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Trade Protection and Use of Captured Units

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Re: Trade Protection and Use of Captured Units
Post by Jonathan_S   » Tue Apr 05, 2016 4:29 pm

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Potato wrote:Your idea trips up where countless others trip up: refitting requires yards, hardware, and personnel that Manticore does not have available. It is all well and good to talk about refitting Solarian SDs to some kind of Manticoran standard, but a SD refit is a massive effort akin to refitting the USS Missouri to fire cruise missiles. The investment needed to do such a widescale refit would be much better used rebuilding Manticore's yards and building new construction warships.
As others said the refit actually done to the Iowa class; refitting for tomahawks in armored box launchers wasn't all that massive a refit. The armored box launchers are external, almost "bolt on", units. Yeah, you have to get power and data lines out to them; and find room to shoehorn in their fire control console. But you don't have to fight with main belt armor to do so; should just be relatively small holes in the much lighter deck armor.

A better analog might be the refitting of the Midway-class carriers with angled flight decks and jet rated catapults; lots more messing about with armor (since they had armored flight decks) and a much larger structural task.


The other thing is that unlike wet navy analogs you don't really need escorts, or even convoys, if your ships are moving between secure systems. With rare exceptions (and the Selker Rift was one) it's almost impossible to detect and intercept ships in hyperspace. Convoy escorts are needed to secure the n-space area around a convoy as it moves from the hyper limit to the planet and back. But system defense forces can do offer that same protection for less cost and while serving the necessary complimentary role of defending the system from raiders. We really only see convoys in places like Silesia, where for various reasons nobody is willing or able to actual secure the space of their member systems, or near the front lines where a system's defenders might get driven off or destroyed; and the supply train needs protection to determine each system is still secure before the vulnerable freighters enter it.

If/when the League fractures I'm sure there will be areas valuable enough to attract commerce, but too weak to ensure system security. So there may be need for some convoys into parts of the ex-League. But intra-sector traffic within the Talbott Sector should be sufficiently safe moving from one LAC + pod defended system to another.
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Re: Trade Protection and Use of Captured Units
Post by kzt   » Tue Apr 05, 2016 5:09 pm

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There is a huge hyper ambush vulnerability that 'SHOULD' exist per the way David has written up how hyperspace works. That is that the scale change between RS and Alpha, so the effective range of a ship on Alpha covers a huge amount of the hyperlimit of a system. According to the Bu9 folks David has not necessarily agreed with this logical interpretation of how the Honorverse works.
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Re: Trade Protection and Use of Captured Units
Post by marklbailey   » Wed Apr 06, 2016 2:06 am

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Thank you, Theemile. I appreciate the distillation involved.

The one-dimensionality referred to is visible in some of the responses and it's a real-world issue, not one confined to forums like this. Here, it's visible in the way responses are framed within contexts. For example, let's look at the issue of SD's. The conventional context is to see them as a capital ship, hence refits/conversions etc have to be done in first class dockyards, we are, after all, discussing a capital ship.

This is a classic sign of constrained thinking. For example, the work of converting most of the obsolete capital ships of the RN to auxiliary uses during WWI was not done in naval yards at all. Much of the stripping was done in commercial scrapyards which had skilled people and cranes sufficient to remove valuable equipment undamaged, and scrap unnecessary structures and equipment. Most of the reconstruction work to convert the hull to its new purpose was done in commercial repair yards. Only work requiring a combat oriented outcome was done in naval yards: examples such as Vindictive's conversion for Zeebrugge spring to mind. However, most of the conversion of Thetis, Intrepid and Iphigenia was not. Similarly, the conversion of the Crimean War blockships (wooden BB reduced to lesser service) was mostly done in commercial yards.

In this instance, conversion of large, why would cheaply available hulls to training ships require a first-class yard? it certainly will not require first-class manning on its original scale for it would no longer be a capital ship at all. It's been converted into a training ship.

