Captured Solly SDs

svenhauke wrote:ok no ai, no problem

but you can have non AI automatic systems, like today ?

so decisions are made by humans but the software can identify spacecraft, mark them aim at them, and then a human needs to say yes to shoot ?

because we don t have AI and our computers can do that, our computers can shoot without AI

so the 6000 personal in solly SD are :

1000 useless superflisoues asslicking sollys

1000 marines

3900 cooks ,toilette repairman,smallcraft personal,quadrupal fusiionreactor crew for all fusion reactors,missile maintaince personal, graser maintainance personal cm maintainance personal, cmlaserclustermaintainance personal,all in 3 shifts

quatermaster pesonal, shipshop personal, inboard intertainment personal secretarys ,assistant to useless superficiousel solly admiral on board and so on

100 people needed to fight

Before Manticore improved its automation, they had crews of 6000, too. Are you suggesting they had 1000 useless people too? Manticore has shown that you can get some improvement with automation, but even they still need 2/3 of the previous crew size. The Solarian League ships don't have that automation.

The combat information center alone probably has 100 people, once you add in four shifts.

If you need a fast troop transport, how about an Atlas class liner which IIRC carries 5000 passengers. If you double or triple the troop space and life support (short term) that's hauling upwards of a reinforced division in one lump, as an added plus their already armed like a heavy cruiser.

i don t think manticore has many useless people, i do think the solarian league got many of them.

so any problem is propably because our beloved author didn t think of it

agree ? friends ?

when henke reviewd the solly bc she noticed that there where too many asistants assistanse posts and you couldn t see from your space the info you needed

after 600 years of inbreeding i can t imagine battlefleet not making up 1000 useless posts in its SD to support familie members

btw does that mean you agree to 1000 marines and the 3900 ?

SWM wrote:

svenhauke wrote:ok no ai,SNIP,

Before Manticore improved its automation, they had crews of 6000, too. Are you suggesting they had 1000 useless people too? Manticore has shown that you can get some improvement with automation, but even they still need 2/3 of the previous crew size. The Solarian League ships don't have that automation.

The combat information center alone probably has 100 people, once you add in four shifts.

No, he said they have 5900/6000 useless drones. I agree. You need about 20 total in reality. None in the engine rooms as is stupid barmy to purposefully have a human error aggregate as part of the decision process for power systems, so that leaves approx 10 on the bridge and 10 in CIC/Flag deck. Leaves 5980 twiddling their thumbs. It is not as if they are going to repair any damage done in the 15 minutes of modern HV battles.

It is true on warships today as well. In battle drills 90% are doing nothing but holding a fire hose or other fire fighting gear. You do not have this problem in space. The vast majority under peace time do not do a thing other than make work and fire fighting drills and its associate flooding drills. The exception is an aircraft carrier launching its airwing and true of other ships and their airwing complements. Takes a bit of training. Warships never used to run 4 shifts like HV ships. Most ships today run 3 shifts or two shifts plus a half dog shift. Warships never used to run 3 shifts. 2 shifts at most during war time conditions in WWII(1 shift + 1/2 a dog). There has been an amazing amount of BLOAT added without any additional fighting ability added.

RFC increased the bloat yet another step.

Relax wrote:

SWM wrote:Before Manticore improved its automation, they had crews of 6000, too. Are you suggesting they had 1000 useless people too? Manticore has shown that you can get some improvement with automation, but even they still need 2/3 of the previous crew size. The Solarian League ships don't have that automation.

The combat information center alone probably has 100 people, once you add in four shifts.

No, he said they have 5900/6000 useless drones. I agree. You need about 20 total in reality. None in the engine rooms as is stupid barmy to purposefully have a human error aggregate as part of the decision process for power systems, so that leaves approx 10 on the bridge and 10 in CIC/Flag deck. Leaves 5980 twiddling their thumbs. It is not as if they are going to repair any damage done in the 15 minutes of modern HV battles.

It is true on warships today as well. In battle drills 90% are doing nothing but holding a fire hose or other fire fighting gear. You do not have this problem in space. The vast majority under peace time do not do a thing other than make work and fire fighting drills and its associate flooding drills. The exception is an aircraft carrier launching its airwing and true of other ships and their airwing complements. Takes a bit of training. Warships never used to run 4 shifts like HV ships. Most ships today run 3 shifts or two shifts plus a half dog shift. Warships never used to run 3 shifts. 2 shifts at most during war time conditions in WWII(1 shift + 1/2 a dog). There has been an amazing amount of BLOAT added without any additional fighting ability added.

RFC increased the bloat yet another step.

We aren't talking about what makes sense to you. We are talking about what David has written into his books and tech bible. And in his universe, it takes a lot more than 20 people.

Your forgetting that unlike in the real world there's both a need and an actual use for having separate on mount weapon crews Relax.


EDIT: Gah some bad numbers due to lack of clarity in som paragraphs, updated figures.

