MILSPEC-555: "EVACUATING A PLANET"

The League has a leg up right now. 3500+ Ubers sitting in the garage.



Perhaps the RMN can use the captured Solly Junk now. Oops. Strip them down crew wise and short trips to Sphinx or anywhere via junction.

Manticore has all of those dormant freighters right now. Can the life support systems of freighters be quickly upgraded to pack 'em and stack 'em?

cthia wrote:Manticore has all of those dormant freighters right now. Can the life support systems of freighters be quickly upgraded to pack 'em and stack 'em?

I thought many would be used in trade with Haven and the Anderman Empire, but regardless freighters have very little life support for their size - just enough for the crew normally.
Here is the Wayfarer in Honor among Enemies:

That was the biggest weakness of Trojan Horse, for the Caravan class were true merchantmen—big, slow, bumbling freighters, without armor, without military-grade drives, without internal compartmentalization or a warship's sophisticated damage control remotes. Their hulls were the flattened, double-ended spindles of any impeller drive vessel, but they'd been laid out to maximize cargo-handling efficiency, without a warship's "hammer head" ends, where the hull flared back out to mount powerful chase armaments. They'd also been built with only one power plant apiece which, like many of their vital systems, was deliberately placed close to the skins of their hulls to facilitate access for maintenance and repair. Unfortunately, that also exposed it to hostile fire, and though Vulcan had added a second fusion plant deep inside Wayfarer's hull, no one in her right mind would ever consider her a "proper" warship.
...
Nor would any raider enjoy taking her on in missile combat. Since the Trojans were intended as armed cruisers, Hemphill had convinced the Admiralty to go whole hog and delete all cargo carrying capacity, aside from a generous allowance for spares and other maintenance items. Even after cramming in all the additional life support Wayfarer's Marines and weapons crews would require, that left the designers an enormous cubage—after all, a Caravan massed 7.35 megatons—and they'd shown a devious inventiveness. They'd provided magazine space for a stupendous ammunition supply for her twenty broadside missile tubes, which, like her energy weapons, were as heavy as one would normally find in a Gryphon-class SD. It made sense to give a vessel which might be called upon to operate outside the logistic pipeline for extended periods as much ammunition stowage as possible, but that was an almost secondary consideration where her broadside armament was involved, for the Trojans' real long-range punch was a totally new departure which Honor found herself totally and unequivocally in favor of.
Wayfarer's Number One Hold had been reconfigured solely to carry missile pods. Its size gave her room for literally hundreds of them, and judicious modification to her stern meant she could do something no regular warship could.
...
Nor had the designers stopped there. Since they had all that space available, they'd outfitted holds Three and Four as LAC bays.

cthia wrote:

H A R V A R D B O G O T A C A M P U S

TA: Handout #5



Self_Evacuatables
At least 30 % of a planet are self_evacuatable. That number rises tremendously on a planet like Manticore, or Earth, where the average mean household income is very high. Which is why I estimate 50 % of Manticore are self_evacs. They'll be off the planet in no time.

The Andermani, Beowulf, Gryphon, Haven will all divert every conceivable ship there. The money is there. Ubers will hang out in the system wanting to make a quick buck that's twice their yearly salary on one run!

Manticore 1.5B pop. = 500M -750M+ population = self_evacs.*

This statement will be common, tied up in the human element...
"Mom, I'm gonna ride with the Hamptons out of system. I'll see you in a few months. I've got enough money to tide me over. Like you suggested, I've got one of the accounts if I need it."

Who owns a car?
Who owns flight to space?
Commercial flight to space.



*Based on 50 % of Manticore pop. based on 1.5B.
Higher population will directly affect self_evacs.

Whatever you are smoking, DON'T send it in this direction

Potato wrote:

Large scale people movement for minimal resources is easiest if you use the hibernation tech. Should cut down on space and life support requirement significantly.

Which is fine in the small scale. People generally do not have tens of millions of cryo tubes lying around. Nor would they have the personnel in the numbers necessary to oversee the mass undertaking of freezing and thawing a population. And the whole process adds a non-trivial amount of time to embarkation/debarkation.

This is surely going to have to be a concerted effort of options to extract people. It isn't like there'll be a shortage of people needing extraction. Besides, there may be advantages and disadvantages of methods affecting certain people's decisions. E.g., cryo for longer trips and people with ailments.

cthia wrote:

H A R V A R D B O G O T A C A M P U S

TA: Handout #5



Self_Evacuatables
At least 30 % of a planet are self_evacuatable. That number rises tremendously on a planet like Manticore, or Earth, where the average mean household income is very high. Which is why I estimate 50 % of Manticore are self_evacs. They'll be off the planet in no time.