The manpower issue is a critical one where any force is expanding rapidly. There, the larger the TS, the better. The larger vessel can handle more trainees for the same sunk costs in ship terms (as in ship crew and skilled personnel to run the ship) while providing the accommodation and training facilities equivalent to many smaller vessels. A standard RN practise was to assign obsolescent large warships in good material condition to shoreside training establishments as tenders. This allowed economies in training staff and training continuity. The same instructors ashore as at sea, the shore base XO was usually the tender's CO and so forth.

We did exactly the same thing when HMAS Jervis Bay was our TS, Staff from the training establishments went aboard with the trainees and we scripted the training to our own personalities. I am methodical, calm and patient, which meant I taught the Mids blind pilotage. A lot.

I take your point on the small regional navies. Indeed, that's why I commented, that's precisely the position my own Navy was in after Australian Federation in 1901. Subsequent to that we formed our own small national navy within the much larger Imperial Navy of the Second British Empire. hence the parallels I have been pointing out here.

The smaller and less wealthy navies will behave in a way similar to the way the Colonial governments here did from 1880 to 1901, and then in a way analogous to the way the federal government did after 1901.

so I note your point on the way 'Rembrandt and the other former members of the Rembrandt league' might behave. As they exist in substantial form they will want to upgrade to Imperial standard ASAP. For them, immediate availability of no-cost, large, robust hulls for local conversion to TS is a "no-brainer" (if I recall my Americanisms properly). They can be gotten into local TS service before a proposal winds its way through the bureaucracy of the Imperial capital.

The very minor or non-existent other naval services down at the hardscrabble layer might well act in a way similar to the way New Zealand acted 1880-1914. They'd be able to man small local squadrons in the same way NZ manned the New Zealand Squadron of the Royal Navy. Their fundamental need will be for a training ship and it may well be a stationary one. Like NZ in the 1890s, it might well form their entire initial training infrastructure.

So giving one of those navies anything larger than a CL will eat up enormous % of the existing manpower of any SDF. Few will have the manpower to man 1 SD even if they strip their entire navy.


So this is the core matter. None of these navies require a capital ship, and that's NOT what is being proposed. Their natural milieu is as trade protection forces and the Admiralty will know that.

That also gives this fictional Admiralty exactly the problem the real one had with Dominion naval forces, how to ensure training to common standards? Within the British Empire that was done by mutually agreed standards, adoption of RN training systems and standards etc. That will not work easily on the sort of scale involved in this fictional universe. it will have to be 'tiered' especially at lower skill/education levels.

This is precisely where a standardised class of TS inexpensive enough for each 'nation' to own and operate directly is required. It enables the upper end of a remedial training system to be standardised. That forms a 'gateway' in terms of standards. In this case, that 'gateway' will be the minimum standard required for remedially trained personnel to be employable in basic roles aboard Imperial Navy ships to Imperial Naval standards. That means they can start cycles of Imperial service - back to their own Navy to raise their standards. This is all common 'train the trainers' stuff, I might add. The Romans did stuff like this.


I, for one, was an early advocate for upgrading the SDFs to a "uniform standard" using the SLN ships - however over the course of many discourses we proved it probably would not happen.


Not what they need at all. The SDF's are your local trade protection forces. As such they have to focus on significant numbers of small trade protection units. Sure, they need the odd heavy unit for flagship and deterrence value, but the refitted TS can do that. As they reach a set minimum standard they may start to form Squadrons that can go 'off station' as part of the Imperial Navy. That's when they will get first class units. Giving them first class units their people cannot handle for local trade protection won't occur.

The formation ofthe RAN on a first class unit basis occurred in 1913 - that was quite a long while after 1885 when we agreed to form the Auxiliary Squadron, which was specifically tasked with building up a pool of naval personnel trained to the point where they could be employed aboard Imperial ships. By 1913, we knew we had the trained personnel, although we had to borrow a lot of RN officers and SNCO to obtain the expertise to reach Imperial Fleet levels on modern ships so we could conduct offensive actions off the Australia Station against a first class enemy.

Sorry maintenance standards are, at the start, just another training opportunity. So when the hull arrives, the first classes done aboard involve cleaning gear and hatch maintenance Phase 1. It's a training ship, not a front line warship, and there's enough captured to pick a standardised group.

