new/old dead horse, futher beating requested

drothgery wrote:Erm... didn't the text where the Quadrant Guard was introduced pretty strongly suggest that they could build their equipment locally without much difficulty?

"Build without much difficulty" and "offload modern equipment" are not synonymous. I doubt that the captured SLM equipment would equip the entire Talbot Guard, but it could provide a head start on equipping the guard.

I was going to start a campaign to stop bestiality, necrophilia, and sadism but was told I'd just be beating a dead horse.

On a marginally more serious note I believe that part of the reason this topic won't die is that if you had just one of the Solarian SDs here and now you would be king of the world. People can't accept that in the Honorverse they are just useless white elephants, despite RFC patiently explaining it over and over.
There are many real world examples of how gifting sophisticated military technology to an undeveloped nation has ended with no functionality in a short time. Without an appropriate industrial base and military support ethos, stuff turns into junk rapidly.

Since no-one seems to have picked up on this bit (apologies if I've missed a post on it)

HB of CJ wrote:*snip*
My first thought was that the GA needed to hang onto the intact ships of all classes because they might need them for any number of purposes ... primarily for refugee exac ships.

After all, would it not be safe to assume, (dangerous word!) that in a pinch a Sollie SD could easily endure over 30,000+ refugees crammed inside for a short 4 week hyper hop?

*/snip*

I would be absolutely stunned if anyone's SDs could carry 30,000+ refugees for 4 days, let alone 4 weeks. It's not a question of physical space (though I don't think there's that much spare cubeage on an SD, what with armour and cofferdamming and magazine racks etc etc etc), it's a question of life support, specifically atmosphere and water recycling. If you're talking about putting 30,000 extra people on an SLN SD, even if you cut the crew by three-quarters from 6,000 to c. 1,500 by leaving all the combat systems unmanned and not embarking marines (and that's assuming you could cut 75% of the crew out that way), you're still talking about a 400% increase in the number of people on board. I doubt a warship has 400% spare life-support capacity - that's all mass and volume that could be used for weapons, sidewall generators, EW hardware, magazine space, armour etc.

They couldn't cram ~4 times the nominal crew load onto the captured Peep ships when Honor was evacuating Hades. They could just barely get up to a 50% increase on the warships, and it was even less for the transports. So yeah, not a chance on cramming 30,000 people onto a SD.

Dafmeister wrote:I would be absolutely stunned if anyone's SDs could carry 30,000+ refugees for 4 days, let alone 4 weeks. ...

For reference:

Echoes of Honor
Epilogue wrote:"Yes, Sir." He glanced down at something White Haven presumed was a memo pad display, cleared his throat once more, and read aloud. "Tracking made it five battlecruisers, four heavy cruisers, a light cruiser, and two of their Roughneck-class assault transports."

...

"... the rumors of my recent death have been exaggerated. I am accompanied by approximately one hundred and six thousand liberated inmates of the prison planet Hades, ..."

The PRH ships liberated are close to SLN crew sizes, and none are SDs, but the ratio of crew-size to "packed to the deck-heads" should be similar.

(I didn't dig far enough back to get the discussion of how many would fit in which ship types, but that discussion is also in Echoes of Honor.)

Weird Harold wrote:The PRH ships liberated are close to SLN crew sizes, and none are SDs, but the ratio of crew-size to "packed to the deck-heads" should be similar.

(I didn't dig far enough back to get the discussion of how many would fit in which ship types, but that discussion is also in Echoes of Honor.)

Even erring generously in favor of the warships still puts most of the passengers onboard the two transports.

The E wrote:Even erring generously in favor of the warships still puts most of the passengers onboard the two transports.

True, but somewhere we should be able to pin down the nominal crew size and/or rated capacity of each ship type and get a rough idea of how much excess capacity there is.

Personally, I doubt that you could lift that contingent in three (or four) SDs with a nominal crew size of 6,000 (even counting the crews as part of the total.) Four SDs would require 26,500 per SD or 442% of nominal crew size; or about 2.2 times as many as I'd expect military redundancy in life support to support.

I don't have my copy of IEH to hand (curse the need for paid employment!) but if memory serves, the Roughnecks were carrying 45,000+ people apiece, having been built as mass-lift troopships.

Dafmeister wrote:I don't have my copy of IEH to hand (curse the need for paid employment!) but if memory serves, the Roughnecks were carrying 45,000+ people apiece, having been built as mass-lift troopships.

Echoes of Honor doesn't say what their nominal capacity is:

The good news was that he'd managed to put together an escort of no less than ten battlecruisers (although one of them was one of the old Lion-class) and six heavy cruisers, and the People's Marines had been able to provide two of their Roughneck-class fast attack transports. The bad news was that he'd been able to come up with less than twenty-seven thousand troops to put aboard those transports.

The Longstops in the previous convoy were good for over 50,000:

"Looking at the numbers from The Book, you're right, Sir," Fritz Montoya said. Honor had called the doctor in for the meeting expressly to address the life support question, and now he turned to look at all of them. "But the transports were designed around a lot of reserve environmental capacity. We could increase a Longstop's load from forty thousand to about fifty without stretching its life support dangerously. In a pinch, I'd be willing to call it fifty-six or maybe even fifty-seven. I wouldn't want to go much over that unless it was for a very short hop, but the enviro plants should carry the atmospheric load for that many as far as we need.

A little later they talk about how much they could boost a warship's carrying capacity:

"And don't forget that warships always have more reserve life support than anything else in space, even military transports," Montoya pointed out. "The RMN's designers always assume warships are going to take damage, for example, so they build as much redundancy as they can into the core survival systems. We could increase nominal crew sizes by at least fifty percent and still have some reserve. In fact, we'd probably run out of places to put people well before we maxed out their enviro."

Which, again, means there's absolutely no way of cramming 30,000 people onto a SD.