Strategic Defense of the American Mandate
Introduction
During the great era of the American Mandate, roughly from the 22nd through 26th centuries, the Mandate enjoyed a great strategic advantage on the defense, owing to her wealth and physical position. The weapons technology of the first half of the 3rd Millennium made large terrestrial bodies very defensible against attacks by spacefleet, given the resources; and the Mandate had most of the population, wealth and heavy metals in the Solar System.
I. Weapons Technologies of the 22nd Century
Ordinary missiles were almost useless as offensive weapons in space combat, because fairly light and cheap laser beams could too easily intercept them. The offensive weapons of the era were torpedoes, which is to say ultra-heavy missiles fitted with armor and numerous other penetration aids, and designed to generate high-frequency laser beams when their warheads detonated. Unlike missiles, torpedoes therefore only needed to close to within a few light-seconds of their targets to score hits, and they were smart enough to gauge the intensity of defensive fire and weigh the odds, detonating at the mathematically optimum moment to maximize their damage. Defense against torpedoes required the use of heavier defensive lasers, or anti-torpedo missiles.
Beams themselves, if sufficiently powerful, made potent offensive weapons. Really heavy beams could smash right through armor and blast a ship to bits with thermal explosions; the main limitation on them was that against rapidly-maneuvering targets they were ineffective past a few light-seconds. Another problem was that, if they fired continuously, beams generated waste heat in the ships themselves, which had to either be absorbed by heat sinks or radiated into space. And, of course, the beams needed to be powered either from batteries, which could be drained in extended combat, or extra powerplants, which were heavy and reduced maneuverability.
A terrestrial world, however, had ample room in which to site vast fusion reactors capable of energizing many super-heavy beams, cooled by huge heat sinks (in some cases, whole seas or oceans), and protected by massive armor and ultra-powerful electromagnetic shields. Such were of course either immobile or at best semi-mobile, but their protection was such that only the most powerful weapons could hope to knock them out. Planetary fortresses could be far stronger than any practical warships, and in space there was little behind which to hide, save for worlds themselves.
II. Astrographical and Resource Considerations
Following the conquest of Mars in 2155, the Mandate controlled everything from the Asteroid Belt to the Sun: the whole of the Inner System. Only four planets (Earth, Mars, Venus and Mercury), one dwarf world (Luna) and two planetoids (Deimos and Phobos) needed to be fortified in order to render everything inside of the Belt safe from attack. One dwarf world (Ceres) and three major planetoids (Vesta, Juno and Pallas) needed to be fortified to secure the main worlds of the Belt, though for a long time the lesser asteroids of the Belt were vulnerable to raids.
In the early part of this era, the 22nd through 23rd centuries, the American advantage in terms of resources was overwhelming. The Earth contained the bulk of the Solar System’s population, and most of the extraterrestrial population was on Luna and Mars. The Outie population was far more productive per capita, but could not really compete in raw productive capacity because of their small numbers. What was more, the Inner System had most of the readily-accessible heavy elements - at this time, mining technology could not get at the lithospheres of the gas giants. Hence, the Mandate could much more easily finance and build powerful spacefleets and fortresses than could the Outies.
III. American Problems and Mandatial Solutions
The main obvious weakness in the American position was that America did not control the Jovian System. While during the 22nd and 23rd centuries, the Jovian lunar system was much more economically important than was the gas giant, even then the colonization of Jupiter itself had begun, and Jupiter massed much more than did all the other planets put together. In the long run, Jupiter could support a vast population, and advances in mining technology were bound to eventually make available the stupendous metal resources of its huge rocky core.
Weissman pointed this out as early as the mid-22nd century, and when he became Commander in the early 23rd century, it was for control of the Jovian System that he primarily launched the First Solar War. Weissman the First won that war, and until the early 25th century, the Jovian System and its resources were firmly under the control of the American Mandate.
His son, who became Weissman II on his father’s assassination by the Muslims in 2248, remedied the second great weakness in the American position. This was the ability of pirates and other raiders to sneak into and establish secret bases in the Asteroid Belt. This was an especial problem while the Jovian System remained Outie, because it was easy for ships to reach the Belt from Jupiter. However, it was still possible for pirates to reach the Belt from farther out, and Weissman II did not want to spread his forces thinly by trying to also hold the Saturn System.
