Vinton is a big ugly question mark. Something went on, and we aren't in the know. Vinton started getting raided relatively early on in the Wars of Reaving (with the bandits trying to knock out the HPG...why?), and then the HPG got infected by a nasty virus in January 3072. That's immediately after the Society/Coyotes decided to go into action; there wasn't time for outsiders to infiltrate the planet to plant the virus. It was an inside job, done by Shark scientists. That much is clear.
By then, the Adders and Vipers had forcefully convinced the Sharks to leave the Homeworlds in force. Vinton going dark quickened the matter, with merchant fleets being turned around mid-transit to head back towards the Inner Sphere. The Sharks weren't rampaging around like certain other Clans, and certainly posed no obvious short-term threats to the Society and their Coyote allies.
So why did the Coyotes invade Vinton in the first place?
(Snip...)
Thoughts?
Well, it's an interesting interpretation. A few quibbles. First: the HPG virus affected only HPGs and WarShips which mounted them. My understanding is that non-HPG equipped ships were not affected, nor were ordinary JumpShips. Of course, this could be disinformation, but that's my understanding.
Second, the Snake Alliance attacked the Sharks shortly after uniting against the Snow Ravens (Bearding of the Shark). However, the Cloud Cobras refused to participate (citing their recent combat losses). The Star Adders quit after a few token attacks. The Goliath Scorpions (clearly an early Snake ally, even if they never openly acknowledged it) never attacked at all. In the end, it was the Vipers, whose costly "victory" against second-line shark forces is questionable.
To my mind, I think what happened is this:
After fending off the Vipers, the Sharks had several years to relocate to the Inner Sphere. Their front-line galaxies were mostly occupied there, except for Beta, which established an enclave in the Chainelains. We know they abandoned most of their other worlds first, leaving Vinton as their last bastion. This makes a lot of sense-- it kept them out of most of the fighting, at least for a long time.
How would I have done a relocation? The thing is, moving millions of people across more than a thousand light years is a logistical nightmare. The Sharks helped the Bears and Cats do it; they knew exactly what they were getting into and had already been preparing for such an eventuality for a while. As the "logistics" clan, they were especially well-prepared for what was ahead. Oh, and BTW, they were selling to the Cats and Wolves in Exile? What do you think they were selling, exactly? If you were in those clans' merchant castes, what would you have bought? Mobile factories? Equipment for upgrading infrastructure? The stuff the Diamond Sharks were most likely to have been making (to sell) is precisely the stuff they needed for a quick resettlement. Shipments might well have been on the way long before the Wars of Reaving started.
I'd have started exploring the Deep Periphery in earnest years before, looking for some suitable hidden bases to house my civilians and production facilities. But maybe they're based in the near periphery, not having thought of it, or not having found any suitable settlement locations.
The Sharks lost 80 jumpships at Salonika. And they still have a massive fleet left over afterwards. So can we stipulate that they have more than enough JumpShips to make a massive command circuit? With 80 JumpShips, and 11 Mammoth-class DropShips modified to be filled with foot infantry bays, you can set up a circular chain (a "conveyor belt") that moves more than half a million people per trip across 1200 LY. Assuming no LiFusion batteries. Each "pulse" of the conveyor is a week apart, and each individual Mammoth's trip is 25 days (that's a full load, launch, go through the "conveyor", land, unload cycle), including 3 hours transiting from one jumpship to another through the conveyor.
(If you want me to explain this concept in detail, ask me in another thread or via PM. There are a number of refinements in the strategy that I'm omitting for simplicity. Such as measures for security in transit, recovery if there's a security breach, supplies, how to set up the conveyor in the minimum possible time, etc. I'm assuming 3 jump collars per jump point; you can add more or less to your taste. You need to have a site prepped to receive all those people, of course, but my plan also has the ability to spread the people out over multiple receiving worlds, and you can prep the planets while you're setting up the circuit.)
You could do it with 40 jumpships and three Mammoths, but with 80 JS and 11 Mammoths it can be a continually operating conveyor belt, moving more than half a million people per week. In two years, you could have moved the entire Diamond Shark Kerensky Cluster population to the Inner Sphere. This scales more or less linearly; with 160 JS / 21 DS, you can do it in just over a year. Obviously, that's just for the people; infrastructure requires more trips but moving 120 kilotons of cargo per week, and that's not counting the "static" cargo carried by the links in the chain but not used during conveyor mode. That's also assuming Mammoths rather than Behemoths, which makes more sense for non-perishable cargo. Five months setup time to get the command circuit in place. Add a few jumpships -- but not as many as you think -- if you are aiming for a longer trip.
OK so now I ask, why
didn't the Sharks do it that way? They had plenty of time.
Greekfire identifies a few possible reasons for why things played out the way they did. I propose another: that the Sharks
did move their entire civilian population, probably to a periphery world or worlds. That's their production area. They keep most of their civilians and factories safely out of harm's way. And why not, right? The Inner Sphere was burning up in Jihad, the Clans are massacring one another. What we see on Trondheim and the khanates is just the sales and marketing arm, including most of the military and intelligence apparatus. The rest of the clan, the civilian part, is safely ensconced out of view.
So how do you go from that many people to being a small, spread-out, largely space-based clan? Well, you start by having lots of branch offices, making it hard to count the population and production to begin with. The known Chainelane Isles enclave is useful in this regard because it's known but largely off-camera. Hell, it might well house all 66 million people right there; the population of the United Kingdom is roughly the same. Though I'd be surprised if the wily and cautious Sharks would be so foolish as to put their population all in one place, and all in the natural invasion path of the Star Adders.
At that point, the rest is spin. Assume that both Vinton and Salonika were (exaggerated/staged/never happened). What changes? The only witnesses other than the Sharks to Salonika were Burrocks, now dead. And maybe some wreckage, which could be anything. The only witnesses to Vinton were the Society-affiliated Coyotes (Shark allies, also now dead), the Shark survivors, and the Blood Spirits who arrived later to find the last survivors, who can once again only attest that 1) the planet was in ruins, and 2) it was mostly emptied. Everyone assumes that the iceberg died in those two battles, and that the part we see is all there is. Not prepping to kill us all or destroy the oceans or something, simply doing what the Shark Foxes do best: playing it low-key and making a killing.
Anyway, that's my theory.