Manning the SLN Reserve

Granted at the start: the SLN has not had any practical, current plan to man a significant portion of the Reserve Fleet in a period of time shorter than several years. (If someone wants to quibble with that, I will be shocked and amused and watch the forum burn with others jumping on you first.)

However: the Reserve was once a rational response to the possible eventual need for a much larger fleet than they had any reason to keep operational in the meantime, and the nominal plans for keeping it from falling too terribly far out of date were not utterly boneheaded. (I do wonder that they didn't consider more seriously the likelihood that mere refits would keep a waller competitive centuries after construction, but even then, new builds replacing the 300 year old ones would still make the Reserve a reasonable response.)

So - any idea if they've ever had any plan at all for crewing the Reserve, and how long it may have taken to get, say, 10, 25, 50% of it out of mothballs, crewed and worked up? If they have ever, presumably it's somewhere around, they can now dig it up, read it over carefully, plot costs and timetables, double-check, and eat their own pulsers like Rajampet but without nanotech help... or figure out how to lie about all those figures to their superiors so things can carry on.

Or if it's public record - tee hee, Audrey O'Hanrahan could look it up and publicize it.

JeffEngel wrote:Granted at the start: the SLN has not had any practical, current plan to man a significant portion of the Reserve Fleet in a period of time shorter than several years. (If someone wants to quibble with that, I will be shocked and amused and watch the forum burn with others jumping on you first.)

However: the Reserve was once a rational response to the possible eventual need for a much larger fleet than they had any reason to keep operational in the meantime, and the nominal plans for keeping it from falling too terribly far out of date were not utterly boneheaded. (I do wonder that they didn't consider more seriously the likelihood that mere refits would keep a waller competitive centuries after construction, but even then, new builds replacing the 300 year old ones would still make the Reserve a reasonable response.)

So - any idea if they've ever had any plan at all for crewing the Reserve, and how long it may have taken to get, say, 10, 25, 50% of it out of mothballs, crewed and worked up? If they have ever, presumably it's somewhere around, they can now dig it up, read it over carefully, plot costs and timetables, double-check, and eat their own pulsers like Rajampet but without nanotech help... or figure out how to lie about all those figures to their superiors so things can carry on.

Or if it's public record - tee hee, Audrey O'Hanrahan could look it up and publicize it.

Well there are about 8000 wallers in the reserve. And Sollie wallers take about 6000 crew each, so we are looking at only 48,000,000 crew members for just the wallers. If you assume that the staffing requirements for the screening ships to support the wallers are the same, then you are going to need about 100,000,000 million crew members. Since you are going to be expanding your merchant marine at the same time, this should be a fun exercise.

fallsfromtrees wrote:Well there are about 8000 wallers in the reserve. And Sollie wallers take about 6000 crew each, so we are looking at only 48,000,000 crew members for just the wallers. If you assume that the staffing requirements for the screening ships to support the wallers are the same, then you are going to need about 100,000,000 million crew members. Since you are going to be expanding your merchant marine at the same time, this should be a fun exercise.

I doubt you could get a response from any naval veteran that did not include profanity if you suggest the serve on a ship where less than 50% of the crew had more than 1 year in service.

Castenea wrote:

fallsfromtrees wrote:Well there are about 8000 wallers in the reserve. And Sollie wallers take about 6000 crew each, so we are looking at only 48,000,000 crew members for just the wallers. If you assume that the staffing requirements for the screening ships to support the wallers are the same, then you are going to need about 100,000,000 million crew members. Since you are going to be expanding your merchant marine at the same time, this should be a fun exercise.

I doubt you could get a response from any naval veteran that did not include profanity if you suggest the serve on a ship where less than 50% of the crew had more than 1 year in service.

I think most of the responses would include nothing but profanity, plus possible violence....

It's a "little" better, in that the Reserve is light on screening elements: the idea was that Frontier Fleet would provide those. It's not clear how well support ships are represented in the Reserve. My guess is pretty poorly but not quite not at all, and that the idea would be that the mighty Solarian merchant marine (for truly, what other nation could possibly represent merchant shipping in the League more than the League itself?) would be leased/nationalized for that use.

I wonder if the idea behind the Reserve was to provide a fast buildup only by comparison with building a fleet some five times the size of the operational one. In that case, aiming for, say, 50% of the Reserve combat-ready in twelve years would be going nicely on schedule, even delightfully ahead of it.

I'll quibble, but only so far as having a plan. I'm confident the SLN pays people to maintain staffing plans in case the reserve is needed, and I'm confident those people have produced artifacts labeled as plans. There may even be people paid to be labeled as reservists.

See? All it takes is sufficient cynicism. Practical? Um, no.

JeffEngel wrote:I wonder if the idea behind the Reserve was to provide a fast buildup only by comparison with building a fleet some five times the size of the operational one. In that case, aiming for, say, 50% of the Reserve combat-ready in twelve years would be going nicely on schedule, even delightfully ahead of it.

The idea (such as it was) was to reinforce the assumption that the SL was invincible. A paper tiger.

Dca wrote:I'll quibble, but only so far as having a plan. I'm confident the SLN pays people to maintain staffing plans in case the reserve is needed, and I'm confident those people have produced artifacts labeled as plans. There may even be people paid to be labeled as reservists.

See? All it takes is sufficient cynicism. Practical? Um, no.

O-kay. I guess, at that point, the question becomes: what do you suppose those "plans" forecast for readiness timetables?

And it occurs to me that the privilege of being labelled a "reservist" - when there's money attached to it and practically no expectations - has to be a gold mine of money laundering, patronage, and corruption in general.

Heck, much the same could be said about the status of "planner" under those conditions.

Dca wrote:

JeffEngel wrote:I wonder if the idea behind the Reserve was to provide a fast buildup only by comparison with building a fleet some five times the size of the operational one. In that case, aiming for, say, 50% of the Reserve combat-ready in twelve years would be going nicely on schedule, even delightfully ahead of it.

The idea (such as it was) was to reinforce the assumption that the SL was invincible. A paper tiger.

I think my cynicism is slightly weaker than yours. I do think the Reserve was, once, what the SLN could do as a good-faith gesture for the need for a more powerful fleet some day, under circumstances too distant and strange to be taken too terribly seriously. As part of that, I'd figure that they'd've had some plan - even a competent one, within the bounds of towering arrogance and so very little practical experience in wars - even if not one that was at all relevant to the circumstances they find themselves in, or one that's been updated in several hundred years.

I suspect we agree in most practical respects, but I could be wrong. The current plans are probably totally unrealistic, but then the obsoleteness of the hardware makes that irrelevant. Not that the planners knew that. They were happy enough planning for the inconceivable.
I agree that the reserve likely grew out of some rational analysis many centuries ago. But in 1921 PD they are the Yamato of their day. (I'm sure real historians can find better analogies.).
Timetables ... Can be as completely as divorced from reality as the plot requires. But they are already seen as sinecures per textev so not much stretching required.
As for cynicism, this entire series is so deeply romantic it's hard to separate the cynics from the romantics. Just ask RnH.

Castenea wrote:I doubt you could get a response from any naval veteran that did not include profanity if you suggest the serve on a ship where less than 50% of the crew had more than 1 year in service.

You should look at USN in WW2. Explosive growth.