How good are the solarian transtellars?

quite possibly a cat wrote:The League has vastly, vastly, more people than Grayson did. The average churn of unemployed workers is probably more than Grayson's entire population many, many times over.

The question is can the league world efficiency tap such a resources? Even at best it will take it will take years to build up momentum.

Greyson was able to rally nearly the entirely of its population and industrial base into "lets do this and get it done mode". Some members RMN have noted that Greyson shows what can be achieved when practically the whole planet puts its effort into doing something. It was also said Greyson really had one direction to go economically and that was up.

This explains Greyson a bit better.
http://infodump.thefifthimperium.com/entry/Harrington/294/1

quite possibly a cat wrote:The League should be in a much better place than Grayson to industrialize. They can start building more slips.

pnakasone wrote:One thing that really helped Greyson was that they had large numbers of very motivated shipyard workers that simply had to be retrained to new technologies and techniques. They where able to greatly reduce the number of workers needed per ship construction and reassign the newly freed workers to other projects and ships.They where also able to shift workers from other industries as labor efficiency increased to more productive jobs.Not to mention Greyson was willing to tap a very big source of available and underused workers in its women.

For a League world do they have enough space trained workers to ramp up production? Do they have a local sources of underused labor that they can tap? Is local production of components already at capacity?

For a League world the real question is how quickly can they start building more ships?

quite possibly a cat wrote:The League has vastly, vastly, more people than Grayson did. The average churn of unemployed workers is probably more than Grayson's entire population many, many times over.

While I agree that their unemployed workers are a tremendous potential resource for the League. IMHO not very many of them will already be trained shipyard workers.

No doubt they could be taught the necessary skills, but I wouldn't be surprised if it won't be far too late for the League by the time their training could be complete.

The individual members of the League, however, IMHO, should definitely begin this training. Any League member who can see the writing on the wall should be busy trying to expand their ship-building capacity and the size of their SDF.

pnakasone wrote:For a League world the real question is how quickly can they start building more ships?

The average core world has about twice the population of the entire Manticoran system, and comparable tech. Some of them have more population than the entire SEM.

kzt wrote:

pnakasone wrote:For a League world the real question is how quickly can they start building more ships?

The average core world has about twice the population of the entire Manticoran system, and comparable tech. Some of them have more population than the entire SEM.

Again the question is not can they do it but do they have the time to do it before the league disintegrates?

Everything takes time and there is a limit to how much you can substitute effort for it.

quite possibly a cat wrote:The League has vastly, vastly, more people than Grayson did. The average churn of unemployed workers is probably more than Grayson's entire population many, many times over.

The but any single League (or "former League") world only has 1/2000 of that "churn of unemployed workers" and only a fraction of those are space qualified shipbuilders.


It may be true that the Solarian League has a thousand times as many shipbuilders/yard workers as Grayson, but it is doubtful that any one world has as many, or more.

There is also the problem that none of the League worlds (that we know of)builds ships in free floating, temporary docks. Much is made of Grayson's style of construction that doesn't require permanent docks.

kzt wrote:

pnakasone wrote:For a League world the real question is how quickly can they start building more ships?

The average core world has about twice the population of the entire Manticoran system, and comparable tech. Some of them have more population than the entire SEM.

And they've had prolong at least as long - so there should be non-trivial numbers of people who've worked 20+ years in an orbital shipyard, got bored, retired the first time and then switched careers - possible even up to a number equivalent to 50% of the current employee count. They'd have to get their rust blown off, but they can presumably be lured (or conscripted) back into the yards at least until newly trained workers can enter the pipeline and gain experience.

But unless yards have a lot of mothballed slips and idled capacity you'll need to initially use them to expand the yard and support factories before you can start laying down many new ships.

Jonathan_S wrote:But unless yards have a lot of mothballed slips and idled capacity you'll need to initially use them to expand the yard and support factories before you can start laying down many new ships.

Takes about 2 years when you have to make deals to import all your shipyard technology from another system...

Grayson got a running start from Manticore.

The League worlds may have all of the technical kowlege and manufacturing ability to produce their CURRENT designs of ships (both civilian and military) but they have a finite number of slips (either in hard yards like the original Manticorian ones or the the disbursed detached slips of the present level of Manticore and Grayson tech) and don't have a lot of "unemployed" ship contruction crews more people who can build the components. They could mobilize and repurpose a number of industries and fabrication centers to build ship parts and gear but that also takes time.

There is also the speed at which they can build ships from existing or any newly built yards. I would bet that the average or even normal time to delivery for a Solly built starship is a lot longer than what was happening at Haven, Grayson and Manticore prior to oyster bay. Certainly Grayson and Manticore were cranking them out faster than Haven.
Throwing people at it doesn't speed up the work after a certain low threshold- they get in each others way and there is a rhythm to that kind of construction.
Even if each League System started tomorrow to add 20 (or 100, it is almost academic) other than the existing slips with current trained and experienced crews (and parts manufacturers) they can only build othern than in the existing yards at a much slower rate fully dependent on the state of the yards, the knowlege and skills of the crews and availabilty of components. If it take two years to build a warship- with in integrated industrial base and staff with years of experience and the wartime pace, how long is it going to take for thte 1st ships to roll off the NEW slips with crews in training building things they are learning?
Does the League HAVE two years from after the time the put together 20 new slips for each industrialized system (and train the people} ?
After two years -with esentialy NONE of the Manticorain/Haven tech- how survivable are any of that first production run of SLN tech warships? How surviable against RMN/RHN/GSN/IAN- or Mayan "SDF" combined with Erwhon's SDF?
About spears against machine-guns from 20th century tanks with close air support and a shitload of mortar and artillery backing them up survivable. The SLN is going to have to swamp their enemies with volume but probably have to be able to catch them first as the GA should be able to typicaly hold open the range.
Unless the Lenny Detwilers and some other new things are thrown in with stuff we haven't seen yet. Sigh.

Bluesqueak wrote:I'm sure that Manticore has a plan for how to handle any 'flag of convenience' operations, because that's an obvious ploy. I think they've seen it in Silesia, for example.

I suspect unless they're carrying unambiguously SLN or Alignment war material, the plan will be to just let it go. Especially since the freighters operating under a flag of convenience are much more likely to be Manticorans than Solarians, since they're the ones who have the ships "now". It's in everyone's interest except the current League government and the Alignment for trade to keep going on.

drothgery wrote:I suspect unless they're carrying unambiguously SLN or Alignment war material, the plan will be to just let it go. Especially since the freighters operating under a flag of convenience are much more likely to be Manticorans than Solarians, since they're the ones who have the ships "now". It's in everyone's interest except the current League government and the Alignment for trade to keep going on.

Even if they do not stop them the Manticorans could cause considerable delays in such ships transit times by enforcing the full body of customs, safety, and health regulations on them. There are probably dozens of obscure regulations that have not been enforced or needed for decades that could delay ships for days or weeks to work threw. But they will always stay within the strict letter of the law.