Fate of Hancock station?

I've started re-reading the series recently and I just finished The Short Victorious War. Re-reading the series, I was surprised by how big a base Hancock was. I mean, when Honor showed up with the brand new BC Nike and a fusion plant needed to be completely replaced the base had no problem doing it. To me, that seems like a fairly capable shipyard. And this was before the first Havenite War started. If anything, Hancock station should have continued to grow once hostilities commenced. So what happened to it? I mean, I realize it is not as big as the shipyard at Grendlesbane, but the fate of that was well documented in War of Honor. What, if anything, happened to the facilities at Hancock?

Henry Brown wrote:I've started re-reading the series recently and I just finished The Short Victorious War. Re-reading the series, I was surprised by how big a base Hancock was. I mean, when Honor showed up with the brand new BC Nike and a fusion plant needed to be completely replaced the base had no problem doing it. To me, that seems like a fairly capable shipyard. And this was before the first Havenite War started. If anything, Hancock station should have continued to grow once hostilities commenced. So what happened to it? I mean, I realize it is not as big as the shipyard at Grendlesbane, but the fate of that was well documented in War of Honor. What, if anything, happened to the facilities at Hancock?

Hancock had a pretty good repair yard; not an actual shipbuilding yard like Grendlesbane got.

It was still a fleet base as of Echoes of Honor, when Minotaur went there to do the trials on the CLAC concept; providing a refit point and anchor for nodal reaction forces to cover Alizon, Zanzibar, Yorik, etc.

We don't seem to see it after Buttercup and the ceasefire. I suspect once Trevor's Star was taken, and then all the Peep systems captured during Buttercup, that it was so far behind the lines that it didn't receive much priority during the ceasefire. OTOH it doesn't seem to have drawn an attack during Thunderbolt, so it's probably still there as a somewhat outdated repair based with minor refit capabilities.

[quote="Jonathan_S"[Hancock had a pretty good repair yard; not an actual shipbuilding yard like Grendlesbane got.

It was still a fleet base as of Echoes of Honor, when Minotaur went there to do the trials on the CLAC concept; providing a refit point and anchor for nodal reaction forces to cover Alizon, Zanzibar, Yorik, etc.

We don't seem to see it after Buttercup and the ceasefire. I suspect once Trevor's Star was taken, and then all the Peep systems captured during Buttercup, that it was so far behind the lines that it didn't receive much priority during the ceasefire. OTOH it doesn't seem to have drawn an attack during Thunderbolt, so it's probably still there as a somewhat outdated repair based with minor refit capabilities.[/quote]

To me it seems like it had more than minor refit capabilities. As I alluded to, it replaced a fusion plant in what was (at the time) a state of the art BC. And I don't see why the RMN would not have continued to upgrade the facilities there. So my next question is, once the central yards in the home system got blown in the Oyster Bay sneak attack, why weren't the Hancock station facilities mentioned? Once Grendlesbane was blown, wasn't it one of the biggest fleet yards outside of Manticore?

Repair isn't construction. For example, a good body shop can fix up a car with a lot of damage if they can get the parts and can make some parts themselves, but you can't have expect them to build you a new car. If you are really patient and have a pile of money to buy all the parts and pay them for the outrageous amount of time it will take them they might be able to, but there is a reason people don't get their cars from body shops.

In the example they used a fusion reactor send from the manticore fabrication plants. Without that part on hand it's 'sucks to be you'.

Henry Brown wrote:To me it seems like it had more than minor refit capabilities. As I alluded to, it replaced a fusion plant in what was (at the time) a state of the art BC. And I don't see why the RMN would not have continued to upgrade the facilities there. So my next question is, once the central yards in the home system got blown in the Oyster Bay sneak attack, why weren't the Hancock station facilities mentioned? Once Grendlesbane was blown, wasn't it one of the biggest fleet yards outside of Manticore?

My guess is, because the front advanced away from Hancock very rapidly. And as soon as the RMN had control of Trevor's Star, they did not need fleet bases between Trevor's Star and the Manticore System as badly.

http://infodump.thefifthimperium.com/en ... gton/104/1

It's a long infodump, but one of the implications is that Hancock and Grendelsbane were both started as virtually identical fleet repair&refit facilities and Grendelbane ended up with more demands upon its capabilities which caused its growth into the large facility Admiral Higgins had to destroy. Both stations were founded as anchors for the northern and southern flanks of the Manticoran Alliance's frontier with Haven.

