Reserve destruction

Has anyone the border Systems in his mind? The mothball fleet isn´t a real threat to a modern fleet, but still good enough to bomb every border System into the Stone Age!

The threat of the mothballers is that you can use them to surpress anyone in the solarian league. Like using tanks agains civilians.

And you can use them to attack your backyard! The great alliance is so big, you couln´t defend all Systems with enough firepower to fight a big battle wall!

So, destroying to mothball ships would show the league that the Alliance isn´t joking and will eliminate a threat without big looses!

Maldorian wrote:Has anyone the border Systems in his mind? The mothball fleet isn't a real threat to a modern fleet, but still good enough to bomb every border System into the Stone Age!

Just how do you propose to man all of those antiques? Assuming of course you can find the people and dock space to bring up to being capable of a ferry flight to wherever you want to intimidate someone; bringing them up to "combat capable" is a much more daunting proposition because that implies you can find weapons and weapons crews for them and can spare six months to a year to work up to combat capable.

Weird Harold wrote:

Maldorian wrote:Has anyone the border Systems in his mind? The mothball fleet isn't a real threat to a modern fleet, but still good enough to bomb every border System into the Stone Age!

Just how do you propose to man all of those antiques? Assuming of course you can find the people and dock space to bring up to being capable of a ferry flight to wherever you want to intimidate someone; bringing them up to "combat capable" is a much more daunting proposition because that implies you can find weapons and weapons crews for them and can spare six months to a year to work up to combat capable.

If the political considerations aren't strong enough to overcome these - and they may well be - there's a point in just taking the Reserve out of play in anyone's hopes, dreams, or expectations.

While it exists, people will be thinking about its use for sale, for parts, for demothballing, for crewing on a slap-dash, good-enough basis sufficient to cow people with no capital ships at all and no GA system defense packages.

Realistically, it's unlikely that much of any use of it would be more practically accomplished with it than by alternative means. But there's a crucial difference between "unlikely" and "impossible", and while it is there at all and many people are making calculations without knowing all WE do about the realism issues, it's going to have a weight on their scales.

If people have dreams about warlordism on the basis of Reserve units, it may be better to crush those dreams now so they can try on some more pro-social ambitions rather than have them get committed to courses of bloodshed and misery that can rack up a body count and a lot of ill-will without going all the way through to a working little empire.

There has never been a problem in manning the reserve. That is a completely BS baloney sandwich red herring brought up by the author. Anyone with a working brain can see that. It is as absurd as saying that if 1000 merchant marine ships all of a sudden showed up in ... 'Y' port anywhere in the world, that said people who now own said ships could not operate them. You do not have to be a genius to operate something. Only willing to learn how.

The real problem is getting said reserve hunk of junk,

1) Out of wherever the reserve is being held
..... paying or
..... stealing
2) Transporting it to your system
..... firing up ancient mothballed systems
..... tugging it to your system

Saying one does not have the infrastructure to work on said ship is stupidity incarnate. This is space. No infrastructure is needed. The ships hull is the infrastructure for attaching cranes etc. As for the repair work, said systems have to be building up said infrastructure anyways, so even if they CURRENTLY do not have said machining etc infrastructure, they are currently working on obtaining it. According to MWW, this is as simple as buying a "miracle 2000" pod widget that you just insert your drawings into and viola, out pops your part.

(How else is one supposed to believe that Manticore is going to get back on its feet in a matter of months/2 years after losing 100% of its infrastructure?)

Loren Pechtel wrote:I had a thought here:

Do a long-duration CLAC mission--drop the LACs so far out they are not detected. Boost to .8c and aim to pass 100,000km from the ships--then go into stealth, wedges down once you actually approach the system.

The reserve isn't going to have warship guards nearby, the LACs won't be detected. When they come into range they fire their grasers but otherwise stay as dark as possible--still no wedge. The Sollies see their ships going boom without any indication of what's doing it--how's that for demoralizing!

