How long before the SLN can face Haven/Manticore

Post by deowll
The SLN hasn't had a research department devoted to improving the their
fleet. Getting one up and producing is going to take a while. Then they are
going to have to incorporate those advances into their fleet....immediately
rather than in a hundred years.

...

Post by deowll
At some point they will start making their own pod layers but.... The pods,
the electronics, the entire thing is going to be relatively primitive in the
first designs. Like I said if the League holds together, I still think
reaching the same level as Manticore is now could take as much as thirty
years.

It only took Haven four years to go from having their asses kicked
soundly by Eighth Fleet, to coming back ready and able to kick ass and
take names themselves, and one of the reasons that they were able to do
it was because of all the tech help that they were getting from SL
corporations.

The League already has most of the technology, (even the FTL comms, only
a few years behind Manty capability,) they just need to put it into the
field. Up until very recently their light units, battlecruisers, etc.,
were tonne for tonne, a match for anything Manticore or Haven had been
putting into space. League stealth and EW systems are still some of the
best anyone has.

They're already deploying pods in the system defence role.

They've got all the pieces. They just haven't put them all together
yet. There may be some bureaucratic inertia which might slow them down,
but the League is *HUGE*. A few of their big warship manufacturing
corporations may figure out that whoever comes up with a new design that
will kick those neobarb Manties and Havenites back into place first, is
going to make a killing, and get into competition to see who can have
the ships rolling out of their production lines fastest, no matter what
the League bureaucrats think that they need.

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deowll

2010-04-02 23:18:32 UTC

Post by deowll
The SLN hasn't had a research department devoted to improving the their
fleet. Getting one up and producing is going to take a while. Then they are
going to have to incorporate those advances into their
fleet....immediately
rather than in a hundred years.

...

Show me anywhere it says the SLN has ftl coms. I can show you were members
of the SLN were very reluctantly admitting that such things even existed.
Haven has stopped dealing with the League because they didn't think it was
paying off for them. The Havenites have their own R & D program going while
the SLN doesn't even seem to have R & D as a budget item. The SLN have been
building slightly modified versions of the same SD for the last 300 years!

Up until recently means _not now_.

SLN EW stopped ~1,000 of ~12,000 missiles aimed at 23 of 79 wallers. This is
your idea of good? As long as they are messing around with their old wallers
they don't have a chance! DW made it clear as can be these designs _can't_
be modernized! The SLN can't even fire enough EW to hope to survive and
their EW doesn't stand up well to what Manticore can throw at them though
the SLN should do better against Haven. They will still have the same
problem of not enough EW to deal with the missile storm even without the EW
storm they are going to run into and until they can get enough EW of
sufficant quality along with properly trained personel to use it they're
going to get cut to rags in combat. Unfortunately the only place you can
test this is in combat.

Frontier Fleet stealth systems are okay. They are clearly better than Monica
and such systems can produce on their own.

Post by Don Sample
They're already deploying pods in the system defence role.

The SLN have also never built a pod layer. The SLN has some idea about pods
and Technodyne which has been going through the wringer and is in disarray
because of Monica has some longer range rather large _single stage_
missiles. We have no suggestion that anyone working for the SLN knows how to
make a two stage missile.

Post by Don Sample
They've got all the pieces. They just haven't put them all together
yet. There may be some bureaucratic inertia which might slow them down,
but the League is *HUGE*. A few of their big warship manufacturing
corporations may figure out that whoever comes up with a new design that
will kick those neobarb Manties and Havenites back into place first, is
going to make a killing, and get into competition to see who can have
the ships rolling out of their production lines fastest, no matter what
the League bureaucrats think that they need.

The League is huge. It is not united. Most systems aren't doing much
spending on the military. Why should they when the SLN takes care of most of
that?

The SLN has a very limited number of military ship yards that are geared to
_slow_ production spread out over _long_ time spans with no budget for R &
D! Every SD in service is a near carbon copy of every other SD. Not a one of
those ships can be modernized to the point of being able to throw an aquate
number of missiles or fire anything other than single stage missiles nor can
they fire more than a fraction of the EW they need. Read what DW said about
them at Spindle. The SLN is going to have to come up with some radically new
designs and they sure aren't set up to do it. That isn't to say that if they
captured a ship with more advanced design features they couldn't copy it at
least in general. How good it would be in practice is anyones guess. Stone
age savages have made copies of airplanes but they didn't fly. What I'm
saying is that just because you build a pod roller using single stage or
even two stage missiles and sub light speed controls doesn't mean you are
ready to take on the Havenite Navy. First you are going to need much better
equipment and some combat experience to validate you ideas. That last can be
a real killer.

I suspect that some of the larger system defense forces that are in the
Alignment have more advanced ship and missile designs but I'm dubious about
them sharing. Beowulf knows but it isn't sharing. Maya/Erwin(sp) knows but
they aren't sharing. Nobody other than the Alliance/Beowulf and Haven seem
to have FTL com. so get over that. While the League has better tech which
should allow their first efforts to be much more compact that the first
efforts of Haven they still have to come up with a design that works.

Post by Don Sample
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Don Sample

2010-04-03 00:54:50 UTC

Post by deowll
The SLN hasn't had a research department devoted to improving the
their fleet. Getting one up and producing is going to take a
while. Then they are going to have to incorporate those advances
into their fleet....immediately rather than in a hundred years.

...

Post by deowll
At some point they will start making their own pod layers but....
The pods, the electronics, the entire thing is going to be
relatively primitive in the first designs. Like I said if the
League holds together, I still think reaching the same level as
Manticore is now could take as much as thirty years.

Show me anywhere it says the SLN has ftl coms.

Haven has had FTL coms since _Ashes of Victory_, (at about the same
level as the Manties started the war with) and part of their deal for
getting tech from the Solarians, is that they've been handing over
samples of captured Manty equipment in turn. Even if they'd home grown
it, FTL comms would have bought a lot of tech in return.

Post by deowll
I can show you were members
of the SLN were very reluctantly admitting that such things even existed.

What the Navy knows, and what various Sollie corporations know, are two
different things.

Post by deowll
Haven has stopped dealing with the League because they didn't think it was
paying off for them.

That is a very recent development. Before the Battle of Manticore, the
Havenites were still measuring all of their dealings with the SL against
the metric of "will this interfere with our tech transfers?"

Post by deowll
The Havenites have their own R & D program going while
the SLN doesn't even seem to have R & D as a budget item.

Once again, the Navy is not the League. And even if the SLN has a
research budget of only .001% of its total budget, it's probably still
outspending everyone else in the explored universe, combined. (Their
actual budget is probably much higher than that. The League is full of
graft, and R&D budgets are a great place for graft, since no one really
expects an immediate pay off from it. Even if 99% of the budget is
siphoned off into graft, they're still spending more than anyone else on
real research.)

Post by deowll
The SLN have been
building slightly modified versions of the same SD for the last 300 years!

So had everyone else, up to the start of the Manty/Haven war.

Post by deowll
Up until recently means _not now_.

It means that they're pretty much at par with (if not ahead of) what
Haven's got, technology wise. They haven't been making MDMs and such,
because they didn't think that they would need them. But 5 years ago,
Haven wasn't building them either.

Post by deowll
SLN EW stopped ~1,000 of ~12,000 missiles aimed at 23 of 79 wallers. This is
your idea of good? As long as they are messing around with their old wallers
they don't have a chance! DW made it clear as can be these designs _can't_
be modernized! The SLN can't even fire enough EW to hope to survive and
their EW doesn't stand up well to what Manticore can throw at them though
the SLN should do better against Haven. They will still have the same
problem of not enough EW to deal with the missile storm even without the EW
storm they are going to run into and until they can get enough EW of
sufficant quality along with properly trained personel to use it they're
going to get cut to rags in combat. Unfortunately the only place you can
test this is in combat.

I'm not saying that they modernize old ships. They scrap the old ones,
and build new. In "The Service of the Sword" Oversteegen was surprised
by just how good the EW in the SL built cruisers he was up against was,
and their stealth systems were good enough that one of them (and very
nearly two) managed to sneak up for an up the kilt shot against him.

The SL has the technology. That they haven't been deploying it in their
wallers is will only be relevant for a few years, a decade at most, not
thirty years.

Post by deowll
Frontier Fleet stealth systems are okay. They are clearly better than Monica
and such systems can produce on their own.

The SLN and Frontier Fleet pull from the same tech and support base.
Their ships are built by the same companies.

Post by Don Sample
They're already deploying pods in the system defence role.

6 years ago, NO ONE had built a pod layer. Building a pod layer is not
a technical challenge. The hard part is coming up with the idea in the
first place.

Same goes for LACs and CLACs.

The League is huge. It is not united. Most systems aren't doing much
spending on the military. Why should they when the SLN takes care of most of
that?

The League corporations are the ones building all that hardware for the
SLN, not individual systems. The SLN doesn't make anything for
themselves. The let everything out to contractors. Even if the SLN is
slow figuring out that they need new hardware, the SL corporations have
been watching what's been going on between the Manties and Haven very
carefully, and some of them are going to figure out that they have an
opportunity to make huge profits by building stuff the SLN doesn't know
that it needs, yet.

