Lord Skimper wrote:I would agree with what you have said before the Yawata strike, even when at war with the Sollies.
After the YS, or OB if you prefer. You need ships and are relying on Haven to upgrade their ships, and build a your ships and Grayson ships. What you need is as many ships as you can have now, or as soon as possible.
Q or AMC ships give you that.
Mothballing freighters is not free, unless you plan to fire all the crew, and pay for ships that have money owed on them, insurance, upkeep if anyone is on board etc.... Idle freighter's are money pits.
Mothballing freighters may not be not free, but it
tons cheaper than tearing apart warships, rebuilding freighters into armed vessels, finding the considerably larger crews for them, and operating them as warships instead freight haulers which generate income.
Making some of these into Q or AMC ships using parts that you have, not Haven parts that would be better used for full military ships. Manty frigate sensors, Sollie plots parts and internal weapons, it is all there. Mothballing the freighters, but re assigning the crews, even if you need to retrain the freighter crews at saganami or other new training facilities. 6 months to bring the engineers up to spec, plus on the job training, 1 to 2 years to bring the others up to spec. Meanwhile your training gives you parts that are not better used else where, Q or AMC ships that are useful else where and all the left over ships give you prison ships that can hold all these prisoners. Even more with some modification. One might even use the prisoners, who are qualified, to help remove some of these components.
Again, who is going to do this job and how? Every trained dockhand Manticore and Grayson have left would be
immeasurably better employed rebuilding their shattered industry and working in the few maintenance facilities (like Hancock) they have left. And they have
no way of chopping up SDs without the hard sites which provided the yard support.
Putting the prisoners on the planet is expensive, dangerous and 1.2 million is 0.2% of the entire population of Gryphon. Keeping them on their own ships, takeout or empty the bottles or remove the wedge nodes, and they have a place they live in as much comfort as before Raging Justice. Methinks that was what it was called?
Expensive? Dangerous? You just maroon them on an island with no way to get off. That's as simple, safe, and cheap as it gets.
If the prisoner population goes up 50 times having then staying in disarmed ships would be ideal, putting 60 million on a planet like Gryphon would raise the population by 10%.
And if wishes were fishes, the sea would be full. But that's equally irrelevant. Unless the SLN is kind enough to send literally its entire active fleet - both Battle Fleet and Frontier Fleet - and all their reserve to colonize Gryphon, they won't get close to that number.
Likewise an additional 10,000 ships would let you use your new crews to man and build 30,000 more Q or AMC ships. Might even have pods and LAC's for them by that time. OK you wouldn't have that many ships maybe 3000 more and a ton of spares.
As for the electronics either you use the Sollie stuff if need be, or you use Manty stuff if it is available.
If on one hand and has been suggested that it will take years to make them compatible, making Haven tech compatible with Manty tech unless a brand new ship is designed, will also take years. If on the other hand it doesn't take years Sollie, Manty tech won't be a problem.
The SLN is capable of learning when whacked with a big enough cluestick, and Second Manticore certainly qualifies. There's no way the RMN will be in a position to capture that many ships again.