So to reiterate, what I am specifically not saying is that these vessels should be reactivated as capital ships at all. I am saying that they are large, cheap hulls well suited to conversion down to TS, where they can play an important role in training SDF personnel and new inductees up to a minimum Imperial Navy standard.


Cheers; Mark
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Re: Trade Protection and Use of Captured Units
Post by kzt   » Wed Apr 06, 2016 2:33 am

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Per David, pretty much any work more complex than repainting or replacing surface mounted assemblies requires a SD capable yard. Of which the TQ has none. Nor does Manticore. The nearest ones are at Beowulf (a SL member) and Gregor (who is not at war with the SL and wants to stay that way) and would still require that you have the ship fully operational and capable of a multi-month trip and multiple WH transits.

If you are going to that much effort to provide a ship that is 200 years old and is totally non-standard, why not provide them a 10 year old RMN SD? They have lots of them, and probably have all the training materials still on hand.
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Re: Trade Protection and Use of Captured Units
Post by Silverwall   » Wed Apr 06, 2016 4:31 am

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A good analogy for the difficulty of refitting those SD's would be the endless delays and troubles the Indian and Chinese Navy's have experianced refitting the ex soviet carriers they are adding to their fleets.

It has not been easy, even with the 'expertise" of the original builders and neither of these are podunk navies like those in Talbot.
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Re: Trade Protection and Use of Captured Units
Post by marklbailey   » Wed Apr 06, 2016 6:42 am

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As mentioned, gentlemen, the vessels are not being refitted for combat operations, let alone as front line combatants. They are useless for that.

The analogy of the Varjag and Admiral Goshkov reconstructions are unsound. Those were complete reconstructions from abandoned (Varjag) and badly damaged (Admiral Gorshkov)vessels into fully operational front-line carriers. Should you want an analogy, conversion of the hull of the carrier Minsk into a museum and theme park is much closer. That was done at a minor commercial yard.

Another use: large, strong hulls with ample life support make good troopships. Converting such a hull to a troopship involves removing most weaponry and converting volume to accommodation. Again, for what reason would this require a specialist Navy yard?

The analogy there is the classic Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars practice of converting older ships-of-the-line to troopships en flute. Armament removed, accommodation expanded, rig reduced.

Downgrading a warship from front-line combatant to auxiliary use rarely involves specialist work, let alone specialist yards.

Why should it?

Cheers: mark
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Re: Trade Protection and Use of Captured Units
Post by Duckk   » Wed Apr 06, 2016 8:24 am

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While David takes inspiration from history, he also doesn't try to hammer the Honorverse into fitting the historical mold. Just because something was easy to do in the Napoleonic era or WWI doesn't necessarily mean it has applicability to the Honorverse.

SDs are tightly packed honeycombs of armored compartments, built with some of the toughest materials ever built. Often components are entirely solid state, and whole mounts are directly fused to the hull, behind a few meters of armor. These are ships built to sneer at nuclear detonations and directed energy weapons in the tera- and petawatt range. Think about what all that means for people just trying refit the ship instead of blowing it up. This isn't a case where a shipwright can pop a few planks off the deck of a wooden hull in order to cart off the cannons. In SVW, it took several months to replace Nike's damaged fusion reactor, and that was just a battlecruiser. Ripping out the broadsides of a SD is a monumental task.

Also, let me direct you to what David has to say about naval refits:

http://infodump.thefifthimperium.com/en ... ngton/82/1
-------------------------
Shields at 50%, taunting at 100%! - Tom Pope
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Re: Trade Protection and Use of Captured Units
Post by Theemile   » Wed Apr 06, 2016 11:01 am

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marklbailey wrote:As mentioned, gentlemen, the vessels are not being refitted for combat operations, let alone as front line combatants. They are useless for that.

The analogy of the Varjag and Admiral Goshkov reconstructions are unsound. Those were complete reconstructions from abandoned (Varjag) and badly damaged (Admiral Gorshkov)vessels into fully operational front-line carriers. Should you want an analogy, conversion of the hull of the carrier Minsk into a museum and theme park is much closer. That was done at a minor commercial yard.

