A single SD-based Space Station

The E wrote:

Jeroswen wrote:Ok I don't know if its the head cold or the meds I am on but I think I need to kick this dead horse as well. I'll probably regret this when I am well again .

A valiant effort on your part here, but let me point out a few holes in your arguments.

1. Manticore has more systems to protect than it has ships especially if it has to go on the offensive.

Do they? Current Manticoran strategic doctrine calls for a succession of deep strikes to disrupt the enemy's warfighting capability and force them to a defensive stance; unlike the first Havenite war, they're not thinking in terms of securing lines of approach. As such, they do not need a lot of garrison forces, and do not forget that if they do? They have the largely intact Havenite Navy to call on.

2. Those crappy SD's are the state of the art for anyone the Grand Alliance will be fighting. Plus the ones used in Manticore II have longer range missiles than is the galactic norm.

This is precisely why the Solarian SDs should not be used. By fighting them on an equivalent level, the risk of losses are much higher, and Manticore (and the Grand Alliance) is still on the wrong end of a manpower imbalance.

3. Manticore and Grayson will have no spare production for anything for at least two years as they rebuild.

Good thing Haven doesn't have those problems then, isn't it?

4. Lots of systems will be coming over to the Grand Alliance as allies or neutral in their favor and will be requesting protection.

And? We've already seen that light Haven sector forces, backed up by static defenses, are sufficient to beat back an SLN attack. We also know that trying to defend everything means defending nothing, so stationing a bunch of ships in every system is definitely not going to be done.

5. It will take at least a couple of years for the rest of the galaxy to begin to "catch up" to the Grand Alliance tech and then it has to design and build the ships to take advantage of that tech. So the SD's would work as a stop gap until better more modern ships are available from the Grand Alliance.

Except that the SLN ships are a disproportionate drain in terms of manpower and ressources. In the short term, the currently deployed GA forces are enough to deal with the SLN, and in the long term, Manticore and GRayson will be able to rebuild and restart their R&D quicker than the remnants of the League will.

6. Missile colliers and fleet repair ships were also captured which takes care of supply and maintenance for the short term.

Too bad that noone trustworthy is actually trained on this hardware.

You can't have them they are crap. You can't get anything that isn't crap for probably 4 years but thats ok. If you get attacked we should be able to liberate you within a week of your capture.

And that's bad, why?

First I appreciate the point by point critique. I'll take your last point first. Telling someone you can probably liberate them in a week sounds great as long as you aren't standing on the planet when it happens. Worse yet, you are refusing to give them equipment that will cost you nothing for them to pick up.

As to the rest I'll respectfully have to disagree. I may be an old pessimist but when the wheels come off there will be too many fires for the Alliance to deal with. They will have to concentrate on protecting their own while they rebuild and let the galaxy burn. They won't have the resources for anything else. I am sure they won't like it and will do what they can, but resources are finite.

In the end I will enjoy seeing how the Alliance navigates this time. It has all the intrigue to make the Dark Ages look like a tea party.

Jeroswen wrote:Anyway one point that really hasn't been made is that Manticore and the alliance don't have the time to break up those ships. ...

You drop them through an asteroid mining wedge. Poof. However Manticore has no shortage of raw materials. I would suspect the mining industry is in free-fall, as they have a real problem with a lack of employment for the asteroid miners. With the collapse of the entire economy nobody is buying raw materials, hence no need to pay miners. Furthermore all the mining related equipment probably hits mandatory service dates without spare parts and needs to be take out of service.

You bring up a good point on the missile colliers only holding so many missiles. There might be some solutions to that, there are always options.

For practical purposes, you will never run an ex-SLN SD out of missiles in the magazine if you are using them in a defensive role. They will replaced, be lost in combat, or have general engineering casualties that cannot be repaired economically before you run out of missiles.

I guess my reason for joining the debate on this side is I imagined myself as the governor of a verge system. Anyone with a brain can see what is coming. When the shoe drops I can't see any system expecting the Grand Alliance to realistically come to its aid if attacked. Some will of course but there will just be too many fires.

Pretty much.

Jeroswen wrote:First I appreciate the point by point critique. I'll take your last point first. Telling someone you can probably liberate them in a week sounds great as long as you aren't standing on the planet when it happens. Worse yet, you are refusing to give them equipment that will cost you nothing for them to pick up.

