Jonathan_S wrote:Actually, based off what RFC said during a con panel (sorry I no longer remember which one) at this point the SLN was a pretty small thing. In fact as I recall it he said that Gustov basically invented the first battleship for his mercenary force (then often employed by the League as they didn't have that serious a navy at the time) as kind of a going away upgrade as he was preparing to go found his empire.n7axw wrote:1. Yes it would have been the Andermani who took the prizes. Where does the notion that the Volsung ships were antiquated come from? The Volsung base had provision for ship repair and had people on hand who could have been busy updating on those hulls that couldn't be gotten out of the yard in time for the confrontation with the Andermani. I will grant you that overall, the Volsungs were behind the Andermani, but probably not by that much. The decisive factor in the confrontation wasn't the tech. It was the battleship. How old the battleship was we don't know; all we are really told was that it had been seriously damaged in combat and apparently been repaired.
2. The way the story is told, Casey is behind the Andermani technologically, but not badly so. Where Travis and his fellow crew members on Casey were feeling at a disadvantage was with the training, the institutional knowledge and experience the Andermani could take for granted.
3.Had Manticore been able to crew its ships and not neglected its logistics, even those "antiquated" battle cruisers could have given its opponents a serious fight. The exception to that would be the League navy which at that time would have represented the galaxy's latest and greatest.
Basically the League said, fine you can go and you can have this new uber-ship built as long as you turn over the plans and we can buy the next batch the yard builds. That seems to have been the point where the League switched from just SDFs and hiring military contractors when needed towards having a large (the largest) standing navy.
So right at the moment the League ships probably aren't significantly more advanced than the Andermani ones -- only in whatever upgrades they've gotten in the decades since Gustov left League space and founded his empire. Because his stuff was apparently top of the line, cutting edge, when he left.
Interesting. Did Gustav get just the one ship on those terms? Or were there more? I find it intriguing that they would have said welcome to your battleship(s)?? After which Gustav goes off and plays conquistador... I wonder if the League approved of that...
Just a brief comment about previous discussion of "antiquated ships". The RMN had one model (reference House of Steel) that lasted over 250 years with regular overhauls which I think it safe to say updates -- the AdAstra class Dreadnought. That says something about the rate of change and, I thought, worth a chuckle.
Don
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