SLN Reserve

Theemile wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:uote="Tenshinai"]But of course, the SLN isn´t likely to have rapid mobilisation ANYTHING, along with personnel unlikely to have trained properly in the last decade, equipment that is in mothball rather than readiness storage etc.

2-8 weeks to get a significant portion of personnel into repetition/refresher training while the most up to date personnel start work on getting ships back online...
6 months for at least 1/4 of the reserve to be operational is definitely very workable if you put a good organiser in charge, with 4/5ths in less than a year.

I'd say those numbers could only hold if the reservists, training facilities, mothballed ships, and reactivation yards were all in the same system. If you don't have a training center on each planet you call up reservists from your got weeks to months of transit time just moving them to where they'll start refresher training. Similarly if the ships for them to man aren't in the same system they're training in you've got another weeks to months delay sailing the newly retrained crews to their ships.

But since we're fairly sure that the SLN's mothballed fleet is only located in s handfull of systems either the reserve activation will only affect those systems or you'll need a much longer best-case timeline than you proposed.

We also know that most of the mothballed ships are at least months away from being usable, with the majority being much more than that (1 year +). Just loading provisions on an RMN ship requires weeks or months, and I doubt that the SLN is as proficient as the RMN or that there are sufficient modern ready provisions available for more than a few % of the fleet at any location.[/quote]


Are you nuts. It doesn't take months or years to provision a ship. I know for a fact that when the USS John Stennis came out of the yards from a complete overhaul. It took less than two days (8 hrs first day 5 hrs second) to fully provision the ship for ten days. That's at 21,000 meals per day. Or the rough equivalent of 25 or 30 tractor trailer's full of food.

saber964 wrote:Are you nuts. It doesn't take months or years to provision a ship. I know for a fact that when the USS John Stennis came out of the yards from a complete overhaul. It took less than two days (8 hrs first day 5 hrs second) to fully provision the ship for ten days. That's at 21,000 meals per day. Or the rough equivalent of 25 or 30 tractor trailer's full of food.

Ok, the Stennis and an SD have the same # of crew, but we are talking about provisions for 4 months, not 10 days, oxygen, The Stennis' mass in water, The Stennis' mass in Hydrogen. In addition, we are discussing a complete "initial" provisioning, so we also need to include spare parts for a ship 70x the size of the Stennis (this is a full set of spares, not just a between mission update), 10,000-20,000 Missiles each the size of a tractor trailer, another 20,000 CMs the size of an SUV, plus anything else necessary.

So, that might be in the area of 30-50,000 tractor trailer loads to pull an SD out of mothballs.

Not to mention, the whole ship needs a minimum of a complete going over to verify it is in proper working over, and any repair/updates they find necessary.

Theemile wrote:
Ok, the Stennis and an SD have the same # of crew, but we are talking about provisions for 4 months, not 10 days, oxygen, The Stennis' mass in water, The Stennis' mass in Hydrogen. In addition, we are discussing a complete "initial" provisioning, so we also need to include spare parts for a ship 70x the size of the Stennis (this is a full set of spares, not just a between mission update), 10,000-20,000 Missiles each the size of a tractor trailer, another 20,000 CMs the size of an SUV, plus anything else necessary.

So, that might be in the area of 30-50,000 tractor trailer loads to pull an SD out of mothballs.

Not to mention, the whole ship needs a minimum of a complete going over to verify it is in proper working over, and any repair/updates they find necessary.

Still complete and utter bullshit. Provisioning might take a few weeks, but not several months.
And they´re not using tractor trailers, and they ARE using the advantage of zero-g to make it MUCH easier to move things around.


And yes the ship will need a complete check, that takes a few weeks but can mostly be done at the same time as provisioning.
It can be done by a skeleton crew and/or techies and/or yardworkers.

Also, because a space navy will by default be capable of working around the clock, you will probably have 3 shifts of people working, remember, the Stennis thing took only 13 workhours, even if you need 50 times more stuff, that´s still less than 1 month of work even at the same rate.

Except the whole space thing which means you can do work in 3D, you can use any and all small craft bays much more easily as you´re not restricted by bringing transportation in over a single dimension.