But that requires being strong everywhere, which as we know is just not possible. The nodal fleet model is the only way to protect a large area with enough force to be effective while at the same time keeping enough forces ready for offensive action.

As for the "costs nothing" thing: True, Manticore could distribute these ships at very low cost. But unless the new operators can be vetted to do nothing untoward with them, this is a risky proposition, especially considering the chaos that is about to break out in League space. What happens when one of the beneficiaries of this arms transfer turns out to be another Warnecke?

The E wrote:As for the "costs nothing" thing: True, Manticore could distribute these ships at very low cost. But unless the new operators can be vetted to do nothing untoward with them, this is a risky proposition, especially considering the chaos that is about to break out in League space. What happens when one of the beneficiaries of this arms transfer turns out to be another Warnecke?

Adding to the Warnecke comment, any aspiring warlord with big pussy-kat eyes who was just handed his first SD will be looking at his neighbors who have been given a similiar gift with now- covetous eyes. Any neighbors whose military is insufficient to run and protect an SD may be the reciepant of a surgical strike to wrest said SD away from them. Then our aspiring warlord has 2 SDs in a region where everyone else has just one... and the will to use them.

Theemile wrote:

The E wrote:As for the "costs nothing" thing: True, Manticore could distribute these ships at very low cost. But unless the new operators can be vetted to do nothing untoward with them, this is a risky proposition, especially considering the chaos that is about to break out in League space. What happens when one of the beneficiaries of this arms transfer turns out to be another Warnecke?

Adding to the Warnecke comment, any aspiring warlord with big pussy-kat eyes who was just handed his first SD will be looking at his neighbors who have been given a similiar gift with now- covetous eyes. Any neighbors whose military is insufficient to run and protect an SD may be the reciepant of a surgical strike to wrest said SD away from them. Then our aspiring warlord has 2 SDs in a region where everyone else has just one... and the will to use them.

That's where part of a "plan" to use these in extended space involved disabling the Hyper Generators permanently, such as removing the alpha nodes completely, to prevent interstellar use. The folks in Manticore, etc. don't trust the outside universe's political worth beans or bean gas. It is highly unlikely that the GA would just "turn over" a ship even as small as a DD to a "Verge warlord"; likely all of the officers and enough of the crewing would originally be loyal to the GA to prevent the "Masada takeover", Monica, or New Tuscany style problems. At most these can only become training and local SDF support ships.

Most extended range SDF functions would still be LACs and pods, not the SD, but that would not be public knowledge, either. The existence of the SD in near-planetary space can't be allowed to be used as a club over the populace but could potentially be a security blanket because no set of pirates a la Warnecke can get within a half a million kilometers of the planet and survive.

SharkHunter wrote:That's where part of a "plan" to use these in extended space involved disabling the Hyper Generators permanently, such as removing the alpha nodes completely, to prevent interstellar use.

Which is an absolutely foolproof way of making sure these ships won't see any offensive use ever, since we all know that noone outside of a few small specialized systems knows how to build impellers or hyperdrives, and noone would even think of selling this tech to anyone ever! It's absolutely flawless!

...Except not really. We know that even a backwater system like Grayson pre-HotQ was able to build these things, what makes you think that a system which already has enough spacers and space-based infrastructure to make the acquisition of a few SDs a viable option cannot rebuild these things to full capability in short order?

The folks in Manticore, etc. don't trust the outside universe's political worth beans or bean gas. It is highly unlikely that the GA would just "turn over" a ship even as small as a DD to a "Verge warlord"; likely all of the officers and enough of the crewing would originally be loyal to the GA to prevent the "Masada takeover", Monica, or New Tuscany style problems. At most these can only become training and local SDF support ships.

Wait, wasn't the previous argument in favour of this scheme that it wouldn't cost the GA/Manticore anything? Sending training cadres and crew out is very definitely not nothing.

Most extended range SDF functions would still be LACs and pods, not the SD, but that would not be public knowledge, either. The existence of the SD in near-planetary space can't be allowed to be used as a club over the populace but could potentially be a security blanket because no set of pirates a la Warnecke can get within a half a million kilometers of the planet and survive.

A pirate that has to get into that sort of range to do his pirating is so bad at his job, it would be almost tempting to let him live just so he can get a clue and offer a real challenge. As I understand it, piracy in the Honorverse happens around the edges of a hyper limit, where defenders cannot hope to respond in time.

