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Build a Fleet!

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Re: Build a Fleet!
Post by Brigade XO   » Mon Aug 31, 2015 8:11 am

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The Star Empire of Manticore has recently undergone a truly massive increase of population with the addition of half of the former Silesian Confederacey (and probably some "independent" star nations in that cluster) and all those systems that joined from the Talbot Cluster. Don't think we have been told how much of Silesian both had Prolong and had significant numbers of the local system's populations had both access to and actually were given Prolong. It was fairley clear that the vast majority of the Talbot systems did NOT have Prolong available or affordable to their general public prior to joining SEM. Certainly some of them did but not for the majority of the population.

San Martin had Prolong available prior to it's capture by Haven but it is not clear if Prolong contineued to be general available while Haven was in control. Certainly when they were liberated and then joined SEM it would have become available again.

So, the very high figure of persons without prolong is probably good with the addition of all those systems which either did not have prior access and with the vast majority of those systems populations were already too old to start treatments.

However, even if SEM was providing massive programs to make Prolong available to the majority of it's newly aquired systems populations, it is going to be a while before that un-Prolonged population rises significantly. In the interm, your working population (including new military recruiters) for those systems are going to be in the position of Grayson where the leaderships and experienced adults are going to be having only a non-enhanced life span.

Then there is the question of where the Prolong is going to be comming from. The vast majority of the Manticore System's orbital manufacturing is GONE. What are the odds that the Production of Prolong (any version) had been in orbital facilities rather than on the surface of the planets? How many and how large would be any Prolong and other pharmacutical production that may have been started on ANY of the new Empire Member Systems either under direct government operation of as private industries encuraged by the Manticorian govenment to both put production locally into the new systems and provide for one of more new systems with both Prolong and other modern drugs that may not have been avialable prior to the joiing the Empire.

It is possible that SEM is going to have significant shortages of a lot of things like drugs- including Prolong- until it can reestablish the orbital manufacturing capacity unless it can purchase the drugs from other places. That presumes that other places, like Beowulf, Erewhon, IAE, various sources in Haven and systems scattered around but not controled by OFS/SL are able to ramp up production to meet the new demand.
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Re: Build a Fleet!
Post by Sigs   » Mon Aug 31, 2015 8:47 am

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Weird Harold wrote:I've said as much. That's why there MUST be a multi-national defense force where those 1500-1600 systems share the cost of defense. It doesn't matter if it is 1500-1600 independent systems or 500-800 multi-system star nations/empires/confederations.
What happens if everyone has the same idea? That Manticore will carry the burden of the real defenses(SD’s, CLAC’s, LAC’s etc)?


Weird Harold wrote:Go read all of Chapter Forty-four. Everyone else, and especially Elizabeth, "bought it."

I am pretty sure that in a democracy it has to make sense and be appealing to everyone, making a Mutual Defense Treaty with every successor state is unlikely because it depends on the successor states more than Manticore, if they don’t want a Mutual Defense Treaty? They agree to a peace treaty but thats it? Do you go in blow their fleet and industry and occupy them to force them to agree to mutual defense?







Weird Harold wrote: No, there only needs to be 51% participation in Mutual Defense treaties. The more that participate, the better the "insurance policy" and the less the cost for each participating system.

How do you figure that number? Does it consider the size and strength of the members? Who the other 49% are? Having the 49% being all the core and shell worlds would ultimately mean that it has failed because the industrial might of the League is still not under the umbrella of a mutual defense treaty.



Weird Harold wrote: If a hundred systems form one sector are divided into five star nations of equal size, and one star nation (mine) just formed out of twenty non-participating systems. The four participating can be expected to provide up to 20% of the Nodal MDF with the final 20% provided by the senior partner (the one with the mosts SDs.)
But all of them will provide 2 BB’s and a dozen DD’s for the Nodal force just like you, no one will be willing to accept the expense of SD’s just to be able to protect the other 4 nations. Your entire concept assumes that someone else will provide the heavy combat ships which would be the exact assumption for all the rest of them.

Weird Harold wrote: When the fifth Nation joins, the cost/system drops to 16.7% and the fifth nation immediately gains the protection of 83.3% of the task force and the back-up of five full Navies if required -- all for the cost of a squadron or two deployed to the multi-national force.
Until there is a crisis somewhere and all 5 nations demand the Nodal force be deployed to protect them, something like what happened in Operation Icarus


Weird Harold wrote: I get that you don't trust anyone else to live up to their obligations -- possibly because you wouldn't live up to your side of the agreement -- but mankind has been making peace treaties for centuries and abiding by them in the large majority of instances.
Read about the difference between a PEACE treaty and a MUTUAL DEFENSE treaty... they are not one and the same.



