By the time he found out about Cataphract, he was already committed. Even committing Anvil Force early wouldn’t have made a darn bit of difference. The big problem was that he isn’t plugged into the Torch intelligence assessments, or he’d have had a suspicion that he wasn’t facing just Manpower, but something deeper, darker and more buried. For Manpower to have created new MDM missiles wasn’t in the cards, for something else lurking in the background, could be.

They shouldn’t surprise Manticore, although it remains to be seen how much of that intelligence gets digested and integrated before they have to face Cranberry – oops, I mean Crandall. And then how much gets distributed to other interested parties, and how soon. Grayson and the Anderman Empire, yes. Torch knows about it, and presumably they’ll tell Erewhon.

With the new intelligence gained from the surrendered ships at New Tuscany I think that Halo, Ageis, etc. are not going to surprise anyone else. And the reason that they have no real experience, or even sim experience, is that their gaming is rigged for political purposes.

Admiral Roszak’s losses were mostly due to letting the enemy get inside their effective missile range – which was a lot longer than he thought because of the MA’s Cataphract missiles. Also, the Cataphract missiles’ second stage was an anti-missile drive, which gave it real crazy acceleration at the tail end — something that didn’t do his own anti-missile defenses any good. If it hadn’t been for the Cataphracts, Roszak would have pounded the crap out of the attackers.

Not exactly. Byng (I think) was impressed by the larger displays on the flag bridge, but Roszak was more impressed by Halo, Ageis, more modern electronics and a number of other improvements. There were also at least two new ship designs in the last decade – one battlecruiser and one destroyer. The Sollies are not standing still. Their basic problem isn’t technology — it’s that they don’t have any real battle experience to test it against, so they’re designing against their fantasies instead of reality.

Didn’t we read in Storm From the Shadows that the funding for the latest improvements in the fleet went essentially for a coat of paint, a lot of A/V propaganda and fair chunk of graft?

I presume she’s going to do the same thing that Torch and Haven did: find a decent sized island that’s far enough away from anything else to be secure, and dump them to look after themselves. It doesn’t have to be on Spindle: she’s got over a dozen planets to choose from. Although I presume she’ll want the upper echelon officers close at hand.

@17 Robert.

And how effective are those upgrades going to be? I assume that the upgrade budget is a prime target for graft and corruption.

@16 Anthony

Frontier Fleet does a lot of anti-piracy work, and most pirates aren’t going to have anything larger than a CL. In fact, Manticore seems to believe that CLs and DDs are perfectly adequate for anti-piracy work except in very unusual cases. That’s why the official Frontier Fleet in the Maya sector is composed exclusively of DDs.

I have the impression that the SLN pod position is that they really are not useful for system defense, and by the way it is impossible to fire pods from a warship.

After all, the omnipotent Solarian League Navy needs not worry about these issues.

If I remember correctly, frontier ship fleets are updated on a fairly regular basis, but battle fleet isn’t, and the Reverse even less. Especially where missile warfare is concerned, since the League never fought a serious missile-heavy engagement. Why, some of the Reserve’s SD still use autocanons for point defense. The League’s SD currently in commission have laser clusters, but the relatively low number of launchers they have on each broadside still mean much less firepower than, say, a Saganami-C. The same goes for their number of counter-missiles tubes and laser clusters.

Argonaut, HMS Victory, USS Constitution, USS Missouri, Vasa, U-505, HMS Holland 1, Mikasa, etc.