Fate of the Solarian League

SWM wrote:Yes, but what people have been saying is that the Core worlds have the capability of doing that conversion, or even building entire new shiphyards for warships.

Either manticore won't be building SDs in 4 years or the entire core can build military shipyards in a few years. It's either a or b.

kzt wrote:

Hasek wrote:Just because the yards exist doesn't mean the new owners are willing to sell, a very large number of these systems are going to have no yard capacity at all

How long is it going to take for Manticore to rebuild their yards from nothing, including rebuilding their entire industrial infrastructure? These systems have full industrial infrastructures. So how long do you think it takes for them to build new yards?

One might note analysis in the later 1950s America general war plans, the declassified ones like Half Moon, which look at exchanges in which each side uses a hundred or more atomic bombs, with the conclusion that it is not clear that there could ever be recovery from loss of most industrial plant and academic research capacity.

There was, separate, a consideration of what was lost with one city in Ohio, including the ability to build ship reaction bearings.

kzt wrote:

SWM wrote:Yes, but what people have been saying is that the Core worlds have the capability of doing that conversion, or even building entire new shiphyards for warships.

Either manticore won't be building SDs in 4 years or the entire core can build military shipyards in a few years. It's either a or b.

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I will go with
(1) Manticore will recover her yards sooner than they estimate (a pessimist's surprises are always pleasant ones)
(2) It will take the core / shell worlds longer to develop effective / productive Warship Yards than they might think. H.J.Kaiser showed you could convert Merchant ships into "wannabe" warships if you have to (see CVE -- combustible, vulnerable, expendable), but it takes a while to build a Newport News.

Erehwon's Carluchi Group and others have been servicing Erehwon's ships for years, learning lessons prior to building (officially) for Erehwon and (unofficially) for Maya Sector.

Most of the Core and Shell Yards are going to be spending a LOT of time in the combustible, vulnerable, expendable stage.
The League will fracture into (nominally) independent sectors / regions and develop new local alliances / trade unions before they can build true warships

-- Stewart

phillies wrote:One might note analysis in the later 1950s America general war plans, the declassified ones like Half Moon, which look at exchanges in which each side uses a hundred or more atomic bombs, with the conclusion that it is not clear that there could ever be recovery from loss of most industrial plant and academic research capacity.

There was, separate, a consideration of what was lost with one city in Ohio, including the ability to build ship reaction bearings.

Yes. David wants things both ways. What he did would take a generation plus to recover. The fact that you can't even make steel plate, wire or pipes makes it really damn hard to recover. When they said 4 years they had not made plans with Beowulf or the Andies, this was pulling themselves up by their bootstraps. Which just won't happen in any kind of reality.

The fact that the RMN isn't consumed with maximizing the life of nodes, reactor life of LACs, and preserving availability of recon drones and spare parts is pretty clear evidence that this wasn't supposed to really hurt them in any way close to what seems logical.

stewart wrote:
I will go with
(1) Manticore will recover her yards sooner than they estimate (a pessimist's surprises are always pleasant ones)
(2) It will take the core / shell worlds longer to develop effective / productive Warship Yards than they might think. H.J.Kaiser showed you could convert Merchant ships into "wannabe" warships if you have to (see CVE -- combustible, vulnerable, expendable), but it takes a while to build a Newport News.

Erehwon's Carluchi Group and others have been servicing Erehwon's ships for years, learning lessons prior to building (officially) for Erehwon and (unofficially) for Maya Sector.

Most of the Core and Shell Yards are going to be spending a LOT of time in the combustible, vulnerable, expendable stage.
The League will fracture into (nominally) independent sectors / regions and develop new local alliances / trade unions before they can build true warships

-- Stewart

Building the yards is the VERY easy problem to solve.

What is actually built in them is the real problem. It requires engineers countless years to gain the experience to build weapons of war. Just because you know something has been invented or exists does not mean you can even approximate it. Hey, I know gasoline exists. I use it everyday. I use its derivatives everyday as well. But how many years would it take me and a whole passel of other rubes to figure out how to create gasoline from oil? Without access to any plans. It would take no less than 5 years minimum and the product produced would be very poor.

