SLN Reserve

Weird Harold wrote:
You're confusing "The Plan" with the corrupt reality.

The reserve as planned is viable. If the Reserve actually had the cadre crews and routine maintenance and upgrades the SLN has paid (is paying) for over the last couple of centuries, they'd be in reasonably good shape as far as a ready reserve.

We have no idea what the reserve was meant to be... it could have been a reserve with a few hundred SD's that were kept up to date like the active fleet and had reserve crews or it could have been mothball of a few hundred SD's kept just in case for a decade or two and then disposed off.

Weird Harold wrote:The reality is that all of the payroll and maintenance budget has gone into the pockets of corrupt reserve admirals and administrators.

I doubt that the SLN is quite that corrupt.

Weird Harold wrote:The other item you're overlooking -- and the real flaw in the SLN reserve -- is that the SLN froze its SD design with the Scientist-class with only a token improvement in the Vega-class rather than the constant, incremental improvement of the type. All of the R&D and incremental improvements has gone to the BCs and below for Frontier Fleet.

And up until the 1900s it would not have been a major problem. Necessity is the mother of all innovation, the SLN had 2300 SDs that up until a couple of decades before the war would have been equal to any of the combatants if not better... hell up until 1910 they were still behind but made up for it with sheer numbers.

Weird Harold wrote:I doubt that the Reserve was planned to ballon up to 8,000 ships, but scrapping the oldest when new construction is added would cut into the budget for mistresses and lavish entertainments the Reserve Admirals deserve. The size of the Reserve is the result of the corrupt reality instead of the rational, if overly conservative, plan for a functional reserve.

Or the size of the reserve is laziness and stupidity, someone most likely an idiot assumes that war fighting technology has reached a maximum and those ships would be good for a long time.

It might just be one of those things that was always done and kept being done simply because everyone was too lazy to do something about it.

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 costs resources to maintain the reserve as well, so the one time fee of scrapping an SD might be high, but keeping an SD in the reserve for 200 years would cost a lot more than the scrapping value of the ship. Besides, if the cost was a major concern use it as target practice or fly it into the nearest star. Hell be a job creator, contract a few systems to scrap x number of SDs a year and let them keep the resources they might even help with the cost.

munroburton wrote: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.

Like I said above, fly it into the nearest star... its free and I doubt you would hurt the star in question.

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

It wont be free, you cant just pick a random system to dump your reserve in, there likely is a major base in the vicinity that would be responsible for maintenance and security of the ships. Leaving SD's unprotected is asking for them to be stolen, or in case of war captured easily or destroyed outright.

Weird Harold wrote:

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.

I figure someone will notice that 80% of the manpower of the SLN doesn't exist if that was the case. If the SDs in the active fleet are manned by 10-12 million people, then there should be 40-48 million reservists. If you had 48 million on paper and only 45 in reality I would buy that, but having 48 million on paper and no one in reality seems to be a little extreme. I mean at some point the systems where the "reservists" live would start asking questions.

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.

If it was that wide spread they would have been caught many more times.

noblehunter wrote: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.

Yeah but any warlord worth the name would attack the reserve first if it was a threat. Attacking the reserve while it is defenceless, or capturing it kind of gives the other side the advantage.

Sigs wrote:

Weird Harold wrote:
You're confusing "The Plan" with the corrupt reality.

I doubt that the SLN is quite that corrupt.

Textev and word of Weber strongly imply that they are -- especially Battle Fleet. Byng, Crandall, Filareta, and Rajampet weren't all that far out of the norm.

FWIW, I don't think the SLN is much more corrupt than the rest of the League government, from the Mandarins on down.

I suspect there are no ongoing maintenance costs. When a vessel arrives in the SLN Reserve, it could then go a whole century without someone even setting a foot aboard. Drained of fuel, air, water, most consumables. Filled with nitrogen atmosphere.

All it might require is the occasional orbital correction - an utterly trivial cost for a civilisation with the space-going capability of the League.

The only time additional resources are spent is whenever they're hauled out of the reserve for their t-century refits.

