SLN reserve possibilities

Hi SharkHunter,

Kudos for the excellent points!

Welcome and please enjoy your favorite simulated beverage on the simulated forum.

While about a third of the BF reserve has at least some form of laser PDC's, ie built in the last 80 years, the rest extend all the way back 200 years.

If the SL were efficient freighter builders [only by SL standards], scrapping the SD's and reusing the useful parts would make more sense, but they don't have the yards even if the BF reserve were evenly dispersed among all the possible shipyards.

I look forward to more excellent posts.

L

SharkHunter wrote:Those ships are "dead" in terms of the current conflicts, zero possibility of resurrecting them. Most of them have been mothballed for decades while the corrupt upper echelons of the SLN have siphoned money off to cronies, etc. There's no money to mobilize enough crew to activate even a small chunk of them, and Gold Peak's Tenth Fleet is forcing a wedge between the Talbot cluster and the majority of the league, and Frontier Fleet -- which is supposed to be WAY closer to state-of-the-art tech, can't even fight effectively against Roland destroyers: at Saltash a set of Rolands blew away four SLN battlecruisers from about 3-5 times the BC's missile range.

The problem is also that the "mandarins" know that. They've preached their invincibility because of the Reserve etc. for decades, and know that their ONLY strategy is commerce raiding, because at least "" (Frontier Fleet) already has enough ships to maybe keep the RMN busy and uppity independence-minded Verge systems looking over their shoulder in fear. It's also one of their only ways of trying to get a bypass around the stranglehold which the RMN and RMMN now has on intergalactic freight and information flow.

The Solarian League Navy is now like a hundred times larger "Spanish armada" going up against a single 20th Century aircraft carrier task fleet. They can go bombard a whole bunch of basically unarmed "islands", but are TOAST the moment a metal ship with radio finds out what they are up to.

Hi Biochem,

The problem is that the SLN's fleet trains aren't very big or experienced, so the likelihood of any being in the reserve is very slight.

First, Crandall's exercise was first considered or planned around 40 years ago, since it took this long to execute it, one wonders were all the delays bureaucratic, or did it take roughly 40 years to build the ships?

Given the bureaucratic nature of the SLN, who would sacrifice part of their budget to create the fleet trains, when there has been so little for them to do in the first place, and civilians have been happily accepting all the transport contracts the SLN has had for centuries, NTM its almost all been within the old league?

I wouldn't be surprised even if the fleet trains totaled hundreds of freighters etc, that it reached 1-2% of the MMM's numbers.

L

biochem wrote:The other problem is the crewing requirements. There simply aren't enough trained spacers in the SL that are not already employed elsewhere to crew the things even on a skeleton basis.

There is one part of the reserve fleet that may be useful however. If whoever designed the thing in the first place wasn't a complete idiot (not necessarily a good assumption with the SL), some of those ships should be supply ships. Textev indicates that SL civilian ships have been advancing technologically even though the military hasn't, so those old supply ships won't be nearly as good as a new built modern civilian ones. But they could help fill the gap until new ships get built.

lyonheart wrote:Hi Biochem,

The problem is that the SLN's fleet trains aren't very big or experienced, so the likelihood of any being in the reserve is very slight.

I imagine the Reserve is so old that the spread of ship types and sense of missions will differ from the modern SLN, i.e., they were built with serious warfare at least theoretically in mind.

On the other hand, there's the risk that back then, they figured the fleet train function would be handled by impressed/leased/rented civilian shipping, perhaps including some built for priority cargoes with military grade compensators, hypergenerators, particle shielding. If they figured that then, there's every chance that those plans have never seriously been revised either.

First, Crandall's exercise was first considered or planned around 40 years ago, since it took this long to execute it, one wonders were all the delays bureaucratic, or did it take roughly 40 years to build the ships?

I wouldn't take either of those possibilities seriously. I'd figure that, in 40 years, there simply hadn't been the interest in a live exercise of the sort. That does speak to institutional vice, of course - it's just not email lost in the Sinai for 40 years looking for the Promised Land of an actual operation, or the freighters that take an entire professional career from keel-laying to launch.

Given the bureaucratic nature of the SLN, who would sacrifice part of their budget to create the fleet trains, when there has been so little for them to do in the first place, and civilians have been happily accepting all the transport contracts the SLN has had for centuries, NTM its almost all been within the old league?

I wouldn't be surprised even if the fleet trains totaled hundreds of freighters etc, that it reached 1-2% of the MMM's numbers.