Much has been made out of the Russians copying western designs. Not true. Rather they took the majority from their own experience built up from decades of experience building war product of what works and does not work and then applied western research.

Whipple invented the jet turbine in the 30's. Was not until the mid 40's that it became even partially operational and then it was highly unreliable and frankly killed a LOT of pilots even with the best minds applied along with giant research facilities already existing to test the components in. SLN core worlds do not have the research facilities. SL core worlds do not have the technical expertise centralized. One world may have a portion but enough to make a competent warship? No.

Think about the huge number of fields of specialization required even if they have a minor nascent shipbuilding facility able to be converted into warship construction.

Propulsion: Everyone "knows" impeller drives exist. How many can actually design and build such drives? RFC has already implied that shipping is below dirt cheap. If this is the case, there are probably only a couple worlds that actually produce impeller drives and then export the components to other ship building centers for inclusion.

Everyone "knows" compensators exist. How many worlds can design and build one from scratch?

Everyone "knows" hypergenerators exist. How many worlds can design and build one from scratch?

These 3 parts of star ship travel are probably concentrated on a few worlds in the SL.

Great we now got over the basic transportation and hull fabrication. WOO HOO! Missiles, Grasers, PDLC, Fire control suites. These technologies are even harder to produce from scratch than the others already stated. If there are a few handful of worlds in the SL that have the technical expertise for propulsion and fabrication, there is probably only a very select few who produce the actual war fighting tech.

Look at western countries as an example. When a tech is new, there are LOTS of start up companies. As time progresses and the technology tree increases in size this forces small companies together to simply survive. The total number of aircraft producers in the world has dramatically shrunk. What used to be 50+ manufacturers during WWII is now essentially 10 with one of those the brand spanking new Chinese who have been trying to come up with a competitive design for the last 15 years! 15! It will be competitive simply because currently they are using western source for their turbine engines. If they did not have access to purchasing those engines, they would not even have this much.

Do any of the SDF's actually produce their own missiles? I doubt it. Their own fire control? Let alone the most critical of all; Sensors? Without high quality sensors, you can have the best ship in the world and it will be utterly useless. Of course it is blind... or sees 10,000 incoming missiles as a single "dot" and any info it does collect is next to useless. Sensor design and fabrication is HIGHLY secretive today. In 2000 years I do not see this changing anytime soon.

By necessity, to even Attempt at producing a worthwhile warship design, MANY, MANY SL worlds will have to band together to even Attempt at designing a warship. If they go independent, sure they could eventually do so with a massive internal boot strap operation... in 20-30 years.

This is why no one is worried about IRAN/N.Korea other than its nukes. Even piss poor design and aiming and the weapons are still effective. This is not true of the Honorverse.

PS. How many SL worlds even have a single human on their planet who knows Jack all about nuclear bombs for creating their missiles in the first place? Bet most worlds it is 0.

The core tech has been stable for 100-400 years. It's not leading edge tech. It's well understood technology that is used by everyone and serviced everywhere. All the core patents have expired hundreds of years ago. We are not talking about geared turbines for big passenger jets, we are talking about revolvers and AC motors.

There are certainly are some a range of commercial manufactures for these, but I suspect that there is at least one shop in every major city in every 1st world nation that could build either one of these for you from scratch (ignoring regulatory issues). It would probably cost more than buying one off the shelf, but you could get it and it would work.

Relax wrote:By necessity, to even Attempt at producing a worthwhile warship design, MANY, MANY SL worlds will have to band together to even Attempt at designing a warship. If they go independent, sure they could eventually do so with a massive internal boot strap operation... in 20-30 years.

1000+ worlds. Think a startup per world.

Someone's gonna make it. I don't mean fast (specially because you actually need hulls to try some systems on). Still...

Take care.

kzt wrote:The core tech has been stable for 100-400 years. It's not leading edge tech. It's well understood technology that is used by everyone and serviced everywhere. All the core patents have expired hundreds of years ago. We are not talking about geared turbines for big passenger jets, we are talking about revolvers and AC motors.

Do you want to build Solarian ships or warships? Andermani or Peep or... There's a bunch of things that are not "revolvers and AC". And, yes, they are old principles. Like Grayson fission plants. And yet...