Weisman II’s solution was to establish an extensive network of sensor stations in the Asteroid Belt, the “Weissman Web.” These stations were positioned to make undetected entry into the Belt difficult, and they were backed up by well-sited fleet bases so that raiders could be intercepted and destroyed. From the mid-23rd to the early 25th century, in consequence, the Belt and the Inner System were almost completely free from pirate raids: the period known as the “American Peace.”
Weissman I’s conquest of the Jovian System and Weissman II’s defense of the Asteroid Belt increased and extended the American resource advantage. America now controlled the physical bulk of the Sun’s planetary system, and with Jupiter and the Belt firmly held, interplanetary trade flourished. For a time, under Murasaki the Great in the late 23rd to mid 24th century, much of the hostility between Mandate and Outies abated, and it seemed possible that America might become the guardian of the whole Solar System.
IV. New Threats and New Technologies
Murasaki III’s foolish war of aggression against the Outer System, the Second Solar War, led to the permanent loss of the Jovian System and the temporary loss of the Belt, putting at naught the strategic policy of the American Peace. Aside from the devastation visited upon the Inner System by the War of the Twelve Tyrants (2414-2415), the Mandate suffered from pirate raids for years afterward.
To make matters worse, Murasaki III’s arrogant murder of Laura Frank, the great Callistan leader, had seriously alienated the Callistan people. Callisto was the main port world of the Jovian System, and had major shipyards capable of building battleships, maulers, and long-range koopcruisers and oortcruisers: thus a hostile Callisto constituted a major military threat, and a regular base for piracy.
Over the centuries, the development of spacecraft and weapons technology had begun to erode the defensive advantages of the American Mandate. To begin with, spacecraft engines had evolved from the ion drives of the early 22nd century through plasma and fusion engines; by the time of the Second Solar War, photon drives were coming into regular usage. This meant that spacecraft were no longer limited to short periods of high-gee acceleration; they could now maneuver evasively throughout the duration of a battle, which meant that they could survive closer approaches to fortresses.
Spacecraft also now employed antimatter as a power storage system. This reduced the energy advantage of fortresses over spacecraft, since the limiting factor on spaceship power now became the ability of the mass-energy converters and other systems to survive processing power, rather than a simple lack of available energy. This also, of course, made a very spectacular form of catastrophic kill possible, both against spacecraft and fortifications.
Beam weapons had also continued to evolve. In the early 22nd century, combatants were limited to lasers and proton blasters, if they wanted to do serious beam damage; neither were very good at penetrating the super-heavy armor and powerful electromagnetic shielding protecting planetary fortresses. The neutron blasters that were developed in the late 22nd century could be defeated by extra shielding for personnel; but the meson mauler was at its most effective against a well-armored stationary target.
Meson Maulers
Meson maulers fired a stream of particles which passed through ordinary matter as if it were not there and decayed within their targets, releasing showers of thermal and hard radiation. They were originally designed by the Murasaki Femto-Technological Institute (MuFTI) in the early 23rd century, specifically to knock out the lunar fortresses of the Europan League and thus support the conquest of the Jovian System.
The main limitation of the meson mauler is that it required the dedication of a super-battleship sized warship, which had to be literally built around the meson weapon, and this warship would of necessity be fairly slow and unmaneuverable. Hence, ground-mounted meson maulers could knock out the warships before the warships could knock out the fortresses. But it was a slender advantage, and one which worried commanders.
The true counter to the meson mauler was developed in the late 23rd century, when MuFTI developed the meson screen, a device which caused the meson beam to decay outside the target’s defenses. The device was perfected over the 24th century, and by the 25th century the meson mauler was far less effective than it had been on its introduction.
Laser Launch Guns and C-Guns
Another threat to fortresses was the laser launch gun, which could propel a projectile at speeds in the hundreds to thousands of kilometers per second, if it was fired at enough distance to get up speed. Laser launch guns (LL-Guns) came into service as early as the late 22nd century, but by the 25th century they were routinely firing 40mm projectiles at velocities of 0.01C.
