Operation Treehouse

Duckk wrote:What are you going on about now? Authors (or any other creator of works) don't owe you anything. You are free to cease consuming their work at any time.

No, I am NOT Duckk. I'm hooked. Hooked I tell you. The Honorverse is a drug. A designer drug! Even the MAlign would be envious!

Tell you what. If you will stop consuming them, I will stop consuming them.

And I promise that I won't hide copies under my bed.

and my fingers ain't crossed.

And can you stop power trippin'? It was meant as light banter as it always is.

Absolute power corrupts -- it's the MAlign complex.

JPMorgan's points numbered for reference.

1 This is not a "name." It is a "description."
Descriptions from textev (text evidence) mean everything!

2 I've always felt that the Point of SF stories set on
other planets, is that things there are different from
"just like now on planet Earth."
Please satisfy my curiosity: if you are determined to
see "just like planet Earth" in the stories you read,
then why not only read stories that are set on Earth?

H True Map-addict, whose first assumption is that stories
set off-Earth will have conditions *other* than on Earth,
until the contrary is proven.

JPMorgan wrote:

Duckk wrote:The first chapter of OBS:

The shuttle quivered gently as its tractors reached out to the seventy-kilometer bulk of Her Majesty's Space Station Hephaestus, the Royal Manticoran Navy's premiere shipyard

{snip - htm}

There certainly are some civilian yards, but to claim the RMN has no yards of its own is completely wrong. And the RMN certainly operates most of the shipyards in the Star Empire.

1 The name means nothing.

2 They may have had a small percentage of ownership but **just like now on planet earth**
the ships are made by privately owned companies. The navies maintain the ships after construction but the builders train the navy yard dogs about their new ships and supply the parts to the navy after it leaves the privately owned slip. Hauptman and others of his ilk were the majority losers when the yards were destroyed. Not to downplay the loss of life of course. Lives trump cash every time.

::a Naughty Moose wonders::

Are your *toes* crossed?

Naughty Moose

cthia wrote:{snip - nm}
and my fingers ain't crossed.
{snip}

Governments have often owned shipyards in the past. The Brooklyn Navy Yard was part of the US Navy and wasn't sold to private interests until the 1960's

The Norfolk Navy Shipyard in Portsmouth, VA is still a Navy owned building, repair and modification yard.

That Mr. Hauptmann's had private yards that build warships under contract with the RMN is not an unusual thing. In the books we have Hauptmann building ships out of his yard facilities associated with the Wyland station at at Sphinx. He also owned yard facilities at Grayson where he was building both warships and civilian vessels. He got involved at Grayson because of the economics- the labor costs and productivity at Grayson were lower (for the labor) and higher (for productivity) then Manticore. Of course he had to have the approval of both Grayson and Manticore to produce the warships if for nothing else for the access to the tech. He already was doing the same thing at and for Manticore, he was also able to bring experienced personel in from the Manticore operations for training of the Grayson personal

Where countries (or Star Nations) get their warships, let alone civilian ships, from is very much a question of ability and capacity to build them and the access to the tech. Some of the warships Japan used in WW II were built in Britian by British yards. It has already been noted in this discussion that the SLN has a lot (probably not all) of it's warships built by the transtellar Technodyne- which is a private company with it's own system.

Haven set up Bolthole to protect the R&D operations and shipbuilding operations there. It was hidden, not just secured in an off-limits part of one of their planitary systems.

As a side question, is there any actual capacity near the Manticore Junction for at least repairing hyper-capable starships? It doesn't seem reasonable to shift any civilian, particularly non-Manticorian freighters, from the Junction area all the way into Manticore A's industrial infrastructure in order to make routine or even emergency repairs on them. The extra time and expense (you may or may not need a tug to move the ship and that is going to cost) but you would be taking up space in at least the civilian yards which could be better used dealing with your own merchant hulls. For Hauptmann or any other shipping (individual ship or fleet owners), getting the ships back into service is a key criteria. If you are going to do routine work, it would be faster if you can schedule a ship on a regular run into dock, transship cargo in the process and do the work near the Junction and return it to service out there.

Brigade XO wrote:As a side question, is there any actual capacity near the Manticore Junction for at least repairing hyper-capable starships? It doesn't seem reasonable to shift any civilian, particularly non-Manticorian freighters, from the Junction area all the way into Manticore A's industrial infrastructure in order to make routine or even emergency repairs on them. The extra time and expense (you may or may not need a tug to move the ship and that is going to cost) but you would be taking up space in at least the civilian yards which could be better used dealing with your own merchant hulls. For Hauptmann or any other shipping (individual ship or fleet owners), getting the ships back into service is a key criteria. If you are going to do routine work, it would be faster if you can schedule a ship on a regular run into dock, transship cargo in the process and do the work near the Junction and return it to service out there.

Yes.