Oh, and we already know that methods for moving big and heavy stuff is dramatically more advanced and better in the Honorverse than in the current real world.

Mass is an issue, weight and size mostly is not.

Theemile wrote:

saber964 wrote:Are you nuts. It doesn't take months or years to provision a ship. I know for a fact that when the USS John Stennis came out of the yards from a complete overhaul. It took less than two days (8 hrs first day 5 hrs second) to fully provision the ship for ten days. That's at 21,000 meals per day. Or the rough equivalent of 25 or 30 tractor trailer's full of food.

Ok, the Stennis and an SD have the same # of crew, but we are talking about provisions for 4 months, not 10 days, oxygen, The Stennis' mass in water, The Stennis' mass in Hydrogen. In addition, we are discussing a complete "initial" provisioning, so we also need to include spare parts for a ship 70x the size of the Stennis (this is a full set of spares, not just a between mission update), 10,000-20,000 Missiles each the size of a tractor trailer, another 20,000 CMs the size of an SUV, plus anything else necessary.

So, that might be in the area of 30-50,000 tractor trailer loads to pull an SD out of mothballs.

Not to mention, the whole ship needs a minimum of a complete going over to verify it is in proper working over, and any repair/updates they find necessary.

We're talking spaceships here, so mothballs is also a relative thing. Excluding organic provisions, everything else could have been left in place, in lockers, or hell on work benches, and simply vent the air, or change atmospheres. Oxygen being corrosive and all.


But with the big super tank farms that seem to always be in orbit of gas giants, I find it extremely hard to believe they can't get the enormous quantity of neutral gases, noble or others, to pump into the ships so they aren't kept in total vacuum for decades to centuries. Basically that thing out of the Prince Roger scene in We Few, they used nitrogen. I'm not 100% certain changing out the gas will totally prevent degradation, but it sounds logically plausible because oxygen really is pretty corrosive.

So virtually everything except food, and missiles (cause nukes) could easily have been left aboard each and every mothballed SLN ship, which drops the reprovisioning time down to at most 2-3 weeks for each SD. Then it's simply how long to retrain the idiots on centuries old hardware/software. Depends how many changes, but they could at least get the ship to turn on and move, anything else would require the 3-6 months simply to gain the needed proficiency.

Somtaaw wrote:We're talking spaceships here, so mothballs is also a relative thing. Excluding organic provisions, everything else could have been left in place, in lockers, or hell on work benches, and simply vent the air, or change atmospheres. Oxygen being corrosive and all.

Your idea about filling them with noble gasses is better - just dumping the air and you'd get things vacuum welding themselves together all over the ship - not to mention there's probably plenty of materials in a spaceship rated for only days of vacuum exposure - not decades (rubber gaskets embrittling as their volatiles boil off (just as one example)

You'd probably be better off pumping them full of nitrogen rather than just going to vacuum.

And then there are components that just have resting shelf lives off only 5 - 10 years (chemical batteries, rubber material, anything that relies on medium term radioactive half-lives, etc). Honorverse doesn't have stasis fields, so the ship isn't sitting unchanged for those decades it's been in mothballs. You'll have to replace all those to limited life components to reactivate the ship (and you'd probably have pulled them during the mothball process so they could be used up as operational spares rather than just wasting their entire shelf-life in a powered down hulk.

So while the minimum necessary to render a ship capable of some level of combat may not be most of a year, it's also not just a matter of pumping in breathable atmosphere, filling up the tank, and tossing some food back in the pantries.

Jonathan_S wrote:

Somtaaw wrote:We're talking spaceships here, so mothballs is also a relative thing. Excluding organic provisions, everything else could have been left in place, in lockers, or hell on work benches, and simply vent the air, or change atmospheres. Oxygen being corrosive and all.

Your idea about filling them with noble gasses is better - just dumping the air and you'd get things vacuum welding themselves together all over the ship - not to mention there's probably plenty of materials in a spaceship rated for only days of vacuum exposure - not decades (rubber gaskets embrittling as their volatiles boil off (just as one example)

You'd probably be better off pumping them full of nitrogen rather than just going to vacuum.

