Sigs wrote:The majority of core and Shell worlds can build a navy to keep the pirates away so the RF is not really offering anything they cannot do themselves unless the RF/MA is planning on funding a lot of Pirate operations.
Can.
First you need a design. How many core systems have experienced warship designers? I'll go with "not many. How many of these are aware of the realities of modern combat vs the SLN's "100-year" rule? Pretty damn few. So not many of the 800 or so core worlds will have a modern warship design ready or nearly ready for production. (Note that the RF is likely to be farther along with this than anyone else.)
So they are going to be designing at best some sort of rip-off of the modern SLN ships (modified to support their local industry instead of the SLN's logistics tail) or more likely essentially armed freighters, as the design time for a full warship is very long, longer than the time to build warship/missile production facilities.
Then you need the ability to produce warships and munitions. This would presumable take only a year or two to build given the Manticore example. But there are a lot of pieces, so we'll see. This will likely be ready well before a new warship design would be, hence armed freighters if you cannot steal or otherwise obtain a full technical package on a real warship.
Then you need crews. If your "navy" consists of my nominal 20 LACs you have about 1000 crew in service and maybe 5000 in support and need a hundred thousand crew and several hundred thousand support personnel. This is hard problem.
Many armed crappy ships with mediocre missiles manned by amateurs learning on the job certainly beats 20 obsolete LACs, but it will be a bloodly learning curve.
Edit: Note that the situation for the few systems that actually design and build their own warship designs is far better. They probably also have a much larger navy to start with, but they still have the issue of understanding Haven sector capabilities. And adding more PDLCs and CMs and improving the SW are obvious steps that will help quite a bit and should be easily doable on a new design and not impossible to add to a modified SLN design.
Oh, and I'll toss this in, from
http://infodump.thefifthimperium.com/en ... gton/193/0This is what I'd be working to set up if I was appointed dictator.
"If the Solarian League, as presently constituted, commits wholeheartedly to fighting Manticore because of "what the Star Empire did to our Frontier Fleet," for example, and if it holds together in the process, then the potential for the League to be willing to sustain very heavy losses and continue to prosecute the war becomes much higher. Once things like the concept of "national honor" get involved, and once somebody begins thumping on a lectern and shouting about how the "fundamental unity of the human race, which has protected us all from the evils of general warfare literally for centuries" is under assault, and how the loss of that fundamental unity will "inevitably lead to an unending procession of war after war between the League's successors," it's entirely possible that the League could find war with Manticore actually pulling it together into an effective interstellar government for the first time since its creation. And if that happens, then the League would be prepared to sustain very heavy absolute losses to continue the war until it attained victory."