The SLN have to set up fleet bases for their active forces anyway. The Reserve depots are likely parked very close to those. For example, the Hyperion yards based at Mars might also provide security for reserves parked around Phobos or Deimos.

Why should they simply throw the ships away? Even scrapping is more cost-effective than that. What I said is that scrapping will never ever recover the full cost of the construction costs for the ship. This, in conjunction with the hypothesis that they probably don't spend a single dollar on a ship during its stay in the reserve(regardless of the material loss this might incur), means they don't have a great deal of motivation to scrap ships at all.

The Marines who boarded Crandall's fleet were not impressed with the quality of maintenance. Those were their fully manned first-line active units. I'm almost certain at least two thirds of the reserve are paralysed junk, similar to most of the RMN's battlecruisers when the Volsungs paid Manticore a visit.

munroburton wrote:I suspect there are no ongoing maintenance costs. When a vessel arrives in the SLN Reserve, it could then go a whole century without someone even setting a foot aboard. Drained of fuel, air, water, most consumables. Filled with nitrogen atmosphere.

Are you talking reality or budget line items?

You're probably correct from a reality standpoint, but from a budget line item standpoint, there is routine maintenance checks, cadre payroll, command and staff payrolls, and probably a couple more line items for the SLN budget that the League Assembly will authorize. The ships will see only a very small percentage of what's authorized, but that's the difference between reality and "The Plan."

munroburton wrote:I suspect there are no ongoing maintenance costs. When a vessel arrives in the SLN Reserve, it could then go a whole century without someone even setting a foot aboard. Drained of fuel, air, water, most consumables. Filled with nitrogen atmosphere.

All it might require is the occasional orbital correction - an utterly trivial cost for a civilisation with the space-going capability of the League.

The only time additional resources are spent is whenever they're hauled out of the reserve for their t-century refits.

The SLN have to set up fleet bases for their active forces anyway. The Reserve depots are likely parked very close to those. For example, the Hyperion yards based at Mars might also provide security for reserves parked around Phobos or Deimos.

Why should they simply throw the ships away? Even scrapping is more cost-effective than that. What I said is that scrapping will never ever recover the full cost of the construction costs for the ship. This, in conjunction with the hypothesis that they probably don't spend a single dollar on a ship during its stay in the reserve(regardless of the material loss this might incur), means they don't have a great deal of motivation to scrap ships at all.

The Marines who boarded Crandall's fleet were not impressed with the quality of maintenance. Those were their fully manned first-line active units. I'm almost certain at least two thirds of the reserve are paralysed junk, similar to most of the RMN's battlecruisers when the Volsungs paid Manticore a visit.

By maintenance I don't mean someone walking in with a wrench to maintain something, I mean the security of the ships as well as the support structure necessary to maintain physical control and ensure those ships don't develop legs and walk away from the SLN inventory.

Granted a large % of the reserve might be nothing but 400 or 500 year old museum but a decent % of the reserve would be considered modern or frontline equipment for most navies including those in the Haven sector as little as two or three decades before the war with the League. And for the league and most of the Galaxy it was modern frontline equipment up until Battle of Spindle.

If I remember correctly, the reserve also has a number of light units from BC to DD. They might be numerous but if they do exist they would be a pirate magnet if not protected properly.

Weird Harold wrote:
Textev and word of Weber strongly imply that they are -- especially Battle Fleet. Byng, Crandall, Filareta, and Rajampet weren't all that far out of the norm.

FWIW, I don't think the SLN is much more corrupt than the rest of the League government, from the Mandarins on down.

There is corruption and then there is CORRUPTION. One is someone skimming from the budget, giving contracts to your friends, over charging the SLN significantly etc... every organization has this to some degree. The other is what you seem to be talking about, saying you have 80 million to 100 million people in uniform while only having 30 or 40 million in uniform.

If corruption in the SLN was the way you seem to see it, they would have few SDs in active service while claiming to have 2,300 SD's. You cant have an entire component of the military(The reserves in this case) not exist while claiming they are 40 or 50 million strong while it doesn't have a corresponding effect on the active fleet.