SLN Reserve

Theemile wrote:We also know that most of the mothballed ships are at least months away from being usable, with the majority being much more than that (1 year +). Just loading provisions on an RMN ship requires weeks or months, and I doubt that the SLN is as proficient as the RMN or that there are sufficient modern ready provisions available for more than a few % of the fleet at any location.

Having it take over a year for a mothballed ship to become operational? That´s beyond incompetent.
That´s almost enough to build a new ship, at that point, having mothballed ships makes absolutely no sense at all as it would literally be cheaper to build new ones on demand.

And you know, they´re NOT doing it like that.

Provisions not available? At major bases located in MAJOR systems, probably with a 10 billion population as the likely minimum.
Yeah, NO.

Non-perishables wont even be unloaded, and restocking a ship might be slow, relatively speaking, but it´s not likely to take several months.

The issues are the exact same as on a large wetnavy warship, except LESS, because the on demand lack of gravity helps moving things quite a lot, and the ability to work in 3 dimensions will also improve matters a little.
Automation is also vastly more common.

Also don´t forget that prepping the ships and restocking them will mostly be done at the same time. This is society where getting work done in space is NORMAL.

I thought the SLN's emergency plans were based on the old adage: when in danger, when in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout'.

Cheers, John

While that may be their system of residence, it is very likely that they are _not_ in-system all the time, or even much of the time.

Your most usable reservists will be professional spacers, most of whom will be, well... spacing. Which means the call up notice has to catch up to them wherever their ships are now. True, some proportion of them will be on in-system ships, but I'd not be surprised if were less than 50%. Unless the pay and perks are really good, it would surprise me if even potential naval service appealed to those who have no desire to travel the universe. Such as the stay at home types who would go into the in-system trade. For that matter, SLN service of any sort won't have been terribly appealing to most people who didn't need a route out of their home systems or have a family tradition. Nothing about the SL attracts the attention of most citizens most of the time.

In point of fact, my expectation is that the SLN reserve has 2 components on the model of the Royal Navy's old Reserve and Volunteer Reserve. The Reserve was composed of professional seamen, often ex-RN, who knew as much or more about driving ships as the RN's active duty personnel - because they were _on_ ships, sailing the world. And therefore had to be rounded up before they could be put into uniform [although many, by analogy with the in-system spacers mentioned above, were fishermen who never went more than a few days from home]. The Volunteer Reserve, in peacetime, was composed of Sunday Sailors who might well, like the crew of HMCS Queen, have nothing more than a rather large millpond as their nearest body of water. They might end up on a ship for an entire 2 weeks/year, with the rest of their training on paper or mock-ups in their local naval establishment. If the mill pond is big enough, they get live training in small-craft handling, but that's about it on a regular basis. Needless to say, on call-up their skills were highly variable and needed a lot of polishing.

I think the application to the SLN is fairly obvious. Including the potential for graft in having volunteer reservists who 'report' for a couple of weeks in the simulators every year or so. Wouldn't surprise me if some of them don't have a couple of hundred years service under their belts by now.

Tenshinai wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:I'd say those numbers could only hold if the reservists, training facilities, mothballed ships, and reactivation yards were all in the same system.

Mostly, they probably are, if nothing else for convenience and to avoid adding extra costs.

Jonathan_S wrote:If you don't have a training center on each planet you call up reservists from your got weeks to months of transit time just moving them to where they'll start refresher training. Similarly if the ships for them to man aren't in the same system they're training in you've got another weeks to months delay sailing the newly retrained crews to their ships.

But since we're fairly sure that the SLN's mothballed fleet is only located in s handfull of systems either the reserve activation will only affect those systems or you'll need a much longer best-case timeline than you proposed.

Most likely, the reserves are at the same bases(/systems) where the majority of training happened and where they initially served, and it is very likely that if you want to get paid as a reservist, you need to be available, which means reservists probably end up living in the same systems as they have mobilisation deployment in.