(And, yes, they can almost certainly pull this off unless they have the bad luck to have a warship in the wrong place. Stay far from the ecliptic and this isn't likely to happen. Defenseless due to no wedges?? Even if they are detected they are basically invulnerable against most threats. Not even the GA possesses a missile that can engage unless they're flying at the launch platform. Grasers can--but only if the firing ship is already perfectly placed. Time is also a factor--suppose they pulled this tactic on manned wallers, would they get hit? No--they will be outside maximum Graser range in 5 seconds. Unless the enemy was already at battlestations they wouldn't have a hope of engaging in this window. You couldn't pull this on alert ships because of detection on the way in, not because of what would happen on the way out.)

Just a nitpick, although it only expands on your "warship in the wrong place". But a missile doesn't have to have a higher terminal velocity than the ballistic, wedge-down, LACs to intercept them. Even an SDM with a terminal velocity of .27c can hit a 0.8c LAC if the firing warship can detect the LAC more than 180 seconds out AND the LAC passes 82,000 km of the warship.
That would let it lead the LAC and put a laserhead within range as the LAC came screaming by.


Now the changes of actually seeing a Manticoran LAC at 4.3 million km is virtually zero. And if the LAC saw your missile launch, which it could hardly help seeing, 3 minutes is probably enough time for it's reaction thrusters to divert course sufficiently to screw up your shot. This is just an extreme example that you don't need missile to catch up to the LAC in a stern chase if you can lead it enough. You just need the courses of the LAC and the missile to converge.
An MDM however could exceed the LAC's max velocity - though in a stern chase the overtake speed after burnout is low enough (less than 9,000 km/s) the LAC could certainly dodge.

Destroying the reserve is not something I would give a high priority if I were the Grand Allied Commander or First Space Lord. Certainly, the most I would dedicate to the task is a screened squadron or squadron-and-a-half of Republican CLACs, even if I thought the target was worthwhile. And I'm not entirely convinced it is. With something like 1400 (soon to be 1300, most likely) SDs in commission, they aren't short of ships to stomp restive SDFs with. And Kingsford (MA though he be) is well aware that the reserve ships are pointless to man, and has told the Mandarins as much.

Really, why fixate on the reserve when the yard-capacity to build effective units, and the protectorate graft needed to pay for them, constitute far more appropriate military and political targets? If you think finding out they have no reserve will be demoralizing, imagine the morale effect when they can't build any ships, and the ones they have keep losing.

Relax wrote:There has never been a problem in manning the reserve.

Not with sufficient lead time, perhaps. BF's pre-war active fleet = 12 million crew. Now more like 8,000,000.

Total required to man the Reserve: 48,000,000. So it's "only" six times.

Oh, I'd grant that if 20-year hitches are standard for SLN enlisted/NCO, they might well have up to five times the active strength in retired personnel floating all over the place due to prolong. But the SL has never before been in a position where it even remotely needed to consider how to effectively reactivate or even conscript those personnel.

In short, it can't happen quickly enough to make a difference now.

munroburton wrote:...snip...

Oh, I'd grant that if 20-year hitches are standard for SLN enlisted/NCO, they might well have up to five times the active strength in retired personnel floating all over the place due to prolong. But the SL has never before been in a position where it even remotely needed to consider how to effectively reactivate or even conscript those personnel.

In short, it can't happen quickly enough to make a difference now.

I have pointed this out before. Just because someone is retired doesn't mean he has the required skill sets.

Even without a paradigm shift I would be next to useless even in my old job for the current US Navy.

Face none of those guys have ever been in a war, with an exception of some FF personnel they won't have the slightest clue how to really maintain a weapon system. They might be able to operate the engineering equipment but as we are talking about BF mainly is that even a surety.

CYA they all got PHDs in that.

And for the RMN manning and training they got nothing to do for the next 2-4 years to build ships.

60 years of experience to BF's is comparing impellers and oars.

