New Manty ship ideas.

KNick wrote:Manticore was from the start an ecologically minded society. Most of the heavy industry was moved off planet from the start to avoid pollution problems from getting started. They had learned from Earth's past. Once they were established in space, the efficiencies became more pronounced. All of this avoided planetary stress and allowed the environment to handle what pollution was generated without significant problems. The fact that this opened the way for OB was an unforeseeable consequence.

Honorverse level tech is so energy intensive that no one in their right mind will have industry on planet. Weber describes ships that burn a significant fraction of their mass in fusion fuel over a few months. A one million ton BC might burn 50,000 tons of Deuterium per month. The energy yield is on the order of 2eex23 Joules or the equivalent of tens of millions of megatons yield. You do not want to dumpnthat much energy into a planetary ecosystem on a routine basis.

Mobryan wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:But, personally, I'm of the opinion that Manticore should and probably will, diversify their missile production locations in the post-Oyster Bay rebuild. Put a few of them in semi-remote locations planetside (so it'd be a clear EE violation to smash them from orbit during a raid)

Except that missile factories would be a legitimate military target, and exempt from the EE. At least that's how I've read it.

"I have explained there[Baen Bar], repeatedly, that collateral damage from strikes on legitimate targets on planetary surfaces do not constitute Eridani Edict violations." -From the EE&OB infodump.


Matt

Edit for format

[edit - oops I see KNick replied with this info already]
True, but we've got another infodump saying "However, a factory which produced missiles but had no capacity to fire them, would not be a legitimate target because it poses no immediate tactical threat to the fleet in orbit around the planet or to the assault troops which it might land to take possession of the factory."

So factories aren't legitimate targets. (Now if you put anti-orbital energy batteries around the factory those would be a legitimate target and any collateral damage to the factory would be fine.

Lord Skimper wrote:Also why can't planet side factories make missiles? Or ship parts?

Others have already answered this, but I wanted to cite Weber's own words on this. From the Pearls: http://infodump.thefifthimperium.com/si ... gton/282/1

And, no, I didn't misspeak myself when I said that the industrial manufacturing went on on the space stations. You put heavy industry in orbit where you can take advantage of microgravity and you don't have to worry about environmental pollution and degradation. Where your manufacturing facilities and your assembly facilities are in handshaking distance of each other. Yes, you could manufacture the parts on a planetary surface and then ship them up on counter-grav shuttles. And, yes, counter-grav make shipping stuff from a planetary surface relatively (you should pardon the expression) dirt cheap. It doesn't make manufacturing stuff in a gravity well any less expensive or difficult, however. Why would any society which had the technological capability to move all of those icky, messy industrial processes out where they aren't going to bother anybody do exactly that? Especially if it's also cheaper and easier to build this stuff in microgravity in the first place? So that means that I really and truly meant what I said every other time I addressed the subject.

SWM wrote:Others have already answered this, but I wanted to cite Weber's own words on this. From the Pearls: http://infodump.thefifthimperium.com/si ... gton/282/1
(Snip)

One thing that gets me is we're actually speaking about ASSEMBLY of missiles here, not necessarily total construction.

Is a missile ASSEMBLED in space? Of course, they are too massive to be otherwise. Is every component FABRICATED in space? The massive parts, yes - but some smaller parts may be constructed on planets (like chipsets) if zero-G techniques are not necessary. Just like today, components will be purchased from dozens, if not thousands of manufacturers- only certain parts will be fabricated under the assembly roof.

I would imagine most heavy industry to be in space - especially any polluting industries. But light, envirnomental neutral industries, especially those requiring high manpower per item, could be planetside.

SWM wrote:

Lord Skimper wrote:Also why can't planet side factories make missiles? Or ship parts?

Others have already answered this, but I wanted to cite Weber's own words on this. From the Pearls: http://infodump.thefifthimperium.com/si ... gton/282/1

And, no, I didn't misspeak myself when I said that the industrial manufacturing went on on the space stations. You put heavy industry in orbit where you can take advantage of microgravity and you don't have to worry about environmental pollution and degradation. Where your manufacturing facilities and your assembly facilities are in handshaking distance of each other. Yes, you could manufacture the parts on a planetary surface and then ship them up on counter-grav shuttles. And, yes, counter-grav make shipping stuff from a planetary surface relatively (you should pardon the expression) dirt cheap. It doesn't make manufacturing stuff in a gravity well any less ftexpensive or difficult, however. Why would any society which had the technological capability to move all of those icky, messy industrial processes out where they aren't going to bother anybody do exactly that? Especially if it's also cheaper and easier to build this stuff in microgravity in the first place? So that means that I really and truly meant what I said every other time I addressed the subject.

Gravity is not a problem as you pointed out with dirt side training for crew, you can easily put grav plating on factory floors, walls and rooves. Could work even better than micro gravity as you could have different gravity directions all over the factories. And as noted 'dirt cheap' counter grav to orbit. Could even have armoured underground factory bunkers, especially after the YS.

It is also really easy for a high tech society to put up a build / factory on the ground while planning out new orbital facilities. The new orbital facilities will be fantastic, in every way better but that all takes time. 1 month a factory can be churning out missiles dirt side. With motivation, which the Yawata Strike gave, 100 factories can be up in a month. It will take years to get one factory going in orbit let alone 100.

