Reserve destruction

There was the whole Monica fiasco. Those BCs that were not actually as bad off that they needed to be scrapped but were taken off the books, sent to Monica along the the equipment (and yard crew to upgrade them) for use against Manticore by essentially grabbing the Talbott end of the Talbot wormhole of the Junction till- supposedly- FF would arrive before RMN could come up with a hyperspace option to retake the Talbott end.

Just how many- if any- units of any size does FF have in a Reserve Fleet? Do they have older, mothballed ships (that would be BC and smaller) that could be placed back into service?

There was the whole Fleet 2000 program to upgrade and refurbish the capital ships, just where would the SLN start in bringing ships up to the current standard as far as age and class of ships? At some point, older SD (or DN) would be impractical to upgrade as you are talking about replacing things like the whole missile weapons systems from magazines, cross-loading, tubes and launchers as well as more modern fire control?
For example you could take a WW II era built BB or CA and upgrade it's weapons but and other systems but a WW I ship would take a lot more work and might not be able to handle the physical changes to accomdate the new weapons and systems. There is the whole other question of, if you don't change out the primary and secondary weapons systems, you will have to maintain and operate- at least on a minimal basis- the production of the missiles and other weapons to fit those older system to make sure you have adiquate ammuntions stocks.

Just how small is the Non SD & DN portion of the SLN Reserve Fleet? While the SLN probably would not want to sell DN and SD mothballed ships to individual systems, what would the situation be with the smaller stuff such as the DD, CL and CA units being retired from the fleet. They -since they would be "theoretically" be older and not up to the standards and tech of the new ships that would replace them.

The SLN- or the scrappers- could sell the older lighter units to individual systems to provide at least a minimal SDF for system protection. A 50 year old destroyer is going to be a match for any garden variety pirate it is likely to have to deal with but unlikely to be able to take on any two of the current generation of the BF or FF unit of the nominally same class.

There is a referbished (without ammuntion or even current upgrade in electronics etc) WW II DE sitting at Albany, NY (USS Slater) that was sold/given to Greek Navy in 1951 and was returned in the 1990s, at a "minimal" cost to a be a museum ship. While it couldn't hope to compete with a modern warship or or even an ageing Coast Guard Cutter (the torpedo tubes were removed a long time ago) or any number of modern ocean-going patrol boats. it could (with trained crew and "little things" like ammunition and better communications and some radar) beat the snot out of most of the pirate vessels operating in the world today.
3.5" main guns, 20mm and 40mm AA guns plus .50cal machineguns are probably up to the task of defeating guys in fishing boats or small coastal freighter with small arms and RPSs. You get the idea.

Relax wrote:

JeffEngel wrote: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...

It's the Solarian League. They've got BIIIIG candles!

2000 systems or thereabouts, 20 new a year. Suppose they have a leisurely five year build time. That'd be, say, some 25 systems building four at a time - a very small proportion of the League building them very slowly in a rather small number of slips in staggered succession. Compared to what the League could be doing, with all the yards they could support in all the seriously industrialized systems - yes, I'd call that a pilot light.

Brigade XO wrote:Just how many- if any- units of any size does FF have in a Reserve Fleet? Do they have older, mothballed ships (that would be BC and smaller) that could be placed back into service?

FF has no significant reserve, nor does the BF Reserve have all that much in screening units. FF is hard pressed to be everywhere it would have work to do as it is - if they could get more funding, they'd have more ships and have them working. One big problem with the Reserve concept has been that BF is supposed to tap FF for a screen, neither of them are practiced with coordination, they hate each others guts, and FF is too thin and too busy - in peacetime - to do that.

Just how well the Reserve could possibly be refitted is well taken, but until 50 years ago with the laserhead and 10 or so with the Havenite advances, there wasn't much refitting to do for centuries, and that's the long period in which the Reserve plan developed. How well they could be refitted now... should not impress anyone, unless someone is really desperate or hasn't got much choice. It's just that, given how crazy things are going to get, and how huge the Reserve is, there may well be people in the near future who are that desperate and that sheer quantity of third-rate hardware combined with the sheer demand for any naval hardware may mean that the Reserve units would be a choice on the table, maybe the only one for some people.

