The People's Republic of Haven

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The Royal Manticoran Navy

The purpose of this article is simply to provide a short statement of the relative strengths of the RMN and the People's Navy at the start of the war, and draw some basic conclusions.

CLASS	Royal Manticoran Navy		People's Navy
	Total #	Tonnage	Total #	Tonnage
SD	188	1,318.5 Mt	412	2801.6 Mt
DN	121	964.3 Mt	48	258.3 Mt
BB	_____	_____	374	1,430.6 Mt
BC	199	148.7 Mt	81	59.0 Mt
CA	333	92.0 Mt	210	54.5 Mt
CL	295	30.1 Mt	354	29.8 Mt
DD	485	35.0 Mt	627	40.7 Mt
Total	1,621	2,318.6 Mt	1,944	4,674.5 Mt

The first thing to be borne in mind is that the People's Republic of Haven consists of over a hundred inhabited planets which require protection. The Star Kingdom of Manticore consists of three inhabited planets. Thus the RMN is provided with an average of 540 ships per planet (or 405 if one includes Medusa, annexed shortly before the war but with no significant human population). By contrast, the PN has only 19 ships per planet. In total numbers, the PN has 1.2 times the strength of the RMN, but 30 times the area to protect.

There are those who would argue that Manticore needed a larger fleet because of the need to protect its large merchant fleet from piracy and due to the vulnerabilities caused by the presence of the Manticore wormhole nexus. Leaving aside the fact that the Manticoran merchant fleet has gained its size and dominance due to Manticore's taxation of ships of other nationalities passing through the junction, the PRH also has considerable volumes of trade and manages with, comparatively, a much smaller fleet. Of course, it is possible to surmise that there might actually be some truth in Manticore's claims to suffer excessively from piracy. The Manticoran policy of aggressively promoting its merchant service, and at the same time forcing other systems to accept the presence of Manticoran warships "escorting" them (and collecting intelligence in the process), has caused much hardship and resentment among many systems' merchant marines. Occasional piratical actions to avenge the harm done, whilst they can never be condoned (and the PN has done much work in piracy suppression, severely hindered by Manticore for base political motives [note especially the fate of PNS Vaubon, attacked by a Manticoran Q-ship in the midst of a battle with pirates]), are almost inevitable consequences of this. However, an examination of the fleet compositions gives the lie to this excuse. The vessels used for convoy escort are destroyers and light cruisers, for pirate vessels are almost universally lightly armed and operate in ones and twos. Manticore actually has fewer vessels of this type than the PN. Manticore's concentration is on ships of the wall (309 to the PN's 460, but with far fewer planets to defend, and excessive even with the wormhole nexus which is in any case well covered by static defences) and on battlecruisers and armoured cruisers. These fast and heavily armed vessels are designed for attacks on orbital and asteroidal infrastructure and in-system shipping, and the RMN spends much of its time training for just such attacks. By contrast, the PN concentrates its strength in battleships which are designed to defend systems from any raiders smaller than ships of the wall. These ships are clearly defensive in nature, too small to capture systems (where ships of the wall would always be engaged) and two slow for the raiding of the RMN's battlecruisers.

As will be clearly seen from the above analysis, the RMN was clearly being built up for a war of conquest, such as the one upon which it has embarked since the attacks on the PRH began.