Fate of Hancock station?

Don't know how accurate the Wiki is since some lingering descendants of Hitler's seem to be seeding it with disinformation. They haven't gotten the memo that that war is over. LOL

Yet, it gives credit for the size of Hancock Station to Mark Sarnow's efforts.

wiki wrote:Hancock Station was a large Royal Manticoran Navy military base in the Hancock System. In the initial period of the First Manticoran-Havenite War the forces assigned to it were responsible for the protection of the Zanzibar, Alizon, and Yorik systems.

History Edit

In the early 1904 PD, the station's expansion was undertaken by Commodore Mark Sarnow. Through Commodore Sarnow's supervision, the repair yards and other orbital facilities were completed ahead of schedule. Due his leadership, Sarnow was promoted to Rear Admiral and Admiral of the Green Sir Yancey Parks was placed in command of the station due to its much larger size.

The station was the object of the People's Navy's attempt to gain a quick, decisive victory against the Star Kingdom of Manticore. However, the RMN was able to defend the system and the station in the First Battle of Hancock. (HH3)

The system was once again attacked during the Havenite Operation Icarus in 1913 PD. The Second Battle of Hancock once again turned into a decisive Manticoran Alliance victory because of the fortuitous presence of Manticore's new secret LAC carrier, HMS Minotaur, and the incompetence of the Havenite acting commander, Rear Admiral Ron Porter.[1] (HH8, HH9)

Though I can't ascertain whether the Havenites sought it for some inherent strategic purpose or because of its size.


An aside:
I know the likelihood of this already being discussed is quite high, but Johnny Come Lately wonders if some bases and pickets are seriously drawn down since this is peace time? Or bases closed?

Jonathan_S wrote:

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.

Repair and refits are something just about any shipyard, of any size can handle in Honorverse. OBS Warlock was delayed returning to Basilisk by two weeks by opening her impeller rooms up to 'replace worn nodes', and tSVW a tincan's after impeller room was buttoned back up within two shifts to get Honor's Nike into the slip for survey. In both cases, they were regarded as mere routine work, nothing particularly special about them.

And Ashes of Victory showed that even repair ships can refit missile launchers onto Masadan mining ships. Deep space work, and with just the repair ship plus whatever crew on the mining ship, and it was less than two weeks to do. That's another pretty good indicator that either repair or refitting is casual.


however you're right, full up construction is definitely a whole other kettle. Repair ships can just about build anything they need, evidence from Warnecke's repair ship being mentioned "it could build entire new transmitters... eventually". So even a base like Hancock which I think had small, limited smelting capability could eventually bootstrap itself into a full up construction base, like Grendlesbane.

Somtaaw wrote:<snip>

however you're right, full up construction is definitely a whole other kettle. Repair ships can just about build anything they need, evidence from Warnecke's repair ship being mentioned "it could build entire new transmitters... eventually". So even a base like Hancock which I think had small, limited smelting capability could eventually bootstrap itself into a full up construction base, like Grendlesbane.

The best analogy of this is the number of custom car shows on TV in the US over the last few years. All these show shops which dismantle a car and rebuild it into something “better”, to a greater or lesser degree. Many of these shows rip the car down to the frame, which often requires repair, and they rebuild or replace the engine, suspension, fuel and and breaking systems, as well as car interiors and a new paint job. In extreme cases, they fabricate new parts or frame members out of sheet metal or tube steel.

However, the time they spend on this process is 10+ times that spent during original construction, and they only custom manufacture <10% of the car, if that – the rest is either parts of the original or parts purchased from other manufacturers. And the parts they do fabricate are made out of blanks or parts manufactured somewhere else. If on their own, they would need a raw materials manufacturer, and then it would take years to make all the parts for just one car.

A repair yard in the Honorverse is the same - they are set up to fabricate portions of the ship and fabricate/repair parts. However, they do this from stock manufactured in Manticore (or other places). If they were to build a new ship, it would take them multiple times what a construction yard would, and would require a source of raw blanks or parts.

Somtaaw wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote: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.