Which brings me back to an argument I, and others, have made ages ago in this thread: SDs are not anti-piracy vessels. They're too slow for that. Just like a contemporary police force won't use tracked APCs for highway patrol duties, a system that tries to use an SD to fight pirates will soon find out that a single SD is utterly trivial to evade.

--a quick snip--, acknowledging good points in advance:

Sharkhunter wrote:Most extended range SDF functions would still be LACs and pods, not the SD, but that would not be public knowledge, either. The existence of the SD in near-planetary space can't be allowed to be used as a club over the populace but could potentially be a security blanket because no set of pirates a la Warnecke can get within a half a million kilometers of the planet and survive.

The E wrote:A pirate that has to get into that sort of range to do his pirating is so bad at his job, it would be almost tempting to let him live just so he can get a clue and offer a real challenge. As I understand it, piracy in the Honorverse happens around the edges of a hyper limit, where defenders cannot hope to respond in time.

Which brings me back to an argument I, and others, have made ages ago in this thread: SDs are not anti-piracy vessels. They're too slow for that. Just like a contemporary police force won't use tracked APCs for highway patrol duties, a system that tries to use an SD to fight pirates will soon find out that a single SD is utterly trivial to evade.

We're all in agreement. Given that these threads are acknowledging the relative uselessness of these ships in any force projection mode, picture ONE SD at Marsh, with a contingent of LACs to patrol the extended system. Even assuming they could get past the LACs (doubtful), the moment Warnecke's cruisers & support ship got into "capture range" of the planet, any SD would have blown them all into plasma.

OK, since we now have TWO threads that will not die on this topic...

You have 48 remaining SD's in Spindle. Delegate 3,000 SEM spacers (500 each for six ships--they are not manning weapons, no marines, just engineering, hyper, and navigation--make the ship go and steer it) to move 6 SD's at at time to the Talbott systems (return by chartered liner to Spindle).

The SD's will be stripped of all useful items (Medical, Battle Armor, any tech that can be utilized), missiles will be removed (if they haven't already), lasers and grasers 'spiked' (except for 1 or 2), and leave it up to the systems what to do with the hulks. Given their relative poverty, they'll probably think of something (like I suggested earlier, a spaced-based SDF command center).

As for Filareta's 60+ ships, move them into orbit (ships with tractor beams will do for them) to orbit aroud Phoenix (next planet inward from Manticore and approximatley where Venus us now) and open them up for retail sales (equipment only, unless the buyer is fully vetted for a full SD). Bet more than a few verge systems would like 4-5 full Sollie SD Hospitals or a Batallion's worth of Battle Armor and would be willing to pay well for it).

Heck, Manticore's economy is a mess--any form of incoming revenue would be welcome...

As for the smaller ships...heck, I don't know. Maybe the same thing.

Hutch wrote:OK, since we now have TWO threads that will not die on this topic...

You have 48 remaining SD's in Spindle. Delegate 3,000 SEM spacers (500 each for six ships--they are not manning weapons, no marines, just engineering, hyper, and navigation--make the ship go and steer it) to move 6 SD's at at time to the Talbott systems (return by chartered liner to Spindle).

Um, we have already stated, repeatedly, that it takes a lot more than 500 people to run a Solarian superdreadnought at a bare minimum level. A better estimate would be 1000 to 2000 per ship, just to keep the thing running.

SWM wrote:

Hutch wrote:OK, since we now have TWO threads that will not die on this topic...

You have 48 remaining SD's in Spindle. Delegate 3,000 SEM spacers (500 each for six ships--they are not manning weapons, no marines, just engineering, hyper, and navigation--make the ship go and steer it) to move 6 SD's at at time to the Talbott systems (return by chartered liner to Spindle).

Um, we have already stated, repeatedly, that it takes a lot more than 500 people to run a Solarian superdreadnought at a bare minimum level. A better estimate would be 1000 to 2000 per ship, just to keep the thing running.

I reject your reality and subsitute my own...

Seriously, freighters run with crews of 40 or fewer. I am talking about a bare bones engineering staff (with perhaps only one fusion reactor running) and bridge/astrogation personnel. No Marines, no Staff, no missile or energy weapon crew, no logistics or supply or medical (well, minimum), just three shifts in the engine/hyper room (300), bridge crew (120) and support (mess cooks, etc. (80).

Yes, the ship wouldn't be able to fight off a pirate frigate, but you should be able to get it from point A to point B.

IMHO of course.