Sure, not everyone is going to be "home" at any single moment, but most will be as only transstellar travel puts people out of touch with their military posting.

Tenshinai wrote:

Theemile wrote:We also know that most of the mothballed ships are at least months away from being usable, with the majority being much more than that (1 year +). Just loading provisions on an RMN ship requires weeks or months, and I doubt that the SLN is as proficient as the RMN or that there are sufficient modern ready provisions available for more than a few % of the fleet at any location.

Having it take over a year for a mothballed ship to become operational? That´s beyond incompetent.
That´s almost enough to build a new ship, at that point, having mothballed ships makes absolutely no sense at all as it would literally be cheaper to build new ones on demand.

And you know, they´re NOT doing it like that.

Eh, it tooks Manticore with the most advanced and productive shipyards in known space about a year to build an SD(P). It took Haven something like, IIRC, 50% longer - and both of those were under War Emergency accelerated conditions. The SLN's normal build rate is closer to a decade than a year since they're building only as many as it takes to retain the necessary yard skills. That'll ramp up a fair bit, but that ramp takes time.

They could probably de-mothball the newest ships, if they wanted them roughly as-is for defenses, in a few months. But almost none of the reserve would have Aegis, much less Halo - and we know a lot of it still mounts bloody auto-cannon. Upgrading them to something that's slightly closer to current SLN operational spec is going to take time -- Not even the SLN would want to give reservists ships that worthless.
So it wouldn't surprise me at all if even just 10 year old ships need the better part of a year to de-mothball and refit for service. (Now, like new builds, as they reactivate more ships they'll get faster and more efficient at it because they'll be bringing on and training up more manpower and they'll get out of the peacetime slow-roll mindset. But it's not going to be all that quick - not for more than the first half dozen or so that have been added or refit in the past few year)

Tenshinai wrote:

Theemile wrote:We also know that most of the mothballed ships are at least months away from being usable, with the majority being much more than that (1 year +). Just loading provisions on an RMN ship requires weeks or months, and I doubt that the SLN is as proficient as the RMN or that there are sufficient modern ready provisions available for more than a few % of the fleet at any location.

Having it take over a year for a mothballed ship to become operational? That´s beyond incompetent.
That´s almost enough to build a new ship, at that point, having mothballed ships makes absolutely no sense at all as it would literally be cheaper to build new ones on demand.

And you know, they´re NOT doing it like that.

Provisions not available? At major bases located in MAJOR systems, probably with a 10 billion population as the likely minimum.
Yeah, NO.

Non-perishables wont even be unloaded, and restocking a ship might be slow, relatively speaking, but it´s not likely to take several months.

The issues are the exact same as on a large wetnavy warship, except LESS, because the on demand lack of gravity helps moving things quite a lot, and the ability to work in 3 dimensions will also improve matters a little.
Automation is also vastly more common.

Also don´t forget that prepping the ships and restocking them will mostly be done at the same time. This is society where getting work done in space is NORMAL.

I'm not talking about just provisioning, fewer than 2500 require that. The rest of the fleet require updating before they can be repaired, 2/3rds of the reserve fleet still has at least some autocannon, so require considerable updates before they are usable in an SLN standard.

Besides, I'm not saying provisions and ammo are not available, just not in sufficient quantities, and not modern. And by provisions, I'm not meaning foodstuffs, but specifically modern parts. Chances are no major base has 40 million new trebuchet missiles just laying about to fill it's reserve's magazines, or 2000 complete spare parts sets laying around.

So it wouldn't surprise me at all if even just 10 year old ships need the better part of a year to de-mothball and refit for service.

There´s a huge difference between "de-mothball" and "de-mothball and refit". And "refit" can go anywhere from "minor stuff that can be done while it´s being made operational" all the way to "needs 8 months of yardtime".

Also, unless they´re stupid, they will stagger the work anyway, focusing on getting ships up and running first, and getting them refit as soon as possible second, otherwise they wont have neither the hardware nor workers to do any refitting for more than a small part.

