Solarian warships/tech : "What is possible!"

ldwechsler wrote:Sleeping giant implies a lot more than we have seen.The US was a sleeping giant before WWII. We let the Japanese and Germans and even allies develop a lot of things we did not.

But we had the tech ready to go when it was necessary.

The Sollies don't have this. Just because they've been around longer doesn't mean their science is better. If that were the case, they would always win.

They don't look like they've made a lot of progress for centuries. Note that even though Haven had Foraker they never caught up with Manticore although they were far larger.

David's been pretty clear in posts and discussions that the tech of the current SLN fleet (even after their much ballyhooed 'Fleed 2000' upgrades) really isn't representative of the best League civilian tech. Nor is the relative lack of shipyards representative of their truely immense latent industrial capacity.

It'll take time to sort through all the stuff moldering away in universities, or realize how to repurpose and merge civilian tech; and certainly years to build yards and train workers. But give the League 15 years to awaken and it's be like dozens of WWII USAs!

Yes there are specific things that even their cutting edge private researchers are probably well behind on - lacking the recent dedicated drive into small high-load rate gravity generators (aka FTL transmitters). But scrounge around and there's probably several fundamental (rather than applied) breakthroughs they've made that just haven't been militarized yet due to relative lack of demand and funding -- which has just changed.

Maldorian wrote:I wonder if someone think of manticorian tec in adifferent way.

The manties use missle pods with their podlayers. What is, if the league dcide to use pods with engines and a cloaking device? You drive the whole pod into missle range and start the missles. such a pod should have a bigger range than manty missles, with lower speed, but if you keep distance to an enemy fleet it could work.

And we shouldn´t forget, that the league has armed sensor probes. If you use them in great numbers it could also a danger to the allince.

The SLN can't reasonably control missiles at that range even if they can sneak them into range.

Jonathan_S wrote:...But give the League 15 years to awaken ...

The League will be lucky to have 15 months. There's no way there will be a Solarian League in 15 years.

There will likely be a thousand or more arms merchants selling advanced weaponry the equal of RMN Tech, but there won't be a Solarian League or SLN buying anything.

Weird Harold wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:...But give the League 15 years to awaken ...

The League will be lucky to have 15 months. There's no way there will be a Solarian League in 15 years.

There will likely be a thousand or more arms merchants selling advanced weaponry the equal of RMN Tech, but there won't be a Solarian League or SLN buying anything.

Yes, unless the Grand Alliance screws up by the numbers. Which seems unlikely since we've been led to believe the League war is scheduled to wrap up in 1000 pages (+/- 500) or so (aka 1 book)


So the high tech the various worlds have shouldn't have time to matter all that much. But that doesn't means the SLN should be taken as representative of the League's general inventiveness.

To back up the previous comment, the SLN doesn't have the range to control the missiles and it doesn't have the fire control links to control them, even if they had the range. They'd need enough missiles to swamp the GA ships and they just can't do it. Not yet.

Back to the tech commentary, as the snippet points out, the hardware is still considered good, even by the GA. Good enough to be worth stripping out while Manticore is lacking the tech industrial base to manufacture their own.

As most people should be aware, and as has been stated in the books, just knowing something can be done is half the battle in an R&D environment. The SLN knows that FTL is possible in small spaces, they know MDMs and DDMs are possible. Etc. They will find ways to come up with this tech and not in the long period it took to develop it.

I think the league, the core systems at least, can hold on for years and years as a political group. More over, I think they can convert to a war footing far faster than 15 years, more like 2 years, if they get their thumbs out and do it.

Fireflair wrote:
I think the league, the core systems at least, can hold on for years and years as a political group. More over, I think they can convert to a war footing far faster than 15 years, more like 2 years, if they get their thumbs out and do it.

First generation of ships will suck in survivabilty as that is harder to do than firepower. But they might well have awesome firepower while they last. And the missile waves that destroyed home fleet had no remote guidance, nor did the ones that killed half of 2nd.

So don't get all wound around the axel about control at long range, it's all been the missile seeker up until apollo, and even with apollo the last few seconds of the missile run are all done solely by the missiles.

There is the rub. The tech exists in the individual League member worlds. The ability to harness that tech does not exist in the League federal government. Yet it is that federal government which is at war with the GA.

If the individual member nations decide they don't want to pay the freight to harness their bailable tech into a full war footing, the SL federal government can't do squat about it. The Mandarins have to persuade each local star system to support the Mandarins war. This isn't the Chamber of Stars whose members are invested in the federal government. These are sovereign star nations with similar production capabilities as Sol.

The SL federal government doesn't have the research capabilities of hundreds of Core worlds. They have whatever capabilities they can persuade out of those sovereign star systems. Anyone they fail to persuade will begin the research if only to prepare for the SL becoming more coercive. The SL are screwed blue because they don't control the true wealth of the League member nations. They control but a minute fraction of that wealth. Persuading those nations to apply that wealth to the SL's defense will simply be too much for our Mandarins. Coercion will fail spectacularly on Beowulf and then whatever chance the Mandarins have to persuade enough Core worlds to fight the GA will vanish like the morning mist beneath the rising sun.

Fireflair wrote:To back up the previous comment, the SLN doesn't have the range to control the missiles and it doesn't have the fire control links to control them, even if they had the range. They'd need enough missiles to swamp the GA ships and they just can't do it. Not yet.

Back to the tech commentary, as the snippet points out, the hardware is still considered good, even by the GA. Good enough to be worth stripping out while Manticore is lacking the tech industrial base to manufacture their own.

