A single SD-based Space Station

fallsfromtrees wrote: All those in favor of putting a stake through the heart of this one, don't reply - but we do need to get the wet noodle bazooka ready.

*Ominous Hmmmmmmmmmm....( see * below)

People, they are useless pieces of crap, no more use to the people of the Honorverse than a complete fleet of dugout canoes would be to us - with the proviso that the dugout canoes are made out of battle steel that you can't do anything with.

True, but people here seem to take a great deal of pleasure in trying to come up with solutions to a perhaps insoluable problem.

Maybe it's just that we are a lot like Princess Ruth, as described in Crown of Slaves:

Ruth, on the other hand, seemed to perk up. However close she and Berry had become, the two had very different temperaments. Berry was essentially a problem-resolver; Ruth, a woman who loved a challenge. Put both of them in front of a cliff, and Berry would start trying to find a way around it—while Ruth would start scrutinizing the face, looking for handholds.

And these ex-Sollie ships are our cliff.



* = see/google Schlock Mercenary

Hutch wrote:And these ex-Sollie ships are our cliff.

I'm down to taking seriously three options for them:
1 - fast and rough recycling (like melt the whole thing down)
2 - slow and thorough recycling (with speculation about what the parts are good for), and
3 - oddball notions in small quantities, like museum ships, training by disassembly, etc.

And I'm prepared to eat fast noodle in case of (3). But for the most part, I think it comes down to (1) vs. (2).

munroburton wrote:You might as well convert a pyramid into an airport.

Jonathan_S wrote:In comparison, a trivial task. Stick a control tower on top, bulldoze out a runway nearby, toss up a windsock and you're in business.

At least if all you want to handle is DC-3s, and only during good weather.

On the plus side the pyramid is low maintenance and isn't a manpower hog.

fallsfromtrees wrote:All those in favor of putting a stake through the heart of this one, don't reply - but we do need to get the wet noodle bazooka ready.

People, they are useless pieces of crap, no more use to the people of the Honorverse than a complete fleet of dugout canoes would be to us - with the proviso that the dugout canoes are made out of battle steel that you can't do anything with.

Ok I don't know if its the head cold or the meds I am on but I think I need to kick this dead horse as well. I'll probably regret this when I am well again .

The SD's are indeed as you have stated fallsfromtrees those SD's are real piles of crap. At least 15 years out of date for comparable Haven systems and 20 for Manticore.

However here are the pro's to using them:
1. Manticore has more systems to protect than it has ships especially if it has to go on the offensive.
2. Those crappy SD's are the state of the art for anyone the Grand Alliance will be fighting. Plus the ones used in Manticore II have longer range missiles than is the galactic norm.
3. Manticore and Grayson will have no spare production for anything for at least two years as they rebuild.
4. Lots of systems will be coming over to the Grand Alliance as allies or neutral in their favor and will be requesting protection.
5. It will take at least a couple of years for the rest of the galaxy to begin to "catch up" to the Grand Alliance tech and then it has to design and build the ships to take advantage of that tech. So the SD's would work as a stop gap until better more modern ships are available from the Grand Alliance.
6. Missile colliers and fleet repair ships were also captured which takes care of supply and maintenance for the short term.

Here are the cons as summarized from above:
1. They are resource hogs both in people and in fuel.
2. They are hopelessly out of date

Now, imagine you are the governor of a system in Talbot or Silesia. Your planet is small and has 500 million people on it. There is a large Manti task force within a day or two hyper from your location. I can't find any textev that states that pods were placed in all of Talbot's systems. So your defenses are made up of old ships that are obsolete and maybe one newer destroyer or courier boat to go get help. You know when the league comes crashing down soon its going to get ugly. Piracy will be on the rise and systems will start waring with each other.

Now if I was this governor I would expand the military, a wealthy country could get away with a military 5% of its total size in population. Since your not so wealthy 1% would probably be pushing it. So lets settle on 3 million in the military. I would ask the Grand Alliance for the following from the ships they have captured.

