Reserve destruction

kzt wrote:It's about 400% of the active force. Planning for how they would mobilize it was apparently a bit vague at best.

400%.... whoah. Oooookay, I understated by quite a bit then. And I think that's just the superdreadnoughts in reserve, we have little to no information on how much of a reserve screen there really is available.

Even if we ballpark Manticoran fleet ratios of roughly 1:1 ratio of heavy cruisers to SDs, and perhaps 2:1 to 4:1 for the light cruisers and destroyers.... mind = blown

Somtaaw wrote:400%.... whoah. Oooookay, I understated by quite a bit then. And I think that's just the superdreadnoughts in reserve, we have little to no information on how much of a reserve screen there really is available.

Even if we ballpark Manticoran fleet ratios of roughly 1:1 ratio of heavy cruisers to SDs, and perhaps 2:1 to 4:1 for the light cruisers and destroyers.... mind = blown

Exactly how they would come up with the screen is also 'a bit vague'. David has said there are lighter ships in the reserve but not anything close to the numbers you would need. SLN also runs light on screen per doctrine, but essentially it seems the BF "plans" (if you dignify what little planning seems to have been done) proposed dragooning all of FF to provide the screen. The practicality of this might be questioned by some...

kzt wrote:

Somtaaw wrote:400%.... whoah. Oooookay, I understated by quite a bit then. And I think that's just the superdreadnoughts in reserve, we have little to no information on how much of a reserve screen there really is available.

Even if we ballpark Manticoran fleet ratios of roughly 1:1 ratio of heavy cruisers to SDs, and perhaps 2:1 to 4:1 for the light cruisers and destroyers.... mind = blown

Exactly how they would come up with the screen is also 'a bit vague'. David has said there are lighter ships in the reserve but not anything close to the numbers you would need. SLN also runs light on screen per doctrine, but essentially it seems the BF "plans" (if you dignify what little planning seems to have been done) proposed dragooning all of FF to provide the screen. The practicality of this might be questioned by some...

Well there's also the minor detail that drydock officials, and officials for the breakers seem to have that bad habit of misplacing anything upto multiple squadrons of battlecruisers. Or that shipyards are building more than ordered, and losing the hulls.... either way, there's going to be a lot less ships in the reserves than should be.

And then the mentioned, possible issue with FF being dragooned into providing screen to BF wallers

kzt wrote:

Somtaaw wrote:400%.... whoah. Oooookay, I understated by quite a bit then. And I think that's just the superdreadnoughts in reserve, we have little to no information on how much of a reserve screen there really is available.

Even if we ballpark Manticoran fleet ratios of roughly 1:1 ratio of heavy cruisers to SDs, and perhaps 2:1 to 4:1 for the light cruisers and destroyers.... mind = blown

Exactly how they would come up with the screen is also 'a bit vague'. David has said there are lighter ships in the reserve but not anything close to the numbers you would need. SLN also runs light on screen per doctrine, but essentially it seems the BF "plans" (if you dignify what little planning seems to have been done) proposed dragooning all of FF to provide the screen. The practicality of this might be questioned by some...

If they'd ever run exercises for that, if they'd kept FF up to strength, if they'd kept FF near BF bases... the plan may have been sound.

For that matter, if technology didn't change much, or not beyond what practical Reserve refits could track, and if they had and kept up to date plans to crew it, it'd be a fine very long-term response to the possibility of Armageddon coming with "only" four or more years of warning, or if it came suddenly but worked slowly enough that the Reserve could be activated to keep up with and exceed active fleet losses.

Unfortunately, none of those conditions obtained.

In a way, it's hard to blame them. For hundreds of years, a serious fight for the League was inconceivable and warfighting technology was going nowhere. The laserhead changed that, slowly; the pressures of the Havenite Wars changed it quickly; and the Alignment and OFS business as usual got the League stuck with a conflict it could otherwise have avoided. They could have seen it coming - if not for the expectations that hundreds of years of history had made pure reflex anymore. There wasn't any imperative to have realistic war plans or to assess new technologies objectively and thoroughly, so the ability to do so atrophied, to the extent it ever developed. The League, even the SLN, had better things to do, things that, on the basis of their long experience, really did make a difference. (Mind you, they were frequently criminal things, so there's a fine place to sling blame!)

