Last use for SL SD captured

munroburton wrote:

robert132 wrote:That reminds me ... did the GA decide what to do with the CREWS of those SDs? 70 ships with (guessing) 5000 warm bodies in each is 350,000 people to house and feed or haul to a planet in another system where they can be warehoused, fed and kept out of trouble.

Easy. They put them in the PoW camps they built for the Havenite crews captured at the end of BoMA1. There were ~380,000 of them, all now repatriated.

Unless you meant Crandall's crews - that was covered in textev. IIRC, they chose an uninhabited tropical island on Spindle and dumped them there with the emergency survival supplies off their own ships.

And Hades

MAD-4A wrote:No - no more than a few hundred - you don't need thousands of crew members to operate a merci. the same systems would be needed regardless of what, or how much, shut down dead weight equipment the hull & drives happen to be lugging around.

You're forgetting that the SLN SDs have NO automation such as merchant ships and newer Haven Sector ships incorporate. Past discussions have settled on that a crew of about 1,000 would be required for any extended ferry -- i.e. any movement from one star system to another.

You might get away with as few as 800 or need as many as 1,200, but it is going to be more that "a few hundred" (per SD) to ferry those ships anywhere useful.

munroburton wrote:Easy. They put them in the PoW camps they built for the Havenite crews captured at the end of BoMA1. There were ~380,000 of them, all now repatriated.

Unless you meant Crandall's crews - that was covered in textev. IIRC, they chose an uninhabited tropical island on Spindle and dumped them there with the emergency survival supplies off their own ships.

You're right, I don't know how I forgot about the POWs from the BoMA1, silly me. And surprisingly I did remember what was done with the survivors from Crandal's debacle.

Thanks!

Weird Harold wrote:

Somtaaw wrote:Personally, I would have taken a page from Henke's taking a page from Haven, and put all the Solarian survivors from Raging Justice on Gryphon islands

"Want to conquer US, did you? Here, have a sample of our beloved weather patterns."

I'd pick a spot in the Sphinx Outback where the Hexapumas and Peak-bears can guard them -- with a little help from the treecats.

Between the wildlife and the winter weather, there's going to be precious little incentive to wander away from the prison camp.

Oh the decisions... introducing the Solarians to the Sphinxian wildlife, or the adventure of Gryphon weather.

I'd have to go with Gryphon though, simply because it's much harsher, and that with the absence of a declaration of war, the Solarian survivors should consider themselves lucky not to be summarily executed as pirates.

That neatly cuts the legs out from all but the thickest head officers objections, while also reminding them, their fair treatment is optional and voluntarily offered.

Weird Harold wrote:

MAD-4A wrote:No - no more than a few hundred - you don't need thousands of crew members to operate a merci. the same systems would be needed regardless of what, or how much, shut down dead weight equipment the hull & drives happen to be lugging around.

You're forgetting that the SLN SDs have NO automation such as merchant ships and newer Haven Sector ships incorporate. Past discussions have settled on that a crew of about 1,000 would be required for any extended ferry -- i.e. any movement from one star system to another.

You might get away with as few as 800 or need as many as 1,200, but it is going to be more that "a few hundred" (per SD) to ferry those ships anywhere useful.

Adding to Harold's point, Mil spec ships were designed for multiple people to operate them for redundancy and optimum performance of the hardware, while civvie ships are built for the minimum of people to operate them.

For example, the impeller rooms.

In a Merchie, Impeller rooms are big, open spaces with access to all the nodes and control hardware in that room. Most likely, the room can be run from just one control panel (and both rooms might be able to be monitored from the station in either room, requiring no man in the 2nd). On a Mil spec vessel, the impeller room is cofferdamned into multiple spaces containing the multiply redundant control system for each node; the number of spaces seems to vary, but in larger ships, each node may have it's own separate control room - and each separate room, requires it's own manning.

Other examples include:

A Merchie has 1 reactor, where an SD has 4 or 5; even to ferry the ship, several would need to be running, and manned at all times. Where a Merchie might have a Engineering space where the compensator, hyperdrive and reactor might all share a space and monitoring crew, in a Mil spec ship ship, each is physically separated from each other in it's own space separated in the ship and require individual monitoring crews.