If White Haven hadn't taken Trevor's Star so quickly and Admiral Rollins hadn't screwed up so badly at Hancock and Seaford, Hancock might have been expanded further.

kzt wrote:Repair isn't construction. For example, a good body shop can fix up a car with a lot of damage if they can get the parts and can make some parts themselves, but you can't have expect them to build you a new car. If you are really patient and have a pile of money to buy all the parts and pay them for the outrageous amount of time it will take them they might be able to, but there is a reason people don't get their cars from body shops.

In the example they used a fusion reactor send from the manticore fabrication plants. Without that part on hand it's 'sucks to be you'.

But those yards would provide the thousands of trained technicians that the SEM oh so very desperately needs. That is if the Highridge government had not abandoned the base during the ceasefire... after all the war was over from their point of view and the allies were nothing but a bother.

Sigs wrote:

kzt wrote:Repair isn't construction. For example, a good body shop can fix up a car with a lot of damage if they can get the parts and can make some parts themselves, but you can't have expect them to build you a new car. If you are really patient and have a pile of money to buy all the parts and pay them for the outrageous amount of time it will take them they might be able to, but there is a reason people don't get their cars from body shops.

In the example they used a fusion reactor send from the manticore fabrication plants. Without that part on hand it's 'sucks to be you'.

But those yards would provide the thousands of trained technicians that the SEM oh so very desperately needs. That is if the Highridge government had not abandoned the base during the ceasefire... after all the war was over from their point of view and the allies were nothing but a bother.

Quote: MoH:
“The loss of life aboard the space stations themselves is currently estimated at five-point-four million,” the Home Secretary said levelly, looking back down at the pad. “That number includes only those we know were onboard at the time.

A few thousand workers at hancock station ammounts to less than 1% of the workers they lost. Although welcome, will not make a big difference.

Before the grand alliance, it was estimated that it would take 5-7 years for manticore to recover. With the grand alliance, haven's approximately 100 systems can each supply 10K-100K workers, and manticore can recover in just a couple of years.

darrell wrote:
Quote: MoH:
“The loss of life aboard the space stations themselves is currently estimated at five-point-four million,” the Home Secretary said levelly, looking back down at the pad. “That number includes only those we know were onboard at the time.

A few thousand workers at hancock station ammounts to less than 1% of the workers they lost. Although welcome, will not make a big difference.

Before the grand alliance, it was estimated that it would take 5-7 years for manticore to recover. With the grand alliance, haven's approximately 100 systems can each supply 10K-100K workers, and manticore can recover in just a couple of years.

That number is not all construction crews, those include everything and anything that have to do with stations that had both military and civilian applications.

Those 5.4 million people include everything needed to run the stations military and civilian applications plus their families.


This is similar to destroying a city with a naval shipyard, you might kill 5.4 million people but ultimately only a fraction of those people are directly related to the construction of the ships. So even though you lose 5.4 million people the actual construction staff is only a fraction of the population, the rest is there in a supporting fashion or completely unrelated to military construction.


If I remember correctly there were only about 340,000 ship yard workers out of that total thus getting 6,000-10,000 workers from Hancock might make a much bigger difference. And since both Zanzibar and Alizon have/had new shipyards and few if any of the manpower died during the attacks on the systems, Manticore can recall anyone on loan plus ask both nations to loan personnel to Manticore and Grayson because those people would be trained by Manticore, to Manticore's level.

David's economic numbers don't really work. Using any rational assumptions you find that the entire industrial economy of Manticore was somewhere between 30,000 and 120,000 people, which means 0.005% of the entire population was invoked in making anything. This includes every single consumer product (from door knobs to toilet paper to computer chips) as well as civilian vehicles as well as every piece of every RMN ship.

Then you have his statements about how you can't get more than 1% of the population in the military due to the economy. So don't think about it too long, that way lies madness.

Henry Brown wrote:
To me it seems like it had more than minor refit capabilities. As I alluded to, it replaced a fusion plant in what was (at the time) a state of the art BC. And I don't see why the RMN would not have continued to upgrade the facilities there. So my next question is, once the central yards in the home system got blown in the Oyster Bay sneak attack, why weren't the Hancock station facilities mentioned? Once Grendlesbane was blown, wasn't it one of the biggest fleet yards outside of Manticore?

I was using the terms the way the books appeared to. Repair is what they did when swapping Nike's fusion reactor. Refit is installing upgrades.

Hancock station could do pretty much any repair. It had a limited ability to upgrade (refit) ships compared to a real shipyard. And it basically never got upgraded to be able to handle construction.