Oh, what the heck . . .

PeterZ wrote:

Theemile wrote:Larger ships may be used on specific, high volume routes and between hub routes. Like how UPS, Fed Ex, or other delivery services do today - they fly 747s between hubs, then smaller planes to regional delivery points, semi trailers to local delivery warehouses, and Brown\White cargo vans to your front door. Occasionally though, they will fly a 747 between point A and point B because there is enough demand to fill the plane with auto parts or fresh pork bellies required on a timely manner to justify the craft. There is no "one size fits all" solution.

Also, Merchie ships in the Honorverse are used for a VERY long time - centuries if possible. The Dromedary may be a 200+ year old design, and technology creep has allowed newer Merchant Marines, like Manticore, to build larger ships as time progressed, while established fleets are still using their perfectly good, paid off, ships which just happen to be 3/4ths the size, but work just as well.

That's my point. Not only is the design still serviceable, but the sips and the mission are also still serviceable. The routes haven't changed enough to make using an upsized ship preferable enough to upgrade a fleet.

Had the demands on the routes changed enough, buying appropriately sized ships would have been the economical thing to do.

The MMM ships did subcontract for other lines, so it is feasible that they hired large MMM hulls for the normal routes as their cargos grew, and moved the smaller ships to other, smaller routes.

Which would be another hit, if the SLMM had to send 2 ships to cover the MMM ship's old routes.

[quote="lyonheart"]Hi Robert132,

IIRC, the largest supertanker was around 623,000 tons and had more than her share of problems dealing with her size so she didn't last that long.

L
[/quote="lyonheart"]


Being hit 3 times by Iraqi Mirage F1s [using 1,000 pound parachute retarted runway cratering bombs] while at Larak Anchorage [under charter to Iran ATT] in 1987-88 might have had a lot to do with the Seawize Giant's longevity. [I was in the Gulf for the last year of the Iran-Iraq War and remember little things like that.]

Theemile wrote:Larger ships may be used on specific, high volume routes and between hub routes. Like how UPS, Fed Ex, or other delivery services do today - they fly 747s between hubs, then smaller planes to regional delivery points, semi trailers to local delivery warehouses, and Brown\White cargo vans to your front door. Occasionally though, they will fly a 747 between point A and point B because there is enough demand to fill the plane with auto parts or fresh pork bellies required on a timely manner to justify the craft. There is no "one size fits all" solution.

That triggered a random thought. I wonder if traffic will ever get to a point, on a given wormhole leg, that it's a sufficient bottleneck that normal traffic will be restricted to ships whose tonnage triggered lock-down of the wormhole most closely matches the minimum safety separation ATC will accept.
(So freighters transfer cargo to speclialized ships that just jump from the warehouse on one end to the warehouse on the other -- think of it as analogous to intermodal freight containers going Chine to Europe using rail to cross the US)

For example if ATC is willing to accept 60 seconds separations between freighters a roughly 6 mton design will, I believe, lock down the wormhole for just about that.
If they were more conservative and wanted longer separations I think the tonnage / time chart would look roughly like this.
_60 seconds | _6.0 mtons
_90 seconds | _7.5 mtons
120 seconds | _8.6 mtons
180 seconds | 10.6 mtons
240 seconds | 12.2 mtons
300 seconds | 13.7 mtons

Hi Jonathan_S,

We're getting closer to that narrow gap with the frequency of overall transits having more than doubled from 480 in OBS to over a thousand per T-day in SoS, or from 3 minute intervals to 85 seconds through all 14 of the WHJ transit lanes, though obviously no single lane has yet approached its actual limit.

Some textev, pearl or post used figures that implied that an 85 second interval per lane might be the present mass/time limit for the SEM's WHJ, but I don't recall where or when.

This limit could be adjusted by putting db's in between the larger ships, or by simply charging more when that day comes.

Although that day from the increase rate over the last 20 years might be less than 75 years away.

But due the fantastic changes happening now means it will happen even sooner.

Interesting times indeed.

L

Jonathan_S wrote:

Theemile wrote:Larger ships may be used on specific, high volume routes and between hub routes. Like how UPS, Fed Ex, or other delivery services do today - they fly 747s between hubs, then smaller planes to regional delivery points, semi trailers to local delivery warehouses, and Brown\White cargo vans to your front door. Occasionally though, they will fly a 747 between point A and point B because there is enough demand to fill the plane with auto parts or fresh pork bellies required on a timely manner to justify the craft. There is no "one size fits all" solution.

That triggered a random thought. I wonder if traffic will ever get to a point, on a given wormhole leg, that it's a sufficient bottleneck that normal traffic will be restricted to ships whose tonnage triggered lock-down of the wormhole most closely matches the minimum safety separation ATC will accept.
(So freighters transfer cargo to speclialized ships that just jump from the warehouse on one end to the warehouse on the other -- think of it as analogous to intermodal freight containers going Chine to Europe using rail to cross the US)

For example if ATC is willing to accept 60 seconds separations between freighters a roughly 6 mton design will, I believe, lock down the wormhole for just about that.
If they were more conservative and wanted longer separations I think the tonnage / time chart would look roughly like this.
_60 seconds | _6.0 mtons
_90 seconds | _7.5 mtons
120 seconds | _8.6 mtons
180 seconds | 10.6 mtons
240 seconds | 12.2 mtons
300 seconds | 13.7 mtons

Montrose Toast wrote:

lyonheart wrote:Hi Robert132,

IIRC, the largest supertanker was around 623,000 tons and had more than her share of problems dealing with her size so she didn't last that long.