The Andermani, Beowulf, Gryphon, Haven will all divert every conceivable ship there. The money is there. Ubers will hang out in the system wanting to make a quick buck that's twice their yearly salary on one run!

Manticore 1.5B pop. = 500M -750M+ population = self_evacs.*

This statement will be common, tied up in the human element...
"Mom, I'm gonna ride with the Hamptons out of system. I'll see you in a few months. I've got enough money to tide me over. Like you suggested, I've got one of the accounts if I need it."

Who owns a car?
Who owns flight to space?
Commercial flight to space.



*Based on 50 % of Manticore pop. based on 1.5B.
Higher population will directly affect self_evacs.

Brigade XO wrote:Whatever you are smoking, DON'T send it in this direction

Not smoking. That is my overworked brain trying to save lives. Or it could be the smell of the strain of engines. If this truly was a real exercise with your ass and loved ones on the line, you'd get a bit more creative.

The notion of a space faring species doomed to become dead on a damned rock whose shelf life ends, for whatever reason in a year, is truly absurd and irresponsible.


But I take it you disagree that once the word gets out on Manticore, that the population will begin dwindling at such a rapid pace? People are frightened and eager to leave once the "State Of The Union Address" is made. Every shipping company in the galaxy will be headed in-system to take passengers. No ship will leave the system with a single vacancy. The rich Manticorans make it well worth it to drop your current cargo and head in-system. Private shippers will get rich. Retired pilots, etc., etc. I would imagine the effort will employ millions. I predict close to half of the population gone in six months.

ACS will take a besting routing the traffic. The thousands upon thousands of cutters and pinnaces operating both ways will surely be an air traffic control nightmare. Will this be a first time Manty tech is overloaded?

Sphinx and Gryphon can temporarily absorb much of Manticore's population if the option is death.

I wonder if Grayson will open the planet for temporary stay.

cthia wrote:Huge sonic boom. Structural damage to buildings etc. We don't care about natural disasters. We only care about not killing people ourselves and getting as many people possible off of this doomed rock.

Perhaps counter-grav assisted landing sites built in geographically desired regions. In the desert on Earth. Grand Canyon? I need solutions people. You are all we've got and the cloud of death draws e'er nigh.

There is no way possible that you're going to evacuate a planet by structurally damaging the already inadequate number of ships available.

Your "30% self evacuees" are going to remove a disproportionate number of ships from availability.

You aren't making any provisions for provisions. Life support means more than air replenishment and scrubbing.

The only way you're going to get significant numbers safely off the planet is to lift inhabitants and habitations together. it may be as basic as cramming as many as possible into a contra-grav tower and painting it with some sort of sealant to make it air-tight. Lift the whole building into orbit (or pieces just big enough to fit into a freighter.)

Contra-grav towers are so big that they must have warehouses full of food (and restaurants and cafeterias to prepare much of that food) and most of the basics of air scrubbers to give a jump start on adding full life support level air handling. A well designed tower would have park levels and other levels with vegetation and possibly artificial lakes for water storage.

The same sort of construction grade contra-grav units that built the tower should be available to lift the tower into orbit. Once in orbit, normal cargo handling equipment should be able to move it into a freighter as one becomes available.

Like a modern city, a contra-grav tower should be able to survive 72 hours without rationing. Maybe as much as three times that (nine days) with careful rationing from the start. That gives you a week for a freighter to make a round trip to a "safe harbor" (including loading and unloading times with a safety margin for Mr Murphy.)

If you think in terms of putting the entire population on-board ships at once, you're going to fail; you can't get enough people into orbit in a timely manner with shuttles and you can't get ships into a gravity well with damage to the planet and the ship. You have to think in terms of converting what already exists into "lifeboats" and getting the population into orbit and out of immediate danger. Then worry about getting them transported to some "safe harbor" in a way that allows you to reuse the ships because you're never going to accumulate enough to do it all at once.

Stop me if I'm being stupid, but could the towers themselves be used as lifepods? We know they've got reactors inside them, counter grav is mentioned as being significant in their construction (though I can't quite remember how) and they can stand up to some level of kinetic strikes... and don't I also recall them being resistant to nuclear blasts?

If you added life support functions and thrusters, could you detach them from the city and send them up out of the atmosphere?

That is, of course, if you prefer an escape pod to a bunker... I can't help but think that a bunker would be more useful in a lot of circumstances...

Walks Alone wrote:Stop me if I'm being stupid, but could the towers themselves be used as lifepods?

That's certainly a better suggestion than trying to land a starship.

(Of course, the minor detail that I suggested pretty much the same thing might have influened my support. )

Oh, I must have missed reading that... sorry! And you posted it literally right before I did...