As most people should be aware, and as has been stated in the books, just knowing something can be done is half the battle in an R&D environment. The SLN knows that FTL is possible in small spaces, they know MDMs and DDMs are possible. Etc. They will find ways to come up with this tech and not in the long period it took to develop it.

I think the league, the core systems at least, can hold on for years and years as a political group. More over, I think they can convert to a war footing far faster than 15 years, more like 2 years, if they get their thumbs out and do it.

Fireflair wrote:I think the league, the core systems at least, can hold on for years and years as a political group. More over, I think they can convert to a war footing far faster than 15 years, more like 2 years, if they get their thumbs out and do it.

They certainly can but will they WANT to?

The Mandarin's handling of Beowulf's secession is going to push any fence sitters off the fence on the wrong side. When the Harrington Doctrine was outlined, it was based in part, on the analysis that showed numerous "fault lines" where the disintegration of the League was already happening. As soon as one system's traditional rival secedes and escapes the moderating influence of League membership, that system is going to secede in self-defense.

The more the SLN is exposed as toothless and unable to prevent secessionist systems from leaving (and commits a few atrocities in their attempts,) the more systems are going to want to secede and declare neutrality.

The MAlign, the GA, internal rivalries, and bureaucratic bungling are all working to dissolve the League and very little is working to hold it together.

The League has the tech, but a major problem are the military leaders!

The german Luftwaffe was very good at the beginning of the war, but during the war they decrease the research budget and they had a bad leader for their equipment. If that leader had said: We need long range bombers and fighters like the allies theycould catch up with the allies. But they develope a lot of stup and the leadership coudn´t decide what they really need.

And that is the problem of the league: Someone in the military leadership must be smart enough to analyse the enemy tactics and how to counter them!

If you don´t know what stuff and tactics your opponent has, than you couldn´t write a catalouge of abilities a new ship for your fleet needs.

In the end, it could be that battle fleet get ships with better tec, but still the same design, a lot of energy weapons and only limited missle defense and missle capaticity. A modern science class.

Dilandu wrote:

Theemile wrote:Still, the overall fact is that to build and update all the military systems to counter the systems the US claimed to be working on in the late 80's, the USSR bankrupted itself.

So the problem wasn't so much of technology (while I agree, that USSR was behind in therms of electronic - largely because of moronic decision to just copy IBM computers in 1970, instead of developing further our own lines of computers), but the economy. And, of course, the absurd situation where the Soviet military have no actual ability to decide, what weapon they want to have...

It is near-always missed in all talks about the USS military, but thing is, that Soviet military was continious victim of different industrial lobbies in Politbureau. Each major military factory - like "Kirovsky Zavod" or "Kharkovsky Zavod" - have their own ambitions and connections in Politbureau. There were constant struggle between factories, to put exactly their design of tank, plane, missile into production. And when Politbureau decided that something must be adopted by military, the military could only curse and obey. They have very little influence about adopting new weaponry (of course, if there are no obvious deficiences...)

So, that's why the USSR in 1980s stuck with THREE DIFFERENT MODELS OF MAIN BATTLE TANK - T-64, T-72, and T-80 (not counting sub-models). They were designed and produced by three different tank factories, which have great influence in Politbureau, and all three sucsessfully persuaded Politbureau to adopt their tanks for mass production. The logistic effect you could easily imagine...

Do pardon my boldness to call attention.

You are not being fair to Russia. Your country was facing the same problem that the SLN is facing now. Countering Manty tech takes the combined scientific breakthroughs of dozens of star systems.

IBM creating a successful PC would take the combined expertise of several companies in the US. IBM did not have what it takes to go it alone. Their forte was the cornered market of their closed architecture mainframes. Which is still their bread and butter.

"The only way we can get into the personal computer business is to go out and buy part of a computer company, or buy both the CPU (central processing unit) and software from people like Apple or Atari--because we can't do this within the culture of IBM."

IBM tried a few PCs before. They all flopped. One in particular, their best and last attempt before biting the bullet and doing it in earnest, was the DataMaster. They took what they learned from it and decided on a completely open architecture. An open architecture was a very radical approach for the proprietary giant. Yet the open philosophy garnered many third party add-ons and support, fueling the PC and its success. And, yes, clones.

Read Blue Magic by James Chposky and Ted Leonsis.



So Russia, though I don't doubt could have produced its own, would have required the time and resources to do it. And why reinvent the wheel at a time, when time, and the budget, was limited in the never-ending cold war with the US. There was also the time needed to develop the underlying software, at the time. Which wasn't a trivial thing, at the time, with yesterday's tools.

Developing computer hardware in the 70's and 80's was not a trivial thing. And the research was prohibitively expensive. That is why a stripped down toy computer cost in excess of $1000 back then for the low end, ram strapped Atari 400. A fully tricked out Atari 800 once threatened the $3000 plateau. (That's $3K in 70's cash!) And the software was relatively cheap because the premium prices charged for the machines easily paid the programmers. Who were churning out many man hours of machine code back then with "back then" tools.

For Russia to have developed their own would have cost a lot more than your country could afford at a time when much more pressing concerns were on the horizon. Literally on the horizon.

Developing your own PC means developing a completely different architecture, or it will simply be another clone. Developing a completely new architecture replete with the underlying software to drive it wasn't exactly a trivial thing back then, even for the unflappable Big Blue.

Heck, it isn't exactly a trivial thing now. And totally expensive.

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