Build a Fleet!

Jonathan_S wrote:I must have missed that "frigate sized LAC" from upthread; sorry about that. But weren't the Ghost-class frigate sized? And they carried nothing but engines and sensor arrays.

You'd might well have to get up to at least DD sized to mount the equivalent of a even a Shrike's weapons and defenses on a spider powered ship... And I'm still unclear on why you need huge, even stealthier, but quite sluggish LACs.

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You remove the Hyperdrive and Alpha node analogues from the "Ghost" to get the Spider LAC (By the way, a Frigate or DD sized sub-light vessel is called a Corvette, not a LAC.) Other than it's stealth, a Shrike (or 3) would be a better option.

Weird Harold wrote:
Defense, yes. Sigs 300-500 SDs is more than "defense." Who, or what, is he defending against?

Defence from people who want what I have, you are looking at it as total numbers, in the war between Manticore and Haven 500 SD's is a lot but for an industrialized nation of 20+ systems that is not too much. In peace time, Manticore will still have a Home Fleet of at least 4 squadrons of SD's, I have a dozen systems with equal industrial capabilities and another 10 with lesser which means that when it comes to defence I would need to provide for all of them. In the SEM before Oyster Bay it seems that at least 90% heavy industries(ship building etc..) were in the Manticore system therefore it required the most defence. A century or two down the road that will probably change as Silesia and Talbott build up their economies and Manticore would require a bigger navy in order to protect all of her industrial centres as there would be more than one.

Throughout history nations that have something of value usually have to defend it, in this case the something in question is the heavy industry, the same thing that someone would love to get their hands on in order to fuel Empire building.


And once again, 350 of the 500 SD's are in reserve and require some time to be brought online, the 150 SD's give enough firepower backed by the BB's to deal with most threats and if the need arises I have 350 more in reserve.

Relax wrote:Conversely we can come at this problem from the SL's perspective where they all have prolong and the planet workforce available to a core world with an average population of 5Billion and 20+ worlds can easily man/produce a navy equal that of Manticore.

Of course the SL has 2000 such worlds... without even getting into the protectorates, let alone the verge population.

This is why the Harrington Doctrine of "managing" the post-league situation is so important -- so that there is no imperative for those worlds to want or need a massive Navy. (or at least a few as possible.)

Sigs wrote:And once again, 350 of the 500 SD's are in reserve and require some time to be brought online, the 150 SD's give enough firepower backed by the BB's to deal with most threats and if the need arises I have 350 more in reserve.

Prior to Haven turning Conquistador, how many SDs did the RMN have? They have so many SDs now because of the threat of Haven and will keep most of them (and build more) as they face the SLN and MAlign. How many will they keep in service when they achieve the Harrington goal of Peace Through
Trade?

160 SDs (20x8-ship squadrons) might be a reasonable SDF If you're close enough to be worried about the RF or Anderman Empire, but those 350 SDs in reserve are going to be exactly as useful as the SLN reserve has proven to be. Maintaining compatibility with your reserve is going to inhibit staying state-of-the-art in your active fleet -- which is going to be an ineffective peacetime navy through lack of combat experience, anyway.

You haven't defined any concrete threat to your systems to encourage your taxpayers to pump money into 350 holes in space. You apparently have no mutual defense treaties with anyone -- i.e. you don't care about your trading partners' survival.

You apparently don't care about how your naval strength will be perceived by your neighbors -- you're apparently content to trigger and fuel an arms race with neighboring systems.

There's no doubt that you could build a multi-trillion dollar fleet, I'm just having trouble understanding why you need one and how you've convinced your democracy to pay for it. A nebulous, "Defence [sic] from people who want what I have," wouldn't make me vote for the excess military you want.

You might ask France and Germany in 1917 about how wonderful mutual defense treaties are. They are not the panacea you seems to think they are.

Brigade XO wrote: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.

SNIPPED

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.

This is an interesting point, which hasn't been addressed; the generational change in the leadership. In a pre-prolong society, all of the Mandarins would have been replaced already; now that the upper echelons of the beaurocracy are occupied, how are the people who want change going to drive them out?

Forex, the Battle Fleet heirarchy comprised of family members of the people we've met--how do you get rid of them?

Brigade XO wrote: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?

There are a number of Pearls regarding Prolong; also, a number of them regarding the post-oyster bay reconstruction. Essentially, what RFC said was: systems put in their own facilities for manufacture, it isn't provided directly from the SEM; and second, that while a lot of the industry was located on the space stations, not all of it was, and there is still a considerable amount of light industry in Manticore.
As an assist, here is a link regarding prolong, but there are several.
http://infodump.thefifthimperium.com/entry/Harrington/278/0

Regards, Rob

kzt wrote:You might ask France and Germany in 1917 about how wonderful mutual defense treaties are. They are not the panacea you seems to think they are.

'Tis not that I think they are a panacea, but that Honor Harrington thinks they are essential.

WWI was a very good example of how a web of bilateral mutual defense treaties can be a bad thing. That doesn't necessarily mean that mutual defense is an invalid concept, it just means that Europe in the early 20th century had a bit of trouble defining "defense" and distinguishing it from "aggression."

kzt wrote:You might ask France and Germany in 1917 about how wonderful mutual defense treaties are. They are not the panacea you seems to think they are.

They probably looked better in the period of the post-Napoleon era (congress of Vienna, ca 1820s) until after the unification of the Germanies and the Italian states led to new arrangements that led, in a non-linear way, to WWI. After WWI they were adopted by nearly everyone in the wake of the fragile establishment of new and fragile regimes everywhere in Europe and the Middle East.

It was the core idea of the League of Nations; the UN and Nato are derivative. Sometimes, it works.

For real helpless victims, look to Czechoslovakia (1938) or Poland in 1939.

Regards, Rob

Theemile wrote:You remove the Hyperdrive and Alpha node analogues from the "Ghost" to get the Spider LAC (By the way, a Frigate or DD sized sub-light vessel is called a Corvette, not a LAC.) Other than it's stealth, a Shrike (or 3) would be a better option.

IIRC it not 100% confirmed that that corvettes are only sub-light (since we have almost no text-ev about them; and most of it from back in Travis Long's day).

Though it is a reasonable speculation; and one that I've made myself.

Jonathan_S wrote:

Theemile wrote:You remove the Hyperdrive and Alpha node analogues from the "Ghost" to get the Spider LAC (By the way, a Frigate or DD sized sub-light vessel is called a Corvette, not a LAC.) Other than it's stealth, a Shrike (or 3) would be a better option.

IIRC it not 100% confirmed that that corvettes are only sub-light (since we have almost no text-ev about them; and most of it from back in Travis Long's day).

Though it is a reasonable speculation; and one that I've made myself.

Tom Pope weighed in on it when I asked him awhile back. Corvettes are essentially Frigate/DD sized Sublight ships with DD/CL weapons fits. It made more sense in Travis Long's day than today (Due to size of the weapons of the day).

They are used sparingly today in certain situations - The Dillingham cartel had a pair protecting it's operations in Walther IIRC, allowing them to Skirt the Silensian rule about private Hypercombatants. It was theorized (but never answered), that those Corvettes were actually standard FFs or DDs with their HyperGenerators pulled to satiate the Silensian Rule without being a "one-off" design.