Yes, you can cut corners, but only so far; and the further you need to take the ship, the larger the crew needs to be. To crew a ship to get to Beowulf, you just need operators and a few maintainers for the ~20 hr voyage, so you might be able to get a ferry crew down to the multiple hundreds for 2-3 shifts of work.

But if you are talking the 2 week voyage from Spindle to Manticore, you need many more. Depending on how your day is structured, you need 3-4 full shift crews to operate the ship. Something will break, so you need more maintainers on top of operators. Eventually someone will get hurt maintaining the ship, so you need a commensurately sized med staff. No one will want to eat MREs for 2 weeks, so you need stewards to cook and serve food. If the crew is over a certain size you need to operate a 2nd or 3rd boat bay in case of emergency, so you need to staff it and provide flight crews for the small craft. You will need to provide a minimum ratio of marines for ship security and policing, etc, etc.

Yes, you don't need to run the weapons, or form boarding parties, or grow hydroponics, or a dozen other things, but there are still systems that require monitoring and service, daily, or they will not work.

Just taking a ship like this out for a spin around the system is the work of many people.

What if, and forgive me but this topic has been niggling at me for a long time, but what if instead of doing anything particularly brash with them, you take, oh say 30 or 40 of them, and fill the launch and cargo bays with sensors, receivers, detection arrays, all the requisite antennas strapped to the hull, and towed them out to, oh lets say 2 lightweeks outside the hyper limit and dropped them there with enough in the bunkers for stationkeeping and running one reactor.

Minimal wedges, sidewalls and 'active' systems, just a lot of receivers tied to whatever ghost rider tech you have lying around - bound to be a lot of the older generation hardware in stockyards no longer useful for front lines but plenty powerful enough to act as a massive passive array wrapped in a shell around the entire Manticore system. Turn the more-or-less useless hulks of the Solly SDs into giant armoured sensor platforms.

No need for heavy refits if you just essentially strapping Manty hardware to the floors and tapping a power run, the grav pulse technology doesn't even need a refit to the SD gravity detectors, those work as-is, and you can stick a modern transmitter drone to the outer hull where you can feed it power and get to it for maintenance which then gives you FTL comms all the way home.

Then crew them with cadets and a handful of experienced training officers each.

Of course you would only need a few of those hulls and you would still need to scrounge up enough cadets for training crews (Nothing like a few weeks on a rusting hulk to teach cadets to appreciate Manticoran standards!), but operating them at a fraction of the power load and functionality would let you get away with maybe a few hundred per hull.

While you could achieve much the same effect with a lot of drones and some platforms, well, you need to build the platforms, crew them, tow them out there and arm them if you want them to have that capability. Those junk SDs are already technically space-worthy, armed, and ready built at a time when Manticoran building capacity is badly reduced. All they have to do is bolt on a few modern touches, and if that compromises the military efficiency, well, you're not going to be taking those things into a fight anyway. And unmanned platforms have a limited lifespan, requiring replacement and/or maintenance, which means you will need to sideline a few ships just to deal with that in any case. Or use junk ships and free up your modern ones for real jobs.

Not only that but you would be training your cadets on ships not a million miles away from what people like Honor Harrington herself would have crewed on in her early years, although undoubtedly Manticoran maintenance standards would have been far better even back then, but would still serve as adequate training ships in that regard.

The SDs are junk of course, but you then have a whole ghost fleet of spare parts sitting there and a lot of cadets with nothing better to do, and who knows if it all fell in the pan, wouldn't it be nice to have a few dozen old style SDs that everyone has forgotten about just hanging out where no-one will really be expecting them to be?

Sideromelane wrote:What if, and forgive me but this topic has been niggling at me for a long time, but what if instead of doing anything particularly brash with them, you take, oh say 30 or 40 of them, and fill the launch and cargo bays with sensors, receivers, detection arrays, all the requisite antennas strapped to the hull, and towed them out to, oh lets say 2 lightweeks outside the hyper limit and dropped them there with enough in the bunkers for stationkeeping and running one reactor.