Post by deowll
The SLN has a very limited number of military ship yards that are geared to
_slow_ production spread out over _long_ time spans with no budget for R &
D!

That is a good description of how Haven was building ships, a few years
ago (except they had an even worse tech base, and more poorly educated
work force.) They managed to get themselves turned around in less than
thirty years.

Post by deowll
Every SD in service is a near carbon copy of every other SD. Not a one of
those ships can be modernized to the point of being able to throw an aquate
number of missiles or fire anything other than single stage missiles nor can
they fire more than a fraction of the EW they need. Read what DW said about
them at Spindle. The SLN is going to have to come up with some radically new
designs and they sure aren't set up to do it. That isn't to say that if they
captured a ship with more advanced design features they couldn't copy it at
least in general. How good it would be in practice is anyones guess. Stone
age savages have made copies of airplanes but they didn't fly. What I'm
saying is that just because you build a pod roller using single stage or
even two stage missiles and sub light speed controls doesn't mean you are
ready to take on the Havenite Navy. First you are going to need much better
equipment and some combat experience to validate you ideas. That last can be
a real killer.

The SLN is not the League. They are a very tiny part of it. The people
building those better smaller ships for Frontier Fleet, will be just as
willing to build bigger, even more capable ships for the SLN.

Post by deowll
I suspect that some of the larger system defense forces that are in the
Alignment have more advanced ship and missile designs but I'm dubious about
them sharing. Beowulf knows but it isn't sharing. Maya/Erwin(sp) knows but
they aren't sharing. Nobody other than the Alliance/Beowulf and Haven seem
to have FTL com. so get over that. While the League has better tech which
should allow their first efforts to be much more compact that the first
efforts of Haven they still have to come up with a design that works.

The biggest hurdle for developing any of this tech is the idea that it's
both possible and useful. Haven went from traditional style SDs to
SD(P)s in four years.

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deowll

2010-04-03 03:56:27 UTC

Post by deowll
The SLN hasn't had a research department devoted to improving the
their fleet. Getting one up and producing is going to take a
while. Then they are going to have to incorporate those advances
into their fleet....immediately rather than in a hundred years.

...

Post by deowll
At some point they will start making their own pod layers but....
The pods, the electronics, the entire thing is going to be
relatively primitive in the first designs. Like I said if the
League holds together, I still think reaching the same level as
Manticore is now could take as much as thirty years.

Show me anywhere it says the SLN has ftl coms.

I don't intend to contest this point. I'm merely noting that the SLN
officers who have committed seem to be singularly unaware of such devices on
their side and the Alignment crews have said the same kinds of things..

Post by deowll
I can show you were members
of the SLN were very reluctantly admitting that such things even existed.

What the Navy knows, and what various Sollie corporations know, are two
different things.

Definitely and it appears that many of those corporations are run by people
that wish the SLN ill.

Post by deowll
Haven has stopped dealing with the League because they didn't think it was
paying off for them.

I think you do need to move back further than that.

Post by deowll
The Havenites have their own R & D program going while
the SLN doesn't even seem to have R & D as a budget item.

You don't get it. ONI for one example was doing almost nothing and there are
other departments that were likewise doing the least possible because it
might upset the brass.

The SLN wanted the status quo to stay the same because they had a vested
interest in it staying the same. Military tech advances was the last thing
they wanted to happen. The SLN actually derived major benefits by preventing
military R & D. It saved them the cost of doing the research and it saved
them the cost of developing, testing, and deploying new hard ware and
working up doctrine to cover the use of said hardware. It meant that their
staggering investment in stock piled hardware was still worth something
instead of so much scrap.

Post by deowll
The SLN have been
building slightly modified versions of the same SD for the last 300 years!

So had everyone else, up to the start of the Manty/Haven war.

Manticore started doing research decades before that because they saw the
handwriting on the wall. The Republic meant to absorb them and the only way
to prevent it was to have a better war fleet because they could not build a
bigger war fleet.

But it also tells us just how much money the SLN had been doing on advancing
the science of military hardware when Manticore and Haven were able to do so
much in only a few decades. None! The SLN Battle Fleet organization is
conservative to the core!

Post by deowll
Up until recently means _not now_.

The League general tech base and science base is decades ahead of the
Republic. The League applied military tech is decades behind with the
expection of the Alignment. Beowulf most likely knows pretty much what
Manticore knows but they aren't telling the SLN jack. The problem the SLN
faces is that many of the most advanced owners of military tech knowledge in
the Leauge aren't sharing or wish to harm the SLN and fracture the League.

I'm not saying that they modernize old ships. They scrap the old ones,
and build new. In "The Service of the Sword" Oversteegen was surprised
by just how good the EW in the SL built cruisers he was up against was,
and their stealth systems were good enough that one of them (and very
nearly two) managed to sneak up for an up the kilt shot against him.
The SL has the technology. That they haven't been deploying it in their
wallers is will only be relevant for a few years, a decade at most, not
thirty years.

It is going to be very hard to convince them to scrap that fleet but yes
they certainly need to do so. Yes I already agreed their stealth is most
likely better than anyone else Manticore has faced.

You are still massively confusing two very different things. The SL has many
abilities of which the SLN and its base of support has no clue. The League
in the form of Beowulf already knows all it needs to know to build SD(P) on
a pare with Manticore but this isn't going to do the SLN any good until or
unless Beowulf decides to share that information. So far they have made
every effort not to do so as have a great many other members of the League
with knowledge of and access to advanced military tech. In Torch of Freedom
characters from Maya admit to lying to ONI about the abilities of Manticore
downplaying them.

Let me put it this way. The League inclusive in the from of Beowulf has the
ability to immediately start building SD(P) on a pare with Manticores best
but the SLN doesn't have a hope of doing so anytime soon because the SLN and
the Navel yards that serve it don't know how.

You keep posting like the SLN has access to all the assets and full support
of the entire League and in practice this is far from true. Arguing that the
SLN could do this or that because a united SL could do something is clearly
bogus. The SL is not united in support of the SLN.

Post by deowll
Frontier Fleet stealth systems are okay. They are clearly better than Monica
and such systems can produce on their own.

The SLN and Frontier Fleet pull from the same tech and support base.
Their ships are built by the same companies.

Actually I don't know that though it is an interesting question. Battle
Fleet is SDs. Frontier fleet doesn't contain a one. Do the same companies
build ships for both? I don't know for sure. Maybe. About all I know for
sure is that Technodyne does build for Frontier Fleet and has been trying to
advance its tech base. Technodyne seemed to know a lot more about
Manticore's abilties than the SLN ONI.

Post by Don Sample
They're already deploying pods in the system defence role.

6 years ago, NO ONE had built a pod layer. Building a pod layer is not
a technical challenge. The hard part is coming up with the idea in the
first place.
Same goes for LACs and CLACs.

Wrong! At this point building a pod layer is not a new idea. Building a good
one that can stand up the competition is going to be the hard part. They are
going to need long range missiles and better EW. They are also going to need
ftl com if they go up against Manticore/Haven.

Actually they already have LACs. Theirs are best reserved for inspecting
commerce for contraband. That being the case they don't actually need a CLAC
until they can come up with a killer LAC.
If they work at it they should be able to build a better LAC than Haven if
only because they _should_ be able to build smaller and more efficient
fusion plants.

The League is huge. It is not united. Most systems aren't doing much
spending on the military. Why should they when the SLN takes care of most of
that?

True but many of those organizations and the SLN itself have been heavily
infiltrated and influenced by the Alignment. Some of those organizations may
be in part or in total owned by the Alignment.
Others are going to be based in systems that for one reason or the other
aren't that fond of the SLN.This is going to create problems.

Post by deowll
The SLN has a very limited number of military ship yards that are geared to
_slow_ production spread out over _long_ time spans with no budget for R &
D!

This was in large part because the Republic managed to unit and work for a
common cause. That is a singularly unlikely prospect in the SL.

True but you aren't going to know how much the Alignment might be able to
reduce the better or cause problems with increasing production.
We do know there is a tie in between Navel yards/Tachnodyne and the
Alignment, remember? We don't know how big the problem is.

We also know that various concerned parties are making plans of their own
that are certain to disrupt any plans the SLN may make.

The biggest hurdle for developing any of this tech is the idea that it's
both possible and useful. Haven went from traditional style SDs to
SD(P)s in four years.

How long did it take Haven to get to three stage missiles which is what
makes their SD(P) dangerous? Please note that they still aren't nearly as
dangerous as what Manticore has. A fact of which they are painfully aware.

Last and not least by the time the SLN is working up its third or fourth
generation SDs the SL may be half its former size or smaller and a lot of
current SLN ships may be space debris. The SLN proper as it once existed may
not even exist any more. I don't know what is going to happen but DW is
laying the ground work for a huge civil war with the SL breaking up.

No matter what you say certain facts still remain. The SL does have an
advanced tech base on which the SLN can now build but they have no tradition
of R & D and they are going to need to do a lot of it fast plus the SLNs
base of support within the SL is very limited. They are going to need to
come up with what are for them new and radically different ship designs and
get them into mass production PDQ! Something else they have never done.
Because the people putting these new designs together are only going to have
a vague clue as to what they actually need the first time, and are going to
have to use what they already know how to make, these ships are going to be
both a huge advance and much less than they need them to be. This process is
going to have to get repeated through several generations of ships before
they can field something as good as Manticore now has.