Just having the extra missile launchers available from hundreds of ships, to help cover the bases AND begin training is very valuable.

Hence why i said they would probably get 1/4 of the reserve up and running in 6 months and 4/5ths in a year.
With more extensive refits, reduce the fraction you get in 6 months and increase the time until you get the majority ready.


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Theemile wrote:The rest of the fleet require updating before they can be repaired

The larger the ship, the easier it is to repair AND refit at the same time.
Also, you mothball ships to keep them from NEEDING repairs in the first place!

There´s always some things that break over time, but those are the exceptions, and the reason why taking vehicles out of mothball isn´t instant. But if there´s large amounts of repairs needed, then they´re not mothballed, they´re just left carelessly abandoned in orbit somewhere.
The administrative and budgeting parts of SLN would scream bloody murder if that was true.

And >90% of any repairs that are needed should be doable by even a skeleton crew, with only the rare exception needing actual yardtime.

Tenshinai wrote:Also, unless they´re stupid, they will stagger the work anyway, focusing on getting ships up and running first, and getting them refit as soon as possible second, otherwise they wont have neither the hardware nor workers to do any refitting for more than a small part.

Actually, textev (Adm Kingsford,)says they won't stagger the work. They don't have the money, time, or personnel to activate more obsolete SDs as targets for the GA to shoot at. So, they're going for commerce raiding and ramping up production of ship more suitable for commerce raiding instead of direct confrontations.

In case no one has mentioned it, there we're no real plans for reactivation and manning beyond TBD when needed. SLN planning doctrine was based on the concept that they would have plenty of warning and time, major adjustments could be made on a century long planning horizon. In truth, given SD build times a rapid developing situation would take a score of years at least, which was true even for Haven, or the Manticoran alliance, at least as far as 1910 pd. In fact, we've learn from MWW that Battle Fleet's active strength was twice what was would he called for based on the effective doctrine the SLN was operating on, as any problem the SLN might have with the PRH would have had the SKM as neutral or a cobelligerent.

Tenshinai wrote:Also, unless they´re stupid, they will stagger the work anyway, focusing on getting ships up and running first, and getting them refit as soon as possible second, otherwise they wont have neither the hardware nor workers to do any refitting for more than a small part.

Just having the extra missile launchers available from hundreds of ships, to help cover the bases AND begin training is very valuable.

Hence why i said they would probably get 1/4 of the reserve up and running in 6 months and 4/5ths in a year.
With more extensive refits, reduce the fraction you get in 6 months and increase the time until you get the majority ready.

Well we already know from the RFC has written that the League did not have real practical plans for reactivating and manning anywhere close to the entire reserve.

It's vastly larger than they can take in hand in any kind of timely manner, even if you just wanted to refill the magazines, load gas and beans, and send it off 'as is'. There's no way they'll get 4/5ths in a year -- they have access to nowhere near the number of reservists needed to man that many additional SDs -- Not unless Manticore returns all the POWs they hold.


Their reserve isn't a rational organization with solid planning, procedures, and stockpiles for rapid reactivation. It's a bloated security blanket whose threadbare state is already apparent to the Mandarins running the League (hence their plans to largely ignore it and focus on commerce raiding)

As seems with some regularity to be forgotten the author noted many years ago our time that the SLN refit policy was to start with the oldest ships and work forwards. That's the opposite of local navy policy here. However, star warships do not rust out, etc.

With respect to personnel, people who fly civilian cargo ships are more or less useless as reservists, because they are not around to be trained, and are likely not to be there when mobilized. Also, if mobilization against a real opponent nears, there is some likelihood that the reservists will disappear off the map while visiting the Verge. The reservists will get some substantial pay, and will I would guess have a month a year or more of active duty training, up to whatever bribes are collected. The complication hinted at by the author is that reservists for a particular ship are not associated with the system in which the ship is stored, so mobilization involves flying people here and there all over the place.