L

Oh, I wouldn't expect it to come to that much either. I'd expect it to be a jaw-droppingly small portion of the total fleet by the standards of any other multisystem navy, even the old Silesian one. (Heck, a good fleet train freighter would've been an awesome vehicle for elicit private abuse there.) But a jaw-droppingly small portion of 8000 hulls is still going to be more than 0. Just less than "much" or even "enough" on this scale.

Given the size of Battle Fleet's budget, and given the availability of that budget for so many centuries and the prior results of that still there in the Reserve (well, assuming they've not been sold off, of course - there's a danger), it wouldn't take more than an occasional admiral with the freak desire to do her darn job to divert a bit of that budget to a fleet train unit. They may even be able to make it fly calling it, oh, a "support battlecruiser" or somesuch, and get quite a few of them for the cost of one more (useless) shining SD.

Ok guy's, as for the need to heavily modify the ships to allow for cargo space, cutting stuff out would be relatively considering they would have access to interiors of the hulls and can apply the use of the most appropriate tools in a very focused way instead of blowing their way through it in the fastest possible way under battle conditions, compare it walking up to a particular tree in a forest with a chain saw and cutting it down against a battalion of soldier with machine guns and artillery having to having to destroy that particular tree from out side the forest under fire from an enemy battalion inside that forest. To simplify the matter I suggested cutting the whole outer structural sections off and keeping the solid hull as sort of a base to build basically a giant cargo bay around because the solid inner hull as I'm given to understanding this area contains all the stuff that makes it a starship and not just a massive weapons array. Seeing as the hammerheads and other warship characteristics would no longer be needed they shouldn't pose as restraints.

As for crew I was thinking of using mostly civilians because these ships would no longer be warships with the permanent nature of the modifications being done to them and I see no reason to use see these ships as worth keeping given the nature of the threat they are currently facing. As for crew size, that could be dramatically reduced because the main reason for large crew is to have many hands on board for repairing battle damage, crewing prize ships, having marines stationed on board to take control of orbital stations and to man the redundant systems if communication links between the bridge and specific sections were severed during combat, none of which would be at all useful on a merchant freighter.

As for the systems being decades old if not centuries old, well I'm given to understanding that technology in the honorverse has somewhat plateaued with very few revolutionary technologies introduced and only relatively small improvements in output for systems, so these systems would be slow and a little clumsy compared to what the Sollies would be used to, but not anything they're too unfamiliar with for the most part. This isn't like trying to teach a brand new MIT graduate how to sort punch cards to programme an 18th century loom and these ships will at best be mediocre, but still better than nothing and only able to partially fill any gap caused by Lacoön. If someone is thinking that age would cause problems, maybe, but the mothballing process should limit that, mostly by removing any atmosphere the material the components are made of can react with (no redox reactions here) and the only degradation I could imagine happening would be cause be materials being inherently unstable and any plans to reactivate the reserve would cover these replacements (I mean some one would have had to come up with a plan to defeat an all conquering alien armada after all, what else would strategic planning do with centuries without the possibility of any kind of real threat possibly entering their minds).

There would also be the fact that with the withdrawal of Manti shipping and closure of the wormholes the League economy is going to go through some real pain, and the member worlds are going to to be ticked with the central government, so they have to appear to be doing something and using the reserve would good propaganda material, because a) central authority is helping ease the damage those nasty Mantis' have done to our trade and b) the current fleet is all that will be needed to deal with the threat same as always and the military might of the Grand Alliance isn't so large that the Solarian League Navy needs to call in the reserve to deal with it (and yes I do consider the fact they lost a quarter of their active fleet already to this threat sort of dismisses this point, but they are Sollies and and they could says that part of their strength was well within their overall strategic margin of safety to maintain their overall superiority and claim they had ships well back from the fighting at the Second Battle of Manticore to observe and say they mauled they took out a large chunk of the Alliance fleet despite being ambushed, lying on this scale seems to be their first response to everything).

And as a very conservative figure on the actual monetary value of the reserve SDs (bear with me I do have a point at the end of it), not counting any other ship class (mostly because I have any notion to how many of them there would be), say a SD cost on average the equivalent to $25 billion (Manticoran dollars because I think that's the currency we're all most familiar with in the honorverse) for the Sollies to produce given the the figure Willard Neufsteiler gives about the value of Honor's prize money for capturing regular Dreadnaughts as being $35 billion IIRC using $25 billion is a very low estimate, the total value of the fleet monetarily $200 trillion, and you guys think scrapping that amount of investment into the military wouldn't give Omosupe Quartermain (Permanent Senior Undersecretary of Commerce) and Agatá Wodoslawski (Permanent Senior Undersecretary of the Treasury) heart attacks, let alone the damage to the moral of the Solarian citizens that all of a sudden the biggest ace up their collective sleeve to prove their unquestionable might is only worth sending to the scrap heap, imagine the operation needed to secretly scrap thousands of SDs without leaving fingerprints that it was done and they can't very well leave them inactive much longer the way things have been going.

