Yes you are right. I makes more sense to put the new promotions into reactivated ships than to modify the SDs. Mind you they would still be obsolete and i still think a new role should be looked. I don´t know any hard numbers about how big is the mothballed fleet but if its big enough it would be the best move.
Regarding the Scientis class you make it sound like they are rafts. They were regarded as a good design by the start of the First Havenite War, and at some point (long in the past admittedly) the SLN was superior technologically.
But what about the associated powers that dont have the luxury of huge mothballed fleets? Like Grayson, Alizon, San Martin, Erewhon or Zanzibar? Are all their trainees going to serve in reactivated RMN ships?
However, from the latest book, the RMN is scrambling to fill all the existing ship slots. Many ships in Home Fleet or which were working up in Manticore space proper lost crew members when the stations blew, even if the ships survived (and vice versa when the crews were on planetary leave.) As of August 1922, there are not many spare crewmembers floating around, and many ships have been deployed understaffed. So the RMN will have to train a whole new class of recruits, (~18 months) before it has a surplus of sailors.
You are not counting on the promotions currently training, which won´t take 18 months.
As for the workforce, Weyland's survivors and Grendlesbane's survivors are needed to rebuild the stations and support the current fleet. Since the fleet repair stations in Manticore and Grayson space are no longer available, the other stations like Hancock, Trevor's star and Basilisk have had to take over the workload for both the navies. Moving available idle specialists and available working hardware to those locations until the Manticore stations are ready would have been already accomplished.
Since the Manty stations were so massive and supported not only the RMN but also the 10-40,000 ship Manticorian Merchant Marine, every friendly shipyard is most likely either repairing an alliance ship, repairing a ship displaced by an alliance ship, or building a tool or module of some kind for the Manticore and Grayson rebuild (either directly or indirectly). At any time before 1926, I fear it would be difficult to find a shipyard or building asset idle for any period of time in Havenite Sector space. So there should be no workforce or shipyard, "just lying idle" in RMN space with nothing better to do than upgrade an SLN SD to an upgraded config that would still get trounced by the ships the RMN is purposely leaving in mothballs due to their obsolence.
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Weren´t those survivors in their way to Bolthole?
Again, all Grayson orbital capacity is intact.
Sometimes separating arguments from different perspectives gets really confusing. Some posts ago it was impossible to do or the capacity didnt exist.
If i´m reading you correctly, all capacity on any shipyard or station capable of doing it is going to be busy. Even with the use of civilian facilities turned to military production, and the inability to laydown major building, they are all going to be doing something else.
But yes i concede your point. If the modifications were to be advantageous, it would make more sense to try them on reactivated RMN units. It would only make sense to do them for those Navies that don´t have the option and would have the industrial capacity. Those powers generally lack the capacity to build their own SDs at least actually (like Grayson or Zanzibar, for example). Mind you they wouldn´t be a waste still.
Once Honor and Hauptman invested in building the initial core for the Blackbird Yard, it became a natural magnet and most of the advanced "heavy industry" of the star system moved out to Blackbird. Therefore, when Blackbird got hammered, so did most of Grayson's military industrial complex. They have a little bit more left closer to Grayson that may be convertible to military purposes, but the combined total capacity of Grayson's close planetary industry probably doesn't exceed what's already available to the Star Empire from its own mobile repair and support ships.
Well it can´t help the rebuild in Manticore, and it has a long way to go to replace its capacity. Most of their production must be dedicated to recover their shipyards, so any modification would be a sideproject. If they can at all. Point taken.
Edit: Thanks for the quote![/quote]
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The Weyland R&D team is on the way to Bolthole. The ~2 million man workforce (military and civilian) has never been mentioned, other than they survived.
As I mentioned,there are massive holes in the current command structure, due to losses at Oyster Bay, most of the promotions and trainees currently in the pipeline will probably be required just to fill existing shortfalls, replace loses, and man the new infrastructure as it is built. Anyone entering the pipeline now will require at least 18 months ( officers 36) of training.
We're actually not certain of the exact #s of surviving RMN/Grayson wallers, Primarily because we don't know the all the battles of the 2nd war and their loses and the number of ships at the stations when they were destroyed at Oyster Bay. In addition, while some SDs had been reactivated, then placed back into mothballs to free crews for the new construction, we do not know how many are still in use, only many were placed back in the reserve, and the ~50 DNs (all larger, more capable and tougher than a Scientist SD) never made it out of the reserve.
However, according to the March 1920 fleet list, 225 SDs survived in the RMN and 90 in the GSN. While the Fleet list says only 6 DNs remained in RMN service, House of Steel (dated ~May 1st 1920) says the remaining DNs were older Gladiators, and the remaining Gladiator and Bellerophon DNs (72 ships originally built) remained in mothballs. We know 7 SDs were lost at Zanzibar and 48 were lost at Manticore (some of which were IAN SDs), but potentially ~300 modern RMN/GSN tube wallers are still in use or in mothballs.
AS for the Scientist class, a little explanation is necessary.