The SLN does _not_ have the luxury of making a series of test builds and
waiting until they come up with something perfect. They _ have_ to start
building a replacement fleet for their current fleet or their current fleet
is going to cease to exist along with the League itself before they can get
any new ships into action. That means they are going to need to settle on a
few designs and mass produce the heck out of them while working hard on the
next improved design and do the same for it. The way I see it they just
refit their yards a bit and keep on building with only a small break in
production.

To many people in the SLN are too much like the people running the Alignment
for me to root for them very much. In fact a lot of the people running the
SLN work for the people running the Alignment. Now that's what I call a
conflict of interest and goes a long way toward explaining why the SLN does
not have a larger base of support.

Post by Don Sample
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Don Sample

2010-04-03 07:34:12 UTC

Post by deowll
The SLN hasn't had a research department devoted to improving the
their fleet. Getting one up and producing is going to take a
while. Then they are going to have to incorporate those advances
into their fleet....immediately rather than in a hundred years.

...

Post by deowll
At some point they will start making their own pod layers but....
The pods, the electronics, the entire thing is going to be
relatively primitive in the first designs. Like I said if the
League holds together, I still think reaching the same level as
Manticore is now could take as much as thirty years.

Show me anywhere it says the SLN has ftl coms.

We have seen SLN officers who *are* aware of just how deficient their
systems are, and the arrogant "our stuff can beat anything in the
universe" guys are getting themselves killed off at a fairly high rate.
It's not going to take too long for the people who can tell their asses
from their elbows to get elevated into positions where they can affect
policy.

Post by deowll
I can show you were members
of the SLN were very reluctantly admitting that such things even existed.

What the Navy knows, and what various Sollie corporations know, are two
different things.

Definitely and it appears that many of those corporations are run by people
that wish the SLN ill.

Some of them. Others are only interested in their bottom lines, and for
them, that means selling the SLN the best hardware they can make.

Post by deowll
Haven has stopped dealing with the League because they didn't
think it was paying off for them.

That is a very recent development. Before the Battle of Manticore,
the Havenites were still measuring all of their dealings with the
SL against the metric of "will this interfere with our tech
transfers?"

I think you do need to move back further than that.

As of "Crown of Slaves", the reason that Pritchart didn't send any
stronger contingent to the funeral of the leader of the Solarian's
Renaissance Association funeral than Victor and Ginny is that she didn't
want to risk upsetting them so much that it would interfere with the
tech transfers.

Post by deowll
The Havenites have their own R & D program going while
the SLN doesn't even seem to have R & D as a budget item.

You don't get it. ONI for one example was doing almost nothing and there are
other departments that were likewise doing the least possible because it
might upset the brass.

It is still an enormous organization. "Almost nothing" added together
enough times adds up to quite a lot. The top brass might not be getting
the real picture, but when you go digging through all the piles of crap,
there's some valuable fertilizer there.

Post by deowll
The SLN wanted the status quo to stay the same because they had a vested
interest in it staying the same. Military tech advances was the last thing
they wanted to happen. The SLN actually derived major benefits by preventing
military R & D. It saved them the cost of doing the research and it saved
them the cost of developing, testing, and deploying new hard ware and
working up doctrine to cover the use of said hardware. It meant that their
staggering investment in stock piled hardware was still worth something
instead of so much scrap.

It only takes one or two defeats to upset the status quo. After that's
happened a few times, people who know what they're doing are going to
start rising into positions of authority.

Post by deowll
The SLN have been building slightly modified versions of the same
SD for the last 300 years!

So had everyone else, up to the start of the Manty/Haven war.

And the people doing that R&D were a bunch of wild eyed pipe
dreamers...until the real universe showed that some of their ideas held
promise.

The SLN has had just as many pipe dreamers (given its size, it's
probably had a lot more). They've just not had the fact that their
status quo ante just won't cut it in the real universe rubbed in their
noses, until recently.

Post by deowll
But it also tells us just how much money the SLN had been doing on
advancing the science of military hardware when Manticore and Haven
were able to do so much in only a few decades. None! The SLN Battle
Fleet organization is conservative to the core!

And after a couple of major defeats, those conservatives will be looking
for nice beachfront retirement homes.

Post by deowll
Up until recently means _not now_.

And if any of those factions are inimical to Manticore?

It doesn't matter much to Manticore if those factions don't like each
other, if they've got the capability to crush them.

Post by deowll
SLN EW stopped ~1,000 of ~12,000 missiles aimed at 23 of 79
wallers. This is your idea of good? As long as they are messing
around with their old wallers they don't have a chance! DW made it
clear as can be these designs _can't_ be modernized! The SLN can't
even fire enough EW to hope to survive and their EW doesn't stand
up well to what Manticore can throw at them though the SLN should
do better against Haven. They will still have the same problem of
not enough EW to deal with the missile storm even without the EW
storm they are going to run into and until they can get enough EW
of sufficant quality along with properly trained personel to use
it they're going to get cut to rags in combat. Unfortunately the
only place you can test this is in combat.

I'm not saying that they modernize old ships. They scrap the old
ones, and build new. In "The Service of the Sword" Oversteegen was
surprised by just how good the EW in the SL built cruisers he was
up against was, and their stealth systems were good enough that one
of them (and very nearly two) managed to sneak up for an up the
kilt shot against him.
The SL has the technology. That they haven't been deploying it in
their wallers is will only be relevant for a few years, a decade at
most, not thirty years.

It is going to be very hard to convince them to scrap that fleet but
yes they certainly need to do so. Yes I already agreed their stealth
is most likely better than anyone else Manticore has faced.

A couple of defeats are very convincing.

Post by deowll
You are still massively confusing two very different things. The SL
has many abilities of which the SLN and its base of support has no
clue. The League in the form of Beowulf already knows all it needs to
know to build SD(P) on a pare with Manticore but this isn't going to
do the SLN any good until or unless Beowulf decides to share that
information. So far they have made every effort not to do so as have
a great many other members of the League with knowledge of and access
to advanced military tech. In Torch of Freedom characters from Maya
admit to lying to ONI about the abilities of Manticore downplaying
them.
Let me put it this way. The League inclusive in the from of Beowulf
has the ability to immediately start building SD(P) on a pare with
Manticores best but the SLN doesn't have a hope of doing so anytime
soon because the SLN and the Navel yards that serve it don't know
how.
You keep posting like the SLN has access to all the assets and full
support of the entire League and in practice this is far from true.
Arguing that the SLN could do this or that because a united SL could
do something is clearly bogus. The SL is not united in support of the
SLN.

I'm just assuming that the League is a little bit capitalistic. The SLN
submits a tender saying "we want ships with capabilities X, Y, and Z"
and a dozen League corporations say "we can do that!" and all that's
left is the haggling over the price. There might be some
inter-corporation dealing over who does X, Y, or Z, but in the end, the
ships get built.

A couple of companies may tell themselves "Hey, in a few years I bet
that someone is going to need something that does A, B, and C!" and
start building it, before any orders have come in. Even if three out of
four of those companies guessed wrong, that last one is going to make a
killing.

Post by deowll
Frontier Fleet stealth systems are okay. They are clearly better
than Monica and such systems can produce on their own.

The SLN and Frontier Fleet pull from the same tech and support
base. Their ships are built by the same companies.

Actually I don't know that though it is an interesting question.
Battle Fleet is SDs. Frontier fleet doesn't contain a one. Do the
same companies build ships for both? I don't know for sure. Maybe.
About all I know for sure is that Technodyne does build for Frontier
Fleet and has been trying to advance its tech base. Technodyne seemed
to know a lot more about Manticore's abilties than the SLN ONI.

Even if Frontier Fleet has been buying from Company X, and the SLN has
been buying from Company Y, do you think that Company X is going to say
"No!" if the SLN says that they want to buy something from them?

Post by Don Sample
They're already deploying pods in the system defence role.

The SLN have also never built a pod layer. The SLN has some idea
about pods and Technodyne which has been going through the wringer
and is in disarray because of Monica has some longer range rather
large _single stage_ missiles. We have no suggestion that anyone
working for the SLN knows how to make a two stage missile.

6 years ago, NO ONE had built a pod layer. Building a pod layer is
not a technical challenge. The hard part is coming up with the
idea in the first place.
Same goes for LACs and CLACs.

They're going to figure it out pretty quickly. They've got all the
pieces. It might take a couple of years to match Apollo, but they've
got most of the pieces to put that together for themselves.

Post by deowll
Actually they already have LACs. Theirs are best reserved for inspecting
commerce for contraband. That being the case they don't actually need a CLAC
until they can come up with a killer LAC.
If they work at it they should be able to build a better LAC than Haven if
only because they _should_ be able to build smaller and more efficient
fusion plants.

Post by Don Sample
They've got all the pieces. They just haven't put them all
together yet. There may be some bureaucratic inertia which
might slow them down, but the League is *HUGE*. A few of their
big warship manufacturing corporations may figure out that
whoever comes up with a new design that will kick those neobarb
Manties and Havenites back into place first, is going to make a
killing, and get into competition to see who can have the ships
rolling out of their production lines fastest, no matter what
the League bureaucrats think that they need.