And then there are components that just have resting shelf lives off only 5 - 10 years (chemical batteries, rubber material, anything that relies on medium term radioactive half-lives, etc). Honorverse doesn't have stasis fields, so the ship isn't sitting unchanged for those decades it's been in mothballs. You'll have to replace all those to limited life components to reactivate the ship (and you'd probably have pulled them during the mothball process so they could be used up as operational spares rather than just wasting their entire shelf-life in a powered down hulk.

So while the minimum necessary to render a ship capable of some level of combat may not be most of a year, it's also not just a matter of pumping in breathable atmosphere, filling up the tank, and tossing some food back in the pantries.

Just as an additional data point (not taking sides here, although it may seem like it), think about those pesky CAPTURED SLN ships. Upon inspection, many of them were in various states of disrepair.

Now, these were active, "top-of-the-line", pride-of-the-SLN ships that had people on them constantly, and yet they were "broken" in many minor ways.

Makes one wonder about the condition of ships that haven't necessarily had anyone onboard in 50 or more years. I admit that the mothballed ships MAY have had caretaker crews, but considering the rampant corruption in the SLN, it's plausible to assume that the caretaker crews only exist on paper, or maybe they actually exist, but have never set foot on any of those ships.

MaxxQ wrote:
Just as an additional data point (not taking sides here, although it may seem like it), think about those pesky CAPTURED SLN ships. Upon inspection, many of them were in various states of disrepair.

Now, these were active, "top-of-the-line", pride-of-the-SLN ships that had people on them constantly, and yet they were "broken" in many minor ways.

Makes one wonder about the condition of ships that haven't necessarily had anyone onboard in 50 or more years. I admit that the mothballed ships MAY have had caretaker crews, but considering the rampant corruption in the SLN, it's plausible to assume that the caretaker crews only exist on paper, or maybe they actually exist, but have never set foot on any of those ships.

Interesting thought - although this might go multiple ways.

IIRC some ships are sent directly from the builders into the reserve. That might mean those ships are in better shape that the average in service one because misuse and lazy deferring of frontline maintenance hasn't has a chance to screw them up.

OTOH it might mean that they're still squeaky clean but haven't had all the builders faults shaken out of them yet (especially if the SLN was insane enough to dump them into reserves without a full set of acceptance trials)

And even worse if the yards and workers know a ship it destinted to go straight to reserve - and whatever inspectors sign off on it as being acceptable are known to be lazy, ineffective, or corrupt you might get real sloppy garbage work on those straight to mothball ships. (Stuff where even if the inspectors were corrupt you couldn't get away with on an ship destined for active duty because normal use would rapidly expose your fuckups -- but if they get found a century from now? Who cares)

MaxxQ wrote:Just as an additional data point (not taking sides here, although it may seem like it), think about those pesky CAPTURED SLN ships. Upon inspection, many of them were in various states of disrepair.

Now, these were active, "top-of-the-line", pride-of-the-SLN ships that had people on them constantly, and yet they were "broken" in many minor ways.

Makes one wonder about the condition of ships that haven't necessarily had anyone onboard in 50 or more years. I admit that the mothballed ships MAY have had caretaker crews, but considering the rampant corruption in the SLN, it's plausible to assume that the caretaker crews only exist on paper, or maybe they actually exist, but have never set foot on any of those ships.

This is true, however those same Reserve ships also haven't had people, so far as we know, aboard them in the past few centuries either. Many having been built, then immediately put into Reserve status, so not having had operational crews aboard, and presuming the construction crews aren't skimping they'd be in good condition.

Definitely not perfect, corruption being accepted in the active Navy, we can only imagine that the shipyards are just as bad, but there's only so much you can skimp before it just doesn't work at all. Probably slightly lower than the active Battle Fleet ships, but higher than a worst case, only built well enough for an inspector to glance at and sign off on.


Splitting the difference, all the SLN Reserve ships are probably at least 75-80% of designed specs, accounting for possible/probable shipyard corruption against not having had crews operating stuff and not pulling regular maintenance to fix the problems they directly cause.

And the caretaker portion really depends on how the mothball process actually works. Atmosphere swaps, would require little to zero caretaker crews, and would match the few facts that those ships are simply parked while their alleged commanding Admirals simply rake in the pay & seniority.

