kzt wrote:
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.)
True, but most of those systems have access to the SLN designs, those designs once put into construction will protect them from pirates and neighbours while allowing them to fight back on somewhat equal terms with the League.
kzt wrote: 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.
And many of those core systems will not only have access to the designs of the ships, in some cases they will have the yards those ships were build in. Then add as the SLN disintegrates most of those remaining ships likely wont go into piracy, some will but the majority will either remain in the system they are stationed in or they will return to the place where the majority of the crew is from. So many systems, not all but many will get some real warships, SD’s, BC’s, HC’s etc...
kzt wrote: 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.
If we assume that the SLN’s split between ships of the wall and screen are similar to that of the RMN in 1905(which if I remember correctly they are not, the SLN has a higher % of lighter units than the RMN.) then that would suggest there are:
~2,300 SD’s in Battle Fleet
~9,200 Lighter units(Mostly in FF but some would be in BF)
subtract that the ~500 that were destroyed/captured by Manticore and you have 1,800 SD’s which have approximately 11,000,000 crew. The 9,200 would yield at least another 5 to 6 million crew.
So on the very low end when we admittedly know that the SLN has more lighter combatants we still come up with 16,000,000 to 17,000,000 Crew from the frontline ships. Assuming the SLN is extremely efficient there would be 3 people in uniform for everyone in a ship, but judging from everything else there would be somewhere 7 or 8 for everyone in uniform.
So Frontline ~17,000,000+
On low end support: ~51,000,000
On high end support~136,000,000
So lets take the difference and say that the SLN has ~17,000,000 Spacers in front line ships and 93,500,000 members in support.
Those 110,000,000 SLN members have to go somewhere when their paycheques start bouncing. Some will turn to piracy, some will return to the protectorates but most will go home or those from the protectorates will stay in a core/shell world. Not every system will get an influx of SLN personnel but many will which means they will have a core of people for their military(as soon as they fire all senior officers).
kzt wrote: 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.
Those few systems that have substantial fleet of their own can make peace with the GA as soon as they think they can hold off the SLN and start building more ships even if they have no hope of fighting the GA you will have a hope of surviving an attempt by the SLN to force you back into the League. Offer some neighbours to join your nation(Gives you more industrial and economic muscle) and you can pump out quite a few ships, man them and hold your own.
kzt wrote: Oh, and I'll toss this in, from
http://infodump.thefifthimperium.com/en ... gton/193/0 This 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."
The problem is that you would also be fighting against the people as well. It is easy for someone to talk about sacrifice and send wave after wave of men and women to their deaths against ships they cannot even touch with their weapons. It is a whole different story when they see the failure of the central government/bureaucracy in the lead up to the war and then the fact that the SLN is really not even a 3rd rate power anymore, add in economic hardship felt due to the closing of the wormholes and the withdrawal of Manticorean Merchant ships and it will be a race against time. Besides, the navy might have a thing or two to say about being send to die by the thousands as a means to unify the nation.