The League is huge. It is not united. Most systems aren't doing
much spending on the military. Why should they when the SLN takes
care of most of that?

The League corporations are the ones building all that hardware for
the SLN, not individual systems. The SLN doesn't make anything for
themselves. The let everything out to contractors. Even if the
SLN is slow figuring out that they need new hardware, the SL
corporations have been watching what's been going on between the
Manties and Haven very carefully, and some of them are going to
figure out that they have an opportunity to make huge profits by
building stuff the SLN doesn't know that it needs, yet.

True but many of those organizations and the SLN itself have been
heavily infiltrated and influenced by the Alignment. Some of those
organizations may be in part or in total owned by the Alignment.
Others are going to be based in systems that for one reason or the
other aren't that fond of the SLN.This is going to create problems.

And what's the difference to Manticore, whether they're fighting the
SLN, or an SL force under the control of the Alignment? Following your
argument the Alignment's going to have even better tech than the League.

Post by deowll
The SLN has a very limited number of military ship yards that are
geared to _slow_ production spread out over _long_ time spans with
no budget for R & D!

This was in large part because the Republic managed to unit and work for a
common cause. That is a singularly unlikely prospect in the SL.

Until the SL gets itself into a major shooting war with the Manties.
Nothing like a war to motivate your workforce.

Post by deowll
Every SD in service is a near carbon copy of every other SD. Not a
one of those ships can be modernized to the point of being able to
throw an aquate number of missiles or fire anything other than
single stage missiles nor can they fire more than a fraction of
the EW they need. Read what DW said about them at Spindle. The SLN
is going to have to come up with some radically new designs and
they sure aren't set up to do it. That isn't to say that if they
captured a ship with more advanced design features they couldn't
copy it at least in general. How good it would be in practice is
anyones guess. Stone age savages have made copies of airplanes but
they didn't fly. What I'm saying is that just because you build a
pod roller using single stage or even two stage missiles and sub
light speed controls doesn't mean you are ready to take on the
Havenite Navy. First you are going to need much better equipment
and some combat experience to validate you ideas. That last can be
a real killer.

The SLN is not the League. They are a very tiny part of it. The
people building those better smaller ships for Frontier Fleet, will
be just as willing to build bigger, even more capable ships for the
SLN.

True but you aren't going to know how much the Alignment might be
able to reduce the better or cause problems with increasing
production. We do know there is a tie in between Navel
yards/Tachnodyne and the Alignment, remember? We don't know how big
the problem is.
We also know that various concerned parties are making plans of their
own that are certain to disrupt any plans the SLN may make.

Huh?

Post by deowll
I suspect that some of the larger system defense forces that are
in the Alignment have more advanced ship and missile designs but
I'm dubious about them sharing. Beowulf knows but it isn't
sharing. Maya/Erwin(sp) knows but they aren't sharing. Nobody
other than the Alliance/Beowulf and Haven seem to have FTL com. so
get over that. While the League has better tech which should allow
their first efforts to be much more compact that the first efforts
of Haven they still have to come up with a design that works.

The biggest hurdle for developing any of this tech is the idea that
it's both possible and useful. Haven went from traditional style
SDs to SD(P)s in four years.

Less than thirty years. And quite frankly, a two stage missile is
tactically almost as useful as a three stager.

Post by deowll
Last and not least by the time the SLN is working up its third or
fourth generation SDs the SL may be half its former size or smaller
and a lot of current SLN ships may be space debris. The SLN proper as
it once existed may not even exist any more. I don't know what is
going to happen but DW is laying the ground work for a huge civil war
with the SL breaking up.

Half the current SLN size is still ten times the size of the combined
Manticore/Haven fleets. And it is the impending breakup of the SL that
is Manticore's hope for survival. There is no way that it could survive
against a united SL.

Post by deowll
No matter what you say certain facts still remain. The SL does have
an advanced tech base on which the SLN can now build but they have no
tradition of R & D and they are going to need to do a lot of it fast
plus the SLNs base of support within the SL is very limited. They are
going to need to come up with what are for them new and radically
different ship designs and get them into mass production PDQ!
Something else they have never done. Because the people putting these
new designs together are only going to have a vague clue as to what
they actually need the first time, and are going to have to use what
they already know how to make, these ships are going to be both a
huge advance and much less than they need them to be. This process is
going to have to get repeated through several generations of ships
before they can field something as good as Manticore now has.

"Tradition" can die pretty quickly, especially when the traditionalists
are getting themselves killed off left and right.

Post by deowll
The SLN does _not_ have the luxury of making a series of test builds
and waiting until they come up with something perfect. They _ have_
to start building a replacement fleet for their current fleet or
their current fleet is going to cease to exist along with the League
itself before they can get any new ships into action. That means they
are going to need to settle on a few designs and mass produce the
heck out of them while working hard on the next improved design and
do the same for it. The way I see it they just refit their yards a
bit and keep on building with only a small break in production.

The Manties aren't engaging on a war of conquest against the SL. Even
if they were, the SL is so big that by the time they got around to
conquering a tenth of the SL worlds, the SL would have the opportunity
to adapt their tactics and tech, and the remaining 9/10 would come down
on them like a tonne of bricks.

Post by deowll
To many people in the SLN are too much like the people running the
Alignment for me to root for them very much. In fact a lot of the
people running the SLN work for the people running the Alignment. Now
that's what I call a conflict of interest and goes a long way toward
explaining why the SLN does not have a larger base of support.

Who you're rooting for is not relevant.

DW, both in story and out, has said that the Manticoran Alliance will
run roughshod over the Solarian League for a few years. After that, if
the SL hangs together, they are going to return the favour, and crush
the Manties.

Manticore's only hope (and the strategy promulgated by Harrington) is to
get the Sollies fighting amongst themselves. If that happens, they have
a chance to survive. If the Manties give the Sollies a few years to get
their act together, the Sollies are going to roll right over the Manties.

--
Quando omni flunkus moritati
Visit the Buffy Body Count at <http://homepage.mac.com/dsample/>

deowll

2010-04-05 06:43:30 UTC

Post by deowll
The SLN hasn't had a research department devoted to improving the
their fleet. Getting one up and producing is going to take a
while. Then they are going to have to incorporate those advances
into their fleet....immediately rather than in a hundred years.

...

Post by deowll
At some point they will start making their own pod layers but....
The pods, the electronics, the entire thing is going to be
relatively primitive in the first designs. Like I said if the
League holds together, I still think reaching the same level as
Manticore is now could take as much as thirty years.

Show me anywhere it says the SLN has ftl coms.

And in what way does this reflect on my observation that those same officers
don't seem to be familiar with any FTL com. being used by their forces?

Post by deowll
I can show you were members
of the SLN were very reluctantly admitting that such things even existed.

What the Navy knows, and what various Sollie corporations know, are two
different things.

Definitely and it appears that many of those corporations are run by people
that wish the SLN ill.

Some of them. Others are only interested in their bottom lines, and for
them, that means selling the SLN the best hardware they can make.

Post by deowll
Haven has stopped dealing with the League because they didn't
think it was paying off for them.

That is a very recent development. Before the Battle of Manticore,
the Havenites were still measuring all of their dealings with the
SL against the metric of "will this interfere with our tech
transfers?"

I think you do need to move back further than that.

Maybe I need to look it up but we also have some fairly early statements
about giving up on tech transfers. They thought they were being cheated and
the transfers weren't really paying off for them. Considering how long it
would have taken to information to reach Haven and anyone to get to the
funeral I'd have thought the guy would have been buried months previously.

Post by deowll
The Havenites have their own R & D program going while
the SLN doesn't even seem to have R & D as a budget item.

You don't get it. ONI for one example was doing almost nothing and there are
other departments that were likewise doing the least possible because it
might upset the brass.

The all I can say is when it comes to doing military tech research DW has
done a great job of hiding most of it. It is also more than passing clear
that until Monica nobody in a position of power was willing to tolerate any
bleep that suggested the Manties or anyone else outside the League were more
than a bunch of jumped up neobarbs with third rate military equipment. To
even hint as such a thing was not a good career move. DW is showing things
progressing through the conversations of a couple of officers in ONI.

It only takes one or two defeats to upset the status quo. After that's
happened a few times, people who know what they're doing are going to
start rising into positions of authority.

How long is it going to take to get some major changes in place after that?
How many people have to get replaced before much changes? How many people
are on the payroll of the Alignment?

Post by deowll
The SLN have been building slightly modified versions of the same
SD for the last 300 years!

So had everyone else, up to the start of the Manty/Haven war.

And the people doing that R&D were a bunch of wild eyed pipe
dreamers...until the real universe showed that some of their ideas held
promise.
The SLN has had just as many pipe dreamers (given its size, it's
probably had a lot more). They've just not had the fact that their
status quo ante just won't cut it in the real universe rubbed in their
noses, until recently.

True however they don't have all the time in the universe nor unlimited
resources to do what needs doing either.

And after a couple of major defeats, those conservatives will be looking
for nice beachfront retirement homes.

After due reflection that is pretty much up to DW. Some may jump ship.
Others may try to change their ways. Where the story line goes is clearly up
to the author.

Post by deowll
Up until recently means _not now_.

