found a use for the ex-Sollie SD.

Vince wrote:No. Just...No.

Lord Skimper wrote:Remove the missiles, they can be used with whatever Sollie ships are still in service by whoever, Beowulf, with a software upgrade.

The good condition ships can then be equipt with a good civilian crew, some, small number of military crew if need be. Then the other 3500 crew spaces, some enlarged where missile storage was, and used as fancy cruise ships.

They already have the life support, the crew quarters, hyper drives, bottles, etc... Entertainment systems, sensors, communications, wedge and sidewalls. PD and CM enough to ward off any stupid pirates. Might even leave a few missiles on board.

This would allow, with advanced warning, for the visiting of the new SEM systems, Talbot, Silesia, the various other parts, even Torch or Erowhan (sp?)
Maybe Mesa. Plus 300 odd Haven systems.

The ship will scare the crap out of any pirate, any lesser Sollie ship willn't know what to do, and one doesn't need to worry about tech loss should such a ship be seized. Although seizing a SD is easier said than done.

With 130 of them that is about 450,000 passengers. Add in 70 or so damaged ships for parts and Beowulf for those extras that are needed.

Plus as they are not useful for anything else, they should go for scrap value. Ie cheap! Can't build a cruise ship for that.

Could even have mock battles, give the passengers the naval engagement experience.

The ships may be useless as military ships but everything that they do have is top notch.

Lord Skimper Adventure Naval Tours.

Vince, hey Vince... Can't you take a joke? Skimper is laughing his arse off...

Don

Load the SDs to the deck heads with captured SLN personal.

Send them off the Sol or other major SL system.

When the drop out of hyper, a computer protocol is activated that accelerates the SD on an impact trajectory.

Six million ton SD impacting at perhaps 2/3 Cee.

Impact energy = 1/2 x 6eex9Kg x (2eex8)^2 = 2eex25 Joules

Equivalent to 500 million Megatons yield.

Ger on the radio and announce, "OOPS!"

After the MAlighnment uses high cee kinetic strikes on about 10 of the main Grand Alliance planets...all at the same time. You can probably cram in over 10,000 refugees per ship for a short hop to a relief planet ... maybe more than that.

Edit: Probably more than 20,000 if the trip is less than a couple of weeks.

All good and fine until the MAlignment identifies, categorizes, then hits the relief planets also. Nasty. All In. The MAlignment will go to extra lengths to make sure it looks like the Sollies did it. HB of CJ (old coot)

RFC said that there would be no frigates with crews of telepathically linked treecats and battle-armored Medusan Marines...

cadastral wrote:RFC said that there would be no frigates with crews of telepathically linked treecats and battle-armored Medusan Marines...

He also promised there would be no math.

After the few that BuShips/Grayson/Haven/Andies takes for detailed analysis, fit out the rest with Hermes Buoys for remote control. Then use them as practice targets once the missile situation is resolved. The target practice would be two fold. Real world tests on the ECM effectiveness and how many MDM/DDMs it takes to get to the crunchy center of a Solie SD.

Uroboros wrote:You could probably build several cruise or passenger ships from the scrap of a single SD. In order to make it work, you'd have to completely gut and rebuild the inside, cutting through layers of armor and removing all sorts of sentisitive equipment, not to mention several hundred thousand to several million metric shitons (yes, an actual measurement) of bulkheads, consoles, engines, weapons... and then rebuilding it all.

The cost would probably be similar to building a brand new SD. And you'd still have to worry about finding civilian engines powerful enough to cart around all the battle armor that can't be removed at all because it's grown in place.

It would be like turning an aircraft carrier into a cruise liner. Ships are purpose built for a reason.

While I agree with most of your points above, especially your main point of forget the whole idea, as it doesn't make any sense at all from any point of view at all, you did make one small error in your analysis.

These are SLN SDs, designed and built to 100 year ago standards. Armor that is grown in place is a fairly recent development, with the first time it is shown is with the RMN BC Nike in The Short Victorious War. I don't remember any mention of any navy other than the RMN (and probably the GSN, since they use nearly identical technology as the RMN does) of using armor that is grown in place, not even the IAN or RHN. It is almost certain the ISLN doesn't, if it has been reported back by the SDF of the Solarian League (unless it was invented in the League, and rammed through the graft laden procurement process, prior to the RMN putting the idea into production) due the Neobarbs Don't Have Any Useful Ideas for the ISLN mindset. I don't know if it could be retrofitted to existing ships. Even if it could be done, the chances of the ILSN applying it to 100 year old ships is so miniscule that it is practically non-existent.

cadastral wrote:RFC said that there would be no frigates with crews of telepathically linked treecats and battle-armored Medusan Marines...

Yeah that's what they invented BCs for.

Seriously RFC has made it abundantly clear that frigates will not be making a comeback. I suppose if someone thinks of something revolutionary that only a frigate sized hull could accomplish and convinces him of its validity he might change his mind but that isn't likely to happen and there is absolutely no reason I seen that a Treecat and Marine manned vessel couldn't be a destroyer or larger in the unlikely case RFC decides to go with such a concept.

I thought I liked frigates as much as most people but now I'm not so sure. If they are such a big deal I don't see why people don't do what I do, enjoy the books whether or not frigates appear and hope that they'll make a showing in the upcoming Travis Long books which I almost certain are set well before the frigate concept became outdated, and are definitely set centuries before the RMN stopped using or building frigates.

I understand the basic reasoning behind why the frigates are considered a pointless type in the main Honervese era but I honestly think it would be a lot clearer for everyone if we actually had tech specs for some frigate classes like we do for many of the destroyer classes and larger warships. That way we could do a side by side comparison between a frigate class and a destroyer class from the same nation and era. Specs for a Lightning class Frigate would be perfect since we could compare it to the specs for the Falcon class Destroyer which was a result of the same design study as the Lightning.

If you give them to various Scout troops to turn in to the former warships recycling center, instead of doing it yourself, the kids will get to collect the deposit.

dreamrider

I agree. Oneof the better uses for some of the captured Solly SDs would be to re-purpose them as the initial cores of Yawata II, Weyland II, etc. Another good idea would just be to salvage materials from thm and use it to build more ships orbuild 3 purpose-built space stations.

Michael Everett wrote:My idea is simple.
1) Unload all the missiles.
2) Fly one Solly SD to a semi-allied third-rate world that doesn't have much of a space infrastructure.
3) Salvage the Impellers for parts, leaving the rest of the ship in orbit.

This gives the planet in question a huge chunk of processed resources that they can recycle, a solid hull that they can use as the core of a space station and plenty of nifty devices they can re-purpose, like moving the CIC's holotank into the center of their cabinet meeting room (or whatever).
Also gets the Solly SD's out of the way.

And since Impellers are so expensive, the chance of the ship being rendered mobile again is very low while the recipients will be overjoyed that they're getting a boost to their planetary economy, even if it is only a temporary one.

Simple.