The maneuverability of these projectiles was limited, but they could do fearsome damage on direct impact, striking as if they were small nuclear warheads. They could of course be intercepted, but were much smaller and more difficult targets than normal missiles, and they could be launched in large swarms.
In the 25th century, the first true C-Guns, solid shot projectiles accelerated to 0.10 C and above, were developed. These could strike with the force of large nuclear warheads, and intercepting them required a high-quality and deeply-deployed sensor system. Even when destroyed, the plasma from their vaporization raced onward, making them dangerous to anything without significant energy shields.
For obvious reasons, both LL-Guns and C-Guns were primarily used for bombardment or defense. They had very little ability to hit maneuvering targets such as warships, because their projectiles travelled far slower than the speed of light, but they could wreak fearsome devastation against anything stationary or failing to evade. Consequently, they began to tilt the balance of power toward warships and away from fortresses.
Antimatter Beam Weapons
First deployed in the late 23rd century and used en masse in the wars of the 25th century, antimatter beams caused a major increase in the overall destructiveness of war, but did surprisingly little to render spaceships more powerful against fortresses. This was because, until the invention of “femtofire” by the Eastern Mandate in the early 31st century, all such beams were charged-particle weapons, and as such very easy to fend off with shields. However, the increased devastation caused to unshielded targets reduced the wealth of those parts of the Solar System with dense populations, and hence improved the resource equation in favor of the Outies - a nice way of stating that they wrecked continents and killed billions of people on Earth and on the older colonized worlds.
Inertial Compensators
The technological balance swung decisively to the offensive with the 26th-century development of the inertial compensator, a gravitic technology that harnessed the inertia of an entire ship together, so as to damp out the effects of acceleration. The antimatter-fuelled photon rocket was already capable of accelerations of thousands of G’s, a technology which had been applied to torpedoes and missiles but could not be applied to crewed warships.
Now, this limitation no longer applied. A new, slashing style of space warfare, with sweeping movements over vast distances, and a much-reduced operational decision cycle, replaced the old languid interplanetary maneuvers. Grav-harnessed ships were almost immune to LL- and C-gun fire, while they could swoop in and launch quick salvoes of such projectiles against fortresses, pressing the defenders hard to avoid devastating relativistic-velocity impacts.
Once, a technologically-progressive and economically-free America would have been the first to master this new technology and employ it to dominate the Solar System. But the Mandate had declined from the days of the Republic, and the Mandate of the 26th century had declined from the days of the Mandate of two centuries past. The Mandatial military mind had become rigid, and while it adopted the new drives, it did not quickly change American doctrine and strategy to match the new technologies.
V. Collapse of the American Strategic Defense System
While the Mandate fought wars, mostly with the Jovian moons but sometimes with the Jovians themselves, or the Saturnians, or the Corporate Republic of Titan, a greater peril grew in the Outer System. Advances in personality copying and integration technology made possible the development of the “horde,” a cybernetic mass mind. The first hordes appeared in the lithospheric mines of Uranus and Neptune, where first the Corporate Republic of Titan and later the Thronedom of Saturn and its successor colonial states had treated the aints operating the mining machines with great cruelty. Consequently, the massminds manifesting there had no means of integrating peacefully into the existing society, and instead overthrew it to found their own empires.
The first massmind, the Uranian Green Horde, appeared in the early 26th century, and by the early 27th had conquered the whole planet. The Uranian Horde was relatively mild: though it fought the Matriarchy of Titania, it eventually let the Free Alliance of Ariel keep control of all the Uranian moons.
On Neptune, however, where the domination of the free but callous individual minds of the Neptunian Matrix was far worse than anything ever seen in the Uranian System, a nastier horde developed. The Neptunian Blue Horde first manifested at around the same time as the Green Horde on the Uranian planet, but waged constant war with the Tritonian Realm, until an even more vicious horde absorbed it.
The Silver Horde first manifested in the early 27th century as a mutant node of the Blue Horde. Reducing the Tritonian Realm to vassalage, the Silver Horde then surged out into space, first attacking the lunar systems of the other gas giants. The Thronedom of Saturn was too strongly defended, and paid tribute to boot, but the Free Alliance of Ariel and the Jovian moons, especially Callisto, came under heavy attack.