1 fast collier 50?
1 fleet repair ship 500?
2 SD's 5,000 each
2 battle cruisers 2,000 each
4 cruisers of any type 1,000 each
8 destroyers 200 each

Most of the figures are general if someone has more firm numbers then please let me know. My head is too foggy atm to find them. But the total necessary personel to man these ships is roughly 20,150. If this buys me some sleep for 3 or 4 years until better is available then yes, I'll go through a year of growing pains to put these ships in action. If I get them for free what do I care? As dangerous as the universe is going to get I will need a navy to protect my own backyard. These will allow me to train up future spacers and provide security in the interim. The only people with equipment that can hurt me are allied with me. Its not like I can get better ships from anywhere else for 3 or 4 years, and when I do I need personal I can put onboard.

{Edited to make a final point:}

For the Grand Alliance to refuse a request for these ships would be to say the following:

You can't have them they are crap. You can't get anything that isn't crap for probably 4 years but thats ok. If you get attacked we should be able to liberate you within a week of your capture.

A noble effort to scale the cliffs (see my previous post above) Jeroswen, but acouple of points before the rest come along and start shooting grasers at it....

Jeroswen wrote: Ok I don't know if its the head cold or the meds I am on but I think I need to kick this dead horse as well. I'll probably regret this when I am well again .

Hope you get to feeling better....my annual 24-hour flu bug has yet to make an apparance this winter.

*SNIP*

However here are the pro's to using them:
1. Manticore has more systems to protect than it has ships especially if it has to go on the offensive.
2. Those crappy SD's are the state of the art for anyone the Grand Alliance will be fighting. Plus the ones used in Manticore II have longer range missiles than is the galactic norm.
3. Manticore and Grayson will have no spare production for anything for at least two years as they rebuild.
4. Lots of systems will be coming over to the Grand Alliance as allies or neutral in their favor and will be requesting protection.
5. It will take at least a couple of years for the rest of the galaxy to begin to "catch up" to the Grand Alliance tech and then it has to design and build the ships to take advantage of that tech. So the SD's would work as a stop gap until better more modern ships are available from the Grand Alliance.
6. Missile colliers and fleet repair ships were also captured which takes care of supply and maintenance for the short term.

Hard to argue the facts in 1-3 and 6, and your suppositions for 4 and 5 are valid, IMHO. I would note that the RH facilities for building ships is intact and will be active. But yeah, if the SEM and RH were streched in their war in defending systems/mounting attacks, taking on a polity about 10 times their size just in member planets (and even more lopsided in population and economies), every hull is going to be needed in multiple places.

Here are the cons as summarized from above:
1. They are resource hogs both in people and in fuel.
2. They are hopelessly out of date

Add to that getting new ammunition once they are shot dry is going to be a problem--and the colliers supplies will last only so long.

Now, imagine you are the governor of a system in Talbot or Silesia. Your planet is small and has 500 million people on it. There is a large Manti task force within a day or two hyper from your location. I can't find any textev that states that pods were placed in all of Talbot's systems. So your defenses are made up of old ships that are obsolete and maybe one newer destroyer or courier boat to go get help. You know when the league comes crashing down soon its going to get ugly. Piracy will be on the rise and systems will start waring with each other.

Now if I was this governor I would expand the military, a wealthy country could get away with a military 5% of its total size in population. Since your not so wealthy 1% would probably be pushing it. So lets settle on 3 million in the military. I would ask the Grand Alliance for the following from the ships they have captured.

1 fast collier 50?
1 fleet repair ship 500?
2 SD's 5,000 each
2 battle cruisers 2,000 each
4 cruisers of any type 1,000 each
8 destroyers 200 each

I would note that both Silesia (the part we're concerned about) and Talbott Sector are part of the SEM and the responsibility of the SEM to protect, not the individual governors of those systems. And we know the Talbott Sector is getting several squadrons of LAC's assigned, which should handle any pirates and give any Sollies smaller than a SD a Very Bad Day.


But the 'independent' Verge and even Shell systems....

Most of the figures are general if someone has more firm numbers then please let me know. My head is too foggy atm to find them. But the total necessary personel to man these ships is roughly 20,150. If this buys me some sleep for 3 or 4 years until better is available then yes, I'll go through a year of growing pains to put these ships in action. If I get them for free what do I care? As dangerous as the universe is going to get I will need a navy to protect my own backyard. These will allow me to train up future spacers and provide security in the interim. The only people with equipment that can hurt me are allied with me. Its not like I can get better ships from anywhere else for 3 or 4 years, and when I do I need personal I can put onboard.

