kzt wrote:runsforcelery wrote:Respectfully, you're wrong.
First, an Honorverse generation is a heck of a lot longer than 20 years or so. This is
not going to take a century to fix.
Second, the training schools and facilities to rebuild the labor force still exist, at least in large part. The education system and infrastructure are essentially intact and prepared to train new workers. Most training in Manticore has been done in simulators for at least 80 T-years, and the simulators are either still sitting right where they were or readily replaced. It's more a software issue than anything else in that respect.
Third, the blueprints/plans for every single lost item still exist. There's no mystery about what needs to be built or how it goes together, and there isn't a single part of the destroyed Manticoran infrastructure which cannot be rebuilt/replaced using the tech readily available in Haven and --- especially for the high-end stuff --- Beowulf.
Fourth, you have immediately available the surplus labor force of Beowulf and a
huge potential Havenite labor force. You think for one minute a Havenite ex-Dolist wouldn't sell one of his kidneys for the opportunity to train on cutting-edge Manty hardware
and be in on the ground floor of rebuilding it? The skill set and experience he would acquire along the way --- courtesy of training in that intact educational infrastructure and the later hands-on experience of the projects themselves --- would be literally priceless when he returned home to a Havenite infrastructure beginning to undo the last century or so of self-inflicted damage.
Fifth, Beowulf and Haven are going to see both the necessity of getting Manticore back on its feet as a key player in the Grand Alliance
and (especially in Haven's case) an opportunity to make some really, really good long term financial investments in a sort of reverse Marshall Plan.
Sixth, from where I sit, it seems to me that you are hugely underestimating the rate at which Honorverse industry and construction can complete a given task. Once the rebuilding process begins, it will go far more rapidly than you seem to believe, and the primary sources of the necessary materials --- the orbital extraction yards and refineries --- are still intact.
Seventh, there is an intact core of cutting-edge Manty tech available in the yards around San Martin and in the MWHJ service and repairs yards which can be immediately retasked. By the same token, the captured Grendelsbane personnel being returned by Haven and the skilled workforce orbiting San Martin, working in the Alizon and Zanzibar yards, working in the San Martin and junction yards, and even assigned to Marsh and/or on loan to Grayson will be available to serve as a core of fully trained workers who can oversee and update Havenites, Beowulfers, and Graysons pouring into Manticore to begin the task of rebuilding.
The task will be arduous, demanding, and quite possibly heartbreaking along the way, but it will not take anything remotely like the timeframe you are projecting.
Well, I might be.
But maybe I'm not.
Lets take education. My assumption is that the shortage isn't in terms of people willing to work, it's people who can run what was described as the most advanced manufacturing system in the known galaxy.
In a rationally run system, the rate at which the educational system produces trained people is roughly equivalent to the rate at which they can find work. So if you assume a career is 20 years you are going to be set to produce starting workers equal to about 5% of the total workforce every year. (This assumes no insanities like the current grad school issues, where every year you get 5 years worth of new PhDs in English etc.)
If the process is roughly akin to the described RMN training system increasing the input doesn't increase the output for years. And you can't massively increase the output rate without without seriously compromising the quality of the output.
Worse, what this produces are trained but not experienced workers. They understand the theory but "In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is." People who haven't actually done the work don't know what can go wrong and how to effectively fix it. This is why foremen and leads have significantly more experience than the average guy out the school.
Sane people (and people following the law) don't assign a newly graduated structural engineer as the lead guy doing the engineering for a 80 story building, because they don't know what they don't know. (There is a reason why you are not even eligible to take the PE test without 4 or more years of professional experience.)
The same is true of people building safety critical components, except when you are building weapon systems and spacecraft there isn't very much that isn't safety critical. You really want the guy in charge of ensuring that the wings are firmly attached to the plane to have enough experience to know what can go wrong, how to spot this, how to fix it, and how to NOT "fix" it.
I'm sure they have the blueprints, but that isn't actually enough to build stuff that will work. Even assuming that they have not just blueprints but also the details on how the design was actually changed during production and what you have to do to make the asemply process work (neither of which are part of the official blueprints) that still isn't enough to build it.
For example, most complex weapon systems and safety related systems depend on a cloud of small parts and sub-assemblies made by well known vendors that were carefully selected and specified by the various system designers. I'd expect that these parts are mostly not available because their manufacturers are out of business because their production facility exploded, their workforce died and their customers ceased to exist.
The bluepints might very well specify that you need a Vector model 567A3 pump and a SQV model 67C-option4d valves in the fuel feed, but they are really unlikely to include detailed plans on how to produce the pumps and valves. So you have to substitute. There was a reason why they specified a Vector 567A3 and not a Jones A14D6, as they are rarely identical with a different label. And you'll need to do this everywhere. Now that means you are no longer producing a tested and qualified design, you are producing something that just looks a whole lot like your tested and qualified design.
And you are doing it without the people who really understand exactly how to produce the design you had. And without the QC people who knew what to look for to stop bad products from leaving.
Every part substituted might only have minor chance of causing any issue, but there are a LOT of parts. So the law of large numbers says you have only a minimal likelihood that this will actually work as designed without changes to reflect subtle differences that you inadvertently introduced.
Essentially a missile or radar built like this is a completely new missile or radar and needs to go through the same step by step integration testing and service qualification you do on a completely new missile or radar before you start installing them where they can kill large numbers of people in all sorts of interesting ways.
It's a lot like the problem of trying to build a Saturn 5 today. We have the blueprints, we have lots of other documentation and we have complete examples, but many of the parts needed are no longer available. To quote NASA "There is no point in even contemplating trying to rebuild the Saturn 5 ... The real problem is the hundreds of thousands of parts that are simply not manufactured any more."
No, it's not in the least like trying to build a Saturn 5 today, because if the specs are known and the tech data is to hand turning out the actual hardware is one hell of a lot easier than turning out the parts for a Saturn 5 would be using 21st century technology. Nor is it necessary for the military tech to be produced
in Manticore, and neither is anything in the basic manufacturing infrastructure of Manticore dependent on top secret Manty technology. The basic industry capable of producing the "secret technology" can be rebuilt using off-the-shelf techniques and hardware readily available in Beowulf. Heck, a lot of it could be imported directly from Haven! And your assessment of the rate at which new workforce can be trained in Manticore is seriously low because you have badly underestimated the rate at which the wsorkforce was
already being trained/expanded.
To take the work force issue first. You are essentially arguing for a closed system, where you are maintaining an existing or slowly expanding/contracting work force. You use the example of a 20-year career and argue that the training infrastructure is/should be sized to graduate 5% of the needed number in a given niche per year. But what Manticore actually had was a very rapidly
expanding work force, with training programs geared to produce a much higher number of new workers per year than your model allows for. You do recall that little matter of the biggest building programs in galactic history and the push too expand manufacturing capacity still further, don't you?
There are also more survivors than you seem to be assuming. As has been pointed out, I haven't even brought in the personnel who survived the Weyland attack simply by not being on board at the time. Your argument about the seniority of the engineers assigned to run projects has a lot of merit, and there are --- you should pardon the expression --- a shitpot of them who were serving in military occupations in places other than the major home system infrastructure. Do they have the ideal skill set for the SEM's current needs? No, they do not. Do they represent a deep reservoir of experienced personnel that can rapidly
acquire whatever skill sets they lack? Yes they do. Does Beowulf, with a massive and undamaged infrastructure of its own have highly trained and experienced engineers who are every bit as good as their dead Manty counterparts and only need to be brought up to speed on the
manufactured tech the Navy needs, not on the
manufacturing tech needed to produce the Navy's goodies? Damned straight Berowulf does.
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.
