Light bulb Captured Solly fleet

munroburton wrote:...The warm bodies have to be coming from somewhere. I'm pointing out that however and wherever they're doing it, they can't be aiming to recruit more than a few tens of thousands, which isn't sufficient to man more than a few handfuls of ex-SLN vessels.

What? From hundreds of worlds with billions of people on them, Germany had 100 times higher recruitment in WWII & they were actively murdering millions of their own people. Did 99.999% of the population become incompetent/illiterate morons that can’t figure out how to turn on a lightbulb? In a modern or ultra-modern society, even those in poor labor positions (or even, as expressed in the books, Slaves) have to have basic technical training, just to do their jobs. It’s not like all those would be spacers have to be taught to read & right from scratch, or even use a computer. Most of the 1000s of jobs on the SDs would be no more technical than working in a food processing center or warehouse. You don’t need to be taught advanced hyperspace physics to load a missile into a missile tube or operate a stove in one of the galleys. Or even change the hydraulic fluid on the captains automatic command chair. Remember many of these “crew intensive” ship jobs are being done by a machine in the non-crew intensive ships. Those jobs are not super-advanced technical jobs, just labor intensive, to boost the fleets requirements and thus pay & budget. They can be done by lower class recruits with normal-level technical skills with little additional training. That means that all those extra “warm bodies” needed for these ships are just that “warm bodies”. The SLN didn’t want to have 1000s of super-smart super-highly-trained personnel on their ships because that can lead to individual thinking, realizing what true Dm-As the officer core really are & mutiny. So, yes Manty/Garson with only a few planets to recruit from may have difficulty filling the “warm body”, requirement but Maya Sector would not.

Castenea wrote:I would be shocked if they are doing some recruiting, but I would be surprised if it goes beyond having a recruiter in the 20 largest cities in the sector, and would easily believe that it is little more than an office on each of the major space stations for each planet.

Yea, Thandi Palane just walked in off the street to a SL Marine base and said "Here I am". Of-course they have active recruitment. There would be no reason to not have active recruitment centers in every city and even small towns throughout the SL, and would likely receive “ramp-up” orders with the opening of a war with Manticore. As recruits are processed, they are screened, those who have very high SL loyalty (not a lot in the Maya sector) are sent off to regular Navy/Marine basic training. Those who have questionable loyalty issues are officially struck as “unsuitable”, but then approached by Barregos’ people. Such a system would have to already be in-place for him to have any “people” at-all. This system could now be ramped up as part of the general “war time recruitment effort”, “Sorry we have such a low % of suitable recruits but we’re trying.” Also if some are found to be totally against the SL but for the Maya sector, then they can go ahead and be “recruited and passed” as plants.

MAD-4A wrote:Such a system would have to already be in-place for him to have any “people” at-all. This system could now be ramped up as part of the general “war time recruitment effort”, “Sorry we have such a low % of suitable recruits but we’re trying.” Also if some are found to be totally against the SL but for the Maya sector, then they can go ahead and be “recruited and passed” as plants.

There is a lot of power of plot in Maya.

The conversation that is being had is very clearly about the Maya sector navy, not the SLN. Maya can not currently be doing much recruitment, because it is one of those things that would get noticed, and cause somebody in the core to actually look at the Maya sector. So, they would not be able to man the SLN SDs. And they are about to get BCs that can easily beat a squadron of SLN SDs, so why would they want them?

MAD-4A wrote:

munroburton wrote:...The warm bodies have to be coming from somewhere. I'm pointing out that however and wherever they're doing it, they can't be aiming to recruit more than a few tens of thousands, which isn't sufficient to man more than a few handfuls of ex-SLN vessels.