Somtaaw wrote:

drothgery wrote:If you already have wallers? You already have better wallers than SLN SDs, an enemy would need a huge number of them to threaten you, and no conceivable entity in the Honorverse has the ability to create that level of trained manpower quickly (this is definitely true in the Honorverse, however illogical it might seem to modern sensibilities).

Eh, not really. Just because Manticore and Haven (plus the various allied powers like Anderman, Grayson, and we can say places like Zanzibar and other former Anti-Haven Alliance) have absolutely fantastic wallers, and more importantly the weapon systems aboard them, does not mean everybody with a waller does.

The thing is that the Haven sector powers are most of the powers with wallers that aren't the SLN. There are not a lot of them. And the League SDFs with wallers (which are most of the rest) have at worst the same thing as the SLN, and probably marginally better.

Interesting discussions.

I tend to agree that there would be a 'grab' for some of the mothballed ships by some of the SL systems. Like Harold, I also agree that this would probably be futile, due to manning and de-mothballing the ships.

But in a SL that is beginning to dissolve before people's eyes, where systems face not only GA but the potential of pirates (whom I assume haven't operated in the SL Core or Shell because of the ISLN reputation) and warlords who do have either a SDF or have co-opted a BF/FF admiral, the decision may be more of a Political move than any logical or rational military option.

Being able to 'show' your people that you are doing everything you can to protect them from their 'enemies' is good political theatre and in a time of trouble, confusion, economic turmoil, and political collapse of an organization that had existed for centuries, I can see it happening.

But I can't see it being effective.

Systems with SDF's that include wallers might find value in adding some of the mothballed ships, but they would face opposition from neighboring systems who might view them with more alarm than they do the GA.

Interesting times...

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.

That's part of why the Reserve is so huge, compared to active fleet. Forgive me, I'm not ex-military myself and in particular I was a Canadian Air cadet (not navy), but isn't your reserve supposed to be smaller than active?

I agree the SLN reserve fleet has gotten way too big. But whether the amount of reserve hardware you have mothball is larger or smaller than your active forces depends on several factors.

I believe there were plenty of times during age of sail when ships put up in ordinary outnumbered the ships in active service. But that was because the technology and weapons changed very slowly; it was easy to regun a ship if desired; partly due to that it was fairly quick to 'de-mothball' a ship; and a crew could be impressed or trained far more quickly than a ship could be built.
So it made a degree of sense to keep excess ships that could be relatively quickly surged in time of war. But a lot of that is because there was high commonality between the needs of a naval sailor and a merchant sailor; and you have a large pool of trained and experience civilian sailors you could grab to man those excess warships.

With ship technology on a couple hundred year plateau, and given the slowness of SLN building, you could train a crew around a cadre in less than half the time it would take to build a new SD. So if you needed identified a need of to occasionally surge, then having a reserve fleet that was already built makes some sense. You're not having to delay your training to wait for ships to be built.
But you still need a cadre of experienced crew to build around - whether those are pulled from existing ships, or shore stations, or wherever.

But the SLN reserve had a couple problems, even before the tech revolution in the Haven sector. It had grown so large that they couldn't have come up with cadre for the vast majority of them. Also the technology hadn't as completely frozen as during the age of sail - all but the newest ships would need a non-trivial period in the yards to upgrade various things (replace autocannon with PDLCs). And that would complete with yard space for new construction. There is far less similarity between the day to day experience and skill between merchant sailors and naval ones than back then. So you need far more training time to get skilled crews. And proportionally I'd suspect that the SL has far less skilled merchant sailors available for impressment than the England's Royal Navy did.

I love this idea that there's going to be some kind of galactic Black Friday at the chain of Solarian Reserve Depots, with most systems showing up to grab a waller or two for themselves.

