Captured Solly SDs

Relax wrote:There is not one single thing a crew can do in the missile feed system. If something blows through, you certainly are not going to fix the problem with your own two hands in the next 20 minutes. One can barely change a single outlet in 10 minutes assuming you already have all of your tools at hand. Splintered tubes/rails, etc for moving 100 ton missiles? Dream on. Hours is reality. Days is more likely.

There is not one single thing a crew can do in an engineering room that a stand alone TTF+spare cannot do 10,000X better and WITHOUT errors. Heard of breakers? Heard of fuses? Heard of magnetic field fuses/breakers? Yea. That is why they exist without a human involved. DW's "cascading" power surge is complete BS. Can a short still be spectacular? Yes you betcha. Sparks flying everywhere when the bus bars melt when the breakers blow. Still is not going to blow up a fusion room.

Now you could argue that if a fusion plant was at max power setting, and its energy siphoned off to create electricity was instantly cut to zero and did not have a viable energy dump, (There is not a single power system today that does not have a 100% capacity relief built in, why would that not be true in 2000 years?) Unless you wish to believe that all humans 2000 years from now are blatantly stupid of basic MURPHY and KISS principles could have interesting implications, but it certainly would not be called a cascading failure power surge! Voltage would spike, as the fusion plant pressure/temperature would climb as it is generating all that power without an outlet. Of course a very simple auto close multiple redundant circuit using halo effect due to overvoltage easily auto closes the Hydrogen feed line, or pressure, or temperature, or far more likely ALL OF THE ABOVE with multiple auto shut down on each sensor type! All of which would happen in a nanosecond to thousandths of a second. I do not know about you, but no human could even dream of stopping it in time that a multiple redundant auto system would not be faster, and far more reliable. No engineer would ever trust a human in the loop. No one trusts humans in the loop on our fission piles today, why the bloody hell would anyone trust a human in the loop for emergency shutdown in 2000 years? What you are going to have a human stand watch to physically turn a valve on the hydrogen feed line?

There is not one single thing a PDLC mount crew can do. Not a single thing. Even if the "communications" are cut. It is all computer or nothing. Incoming at 0.8c is just a tad faster than human reflexes...

There is not one single thing a graser mount crew can do when ships are separated by light seconds of distance. Now one could argue for a SINGLE human being able to figure out FfF and select a wedge shape for the computer to shoot at assuming communications are disrupted. Oh wait, that would require that both multiple hardline and wireless communications for target discrimination are offline. The human inquestion does not have a clue if that is a friendly ship or a foe they are firing at if they are not in communication with the bridge etc. This would require at least wireless coms to still work, in which case the mount itself still has its own coms as well. Yea, I don't buy that line either that a Graser mount would be useful with a human because by that time, the ship is a drifting hulk without a bridge, CIC, or a flag deck.

svenhauke wrote:2 school of thoughts

1. a SD is useless unless fully maned
2. a SD is usefull with a minimum crew

school 1 is not willing to admit school 2 might be right

there are 6000 people on an SD to maximise function

theres about 20 needed to mimimal function

if you say only at maximum functin is a SD usefull then 20 are of course unacceptable

example graser gun crews, if battledamage disables central control and there are no local crew then the graser is gone

with local crew it can fire with its own limited local targeting electronics , and the crew may be able to repair the controllines,therefore the 4 personal are usefull to enhance fighting capability

but they are not needed, at the start of a battle the graser is under central firecontrol

and if thats lost... so what theres still lots of grasers left

and our beloved author never said they can t be faught with minimum crews, he just sais so many are needed to fully maximise their capability

considering what a SD costs it does make sense to maximise capabilitiy

on the other hand solly SD´s are for free

SWM wrote:Actually, no one is saying that an SD is useless unless fully crewed. You are exaggerating. There is simply disagreement about how large a crew is "minimally crewed". And David Weber is the one who decides that. He says that a superdreadnought needs thousands to be minimally crewed. Not the full 6000, but a couple orders of magnitude more than 20.

SWM wrote:I'm not disagreeing with you. I'm just saying that David's world doesn't work like that. We are talking about David's world, not the real world. You can rant all you want, but it doesn't change David's world.

Relax wrote:

SWM wrote:I'm not disagreeing with you. I'm just saying that David's world doesn't work like that. We are talking about David's world, not the real world. You can rant all you want, but it doesn't change David's world.

I thought it was self evident, but I was pointing out all the crew that could be eliminated if one is stripping down to bare minimum. Still need cooks, maintainers, doc, purser, etc. If you are a po-dunk-ville vergie, you do not need graser mount crew for instance.

SWM wrote:Notice that I have not said anywhere in this thread that graser mount crew is necessary.

lelder5 wrote:I have advocated in the past some modification to allow the captured SD's to serve as "jeep carriers". The production of LAC's should be less effected by the results of the MALighn's raids. Something is going to be needed to hyper squadrons of LACs around. Freighters are ok for transport but vulnerable in combat. A converted SD is a harder target and could fight back against most sollie commerce raiders, which would be trying to prevent friendly systems from putting together the sort of LAC and missle defense I think we will see in the battle of Beowulf.