Enjoy,
T2M

derKaroliner wrote:Destroying the reserve is not something I would give a high priority if I were the Grand Allied Commander or First Space Lord. ... And Kingsford (MA though he be) ...

Wait, what? I've seen nothing to suggest Kingsford is associated with the Malign, unlike his predecessor.

Really, why fixate on the reserve when the yard-capacity to build effective units, and the protectorate graft needed to pay for them, constitute far more appropriate military and political targets? If you think finding out they have no reserve will be demoralizing, imagine the morale effect when they can't build any ships, and the ones they have keep losing.

Yes.

Relax wrote:There has never been a problem in manning the reserve. That is a completely BS baloney sandwich red herring brought up by the author. Anyone with a working brain can see that. It is as absurd as saying that if 1000 merchant marine ships all of a sudden showed up in ... 'Y' port anywhere in the world, that said people who now own said ships could not operate them. You do not have to be a genius to operate something. Only willing to learn how.

The real problem is getting said reserve hunk of junk,

1) Out of wherever the reserve is being held
..... paying or
..... stealing
2) Transporting it to your system
..... firing up ancient mothballed systems
..... tugging it to your system

Saying one does not have the infrastructure to work on said ship is stupidity incarnate. This is space. No infrastructure is needed. The ships hull is the infrastructure for attaching cranes etc. As for the repair work, said systems have to be building up said infrastructure anyways, so even if they CURRENTLY do not have said machining etc infrastructure, they are currently working on obtaining it. According to MWW, this is as simple as buying a "miracle 2000" pod widget that you just insert your drawings into and viola, out pops your part.

(How else is one supposed to believe that Manticore is going to get back on its feet in a matter of months/2 years after losing 100% of its infrastructure?)

There has always been a problem in manning the reserve.

How many thousands of ships does the SLN have sitting in mothballs and where are they?
How many "reservests" does the SLN- Battle Fleet have who have been kept current on even the 2000 program for upgrades that were supposed to have been done to those ships that the SLN buracracy had decided were worth upgrading to more modern systems.
That doesn't count those ships which have not been upgraded in the last 30+ years and for which there probably not very many people currently trained to operate them.

The SLN ships are extreemly labor intensive for operation, they don't have the last 20 years of excpetional automation tech that Manticore has been able to put in-place so they really need full crews at least as large as the most current generation of the SLN ships of the wall.

Kingsford has already decided - we saw in the discussions of potential tactics to counter Manticore after FIlerta blew it at 2nd Manticore- that most of the reserve is so much scrap and deathtraps. A major problem for SLN is being able to field anything in a manner that might be remotely helpfull in being able to claim a "victory" against Mantiore at the same time avoiding having to say that the vaunted "reserve strength" of the SLN is so much crap.

Every time SLN has gone up against Manticore and now Manticore and Haven, they have lost big time. At this point, the crews of two entire major fleets have been either captured or killed and none of the prisoners are getting back to the SLN until after the war.

I don't think we have ever seen any detail on what the Reserve compliment of the SLN personnel is in terms of numbers.

On the question of crewing 1000 merchant ships somebody has just bought it is an entirely different question. What do you need to fully crew and FIGHT a slightly used SLN SD? 7,000 people? As opposed to perhaps 70 to 100 to operate a 4MT freighter that is essentialy a soap bubble with no weapons, no defense or military grade scanning systems, ONE fusion power plant, and no need to run all the maintenance on all those miiltary systems and weapons.
Even presuming you had started hireing the crews for those merchants the same time you placed the orders and had the crews (and ships) checked out by competent yards before you accepted delivery, you could run the merchant ships a bit light on fully trained staff and train up the rest on your (relatively) quiet merchant runs and use labor from your ports of call to move cargo. The SDs are going to take time to teach you new crews how to operate (in some cases how to turn on) all that military equipment and actually train them to do their jobs before you start trying to turn them into a warfighting crew that can function.