What? From hundreds of worlds with billions of people on them, Germany had 100 times higher recruitment in WWII & they were actively murdering millions of their own people. Did 99.999% of the population become incompetent/illiterate morons that can’t figure out how to turn on a lightbulb? In a modern or ultra-modern society, even those in poor labor positions (or even, as expressed in the books, Slaves) have to have basic technical training, just to do their jobs. It’s not like all those would be spacers have to be taught to read & right from scratch, or even use a computer. Most of the 1000s of jobs on the SDs would be no more technical than working in a food processing center or warehouse. You don’t need to be taught advanced hyperspace physics to load a missile into a missile tube or operate a stove in one of the galleys. Or even change the hydraulic fluid on the captains automatic command chair. Remember many of these “crew intensive” ship jobs are being done by a machine in the non-crew intensive ships. Those jobs are not super-advanced technical jobs, just labor intensive, to boost the fleets requirements and thus pay & budget. They can be done by lower class recruits with normal-level technical skills with little additional training. That means that all those extra “warm bodies” needed for these ships are just that “warm bodies”. The SLN didn’t want to have 1000s of super-smart super-highly-trained personnel on their ships because that can lead to individual thinking, realizing what true Dm-As the officer core really are & mutiny. So, yes Manty/Garson with only a few planets to recruit from may have difficulty filling the “warm body”, requirement but Maya Sector would not.

Castenea wrote:I would be shocked if they are doing some recruiting, but I would be surprised if it goes beyond having a recruiter in the 20 largest cities in the sector, and would easily believe that it is little more than an office on each of the major space stations for each planet.

Yea, Thandi Palane just walked in off the street to a SL Marine base and said "Here I am". Of-course they have active recruitment. There would be no reason to not have active recruitment centers in every city and even small towns throughout the SL, and would likely receive “ramp-up” orders with the opening of a war with Manticore. As recruits are processed, they are screened, those who have very high SL loyalty (not a lot in the Maya sector) are sent off to regular Navy/Marine basic training. Those who have questionable loyalty issues are officially struck as “unsuitable”, but then approached by Barregos’ people. Such a system would have to already be in-place for him to have any “people” at-all. This system could now be ramped up as part of the general “war time recruitment effort”, “Sorry we have such a low % of suitable recruits but we’re trying.” Also if some are found to be totally against the SL but for the Maya sector, then they can go ahead and be “recruited and passed” as plants.

crewdude48 wrote:The conversation that is being had is very clearly about the Maya sector navy, not the SLN. Maya can not currently be doing much recruitment, because it is one of those things that would get noticed, and cause somebody in the core to actually look at the Maya sector. So, they would not be able to man the SLN SDs. And they are about to get BCs that can easily beat a squadron of SLN SDs, so why would they want them?

They can already beat a squadron of SLN SDs with the arsenal ship/fire control cruiser combo they have 'now'. It might have been dicey without MDM pods for the arsenal ships, but they've got them.

MAD-4A wrote:

munroburton wrote:...The warm bodies have to be coming from somewhere. I'm pointing out that however and wherever they're doing it, they can't be aiming to recruit more than a few tens of thousands, which isn't sufficient to man more than a few handfuls of ex-SLN vessels.

What? From hundreds of worlds with billions of people on them, Germany had 100 times higher recruitment in WWII & they were actively murdering millions of their own people. Did 99.999% of the population become incompetent/illiterate morons that can’t figure out how to turn on a lightbulb? In a modern or ultra-modern society, even those in poor labor positions (or even, as expressed in the books, Slaves) have to have basic technical training, just to do their jobs. It’s not like all those would be spacers have to be taught to read & right from scratch, or even use a computer. Most of the 1000s of jobs on the SDs would be no more technical than working in a food processing center or warehouse. You don’t need to be taught advanced hyperspace physics to load a missile into a missile tube or operate a stove in one of the galleys. Or even change the hydraulic fluid on the captains automatic command chair. Remember many of these “crew intensive” ship jobs are being done by a machine in the non-crew intensive ships. Those jobs are not super-advanced technical jobs, just labor intensive, to boost the fleets requirements and thus pay & budget. They can be done by lower class recruits with normal-level technical skills with little additional training. That means that all those extra “warm bodies” needed for these ships are just that “warm bodies”. The SLN didn’t want to have 1000s of super-smart super-highly-trained personnel on their ships because that can lead to individual thinking, realizing what true Dm-As the officer core really are & mutiny. So, yes Manty/Garson with only a few planets to recruit from may have difficulty filling the “warm body”, requirement but Maya Sector would not.

