A question about shipping companies in Honorverse

Liberty Ships. Built in good numbers, but compromised on redesign. We'll worth checking Alistair McLean's novel 'San Andreas' for some general comments on the Russian Convoys, and ones specific to the Liberty Ships themselves.

Not that he's perfect of course. He mentions a frigate mounting 'Boulton-Paul Defiant' turrets. The Defiant was a pre-war single engined fighter (similar to the Hurricane/Spitfire) with the armament carried in a turret immediately behind the pilot.

WLBjork wrote:Liberty Ships. Built in good numbers, but compromised on redesign. We'll worth checking Alistair McLean's novel 'San Andreas' for some general comments on the Russian Convoys, and ones specific to the Liberty Ships themselves.

The Liberty ship achieved its design goals of being cheap and easy to produce. A Liberty ship only had to make one successful trip to England to pay for it self. I remember reading that they had calculated they would lose a percentage of ships to mechanical failures but consider it an acceptable loss rate.

pnakasone wrote:

WLBjork wrote:Liberty Ships. Built in good numbers, but compromised on redesign. We'll worth checking Alistair McLean's novel 'San Andreas' for some general comments on the Russian Convoys, and ones specific to the Liberty Ships themselves.

The Liberty ship achieved its design goals of being cheap and easy to produce. A Liberty ship only had to make one successful trip to England to pay for it self. I remember reading that they had calculated they would lose a percentage of ships to mechanical failures but consider it an acceptable loss rate.

Though the deadly results of the combination of brittle steel and new welding technology wasn't foreseen or explicitly factored into the probably loss rates.

And probably due to limited experience with all welded hulls, plus being a few decades before the structural understanding of stress risers/concentrators meant that they weren't designed to with crack limiting features or avoidance of stress concentrators like sharp corners.


And while better steel, or riveting (which just happens to be crack arresting) would have avoided this dangerous flaw I'm not sure it's entirely fair to slam the designers for risks that weren't really known at the time.

Jonathan_S wrote:And probably due to limited experience with all welded hulls, plus being a few decades before the structural understanding of stress risers/concentrators meant that they weren't designed to with crack limiting features or avoidance of stress concentrators like sharp corners.


And while better steel, or riveting (which just happens to be crack arresting) would have avoided this dangerous flaw I'm not sure it's entirely fair to slam the designers for risks that weren't really known at the time.

I believe that the (almost) entire science and engineering of cracks in metals started with an engine room crewman on a WWII merchie marking the growth of a crack in the engine room on the deck plates.

Getting back to the original topic, I would think that a company of this or similar nature would be in high demand from nation's that are at war. It has to change logistic equations just a little when you're dealing with a company that guarantees the safe arrival of vital goods, although I doubt they would transport military hardware.

Rednek731 wrote:Getting back to the original topic, I would think that a company of this or similar nature would be in high demand from nation's that are at war. It has to change logistic equations just a little when you're dealing with a company that guarantees the safe arrival of vital goods, although I doubt they would transport military hardware.

No such guarantee can be offered. If an armed merchantman sails into a war zone(rather than merely pirate-infested space), it has to be at least as powerful and as tough as a cruiser to stand any chance of fending hostile commerce raiders off.

The RMN's Trojans, armed with missile pods, LACs and SD-grade energy weapons, were still shredded when facing opponents aware of their nature.

At most, it'd shave a few percent off the insurance costs - inevitably inflated by operating in a war zone anyway.

Fox2! wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:And probably due to limited experience with all welded hulls, plus being a few decades before the structural understanding of stress risers/concentrators meant that they weren't designed to with crack limiting features or avoidance of stress concentrators like sharp corners.


And while better steel, or riveting (which just happens to be crack arresting) would have avoided this dangerous flaw I'm not sure it's entirely fair to slam the designers for risks that weren't really known at the time.

I believe that the (almost) entire science and engineering of cracks in metals started with an engine room crewman on a WWII merchie marking the growth of a crack in the engine room on the deck plates.

Much earlier than that. I'm a Civil Engineer. Bridges are my specialty. One of the first filmstrips that are shown early on in the course are Stress Corrosion Cracking. (SCC) Where metals suffer cracking from stresses in corrosive environments. One of the first examples I witnessed were duplicated examples of the problems suffered by the British Army in India from its brass shell casings in the 19th Century. The problem was solved with annealing. This info can be found in Wikipedia. An exhaustive series of filmstrips were shown in the first year of "Strength Of Materials" in my Civil Engineering discipline. Pipelines and bridges are especially susceptible and many problems, and disasters, are as a result.

Rednek731 wrote:Getting back to the original topic, I would think that a company of this or similar nature would be in high demand from nation's that are at war. It has to change logistic equations just a little when you're dealing with a company that guarantees the safe arrival of vital goods, although I doubt they would transport military hardware.

I think a military that would use such companies are crazy. Classified information and hardware can be too much of a temptation, and a target, even for the intensely vetted.

I can hear some general or Commander in Chief blistering battle steel.

"You shipped a highly classified, extremely dangerous, strategically important piece of equipment by who?"

"They were armed shippers sir!"

"Un huh. And the outfit that now possesses our latest war ending weapon is also armed! With our weapon!"

cthia wrote:

Rednek731 wrote:Getting back to the original topic, I would think that a company of this or similar nature would be in high demand from nation's that are at war. It has to change logistic equations just a little when you're dealing with a company that guarantees the safe arrival of vital goods, although I doubt they would transport military hardware.

I think a military that would use such companies are crazy. Classified information and hardware can be too much of a temptation, and a target, even for the intensely vetted.

I can hear some general or Commander in Chief blistering battle steel.

"You shipped a highly classified, extremely dangerous, strategically important piece of equipment by who?"

"They were armed shippers sir!"

"Un huh. And the outfit that now possesses our latest war ending weapon is also armed! With our weapon!"

Sure you wouldn't want to risk your best toys on a 3rd party freighter, or even on a domestically flagged freighter without a solid naval escort (and a lot of the time your most sensitive stuff would be carried on actual naval auxiliary ammo and repair ships.

But there's lots of important but non-classified logistics to move around to support a war. You'd ideally still like to move that on your own (or closely allied) merchant hulls; defended by your own escorts. But sometimes that't not possible.

I guess I could see a military sometimes farming out a contract to move (say) fuel, food, normal spare parts, small arms ammo, etc on independently sailing 3rd party ships. Though whether those should be armed would depend on what price premium they command and what the anticipated risks are.
At the scale the military might need that stuff moved losing an undefended ship or two might be less expensive than paying a significant premium to exclusively use armed freighters for all independent sailings.

cthia wrote:

Rednek731 wrote:Getting back to the original topic, I would think that a company of this or similar nature would be in high demand from nation's that are at war. It has to change logistic equations just a little when you're dealing with a company that guarantees the safe arrival of vital goods, although I doubt they would transport military hardware.

I think a military that would use such companies are crazy. Classified information and hardware can be too much of a temptation, and a target, even for the intensely vetted.

I can hear some general or Commander in Chief blistering battle steel.

"You shipped a highly classified, extremely dangerous, strategically important piece of equipment by who?"

"They were armed shippers sir!"

"Un huh. And the outfit that now possesses our latest war ending weapon is also armed! With our weapon!"

True, but I wasn't talking about shipping anything vital, unless you could convince the shippers it wasn't vital. I'm thinking more along the lines of keeping the economy going, and I'll admit that an earlier post was correct about no guarantees in a warzone, but I'd imagine that an armed merchantman (one that was built from the keel out to be a q-ship) could outfight almost any conventional raiders (heavy cruisers or lower) that they couldn't outrun.