Next Bolthole devellopment

While Beowulf was unable to fully outfit their fleet to manticoran standards, there was no reason they would not develop their industry and infrastructure to match their ally. So best able to take advantage of their relationship.

SYED wrote:While Beowulf was unable to fully outfit their fleet to manticoran standards, there was no reason they would not develop their industry and infrastructure to match their ally. So best able to take advantage of their relationship.

There was EVERY reason not to do so while Sigma Draconis was a League Member. Best use of their relationship is to keep prying Solaran eyes away from Manty tech and production advantages.

Besides Beowulf is a Bio-sciences specialist not a particularly Militarized world. Now, of course, as a member of the Grand Alliance, they would be wise to do so.

BobG wrote:

SYED wrote:Those temporary and mobile ship docks and repair facilities. While they won't be useful for long term construction, could they be used to build up such facilities?

I still think the Alliance should hit Yildun and take out the Technodyn facilities there. In this case, "take out" means tugs and freighters, and haul the surviving ones (after another interesting battle) back to Manticore.

Yes, I do have ideas on how to do that, but that would be fanfic.

-- Bob G

I'm mildly surprised that they haven't. It has a junction with two remote termini, so it's on the target list for Lacöön II. It also doesn't have any planets - the entire population is in orbital stations of one sort or another.

WeirdlyWired wrote:

SYED wrote:While Beowulf was unable to fully outfit their fleet to manticoran standards, there was no reason they would not develop their industry and infrastructure to match their ally. So best able to take advantage of their relationship.

There was EVERY reason not to do so while Sigma Draconis was a League Member. Best use of their relationship is to keep prying Solaran eyes away from Manty tech and production advantages.

Besides Beowulf is a Bio-sciences specialist not a particularly Militarized world. Now, of course, as a member of the Grand Alliance, they would be wise to do so.

Actually, neither of those is true. Beowulf is where most of the early advances in hyper travel came from.

They also upgraded their military manufacturing so that the were able to hit the ground running after Oyster Bay. Otherwise they wouldn't be able to crank out things like Keyhole II platforms or Mycroft systems as fast as they have. They just made a deliberate decision not to deploy them in their actual ships, on the entirely justified basis that the SLN brass didn't care about advances in military tech.

If Manticore can get the best/most advanced machine tools from Beowulf, Erwhon and the Aldermani, that can be used as PART of the process rebuild the Manticore infrastructure. SEM still has all the information about it's most advanced tech, it mostly just doesn't have the most recent versions of the machines (or lines to produce them) or the experienced workforce to do the work.

If you can ship in the largest and/or most effective prefabricated modules for space stations and manfuacturing facilities, those can be used at at least two leves.
One is to use them to build the next (probably several) levels of tools to regain that manufacturing level on at least a small scale -and then expand that.
Two is to produce waht is nessisary at the lower levels of tech for all that more basic sets of equpment and products like consumer & export good which DON'T require cutting edge SEM military tech levels as well as much of the needed military equipment just below that cutting edge level.
If Beowulf and the Aldermani are producing Mk 23 systems, they can certainly provide new manufctured lines in modules with training materials for Manticore to set up and start production of whatever it is desinged to do.

This needs a blended approach. An intial layer (a big one) of "just good enough" equipment and facilities to create a starting point of of manufacturing (at all levels) and another layer of the best, most advanced to be seed the highest tech and build out what they need at the top end of the military and other tec in the home system.
Both will be needed to train up sufficent cadre of people to continue to expand the ability to produce what they need.

Brigade XO wrote:This needs a blended approach. An intial layer (a big one) of "just good enough" equipment and facilities to create a starting point of of manufacturing (at all levels) and another layer of the best, most advanced to be seed the highest tech and build out what they need at the top end of the military and other tec in the home system.
Both will be needed to train up sufficent cadre of people to continue to expand the ability to produce what they need.

Production in the honorverse seems to be magical. There is no supply chain, anyone with the plans can produce equipment (which will work perfectly) on any random vendor's production gear.

kzt wrote:

Brigade XO wrote:This needs a blended approach. An intial layer (a big one) of "just good enough" equipment and facilities to create a starting point of of manufacturing (at all levels) and another layer of the best, most advanced to be seed the highest tech and build out what they need at the top end of the military and other tec in the home system.
Both will be needed to train up sufficent cadre of people to continue to expand the ability to produce what they need.

Production in the honorverse seems to be magical. There is no supply chain, anyone with the plans can produce equipment (which will work perfectly) on any random vendor's production gear.