The societies of the Uranian and Jovian moons shattered. In particular the people of Titania and Oberon, which had once been leaders of the Uranian moons and were offended by the lack of protection afforded them by Ariel; of Callisto, which had been badly hurt in wars with the Mandate and were skilled ship builders; and of Io, who were inherently warlike, launched great fleets. Some, particularly Callistan and Oberonian, fled outward to the Oort Cloud and the Near Stars. Others ran inward, in hopes of founding new colonies among those Mandatial territories depopulated in the civil wars of the early 25th and early 26th centuries, many of which had not been fully resettled. Their plan was to become American military allies, and hence enjoy Mandatial military protection.
Things did not work out as the Outies had planned. The now-rigid American social system had trouble dealing with free-minded, violent Outies, and conflicts soon flared. The Callistans and Oberonians, in their fast modern warships, found it unexpectedly easy to defeat the now-outdated American vessels and tactics.
In 2656, at the Battle of Ceres, a major American fleet, composed of several Forces, was surrounded and shattered by a fleet crewed chiefly by people from Titania, but which also significantly included Callistans and Oberonians, showing that under the stress of the Silver Horde, former enemies among the Outies had now become allies. Commander Stryker II was slain in the fighting, and the Outies proceeded to rampage through the Inner System, sacking the Belt, Mars and Luna, and establishing bases on Luna and in the Belt.
From this point on, the American strategic defense system crumbled. Outie fleets ranged throughout the Inner System, often being hired by this or that Commander or Marshal to shore up local defenses. Each world was on its own, and regardless of theoretical central authority, each local military leader became something of a warlord.
With the constant devastation from the wars, and with the Silver Horde drawing on the metal of a gas giant core, the Mandate no longer enjoyed any strategic advantage. The Mandate did have an advantage in discipline, as the American Forces were more organizationally proficient than the ragtag Outie fleets, but the American Forces now depended on those very Outies for their faster combatants, and over time the Outie forces learned American discipline.
The Mandate remained impressive: it was individually more powerful than any one Outie polity, save for the Silver Horde itself. The time of the Hordes was in any case limited, as their very unity made them intellectually inflexible, and further advances in transcendence-augmentation eventually enabled individual minds to out-think them.
Still, the Silver Horde might have overwhelmed the Solar System, and individual minds remained mired in these masses, had not the Mandate done one signal service. Under Marshal Hernando Castro, who fought for the later Strykers, the Mandate formed an alliance with Luno-Titania and Luno-Callisto and smashed a major fleet of the Silver Horde off Luna in 2770. Though the alliance then collapsed and the Americas themselves were sacked in 2772, this blow had weakened the Silver Horde too greatly for full recovery, and Hivenode Father-Eye dissolved in 2776, splintering the horde forever and making a marvelous millennial birthday present for what was left of America.
After that all spirals into darkness. The Spatial Mandate was no more, and the Western Mandate fell in 2796. The Eastern Mandate, which had heavily fortified the whole Old World, and which integrated the new high-acceleration combat into its tactical doctrine, lasted in one form or another for yet another millennium, but the old American Mandate and the Peace it had brought to the Inner System was irretrievably lost.
Conclusion
The American Mandate was able to brilliantly take advantage of its domination of the Inner System and the early 3rd millennium supremacy of the strategic defensive to bring peace and order to most of the human race for centuries. During that time, Mankind gained the wealth and technology which made it possible for humans to colonize the Outer System, and launch the first sublight starships.
While the Mandate remained intellectually flexible, it was able to adapt to the changes in military technology, even those which weakened its position. It was only when the Mandate became intellectually rigid, beginning in the 26th century, that it lost the ability to adapt.
Some have blamed Rainaldo’s division of the Mandate into three for the later weakness, but it was in fact the third division - the Mandate in Space - which controlled everything (including Luna) beyond the Earth’s immediate orbit. The Mandate in Space could have survived on its own resources, had not its supporting society rotted away beneath. The devastation caused by Outie invasions was far less fatal than the inability of the Mandate to rebuild, as it would once have easily done.
Still, we of modern Solar Civilization owe the Mandate a debt of gratitude. Had the American Peace never been, we would never have been, and Mankind might have fallen apart into petty warlordism long before we reached the stars.
