Sorry if this is spaghetti-quoting. Forgive me. But throughout pretty much the entire Haven war, the only reason why Haven kept up with Manticore is explicitly because the Solarian League was doing tech transfers to them. And several times the Solarian League's technology is far beyond anything Manticore can touch. Like the stealth technology that is only caught out by extreme chance (a laser-beam comm from a stealthed drone that is intercepted because a ship somehow moved in between the drone and the ship it was beaming to, which is insanely implausible but whatever). The rest is explicitly old stuff that manages to keep Haven in the running despite Manticore's +2000000000000000000000% Research Rate.
Which novel does this particular piece of stealth technology come from? Can you provide supporting quotes regarding the overall pattern you describe? Do you believe that the "two followed by long string of zeroes" is an accurate number?
Because it sounds to me like you have formed a semi-accurate 'fanon' of the series that outright contradicts some points and is poorly supported in others.
I broadly agree with this. Weber, IIRC, retcons constant pirate action in as why Manticore's navy is so extremely well-experienced and have put all of their technology through its paces, but that's really just on the same scale, maybe less-so, then the Solarian League's constant invasions and brushfire wars that get retconned in later.
Quite so- and the League should be fighting pirates just as much as the RMN does.
Weber's excuse for why this
doesn't keep the League competitive does contain some worthwhile elements.
1) The League can afford to throw numbers at antipiracy and policing problems since it has more shipbuilding capacity than it knows what to do with. It can also afford more consistently to go after the "root cause" of a piracy or military security problem, because no one is going to give them any crap about it if they sail where they like and blow up what they like. Manticore needs to be more circumspect in their overall strategic posture
prior to the events of the late novel series, because they are,
until then, a regional power, not a galactic one. This means Manticore would have more reason to be stuck fighting actual pirate and rogue-actor ships on roughly equal terms, instead of just rolling in with an overwhelming force of battlecruisers and annihilating the entire pirate fleet and the safe-harbor port they rode in on.
2) One of the main threats to the League military is corrupt actors firing copies of their own weapons at them. Any weapon they manufacture that reaches mass production is, by the sheer scale of that production and the somewhat 'loose' nature of the Solarian League, likely to eventually wind up in the hands of rogue states, pirates, and other Chronic Troublemakers. Thus, aggressive military innovation is at best a very temporary solution to their problems, and they are frankly
much better off concentrating on the areas where they enjoy a truly unique advantage over likely enemies that cannot be taken away from them or copied: logistics, soft-power influence, and the overwhelming military mass that can be maintained when you have centuries of leisure time to assemble a fleet and a supermajority of the industrial capacity of the human universe with which to do it.
3)
Despite all this, the League's "Frontier Fleet" light combatants, the ones that actually fight these antipiracy actions,
are generally displayed as being mostly competent. Aside from simply lacking the specific "killer app" superweapon technologies Manticore has, they perform well, and their hardware is much closer to competitive. A Solarian League Navy cruiser of the Frontier Fleet, as portrayed circa 1920-22 in the setting, would probably be able to do quite well against most RMN cruisers of 1910 or 1915... And a Frontier Fleet ship of 1910 or earlier would likely be roughly a match for an RMN unit of equal tonnage
in 1910 unless the RMN unit got some lucky shots in with an opening salvo of (few) missile pods. It's the "Battle Fleet" where Weber fully breaks out the "blatant stupid obsolescence" trope, justifying it by the League never actually needing those ships for practical purposes.
One of the thing is that Manticore's new stuff isn't really all that new outside of FTL Comms which honestly should have been invented already somewhere. Missile Pods were all old tech that just happened to have miniaturized stuff perfected for it, but Haven was able to replicate them with ingenuity and maybe some tech help. They largely just had bonus stuff that gave bonuses to their missiles alongside that. And it's not like the League was unaware of this stuff. They had a ton of observers who reported on how all of this worked (and got told to fuck off because apparently they weren't meant to actually bring back information as the League refused to believe them despite them being literally next door to Sol thanks to Wormholes)
As you said, the League should have won in pure scale, both materiel and personnel.
Well, the really big transformational tech was the
long range missiles. Podlaying missile technology isn't nearly as decisive without that.
First, because of the time of flight issue- the longer it takes enemy fire to reach you, the easier it is to set up a gigantic barrage of your own missiles, ready to go when you push the Big Red button.
Second, because of one of Murphy's Corollaries: "If the enemy is in range, so are you." What's overwhelming is being able to hit the enemy in tactical situations where they aren't even close to being able to return fire- to where they can't even just "hold on" until they get in range themselves, but are likely to be wrecked as a fighting force before even deploying their own weapons. Note that Haven manages to fight Manticore on at least
comparable terms where neither side can just casually vaporize the other's fleets, and it takes a
radical advance in fire control to give Manticore that kind of superweapon performance back.
All the other major techs in Manticore's superweapon palette would work reasonably well if not fired from a missile pod. Missile pods aren't transformational without the other superweapons.
The funniest thing about him using the 10 Year Rule is that it only lasted for only 12 years because it turned out to be an immense screwup.
Also the person behind the immense screwup that actually was a massive cut to Britain's military that left it woefully underprepared for WWII was... Winston Churchill.
Since this sounds like it's about Churchill's involvement in the British government in the 1920s, I think it must be pointed out that the British were under a
lot of pressure to downsize their military and avoid mass production of expensive equipment; they'd nearly blown out their economy fighting World War One. Churchill has plenty of screwups to his name, but I'm not sure I'd blame him for that one given that "small military" was a very popular choice at the time.
Politicians in a democracy shouldn't be penalized for doing what people actually want them to do.
Also if I remember correctly when they do the 100 year update in the middle of the books, its specifically a visual one only, they don't actually upgrade anything to be more effective, they just make it look cooler.
You do not remember correctly.
They
do make it look cooler, but they
also:
1) Design a whole new defensive ECM system that probably requires significant restructuring of the ships, and which lets them further upgrade the designs just by swapping out new drones for old ones.
2) Develop an "oh shit dump a ton of countermissiles" technology that when you think about it
actually makes a lot of sense. And should probably work better than it does.
3) More generally increase modularity, which means planning ahead for future updates even if they don't actually have the tech
yet... one aspect of doing a 100-year update is that you try to plan ahead for shit you're going to invent thirty years from now, which means leaving spaces open to put it in, or making it easy to hot-swap it out for something that was already there.
4) By all appearances, work on missile pod systems, though likewise, those systems are being developed by specific defense contractors and don't get rolled out to the whole fleet right away- it's the kind of shit that a navy
not expecting war might reasonably spend 5-10 years working the bugs out of, if only because it works a LOT better with supporting ancillary systems in place than if you just crap a bunch of missiles out in the general direction of the enemy.