And if any of those factions are inimical to Manticore?
It doesn't matter much to Manticore if those factions don't like each
other, if they've got the capability to crush them.

You are asking if the Alignment is hostile to Manticore? Geez!

How does that help the SLN?

Post by deowll
SLN EW stopped ~1,000 of ~12,000 missiles aimed at 23 of 79
wallers. This is your idea of good? As long as they are messing
around with their old wallers they don't have a chance! DW made it
clear as can be these designs _can't_ be modernized! The SLN can't
even fire enough EW to hope to survive and their EW doesn't stand
up well to what Manticore can throw at them though the SLN should
do better against Haven. They will still have the same problem of
not enough EW to deal with the missile storm even without the EW
storm they are going to run into and until they can get enough EW
of sufficant quality along with properly trained personel to use
it they're going to get cut to rags in combat. Unfortunately the
only place you can test this is in combat.

I'm not saying that they modernize old ships. They scrap the old
ones, and build new. In "The Service of the Sword" Oversteegen was
surprised by just how good the EW in the SL built cruisers he was
up against was, and their stealth systems were good enough that one
of them (and very nearly two) managed to sneak up for an up the
kilt shot against him.
The SL has the technology. That they haven't been deploying it in
their wallers is will only be relevant for a few years, a decade at
most, not thirty years.

It is going to be very hard to convince them to scrap that fleet but
yes they certainly need to do so. Yes I already agreed their stealth
is most likely better than anyone else Manticore has faced.

A couple of defeats are very convincing.

Again that is up to DW. The people at the top may still think if we can only
do this or that our wallers will blow Haven/Manticore away...or they not.

Goody! The US government would like starships like the ones in Star Trek. Do
you know a company that can supply them for a reasonable price? Oh all we
have to do is give the specifications and some company will do the rest!
Great!

I have not doubt the SLN yards will in fact do their best. You are however
pretty much ignoring everything DW has said about those yards. They are into
incremental changes in designs and slow building programs. They are not the
leaders in cutting edge military tech in the SL. The people that are aren't
shaving with them. I'm sure they can come up with something better than
what is in use but they are going to have to do it based on what they
already know. The issues most likely to be addressed in their first efforts
are point defense, EW, missile range and the ability to fire a lot more
missiles faster.

How much actual improvement they can make in that first generation is up to
DW. It also isn't clear how the money is going to get divided up between the
needs of Frontier Fleet and Battle Fleet under very stressful and demanding
circumstances.

Post by Don Sample
A couple of companies may tell themselves "Hey, in a few years I bet
that someone is going to need something that does A, B, and C!" and
start building it, before any orders have come in. Even if three out of
four of those companies guessed wrong, that last one is going to make a
killing.

Oh I don't think they're going to have that many problems finding customers
even for poor designs. I think we can be pretty sure the level of spending
on things military is about to go way up in fact it already has though right
now they are working on getting the mothballed fleet combat ready.

Post by deowll
Frontier Fleet stealth systems are okay. They are clearly better
than Monica and such systems can produce on their own.

The SLN and Frontier Fleet pull from the same tech and support
base. Their ships are built by the same companies.

Actually I don't know that though it is an interesting question.
Battle Fleet is SDs. Frontier fleet doesn't contain a one. Do the
same companies build ships for both? I don't know for sure. Maybe.
About all I know for sure is that Technodyne does build for Frontier
Fleet and has been trying to advance its tech base. Technodyne seemed
to know a lot more about Manticore's abilties than the SLN ONI.

I'm sure they'll try to sell them _something_. That doesn't mean they can
sell them a new SD(P) analog the equal of what Haven and Manticore are now
using.

Post by Don Sample
They're already deploying pods in the system defence role.

The SLN have also never built a pod layer. The SLN has some idea
about pods and Technodyne which has been going through the wringer
and is in disarray because of Monica has some longer range rather
large _single stage_ missiles. We have no suggestion that anyone
working for the SLN knows how to make a two stage missile.

6 years ago, NO ONE had built a pod layer. Building a pod layer is
not a technical challenge. The hard part is coming up with the
idea in the first place.
Same goes for LACs and CLACs.

They're going to figure it out pretty quickly. They've got all the
pieces. It might take a couple of years to match Apollo, but they've
got most of the pieces to put that together for themselves.

What you should have said is they _need_ to figure it out now! Last week
would have been better. The odds that they will right away are slim to none.
I can't even swear that the SLN knows that Apollo exists so that's going to
make it rather difficult for them to duplicate it quickly. First they have
to become aware of the concept, then they have to do some R & D to develop a
way to implement it, then it has to go into production and their ships will
have to be fitted with it. That isn't going to be easy because an Apollo
amounts to a very large robotic LAC and DW seems to think you need to ream a
nice big hole in your ship in order to transport and service the thing.

The SLN can't afford to wait around until they do because they are about to
be challenged by a lot more than Manticore/Haven and they are going to have
to get _something better than they have_ in production or Battle fleet is
going to get blown to dust bunnies when it tries to prevent what the
Alignment and the Maya sector have in mind much less taking on the
Manticore/Haven machine.

If the Maya sector can get a few wins under it's belt is can turn into a
bigger threat that Manticore because, according to DW, it has more wealth.
It is second to the SL proper and having Maya pull out is going to cut a
huge hole in the SLN budget.

It may also be true that a lot of the verge is simply going to stop paying
tribute to the SLN because the local part of Frontier fleet has lost control
or gone rogue. That's the sort of thing that can happen during a crisis when
many of the sector governors are on the payroll of the Alignment. A lot of
Frontier Fleet Admirals may be as well. It has been made clear that many
Battle Fleet Admirals work for the Alignment and depend on manpower to cater
to their vices.

Post by Don Sample
They've got all the pieces. They just haven't put them all
together yet. There may be some bureaucratic inertia which
might slow them down, but the League is *HUGE*. A few of their
big warship manufacturing corporations may figure out that
whoever comes up with a new design that will kick those neobarb
Manties and Havenites back into place first, is going to make a
killing, and get into competition to see who can have the ships
rolling out of their production lines fastest, no matter what
the League bureaucrats think that they need.

The League is huge. It is not united. Most systems aren't doing
much spending on the military. Why should they when the SLN takes
care of most of that?

The League corporations are the ones building all that hardware for
the SLN, not individual systems. The SLN doesn't make anything for
themselves. The let everything out to contractors. Even if the
SLN is slow figuring out that they need new hardware, the SL
corporations have been watching what's been going on between the
Manties and Haven very carefully, and some of them are going to
figure out that they have an opportunity to make huge profits by
building stuff the SLN doesn't know that it needs, yet.

True but many of those organizations and the SLN itself have been
heavily infiltrated and influenced by the Alignment. Some of those
organizations may be in part or in total owned by the Alignment.
Others are going to be based in systems that for one reason or the
other aren't that fond of the SLN.This is going to create problems.

You really do need to be careful what you are saying. I never for a moment
suggested that the Alignment had better tech than the SL as a whole or a
stronger military. I don't _think_ it does though it has made several
interesting innovations.

What one part of the SL has in not available to all parts of the SL and it
does look like DW is getting ready for a large scale Civil War within the SL
with much more than two sides. I believe that the Star Empire will find both
friends and mortal enemies among the emerging parts.

Post by deowll
The SLN has a very limited number of military ship yards that are
geared to _slow_ production spread out over _long_ time spans with
no budget for R & D!

This was in large part because the Republic managed to unit and work for a
common cause. That is a singularly unlikely prospect in the SL.

Until the SL gets itself into a major shooting war with the Manties.
Nothing like a war to motivate your workforce.

I take it you haven't read the last book or paid any attention what so ever
to the emerging plot line. Unity is the last thing we can expect from the
SL.

Post by deowll
Every SD in service is a near carbon copy of every other SD. Not a
one of those ships can be modernized to the point of being able to
throw an aquate number of missiles or fire anything other than
single stage missiles nor can they fire more than a fraction of
the EW they need. Read what DW said about them at Spindle. The SLN
is going to have to come up with some radically new designs and
they sure aren't set up to do it. That isn't to say that if they
captured a ship with more advanced design features they couldn't
copy it at least in general. How good it would be in practice is
anyones guess. Stone age savages have made copies of airplanes but
they didn't fly. What I'm saying is that just because you build a
pod roller using single stage or even two stage missiles and sub
light speed controls doesn't mean you are ready to take on the
Havenite Navy. First you are going to need much better equipment
and some combat experience to validate you ideas. That last can be
a real killer.

The SLN is not the League. They are a very tiny part of it. The
people building those better smaller ships for Frontier Fleet, will
be just as willing to build bigger, even more capable ships for the
SLN.

True but you aren't going to know how much the Alignment might be
able to reduce the better or cause problems with increasing
production. We do know there is a tie in between Navel
yards/Tachnodyne and the Alignment, remember? We don't know how big
the problem is.
We also know that various concerned parties are making plans of their
own that are certain to disrupt any plans the SLN may make.

Huh?

Dude even if you haven't read the last book you haven't been paying _any_
attention if you don't know what the Alignment and the Maya Sector are up
to. You have also failed to note that a founding member of the SL, Beowulf,
has to have known pretty much all there is about Manticore and its navy and
they not only haven't tried to share any of the information with the League
boses, they have gone to great lengths to keep them from learning.