Repair and refits are something just about any shipyard, of any size can handle in Honorverse. OBS Warlock was delayed returning to Basilisk by two weeks by opening her impeller rooms up to 'replace worn nodes', and tSVW a tincan's after impeller room was buttoned back up within two shifts to get Honor's Nike into the slip for survey. In both cases, they were regarded as mere routine work, nothing particularly special about them.

And Ashes of Victory showed that even repair ships can refit missile launchers onto Masadan mining ships. Deep space work, and with just the repair ship plus whatever crew on the mining ship, and it was less than two weeks to do. That's another pretty good indicator that either repair or refitting is casual.


however you're right, full up construction is definitely a whole other kettle. Repair ships can just about build anything they need, evidence from Warnecke's repair ship being mentioned "it could build entire new transmitters... eventually". So even a base like Hancock which I think had small, limited smelting capability could eventually bootstrap itself into a full up construction base, like Grendlesbane.

Good point - though refitting missile launchers into a unarmored mostly empty shell of a mining ship is probably significantly easier than most of the upgrades done to warships. The limitations on refit are (I presume) mostly a matter of supply chain, manpower, and tying up slips.

A repair base presumably doesn't have the production lines to churn out significant numbers of the latest components to do major midlife overhauls of ships. And while you could ship those components forward from the factories that support one of your major shipyards, for most refits you're better off just sending the ship back to the yards instead. (Like retrofitting a bow wall onto an older ship apparently requires replacing/rebuilding the forward impeller rooms and nodes; and just doing an overhaul, not upgrade, of Warlock's forward Warshawski tuners took about 7 weeks back in OBS)

Also a repair base presumably isn't staffed or sized for routine major (and lengthy) overhauls - and some of the upgrades could have a ship opened up and tying up many of your skilled repair workers for many months. (Even swapping the fusion reactor on Nike took almost 2 months - and if it'd been faster (including round trip) to send her back to the main yards they'd have done that)

And while you could presumably pull the workers off the refit to work on damaged ships with only a relatively minor delay you can't recover the slip as easily. And a repair base probably doesn't have an overabundance of hard slips with all their supporting equipment. You wouldn't want to lose one of them to a half year upgrade in case you got a rash of damaged ships in.


As it is I suspect that if a significant number of ships come in with significant damage they triage and do some bandaid repairs just to get some safe enough to move back to a main yard that has the infrastructure to tie up in a major repair.



So in a longwinded way I'm basically agreeing with you. Yes, the repair workers probably have the skills (if not necessarily the practice main yard workers might get if they serially upgraded multiple members of the same ship class) to do even a major refit/upgrade if the necessary materials could be supplied. But they probably usually don't because it's a misuse of a forward repair base.

kzt wrote: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.

And the 1% of late 1st war Manticore is way, way more than anyone else in the Honorverse except Grayson. Despite prolong that's been around for way too little time for anyone with prolong to be physically old, but long enough for almost anyone without it to die of old age. And a society with essentially no sexism. And a medical establishment that can completely cure or repair just about anything that's not immediately fatal.

As a possible comparison, let's look at Pearl Harbor in WW II -- the shipyard there couldn't really _build_ major ships or weapons system (no armor plate factories, no arsenals for building battleship guns, no way to make turbine reduction gears), but they could roll and shape steel plate, meaning they _could_ do just about everything else given time. They built bows for cruisers, did major patch jobs, etc.

Big refits, and new ship construction, were carried out in the continental US, but Pearl could do just about everything else, and often did. In a world where it takes many weeks for ships to go from Manticore to necessary positions, instead of the week or three it took ships in our world, fleet bases would probably have to be even more capable and self-reliant.

Hancock Station got stolen and carried off by a band of Javas who snuck in after nightfall and cut it to pieces when no one was looking.

Theemile wrote:

Somtaaw wrote:<snip>

however you're right, full up construction is definitely a whole other kettle. Repair ships can just about build anything they need, evidence from Warnecke's repair ship being mentioned "it could build entire new transmitters... eventually". So even a base like Hancock which I think had small, limited smelting capability could eventually bootstrap itself into a full up construction base, like Grendlesbane.