There are likely several shipyards able to do "warships"... at a Solarian standard.

Take care

This conversation seems to be a vigorous argument about whether the glass is half empty or half full without much indication of the volume of the glass.

Building an infrastructure to build modern-ish warships is going to take time anywhere in the League. It's going to take time to build the yards, to build the ships, to build the experience, to build the technologies, to build the officer corps and crew base.

I don't think anyone would dispute that.

But so we can argue a bit more tangibly:

How long? How long do you suppose it would take what kinds of fragments of the League where to build what?

Large warships will take longer. Better warships will come later than worse ones. Smaller crew totals will come sooner than larger ones. Lousy crews and officers will be available before better ones and in larger numbers. Larger portions of the League working together will do better than little ones. Some groups (especially smaller ones) will be able to do better in some cases buying export stuff from elsewhere than trying to build it at home.

I suspect that the core of post-League fleets will be, for some time, existing SLN and SDF ships, and the core of their yards the existing warship yards. I also suspect that they're going to be known to be largely incapable relative to GA tech. So we can expect scrambles to upgrade any which way people can, like the Cataphract missile, while every wild idea that didn't get through conservative SLN procurement gets a day in the sun and any yard capacity around gets turned toward building the best stuff people can build. Thankfully, if you don't want to be the League anymore, you may not have to face GA tech, so "traditional" ships and weapons can still go far in the threat environment you do face. (Think how long and in how many places WWII-era military technology has remained in use.)

I figure that the systems with the League's leading missile manufacturing bases (Yildun?) will - if left alone - be building intermediate missile tech (stopgaps combining basic lessons from the Havenite Wars with the League tech base, like the Cataphract) starting already (1922 P.D.), with that filtering out to other missile manufacturing sites in the next couple years and to new manufacturing sites throughout (former) League space in the next four.

I do not think that the sites that are making the practical breakthroughs with leading edge inertial compensators, FTL communications, fission plants, baffles for multidrive missiles, or fusion plant miniaturization are necessarily the same sites, or that they are necessarily going to end up in communication or consolidation in the same new states. Tying all that together has been natural for Manticore as a single star system, at the center of a web of communications and intelligence from the whole of human civilization, wealth from that commerce, and the needs of fighting a twenty year war for survival. (Haven's centralization around Haven itself and Bolthole for development has helped it a lot that way, too.) That's going to make for serious problems putting whole effective modern fleets together for the League successor states: expect whole academic, industrial, and institutional shifts to have to occur before any of them are really on their feet for recreating modern fleets. And expect that to take 10-30 years.

In the meantime, there will be weird stuff popping up based on what they've seen and heard, what any given system or state can build and develop on its own, and what it can buy or steal from other sources. Heck, the MAN's tool kit represents one instance of that, to an extreme: no FTL communications, no special EW advances, but a fresh start on approaching combat that would do Sonja Hemphill proud (if it hadn't killed so many of her friends). Few of those fleets will be that radical or that advanced - an example that may be apt but for being off in the other direction would be Grayson's toolkit before the Alliance, with the bulky but more efficient re-discovered compensator and the advanced fission plants.

Systems with military shipyards, with realistic working SDF's, and with the beginnings of a military R&D sector will be likely nuclei for new states. If you don't have one of those in your successor state, you're either going to have to develop that in a hurry or you're too likely to have to surrender, in whole or in pieces, to another state (or states) that have them. But that's going to be something going on over the course of decades of warfare and threats of warfare. By the end of that - call it 1970, 1980 P.D. - everyone in former League states will be fighting with fleets using FTL communications, multi-drive missiles, and pod-laying wallers - if you don't have those by then, you've already fallen out of the game.

Excuse me, but did you mean PAKISTAN/N.Korea?
Iran has been doing rather well for itself lately,
including collecting a couple of USA drones.
Remember, Iran/Persia has a long history of
theoretical math and practical technology.

HTM

Relax wrote:[snip - htm]
This is why no one is worried about IRAN/N.Korea other than its nukes. Even piss poor design and aiming and the weapons are still effective. This is not true of the Honorverse.
[snip - htm]