Take a Saganami B for example. According the the wiki, ( can;t find a textev confirmation anywhere on quick notice), she has a crew of 384. Each of her 38 broadside weapons mounts needs 4 people to provide effective local control, that means her two Energy Broadsides alone take up over 152 crew. Add in the chase mounts and the missile tubes and you probably have 90% of her crew.

Also engineering crew in the power room are there to step in when the computer inevitably get fried by battle damage. The original fearless lost her forward fusion bottle to exactly that kind of calamity. At the end of the day 99% of the crew are there as backup for when bits of the ship get shot up and the computer can't cope and the crew have to take over for them.

Carl wrote:Also engineering crew in the power room are there to step in when the computer inevitably get fried by battle damage. The original fearless lost her forward fusion bottle to exactly that kind of calamity. At the end of the day 99% of the crew are there as backup for when bits of the ship get shot up and the computer can't cope and the crew have to take over for them.

Ignoring the minor detail that you can harden computers against far higher levels of radiation than that that would immediately fatal to a human, what are you going to know if you lose the electronics on an honorverse fusion reactor? Nothing, because you are instantly converted to plasma when the grav field fails. Things that go bad on a system running at hundreds of millions K and millions of Bars of pressure are not going to be within the OODA loop of a human.

There is not one single thing a crew can do in the missile feed system. If something blows through, you certainly are not going to fix the problem with your own two hands in the next 20 minutes. One can barely change a single outlet in 10 minutes assuming you already have all of your tools at hand. Splintered tubes/rails, etc for moving 100 ton missiles? Dream on. Hours is reality. Days is more likely.

There is not one single thing a crew can do in an engineering room that a stand alone TTF+spare cannot do 10,000X better and WITHOUT errors. Heard of breakers? Heard of fuses? Heard of magnetic field fuses/breakers? Yea. That is why they exist without a human involved. DW's "cascading" power surge is complete BS. Can a short still be spectacular? Yes you betcha. Sparks flying everywhere when the bus bars melt when the breakers blow. Still is not going to blow up a fusion room.

Now you could argue that if a fusion plant was at max power setting, and its energy siphoned off to create electricity was instantly cut to zero and did not have a viable energy dump, (There is not a single power system today that does not have a 100% capacity relief built in, why would that not be true in 2000 years?) Unless you wish to believe that all humans 2000 years from now are blatantly stupid of basic MURPHY and KISS principles could have interesting implications, but it certainly would not be called a cascading failure power surge! Voltage would spike, as the fusion plant pressure/temperature would climb as it is generating all that power without an outlet. Of course a very simple auto close multiple redundant circuit using halo effect due to overvoltage easily auto closes the Hydrogen feed line, or pressure, or temperature, or far more likely ALL OF THE ABOVE with multiple auto shut down on each sensor type! All of which would happen in a nanosecond to thousandths of a second. I do not know about you, but no human could even dream of stopping it in time that a multiple redundant auto system would not be faster, and far more reliable. No engineer would ever trust a human in the loop. No one trusts humans in the loop on our fission piles today, why the bloody hell would anyone trust a human in the loop for emergency shutdown in 2000 years? What you are going to have a human stand watch to physically turn a valve on the hydrogen feed line?

There is not one single thing a PDLC mount crew can do. Not a single thing. Even if the "communications" are cut. It is all computer or nothing. Incoming at 0.8c is just a tad faster than human reflexes...

There is not one single thing a graser mount crew can do when ships are separated by light seconds of distance. Now one could argue for a SINGLE human being able to figure out FfF and select a wedge shape for the computer to shoot at assuming communications are disrupted. Oh wait, that would require that both multiple hardline and wireless communications for target discrimination are offline. The human inquestion does not have a clue if that is a friendly ship or a foe they are firing at if they are not in communication with the bridge etc. This would require at least wireless coms to still work, in which case the mount itself still has its own coms as well. Yea, I don't buy that line either that a Graser mount would be useful with a human because by that time, the ship is a drifting hulk without a bridge, CIC, or a flag deck.

All of that, while true, is irrelevant though. Word of God says that the universe doesn't work that way, and that's that.

I think the final nail in the coffin for me about Sollie SD's is simply the fact that the MAlign doesn't want them -- and they potentially have much of the Darius populace available for crewing, aka their version of supermen. They know that those ships are about as useful as a long distance heavy cavalry charge against a well supplied sniper formation without the benefit of artillery.

In terms of ship conversion, one of the more senior posters made a point in the big thread (or maybe a series of points) that just the effort to decommission an SD (pull the tubes, grasers, and fusion plants) doesn't get anything useful that can't be had for less work, and made better and cheaper from scratch. The only use I'd still posit as partially sensible is that maybe you could train non-com and enlisted folks in the Talbott sector etc. in some aspects of warship repair by deconstructing the SD's, the same way an auto-shop class will use older cars to teach high-school level basic repair tech.