Mesa occupation

You don't get the SCALE of the big freighters. Their cargo bays are big enough that you could lose a Nimitz class aircraft carrier in the shadows.

kzt wrote:Occupy? She's got about 1000 marines. There are probably more than a thousand towns with a population over 100,000. And the citizen class is not a bunch of hipsters in San Francisco. They are not blind, not stupid and not unarmed.

More marines than that.
IIRC Tenth Fleet has;
BC 2 companies of marines 250 x 14 or 16 BC's= 3500 or 4000
SD(P) 1 3 company battalion of 400 marines x 20 SD(P)= 8000
CLAC 1 company of 140 marines x 8 CLAC= 1120
total marines 12,620 or 13,120 or the equivalent of a RW USMC slightly under strength division which is normally about 17,000 men.

Cargo hold seals for shuttles? Cargo holds are airless or after the doors are closed repressurized...

The doors on slavers are just doors like any other freighter.

Step 1: Force Slaves into cargo hold
Step 2: Do not depressurize the cargo hold
Step 3: Open doors, blowing into outter space...
_
Edited to get the into the sentence instead of "the slaves", gotta get the facial expressions of the slaves in there...

saber964 wrote:total marines 12,620 or 13,120 or the equivalent of a RW USMC slightly under strength division which is normally about 17,000 men.

So at best she has almost the size of the entire Chicago police department to attempt to secure a planet with about 2000x more people than the population of Chicago, spread over an area a million or so times larger. Chicago is not, btw, a paragon of peace and honesty.

kzt wrote:

saber964 wrote:total marines 12,620 or 13,120 or the equivalent of a RW USMC slightly under strength division which is normally about 17,000 men.

So at best she has almost the size of the entire Chicago police department to attempt to secure a planet with about 2000x more people than the population of Chicago, spread over an area a million or so times larger. Chicago is not, btw, a paragon of peace and honesty.

So yes, Gold Peak definitely would not be trying to do it that way.

Typical Manticoran occupation procedures are the set up a local administration and local police as much and as soon as practical, with the Marines or Army mostly available as very mobile fire brigades: the hammer to bring down when the occupied coalesce into a large problem that can get smacked. In addition, they've got lots and lots of orbital surveillance and in a pinch, KEWs of any yield they need.

The hard part on Mesa is two-fold.

First, 10th Fleet hasn't got even the light-handed occupation force Manticore would want or expect. They've had very few or no transports, very few Marines, no Army help closer than Talbott, and precious little of it there, even including the Talbott Guard, if they can practically be deployed at all yet. So they'd be more dependent than ever on locals to self-occupy.

Second, the locals are in a terrible position to self-occupy. They've just had weapons of mass destruction going off and the beginnings of a civil war. Slaves are not trained at all to be a police force; seccies are a small portion of the population and the most training any of them have that is relevant is as gang members; and the citizen class is, really, the portion of Mesa that most needs control of it exercised. The least doomed arrangement I can see is a coalition of seccy gangs and Peaceforce units willing and able to take orders from an occupation authority - and yes, that's a partnership between groups that were just killing each other and have hated one another for generations. But every other party on Mesa is likely worse for being able to maintain order under the direction of an occupation authority, and that partnership would at least be able to assure slaves, seccies, and citizens that it may not be open season on them and their families.

Relax wrote:Cargo hold seals for shuttles? Cargo holds are airless or after the doors are closed repressurized...

The doors on slavers are just doors like any other freighter.

Yes, but we are talking about the amount of work (and equipment) required to refit any captured slaver ships, into generic freighters. The slaver 'might' have the equipment to repressurize after ejecting the slaves, but it's definitely not a high-speed thing.

And to depressurize to let your cargo shuttles undock, would require opening the doors again (and the resulting loss of atmosphere). Otherwise, what you have is a ship that can only perform "move bulky cargos from one place to another, in an airless condition. Bring Your Own Cargo Shuttles."

So, I'll re-iterate, just ripping everything and the kitchen sink out of a slaver ship to get a totally empty shell is bad. Yes you'll have impellers, hyper generator, and possibly you kept the bare bones, non-slave portions of the ship. Which so far as we've seen, have hatches that led to slave sections that will definitely require replacement with double-sided controls (instead of the existing crew-side only ones).


As for

Relax wrote:The doors on slavers are just doors like any other freighter.

Sorry, not quite. The doors are slavers (assuming you're talking internal doors, which means hatches) are generally one-sided only. Why? Because all doors have a manual latch, which genetic slaves can overpower the 'merely human' crew. Because they might have the cargo variants (such as WEB Du Havel) who not only are stronger than most humans, but they're very very smart.

