Some comments on the economics of the series

We know that Weyland was Manticore's r&d center and that most of its personell were on the ground on Gryphon when the OB attack came in. We also know that when the alliance between Haven and Manticore was formed, a substantial percentage of that r&d establishment was sent off to Bolthole. Do we have any numbers or percentages on just how many people went to Bolthole and how many were left behind to help with the recovery at Manticore?

Don

That's what I get for posting at 2am. The expansion of training is a big deal that I didn't grasp. That does help a huge amount, though the logical thing to do is to ship them off to Beowulf for actual experience until the local manticore facilities are built.The fact that you have the grendlesbane workforce to, play, to at least some (possibly a lot) of the role of leads and experienced supervisors is also a big deal.

I still think that taking a set of blueprints and hauling it off to somewhere new and using totally new people using different production equipment and a totally different supply chain is a much bigger deal than you are portraying. The FOGBANK fiasco and the issues with the AMRAAM engines are examples of the kinds of very difficulty to solve issues that come up. The Intel Copy Exactly plan was created to deal with that, but you obviously can not do something like that when you are changing everything about the manufacturing environment.

n7axw wrote:We know that Weyland was Manticore's r&d center and that most of its personell were on the ground on Gryphon when the OB attack came in. We also know that when the alliance between Haven and Manticore was formed, a substantial percentage of that r&d establishment was sent off to Bolthole. Do we have any numbers or percentages on just how many people went to Bolthole and how many were left behind to help with the recovery at Manticore?

Don

I don't think it's been stated in the books that they have been sent off, it has been implied here that they will be. I think those kind of numbers are all kind of delibritely vague.

You don't think David Weber (aka runsforcelery) has a pretty good idea of how much Manticoran engineering expertise was on loan to Grayson, and where/how it was distributed??

I'm pretty much willing to take his statement at face value, particularly given that the huge amount of Grayson space infrastructure in Grayson orbit, and otherwise scattered around the system was essentially untouched. Warship building, and dedicated warship related fabrication was concentrated at Blackbird. That leaves, well, all the rest of the population and economy.

dreamrider

Vince wrote:I don't think that Grayson support (skilled yard/manufacturing personnel) will be available to help in the rebuilding, as Blackbird was completely trashed in Oyster Bay. For the same reason, the Manticoran skilled yard/manufacturing personnel on loan to Grayson are mostly dead, and Grayson will need the assistance of any survivors to rebuild as well (whether they should stay and help rebuild the Grayson industrial base or go home to Manticore to rebuild the Manticoran industrial base is a policy decision, and therefore is also a political decision).

dreamrider wrote:
I'm pretty much willing to take his statement at face value, particularly given that the huge amount of Grayson space infrastructure in Grayson orbit, and otherwise scattered around the system was essentially untouched. Warship building, and dedicated warship related fabrication was concentrated at Blackbird. That leaves, well, all the rest of the population and economy.

David posted something (I think is is in the pearls) that essentially says that the multiple km wide space stations in orbit around Grayson don't exist. So no, they are totally screwed.

Hello RFC and anyone who knows offhand;

While Lockheed-Vega built 2750 B-17's for Boeing, or 21.6% of the final total of 12,731 B-17's; my searches haven't found the order date and first delivery.

No manufacturer likes building another's product, certainly from what a retired Douglass employee told me about his experience building Boeing's B-47's in the 1950's was quite a caution, though the obvious war peril may have reduced that lack of pride in the product for the 3000 B-17's Douglass made, if anyone has the dates for that too.

Please don't bring up Ford and Willow Run, initially it was a disaster; it was supposed to be delivering B-24's before Pearl Harbor yet wasn't, as in why are ASR aircraft called Dumbo's?

Thanks ahead of time,

L


[quote="runsforcelery"]**quote="kzt"**[quote="runsforcelery"]

SNIPPED 4 BREVITY

You seem to be operating on the assumption that the destruction of the space stations eliminated everyone who knows or can quickly be brought up to speed on how to put that infrastructure back together again, because it's the basic infrastructure, not the top secret Ohmigod weaponry that needs to be rebuilt from the ground up. Once it's back up and running, the Navy (obviously) is going to need to get its own production cycles running again. In the meantime, they are busy turning to Beowulf, which already has the tech base required to build the components and systems (but doesn't have the manufacturing specs on them) to close the gap. This is the equivalent of a team from Lockheed walking into Boeing's offices during World War II with every single file, document, diagram, and spec for the P-38. In addition, they can provide complete working specimens of the aircraft and every single one of its subsystems, and they have at least one major plant worth of work floor and supervisory personnel, with hands-on experience of every step of the design and assembly processes, ready and available to sit down with their Boeing counterparts and walk them through the new plane and all of Lockheed's manufacturing techniques.

Can Boeing turn out a finished P-38 next Wednesday? Hell no. Can they do it in 4-6 months under wartime conditions? Hell yes.

So while Manticore's teaching facilities, which were producing new engineers and trained work force at about 3 times simple replacement rate --- there was already a war on and Manticore was sending technical missions in a lot of directions at once, remember? --- ramps its training schedule still higher (up to, say, twice that level), Beowulf provides already trained and experienced engineers well versed in and thoroughly capable of rebuilding basic infrastructure, and Haven provides a slew of already trained workers who need their skills significantly upgraded but are in a position to profit by both simulation training and hands-on experience. In the meantime, Beowulf is ramping up to build the actual war fighting hardware Manticore is no longer able to produce, Haven is building new hulls to mount it in, and Manticore itself is regenerating its industrial infrastructure one hell of a lot more rapidly, even proportionately, than either Japan or Germany managed after WW II.