The supply chain could be a problem. For production, our current technology is moving toward more flexibility using design programs and controlled machine tools. A few months back, http://www.instructables.com/ had an article where someone explained how he built his own computer controlled woodwork machine for very low cost. How far could this go over centuries

Brigade XO wrote:This needs a blended approach. An intial layer (a big one) of "just good enough" equipment and facilities to create a starting point of of manufacturing (at all levels) and another layer of the best, most advanced to be seed the highest tech and build out what they need at the top end of the military and other tec in the home system.
Both will be needed to train up sufficent cadre of people to continue to expand the ability to produce what they need.

kzt wrote:Production in the honorverse seems to be magical. There is no supply chain, anyone with the plans can produce equipment (which will work perfectly) on any random vendor's production gear.

DDHv wrote:The supply chain could be a problem. For production, our current technology is moving toward more flexibility using design programs and controlled machine tools. A few months back, http://www.instructables.com/ had an article where someone explained how he built his own computer controlled woodwork machine for very low cost. How far could this go over centuries

I think kzt is partly right: today's manufacturing technology could not do what David is expecting it to do. He's also right that it's magical, in the sense of Clark's Law: any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

The biggest issue here is that the series was created in the early 90s, a quarter century ago. Today, we have things like 3D printers that can create an entire car. Really - it took a very advanced facility three months to do it. There are 3D printed dresses. Not very practical and highly expensive at the moment. Where would this technology be in another two thousand years?

There are a lot of things you can do even with the rather simple 3D printers you can find in a maker shop, from printing enough keys to make a master key for a tumbler lock (1) to making casts of ancient skeletons. You want a cast of a Homo naladi skull? Just download the file, fire up your 3D printer and you'll have it in a couple of hours.

With this kind of technology, all you have to do is load the plans into an appropriate machine. It really is that simple.

(1) You can find out how to do that on the internet - I'm not going to repeat the instructions here.

In the honorverse it is popping out a complete missile or entire pod. It seems a little harder to have a general purpose fabricator that can turn out 5000 tons of complex molecular scale electronics that can handle thousands of gravities of acceleration almost with the superconducting cabling etc.

Particularly given that they use metal flywheels in their hyperdrives.

SYED wrote:While Beowulf was unable to fully outfit their fleet to manticoran standards, there was no reason they would not develop their industry and infrastructure to match their ally. So best able to take advantage of their relationship.

JohnRoth wrote:

WeirdlyWired wrote:There was EVERY reason not to do so while Sigma Draconis was a League Member. Best use of their relationship is to keep prying Solaran eyes away from Manty tech and production advantages.

Besides Beowulf is a Bio-sciences specialist not a particularly Militarized world. Now, of course, as a member of the Grand Alliance, they would be wise to do so.

Actually, neither of those is true. Beowulf is where most of the early advances in hyper travel came from.

They also upgraded their military manufacturing so that the were able to hit the ground running after Oyster Bay. Otherwise they wouldn't be able to crank out things like Keyhole II platforms or Mycroft systems as fast as they have. They just made a deliberate decision not to deploy them in their actual ships, on the entirely justified basis that the SLN brass didn't care about advances in military tech.

Beowulf only publically appeared to be a bio-sciences world, but as we've seen they do have a rather larger navy than nearly any other single-system entity we've yet seen. Beowulf had to have those ships built somewhere, and since they long ago gave up on really achieving changes from within the League, this means they must build their SDF purely locally.

In addition to very probably building their ships purely in Beowulf, they used to regularly conduct training exercises with the RMN. They knew almost exactly what Manticoran ships were capable of, and I would not be very surprised if Manticore were regularly handing over the plans to Beowulf of the same level they used to give to Alizon, Zanzibar or Erewhon.

We know Beowulf has long collaborated on concealing the exact extent of Manticoran naval increases, but they were also willing to go to the mat against Tsang's task group when outnumbered (openly) by 2:1. Since Truman's detachment wasn't actually sitting alongside the BSDF, any missiles fired at the Beowulf ships would be threats.... unless the Beowulf ships had limited Manticoran style upgrades/changes.

My estimate is Beowulf had at least first-flight Ghost Rider remote drones & decoys including Dragon Teeth and Dazzlers, the very latest capacitor SDM's Manticore had pre-MDM era, and possibly flatpack pods loaded with fusion MDMs since those are very easily concealed. They couldn't change their missile tube, energy batteries or PDLC's easily without it being obvious they were tinkering, but their countermissile tubes were almost certainly altered for Manticoran CM's, possibly the Mark 30's Honor had at Silesia, or even all the way upto full up Vipers.


Which may be another reason how Beowulf became the primary missile supplier, because they were already manufacturing limited quantities of flatpacks, countermissiles, and fusion MDM's for their own SDF due to how easily concealed nature those are. It wouldn't be hard to keep the SLN from realizing Beowulf had Manty weapons, even if the SLN were willing to admit that they might be superior, and since Beowulf withdrew the SLN is no longer in a position to demand Beowulf turn over evidence of any nature.