Hi Cyn,
I admire your stubborn determination, but this topic has been done to death, so you might try checking the old threads on the topic including RFC's posts, and move on to other fruitful ideas.
I believe he stated you could build a better new freighter faster than trying to convert the SD's at far less cost, so there's no point trying even if the SL had the excess yard capacity available.
Again this is all moot since the BF reserve will be scrapped by the GA in 2-3 month's.
Regarding your well reasoned cost estimates, the standard we were using at the bar for years was around M$5000/ton for major warships, or a new 8.5 MT SD costing over M$42.5 B, which RFC eventually let us know had dropped over 20% because of the sheer volume of production during the first war.
Given that the BF's SD's are around 80% of that mass and built far more slowly [~3+ years], past estimates of their costs were at least around 20% higher or over M$40B for the latest [Vega?] class.
While your concern for Agata and Omosupe's hearts is very kind, I believe they have the best doctors available in Old Chicago, so the news of how worthless the BF reserve is now wouldn't have been fatal in the first place, if they had ever considered scrapping the BF reserve, for which we have absolutely no textev.
That is, they were going to continue to bluff about its overwhelming power to the rest of the SL, particularly the verge, shells and protectorates for as long as possible to keep them in line; which is why many here have argued taking the BF reserve out should be one of the first GA goals; if they are left with few SD's and mainly BC's as their biggest ships, far more members will consider leaving, NTM need far less protection provided by the GA when they do.
I look forward to more interesting posts in the future.
L
Cyn wrote: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.