During the great era of the American Mandate, roughly from the 22nd through 26th centuries, the Mandate enjoyed a great strategic advantage on the defense, owing to her wealth and physical position. The weapons technology of the first half of the 3rd Millennium made large terrestrial bodies very defensible against attacks by spacefleet, given the resources; and the Mandate had most of the population, wealth and heavy metals in the Solar System.
I. Weapons Technologies of the 22nd Century
Ordinary missiles were almost useless as offensive weapons in space combat, because fairly light and cheap laser beams could too easily intercept them. The offensive weapons of the era were torpedoes, which is to say ultra-heavy missiles fitted with armor and numerous other penetration aids, and designed to generate high-frequency laser beams when their warheads detonated. Unlike missiles, torpedoes therefore only needed to close to within a few light-seconds of their targets to score hits, and they were smart enough to gauge the intensity of defensive fire and weigh the odds, detonating at the mathematically optimum moment to maximize their damage. Defense against torpedoes required the use of heavier defensive lasers, or anti-torpedo missiles.
Beams themselves, if sufficiently powerful, made potent offensive weapons. Really heavy beams could smash right through armor and blast a ship to bits with thermal explosions; the main limitation on them was that against rapidly-maneuvering targets they were ineffective past a few light-seconds. Another problem was that, if they fired continuously, beams generated waste heat in the ships themselves, which had to either be absorbed by heat sinks or radiated into space. And, of course, the beams needed to be powered either from batteries, which could be drained in extended combat, or extra powerplants, which were heavy and reduced maneuverability.
A terrestrial world, however, had ample room in which to site vast fusion reactors capable of energizing many super-heavy beams, cooled by huge heat sinks (in some cases, whole seas or oceans), and protected by massive armor and ultra-powerful electromagnetic shields. Such were of course either immobile or at best semi-mobile, but their protection was such that only the most powerful weapons could hope to knock them out. Planetary fortresses could be far stronger than any practical warships, and in space there was little behind which to hide, save for worlds themselves.
II. Astrographical and Resource Considerations
Following the conquest of Mars in 2155, the Mandate controlled everything from the Asteroid Belt to the Sun: the whole of the Inner System. Only four planets (Earth, Mars, Venus and Mercury), one dwarf world (Luna) and two planetoids (Deimos and Phobos) needed to be fortified in order to render everything inside of the Belt safe from attack. One dwarf world (Ceres) and three major planetoids (Vesta, Juno and Pallas) needed to be fortified to secure the main worlds of the Belt, though for a long time the lesser asteroids of the Belt were vulnerable to raids.
In the early part of this era, the 22nd through 23rd centuries, the American advantage in terms of resources was overwhelming. The Earth contained the bulk of the Solar System’s population, and most of the extraterrestrial population was on Luna and Mars. The Outie population was far more productive per capita, but could not really compete in raw productive capacity because of their small numbers. What was more, the Inner System had most of the readily-accessible heavy elements - at this time, mining technology could not get at the lithospheres of the gas giants. Hence, the Mandate could much more easily finance and build powerful spacefleets and fortresses than could the Outies.
III. American Problems and Mandatial Solutions
The main obvious weakness in the American position was that America did not control the Jovian System. While during the 22nd and 23rd centuries, the Jovian lunar system was much more economically important than was the gas giant, even then the colonization of Jupiter itself had begun, and Jupiter massed much more than did all the other planets put together. In the long run, Jupiter could support a vast population, and advances in mining technology were bound to eventually make available the stupendous metal resources of its huge rocky core.
Weissman pointed this out as early as the mid-22nd century, and when he became Commander in the early 23rd century, it was for control of the Jovian System that he primarily launched the First Solar War. Weissman the First won that war, and until the early 25th century, the Jovian System and its resources were firmly under the control of the American Mandate.
His son, who became Weissman II on his father’s assassination by the Muslims in 2248, remedied the second great weakness in the American position. This was the ability of pirates and other raiders to sneak into and establish secret bases in the Asteroid Belt. This was an especial problem while the Jovian System remained Outie, because it was easy for ships to reach the Belt from Jupiter. However, it was still possible for pirates to reach the Belt from farther out, and Weissman II did not want to spread his forces thinly by trying to also hold the Saturn System.
