Military to civilian ship conversion

cthia wrote:

The E wrote:
Unfortunately, Honorverse warships are not old, broken down cars that a couple mechanics can work on in their spare time.

I'm curious, does the US Navy do this? Hand old Cruisers, Destroyers or Carriers off to a bunch of weekend mechanics to do with as they please?

I don't know.

Neither do I think that the US Navy has or will ever have hundreds of captured warships that they don't know what the hell to do with either.

Nor do they have the need to have technicians and workers with mad mad skills, above and beyond the call of duty, either.

I'd imagine that the Navy of the Honorverse is quite a bit different in many ways.

*shrugs*

Bold mine.

Yeah, the Navy DOES know what to do with old/captured warships - they use them for boarding action training, and target practice. They even use them to test new weapons. Ever see the atomic bomb testing with the ships?

Pretty much EXACTLY the same thing that the captured Solly ships are good for, and what I've been saying all along.

MaxxQ wrote:Yeah, the Navy DOES know what to do with old/captured warships - they use them for boarding action training, and target practice. They even use them to test new weapons. Ever see the atomic bomb testing with the ships?

Pretty much EXACTLY the same thing that the captured Solly ships are good for, and what I've been saying all along.

I'm not sure if any major navy has put a captured or surrendered ship into their active service since the age of sail.

Temporarily in order to move it and study it's systems, or to steam it to a weapons test, yes - but actually put back into service in their own fleet? Not to my limited knowledge.


Even major upgrades to old warships were a mostly an aberration of the inter-war treaty system. The US Navy General Board notes are quite clear that refitting and upgrading the battleships gives you an inferior result for your money compared to building new -- but because of the treating imposed building holiday everyone reconstructed battleships as that was the only way to maximize effectiveness under the rules of the treaty. In the absence of treaty the USN at least would have much preferred to spend those same dollars building new clean-sheet designs; even if it meant having to scrap the earlier ships.

(Admittedly there were some significant aircraft carrier rebuilds / upgrades; especially to the Midway-class but also various "Phantom-izations", that were not driven by arms limitation treaties. Still those are more the exception than the rule)

cthia wrote:

The E wrote:
Unfortunately, Honorverse warships are not old, broken down cars that a couple mechanics can work on in their spare time.

I'm curious, does the US Navy do this? Hand old Cruisers, Destroyers or Carriers off to a bunch of weekend mechanics to do with as they please?

I don't know.

Neither do I think that the US Navy has or will ever have hundreds of captured warships that they don't know what the hell to do with either.

Nor do they have the need to have technicians and workers with mad mad skills, above and beyond the call of duty, either.

I'd imagine that the Navy of the Honorverse is quite a bit different in many ways.

*shrugs*

MaxxQ wrote:Bold mine.

Yeah, the Navy DOES know what to do with old/captured warships - they use them for boarding action training, and target practice. They even use them to test new weapons. Ever see the atomic bomb testing with the ships?

Pretty much EXACTLY the same thing that the captured Solly ships are good for, and what I've been saying all along.

Same here. I had the exact same recommendations on my very first and very few posts in one of the many "Captured Solly Ship" threads eons ago. Other than reclaiming the metal, that is.

To use as target practice and to hone the skills of the many "Guns." And as "troop storming" training.


Regardless, I don't see it as a complete parallel. Even the US navy would be hard pressed to handle thousands of captured ships. Where would we even put them? Of course, the difference herein is that we can't afford to ignore reclaiming the metal as we don't have asteroid mining facilities. And a planetary resource is a terrible thing to waste.

cthia wrote:

The E" quote="cthia wrote: By the way, I wonder if these workers and technicians can acquire one of these captured ships headed for the breakers and refit it to their own personal tastes on their own time with help from friends, just to scratch an itch of their own design which may later be incorporated -- a personal testbed of sorts.

Unfortunately, Honorverse warships are not old, broken down cars that a couple mechanics can work on in their spare time.

I'm curious, does the US Navy do this? Hand old Cruisers, Destroyers or Carriers off to a bunch of weekend mechanics to do with as they please?

I don't know.

Neither do I think that the US Navy has or will ever have hundreds of captured warships that they don't know what the hell to do with either.

Nor do they have the need to have technicians and workers with mad mad skills, above and beyond the call of duty, either.

I'd imagine that the Navy of the Honorverse is quite a bit different in many ways.

*shrugs*[/quote]


the last time the US Navy(beyond pirate skiffs) was WWII. In fact that one ship we captured still exist. FYI it was the U-505 now in a museum in Chicago IL.

I really think that we are missing the utility of being able to do it the hard way at least once. The hard way pushes your expertise.

Having an access to captured ships could be invaluable to the shipbuilding in some navies. They already have a structure in which they can test potential aberrations before discovering that they're only abortions before building. I can see the Havenites choosing to take on this type of surgery at least on a section of a prebuilt enemy ship if only as a platform to test some of their on-the-fly jury rigging. Which may turn out to be better to bore through battle steel than to build to that point.