There was the Fleet 2000 program (or some such name) but I don't think that applied to a majority of the mothball fleet.

What they have in the Reserve Yards might impress a Verge system but the SLN is getting the idea that the inactive reserves are just so much dangerous junk and deathtraps against anybody they are actually fighting now even if they can put together and train to competence the crews.

We didn't get a confirm or deny on what happened to Fillerta's fleet train but I suspect it was probably swept up as soon as Mantiore started getting hold of ships computers. That, along with Crandalls ships, would take care (eliminate from Solly use) much of the 1st line fleet train.

SLN is going to have to stuggle to move anything right now. Between what they lost with Crandall and Fillerta and the loss of all the MMM shipping cutting so much of the total freight capasity of the League, they are in a tough place.

Sharkhunter, I'm afraid you are grossly underestimating things. The topic of modifying military hulks into freighters has been discussed numerous times, with input from David Weber himself.


First, you cannot easily just peal off the outer hull of a superdreadnought. That hull is a single continuous shell with the strongest composites available, essentially grown onto the ship. It is extremely difficult to cut or tear off (deliberately).

Pealing off the outer hull still doesn't give you nearly as much room as you would want for a freighter. The inner hull is a large portion of the ship, and far more volume than would be taken by [edit]the crew and equipment portion of[/edit] a freighter. The resulting freighter would have less than half the freight volume of an equivalent freighter.

The very shape of a warship is different from a freighter. The hammerheads would essentially be wasted space on a freighter. It would also make the ship appear to be a legitimate military target.

There are huge differences between the equipment on a warship and a freighter. Superdreadnoughts have three fusion generators, much more powerful nodes, more powerful inertial compensators, and so on. All of this equipment is many many times more expensive to maintain, requires maintenance much more often, and require many more people to run, further increasing the cost.

The crew would have to be many times larger than a normal freighter. They would also have to be trained to handle military-grade equipment.

If you tried to replace all the military grade equipment with civilian grade, it would cost more than building a brand new civilian freighter, and take just as long.

All in all, your modified superdreadnought freighter would probably cost more to run than it could earn.

Yep. You either find a way to use the ship "as is" which is possible in those areas of the galaxy without Haven sector tech or you send the ship to the breakers.

Don

Aside from the problems already discussed with the use of the BF reserve fleet, the following major problem exists: the proposed work would have to be carried out in a major shipyard.

Every system with shipyards capable of carrying out the work is going to be a priority target for the initial Grand Alliance offensive. Also, it is very likely that the reserve fleet's ships are laid up in the same systems that would carry out the work and will be targets of opportunity during the strikes on the shipyards so the ships themselves won't exist for very much longer.

Sorry to rain on your parade

[quote="fallsfromtrees

For the shipping of the whole Solarian League, without the use of wormhole junctions, it'd be at best a tiny drop in a huge bucket, but if there's a will to drop that much at least....


That's true, but it may cause a wee bit of morale and public relations problem. Beating your swords into plowshares in the middle of a war, just because your swords are useless and all your farm equipment's been taken away just won't play well out there.[/quote]
Which is why you don't decommission all of the SDs, just a few to supply the crews, and you do what the mandarins do so well, you lie about why you are doing it.[/quote]

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Slight wrinkle in the plans --
Most of the SLN reserve SD's were in orbit without assigned crew. As noted elsewhere, many of the designated SLN BF C.O.'s and Admirals had never been aboard their designated ships.
No assigned crew, no available trained manpower for other ships of any type.

-- Stewart

nrellis wrote:Aside from the problems already discussed with the use of the BF reserve fleet, the following major problem exists: the proposed work would have to be carried out in a major shipyard.

Every system with shipyards capable of carrying out the work is going to be a priority target for the initial Grand Alliance offensive. Also, it is very likely that the reserve fleet's ships are laid up in the same systems that would carry out the work and will be targets of opportunity during the strikes on the shipyards so the ships themselves won't exist for very much longer.

Sorry to rain on your parade

At least partially true. But it would be improbable that the GA would be able to find and destroy everything.

Don