Another use: large, strong hulls with ample life support make good troopships. Converting such a hull to a troopship involves removing most weaponry and converting volume to accommodation. Again, for what reason would this require a specialist Navy yard?

The analogy there is the classic Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars practice of converting older ships-of-the-line to troopships en flute. Armament removed, accommodation expanded, rig reduced.

Downgrading a warship from front-line combatant to auxiliary use rarely involves specialist work, let alone specialist yards.

Why should it?

Cheers: mark


The entire ship - as in the complete structure - is armored. The internal bulkheads are part of the armoring scheme, and have complex cofferdaming. One of the RMN SD classes was derided that it's complex armoring scheme (which was also lauded as making it the best armored ship class in the fleet) made maintenance and upgrades nearly impossible. In many cases entire subsystems were left in place - disconnected and abandoned, because there was no way to economically remove the hardware due to the armor cofferdaming and the practice was not repeated to the same degree on future classes - note - not abandoned, scaled back.

The Author has remarked that even reworking the Missile magazines - essentially large warehouse structures with racks and missile handling hardware would require a warship yard. Even that structure is hardened enough that a commercial operation cannot easily cut up the existing framework with plasma torches and toss the parts out the missile tubes, then build commercial tech berthing areas in the spaces. The use of commercial yards for even this low level deconstruction/construction work been mentioned by many posters over the years and repeatedly shot down by the author.

As for it's use as a troopship - an SD requires a skeleton crew of >1000 people just to run it's basic systems - and between 4 and 6.5 thousand to fight the ship. Yes, you can put 10,000 people on the ship with 1000 sailors running it, but dedicated troop transports and commercial people movers have crews of 50-200 people and can haul 20-60,000 people at a time (Mil spec transports have larger crews to run their defensive systems.)

As for training - the SLN ships use different software and have slightly different manning requirements for tasks. To train properly, you should be working on the hardware and software (or as close to it as possible) you will be using when you join the fleet. And fortunately, the RMN has 150-200 "old" DNs and SDs in mothballs with RMN spec hardware and software which it can use for such training purposes. none of these ships is more than 35 years old (despite their war use), and many are updated to the then-current hardware spec within the last 5 years. So why use strange foreign ships when you have standard ships you have training experts on available?
******
RFC said "refitting a Beowulfan SD to Manticoran standards would be just as difficult as refitting a standard SLN SD to those standards. In other words, it would be cheaper and faster to build new ships."
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Re: Trade Protection and Use of Captured Units
Post by Theemile   » Wed Apr 06, 2016 12:12 pm

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Theemile wrote:
The entire ship - as in the complete structure - is armored. The internal bulkheads are part of the armoring scheme, and have complex cofferdaming. One of the RMN SD classes was derided that it's complex armoring scheme (which was also lauded as making it the best armored ship class in the fleet) made maintenance and upgrades nearly impossible. In many cases entire subsystems were left in place - disconnected and abandoned, because there was no way to economically remove the hardware due to the armor cofferdaming and the practice was not repeated to the same degree on future classes - note - not abandoned, scaled back.

The Author has remarked that even reworking the Missile magazines - essentially large warehouse structures with racks and missile handling hardware would require a warship yard. Even that structure is hardened enough that a commercial operation cannot easily cut up the existing framework with plasma torches and toss the parts out the missile tubes, then build commercial tech berthing areas in the spaces. The use of commercial yards for even this low level deconstruction/construction work been mentioned by many posters over the years and repeatedly shot down by the author.

As for it's use as a troopship - an SD requires a skeleton crew of >1000 people just to run it's basic systems - and between 4 and 6.5 thousand to fight the ship. Yes, you can put 10,000 people on the ship with 1000 sailors running it, but dedicated troop transports and commercial people movers have crews of 50-200 people and can haul 20-60,000 people at a time (Mil spec transports have larger crews to run their defensive systems.)