I'm not arguing here that Manticore will have completely regenerated to its pre-Oyster Bay industrial capacity in 5 T-years. I'm arguing that it will have reconstituted an enormous chunk of that pre-Oyster Bay capacity within 5 T-years, perhaps 75% of it within 10 T-years, and every single bit of it within 12.

All of which is one heck of a lot less than "at least a generation."

And I might point out, if I were in a snitty mood, that to a significant extent, this is a case of my universe, my governing assumptions. **/quote**

kzt wrote:

n7axw wrote:We know that Weyland was Manticore's r&d center and that most of its personell were on the ground on Gryphon when the OB attack came in. We also know that when the alliance between Haven and Manticore was formed, a substantial percentage of that r&d establishment was sent off to Bolthole. Do we have any numbers or percentages on just how many people went to Bolthole and how many were left behind to help with the recovery at Manticore?

Don

I don't think it's been stated in the books that they have been sent off, it has been implied here that they will be. I think those kind of numbers are all kind of delibritely vague.

Concur, the last mention of them in ART was during Elizabeth's and Eliose's conversation after the news of the treaty approval by the Haven Legislature. It was indicated (IIRC, I do not have the textev in front of me) that there were 'still a few heads to knock together' but that is was going to go through.

Given the timeline has moved ahead a couple of months in SoF and CoG, I suspect that they are on the way, but their arrival (and the long-awaited Hemphill-Foraker meeting)is probably going to appear (if not off-screen) in the next book.

IMHO as always.

Weird Harold wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:...although there may have been military couriers sitting with nodes hot near the Junction and the Hyper limit to speed up the passing of critical military messages...

If there were/are military couriers, they weren't available to the High Ridge government's ACS commander when the GSN came riding to the rescue of Trevor's Star.

War of Honor
Chapter Fifty-three
wrote:Stokes' expression seemed to congeal like cold gravy. Its angry flush faded abruptly into something much paler and tinged with green. The Junction lay four hundred and twelve light-minutes from Manticore-A. At the moment, the capital planet itself was on the far side of the primary, which added another twelve light-minutes. Of course, ACS had been provided with grav-pulse communicators as soon as they became available. Although the capital planet lay beyond direct transmission range of even the latest generation FTL systems, repeater stations had been emplaced to cover the gap, which meant that the sheer distance between Stokes and the city of Landing no longer imposed the delays of simple light-speed transmission lags. At the moment, however, that was of scant comfort to Admiral Allen Stokes.

Your courier micro-jump relay would seem tailor-made for such an astrographic alignment but didn't even cross Adm Stokes mind.

Actually it doesn't; not after FTL comms became available. (cutting the time by 62x; less some overhead for relaying)

If dedicated military couriers to the Junction had existed they'd have been supplanted by the FTL relay chain mentioned in that quote.

By the time you spin up even a hot-standby hyper-generator(~4 minutes) jump up to the Alpha bands, accelerate across 6 light minutes, and hyper back into normal and beam your message out you've probably spent significantly more time than the ~7 minutes the FTL message takes. You might cut that a little if you jumped a bit higher band, but it's such a short trip you're not likely to save all that much.
And you'd still be beyond the hyper limit; so at least 11 lightminutes from the capital planet - so you have to use FTL comms anyway; or just the light speed lag from that leg alone would take longer than the entire FTL relay chain.


Dedicated military couriers might work when you're outracing an about 7 hour comm lag, should cut at least 4 hours out, but they can't compete against a 7 minute FTL comm lag.

kzt wrote:

dreamrider wrote:
I'm pretty much willing to take his statement at face value, particularly given that the huge amount of Grayson space infrastructure in Grayson orbit, and otherwise scattered around the system was essentially untouched. Warship building, and dedicated warship related fabrication was concentrated at Blackbird. That leaves, well, all the rest of the population and economy.

David posted something (I think is is in the pearls) that essentially says that the multiple km wide space stations in orbit around Grayson don't exist. So no, they are totally screwed.

Not all of the Manticoran engineers who went to help out at Grayson were at Blackbird. Many were undoubtedly on the ground on Grayson, helping out with the engineering problems they faced there.

SWM wrote:

kzt wrote: David posted something (I think is is in the pearls) that essentially says that the multiple km wide space stations in orbit around Grayson don't exist. So no, they are totally screwed.

Not all of the Manticoran engineers who went to help out at Grayson were at Blackbird. Many were undoubtedly on the ground on Grayson, helping out with the engineering problems they faced there.

Since the Greyson's used dispersed yards rather than huge space stations which contained lodging and even whole family life for workers, it's very likely that off-duty personnel were housed dirtside at the time of the OB attack and if I recall correctly, Blackbird is a large asteroid surrounded by dispersed yards which means that it's off duty workers were probably housed there and had a good chance of survival as well.

Because of the way their orbital infrastructure was built, the Greysons probably lost a significantly lower percentage of their trained workforce and engineers than the Manties did and this would have included Manticorian engineers loaned to the Greysons.