Infrastructure

cthia wrote:

saber964 wrote:The 75% slack was the U.S. economy converting to wartime production. Which took place throughout 1942. Companies converted to war production that had never produced any type of military equipment e.g. Singer Sewing Machine CO started manufacturing machine guns, American Casket built WACO and Horsa gliders, Goodyear tire and rubber built several types of aircraft besides tires. FYI the last civilian car rolled off the line in November 1942 after that, the car plant was building tanks and APCs.

Exactly!

Don't forget about the many US factories that were not being used, at the time, that were given new life.

Now, let's project that same phenomena onto the 75 % of the idle Manticoran economy converting to wartime production. Manticore & Sphinx.

That was very true, the USN in 1940 took over Cramp Shipbuilding and refurbished it, after it went bankrupt in 1927. IIRC they built several light and heavy cruisers plus subs.

cthia wrote:

saber964 wrote:The 75% slack was the U.S. economy converting to wartime production. Which took place throughout 1942. Companies converted to war production that had never produced any type of military equipment e.g. Singer Sewing Machine CO started manufacturing machine guns, American Casket built WACO and Horsa gliders, Goodyear tire and rubber built several types of aircraft besides tires. FYI the last civilian car rolled off the line in November 1942 after that, the car plant was building tanks and APCs.

Exactly!

Don't forget about the many US factories that were not being used, at the time, that were given new life.

Now, let's project that same phenomena onto the 75 % of the idle Manticoran economy converting to wartime production. Manticore & Sphinx.

Manticore has been at war for some time now. They are unlikely to have vast amounts of unused production capacity, which was apparently all in orbit. In the US, GNP had returned to pre-depression levels in 1938.

cthia wrote:

saber964 wrote:The 75% slack was the U.S. economy converting to wartime production. Which took place throughout 1942. Companies converted to war production that had never produced any type of military equipment e.g. Singer Sewing Machine CO started manufacturing machine guns, American Casket built WACO and Horsa gliders, Goodyear tire and rubber built several types of aircraft besides tires. FYI the last civilian car rolled off the line in November 1942 after that, the car plant was building tanks and APCs.

Exactly!

Don't forget about the many US factories that were not being used, at the time, that were given new life.

Now, let's project that same phenomena onto the 75 % of the idle Manticoran economy converting to wartime production. Manticore & Sphinx.

phillies wrote:Manticore has been at war for some time now. They are unlikely to have vast amounts of unused production capacity, which was apparently all in orbit. In the US, GNP had returned to pre-depression levels in 1938.

Production facilities lost in orbit would comprise mostly military production, less a few arcane, specialized facilities that may benefit from it -- such as perhaps some esoteric medical production facilities.

I'm talking about turning the production facilities on-planet towards the war effort. Factories that have long been producing electronics, appliances, aircars, heavy equipment, hoverboards, infantry weapons, farming equipment, etc. Spoiled Manticorans can do without such luxury items for a time.

I would imagine that many Manticoran factories did take a hit, production wise, when their lucrative export business took a downswing with the closing of the wormholes and trade negatively affected with League space.

cthia wrote:Production facilities lost in orbit would comprise mostly military production, less a few arcane, specialized facilities that may benefit from it -- such as perhaps some esoteric medical production facilities.

I'm talking about turning the production facilities on-planet towards the war effort. Factories that have long been producing electronics, appliances, aircars, heavy equipment, hoverboards, infantry weapons, farming equipment, etc. Spoiled Manticorans can do without such luxury items for a time.

I would imagine that many Manticoran factories did take a hit, production wise, when their lucrative export business took a downswing with the closing of the wormholes and trade negatively affected with League space.

Actually, I believe civilian production was almost entirely in orbit as well. After all, they exported vast amounts of whatever they produced via the wormhole network, so the minor inconvenience of shipping down to the surface(which is easier and quicker than shipping from surface to surface anyway) is more than outweighted by the convenience in not having to haul all the stuff up from the surface.

On-planet production facilities are likely limited to agriculture and other parts of the food industry, as well as a distribution and delivery network. The Manticoran colony always had easy access to space and many reasons exist for keeping industrial manufacturing in space - low-g, asteroid mining, pollution, automation, etc.. Once they had their core stations up and building more modules onto themselves, it would have been the cheapest way by far.

Even if there are substantial numbers of planetary facilities, it's hard to see how, for example, a city-scale bakery could possibly be converted to war production. The gulf between scales is just too vast - a fully laden WW2 Yorktown-class carrier came in at around 25,000 tons. A modern Manty LAC comes in at around 17 or 21k tons.

The GA doesn't need tanks, rifles and bullets. They need starships as big as and bigger than the pyramids, firing missiles the size of small aircraft.

munroburton wrote:

cthia wrote:Production facilities lost in orbit would comprise mostly military production, less a few arcane, specialized facilities that may benefit from it -- such as perhaps some esoteric medical production facilities.

I'm talking about turning the production facilities on-planet towards the war effort. Factories that have long been producing electronics, appliances, aircars, heavy equipment, hoverboards, infantry weapons, farming equipment, etc. Spoiled Manticorans can do without such luxury items for a time.