L
[/quote="lyonheart"]


Being hit 3 times by Iraqi Mirage F1s [using 1,000 pound parachute retarted runway cratering bombs] while at Larak Anchorage [under charter to Iran ATT] in 1987-88 might have had a lot to do with the Seawize Giant's longevity. [I was in the Gulf for the last year of the Iran-Iraq War and remember little things like that.]

Greetings,
I remember reading up on the reports of those actions, we (USS Caron) were working up for a Med deployment that could have seen us continue on to the Gulf. VERY interesting reading. Most of the shouting and shooting was done before we threw lines and headed east from Norfolk though.

1,000 lb retards will ruin darned near anyone's day if they don't have a foot of armor on deck.

My take on the merchant shipping situation in the Honorees is that many of the ships were designed and built to serve as general purpose vessels who are inteneded to serve some version of regular runs and trade routes. This is not just there and back again like a modern oil tanker.
These ships are going to pick up and deliver multiple sets of cargo an a number of stops in a planned route. They are quite often neither the ship picking up a give cargo from its point of manuracture and delivering it to the system of the buyer but drop and pick up goods for further shipment at many systems and both ends of wormholes.
Remember we are talking about what has mostly been a stable economic mix for centuries. Shipping gets optimized and so do trade routes. What your compititon does also drives what you do (or don't do) and what you think you must alter to gain advantage.
Sure, there are merchant freighters out in the Verge and ships will poke around looking for cargos- but more often they are part of a system that is constantly looking for new markets and new suppliers. So even if you are a ship in a shell company owned by Manpower and are smuggling arms places (or slaves) you are going to have to attempt to cover your costs and APPEAR to make a profit or your going to attract attention you don't want.

There are agents and scouts for all sorts of shipping companies, transtellars, and just business people looking to buy and sell stuff and find places that will buy not just 100,000tons of tractors and cars one time but continue to buy on an ongoing basis and possibly give you paid shipping business to take their own products elcewhere.

Smaller ships (that 1-2MT range) do smaller jobs and you can still fit a lot of stuff into a hull rated to take that much weight in shipments so you are likely to be carrying a large variety of cargo.

Neither Pritchart nor her foreign policy experts — including Kevin Usher, one of the canniest analysts she’d ever met . . . and the only one she trusted without qualification — were sure exactly why the High Ridge Government refused to negotiate in good faith

That's the part I find really hard to believe. "The gov't can do things during wartime that it can't do during peace time" is a pretty standard situation. For that matter, Manties ought to be discussing it on a regular basis.

The idea that that is a surprise is, IMAO, simply silly

GregD wrote:

Neither Pritchart nor her foreign policy experts — including Kevin Usher, one of the canniest analysts she’d ever met . . . and the only one she trusted without qualification — were sure exactly why the High Ridge Government refused to negotiate in good faith

That's the part I find really hard to believe. "The gov't can do things during wartime that it can't do during peace time" is a pretty standard situation. For that matter, Manties ought to be discussing it on a regular basis.

The idea that that is a surprise is, IMAO, simply silly

Governments often get away with a lot. Remember that the High Ridge government kept putting off elections, ones that might well remove them from office. They would have had to add some people to the Upper House so they blocked elections until the disaster forced them upon them.

And their actions dealing with Haven, which resulted from noting being able to have peace without new elections, were ridiculous. But they had control.

GregD wrote:

Neither Pritchart nor her foreign policy experts — including Kevin Usher, one of the canniest analysts she’d ever met . . . and the only one she trusted without qualification — were sure exactly why the High Ridge Government refused to negotiate in good faith

That's the part I find really hard to believe. "The gov't can do things during wartime that it can't do during peace time" is a pretty standard situation. For that matter, Manties ought to be discussing it on a regular basis.

The idea that that is a surprise is, IMAO, simply silly

It's not completely preposterous, though. StateSec had grabbed most of the intelligence organs in the PRH when the CoPS took over. Very few of them would have found work with the restored regime.

Virtually the only intelligence agency outside StateSec's control would have been in the Octagon - which blew up during the McQueen coup attempt. So there probably was a bit of an analyst deficit in the RoH's early years.

Pritchart's background - and those of her cabinet - doesn't really provide any insights into the thinking of an aristocratic Manticoran politician.

munroburton wrote:Pritchart's background - and those of her cabinet - doesn't really provide any insights into the thinking of an aristocratic Manticoran politician.

In other contexts, Kevin Usher showed an excellent understanding of how Manticoran aristocrats of High Ridge's circle were likely to act. And the reasons for the High Ridge government's failure to negotiate a peace treaty were common knowledge on Manticore; literally everyone who paid attention to Manticoran politics knew exactly what was going on and why, no matter where on the political spectrum they lined up at. Many thought the government's actions were stupid and dangerous, but they still understood it.