Textev from the top of the SLN indicates there may be as few as six Reserve depots. Remember that the entire Reserve, as numerically enormous as it is, barely masses more than 50 billion tons - insignificant on a cosmic scale. Everything in a mothballed condition could fit into a sphere the size of our Moon.

Every single starship ever built, destroyed or scrapped in the Honorverse could fit into the Sol hyper limit without any collisions.

Worst case, there can only be six or so parties with ~1300 cold-stored SDs in varying degrees of obsolescence. For now, they are under the control of active Battle Fleet units, which is the greater danger.

Despite being slashed by about 600, they still have approximately 1400 fully manned and deployable ships. 100 near Beowulf, 600 at Tasmania and 700 elsewhere. Some of those 700 are probably guarding the Reserve depots.

If those COs are smart and prepared, they might strip the crews on their active ships to skeleton levels in order to bring as many Reserve SDs' hyperdrives and impellers online. Then move as many as she can to an uninhabited star, probably taking what little shipyard staff and equipment there is along.

Then... well, then you have a warlord with a secret base supporting a fleet of 100 active SDs drawing supplies and spare parts from 500 to 1400 SDs. Most deserters from the warlord's command would be returning to the League or their homeworlds rather than setting out to carve their own piece, containing the problem.

If that warlord is some kind of reincarnation of Napoleon, Clausewitz or Alexander, they could quickly make Gustav Anderman green with envy, provided they manage to avoid provoking the GA. If it's another Byng, Crandall or Rajampet, the GA will inevitably smash them.

From the SLN's perspective, the best use of the reserve is probably as a source of parts, particularly the long lead time stuff like fusion plants.

When Haven went on their crash SDP program they used the stockpiled components originally created for regular wallers. The simply designed and built new hulls that the existing parts would work in. The textev implies they were more difficult to produce and probably expensive. I'm betting it included things like fusion plants, alpha and beta nodes, energy weapons, possibly CM and PDLC installations, control links, etc.

Since the SLN reserve wallers are useless as is, start scrapping them for parts. Unless the old ones arent suitable for some reason, this could save a ton of time and money getting *something* of a modern design in service with a chance of being more than a target.

If some SLN genius figures out what Maya did, start with a mine layer hull, ensure it can shoot the new ordinance you hope will be arriving in time, make it an arsenal ship and use your recycled components to outfit it.

SYED wrote: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're mothballed--how will Manticore get them home???

If the Reserve ships are primarily DNs or SDs of varying degrees of obsolescence or upgraded refits, how usefull are they going to be for anything but spare parts for the Active Fleet?

How many things like the impeller nodes are going to be useable on anything other than a DN or SD? How many fusion plants (and related systems) are fully transferable from one ship (in a class of ships or older/newer class) without significant changes to the new ship. Then there is the non-trivial problem of taking a fusion plant out of the armored areas of something built like a DN or SD. You then also have to open the access through the armor of the recipient ship, do the install and close it up again. If you don't already have compatable spaces to put the transplant into, you are going to have further modify the recipient.

It might be cost efficiet to take a "used" 100 year old fusion plant (or two) from an SD and put it into a new or used freighter but for a nominally front line SD, not so much. Unless there is no way to get a proper, designed, replacement from some logistics yard, and you really really need to get that ship back to full function, you are kind of stuck.

Using the Reserves (primarily DN and larger) as sources of parts can be much more effective than trying to bring any but the most recently upgraded (to current standards) back into service. Even so, you are still going to have to pull required parts and send them where they are needed. Depending on the problems involved, much of the maintenance and repair to the currently operational ships might be better done by sending the ships to the Reserve locations and use the maintenance/repair the facilites there than send for the parts-wait for them to be pulled/checked -and sent forward to where the recipient is located.

At this point, it might be an interesting ploy on the part of the GA to just seriously damage any SD or DN encountered and leave it stranded in a system rather than destroy it. The tangle and damage of the SLN supply lines would be massive.