I would also note that your numbers do not include all the support and logistics/maintenance/training staff you'll need for a fleet that size. A planet that up to now has had maybe a couple of DD's and some LAC's is going to be hard-pressed to fill those numbers...

For the Grand Alliance to refuse a request for these ships would be to say the following:

You can't have them they are crap. You can't get anything that isn't crap for probably 4 years but thats ok. If you get attacked we should be able to liberate you within a week of your capture.

I still don't think I agree with you, but I will admit that you state your position well, especially with a foggy brain (heck, that has been my status for the past 15 years...)

Why do you find that orbital space "bothersome?"
DW doesn't find it bothersome.
Perhaps because there is so much of it!

This Presumption is an obvious error,
because junking them uses work crews who do that same
work in that same system, gaining the raw materials,

but moving them requires that a ship crew be detached
for several weeks, maybe even a couple of months,
leaving them unavailable for other purposes.

HTM

SharkHunter wrote:[snip - htm]
That said, if they haven't already been junked, as a group those dang big useless boats are soaking up empty but bothersome orbital space around busy planets,
[snip - htm]
Under the presumption that it would be worth the bother to move them rather than junking them, then what?

How long is it going to take some system to train people to operate tand maintain them?.

Forget fighting them until you train people to survive shipboard, maintain and operate the SLN equipment with without killing themselves and possibly everybody else on the ship by pushing the wrong button.

Moving them from Manticore will need at least a minimal crew of people who can operate the systems, navigate and both take the ship (each one) both throught a wormhole and travel in hyperspase. At bare minimum you will need experienced merchant marine crews (yes, crews for each SD because there is a lot of stuff to operate and keep an eye on just to stay alive and fly the ship.) Forget grabbing an untrained batch of people from the place you are sending the ship to do the transit.
You might give a newly liberated or allied system a former SLN SD for free but charge them for the transport/deliver crew. After all, particulary if you are going to use MMM crews, those people should be paid for the work of delivery and both help support those crew and their companys who's ships have been out of service since Lacoon II. Money for both the crew and the ship/shipping company that owns their ship will put some money back into the Manticor economy. Some of them might also want to stay on -with contracts- to pass along what they know as far as operations and maintainence to the new owners who will need basic training to maintain station keeping and stay alive and not let the ship fall into the planet.

I suspect that the ships (in operating condition) that were surrendered at Manticore and Spindle are a bit short on missiles, both shipkillers and CM. At Mantiicore they first went int rapid volley firei and then they had to survive the incomming pod launched response from RNM & RHN. The Catafract missles are probably gone, all of what was in the SLN pods certainly is.

Manticore had almost everybody abandon ship to get the crews off, you are going to have to refurbish the escape pods. That will be somewhat ticky if they were also told to land said pods on a planet. You would probably need SLN personnel to do the referbish because they "should" have trained on things like that. Could be done on a limited basis by SLN personel though the recipients of ships that had them replaced should be checked by the new owners.

When delivered to some system, Manticore might want to pull out some of the W-sail important pieces and take the pieces home to keep them out of using wormholes after delivery. Same with some of the important hyper-space pieces for the same reason- can't take the ship off on a mission to attack another system.

As Manticore deconstructs the SD that are not going to be sent away, you might want to extract things like all the nodes etc plus spair parts before reprocessing the huks for raw materials or later sale as replacement parts for new treaty partners systems who are going to need them.
Materials and cashflow for Manticore plus things Beowulf may want (and offset the cost of all the things Beowulf is manufacturing for Manticore's infrasture and manufactuing line replacement.

Brigade XO wrote:How long is it going to take some system to train people to operate tand maintain them?

Note that this is a universe where it took the premier fighting navy in existence around two years to turn a bright college student into a very junior enlisted man. Some may disagree with RFC on how plausible this is, but to become capable sailors in the Honorverse takes a long time and a lot of specialized training.