Weird Harold wrote: Also, IIRC, we're talking about a time frame several decades beyond 1922PD -- possible as late as 1950 PD. Most of the problems you cite would be fully resolved in ten-twenty years and be irrelevant to maintaining the MDF task forces.

And in 1950 PD the rest of the galaxy should be able to take care of itself, asking one nation, or a small group of nations to provide for a large part of the defense of hundreds of other nations when those nations are perfectly capable to provide their own defense. And add to that the expectation that they would provide it for decades or even centuries, taxpayers in those nations will throw out any politician who suggests this.
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Re: Build a Fleet!
Post by Weird Harold   » Mon Aug 31, 2015 2:13 pm

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Does anyone have an estimate of ship costs or a comparison of relative costs?
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Answers! I got lots of answers!

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Re: Build a Fleet!
Post by Theemile   » Mon Aug 31, 2015 4:38 pm

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Weird Harold wrote:Does anyone have an estimate of ship costs or a comparison of relative costs?

The best we've really seen is in print is Honor's description of the DN buyout in FoD, With (iirc) a capitol ship costing in the mid to high single digit Billions in 1905, or roughly the cost of a Ford class Carrier. The war made ship cheaper overall as they were hammered out in series, but how much we were never told (I believe purposely - this has been asked of David multiple times and he has explicitly refused to comment), but he did say that n SD(p) was cheaper to produce than a Pre-war DN. due to "simplifying" the offensive design and economy of scale.

http://infodump.thefifthimperium.com/entry/Harrington/276/1
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RFC said "refitting a Beowulfan SD to Manticoran standards would be just as difficult as refitting a standard SLN SD to those standards. In other words, it would be cheaper and faster to build new ships."
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Re: Build a Fleet!
Post by Jonathan_S   » Mon Aug 31, 2015 5:14 pm

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Catching up on this thread after the weekend; appologies for the multi-quote wall of text.
Weird Harold wrote:I also choose to work from the premise that Manticore/GA Tech is NOT the only tech spreading through human occupied space. Somebody is going to apply Spider Drive technology to LACs and somebody is going to combine Manticoran Multi-drive tech with "Technodyne's" Multi-Stage tech to produce a four or five stage system defense missile such as my notional Huacha uses. A missile too big for shipboard deployment, or free-floating pods/forts, but ideal for moons and asteroids.

Couple technology nitpicks.

Spider technology seems a poor fit for LACs. It appears to be more mass intensive than impellers, and the number of spider nodes seems to have a direct impact on it's maximum acceleration (though you quickly hit the ceiling of what even the MAlign super grav-plates can handled).

In the Ghosts, which are (IIRC) several times the size of a LAC, the Spider drive is described as consuming a "A huge chunk of [the ship's] available tonnage". And ghost-class ships didn't leave any room for weapons.

And in a LAC sized hull you might not be able to mount enough nodes to pull even 150g.


Plus making a small ship mostly drive, but with low accel, doesn't seem like a great system-defense unit; even in swarms. Once they fire they're pretty explosed, but they can't run as fast as their targets and can't mount the armor or sheer numbers of CM and PDLCs that a larger spider ship could.
They're stealthy, I'll grant you that, but I don't see the tradeoffs being worth it in something so small.

Then for MDMs, I don't really see why you'd ever go past a 4-drive design. At that point you're already running up against the speed of light, so extra drives won't get you across a star-system an faster than a ballistic coast will. And the 4th drive appears to offer plenty of delta-v for terminal maneuvering after any reasonable ballistic segment. (And with unreasonably long ballistic segments the targets would be outside the hyper limit and have time to jump clear - making engaging them a waste of ammo)


Weird Harold wrote:
Maldorian wrote:So, why not create ships that are even bigger than Superdreads? An, just call it "Ultra Dreadnought", ...


As long as Impeller Drive is needed to get respectable acceleration, Warships are limited to around nine or ten Megatons. (Merchant ships can go a bit bigger because the don't need very high accelerations; but even they are limited to around twelve megatons unless they're willing to accept acceleration of 100G or less.)
The open question is how much that changed much with the latest RMN compensators.

The Invictus-class SD(P)s, at almost 8.8 mtons would have been past the ideal point (8.5 mtons) for the pre-war compensators. They'd have given up 107.4 g accel from their 'over-tonnage'; which clearly hasn't happened.

If we assume that the compensators improve the dropoff point, and then the drop-off beyond that point at exactly the same ratio as they improved acceleration then we can calculate the results.