As for training - the SLN ships use different software and have slightly different manning requirements for tasks. To train properly, you should be working on the hardware and software (or as close to it as possible) you will be using when you join the fleet. And fortunately, the RMN has 150-200 "old" DNs and SDs in mothballs with RMN spec hardware and software which it can use for such training purposes. none of these ships is more than 35 years old (despite their war use), and many are updated to the then-current hardware spec within the last 5 years. So why use strange foreign ships when you have standard ships you have training experts on available?



1 more point on Troop Transports - this is taking place in a era where the Manty merchant marine was recalled from the SL due to war fears. This means somewhere between 10,000 and 40,000 merchies are limited to just 1/2 their normal trading grounds and most are sitting either idle or under-utilized - finding extra troop transports is not an issue at this time.

As I said previously, the timing on everything is important.
******
RFC said "refitting a Beowulfan SD to Manticoran standards would be just as difficult as refitting a standard SLN SD to those standards. In other words, it would be cheaper and faster to build new ships."
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Re: Trade Protection and Use of Captured Units
Post by MaxxQ   » Wed Apr 06, 2016 2:14 pm

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Theemile wrote:
marklbailey wrote:As mentioned, gentlemen, the vessels are not being refitted for combat operations, let alone as front line combatants. They are useless for that.

The analogy of the Varjag and Admiral Goshkov reconstructions are unsound. Those were complete reconstructions from abandoned (Varjag) and badly damaged (Admiral Gorshkov)vessels into fully operational front-line carriers. Should you want an analogy, conversion of the hull of the carrier Minsk into a museum and theme park is much closer. That was done at a minor commercial yard.

Another use: large, strong hulls with ample life support make good troopships. Converting such a hull to a troopship involves removing most weaponry and converting volume to accommodation. Again, for what reason would this require a specialist Navy yard?

The analogy there is the classic Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars practice of converting older ships-of-the-line to troopships en flute. Armament removed, accommodation expanded, rig reduced.

Downgrading a warship from front-line combatant to auxiliary use rarely involves specialist work, let alone specialist yards.

Why should it?

Cheers: mark


The entire ship - as in the complete structure - is armored. The internal bulkheads are part of the armoring scheme, and have complex cofferdaming. One of the RMN SD classes was derided that it's complex armoring scheme (which was also lauded as making it the best armored ship class in the fleet) made maintenance and upgrades nearly impossible. In many cases entire subsystems were left in place - disconnected and abandoned, because there was no way to economically remove the hardware due to the armor cofferdaming and the practice was not repeated to the same degree on future classes - note - not abandoned, scaled back.

The Author has remarked that even reworking the Missile magazines - essentially large warehouse structures with racks and missile handling hardware would require a warship yard. Even that structure is hardened enough that a commercial operation cannot easily cut up the existing framework with plasma torches and toss the parts out the missile tubes, then build commercial tech berthing areas in the spaces. The use of commercial yards for even this low level deconstruction/construction work been mentioned by many posters over the years and repeatedly shot down by the author.

As for it's use as a troopship - an SD requires a skeleton crew of >1000 people just to run it's basic systems - and between 4 and 6.5 thousand to fight the ship. Yes, you can put 10,000 people on the ship with 1000 sailors running it, but dedicated troop transports and commercial people movers have crews of 50-200 people and can haul 20-60,000 people at a time (Mil spec transports have larger crews to run their defensive systems.)

As for training - the SLN ships use different software and have slightly different manning requirements for tasks. To train properly, you should be working on the hardware and software (or as close to it as possible) you will be using when you join the fleet. And fortunately, the RMN has 150-200 "old" DNs and SDs in mothballs with RMN spec hardware and software which it can use for such training purposes. none of these ships is more than 35 years old (despite their war use), and many are updated to the then-current hardware spec within the last 5 years. So why use strange foreign ships when you have standard ships you have training experts on available?


Adding to what you've mentioned about armor, one thing I don't recall seeing anyone mention is that the armor is grown in place. It's not plates welded onto a framework - it's formed around the framework.
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