Last use for SL SD captured

When you lose all your orbitals and have 1.2 million crew facilities just sitting around you use it. Anything not perfect is taken apart and used as parts. Until what you have is replaced and recycled, you use what you have. Each ship gives you 4,000 berths for crew to work out of, Machine shops, sensor platforms, sidewalls and wedges, minimal grasers lasers and missile tubes, defensive system etc that will likely never get used. That is all fine, the manufacturing of new bases will continue asap, facilitators will be trained as will new crew. Until these new bases are made the SD ships will serve as 'trailers' for the workers.

Lord Skimper wrote:When you lose all your orbitals and have 1.2 million crew facilities just sitting around you use it. Anything not perfect is taken apart and used as parts. Until what you have is replaced and recycled, you use what you have. Each ship gives you 4,000 berths for crew to work out of, Machine shops, sensor platforms, sidewalls and wedges, minimal grasers lasers and missile tubes, defensive system etc that will likely never get used. That is all fine, the manufacturing of new bases will continue asap, facilitators will be trained as will new crew. Until these new bases are made the SD ships will serve as 'trailers' for the workers.

All well and good, if you are in desperate need of worker housing, but I would consider it likely anyone who takes out the orbitals would either demand your surrender, and/or remove the mothballed SDs by either destroying them or carrying them away. Also Manticore obtained these SDs after the rebuilding was months underway, thus the housing shortage was solved some other way then and is currently being rectified by building permanent quarters.

Castenea wrote:

Lord Skimper wrote:When you lose all your orbitals and have 1.2 million crew facilities just sitting around you use it. Anything not perfect is taken apart and used as parts. Until what you have is replaced and recycled, you use what you have. Each ship gives you 4,000 berths for crew to work out of, Machine shops, sensor platforms, sidewalls and wedges, minimal grasers lasers and missile tubes, defensive system etc that will likely never get used. That is all fine, the manufacturing of new bases will continue asap, facilitators will be trained as will new crew. Until these new bases are made the SD ships will serve as 'trailers' for the workers.

All well and good, if you are in desperate need of worker housing, but I would consider it likely anyone who takes out the orbitals would either demand your surrender, and/or remove the mothballed SDs by either destroying them or carrying them away. Also Manticore obtained these SDs after the rebuilding was months underway, thus the housing shortage was solved some other way then and is currently being rectified by building permanent quarters.

Not only that, but the commute from the surface to orbit is likely no worse than the commute many people here and now take to get to work. With current launch vehicles, a satellite can make orbit in roughly 1/2 to 1 hour, depending on altitude, inclination, and whether it's a prograde or retrograde orbit

MaxxQ wrote:Not only that, but the commute from the surface to orbit is likely no worse than the commute many people here and now take to get to work. With current launch vehicles, a satellite can make orbit in roughly 1/2 to 1 hour, depending on altitude, inclination, and whether it's a prograde or retrograde orbit

And of course Field of Dishonor specifically mentions that Manticore is only a twenty minute shuttle ride from Hephaestus. (It's when talking about the attraction of the on-station Dempsey's despite the short hop down to the surface).

So yeah, given the easy and cheap launch capabilities counter-grav shuttles give you there's no major hardship in commuting up from the surface every day until the orbital habitats are sufficient rebuilt to allow occupancy. The rebuilding workforce presumably isn't so large for the available shuttles to be a major 'rush hour' bottleneck.



Also, like basically every other suggestion for ex-SLN SDs, why would they be better for Manticore than the mothballed RMN tube wallers Manticore has in relative abundance?
Even if you want to use SDs as short term construction housing at least the RMN SD have full manuals and there's training on how specifically to run and maintain engineering and life support.
While there's no doubt they could figure that out for the SLN units, and steal spares from other ex-SLN SDs, why bother when the planet, or the mothballed RMN units, are right there?

Jonathan_S wrote:

MaxxQ wrote:Not only that, but the commute from the surface to orbit is likely no worse than the commute many people here and now take to get to work. With current launch vehicles, a satellite can make orbit in roughly 1/2 to 1 hour, depending on altitude, inclination, and whether it's a prograde or retrograde orbit

And of course Field of Dishonor specifically mentions that Manticore is only a twenty minute shuttle ride from Hephaestus. (It's when talking about the attraction of the on-station Dempsey's despite the short hop down to the surface).

So yeah, given the easy and cheap launch capabilities counter-grav shuttles give you there's no major hardship in commuting up from the surface every day until the orbital habitats are sufficient rebuilt to allow occupancy. The rebuilding workforce presumably isn't so large for the available shuttles to be a major 'rush hour' bottleneck.



Also, like basically every other suggestion for ex-SLN SDs, why would they be better for Manticore than the mothballed RMN tube wallers Manticore has in relative abundance?
Even if you want to use SDs as short term construction housing at least the RMN SD have full manuals and there's training on how specifically to run and maintain engineering and life support.
While there's no doubt they could figure that out for the SLN units, and steal spares from other ex-SLN SDs, why bother when the planet, or the mothballed RMN units, are right there?

Back in my wild, wacky college days, I piled on a couple orbital mechanics classes. One of the early exercises was the math behind tunneling a straight line through the Earth to another point. Vacate the air, make the sides frictionless, and drop a ball. Turns out, it doesn't matter if the hole goes straight through the center of the Earth, or at a shallow angle, it's all the same. It takes just over 89 minutes for the ball to fall through the earth, go to the other side, stop ~4 feet above the surface, and then fall again and come back to your waiting hand. This is the same number as if you could have an orbit at 4' above the Planet Earth (assuming the planet was completely flat and roughly at sealevel). This orbital period increases slowly, so by the time you get to the region of the ISS and space shuttle, the orbital period is ~90 minutes.