Minimal wedges, sidewalls and 'active' systems, just a lot of receivers tied to whatever ghost rider tech you have lying around - bound to be a lot of the older generation hardware in stockyards no longer useful for front lines but plenty powerful enough to act as a massive passive array wrapped in a shell around the entire Manticore system. Turn the more-or-less useless hulks of the Solly SDs into giant armoured sensor platforms.

No need for heavy refits if you just essentially strapping Manty hardware to the floors and tapping a power run, the grav pulse technology doesn't even need a refit to the SD gravity detectors, those work as-is, and you can stick a modern transmitter drone to the outer hull where you can feed it power and get to it for maintenance which then gives you FTL comms all the way home.

Then crew them with cadets and a handful of experienced training officers each.

Of course you would only need a few of those hulls and you would still need to scrounge up enough cadets for training crews (Nothing like a few weeks on a rusting hulk to teach cadets to appreciate Manticoran standards!), but operating them at a fraction of the power load and functionality would let you get away with maybe a few hundred per hull.

While you could achieve much the same effect with a lot of drones and some platforms, well, you need to build the platforms, crew them, tow them out there and arm them if you want them to have that capability. Those junk SDs are already technically space-worthy, armed, and ready built at a time when Manticoran building capacity is badly reduced. All they have to do is bolt on a few modern touches, and if that compromises the military efficiency, well, you're not going to be taking those things into a fight anyway. And unmanned platforms have a limited lifespan, requiring replacement and/or maintenance, which means you will need to sideline a few ships just to deal with that in any case. Or use junk ships and free up your modern ones for real jobs.

Not only that but you would be training your cadets on ships not a million miles away from what people like Honor Harrington herself would have crewed on in her early years, although undoubtedly Manticoran maintenance standards would have been far better even back then, but would still serve as adequate training ships in that regard.

The SDs are junk of course, but you then have a whole ghost fleet of spare parts sitting there and a lot of cadets with nothing better to do, and who knows if it all fell in the pan, wouldn't it be nice to have a few dozen old style SDs that everyone has forgotten about just hanging out where no-one will really be expecting them to be?

Manning requirements would still be in the 1000 man area for a deployment over a couple days, and the ship would have next to 0 combat ability at that point (ok, maybe a legacy cl's ability).

There really isn't anyone just sitting around looking for a job, even the new cadets. SoV describes ships leaving manticore with dangerous holes in their crews, due to losses when the stations blew. Also, the new stations, and the jobs they represent, are quickly coming into shape, so there are many new jobs to fill, in an organization with jobs to fill at all levels.

There are also many RMN ships recently placed in mothballs already with 1915+ RMN tech which could be crewed with the crew sizes we are talking about ( Star Knights have ~1000 crewmen, so you could crew a old CA or several old DDs or CLs for each SD ferry crew.)


So Most importantly, what can this do that a Ghost Rider drone or 3 cannot, or 3 DDs/2 CLs/1CA cannot?

I'm not going to read through 53 pages of comments to see if my suggestion is listed, but I figured what the heck, I'll post my 2 cents worth.

I have a simple, elegant and functional uses for all the captured Solarian ships. Give one to the marines to use as a training platform for boarding parties. For the rest, I can sum up their disposal in one word......... TARGETS.

Rent them out for parties?

Putting the SLN POWs on Sphinx would make for an interesting time. Not only would they have to deal with the winter, it's a fair bit above Earth normal for gravity and unless those SLN spacers were in really good condition, they are going to have an intersting time adapting to the local conditions.
Those conditions, particularly the winter, would make doing anything but surviving in the camps difficult since you aren't going to do well outside in 3 T-years of winter.

Not exactly mistreatment of prisoners but certainly almost as bad as Ceberus though the local flora and fauna isn't going to outright poison you should you eat it. On the other hand, some of the fauna might just eat you. Sphinx might not be such a good ideas from the point of view of having to provide all that energy to keep people warm and alive during the winter and setting the prisoners to building simple buildings like log barracks isn't going to cut it.