I would imagine that many Manticoran factories did take a hit, production wise, when their lucrative export business took a downswing with the closing of the wormholes and trade negatively affected with League space.

Actually, I believe civilian production was almost entirely in orbit as well. After all, they exported vast amounts of whatever they produced via the wormhole network, so the minor inconvenience of shipping down to the surface(which is easier and quicker than shipping from surface to surface anyway) is more than outweighted by the convenience in not having to haul all the stuff up from the surface.

On-planet production facilities are likely limited to agriculture and other parts of the food industry, as well as a distribution and delivery network. The Manticoran colony always had easy access to space and many reasons exist for keeping industrial manufacturing in space - low-g, asteroid mining, pollution, automation, etc.. Once they had their core stations up and building more modules onto themselves, it would have been the cheapest way by far.

RFC has even posted about that. It wasn't just military, shipbuilding, and specialist manufacturing that was in space. Basically all heavy industry, and much of the high-tech industry, as well as non-trivial parts of light industry were all located space-side.
And basically for the reasons you said. As a system that had easy access to space since the day it was founded most resource extraction is orbital from asteroids (or presumably from mining gas giants; though I can't recall if we've seen that directly mentioned in text-ev). Keeping it in space makes the logistics easier, and cheaper, unlike here now on earth.

Manticore just doesn't appear to have the vast planetary civilian manufacturing base that cthia is assuming. That, and most of its workers, were in orbit and were destroyed/killed in Oyster Bay. It's not a permanent crippiling impact on Manticore. But it'll take longer to recover from than the sinking of most of the US pacific fleet's tonnage did at Pearl Harbor (an attack that mostly missed even the on-base repair facilities and didn't come within 2000 miles of the production/manufacturing facilities or their employees)

cthia wrote:Now, let's project that same phenomena onto the 75 % of the idle Manticoran economy converting to wartime production. Manticore & Sphinx.

How many missiles a day can Cosmos turn out?

cthia wrote:I'm talking about turning the production facilities on-planet towards the war effort. Factories that have long been producing electronics, appliances, aircars, heavy equipment, hoverboards, infantry weapons, farming equipment, etc. Spoiled Manticorans can do without such luxury items for a time.

There is no such thing per the author. You will have to take up his economic assumptions with him.

kzt wrote:

cthia wrote:I'm talking about turning the production facilities on-planet towards the war effort. Factories that have long been producing electronics, appliances, aircars, heavy equipment, hoverboards, infantry weapons, farming equipment, etc. Spoiled Manticorans can do without such luxury items for a time.

There is no such thing per the author. You will have to take up his economic assumptions with him.

I wasn't aware of the author's vision in this case. And that trumps all.

It does seem prudent, considering an advanced society's likely respect for the environment and attention to pollution. Though I always envisioned Honorverse tech to have solved that problem w/o having to resort to polluting space.

Part of me does think it odd that some nation fighting wars as long as Manticore would place all of its eggs in one space basket.

I was initially thinking that there would be emergency contingency factories set up on-planet to bootstrap a totally destroyed infrastructure. Destroying your infrastructure is what your enemies do. It doesn't come as a surprise.

I did consider that the Eridani Edict may be agreed upon and practical only because all military targets are in space. If significant military infrastructure is left planet side then perhaps an Eridani Edict wouldn't be possible?

Otherwise, I suppose I sort of gave Manticore too much credit for not lacking foresight, in this case.

.

kzt wrote:

cthia wrote:Now, let's project that same phenomena onto the 75 % of the idle Manticoran economy converting to wartime production. Manticore & Sphinx.

How many missiles a day can Cosmos turn out?

Probably not many, but their holographic system can probably be used to simulate design. Cosmos can be utilized as a high tech office of sorts.

Where there's a will, there's a way.

cthia wrote:Part of me does think it odd that some nation fighting wars as long as Manticore would place all of its eggs in one space basket.

I was initially thinking that there would be emergency contingency factories set up on-planet to bootstrap a totally destroyed infrastructure. Destroying your infrastructure is what your enemies do. It doesn't come as a surprise.

I did consider that the Eridani Edict may be agreed upon and practical only because all military targets are in space. If significant military infrastructure is left planet side then perhaps an Eridani Edict wouldn't be possible?

Otherwise, I suppose I sort of gave Manticore too much credit for not lacking foresight, in this case.

.

my recollection of RFC's post on that topic were basically that it was more like three baskets; a major shipyard and manufacturing station around each of their three habitable planets. So if something unfortunate happened to one you'd still have the other two.

But there was an assumption (which the spider drive tech rendered partially incorrect) that the only real way to destroy those stations was to fight your way through home fleet and the entire fixed defenses of the system. And if you could do that then militarily it didn't matter if the industry was in stations or on the surface because with the navy and defenses destroyed Manticore would be surrendering even if their industry (other than the shipyards; which do need to be orbital) was totally intact. And if they refused any military defenses on the surface can be bombarded from orbit. Then with them gone the attacking fleet can land troop to seize any factories, cities, etc.

Now that approach did turn out to leave insufficient flexibility or redundancy to handle an unexpected / unconventional threat. Such is life, or at least literary plots.