Post by deowll
I suspect that some of the larger system defense forces that are
in the Alignment have more advanced ship and missile designs but
I'm dubious about them sharing. Beowulf knows but it isn't
sharing. Maya/Erwin(sp) knows but they aren't sharing. Nobody
other than the Alliance/Beowulf and Haven seem to have FTL com. so
get over that. While the League has better tech which should allow
their first efforts to be much more compact that the first efforts
of Haven they still have to come up with a design that works.

The biggest hurdle for developing any of this tech is the idea that
it's both possible and useful. Haven went from traditional style
SDs to SD(P)s in four years.

Less than thirty years. And quite frankly, a two stage missile is
tactically almost as useful as a three stager.

Unless the other side has FTL com plateforms and kills you before you get
into effective range. I take it you also didn't get what 8th fleet did to
the Havenite forces at Manticore.

For once you said something that DW agrees with. A united SL is unbeatable
but of course he also said before Oyster bay that Manticore had the ability
to take over the SL and keep them from building a fleet that could challenge
it so I guess it depends on what you want to go with.

What is massively obvious is that DW looks to be setting up a multisided
Civil War. What he does is his call. He may never write another book. Who
knows? Life is fickle.

The current size of the SLN is in some regards redundant because those ships
pretty much all need to be replaced before they get blown away by somebody
using a more current ships design. I think it is fair to say that their
smallest sizes are the least obsolete. I don't have a clue how big a fleet
the SLN will be able to support after the bleep really hits the fan.

"Tradition" can die pretty quickly, especially when the traditionalists
are getting themselves killed off left and right.

Tradition can die in a flash but creating new ones takes time.

Well actually DW disagrees with you and Oyster Bay was his way of preventing
it. The other point I am staggered you are missing is that the SL is about
as disunited as an organization can be and still be united in theory. That
amounts to everybody pays for protection by the SLN whether they want to or
not and a great many don't want to. The only thing keeping the SL in one
hunk is that those who wish to leave are afraid of Battle Fleet. Of course
if something truly stunning like over a fourth of Battle Fleet got taken out
by a bunch of neobarbs without so much as a good nosebleed on the part of
the neobarbs then the forces holding the SL together just might not be
enough to get the job done. That would be especially likely to happen if a
major hunk of Battle Fleet/Frontier Fleet were pulled out of position for
some reason like getting ready to launch a second suicide attack against
Manticore. Of course if you had a major power like the Alignment set up to
cause all bleep to break out at the least opportune moment then you can
pretty much count on things getting much worse before they get better.

Who you're rooting for is not relevant.
DW, both in story and out, has said that the Manticoran Alliance will
run roughshod over the Solarian League for a few years. After that, if
the SL hangs together, they are going to return the favour, and crush
the Manties.
Manticore's only hope (and the strategy promulgated by Harrington) is to
get the Sollies fighting amongst themselves. If that happens, they have
a chance to survive. If the Manties give the Sollies a few years to get
their act together, the Sollies are going to roll right over the Manties.

Well actually I think we can count on the good offices of the Alignment to
take care of that as well as the governor of the Maya Sector so the Manties
don't have anything to worry about from the SLN based on your words of
wisdom.

I'm much less certain what Beowulf is up to. It clearly doesn't like the SLN
most likely because the SLN is about as corrupt as an organization can get
with much of the leadership having clear ties to Mesa. That doesn't tell me
what it's plans are.

Post by Don Sample
--
Quando omni flunkus moritati
Visit the Buffy Body Count at <http://homepage.mac.com/dsample/>

pyotr filipivich

2010-04-03 03:25:37 UTC

Let the Record show that "deowll" <***@gmail.com> on or about Fri,
2 Apr 2010 02:07:53 -0500 did write/type or cause to appear in

Post by deowll
Well the first thing is to vastly increase the amount of EW. That is one of
the most obvious lessons they should pick up on. DW has already made clear
that the old wallers can't sanely be reworked to do this nor is it at all
likely that the first try on a new design by the SLN will be up to getting
the job done. The gape between their previous expectations and current needs
are to great so it will take at least 3 or four generations of ships to
acquire adequate EW to deal with Haven as it is now. They aren't going to
know that for a long time. They are almost certain to think they made a lot
more progress than they did on that first try.
So as a first effort you get _some_ new ships with vastly expanded but still
pretty much old EW designs and in less than the needed amounts both in
amounts of EW and numbers of ships.

Egad - "Quantity has it's own quality" meets "Yeah, but lots of
better quality has its own quality" - if any group is likely to keep
in mind that numbers can make up a tech difference, it would be the
Republic of Haven.
-
pyotr filipivich.
Just about the time you finally see light at the end of the tunnel,
you find out it's a Government Project to build more tunnel.

deowll

2010-04-03 04:51:57 UTC

Post by pyotr filipivich
2 Apr 2010 02:07:53 -0500 did write/type or cause to appear in

Very true but DW in the guise of Queen Elizabeth Winton has led us to think
that Haven is about to get a tech upgrade. That could mean they are about
to start sowing dragons teeth and their LACs could be about to get a lot
nastier with a more compact power supply of one sort or another.

This idea hasn't been mentioned but it does stand to reason that if
Manticore can now shrink fusion plants down to stick inside a missile
something smaller might be fitted to the smaller sizes of military ships
than the traditional oversized power plants.

Post by pyotr filipivich
-
pyotr filipivich.
Just about the time you finally see light at the end of the tunnel,
you find out it's a Government Project to build more tunnel.

pyotr filipivich

2010-04-03 07:36:07 UTC

Let the Record show that "deowll" <***@gmail.com> on or about Fri,
2 Apr 2010 23:51:57 -0500 did write/type or cause to appear in

Post by pyotr filipivich
2 Apr 2010 02:07:53 -0500 did write/type or cause to appear in

Very true but DW in the guise of Queen Elizabeth Winton has led us to think
that Haven is about to get a tech upgrade. That could mean they are about
to start sowing dragons teeth and their LACs could be about to get a lot
nastier with a more compact power supply of one sort or another.
This idea hasn't been mentioned but it does stand to reason that if
Manticore can now shrink fusion plants down to stick inside a missile
something smaller might be fitted to the smaller sizes of military ships
than the traditional oversized power plants.

True enough. But up until now, it was Haven which had to overcome
quality with number. Now it is the Sollies who have to overcome
_Haven_ quality with number - only Haven has a lot more numbers of
their own. They have the tech edge, they have a numerical - not so
much superiority, but they are not "as dependent" on technology as
Manticore & Grayson are, to overcome the numbers.
Although, it does seem that even the Republic will have their
capacity taxed by the sheer number of Sollie hulls are in that "target
rich environment."

tschus
pyotr
-
pyotr filipivich.
Just about the time you finally see light at the end of the tunnel,
you find out it's a Government Project to build more tunnel.

deowll

2010-04-05 06:54:24 UTC

Post by pyotr filipivich
2 Apr 2010 23:51:57 -0500 did write/type or cause to appear in

Post by pyotr filipivich
2 Apr 2010 02:07:53 -0500 did write/type or cause to appear in

Post by deowll
Well the first thing is to vastly increase the amount of EW. That is
one
of
the most obvious lessons they should pick up on. DW has already made clear
that the old wallers can't sanely be reworked to do this nor is it at all
likely that the first try on a new design by the SLN will be up to getting
the job done. The gape between their previous expectations and current needs
are to great so it will take at least 3 or four generations of ships to
acquire adequate EW to deal with Haven as it is now. They aren't going to
know that for a long time. They are almost certain to think they made a lot
more progress than they did on that first try.
So as a first effort you get _some_ new ships with vastly expanded but still
pretty much old EW designs and in less than the needed amounts both in
amounts of EW and numbers of ships.

Very true but DW in the guise of Queen Elizabeth Winton has led us to think
that Haven is about to get a tech upgrade. That could mean they are about
to start sowing dragons teeth and their LACs could be about to get a lot
nastier with a more compact power supply of one sort or another.
This idea hasn't been mentioned but it does stand to reason that if
Manticore can now shrink fusion plants down to stick inside a missile
something smaller might be fitted to the smaller sizes of military ships
than the traditional oversized power plants.

Haven has a major advantage in applied tech. Their tech base is a few
generations less modern. If the Sollies got working Havenite equipment they
should be able to make something that could do the same job only better. The
Sollies aren't set up to mass produce battle fleets the Bolt Hole can. Their
officer core is a million miles from being highly qualified battle tested
veterans. There only combat veterans are Frontier Fleet and nobody in
Battle Fleet is going to listen to those losers who haven't ever taken part
in a major fleet action either come to that.

The good news/bad news is that it looks like the SLN is soon going to be
composed of veterans. I'm afraid all that a lot of the survivors are going
to learn is they need better equipment or a safer profession.

Post by pyotr filipivich
tschus
pyotr
-
pyotr filipivich.
Just about the time you finally see light at the end of the tunnel,
you find out it's a Government Project to build more tunnel.

Loren Pechtel

2010-04-27 18:37:02 UTC

Post by deowll
That is a complex question that leaves aside the political problems inside
the League at least for the moment. I'm thinking thirty years even if the
internal political situation was okay which of course it isn't.
The biggest problem may well be how long will be before the people in charge
realize that the mothballed fleet is scrape? That it can not just be updated
and be ready to rock and roll. That they have to go with new building.

