacked (2) and how many planets had major
debris falling out of orbit (3) and then there was the attack in Manticore
B. Do you happen to know what was there? �That suggests at least to me
that
something besides the research station and the navy yards got taken out.
"Within a total space of barely eleven minutes, both of the Star Empire's
major orbital industrial nodes and well over ninety percent of its dispersed
shipyards, along with the better part of five and a half million trained
technicians and naval personnel-and, all too often, their families-had been
wiped out of existence."
A node is a location. �How many nodes do we have. �All of the LaGrange
points are a node. �Some of them are better to put major configurations of
space stations in and others are only good for smaller groups. �Some one
better then me is going to have to figure out how many nodes we have in
this system, but I feel is more than the 2 per planet I can think of.
Post by deowllSince a ship unloading passengers was also noted as being destroyed I'd have
to assume that the list is _not_ all inclusive. If they had two major
industrial nodes how many minor ones did they have?
Since we don't know haw many civilian slips there are, how many are empty,
how many have a ship coming in, parked, going out, or down for maintenance,
I would agree the list is not all inclusive as it doesn't run even 1
million names. Might be nice to have a list of all the captains of ships
killed, so we would know the names of the ships killed.
Well ifhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrangian_pointis correct 5 per
planet, 2 major and three minor. �The A-subsystem has 7 planets (HMSS
Hephaestus (Manticore), HMSS Vulcan (Sphinx)), the B-Subsystem has 7
planets and 3 asteroid belts (HMSS Weyland (Gryphon)), and we know all
three were destroyed. �So that is 70 nodes of which 28 should be major
configurations and 42 are minor.
Post by deowllSince something less than 10% of the shipyards were still there we are left
to wonder what the heck that part did or could do after the attacks.
Waiting to start new ships probably as I think they were empty, from the
previous build and still stock piling the new parts for the next build.
Well over 90% of the yards and the parts are now debris. However what is
left _might_ be able to do some maintenance assuming they can find parts. In
my opinion DW over did some of this.
I'm going to note that the Star Empire has a rather large number of slightly
aging destroyers in mothballs somewhere. Given the way this Universe works
this does not compute at all. These ships should be out showing the flag and
keeping really weak commerce raiders from being able to move in and take
over a location or raid shipping. They should also be there to be able to
run home and tell mama and papa where the bad guys are that they can't deal
with. They should be nosing around hostile systems gather juicy details so
that when the big boys show up they have a clue what to expect. DW has only
noted this sort of thing to happen once when he had the Sollies spied on.
Please note I don't expect him to write books about it if he doesn't want to
but if I were about to attack Haven I'd want to review the scouting reports
first and even the Republic should have been able to send passive recon
platforms through the Manticore system. Most systems would be much easier to
scout than those two. Of course if you are snooping around people want to
spend the effort to stop you and build up a stronger defense which limits
the amount of effort they can spend on the offence.
DWs explanation was everybody not a citizen of Manticore was to ignorant to
crew these ships and they weren't needed when the same people were needed to
crew larger ships. Of course if fifteen or twenty of them had jumped on the
hyper footprint the situation in the story line would be rather different
than it is now. We can't have that now can we? Actually I did and do
consider that to be a BS line line of thought and just one more flaw to over
look in what is a much better story line than most.
I �don't expect these ships to show up and be used for anything though I
would have recruited crews from Silesia, Talbot and elsewhere to crew them
and gain experience and kept them in service. Their officers would have
constituted a sort of reserve for future promotion if needed. After the
battle of Manticore their officers could have been used to crew the new
building which I can only assume is now being crewed by people that were
third stringers, ground based personal, greener than grass newbie, formerly
retired personnel, or merchant ship crews. I would have replaced the
promoted personal with the same people green as grass people that are now
running wallers under the system DW prefers.
Post by deowllHowever it must be noted that 40,000 ship yard personnel were captured by
Haven at Grindlesbane. They are still alive.
Yep, wonder just which POW enclave they are moldering away in.
--
Terry FitzSimons
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A couple things. One, the one thing that Weber has harped on almost
from the first book is the cronic manpower shortage that the RMN has.
I grant you, now that they have expanded a lot manpower is going to be
a little easier to obtain, as soon as all those people you mentioned
are educated up to Manticoran standards. Two, money, While Weber can
write up fleets out of thin air, if you want to have a reasonably
realistic storyline you have to pay for it. Weber again has been
having people complain about economic hardships since the early
books. Finally, while running a destroyer or light combatant is
easier than running a SD or CLAC, the individual people have to know
their stuff better because of the smaller crew sizes. Where a
department on an SD might have 500 or a 1000 people in it, a DD will
only have 10-30. So again, until they get trained up, the extra
people that they just picked up from Talbot and San Martino are not
going to be all that usufull.
=======================================================================================================
deowll
My problem with this is that more than enough of these people have been
working and living in merchant and military hulls that, even though
Manticore would consider them obsolete designs, are still the same things
using the same kind of power systems. (In other words you don't have to
train somebody that has never been off a medieval style farm.) In fact they
most likely aren't going to be much if any less well trained that anybody
else you just grabbed off a merchant ship no matter whose merchant ship it
might be. The stuff in Silesia is pretty much SL normal and the merchant
hulls Manticorian merchants are using would include equivalent designs
that, at most, would be slightly more advanced versions of exactly the same
thing and by that I mean SL normal. Everything Manticore is doing is based
squarely on the same tech base as the League with a few more tech advances
fully implemented. Some of the the merchant ships might actually be the same
things. That being the case one leg of your justification just broke. There
are enough educated people because there just is not that much difference
between the best crews in Talbot and Silesia and what Manticore actually is
using to man their last build up. Those are the facts and I really wish DW
wouldn't stretch my credulity by trying to obfuscate the obvious.
A second observation is that the Cluster and Silesia have their own tax base
and will no doubt be supporting some sort of navel force and this looks like
the sanest way I can think of to lay the foundation for that force. You give
them some small ships and train them to use them and as resources become
available you move the more promising people on to bigger and better things.
In fact I'm sure some of the richer systems would jump at the chance to pick
up an old destroyer or two to replace their own much more obsolete and much
less combat effective ships. That being the case you could effectively man
some of these ships for free. That negates a second leg of your
justification: cost. If you can get somebody else to pay for it the cost is
nothing.
I do acknowledge that you would have a major loyalty issue with any
planet/system that had been forced to join the Star Empire but that isn't an
issue with several systems in the Cluster. They wanted to join the Star
Empire in part to be better able to defend themselves against Frontier
Fleet. These systems are extremely unlikely to gag at the thought of taking
over the care and feeding of a destroyer or two if they were already feeding
a couple of equally costly but much less effective warships. In other words
you can find some people you can trust at least as much or more than you can
trust the Andies and Manticore has shared most if not all of its advanced
tech with the Andies. That takes care of a third issue.
I'll throw out another observation. Many of the most modern up to date
container ships in the world are being run by crews including captains from
third world nations because they work cheaper, are just as intelligent, and
are as motivated as crews from more advanced nations. If any of the Star
Empire Merchant fleets are doing the same thing then their crews would not
be composed solely of Manticore citizens.
Okay I can recall a few books back an armed merchant man operating in
Silesia whose Captian had been a Captian in the Star Kingdom navey but his
crew wasn't from Manticore so far as I could tell from the story line. If I
recall correctly they still took out a couple of the smaller Havenite ships
and then went to warn HH about Havenite forces being nearby. I think its
reasonable to assume that this man and his crew could have taken over a
destroyer and after a while to work up handled it with professionalism.
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