League FTL

yes. i see.

sorry brain not working so well today

good effort though.

Weird Harold wrote:Haven hadn't cracked the problems either, but they were far closer than the League -- eg the RHN used specialized LACs to monitor drones and compile reports for FTL transmission

And the Andermani had pretty much matched the capabilities of the first-gen Manticoran FTL comm-equipped recon drones as of War of Honor.

For SLN R & D you could look at the Nazi A-bomb program. IIRC the had big problems with the bureaucracy and competing programs run under different ministries. IIRC the different ministries were the Army BuOrd, Air Force, Post Office(sub ministry of education IIRC) Navy BuOrd and a separate program directly with the Min of Education.

saber964 wrote:For SLN R & D you could look at the Nazi A-bomb program. IIRC the had big problems with the bureaucracy and competing programs run under different ministries. IIRC the different ministries were the Army BuOrd, Air Force, Post Office(sub ministry of education IIRC) Navy BuOrd and a separate program directly with the Min of Education.

Very good analogy.

And to extend the analogy, Maniticoran R & D is more akin to the US Manhattan Project during World War II.

Vince wrote:

saber964 wrote:For SLN R & D you could look at the Nazi A-bomb program. IIRC the had big problems with the bureaucracy and competing programs run under different ministries. IIRC the different ministries were the Army BuOrd, Air Force, Post Office(sub ministry of education IIRC) Navy BuOrd and a separate program directly with the Min of Education.

Very good analogy.

And to extend the analogy, Maniticoran R & D is more akin to the US Manhattan Project during World War II.

Also forgot about all the atomic scientists who bailed out of the axis powers during the thirties like Enrico Fermi Italy, Leo Szilard Hungary, Albert Einstein Germany etc

Vince wrote:

saber964 wrote:For SLN R & D you could look at the Nazi A-bomb program. IIRC the had big problems with the bureaucracy and competing programs run under different ministries. IIRC the different ministries were the Army BuOrd, Air Force, Post Office(sub ministry of education IIRC) Navy BuOrd and a separate program directly with the Min of Education.

Very good analogy.

And to extend the analogy, Maniticoran R & D is more akin to the US Manhattan Project during World War II.

You mean when given several plausible paths to the goal simply trying them all in parallel? (Which is why Oak Ridge had an interesting diversity of uranium enrichment methods; and why both uranium and plutonium bombs were investigated in parallel).

The difference is that, despite spreading the effort over competing approaches, it was all under one overarching organization and there weren't really serious rivalries between the people pursuing (for example) gaseous diffusion, thermal diffusion, or electromagnetic separation.

Jonathan_S wrote:You mean when given several plausible paths to the goal simply trying them all in parallel? (Which is why Oak Ridge had an interesting diversity of uranium enrichment methods; and why both uranium and plutonium bombs were investigated in parallel).

The difference is that, despite spreading the effort over competing approaches, it was all under one overarching organization and there weren't really serious rivalries between the people pursuing (for example) gaseous diffusion, thermal diffusion, or electromagnetic separation.

Both. As in "We have to get it done as fast as possible." And "We don't care where the ideas came from or whose toes we step on, if it works it isn't stupid."

A few data points to consider:
We have textev that RMN new builds circa 1900 were on par with captured SLN hardware, which implies the general tech base caught up probably circa 1890.

The R&D effort for MDMs and Ghost Rider began around 1855 (or was it 1865?), and first use in anger was 1912. I'll wager that in the specific technologies required for those projects, the SLN was surpassed far earlier than 1890 and it still took nearly 60 years to get it done.

Vince wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:You mean when given several plausible paths to the goal simply trying them all in parallel? (Which is why Oak Ridge had an interesting diversity of uranium enrichment methods; and why both uranium and plutonium bombs were investigated in parallel).

The difference is that, despite spreading the effort over competing approaches, it was all under one overarching organization and there weren't really serious rivalries between the people pursuing (for example) gaseous diffusion, thermal diffusion, or electromagnetic separation.

Both. As in "We have to get it done as fast as possible." And "We don't care where the ideas came from or whose toes we step on, if it works it isn't stupid."

Just the sheer amount of resources America was able to dedicate to the Manhattan Project was outstanding.

The SL if it can get its head out of rear and its act together just by the sheer amount of resources can match the RMN in very short time period.

--snipping--

pnakasone wrote:Just the sheer amount of resources America was able to dedicate to the Manhattan Project was outstanding.

The SL if it can get its head out of rear and its act together just by the sheer amount of resources can match the RMN in very short time period.

I disagree. Let's posit a successful attack by Japan in taking out the Pacific carriers at Pearl Harbor, combined with an simultaneous attack by the Nazi's taking out both the Norfolk and NY shipyards at the beginning of WWII. Does that give Germany enough time to develop atomic weaponry and rockets before the US can "get back across the pond", AKA does England survive as free nation long enough to act as the invasion landing points for both North Africa, Italy, and D-DAY?

That's the situation the Solarian League is in at present. The GA has the capacity to near-term destroy virtually all of the League's hulls (active, mothballed, and shipyards), so even if they got to "FTL, MDM, and GA level compensators" near term, it would still take a rather long time to come up with a "bolthole location" and build enough ships to take out the Alliance ships near term. What the GA can't do is police enough systems to keep that Bolthole from happening in the longer term.