Somtaaw wrote:

Weird Harold wrote:We don't have even a hint of Solarian capital ships being in non-SLN hands. The biggest SLN ships we've seen in non-SLN hands are Battlecruisers sent to the breakers instead of the reserve fleet. Even those are remarked on as being beyond the usual level of "lost ships" in the hands of pirates or warlords.

But we do have lots of evidence that in the League, they never stopped building superdreadnoughts. Why? Because superdreadnought construction contracts were very lucrative, and very very easy ways for someone in power to pay back a favor with a federal government level contract to build waller.

Actually not. They had a plan to build a certain number of wallers per year, in a small number of shipyards (I think 6). At the same time, they'd refurbish the same number of the oldest active duty wallers and move them to the reserve. I think they also sent the same number of the oldest (and hence most obsolete) wallers from the reserve to the breakers, but I could be wrong on that - given the size of the reserve, they might have simply held on to them.

Now, the corruption in those contracts was pretty big, but they couldn't just pass out a contract to build a waller as a favor - whoever was owed the favor probably didn't own a shipyard that could do the job, and if they did, they'd already be building wallers.

JohnRoth wrote:

Somtaaw wrote:
But we do have lots of evidence that in the League, they never stopped building superdreadnoughts. Why? Because superdreadnought construction contracts were very lucrative, and very very easy ways for someone in power to pay back a favor with a federal government level contract to build waller.

Actually not. They had a plan to build a certain number of wallers per year, in a small number of shipyards (I think 6). At the same time, they'd refurbish the same number of the oldest active duty wallers and move them to the reserve. I think they also sent the same number of the oldest (and hence most obsolete) wallers from the reserve to the breakers, but I could be wrong on that - given the size of the reserve, they might have simply held on to them.

Now, the corruption in those contracts was pretty big, but they couldn't just pass out a contract to build a waller as a favor - whoever was owed the favor probably didn't own a shipyard that could do the job, and if they did, they'd already be building wallers.

Just because a yard can build waller, doesn't mean that it does. Without a contract to pay for the large amounts of supplies, in particular the vast amounts of armor and the lengths of electronics paraphernalia. And if you have stuff just laying around, odds are you'd be building smaller ships that are easier to either sell, or lose than a waller.

Somtaaw wrote:Just because a yard can build waller, doesn't mean that it does. Without a contract to pay for the large amounts of supplies, in particular the vast amounts of armor and the lengths of electronics paraphernalia. And if you have stuff just laying around, odds are you'd be building smaller ships that are easier to either sell, or lose than a waller.

The new builds for the Battle Fleet wall of battle seemed to be at a level just sufficient to keep the yards in business and practice building wallers - call it a pilot light for fleet building.

It may have doubled as a way to keep an eye on those yards and those parts to make sure idle hands didn't make off with the goods. On the other hand, having such non-urgent contracts, with the League having so few places to serve as your competition - and it being a closed community so ripe for price fixing - it's also probably been a wonderful locus for graft. The shipbuilders could pad the contracts with barely any limit at all, and the officials supposedly supervising it could be bought off for a piece of that action.

The League's had just a few problems with reasonable - given their situation and expectations - plans running headlong into corruption, laziness, arrogance, and simply having no reason to be urgent about anything on behalf of the most powerful, most secure state ever.

JeffEngel wrote:

Somtaaw wrote:Just because a yard can build waller, doesn't mean that it does. Without a contract to pay for the large amounts of supplies, in particular the vast amounts of armor and the lengths of electronics paraphernalia. And if you have stuff just laying around, odds are you'd be building smaller ships that are easier to either sell, or lose than a waller.

The new builds for the Battle Fleet wall of battle seemed to be at a level just sufficient to keep the yards in business and practice building wallers - call it a pilot light for fleet building.

~~~ 2000 SD's... Lets assume a service life of??? 100 years before going into the reserve. That would be 20 new a year. Or more than was built by Manticore in the 1st Havenite war. Then add in all of the service slips for overhaul etc.

Somehow that is hardly a "candle" of building. Manticore also builds faster as well. So...

What if instead of destroying them, the alliances seizes them then distributes them to more friendly nations? They might be out of date, but pirates and raiders would still hesitate to facing them. Imagine he effect of the league of the alliance coming in, then handing out them to a whole slew of neo barbs.

They need the services of a shipyard and skilled techs to reactivate. Those skills don't exist outside the SL. Nor do the spares and needed supplies.