So... we can kill this thread if y'all want, no harm no foul.
That said...
Weird Harold wrote:Brigade XO wrote:Or you could just not do much and park it like an very overweight guard dog and staff as required.
Staffing is one of the biggest problems; It requires humongous numbers of trained spacers just to keep a Scientist-class SD from falling out of orbit. Not to mention they've been described as not very energy-efficient; as in they are the Honorverse equivalent of gallon-per-mile gas-hogs.
Why accept a white-elephant that take 750-1000 people as a station-keeping watch when either Manticore or Haven can provide state-of-the-art space station components that only require a dozen or so permanent crew when assembled?
Likely to train minimal in-system forces in something bigger than LAC fission rooms, etc. The "true station" argument that I put up is that Haven needs to rebuild their own capacity that the RMN trashed first PLUS act as a ship supplier so that the RMN and Beowulf can arm them, and that there's NO excess Manticoran building capacity until the 99% destroyed space-based infrastructure gets replaced. That means the rest of the Verge / GA / Silesian / Talbott systems gets to suck the supply hind teat for at least the next several years. At the same time that FF and the MAlign are getting frisky.
That said, I hadn't thought an essentially mothballed but still lightly staffed ship would need that big of a "station keeping force", at least until it was made useful for other purposes. That staffing would be whatever those other purposes required. I'd imagined that a good freighter crew could keep the SD from falling out of orbit, for example, because there's no goal to "fight the ship", ever, except defensively. It's exactly the guard dog "pit bull with big teeth sitting in the yard", pretty much.
If it required the full quantity of 750-1000 trained spacers to do even that much, I'd hope they're already on their way to the breakers.