Weisman II’s solution was to establish an extensive network of sensor stations in the Asteroid Belt, the “Weissman Web.” These stations were positioned to make undetected entry into the Belt difficult, and they were backed up by well-sited fleet bases so that raiders could be intercepted and destroyed. From the mid-23rd to the early 25th century, in consequence, the Belt and the Inner System were almost completely free from pirate raids: the period known as the “American Peace.”
Weissman I’s conquest of the Jovian System and Weissman II’s defense of the Asteroid Belt increased and extended the American resource advantage. America now controlled the physical bulk of the Sun’s planetary system, and with Jupiter and the Belt firmly held, interplanetary trade flourished. For a time, under Murasaki the Great in the late 23rd to mid 24th century, much of the hostility between Mandate and Outies abated, and it seemed possible that America might become the guardian of the whole Solar System.
IV. New Threats and New Technologies
Murasaki III’s foolish war of aggression against the Outer System, the Second Solar War, led to the permanent loss of the Jovian System and the temporary loss of the Belt, putting at naught the strategic policy of the American Peace. Aside from the devastation visited upon the Inner System by the War of the Twelve Tyrants (2414-2415), the Mandate suffered from pirate raids for years afterward.
To make matters worse, Murasaki III’s arrogant murder of Laura Frank, the great Callistan leader, had seriously alienated the Callistan people. Callisto was the main port world of the Jovian System, and had major shipyards capable of building battleships, maulers, and long-range koopcruisers and oortcruisers: thus a hostile Callisto constituted a major military threat, and a regular base for piracy.
Over the centuries, the development of spacecraft and weapons technology had begun to erode the defensive advantages of the American Mandate. To begin with, spacecraft engines had evolved from the ion drives of the early 22nd century through plasma and fusion engines; by the time of the Second Solar War, photon drives were coming into regular usage. This meant that spacecraft were no longer limited to short periods of high-gee acceleration; they could now maneuver evasively throughout the duration of a battle, which meant that they could survive closer approaches to fortresses.
Spacecraft also now employed antimatter as a power storage system. This reduced the energy advantage of fortresses over spacecraft, since the limiting factor on spaceship power now became the ability of the mass-energy converters and other systems to survive processing power, rather than a simple lack of available energy. This also, of course, made a very spectacular form of catastrophic kill possible, both against spacecraft and fortifications.
Beam weapons had also continued to evolve. In the early 22nd century, combatants were limited to lasers and proton blasters, if they wanted to do serious beam damage; neither were very good at penetrating the super-heavy armor and powerful electromagnetic shielding protecting planetary fortresses. The neutron blasters that were developed in the late 22nd century could be defeated by extra shielding for personnel; but the meson mauler was at its most effective against a well-armored stationary target.
Meson Maulers
Meson maulers fired a stream of particles which passed through ordinary matter as if it were not there and decayed within their targets, releasing showers of thermal and hard radiation. They were originally designed by the Murasaki Femto-Technological Institute (MuFTI) in the early 23rd century, specifically to knock out the lunar fortresses of the Europan League and thus support the conquest of the Jovian System.
The main limitation of the meson mauler is that it required the dedication of a super-battleship sized warship, which had to be literally built around the meson weapon, and this warship would of necessity be fairly slow and unmaneuverable. Hence, ground-mounted meson maulers could knock out the warships before the warships could knock out the fortresses. But it was a slender advantage, and one which worried commanders.
The true counter to the meson mauler was developed in the late 23rd century, when MuFTI developed the meson screen, a device which caused the meson beam to decay outside the target’s defenses. The device was perfected over the 24th century, and by the 25th century the meson mauler was far less effective than it had been on its introduction.
Laser Launch Guns and C-Guns
Another threat to fortresses was the laser launch gun, which could propel a projectile at speeds in the hundreds to thousands of kilometers per second, if it was fired at enough distance to get up speed. Laser launch guns (LL-Guns) came into service as early as the late 22nd century, but by the 25th century they were routinely firing 40mm projectiles at velocities of 0.01C.