So you really believe that recruiting some random people and putting them through some accelerated basic training will get crews that are combat effective??? There is a reason a military trains their recruits extensively, because when the sh!t hits the fan untrained or badly trained personnel tend to become panicked/hysteric/catatonic and do really really stupid things. Most military training in it's most basic form is used to make your recruits take orders and behave in a certain and predictable way without thinking, and THAT takes time. On top of that, you can't expect to put a civilian in charge of military equipment without a lot of retraining, the military does a lot different compared to the civilian sector and assuming military equipment is equal the civilian ones are another recipe for disaster.

Joat42 wrote:So you really believe that recruiting some random people and putting them through some accelerated basic training will get crews that are combat effective???

uh...yea...It's not accelerated. Were you ever even in the military? I was, GMG3 USN. I had a total of 6 months training, including basic training, before being sent to the fleet. The missile loaders in HH (or the hydraulics for the command chairs) aren’t so much more complicated that it would take 4 times more training to figure out how they work. Especially in a society where the average Joe-Schmo on the street rides to his factory job in an Anti-grave vehicle.

Joat42 wrote:There is a reason a military trains their recruits extensively, because when the sh!t hits the fan untrained or badly trained personnel tend to become panicked/hysteric/catatonic and do really really stupid things.

So...what? The training officers in HH are so incompetent that it takes them 9 time longer to train a recruit in basic than modern day training officers. They need to recruit better training officers.
That's why it's called "Basic training" to weed out the idiots who would screw the pooch. Unfortunately in a peace time navy it’s more about politics than capability so good people are passed over while morons with connections get promoted. Mayan recruiters, on the other hand, would be recruiting for a coming war and would not make such idiotic mistakes, so they would contact those that screened well in the first place. So no, they would not be recruiting some idiot who would panic at the first mouse that runs across his feet, that’s what the screening & basic training is for & that takes 2 months. As for them being noticed, I already addressed that. There is NO Maya Navy! The would-be "Maya Navy" is PART of the SLN actually a FF detachment, a very disloyal and treasonous part that has been carefully & secretly recruited by governor Barregos most of which has been hidden. As I said, you adjust your recruiters to have disloyal (Maya loyal) recruiters in place, which they would already have to have to get the best people for the would-be Maya Navy in place. You then ramp up recruitment drives, under the official need to “support the war effort against Manticore” those who test poorly or test very loyal to the SL are passed & sent on to regular (official) SL basic training as “increased recruitment for the War effort”. Those who test well but also test poorly for loyalty to the SL (lots in Maya sector) are “OFFICALY FAILED” as “UNSUITABLE FOR MILITARY USE”. But then, your MAYA LOYAL recruiters contact them for “special service” and indoctrinate them SECRETLY as “Maya Navy” personnel, with a secret basic training system set up under the table (plenty of disloyal worlds to choose a suitable secret location from) which would already be needed anyway. No they won’t get ½ a billion recruits set up & suitable for action next week. But with all the Maya worlds available, they should be able to get ¼ mill in a year or 2 at the most. The ships (as I also stated earlier) don’t have to have a full crew day after tomorrow. They just need a few skeleton maneuver crews (which can be handled by some recruited Merchi spacers) to get them from Erewhon to a pre-designated storage point in space (either an uninhabited/no planet star to orbit or a plain set of coordinates in deep space with absolutely nothing around & no traffic routs in the area) to hide them until crews are available. & yes, some of their equipment may be better, but, when facing a vastly superior enemy, you don’t snub your nose at possible reinforcements. That’s just stupid. That’s like the USN at the start of WWII stating “well the Yorktown’s are better carriers so we’ll just scrap the Lexington’s & Ranger they’re not as good”, The US didn’t scrap the Texas or Arkansas when war broke out, “They aren’t as good as the new Washingtons so we don’t need these obsolete ships any more scrap them.“ Did Britain (or anybody else) scrap their PDs in 1914 when WWI broke out? No they used them. The German PDs were at Jutland & gave a good showing for themselves. You have them – USE THEM, Duh. if nothing else the empty hulls would be floating in storage till Maya dose declare independence and then seizes all their current recruit cadre to man them as a reserve fleet.