"We've already begun an emergency mobilization of all civilian repair and service ships assigned to both the Junction's central nexus and Basilisk. We're also making plans to tow the Junction industrial platforms back into the inner system, but, to be honest, like the Trevor's Star platforms, they're really designed for repair and routine service work, not heavy fabrication. We can increase their construction capacity, but what they have now is too small to have any immediate effect."

kzt wrote:

Brigade XO wrote:As a side question, is there any actual capacity near the Manticore Junction for at least repairing hyper-capable starships? It doesn't seem reasonable to shift any civilian, particularly non-Manticorian freighters, from the Junction area all the way into Manticore A's industrial infrastructure in order to make routine or even emergency repairs on them. The extra time and expense (you may or may not need a tug to move the ship and that is going to cost) but you would be taking up space in at least the civilian yards which could be better used dealing with your own merchant hulls. For Hauptmann or any other shipping (individual ship or fleet owners), getting the ships back into service is a key criteria. If you are going to do routine work, it would be faster if you can schedule a ship on a regular run into dock, transship cargo in the process and do the work near the Junction and return it to service out there.

Yes.

"We've already begun an emergency mobilization of all civilian repair and service ships assigned to both the Junction's central nexus and Basilisk. We're also making plans to tow the Junction industrial platforms back into the inner system, but, to be honest, like the Trevor's Star platforms, they're really designed for repair and routine service work, not heavy fabrication. We can increase their construction capacity, but what they have now is too small to have any immediate effect."

IIRC there is also warehousing and trans-shipping facilities there

Jonathan_S wrote:

kzt wrote:Pro tip for JPMorgan: Don't argue with Duckk on background issues unless you have really solid evidence, he knows the background intimately.

Follow-up pro tip for JPMorgan - also keep an eye out for surprisingly authoritative sounding posts from runsforcelery. (That's David Weber's username here on this forum; but as he sometimes says he's just the author so what does he know)


I don't have time to do the research this morning to double check, but I was under the impression that at least as late as WWII the USN and RN both used a mix of Navy owned and operated shipyards, private shipyard specializing in naval construction, and (for the war effort) purely civilian yards building war emergency designs to merchant construction specs. But isn't the Portsmouth Royal Dockyard still an RN naval base (though it's role as a ship construction center has faded drastically over the years)
So I'm not sure that even on Earth the assumption that despite their name naval shipyards are commercial entities is always correct.

Actually during WWII U.S. shipyards both civilian and military built warships. Newport News shipbuilding next door to Norfolk NY built CV BB CA CL DD LST and is currently sole source builder of CVN. Then you have shipyards like New York shipbuilding, Federal Shipbuilding, Bethlehem Steel various shipyards in Fall River MA, Sparrow Point MD, and San Francisco CA. Bath Ironworks Bath ME

drothgery wrote:

exiledtoIA wrote:Actually there is textev that Bolthole was started before the Committee took over Haven.
I can't remember the name of the Navies senior intel officer, but she comments that she would like to talk with ADM Parnell because she suspects he may have been involved with Bolthole from the start.

There's textev that Pat Givens thought Bolthole was set up by the Legislaturalists. But there's also Word of Weber that she was incorrect.

It's not surprising that she is mistaken about some of her theories. She's an intelligence analyst not a psychic with a crystal ball. Actually now that I think about it. She is right almost too often. Look at accuracy the intelligence (or lack there of) coming out of our current intelligence apparatus or for that matter the repeated historical blunders due to faulty intelligence throughout human history. To my knowledge, this is the first time she's been wrong about something.

biochem wrote:It's not surprising that she is mistaken about some of her theories. She's an intelligence analyst not a psychic with a crystal ball. Actually now that I think about it. She is right almost too often. Look at accuracy the intelligence (or lack there of) coming out of our current intelligence apparatus or for that matter the repeated historical blunders due to faulty intelligence throughout human history. To my knowledge, this is the first time she's been wrong about something.

ONI also missed the build-up to Icarus, they were sure that the Committee were too paranoid to give McQueen the necessary freedom of action.

[Edit]No-one picked up on Operation Dagger/Stalking Horse, either, or Giscard's commerce-raiding operation in Silesia. Pat Givens' team have missed plenty.

Dafmeister wrote:

biochem wrote:It's not surprising that she is mistaken about some of her theories. She's an intelligence analyst not a psychic with a crystal ball. Actually now that I think about it. She is right almost too often. Look at accuracy the intelligence (or lack there of) coming out of our current intelligence apparatus or for that matter the repeated historical blunders due to faulty intelligence throughout human history. To my knowledge, this is the first time she's been wrong about something.

ONI also missed the build-up to Icarus, they were sure that the Committee were too paranoid to give McQueen the necessary freedom of action.

[Edit]No-one picked up on Operation Dagger/Stalking Horse, either, or Giscard's commerce-raiding operation in Silesia. Pat Givens' team have missed plenty.

I wouldn't blame RMN ONI to much on missing on picking up on Dagger and Stalking Horse. They were still trying to get a real handle on the CPS and the PN in the aftermath of the purges. They were still trying to build dossiers on PN senior officers who had been junior captains and commanders promoted beyond there capabilities. Plus it takes time for intelligence information to work it's way through the system. In the RW during the Cold War it could take any where from 2-3 days and up to 7-10 days for intelligence information to travel from the U.S. to Russia.