And there appears to be two levels of Reserve, there's the ready reserve, and then reserve, so the ready reserves may very well be kept in a higher readiness, whether because they were only recently rotated into the reserve or they're preparing to be cycled into active fleet. And then the true Reserve, which is where all the SD's that still mount autocannons are, simply swapped out atmospheres and practically abandoned?

Somtaaw wrote:We're talking spaceships here, so mothballs is also a relative thing. Excluding organic provisions, everything else could have been left in place, in lockers, or hell on work benches, and simply vent the air, or change atmospheres. Oxygen being corrosive and all.


But with the big super tank farms that seem to always be in orbit of gas giants, I find it extremely hard to believe they can't get the enormous quantity of neutral gases, noble or others, to pump into the ships so they aren't kept in total vacuum for decades to centuries. Basically that thing out of the Prince Roger scene in We Few, they used nitrogen. I'm not 100% certain changing out the gas will totally prevent degradation, but it sounds logically plausible because oxygen really is pretty corrosive.

So virtually everything except food, and missiles (cause nukes) could easily have been left aboard each and every mothballed SLN ship, which drops the reprovisioning time down to at most 2-3 weeks for each SD. Then it's simply how long to retrain the idiots on centuries old hardware/software. Depends how many changes, but they could at least get the ship to turn on and move, anything else would require the 3-6 months simply to gain the needed proficiency.

Let's toss a little real world experience into the mix. During the period of time that the ship is in the hands of the shipyard going through the reactivation overhaul (which is what it actually is) the Supply Corps is (supposedly) busy bringing together all the various stores including food and other crew consumables, fuel (hydrogen in this case,) replacements for loose, strayed or stolen ship's equipment ranging from machine tools to vac-suit sealing patches.

Just as soon as an area of the ship is accepted by the incoming ship's company and CO loading begins of the "stuff" that's safe to handle and store aboard, leaving the really dangerous and bulky stuff such as fuel and ordinance for very last and in that order. You need fuel to move that bucket from the yard, take her through acceptance trials and then to the ordinance docks to load the stuff that goes *BANG!*.

Real world, we loaded out a 40k ton amphibious assault ship that had been FULLY unloaded in preparation for an overhaul, and did the job with ship's company and 3 cranes in about 6 days, taking breaks for meals and sleep when we loaded faster than the supply center could bring us the dry stores. We (and I assume your SD would) took our fuel for ship and aircraft (about 6 or so million gallons) sufficient for 14 days from connections to the pier pipelines along with fresh water.

We steamed out of Norfolk VA for Desert Shield 10 days after the skipper was asked "can you go," having fully loaded the ship in 6 days and then 4 to say "Goodbye" to families (and to allow the higher level schedulers to catch up to us.) Then stopping in Moorhead City NC to pick up 2000 jarheads, their vehicles and other equipment. That loading took 2 days. Then away we went.

But then, we weren't an SLN crew bringing an obsolete P.O.S. back to life with hundreds of featherbedding SLN yard workers underfoot.

For the battleships that underwent reactivation in the 1980s, once the ships were refloated after completing the drydock part of reactivation loading of portable equipment and many stores began even while the shipyards were still hard at it. Same with ships still in the builder's hands.

MaxxQ wrote:Makes one wonder about the condition of ships that haven't necessarily had anyone onboard in 50 or more years. I admit that the mothballed ships MAY have had caretaker crews, but considering the rampant corruption in the SLN, it's plausible to assume that the caretaker crews only exist on paper, or maybe they actually exist, but have never set foot on any of those ships.

I would say that that is unlikely, as that isn´t corruption, that´s stupidity as anyone taking even the slightest look at matters will find that there IS blatant corruption to a level that you simply cannot overlook.

More likely, there ARE caretaker crews, and they probably spend somewhere between half and one tenth of the time they´re supposed to on their job. But if that job includes minor fixes and replacements, they´re probably done and then "billed twice".

That way they can´t be accused of not doing their jobs without someone making a lot more effort than it´s really worth.

For 9 out of 10 ships it will add maybe a week or two of work for a skeleton crew, with the rest turning up larger problems or happens to be in better than expected condition.