This is a big part of why I think the captured SDs are a solution in search of a problem; in the time anyone that doesn't already have a navy sufficiently good that they have no use for bad SDs (which pretty much covers anyone that has any non-SLN wallers, and anyone with Haven sector-style sub-wall defenses) to get to the point where they could use the SLN SDs they could build or buy better (and probably more mission-appropriate) hardware that will have a much lower operating cost.

drothgery wrote:

Brigade XO wrote:How long is it going to take some system to train people to operate tand maintain them?

Note that this is a universe where it took the premier fighting navy in existence around two years to turn a bright college student into a very junior enlisted man. Some may disagree with RFC on how plausible this is, but to become capable sailors in the Honorverse takes a long time and a lot of specialized training.

This is a big part of why I think the captured SDs are a solution in search of a problem; in the time anyone that doesn't already have a navy sufficiently good that they have no use for bad SDs (which pretty much covers anyone that has any non-SLN wallers, and anyone with Haven sector-style sub-wall defenses) to get to the point where they could use the SLN SDs they could build or buy better (and probably more mission-appropriate) hardware that will have a much lower operating cost.

Are the high-automation ships going to be just as easy to crew with people who are still learning as SLN wallers though? If the highly automated ships demand a crew with a higher skill base, then you may well get yourself 3000 good-enough-for-SLN-materiel crew sooner than you'll get 150 ready-for-Rolands. For that matter, crewing the SLN waller along the way may represent only a small detour from going through schooling directly to the fancy modern ship.

If they'd be ready to crew far more modern units in far greater numbers just as soon, that goes out the window. I'm not clear on the basis of that assumption though.

JeffEngel wrote:If they'd be ready to crew far more modern units in far greater numbers just as soon, that goes out the window. I'm not clear on the basis of that assumption though.

As far as I know, the training pipeline was still working. So you have 2+ years of recruits trained without ships to put them on, plus new grads from the academy also without ships to put them on.

Exactly what this results in is a question. We really don't understand the whole training structure. It's perfectly possible there was a series of major training facility on the platforms, as they were the most important naval installations the RMN had, which might leave huge gaping holes in their actual ability to train new crews. But I think David really doesn't want the OB strike to have any long-term effect based on what he's written.

kzt wrote:

JeffEngel wrote:If they'd be ready to crew far more modern units in far greater numbers just as soon, that goes out the window. I'm not clear on the basis of that assumption though.

As far as I know, the training pipeline was still working. So you have 2+ years of recruits trained without ships to put them on, plus new grads from the academy also without ships to put them on.

Exactly what this results in is a question. We really don't understand the whole training structure. It's perfectly possible there was a series of major training facility on the platforms, as they were the most important naval installations the RMN had, which might leave huge gaping holes in their actual ability to train new crews. But I think David really doesn't want the OB strike to have any long-term effect based on what he's written.

I think, at any rate, that if it'd've been meant to have that specific long-term effect, it would have been mentioned. Apparently almost all RMN training is in ground-side classes, middie cruises, and (if any) space-side assignments that weren't in Oyster Bay's crosshairs.

For the Verge, Silesia, or Talbott systems with a hypothetical use for a SLN SD only slightly used though, it's not the RMN pipeline for personnel that would matter. It's what they've got started for themselves, or other people's existing pipelines they may tap. Certainly if one of them is secure under an RMN umbrella, they wouldn't want to get those RMN-training personnel diverted into crappy captures instead of anything better coming up in a similar time period - if it's coming up in a similar period, or if it doesn't mean keeping them out of the good units for long by screwing up what they are training on or sending them far from the yards where their new ships will be when they finish.

For systems that are going to have to get their own crews and their own ships, if they can get lousy ships cheap, that's at least a partial solution to half their problem.

For the RMN, given RFC's statement that they're not useful weapon platforms, presumably either the upcoming RMN crews will have other ships (somehow); by the time they were retrained for SLN SD's, they'd have those better ships; or the rest of the RMN can pick up the slack so well that those crews in training can just have more training or pre-emptive leave time or who knows what, instead of getting into those prizes. None of those three sound entirely plausible to me, but I think we're stuck assuming some combination of them.