The maneuverability of these projectiles was limited, but they could do fearsome damage on direct impact, striking as if they were small nuclear warheads. They could of course be intercepted, but were much smaller and more difficult targets than normal missiles, and they could be launched in large swarms.
In the 25th century, the first true C-Guns, solid shot projectiles accelerated to 0.10 C and above, were developed. These could strike with the force of large nuclear warheads, and intercepting them required a high-quality and deeply-deployed sensor system. Even when destroyed, the plasma from their vaporization raced onward, making them dangerous to anything without significant energy shields.
For obvious reasons, both LL-Guns and C-Guns were primarily used for bombardment or defense. They had very little ability to hit maneuvering targets such as warships, because their projectiles travelled far slower than the speed of light, but they could wreak fearsome devastation against anything stationary or failing to evade. Consequently, they began to tilt the balance of power toward warships and away from fortresses.
Antimatter Beam Weapons
First deployed in the late 23rd century and used en masse in the wars of the 25th century, antimatter beams caused a major increase in the overall destructiveness of war, but did surprisingly little to render spaceships more powerful against fortresses. This was because, until the invention of “femtofire” by the Eastern Mandate in the early 31st century, all such beams were charged-particle weapons, and as such very easy to fend off with shields. However, the increased devastation caused to unshielded targets reduced the wealth of those parts of the Solar System with dense populations, and hence improved the resource equation in favor of the Outies - a nice way of stating that they wrecked continents and killed billions of people on Earth and on the older colonized worlds.
Inertial Compensators
The technological balance swung decisively to the offensive with the 26th-century development of the inertial compensator, a gravitic technology that harnessed the inertia of an entire ship together, so as to damp out the effects of acceleration. The antimatter-fuelled photon rocket was already capable of accelerations of thousands of G’s, a technology which had been applied to torpedoes and missiles but could not be applied to crewed warships.
Now, this limitation no longer applied. A new, slashing style of space warfare, with sweeping movements over vast distances, and a much-reduced operational decision cycle, replaced the old languid interplanetary maneuvers. Grav-harnessed ships were almost immune to LL- and C-gun fire, while they could swoop in and launch quick salvoes of such projectiles against fortresses, pressing the defenders hard to avoid devastating relativistic-velocity impacts.
Once, a technologically-progressive and economically-free America would have been the first to master this new technology and employ it to dominate the Solar System. But the Mandate had declined from the days of the Republic, and the Mandate of the 26th century had declined from the days of the Mandate of two centuries past. The Mandatial military mind had become rigid, and while it adopted the new drives, it did not quickly change American doctrine and strategy to match the new technologies.
V. Collapse of the American Strategic Defense System
While the Mandate fought wars, mostly with the Jovian moons but sometimes with the Jovians themselves, or the Saturnians, or the Corporate Republic of Titan, a greater peril grew in the Outer System. Advances in personality copying and integration technology made possible the development of the “horde,” a cybernetic mass mind. The first hordes appeared in the lithospheric mines of Uranus and Neptune, where first the Corporate Republic of Titan and later the Thronedom of Saturn and its successor colonial states had treated the aints operating the mining machines with great cruelty. Consequently, the massminds manifesting there had no means of integrating peacefully into the existing society, and instead overthrew it to found their own empires.
The first massmind, the Uranian Green Horde, appeared in the early 26th century, and by the early 27th had conquered the whole planet. The Uranian Horde was relatively mild: though it fought the Matriarchy of Titania, it eventually let the Free Alliance of Ariel keep control of all the Uranian moons.
On Neptune, however, where the domination of the free but callous individual minds of the Neptunian Matrix was far worse than anything ever seen in the Uranian System, a nastier horde developed. The Neptunian Blue Horde first manifested at around the same time as the Green Horde on the Uranian planet, but waged constant war with the Tritonian Realm, until an even more vicious horde absorbed it.
The Silver Horde first manifested in the early 27th century as a mutant node of the Blue Horde. Reducing the Tritonian Realm to vassalage, the Silver Horde then surged out into space, first attacking the lunar systems of the other gas giants. The Thronedom of Saturn was too strongly defended, and paid tribute to boot, but the Free Alliance of Ariel and the Jovian moons, especially Callisto, came under heavy attack.