MAD-4A wrote:

Joat42 wrote:So you really believe that recruiting some random people and putting them through some accelerated basic training will get crews that are combat effective???

uh...yea...It's not accelerated. Were you ever even in the military? I was, GMG3 USN. I had a total of 6 months training, including basic training, before being sent to the fleet. The missile loaders in HH (or the hydraulics for the command chairs) aren’t so much more complicated that it would take 4 times more training to figure out how they work. Especially in a society where the average Joe-Schmo on the street rides to his factory job in an Anti-grave vehicle.

Just because you know how to drive a vehicle doesn't mean you know how to service/repair one. You can learn to drive a car in less than a week, learn all the traffic rules in another week or two, learn to become a car-mechanic, a year or more. And then you need to relearn that so you do it the military way according to regs and regulations. Another thing is that the more advanced technology becomes, less and less people will understand how it really works and how to fix it since you need to become a specialist for that - which is already true today. You can't compare 20th century tech with whats available in the Honorverse and believe that the learning curve is exactly the same, it isn't.

And yes, I have been in the military.

MAD-4A wrote:

Joat42 wrote:There is a reason a military trains their recruits extensively, because when the sh!t hits the fan untrained or badly trained personnel tend to become panicked/hysteric/catatonic and do really really stupid things.

So...what? The training officers in HH are so incompetent that it takes them 9 time longer to train a recruit in basic than modern day training officers. They need to recruit better training officers.
That's why it's called "Basic training" to weed out the idiots who would screw the pooch.

It's your opinion that the training officers in Honorverse are incompetent, I state that to train someone into a specialist role takes time.

MAD-4A wrote:Unfortunately in a peace time navy it’s more about politics than capability so good people are passed over while morons with connections get promoted. Mayan recruiters, on the other hand, would be recruiting for a coming war and would not make such idiotic mistakes, so they would contact those that screened well in the first place. So no, they would not be recruiting some idiot who would panic at the first mouse that runs across his feet, that’s what the screening & basic training is for & that takes 2 months. As for them being noticed, I already addressed that. There is NO Maya Navy! The would-be "Maya Navy" is PART of the SLN actually a FF detachment, a very disloyal and treasonous part that has been carefully & secretly recruited by governor Barregos most of which has been hidden. As I said, you adjust your recruiters to have disloyal (Maya loyal) recruiters in place, which they would already have to have to get the best people for the would-be Maya Navy in place. You then ramp up recruitment drives, under the official need to “support the war effort against Manticore” those who test poorly or test very loyal to the SL are passed & sent on to regular (official) SL basic training as “increased recruitment for the War effort”. Those who test well but also test poorly for loyalty to the SL (lots in Maya sector) are “OFFICALY FAILED” as “UNSUITABLE FOR MILITARY USE”. But then, your MAYA LOYAL recruiters contact them for “special service” and indoctrinate them SECRETLY as “Maya Navy” personnel, with a secret basic training system set up under the table (plenty of disloyal worlds to choose a suitable secret location from) which would already be needed anyway. No they won’t get ½ a billion recruits set up & suitable for action next week. But with all the Maya worlds available, they should be able to get ¼ mill in a year or 2 at the most.

So you are proposing to rebuild the recruiting structure and inserting loyal personnel to recruit 250 million people during a 2 year period? That's quite an undertaking without anyone wondering what the heck is going on. So where are all those recruits going to be placed until Maya can get their hands on the ships (if ever)?

