SLN Reserve

munroburton wrote:It is useless. I believe the Reserve is only so large because it costs resources to actually disassemble and scrap old vessels.

Not to mention that if you scrap or sell or just demobilize a Reserve ship, you can't collect the Payroll for the Reserve Crew (which only exists on paper) to pad your bank account.

The large size of the SLN reserve is almost entirely due to the opportunity it presents for corruption.

munroburton wrote:It is useless. I believe the Reserve is only so large because it costs resources to actually disassemble and scrap old vessels.

It ties up a yard slip. It consumes millions of labour man-hours and all the supporting operational resources that entails. Even if recycling efficiency is high, scrapping Honorverse starships is an economically negative activity.

Whereas a long-term parking orbit is effectively free. The thing about space? There's a lot of it.

That is usually why just sell such ships at a bargain scrap price to business that do the cutting up and reclaiming of materials and equipment rather then do it themselves.

A few questions.

How much of the reserve fleet is actually there compared to what it should be on paper?

How much of the reserve fleet is actually in the condition it supposed to be on paper?

If they actually ever did an audit how much of the SLN budget is being skimmed off and pocketed by various parties?

Weird Harold wrote:Not to mention that if you scrap or sell or just demobilize a Reserve ship, you can't collect the Payroll for the Reserve Crew (which only exists on paper) to pad your bank account.

The large size of the SLN reserve is almost entirely due to the opportunity it presents for corruption.

pnakasone wrote:That is usually why just sell such ships at a bargain scrap price to business that do the cutting up and reclaiming of materials and equipment rather then do it themselves.

A few questions.

How much of the reserve fleet is actually there compared to what it should be on paper?

How much of the reserve fleet is actually in the condition it supposed to be on paper?

If they actually ever did an audit how much of the SLN budget is being skimmed off and pocketed by various parties?

I doubt the sort of thing that went on in the Silesian Navy is replicated in the SLN to the same degree. Even in the Confederacy, only one Governor was so corrupt he claimed the costs of non-existent ships and their crews.

The presence of ex-SLN heavy cruisers at Tiberian and battlecruisers at Monica and Torch were presented as unprecedented. No one had heard of the SLN allowing such powerful hardware to be sold off.

Most of the SLN's corruption has to be tied up in the military-industrial complex - in the close ties between BF flag officers and corporations such as Technodyne.

Field of Dishonor told us that an ex-Havenite dreadnought was valued at around 32 billion dollars. The SLN has built ten thousand wallers in the last three or four centuries.

That's where the money is. Flag officers in charge of BF procurement control an immense fortune, to be handed out as they regard fit, without any budgetary battles in the Assembly to worry about.

munroburton wrote:The presence of ex-SLN heavy cruisers at Tiberian and battlecruisers at Monica and Torch were presented as unprecedented. No one had heard of the SLN allowing such powerful hardware to be sold off.

A different explanation could be that was the first time some one caught them at it.

pnakasone wrote:

munroburton wrote:The presence of ex-SLN heavy cruisers at Tiberian and battlecruisers at Monica and Torch were presented as unprecedented. No one had heard of the SLN allowing such powerful hardware to be sold off.

A different explanation could be that was the first time some one caught them at it.

David has mentioned on a couple occasions that they are all there and intact ( no one has gutted them and sold off the parts.) It's just the money sent to maintain and upgrade the ship's which has been mispent (it's amazing how many fusion plants a mothballed ship can go through every decade), as well as being a place to keep spare command crews and admiralty staffs. While there are command staffs for each ship, each ship doesn't have a crew. I don't believe the officers each have more than a handful of staffers to push paperwork for the ship they never visit.

One thing the reserve does is strongly discourage any attempts to plan for a fight against the League. The reserve is a physical symbol of the impossibility of any medium or long term success against the League. It doesn't matter if an aggressor could beat Frontier Fleet or even Battle Fleet because sooner or later there would be thousands of SDs coming down on them. If the League had to build the ships first,* it would be a lot easier for a megalomaniac to convince himself that he could arrange a peace before doom arrived.

*That would likely mean building the shipyards first for any real quantity of new construction. The League is probably set up to build a few SD at a time just to keep their hand in, but nowhere near enough to seriously expand the fleet.

pnakasone wrote:

munroburton wrote:The presence of ex-SLN heavy cruisers at Tiberian and battlecruisers at Monica and Torch were presented as unprecedented. No one had heard of the SLN allowing such powerful hardware to be sold off.