Sonja may have been able to use several of them in the yards to help to quickly develop her grav lance. Just being able to try ideas on NOW. We're talking about the best of the best guys. These are the people working for Hemphill and Foraker.

Here is a simple way to look at it: I own a two door Ford F150 pick up truck. Bench seat meaning it can hold three people. I want to modify it to seat eight. Need to cut the rear of the cab off and extend the roof line to the rear of the bed. Remove the tailgate and replace with standard rear doors. Add at least one more side door for entry into the rear of the vehicle. Two more bench seats and the mounting assemblies for them. Seat belts. Probably want to route some A/C and lighting to the rear. Might have to move the access to put gas in the vehicle. Maybe a couple of speakers in the rear? Got to run wiring. Have to move ad wiring to move the third brake light from the cab to the back of the truck. Dozens of other little things I haven't thought of or mentioned. End product is a fabricated, uncomfortable, unreliable Ford E150 van. Even assuming the production costs are the same, the time cost would far outweigh just building the van from the ground up.

This doesn't even take into account the difference between industrial applications. Let's say you have an Indian Tata Xenon pick up you had acquired. How difficult would it be to retrofit it using American made parts and technology?

Of any captured enemy tech or vehicles, the most complete vehicles are studied and any valuable tech is reverse engineered. The unit in question is completely dissected to examine every part with no thought of returning it to usable condition. The rest are destroyed or scrapped and stripped of anything that might be useful, which would most likely be just the basest of materials, ie metal that could be melted and recast. Even that might not be worth the effort.

Forgot to mention the cost of training people to use foreign technology. Enlisted are trained to operate a very specific set of tools, learning to use something completely new is very time intensive.

In short, captured units are really only good for R&D. They have no material value. And retrofitting an existing vehicle for a completely different use is extremely inefficient and too costly.

As to the question of the value of learning to retrofit a vehicle just for the hands on experience? That is what the R&D geeks and engineers are for. They take a piece of technology and run it through the computers and figure out how many ways they can retool it for different purposes. Then they give the blueprints to the techs and they put it together. The engine, transmission, and drive train of an F150 P/U and and E150 Van are the same, but everything on top is different, except for some shared components. There is some value to cross-training but generally specialization is more efficient.

cthia wrote:I really think that we are missing the utility of being able to do it the hard way at least once. The hard way pushes your expertise.

But it also requires you to have the space available in your yards and the manpower to work on that ship. But when the Alliance is essentially fighting for it's life what are the chances that they can justify taking away an SD(P) slip just to train a few technicians on a captured SD.

cthia wrote:Having an access to captured ships could be invaluable to the shipbuilding in some navies. They already have a structure in which they can test potential aberrations before discovering that they're only abortions before building. I can see the Havenites choosing to take on this type of surgery at least on a section of a prebuilt enemy ship if only as a platform to test some of their on-the-fly jury rigging. Which may turn out to be better to bore through battle steel than to build to that point.

So you think they would send hundreds or thousands of technician on a side project that might just might give them better training when they are fighting for their life? I would prefer to have an extra SD(P) or a few extra lighter units than better trained yard workers and a total wreck at the end of the entire exercise.

If this was during peacetime and they had the capability and desire to waste time and money sure but as it is? Doubt it.

cthia wrote:Sonja may have been able to use several of them in the yards to help to quickly develop her grav lance. Just being able to try ideas on NOW. We're talking about the best of the best guys. These are the people working for Hemphill and Foraker.

And why would they need any of the captured ships? They can have a couple of DD's or CL's for practice, after all they have plenty of obsolete ships of their own.

Jonathan_S wrote:

MaxxQ wrote:Yeah, the Navy DOES know what to do with old/captured warships - they use them for boarding action training, and target practice. They even use them to test new weapons. Ever see the atomic bomb testing with the ships?

Pretty much EXACTLY the same thing that the captured Solly ships are good for, and what I've been saying all along.

I'm not sure if any major navy has put a captured or surrendered ship into their active service since the age of sail.

#GraysonSpaceNavy

Jonathan_S wrote:

MaxxQ wrote:Yeah, the Navy DOES know what to do with old/captured warships - they use them for boarding action training, and target practice. They even use them to test new weapons. Ever see the atomic bomb testing with the ships?

Pretty much EXACTLY the same thing that the captured Solly ships are good for, and what I've been saying all along.

I'm not sure if any major navy has put a captured or surrendered ship into their active service since the age of sail.

Didn't the British bomb much of the French fleet to prevent the Germans from taking the ships into service? If so what happened to any of the ships that survived and didn't join the Free French forces? For that matter what happened to the ships of other nations Germany overwhelmed that survived the invasions?

RedBaron wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:I'm not sure if any major navy has put a captured or surrendered ship into their active service since the age of sail.

#GraysonSpaceNavy

The GSN was not a "major navy" when they recommissioned "Manticore's Gift" and her sisters.

Also, at that point in the timeline, there wasn't a lot of difference between PRN, RMN, and SLN Superdreadnoughts -- the smaller, almost DN size of the Scientist and Vega classes of the SLN being the major difference.