The best compensator we've seen to date was in SftS with an Invictus at full military power able to pull 613.3 g. Applying linear scaling that 155% more effective compensator means an "Ultra Dreadnought" would hit the dropoff point at 13 mtons (600g at 100% power). Beyond that I think it would lose 1g of acceleration for every 3875 additional tons; so pushing it up to 13.95 mtons would bring it down to 400g, while continuing up to even 15.1 mtons would bring its full military power down to a pokey 100g.
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Re: Build a Fleet!
Post by Weird Harold   » Mon Aug 31, 2015 6:40 pm

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Jonathan_S wrote:And in a LAC sized hull you might not be able to mount enough nodes to pull even 150g.


Good points, but I did consider the mass penalty and specified a "frigate sized" LAC.

I know they're not optimal for the LAC role as we've seen LACs employed, but I believe there would be a lot of sub-optimal legacy equipment around at the 1950-1960 PD point of the Honorverse.

Likewise, the System Defense missiles don't really need a fifth stage or to combine GA Multi-drive tech with Technodyne's multi-stage tech. But I can see the extra drive and "best of both world's" tech being a selling point right after the collapse of the SL. Not an optimal design for several reasons, but adequate to the purpose of overwhelming an attacking fleet with missiles.
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Answers! I got lots of answers!

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Re: Build a Fleet!
Post by Weird Harold   » Mon Aug 31, 2015 7:19 pm

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Theemile wrote:...The war made ship cheaper overall as they were hammered out in series, but how much we were never told (I believe purposely - this has been asked of David multiple times and he has explicitly refused to comment), but he did say that an SD(p) was cheaper to produce than a Pre-war DN. due to "simplifying" the offensive design and economy of scale.

http://infodump.thefifthimperium.com/entry/Harrington/276/1


Thanks for the link, it just complicated the question, but it was helpful.

There is a distinct difference when one begins amortizing costs over "we'll build a class of six superdreadnoughts and make lots of detail changes while they're under construction because, after all, there's time to get it right" as opposed to "we'll build a class of sixty superdreadnoughts using plans which have been frozen for production rationalization under wartime emergency conditions."


Apparently, RFC considers a run of sixty SD exceptional even under wartime pressures?

It should also be pointed out that they (and Haven) are building warships on a scale on which no one has ever before built warships. The Solarian League Navy has a huge absolute number of warships, but it builds them relatively slowly and - for a fleet its size - in teeny-tiny handfuls. Other navies/system-defense forces which build capital ships, also tend to build them in small numbers with lengthy construction times and hence much higher sticker prices. Manticore's construction policies and practices were already much more productive than almost anyone else's, even before active hostilities broke out. Haven's were substantially less productive (and more expensive) than Manticore's, but still better than probably 85 percent of the rest of the galaxy's major navies.


I have to wonder where Sigs found the money, time and/or facilities to build his claimed 500+ SD equipped SDF even considering his claim of paranoia over the collapse of the SL and its failure to provide the (implicitly) promised protection. (Bearing in mind that the premise is a fleet built from scratch with no legacy units.
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Answers! I got lots of answers!

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Re: Build a Fleet!
Post by Sigs   » Mon Aug 31, 2015 7:34 pm

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Weird Harold wrote:I have to wonder where Sigs found the money, time and/or facilities to build his claimed 500+ SD equipped SDF even considering his claim of paranoia over the collapse of the SL and its failure to provide the (implicitly) promised protection. (Bearing in mind that the premise is a fleet built from scratch with no legacy units.


Taxes? Pretty much any source of government revenue… you know the usual way nations get funds for their military.


It is build from scratch with no more legacy units but the assumption is that it is 15-20 years after 1920. Legacy units are retired as the new construction comes in to service, with a dozen systems with equal or similar industry and economy as Manticore, if Manticore can have 300 DN's and SD's in 1905 as a single system nation, why can't a dozen systems of equal economic and industrial ability and 10 other systems also pretty well industrialized and financially powerful maintain ~22-23 SD's per system?
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Re: Build a Fleet!
Post by Weird Harold   » Mon Aug 31, 2015 8:13 pm

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Sigs wrote:...dozen systems of equal economic and industrial ability ...


You have a dozen Wormhole Junctions that cover 2/3 of the league border too? :shock:

I don't doubt that you could build the infrastructure, the SDs, the screening elements, the missiles, Drones, and all of the other minutia. I just doubt you could get a democracy to pony up around a trillion bucks in taxes without a clear and present danger.

If you are using the GA as a bogeyman to convince your taxpayers you need such a big Navy, the GA is going to stomp you before you get it built.
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Answers! I got lots of answers!

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Re: Build a Fleet!
Post by kzt   » Mon Aug 31, 2015 10:56 pm

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You have 25 core systems with say 8 billion people each. All with prolong. So 200 billion population. Assume each is willing to pay 1,000 per year for defense. That's 200 trillion a year. In a war or high threat it goes higher, I can see 2 quadrillion a year before you go into deficit spending, which you will in a war.
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