Remember also that they have only seen the degraded performance of
Manticore's weapons. They think Manticore's best is pod-launched
two-stage missiles. They know nothing of Apollo nor that the missiles
were wasting a drive stage nor that they can be fired from internal
tubes. They also don't know that basically every Manticore waller is
a SD(P).

Thus the first upgraded Sollie fleet that comes knocking will still
get it's ass blown away.

They will need two fleet replacements to stand up to Manticore.

deowll

2010-05-03 03:06:56 UTC

Remember also that they have only seen the degraded performance of
Manticore's weapons. They think Manticore's best is pod-launched
two-stage missiles. They know nothing of Apollo nor that the missiles
were wasting a drive stage nor that they can be fired from internal
tubes. They also don't know that basically every Manticore waller is
a SD(P).
Thus the first upgraded Sollie fleet that comes knocking will still
get it's ass blown away.
They will need two fleet replacements to stand up to Manticore.

I would have said three upgrades but why bicker over details?

The question is how much of the SL will still be part of the SL by the time
they can get that fleet battle ready.

Oddly enough it would not shock me if many of the core worlds decided to
stay in the SL but I would expect them to make some changes giving them more
control over the League government. Something along the lines of being able
to appoint or at least remove the top officials on some sort of majority
vote.

Loren Pechtel

2010-05-03 14:37:57 UTC

Post by Loren Pechtel
They will need two fleet replacements to stand up to Manticore.

I would have said three upgrades but why bicker over details?

How are you seeing 3?

If they were going to go after Manticore they would update their
weapons to at least match and probably exceed what they saw--but what
they saw was weapons well below their max.

This updated fleet would be smashed nearly as easily as the first ones
but then they would know what they were facing.

I would expect the next replacement to be similar to what Manticore is
fielding.

Post by deowll
The question is how much of the SL will still be part of the SL by the time
they can get that fleet battle ready.

Nothing, probably.

Post by deowll
Oddly enough it would not shock me if many of the core worlds decided to
stay in the SL but I would expect them to make some changes giving them more
control over the League government. Something along the lines of being able
to appoint or at least remove the top officials on some sort of majority
vote.

I think the Mesan Alignment will be trying to tear them up. They
can't survive if the Sollies came after them. They truly could run
Mesa out of missiles.

Don Sample

2010-05-03 20:45:30 UTC

Post by Loren Pechtel
They will need two fleet replacements to stand up to Manticore.

I would have said three upgrades but why bicker over details?

How are you seeing 3?
If they were going to go after Manticore they would update their
weapons to at least match and probably exceed what they saw--but what
they saw was weapons well below their max.
This updated fleet would be smashed nearly as easily as the first ones
but then they would know what they were facing.
I would expect the next replacement to be similar to what Manticore is
fielding.

At the rate that Manticore has been innovating, by the time the Sollies
have caught up with where they are now, they'll have moved on. They're
going to at least have the spider, and streak drives, and who knows what
else.

Post by deowll
The question is how much of the SL will still be part of the SL by the time
they can get that fleet battle ready.

Nothing, probably.

I think the Mesan Alignment will be trying to tear them up. They
can't survive if the Sollies came after them. They truly could run
Mesa out of missiles.

--
Quando omni flunkus moritati
Visit the Buffy Body Count at <http://homepage.mac.com/dsample/>

deowll

2010-05-04 06:38:40 UTC

Post by Loren Pechtel
They will need two fleet replacements to stand up to Manticore.

I would have said three upgrades but why bicker over details?

How are you seeing 3?
If they were going to go after Manticore they would update their
weapons to at least match and probably exceed what they saw--but what
they saw was weapons well below their max.

The only way the SLN is going to know anything with any detail about the
coming battle at all is if Manticore and the Republic let them know. Since I
don't expect any Manticore forces to take part that isn't going to tell them
what they need to take out Manticore's finest nor does it magicly tell them
how to make something equal or better than what they faced nor upgrade
combat doctrine to get the best out of whatever it is they are able to coble
together as a first desperate response to the realization of their
overwhelming inferiority.

The second wave would be less of a cludge and based on lessons learned
fighting the forces tearing the SL apart. The people still alive are going
to be rather better informed about what does and does not work. It should
have things like two stage missiles or even three stage missles and maybe
some sort of FTL com., a lot more point defense and more and better EW.

The third wave might be equal in combat performance to what the Havenites
are using.

Post by Loren Pechtel
This updated fleet would be smashed nearly as easily as the first ones
but then they would know what they were facing.
I would expect the next replacement to be similar to what Manticore is
fielding.

I wouldn't even expect them to actually know what Manticore is fielding in
any detail.

Post by deowll
The question is how much of the SL will still be part of the SL by the time
they can get that fleet battle ready.

Nothing, probably.

I think the Mesan Alignment will be trying to tear them up. They
can't survive if the Sollies came after them. They truly could run
Mesa out of missiles.

No. The SLN could if the SL were united but then the RF would not exist nor
the Maya sector DF if that was true. It looks like many/most of the verge
governors are going to take over their sectors "due to the emergency" and
that will reduce the SLN base of support to the Core Worlds. If the Maya
sector is the second richest unit around after the SL itself then what is
left of the SL may not be as rich is it is. Up to DW I suppose.

Loren Pechtel

2010-05-04 18:29:18 UTC

Post by deowll
The only way the SLN is going to know anything with any detail about the
coming battle at all is if Manticore and the Republic let them know. Since I
don't expect any Manticore forces to take part that isn't going to tell them
what they need to take out Manticore's finest nor does it magicly tell them
how to make something equal or better than what they faced nor upgrade
combat doctrine to get the best out of whatever it is they are able to coble
together as a first desperate response to the realization of their
overwhelming inferiority.

I think they'll have some courier boats or the like that dash off a
report.

Post by deowll
The second wave would be less of a cludge and based on lessons learned
fighting the forces tearing the SL apart. The people still alive are going
to be rather better informed about what does and does not work. It should
have things like two stage missiles or even three stage missles and maybe
some sort of FTL com., a lot more point defense and more and better EW.

I expect a second wave (if they're capable of sending it, I don't
think they can) to be able to beat what they actually see in this
battle. That's at least 2-stage missiles, pods and FTL comm. They
might not realize what a SD(P) really is and probably won't know the
missiles are three stage. They also won't realize about Apollo even
if they face it.

To defeat that fleet Manticore would have to go all out.

Post by deowll
The third wave might be equal in combat performance to what the Havenites
are using.

No. They would have seen 3 stage missiles and probably figured out
what Apollo is and thus they would have something on a par with it.

Post by deowll
I wouldn't even expect them to actually know what Manticore is fielding in
any detail.

It's pretty hard to hide it in combat.

Post by Loren Pechtel
I think the Mesan Alignment will be trying to tear them up. They
can't survive if the Sollies came after them. They truly could run
Mesa out of missiles.

If they realize what's up I think everyone in the area including the
Mesa sector will go after the Alignment.

deowll

2010-05-05 04:12:17 UTC

I think they'll have some courier boats or the like that dash off a
report.

Anything like that is more likely to be dashing from a shrike or DD if it
isn't with the fleet and won't do any dashing if it is.

Yes I did think about it too. I concluded that if they were anywhere near
the system they were going to find a DD coming out of hyper behind them.

I expect a second wave (if they're capable of sending it, I don't
think they can) to be able to beat what they actually see in this
battle. That's at least 2-stage missiles, pods and FTL comm. They
might not realize what a SD(P) really is and probably won't know the
missiles are three stage. They also won't realize about Apollo even
if they face it.
To defeat that fleet Manticore would have to go all out.

Why?

Post by deowll
The third wave might be equal in combat performance to what the Havenites
are using.

No. They would have seen 3 stage missiles and probably figured out
what Apollo is and thus they would have something on a par with it.

Seen Apollo where? They don't have a clue that Apollo exists or how it
works.

Post by deowll
I wouldn't even expect them to actually know what Manticore is fielding in
any detail.

It's pretty hard to hide it in combat.

What combat? After the clash with the Havenite forces I expect the SLN to be
distracted for some time and to pretty much put any issues with Manticore on
the back burner.

Post by Loren Pechtel
I think the Mesan Alignment will be trying to tear them up. They
can't survive if the Sollies came after them. They truly could run
Mesa out of missiles.

If they realize what's up I think everyone in the area including the
Mesa sector will go after the Alignment.

If is a big word and the Mesa sector supports Mesa, sort of.

Loren Pechtel

2010-05-05 05:38:18 UTC

I think they'll have some courier boats or the like that dash off a
report.

Anything like that is more likely to be dashing from a shrike or DD if it
isn't with the fleet and won't do any dashing if it is.
Yes I did think about it too. I concluded that if they were anywhere near
the system they were going to find a DD coming out of hyper behind them.

And Manticore can track all the ships that stay far from the battle?
Remember that a hyper footprint does them no good--they won't be able
to get an exact count on the small stuff that stays many light-hours
away. You can slip off into hyper undetected.

