Jonathan_S wrote:Hmm, I think there may be something off on your timeline. The Maccabeus attack on Grayson was in early 1903, and Honor spent "over eight Sphinxian months—almost a full T-year—of reconstructive surgery and therapy" [SVW] getting her artificial nerves and eye as a result of the neural blast she took during that. Can't remember exactly when Grayson officially joined the alliance, or exactly when Honor got Nike, but it seems like BuShips probably had much closer to 18 months (not under 6) between when Honor returned and when she took Nike from the builders yards.
Hmm... I remembered it was a low month count and I checked the wiki to see if my memory was correct. It lists Second Yeltsin as happening in 1903 and HMS Nike's commissioning in 1904, so I figured I was more or less right. I didn't remember that those were Sphinxian months -- in the early books RFC was still trying to confuse us with those and Manticoran years and weeks. 8 Sphinxian months in the middle of the year mean 4*38 + 4*39 = 308 Sphinxian days, which are 328.8 T-days.
More specific dates show First Yeltsin on 25 April 1903 and the wiki says Nike was launched "late 1904". So the actual number is probably over 12 months and thus closer to yours than mine.
Come to think of it, you had to be right. White Haven wouldn't have been putting so much pressure on the Admiralty to give her a ship ("something sedate") if it had been only a short time.
I get the impression that a compensator is large enough that replacing it is probably about on par with the job it took Hancock Station to replace one of Nike's fusion reactors (about 2 months) because like a fusion reactor it can't fit through hatches.
Not a trivial change, but not what I'd call a major refit. (Those are probably more like 9 - 15 months and involve tearing out and replacing far more than a single (if large and deeply buried) system.
Indeed, if properly designed, most single subsystems can be replaced in 2 or 3 months at a repair dock. Warships that can't be serviced wouldn't be much good after going into combat, after all. The major refits are probably needed to update the whole ship, something the Ad Astra DNs probably underwent multiple times throughout their lives. This has probably been the doctrine for the RMN, given that they didn't have the resources or budget to build new ships and throw away the old ones, nor wanted to.
SLN doctrine might have been the complete opposite: given that they had to spend budget anyway to keep their suppliers (and grafters) happy and had a huge surplus of ships, designing them to be upgraded was probably pretty far down the list of priorities. That doesn't mean they weren't, but that probably meant it was a happy coincidence and stubbornness/inertia of their ship design teams. Either way, they wouldn't have the expertise to put that into practice.
Then there was this conversation (I believe in 1912 PD; so 7 years into the war), from over a year after White Haven finally captured Trevor's Star where Caparelli was telling him that they had to pull back 1/4 of the wall because they'd been deferring maintenance in the final push to Trevor's Star.
Echoes of Honor Ch. 20 wrote:We've been refitting the new systems and weapons and compensators on an ad hoc basis since the war started, but over half our wall of battle units are at least two years behind the technology curve. That's seriously hurting our ability to make full use of the new hardware, especially the compensators, since our squadrons are no longer homogenous. It doesn't do us a lot of good to have three ships in a squadron capable of accelerating at five hundred and eighty gravities if the other five can only pull five-ten! We've got to get all the current upgrades into a higher percentage of the total wall.
That means that almost half the wall has gotten a compensator upgrade within the last 2 years, and it sounds like the rest have gotten at least one upgrade since the war started. (Because the accel quoted for the "slow" units is way too high for a pre-war compensator. Their quickest pre-war waller was the refit Ad Astra-class DN with it's puny 3.8 mton size allowing it to pull 450.8g at 0% margin. A more realistic minimum waller would be a Majestic-class of 6.75 mtons and 422.5g.
So waller squadrons pulling either 510 or 580 is a sizable improvement over what they could do pre-war.
As you said, still too high. At this time, the state-of-the-art Medusa can only pull 510 and an Edward Saganami-A could reach 592, both at 100% compensation. Caparelli may have just used arbitrary numbers to make a point, not reflect actual performance.
And an ad hoc refit doesn't sound like taking the ships out of service for 9-16 month refits; not if nearly half the fleet managed to get new compensators in the last 2 years; and half that time ships were even deferring routine yard maintenance to keep the numbers at the front up (so hardly when the RMN would be pulling others off the front lines for major refits).
That's not how I read the passage. First, he says "at least 2 years," so there are ships that are probably even further behind, though I hope BuShips didn't let the fleet get too inhomogeneous (and let's agree those are T-years, not Manticoran years). But "2 years behind the technology curve" does not mean "has had a major refit in the last 2 years." A ship that was updated 24 months ago is probably "in the curve" right now. And I remember thinking when reading this part of the books that Manticore had been deferring upgrade for far longer. The war had been going on for 7 years at this point, so my thinking is that most units had been at full operation for that long.
Second and more to the point, "updating ad hoc" does not mean that the process of the updating was ad hoc on each ship, but that the selection of ships was ad hoc. That is, they updated ships as those became free from high-priority operations or needed them anyway due to battle damage. They weren't pulling completely 100% combat-effective units out of the front line just because it was overdue for upgrades.
This passage does not tell us how long it takes to make those updates. The biggest problem for them was actually the full downtime, though: those updates can't be done in the field, so the ships must travel to the major shipyards in the first place. Even if Hancock Station is able to perform the operation, it can't do that on more than 2 ships at a time or so.