SWM wrote:I wanted to cite Weber's own words on this. From the Pearls: http://infodump.thefifthimperium.com/si ... gton/282/1

And, no, I didn't misspeak myself when I said that the industrial manufacturing went on on the space stations. You put heavy industry in orbit where you can take advantage of microgravity and you don't have to worry about environmental pollution and degradation.

I really, really dislike the word "microgravity". Although it's true that an object in orbit around a planet experiences significantly less gravitational pull from that planet than does the same object on the planet's surface, the difference does not justify the "micro-" prefix, which has the general connotation of "very small" and the specific SI meaning of "10^-6" aka "one millionth". A large space station might have sufficient mass to generate its own μG-scale field.

The effect most people refer to by that term is actually "weightlessness", which is not caused by weak gravity, but by the fact that the object experiencing that gravity is allowed to do so without any impediment. This is also known as "free fall". The gravitational field of the planet is what's holding the orbiting object ... in orbit.

Lord Skimper wrote:Gravity is not a problem as you pointed out with dirt side training for crew, you can easily put grav plating on factory floors, walls and rooves. Could work even better than micro gravity as you could have different gravity directions all over the factories. And as noted 'dirt cheap' counter grav to orbit. Could even have armoured underground factory bunkers, especially after the YS.

It is also really easy for a high tech society to put up a build / factory on the ground while planning out new orbital facilities. The new orbital facilities will be fantastic, in every way better but that all takes time. 1 month a factory can be churning out missiles dirt side. With motivation, which the Yawata Strike gave, 100 factories can be up in a month. It will take years to get one factory going in orbit let alone 100.

Skimper, what in the world makes you think that it would only take 1 month to build a missile factory on the ground? That is so ridiculous it is mind-boggling. You are just spewing things out with no knowledge whatsoever.

With Honorverse technology, they can build a factory in orbit just as fast as they can on the ground. There is no advantage to building them on the ground. They could build them on the ground, but why would they bother, as David Weber said in that paragraph I quoted. He should know--it's his universe.

Umm, it was noted way back in Book 3 that space on the stations was extremely expensive. And given that work on the stations supposedly requires that you live on the station, which means you are paying exorbitant wages to your techs who work at the plant can afford to live there, well, yes , I can think of reason$ not to do that. Even before the entire industrial plant of the entire planet (and all of the workers families) got blown up in 2 seconds.

SWM wrote:With Honorverse technology, they can build a factory in orbit just as fast as they can on the ground. There is no advantage to building them on the ground. They could build them on the ground, but why would they bother, as David Weber said in that paragraph I quoted. He should know--it's his universe.

kzt wrote:Umm, it was noted way back in Book 3 that space on the stations was extremely expensive. And given that work on the stations supposedly requires that you live on the station, which means you are paying exorbitant wages to your techs who work at the plant can afford to live there, well, yes , I can think of reason$ not to do that. Even before the entire industrial plant of the entire planet (and all of the workers families) got blown up in 2 seconds.

SWM wrote:With Honorverse technology, they can build a factory in orbit just as fast as they can on the ground. There is no advantage to building them on the ground. They could build them on the ground, but why would they bother, as David Weber said in that paragraph I quoted. He should know--it's his universe.

Start from the basic principle that it takes energy to move mass around. The cheapest movement possible is in zero gravity and a vacuum, where there is no environmental acceleration to the mass and no atmospheric resistance.

In the Honorverse, components end up massing thousands of tons. Even a modern destroyer outmasses an Iowa-class BB by almost two to one. That's a huge amount of mass to refine, ship from the asteroid belt to orbit to ground, manufactured, then shipped back in space and assembled. In the past 20 years, Manticore has built over four hundred vessels massing at least seven million tonnes. That's nearly three billion tonnes.

It must be much easier on the planetary atmosphere to keep all that energy and mass in orbit. Except when it comes crashing down, of course...

Space can't be that expensive aboard stations if millions of people lived in orbit. In any case, the employer probably makes some effort to provide the accommodation. It's probably cheaper to buy the Hephaestus equivalent of an apartment block than it is to pay all your employees enough for them to rent spaceside accommodation. Besides, those employees are likely to have permanent residences on the surfaces.

munroburton wrote:Space can't be that expensive aboard stations if millions of people lived in orbit. In any case, the employer probably makes some effort to provide the accommodation. It's probably cheaper to buy the Hephaestus equivalent of an apartment block than it is to pay all your employees enough for them to rent spaceside accommodation. Besides, those employees are likely to have permanent residences on the surfaces.

That all makes sense, but doesn't fit the way David has put things together. Not that the way he has done this makes a lot of sense.

The stations are close enough to the planet that you should be able to commute. But nobody does. They all live there, all the time, every day. Then there is some significant proportion of 300 million people doing "asteroid mining" while something like a million or two people doing all the industrial production in the entire system. And we are not talking about just military ship production, we are talking everything manufactured.

However on Manticore you can pretty much live where ever you want and commute to a job there too, because people actually have privately owned supersonic flying cars.

It's nuts.