Post by Loren Pechtel
I expect a second wave (if they're capable of sending it, I don't
think they can) to be able to beat what they actually see in this
battle. That's at least 2-stage missiles, pods and FTL comm. They
might not realize what a SD(P) really is and probably won't know the
missiles are three stage. They also won't realize about Apollo even
if they face it.
To defeat that fleet Manticore would have to go all out.

Why?

Because holding back they would be destroyed--the fleet would be built
to defeat what they saw at Manticore.

Post by deowll
The third wave might be equal in combat performance to what the Havenites
are using.

No. They would have seen 3 stage missiles and probably figured out
what Apollo is and thus they would have something on a par with it.

Seen Apollo where? They don't have a clue that Apollo exists or how it
works.

From the second battle.

Post by deowll
What combat? After the clash with the Havenite forces I expect the SLN to be
distracted for some time and to pretty much put any issues with Manticore on
the back burner.

Probably. I'm saying if they do come back what would happen.

Post by Loren Pechtel
If they realize what's up I think everyone in the area including the
Mesa sector will go after the Alignment.

If is a big word and the Mesa sector supports Mesa, sort of.

Supports Mesa *NOW*.

deowll

2010-05-06 03:34:21 UTC

Post by deowll
The only way the SLN is going to know anything with any detail about the
coming battle at all is if Manticore and the Republic let them know.
Since
I
don't expect any Manticore forces to take part that isn't going to tell them
what they need to take out Manticore's finest nor does it magicly tell them
how to make something equal or better than what they faced nor upgrade
combat doctrine to get the best out of whatever it is they are able to coble
together as a first desperate response to the realization of their
overwhelming inferiority.

I think they'll have some courier boats or the like that dash off a
report.

Anything like that is more likely to be dashing from a shrike or DD if it
isn't with the fleet and won't do any dashing if it is.
Yes I did think about it too. I concluded that if they were anywhere near
the system they were going to find a DD coming out of hyper behind them.

You did read the last book right? By the time this fleet shows up you might
not even be able to see the stars inside the Manticore system they are going
to have so many observation platforms out. They can detect hyperfoot prints
out for a week or more and localize them. All of this to prevent suprises
attacks from Haven and now the Alignment. Do you honestly think the SLN is
going to be allowing for something like that?

The people running Manticore have told their Queen that _nobody_ is coming
out of hyper without them knowing it and dropping a fleet on them
immediately with platforms so thick you can walk on them. Telling Queen Beth
they were wrong about that is an experience I don't even want to imagine. I
do think they meant it.

To sum it up at almost any other systems you could name including Earth and
Mesa I might agree with you but not at Manticore or Haven.

Why?

Because holding back they would be destroyed--the fleet would be built
to defeat what they saw at Manticore.

We have already agreed the fleet isn't going home. Any news about what
happens is only going out with the permission of the victors.

Post by deowll
The third wave might be equal in combat performance to what the Havenites
are using.

No. They would have seen 3 stage missiles and probably figured out
what Apollo is and thus they would have something on a par with it.

Seen Apollo where? They don't have a clue that Apollo exists or how it
works.

From the second battle.

They know they saw shockingly good control of missiles and EW at long range.
They have never heard of Apollo and the keyhole platfroms weren't in use so
they've never seen the entire thing in action.

Post by deowll
What combat? After the clash with the Havenite forces I expect the SLN to be
distracted for some time and to pretty much put any issues with Manticore on
the back burner.

Probably. I'm saying if they do come back what would happen.

Post by Loren Pechtel
If they realize what's up I think everyone in the area including the
Mesa sector will go after the Alignment.

If is a big word and the Mesa sector supports Mesa, sort of.

Supports Mesa *NOW*.

DW has made it clear the elite of the region shares the values of the
founder of Mesa. This doesn't mean they won't act in their own best interest
but the same can be said of the Alliance.

Don Sample

2010-05-06 04:55:15 UTC

Rajampet was explicitly said to be putting together another 600 ship
fleet, to follow on after Filareta's 400 ships, but there was
speculation by some of his officers that it would get called off, if
Filareta was as soundly defeated as Crandall was.

Post by Loren Pechtel
To defeat that fleet Manticore would have to go all out.

Why?

Because holding back they would be destroyed--the fleet would be built
to defeat what they saw at Manticore.

We have already agreed the fleet isn't going home. Any news about what
happens is only going out with the permission of the victors.

Filareta is less of a total idiot than Crandall was, and realizes that
he's about to get his ass handed to him (but orders are orders.) He's
probably going to leave a few destroyers and such behind after dropping
out of hyper, before accelerating into the system. If they never bring
up their drives, they should remain very stealthy, and the initial
hyper-footprint of 400 SDs (plus all their other escorts) should provide
suitable cover for their hyper-footprint, so the Sollies should get some
sensor data on how his fleet was destroyed/captured, a month or two
after they've gotten news of the defeat from the Manties, through the
junction.

--
Quando omni flunkus moritati
Visit the Buffy Body Count at <http://homepage.mac.com/dsample/>

Loren Pechtel

2010-05-07 16:20:34 UTC

Post by Loren Pechtel
And Manticore can track all the ships that stay far from the battle?
Remember that a hyper footprint does them no good--they won't be able
to get an exact count on the small stuff that stays many light-hours
away. You can slip off into hyper undetected.

I fully agree they can detect hyper footprints.

However, when 500 of the wall come in can you tell if it was 50 or 51
dispatch boats that came with them? I don't think so. That's why I
think someone can report back. The drop in with the fleet and lie
doggo.

Post by Loren Pechtel
Because holding back they would be destroyed--the fleet would be built
to defeat what they saw at Manticore.

We have already agreed the fleet isn't going home. Any news about what
happens is only going out with the permission of the victors.

I don't think Manticore can stop an observer from getting away.

Post by deowll
Seen Apollo where? They don't have a clue that Apollo exists or how it
works.

From the second battle.

They know they saw shockingly good control of missiles and EW at long range.
They have never heard of Apollo and the keyhole platfroms weren't in use so
they've never seen the entire thing in action.

Not yet. I'm saying they'll see these things when their refitted
fleet comes after Manticore. (That is, assuming the Sollies remain
able to do so, something that's quit questionable.)

Post by deowll
If is a big word and the Mesa sector supports Mesa, sort of.

Supports Mesa *NOW*.

DW has made it clear the elite of the region shares the values of the
founder of Mesa. This doesn't mean they won't act in their own best interest
but the same can be said of the Alliance.

Will they support the objectives of the Alignment, though???

pyotr filipivich

2010-05-03 22:15:56 UTC

Post by deowll
The question is how much of the SL will still be part of the SL by the time
they can get that fleet battle ready.
Oddly enough it would not shock me if many of the core worlds decided to
stay in the SL but I would expect them to make some changes giving them more
control over the League government. Something along the lines of being able
to appoint or at least remove the top officials on some sort of majority
vote.

I suspect a certain "retrenchment" - the core worlds will remain
the Solarian League. The Frontier worlds are likely to be considered
no great loss, bunch of primitives failing back into neo-barbarism. (I
keep thinking of the western Roman empire, which didn't so much fall,
as 'contract' back to a more manageable size. Of course, if you
happened to be a Celto-Roman in Londinium, you knew the Empire was
pretty much a goner a century or two before the residents in Rome
found out.
So the residents of the inner core worlds might hear about some
frontier world going "neo-barb" - more likely they may notice they are
not hearing anything about it.

Of course, in some Sectors (Maya/) there will be "loyal" Solarian
League Officers (Military and Civilian) who will be taking the Needed
Actions to preserve the Solarian League Way of Life in these Troubled
and Trying Times. They will be reluctant to do so, mind you, but
they know that what they are doing will be for the Good of Humanity,
Truth., Justice and the Solarian Way! (Exeunt, flags waving.)

tschus
pyotr
-
pyotr filipivich.
Just about the time you finally see light at the end of the tunnel,
you find out it's a Government Project to build more tunnel.

deowll

2010-05-04 06:42:15 UTC

Post by pyotr filipivich

I suspect a certain "retrenchment" - the core worlds will remain
the Solarian League. The Frontier worlds are likely to be considered
no great loss, bunch of primitives failing back into neo-barbarism. (I
keep thinking of the western Roman empire, which didn't so much fall,
as 'contract' back to a more manageable size. Of course, if you
happened to be a Celto-Roman in Londinium, you knew the Empire was
pretty much a goner a century or two before the residents in Rome
found out.
So the residents of the inner core worlds might hear about some
frontier world going "neo-barb" - more likely they may notice they are
not hearing anything about it.
Of course, in some Sectors (Maya/) there will be "loyal" Solarian
League Officers (Military and Civilian) who will be taking the Needed
Actions to preserve the Solarian League Way of Life in these Troubled
and Trying Times. They will be reluctant to do so, mind you, but
they know that what they are doing will be for the Good of Humanity,
Truth., Justice and the Solarian Way! (Exeunt, flags waving.)
tschus
pyotr

The movers and shakers are going to notice when major trading partners
change hands along with mountains of wealth. The standard of living on the
core worlds is likely to take a major hit.

Post by pyotr filipivich
-
pyotr filipivich.
Just about the time you finally see light at the end of the tunnel,
you find out it's a Government Project to build more tunnel.

pyotr filipivich

2010-05-04 21:54:16 UTC