A repair yard in the Honorverse is the same - they are set up to fabricate portions of the ship and fabricate/repair parts. However, they do this from stock manufactured in Manticore (or other places). If they were to build a new ship, it would take them multiple times what a construction yard would, and would require a source of raw blanks or parts.

Unfortunately, even the 'real' construction yards don't build their own components on-site. They get shipments from other manufacturers, and then really only do final assembly and fine-tuning. Which is ultimately something every single repair & refit yard can also do.

Both 'construction' and 'repair' yards, at least in the Manticoran versions, use formal slips for the majority of work. Grendlesbane, as an example for a full up construction yard had multiple smelters, refineries and other miscellaneous 'construction' paraphernalia buildings which were nuked during the raid. However, even there, they must have relied on additional shipments from Manticore to help manufacture, because one of the ways High Ridge/Janacek reduced naval expenses was by shutting down and putting everything into controlled storage.

Also, on the Solarian side, we saw it as the Laocoon's were activating the one Manticoran speaking to the Solarian, can't recall which system, and she had megatons upon megatons of armor plates due for delivery on the other side of the League. And armor plates are arguably one of the easier things to form 'on site' as opposed to something like say molycirc electronics which require vastly higher precision during construction. Granted, that might just have been exported as an industry, for that systems profits, but it definitely shows that even construction yards 'order out'.


So when it boils down to it, a yard is really a yard. If you start off with a simple and basic repair yard, but you're willing to throw a little extra money at it, you can upgrade it's capabilities into full up construction, limited only by the size of the slips you choose to build. Grendlesbane had full superdreadnought size slips in addition to much more numerous cruiser size slips. Yorik and Alizon had construction yards that were capable only of cruisers, and Blackbird could build anything & everything. Seaford Nine was primarily the Havenite equivilant of Hancock and immediately pre-Buttercup when it was retaken during the McQueen offensives, a Manticoran defender had noted that Manticore could have brought in tech teams and 'modernized' Seaford Nine, but it wasn't cost-effective to turn it into a mini-Grendlesbane.

If I had to hazard a guess -- aka this is just my "not RFC but an authorial type" opinion-- Hancock is still operational and vital to it's "service area". Otherwise Allied ships in the area of Alizon, Yorik, Zanzibar, etc. really don't have much of a place to go for overhaul and refit currently. After Oyster Bay it would be even more important; realistically where else are many of the Grayson, RMN, and other ships going to be refit and re-armed? Yes, Trevor's star, but it's a LOT easier to resupply the base as a strong nodal position.

In fact I wouldn't be surprised if Hancock isn't really well defended with sysem defense pods and a huge sensor array left over from the Peep and early RN years before the Grand Alliance formed. There's no reason to deconstruct the base or that array; the skilled workers there can do more to train up-and-comers needing the skills "in place" than anywhere else.

Thoughts?

SharkHunter wrote:If I had to hazard a guess -- aka this is just my "not RFC but an authorial type" opinion-- Hancock is still operational and vital to it's "service area". Otherwise Allied ships in the area of Alizon, Yorik, Zanzibar, etc. really don't have much of a place to go for overhaul and refit currently. After Oyster Bay it would be even more important; realistically where else are many of the Grayson, RMN, and other ships going to be refit and re-armed? Yes, Trevor's star, but it's a LOT easier to resupply the base as a strong nodal position.

In fact I wouldn't be surprised if Hancock isn't really well defended with sysem defense pods and a huge sensor array left over from the Peep and early RN years before the Grand Alliance formed. There's no reason to deconstruct the base or that array; the skilled workers there can do more to train up-and-comers needing the skills "in place" than anywhere else.

Thoughts?

Really depends how much raw fabrication capability Hancock has and how much it relied on a warehouse of spares topped up by semi-regular shipments from the home system. More of the latter than the former and Hancock will run dry eventually.

Grendelsbane was, I think, less out-of-the-way for traffic between Manticore and Trevor's Star not using the Junction than Hancock was(they avoided using the Junction because of Peep spies), so it ended up being developed as the main halfway base.