The SLN Scientist was not the crème of the crop in 1900. They were essentially the pattern for the RMN Manticore class, built in the mid 1700s, and updates kept them viable through ~1900. However, weapons tech and more important, tactics, started changing in ~1860 with the advent of the laser head, and the SLN was one of the last militaries to adopt it (The RMN was the 2nd adaptor). More importantly, the SLN never adapted it's ships to the fact that the missile had just become the predominant weapons system, and changed it's ships and tactics to match.
Prior to the Laser head, the missile dual was the prelude to the real fight. Missiles had 2 settings, Burn and Boom. They could either attempt to use their contact nuke warhead (emphasis CONTACT) to "burn" and overload the sidewalls of the target by exploding next to them and overloading the generators, or they could attempt to penetrate the sidewalls in the "Boom" setting, using gravity generators to harmonize a hole through the sidewalls and deliver their Contact nuke to explode against the surface of the target.
Originally defended by chemical and e-rail fired machine guns, then counter missiles and finally laser clusters, the chances of a missile hitting it's target against an equal foe, fell to under 5%. The use of Machine guns fell as missile speeds went up and engagement periods shrank.
However, the missile dual weakened the opponent and gave a feel for the ECM of opponent, while weakening the ECM and hampering the defenses of the target for the energy dual to follow. While rarely decisive, many battles would end prematurely, as one wall rolled wedges towards the enemy and disengaged after a disproportionate amount of damage was done.
The importance of weakening the sidewalls and ECM was they hid the true location of the enemy - a ship does not need to be in the center of the wedge, the ship can be loosely bound to it and sit in a suboptimal position for acceleration, but one outside the place he is expected to be, so the oppositions' poorly aimed lasers just fly past him.
The Energy battle was the slugging match, as the 2 walls slid to ~500,000 kilometers of each other (ships without sidewalls were vulnerable at 1 million KM) and bashed each other. Each ship carried dozens of energy weapons, of varied sizes, to bracket the optimal area a target could be in to increase the probability of a hit. The supposed rule was that capital ships of the same tech each could have the same amount of armor and weapons per ton, so if your ships were small (like DNs), you just brought more to soak up the fire and deal out more damage. So theoretically, in 1860 the Scientists were still a dangerous beast despite larger opponents, especially since the SLN could bring more ships to bear than anyone else could, and just crush the opponent with the weight of numbers.
This had been the manner of warfare for years, with one technology slightly disturbing the trend one way or another.
Laserheads changed all this. Suddenly missiles are exploding 20-50,000 kilometers for a ship and hitting almost every time, forcing intercepts not 10s of kilometers from the sidewalls, but hundreds of thousands of kilometers from the ships - Effectively killing the use of autocannon whose ranges measured in mere 100s of kilometers. In addition, the nuclear pumped Laserheads are a different frequency range than shipborne lasers and grasers, causing the armoring techniques previously useful against nukes, lasers and grasers to be almost useless against their hits.
The RMN had actually sacrificed ships of the Thorston and Manticore classes in the 1870s-1900s to see what a laserhead would do to a capital ship and how to protect against it. The subsequent classes reflected this change and the new armoring techniques required to protect against this threat. However, the mainstream RMN tactical leadership was still entrenched in the "classical" style of warfare in 1900 and just adjusted their battle to have better missile duals, followed by the close in energy battle - little knowing the laser head had the potential be decisive all on it's own and to all but eliminate the follow on energy battle. So at this point, in the mindset and thoughts of the Leadership of the RMN, ships like the Scientist and it's energy focused doctrine were still considered dangerous opponents, even though they had unknowingly become paper tigers. This mindset changed during the 1st Havenite war, as battles showed the danger of the laserhead, and the focus moved away from the energy dual.
The SLN on the other hand, not wanting to tip the apple cart, never investigated the implications of the laserhead, or just ignored reports of them, and eventually added the laserhead to their inventory, because every other major navy already had them. They never learned anything else, and have never changed their mindset. The ships they use today are little changed from how they looked in 1850 (and most of them were there in 1850), and their doctrine is still the same - just bring in the wall of battle and crush them with numbers.
So, they are still lording over the equivalent of 10,500 WWII built Sherman tanks, using WWII field manuals, and trying to use them effectively against Post-modern NATO armies. They might have been effective in the 1960s, but in this fight, they are almost worthless.[/quote]
Yes as I cited earlier as of
p 683 SoV Hadn't the same basic design and combat philosphy applied for over a hundred and fifty years? Of course it has!
.
Yes it was
modern technology and ahead of Haven's at the time of OBS. But Haven Grayson, Manticore, The Anderman Empire, and the Maya sector of the SL have moved way beyond that. Not to mention Darius and the rest of the RF.
Ephron Vangelis had had his doubts about certain of those comforting assumptions even before the Solaran league started figuring how much
updating
any ship expected to live in combat with a Manty was likely to need
Helas,chou, Je m'en fache.
], and use one simplifying assumption - because I'm too lazy to break out the integral table - on how to calculate the volume concerned, you should find that you need to cover about 5% of the volume around the ship out to 50,000km. Which 5%, of course, depends on how the ship is maneuvering, but only 5%. Mind you, since missiles can enter that volume from anywhere on its perimeter outside the wedge, you have to cover all of it, continously.