A different explanation could be that was the first time some one caught them at it.

Possible, but I would argue that if malfeasence was really so widespread and deep in the SLN, then various intelligence services would have picked up on it and the interstellar warship market(which isn't exactly a boom industry) would see quite a lot of third and fourth-hand ex-Solarian ships, thus it wouldn't have been such a surprise.

And whilst the GA and associated powers' investigations didn't turn it up in all cases, in every one of the three instances above, the original supplier was Technodyne(not the SLN), acting on behalf of the Mesan Alignment, via Manpower. Being fingered for Monica alone was enough to force an investigation of Technodyne and several rounds of indictments.

munroburton wrote:Possible, but I would argue that if malfeasence was really so widespread and deep in the SLN, then various intelligence services would have picked up on it and the interstellar warship market(which isn't exactly a boom industry) would see quite a lot of third and fourth-hand ex-Solarian ships, thus it wouldn't have been such a surprise.

And whilst the GA and associated powers' investigations didn't turn it up in all cases, in every one of the three instances above, the original supplier was Technodyne(not the SLN), acting on behalf of the Mesan Alignment, via Manpower. Being fingered for Monica alone was enough to force an investigation of Technodyne and several rounds of indictments.

I got the impression that there are a lot of parts of league warships floating around on the grey/black market, but that entire operable hyper warships was order of magnitude more than had been seen previously. i.e. you may have been able to get all the parts for a SL DD, but those parts would have come from different ships and a lot of final assembly would be required.

Theemile wrote:
Given 10 years, the SLN could have doubled the size of the active fleet, and readied another few hundred for quick activation, with cadre crew already assigned, and be readying more for fleet replacements as other ships are killed.

And that would still leave 3/4 of the reserve as a resource sinkhole. In those same 10 years, they could have build 1,000 to 1,500 SDs...all brand spanking new ships. No matter how you slice it, the reserve makes no sense from anyone's point of view even that of the corrupt SLN.

Theemile wrote:But, that requires time to increase budgets and staffing levels. Time, the SLN would have had if they were paying attention. In 1905, Haven had ~900 wallers and BBs, The RMN had ~300 wallers, and the IAN probably had ~200. When you throw in fortification and other fixed defenses, the active SLN couldn't take on 2 empires if they got together. (the RMN had ~150 forts at the planets and junction, each with ~3 SDs of combat power on average, plus minefields and independant weapons plarforms. Assuming tech parity and given that a Scientist is essentially a DN, with 3/4ths of an SDs combat power, Just the forts and wallers of the RMN could have accounted for 1/2 the active SLN wall.)

Yeah but then the SLN would have plenty of time to build up it's fleet. Forts are a defensive weapon, they can be in only one place at any one time and their movement is severely limited.


In a defensive war from the point of view of the SLN in 1905, any alliance between Manticore and haven would still represent about at most 45% of their mobile firepower. No one would go and start a fight with the big bad SLN and count their forts as part of their fleet. In 1905, the active RMN wall converted to DN strength would amount to just over 16% of the SLNs active wall. The PN would account to about 29%. In this case, the size of the League is in their favour, because they can trade space for time.

That policy mirrors the two power standard of the Royal Navy except taken to an extreme of being stronger then all the other navies in existence.

Theemile wrote:Someone should have noticed this and started expanding the active wall before 1900, so they could continue to be able to crush anyone with the weight of their numbers. But no one did, now they are faced with the need for a crash mobilization, which they are unprepared for.

If they were technologically equal, the 2300 SDs of the SLN would be able to match up against the GA even if we use 1920 fleet strength and the Alliance was composed of the Andies, Grayson, Manticore and Haven.

The SLN still has more ships than the next 4 most powerful fleets in existence and no one in the galaxy could have foreseen an alliance between Grayson, Manticore, Haven and the Andies(secretly). Hell they(The GA) couldn't have foreseen it 6 months before it happened.

pnakasone wrote:

Theemile wrote:Someone should have noticed this and started expanding the active wall before 1900, so they could continue to be able to crush anyone with the weight of their numbers. But no one did, now they are faced with the need for a crash mobilization, which they are unprepared for.

Why bother paying attention to what everyone else is doing. When to do so would be a waste of time and money because it is absolutely written in stone fact that the SLN is and always will be the greatest most powerful and technically advanced fleet in human space.

And up to about 1900 they were right... even if they were slightly behind technologically than the newest RMN ship they still had the numbers to offset any advantage that the RMN had technologically in 1900-1905.