The point of my story, is any low orbital body can be reached in <45 minutes from any place on an earth sized planet, especially assuming Honorverse level accelerations. As has been pointed out by others, many people have a longer commute today around a large city, than it would be to go to a space station in the Honorverse.

I still think you can recycle the life support, displays, bunks, engineering, Nodes and some CM and PD, Hyper sails and drive thrusters etc... for a Modern Trojan 2 CLAC, no pod laying just towed System pods & 100-200 LAC support bays. Run it with a weak wedge to blend in with other Caravan freighters. Use whatever kind of LAC are appropriate for the situation. Make everything as modular as possible allowing for easier upgrades. The CLAC can be defensive only, the LAC and System pods are powerful enough to defeat any threat. A Military Wedge, Sidewalls, even Solly Sidewalls, and Solly PD and Counter Missiles plus LAC screen and LAC offense. The SD wedge and Sidewalls will also give a psychological edge and panic to any lesser ships in a system, pirates or raiders. System pods could be ERM or multi stage Capacitor based if put into Shell or Rim hands. Should be a few million in Haven suddenly made outdated but still overpowering compared to Solly tech.

Lord Skimper wrote:I still think you can recycle the life support, displays, bunks, engineering, Nodes and some CM and PD, Hyper sails and drive thrusters etc... for a Modern Trojan 2 CLAC, no pod laying just towed System pods & 100-200 LAC support bays. Run it with a weak wedge to blend in with other Caravan freighters. Use whatever kind of LAC are appropriate for the situation. Make everything as modular as possible allowing for easier upgrades. The CLAC can be defensive only, the LAC and System pods are powerful enough to defeat any threat. A Military Wedge, Sidewalls, even Solly Sidewalls, and Solly PD and Counter Missiles plus LAC screen and LAC offense. The SD wedge and Sidewalls will also give a psychological edge and panic to any lesser ships in a system, pirates or raiders. System pods could be ERM or multi stage Capacitor based if put into Shell or Rim hands. Should be a few million in Haven suddenly made outdated but still overpowering compared to Solly tech.

Again not a terrible idea, I even think somebody will try it with some of the white elephants in the SLN reserve, but why would Manticore or anyone else in their part of space do this? Manticore and Haven have a set of better ships, and Haven is currently building better ships, Manticore will be building better ships once they have the facilities to to even attempt what you are suggesting.

Lord Skimper wrote:I still think you can recycle the life support, displays, bunks, engineering, Nodes and some CM and PD, Hyper sails and drive thrusters etc... for a Modern Trojan 2 CLAC, no pod laying just towed System pods & 100-200 LAC support bays.

You're still convinced that it is somehow possible for Manticore in its current state to take a ship built to one design paradigm and rebuild it into something completely different, or that doing so is in any way a practical solution to an actual problem Manticore currently has?

Honest question, do you even try to process anything people write in response to your "ideas", or is it just not registering in your brain?

To pull out anything, even the relatively "useful" bits that are fairly universal, like the miles and miles of wiring, life support (or at least pieces of it, since we know Grayson and Manticoran life supports aren't even 100% compatible, source IEH) you first must get through the superdreadnought armor.


The same superdreadnought armor, that is specifically designed to be not only the thickest and most powerful armor ever placed on a warship, but also all the rest of the internal armoring, which is what makes a superdreadnought capable of "withstanding punishment that would destroy lesser ships, and stay in action."


If you have a shipyard capable of getting through both the external and internal armor of a Solly superdreadnought, you are under utilizing that same shipyard that should be building a modern podnought with all the fixings. And not only that, you could build at least one, maybe even be half done the second podnought, before you ever finish stripping the Solly superdreadnought.



And making this argument isn't really easy, it's taken months of me lurking and reading the arguments and counter-arguments, to reluctantly realize the older posters are right. The Solly superdreadnoughts are barely even worth using as live decoy's, parked in an orbit and turning their impellers on when attackers arrive, simply to spook them.

I remain more than mildly skeptic, that ships are not universal in their control panels. Henke in Storm from the Shadows just up and steals two of the Solly battlecruisers, that used to be under the command of Admiral Byng, Terekhov "borrows" the Solarian freighter Copenhagen, I don't even want to start the whole list of everytime Manticoran prize crews are operating someone else's ship (with, or without native crews to watch over). And it goes not only through the main Honorverse storyline, but even in the More Than Honor Grand Tour where Manticoran archaeologists take the Melungeon light cruiser into combat with a Peep cruiser (ok admittedly, they only fired a single broadside or so, but they were still capable of the basic flight away from the planet (helm control), targetting and launching of both missiles and defensive (tactical control), and keeping the ship online (engineering and power). And they managed that as archaeologists, they weren't even professional spacers, let alone naval officers, excepting the one who they named Captain.


However, aside from that skepticism that most ships are universal enough to permit basic flight, without the massive remedial training, Solly superdreadnoughts are simply too big, and not worth throwing into a shipyard when modern podnoughts and CLAC's need to be built instead.

Somtaaw wrote:However, aside from that skepticism that most ships are universal enough to permit basic flight, without the massive remedial training, Solly superdreadnoughts are simply too big, and not worth throwing into a shipyard when modern podnoughts and CLAC's need to be built instead.

The thing I would compare the instances you mention to is something like a US crew taking over a chinese submarine. Most of the controls and basic concepts will be fairly obvious on an intuitive level, so driving that boat to a friendly harbour will at least be possible (if not exactly comfortably so), but anything more complex becomes exponentially more difficult, and taking such a ship into combat is a very bad idea under normal circumstances. The big-picture controls are all very much equivalent, it's just that without being trained on the intricacies of the control systems and the proper maintenance procedures, operating the ship at the skill level necessary for combat use isn't going to happen.