The societies of the Uranian and Jovian moons shattered. In particular the people of Titania and Oberon, which had once been leaders of the Uranian moons and were offended by the lack of protection afforded them by Ariel; of Callisto, which had been badly hurt in wars with the Mandate and were skilled ship builders; and of Io, who were inherently warlike, launched great fleets. Some, particularly Callistan and Oberonian, fled outward to the Oort Cloud and the Near Stars. Others ran inward, in hopes of founding new colonies among those Mandatial territories depopulated in the civil wars of the early 25th and early 26th centuries, many of which had not been fully resettled. Their plan was to become American military allies, and hence enjoy Mandatial military protection.
Things did not work out as the Outies had planned. The now-rigid American social system had trouble dealing with free-minded, violent Outies, and conflicts soon flared. The Callistans and Oberonians, in their fast modern warships, found it unexpectedly easy to defeat the now-outdated American vessels and tactics.
In 2656, at the Battle of Ceres, a major American fleet, composed of several Forces, was surrounded and shattered by a fleet crewed chiefly by people from Titania, but which also significantly included Callistans and Oberonians, showing that under the stress of the Silver Horde, former enemies among the Outies had now become allies. Commander Stryker II was slain in the fighting, and the Outies proceeded to rampage through the Inner System, sacking the Belt, Mars and Luna, and establishing bases on Luna and in the Belt.
From this point on, the American strategic defense system crumbled. Outie fleets ranged throughout the Inner System, often being hired by this or that Commander or Marshal to shore up local defenses. Each world was on its own, and regardless of theoretical central authority, each local military leader became something of a warlord.
With the constant devastation from the wars, and with the Silver Horde drawing on the metal of a gas giant core, the Mandate no longer enjoyed any strategic advantage. The Mandate did have an advantage in discipline, as the American Forces were more organizationally proficient than the ragtag Outie fleets, but the American Forces now depended on those very Outies for their faster combatants, and over time the Outie forces learned American discipline.
The Mandate remained impressive: it was individually more powerful than any one Outie polity, save for the Silver Horde itself. The time of the Hordes was in any case limited, as their very unity made them intellectually inflexible, and further advances in transcendence-augmentation eventually enabled individual minds to out-think them.
Still, the Silver Horde might have overwhelmed the Solar System, and individual minds remained mired in these masses, had not the Mandate done one signal service. Under Marshal Hernando Castro, who fought for the later Strykers, the Mandate formed an alliance with Luno-Titania and Luno-Callisto and smashed a major fleet of the Silver Horde off Luna in 2770. Though the alliance then collapsed and the Americas themselves were sacked in 2772, this blow had weakened the Silver Horde too greatly for full recovery, and Hivenode Father-Eye dissolved in 2776, splintering the horde forever and making a marvelous millennial birthday present for what was left of America.
After that all spirals into darkness. The Spatial Mandate was no more, and the Western Mandate fell in 2796. The Eastern Mandate, which had heavily fortified the whole Old World, and which integrated the new high-acceleration combat into its tactical doctrine, lasted in one form or another for yet another millennium, but the old American Mandate and the Peace it had brought to the Inner System was irretrievably lost.
Conclusion
The American Mandate was able to brilliantly take advantage of its domination of the Inner System and the early 3rd millennium supremacy of the strategic defensive to bring peace and order to most of the human race for centuries. During that time, Mankind gained the wealth and technology which made it possible for humans to colonize the Outer System, and launch the first sublight starships.
While the Mandate remained intellectually flexible, it was able to adapt to the changes in military technology, even those which weakened its position. It was only when the Mandate became intellectually rigid, beginning in the 26th century, that it lost the ability to adapt.
Some have blamed Rainaldo’s division of the Mandate into three for the later weakness, but it was in fact the third division - the Mandate in Space - which controlled everything (including Luna) beyond the Earth’s immediate orbit. The Mandate in Space could have survived on its own resources, had not its supporting society rotted away beneath. The devastation caused by Outie invasions was far less fatal than the inability of the Mandate to rebuild, as it would once have easily done.
Still, we of modern Solar Civilization owe the Mandate a debt of gratitude. Had the American Peace never been, we would never have been, and Mankind might have fallen apart into petty warlordism long before we reached the stars.