That's a lot of hatches that would need to be replaced, and while you're ripping doors (and other things out), you need to be ensuring your ship still has decent structural integrity. Would really suck if you tripped on something, hit a wall on the way down, and the whole room collapsed because you took out everything related to a slaver.

Somtaaw wrote:That's a lot of hatches that would need to be replaced, and while you're ripping doors (and other things out), you need to be ensuring your ship still has decent structural integrity. Would really suck if you tripped on something, hit a wall on the way down, and the whole room collapsed because you took out everything related to a slaver.

No, the actual occupied portion of a typical freighter is very small. It's a few percent of the volume. The overwhelming vast majority of a freighter is empty space The cargo bay is hundreds of meters deep and wide by thousands of meters long and it's just empty space under the hyperdrive, reactor and pressurized walkway against the dorsal surface.

The interior of a freighter is inside the compensator so it's always at zero G without the grav plates. You don't really need to secure stuff that strongly as there isn't that much force that will ever be applied to the load.

kzt wrote:No, the actual occupied portion of a typical freighter is very small. It's a few percent of the volume. The overwhelming vast majority of a freighter is empty space The cargo bay is hundreds of meters deep and wide by thousands of meters long and it's just empty space under the hyperdrive, reactor and pressurized walkway against the dorsal surface.

The interior of a freighter is inside the compensator so it's always at zero G without the grav plates. You don't really need to secure stuff that strongly as there isn't that much force that will ever be applied to the load.

"Thousands of meters long" is probably an exaggeration (for a post-resizing freighter). An 8 MT freights probably has similar dimensions to an 8 MT SD; and I wouldn't call 1,100 - 1,400 m "thousands".


Still, nitpick aside, it is a vast volume left over after the rooms you need for reactors, bunkerage, impeller rooms, boat bays, crew and life support areas, etc.

kzt wrote:No, the actual occupied portion of a typical freighter is very small. It's a few percent of the volume. The overwhelming vast majority of a freighter is empty space The cargo bay is hundreds of meters deep and wide by thousands of meters long and it's just empty space under the hyperdrive, reactor and pressurized walkway against the dorsal surface.

The interior of a freighter is inside the compensator so it's always at zero G without the grav plates. You don't really need to secure stuff that strongly as there isn't that much force that will ever be applied to the load.

Sure, but I'm still arguing against Relex's point that after you rip everything "slaver" related out of a slaver's ship, you magically have a freighter ready to go. If refits were that easy, there wouldn't be that huge arsed threadnought of "how to make SLN superdreadnoughts useful".

Hatches, rooms, docking bays large enough to handle full up cargo shuttles (which are presumably larger than a general personnel shuttle), internal cargo shifting, the list goes on and on. Yes the majority of any cargo ship is empty space, but a refit is a refit, whether it's a 200 year old SLN superdreadnought, or a slaver that was just came out of the yard last week.

Somtaaw wrote:

kzt wrote:No, the actual occupied portion of a typical freighter is very small. It's a few percent of the volume. The overwhelming vast majority of a freighter is empty space The cargo bay is hundreds of meters deep and wide by thousands of meters long and it's just empty space under the hyperdrive, reactor and pressurized walkway against the dorsal surface.

The interior of a freighter is inside the compensator so it's always at zero G without the grav plates. You don't really need to secure stuff that strongly as there isn't that much force that will ever be applied to the load.

Sure, but I'm still arguing against Relex's point that after you rip everything "slaver" related out of a slaver's ship, you magically have a freighter ready to go. If refits were that easy, there wouldn't be that huge arsed threadnought of "how to make SLN superdreadnoughts useful".

Hatches, rooms, docking bays large enough to handle full up cargo shuttles (which are presumably larger than a general personnel shuttle), internal cargo shifting, the list goes on and on. Yes the majority of any cargo ship is empty space, but a refit is a refit, whether it's a 200 year old SLN superdreadnought, or a slaver that was just came out of the yard last week.

SDs are a different bird from a freighter - EVERY hatch, interior bulkhead, support etc. is another layer of armor in an SD. Cutting into any wall, or through any hatch, is like cutting into a main battle tank. Remember on a BC it took several weeks to cut through several bulkheads and floors to reach the reactor - and that was avoiding the main side armor. SDs are armored to yet another degree, with insane levels of cofferdaming.

In a freighter... psssst ... it's walls need to hold back space. Remember, the Lunar landers had aluminum walls so thin, a ball point pen could be pushed through them by a child, yet they sufficed for the lander's livable areas. A freighter will be "slightly" tougher than one of the landers, but their are not armored like a warship and have zero cofferdaming like a warship does - a pinnance's anti-personnel laser(or a PDLC) is a threat to a freighter's OUTTER hull - the inner partitions are not even that strong.