MAD-4A wrote:The ships (as I also stated earlier) don’t have to have a full crew day after tomorrow. They just need a few skeleton maneuver crews (which can be handled by some recruited Merchi spacers) to get them from Erewhon to a pre-designated storage point in space (either an uninhabited/no planet star to orbit or a plain set of coordinates in deep space with absolutely nothing around & no traffic routs in the area) to hide them until crews are available. & yes, some of their equipment may be better, but, when facing a vastly superior enemy, you don’t snub your nose at possible reinforcements. That’s just stupid. That’s like the USN at the start of WWII stating “well the Yorktown’s are better carriers so we’ll just scrap the Lexington’s & Ranger they’re not as good”, The US didn’t scrap the Texas or Arkansas when war broke out, “They aren’t as good as the new Washingtons so we don’t need these obsolete ships any more scrap them.“ Did Britain (or anybody else) scrap their PDs in 1914 when WWI broke out? No they used them. The German PDs were at Jutland & gave a good showing for themselves. You have them – USE THEM, Duh. if nothing else the empty hulls would be floating in storage till Maya dose declare independence and then seizes all their current recruit cadre to man them as a reserve fleet.

Your comparison isn't apt, since the technology gap in Honorverse is more akin to early 20th century ships with some upgrades compared to late 20th to 21th century ships. I doubt anyone would try to use the USS Texas in a battle today since it's obsolete and would be sunk before even seeing what sunk it.

The captured SD's are slow, obsolete, manpower intensive and a money sink. No modern navy has any use whatsoever for them in a battle-role. These SD's are like a hammer, everything suddenly looks like a nail.

Hay, MAD, did the US send the USS Constitution on operations during WWI? The current tech disparity is more like between the American Civil War and World War One than it was between WW1 and WW2 Just because you have something that used to be a war ship does not mean it is a good idea to use it. Please go look up the sunk cost fallacy. It would be more economical, (in terms of money, effort, lives eventually lost in combat, literally anything but raw materials used) to ignore those ships and build new ones, rather then try to retrofit them to something that anything smaller than the SLN could benefit from.

I mean, yes, these ships are, by definition, on par with all other SLN SDs, but you would then have to figure either get Erewhon to improve the Cataphract and increase its range, or figure out how to build an EDM or MDM to fit into the launch tubes of the SLN SDs. Because if Maya only matches SLN tech, they will lose any eventual confrontation.

Joat42 wrote:Your comparison isn't apt, since the technology gap in Honorverse is more akin to early 20th century ships with some upgrades compared to late 20th to 21th century ships. I doubt anyone would try to use the USS Texas in a battle today since it's obsolete and would be sunk before even seeing what sunk it.

I don't know. She's not that much worse protected that the Iowa class (and most of that difference is largely bolt-on point defense weapons; like Phoenix -- or now you'd use SeaRAM). And we used one of them in Desert Storm.
Sure that's an expensive and manpower intensive way to provide shore bombardment - but neither BB would be all that likely to be sunk in a similar situation.

Actually, except for subs (admittedly a major threat) most modern anti-ship weapons would only be capable of mission killing, not sinking, a BB. (Though some of the laser guided bunker busters might well be able to do so)
Not because it's impossible, or even necessarily very difficult, to build an anti-BB missile - but just because nobody operates heavily armored warships, so weapons aren't routinely stocked to deal with them.
(But putting BBs back in service it a lot more difficult and expansive than designing and building anti-ship missiles capable of seriously threatening them).


But none of that really applies to the ex-SLN SDs in the Honorverse. Pretty much everyone still fields weapons capable of destroying those And they've even more manpower intensive than old wet-navy BBs - but without the semi-unique capabilities (heavy shore bombardment) that the later offer.

MAD-4A wrote:

Joat42 wrote:So you really believe that recruiting some random people and putting them through some accelerated basic training will get crews that are combat effective???

uh...yea...It's not accelerated. Were you ever even in the military? I was, GMG3 USN. I had a total of 6 months training, including basic training, before being sent to the fleet. The missile loaders in HH (or the hydraulics for the command chairs) aren’t so much more complicated that it would take 4 times more training to figure out how they work. Especially in a society where the average Joe-Schmo on the street rides to his factory job in an Anti-grave vehicle.

That's on Earth today. In Manticore, you spend two years in training before you get on board a ship, and that's during wartime. And that's for tech third class.