Lord Skimper wrote:It sure appears from the cutaway drawings that Mk13 missiles are pretty much the same dimensions of the Mk16. Refitting to fire Mk16's shouldn't be such a big deal, from the missile tube impossible to cut through armour point of view. Internal refits will be gutted and replaced but then that is what a refit is.
Except we have text evidence that says that such an operation is neither simple nor cheap. I would also point out that your notional design somehow manages to pack in 40% more missiles and better armor than an Invictus while being 1.7 Mt lighter without explanation. One of those numbers is unattainable, which one is it?
Dispersed yards are built around parked ships. No big deal here.
Noone said dispersed yards were hard. Anyone with a working space-based infrastructure can build them. But it takes a lot more than that to actually make them useful, namely a support infrastructure building parts and refining materials and work crews capable of putting it all together, none of which Silesia can provide given what we know of them. It took the Graysons years to get to a point where they were able to launch SDs, and that was with a population base that included an abnormally high number of people trained to do work in space.
Even Graysons could do this. As for people who think that the technical data no longer exists nor that the refineries or part making facilities where on the stations well we will just point out they don't know what a dispersed yard is.
Come on. Dispersed yards do not build impeller nodes, fire control suites, launcher assemblies, fusion reactors, keyhole bays, keyhole platforms, computer systems, environmental systems, or any of the multitude of parts a combat vessel needs. They're just places to put all those assemblies into a ship-like shape and apply armor, and in case you haven't noticed, all those parts are not in large supply right now. Even if they were, they'd be better utilized building actually usable ships instead of Skimper realitybenders.
EDIT:
The big problem which you consistently ignore is that, in order to do this "refit", you would need to ferry all the mothballed ships to Silesia, send a bunch of instructors and quality control guys over to oversee the construction, and then organize ways and means of getting the parts manufactured, and ALL of that while the SEM has not regained the infrastructure that they had back when they helped bootstrap Grayson.