Solarian Cruisers (SPOILER)

I happen to think there will be a massive demand for ex-SLN cruisers for pirate activities. Let's consider the facts:

1) The protectorates will be set free from their OFS compelled contracts with Solly Transstellars. That doesn't do anything about the exports those ex-Protectorates have to sell. Nor does that have any impact on the demand for those exports in the Solarian League Core Worlds.

2) There aren't enough non-RMMM ships to meet the demand to ship those Protectorate exports into the Core Worlds. There simply isn't enough hulls without using the WHJ networks. The SEM won't allow star systems that haven't either agreed to join the effort to redesign the League's Constitution and join that new entity or Leave the league and sign a treaty with the SEM to use the WHJ netwwork the sEM controls.

3) The GA is the only group of nations with enough merchant hulls to meet the demand of shipping ex-Protectorate exports into the core Worlds. The ex-Protectorates will be much more comfortable letting the GA backed merchant shipping take the risk of trying to sell those goods to potentially hostile Core World Transstellars than selling those exports themselves.

4) The ex-Protectorates will want a dependable hard currency. Solarian Credits have lost their legal backing. Solarian Credits are likely still being honored in the League, but how acceptable will they be to other ex-Protectorates, Verge and Fringe worlds? Certainly the acceptance won't be universal. The Manticoran Dollar, however, will remain a universally acceptable reserve currency. It may become the ONLY universally accepted galactic reserve currency.

5) The GA has the most potent navy in the galaxy. The GA will have cruisers protecting their shipping that can defeat anyone else's SDs. Heck, the GA destroyers have a good shot of taking out anyone else's SDs and win.

All these facts suggest to me that the GA merchant marines will secure almost all the exports the Verge, Fringe and ex-Protectorates have for the Core Worlds. Those exports will be shipped to the Core Worlds that have always demanded them. The RMMM skipper will offer a fair market value for those resources and the Transstellar can either pay the price or negotiate other mutually agreeable terms. Truly intrasigent star nations and transstellars don't get their needed resources and have to find alternative solutions for their needs. Violent star nations get a visit by the GA.

Bottom line is that the SEM's economy will recover VERY quickly. Their merchant hulls will be busy for the next several years. They will be building relationships with the Protectorates to provide their exports to waiting Core World customers. By the time the SEM industrial infrastructure is rebuilt, the RMMM will have had several years of securing a dominant marketshare of the galaxy's raw material exports. Exporting worlds will sell their exports to Manty shippers to avoid the risk of loss. The Manty merchant skipper will sell to their Core World customers and collect a profit. The SEM will facilitate financing needs for those shippers.

Solly star nations will want to build up their merchant shipping or resource extraction facilities to reduce their need for exports. This runs into the cost vs.benefits of investing in those assets. The RMMM have existing hulls generating a return that have likely already paid off their capital investment. These ships can retun a smaller operating profit than new build ships that have yet to repay their capital investment. The same is true for capital investments in resource extraction. Those ex-Protectorates, Verge and Fringe worlds that had been exporting resources have existing assets producing exports that have their capital costs already paid.

The Manties and their exporting customers have an incentive to keep costs down to prevent the Core Worlds from investing heavily in resource extraction and shipping assets. They will be in a position to compete effectively with the Core Worlds. This will likely be true for many years until the the standard of living in those ex-Protectorates and verge worlds rise enough to inflate wages to Core Worlds levels. That won't happen for quite some time.

This creates a situation where the GA has the most responsibility for protecting their shipping and is hurt the most by piracy. The ex-Protectorate don't care about their exports after they sell it to the shipper. Some of those star nations will encourage piracy, if they can get away with it. That New York financiers supported the Caribean Pirates in the 19th Century is an example what sort of dynamic will be in play. The sheer size of the volume of space the RMMM will be working in guarantees there will be many pockets of very Silesia-like pro pirate financiers. The Core Worlds will have a massive amount of capital looking for a good return. The ex-protectorates and verge will have many worlds looking foor ways to make money. Supply and Demand WILL meet to clear the price that satisfies both parties.

So, all this means the SEM will recover quickly from their economic downturn after Honor's victory over the Solarian League AND that the greater than 10,000 ex-SLN warships have become very valuable assets to PRIVATE investors willing to finance piracy. The upcoming turmoil beyond the Old League will enable many ex-SLN units stationed there to be "lost". Their paperwork will be destroyed in the transition of power and the officers released into civilian status. The ships will find their way into piratical hands funded by transstellars acting in their standard amoral behavior. It helps that the increase in pirate activity will tend to limit investments in merchant shipping inside the Old League to compete with GA protected shipping.

Just like the MA did in Silesia for centuries, the new circumstance in the ex-Protectorates will open up all sorts of opportunities for mischief. I doubt they can resist. This will cause the the GA problems AND present an opportunity for the MA to be discovered.

The problem with solarian warships is, that they are overpowered to fight Traders and only targets for manty warships.

They are to expensive to run. A Q-ship with hidden weapons would be much better. A warship in Honorverse is a warship. In the age of sail, you couldn´t see if the sails at horizon are a merchant, a warship or a pirate. A Q-ship would use that cover, too.
The problem is, it is very difficult to hide a warship.

I suspect anti-competitive efforts will arise in the SL to complement the SEM's. Like refusing to allow non-sl flagged, crewed and constructed vessels to transport goods between SL ports. We'll call it the Jones Act.

kzt wrote:I suspect anti-competitive efforts will arise in the SL to complement the SEM's. Like refusing to allow non-sl flagged, crewed and constructed vessels to transport goods between SL ports. We'll call it the Jones Act.

Absolutely. Those systems enacting such laws won't get access to the majority of the resources being exported by the ex-Protectorates. They will have to either extract the needed resources locally or find another supplier. Because these laws limit the size of the supplier base these systems have access to, their costs will go up. That increase may or may not be acceptable to the importing transstellars' customer base.

Maldorian wrote:The problem with solarian warships is, that they are overpowered to fight Traders and only targets for manty warships.

They are to expensive to run. A Q-ship with hidden weapons would be much better. A warship in Honorverse is a warship. In the age of sail, you couldn´t see if the sails at horizon are a merchant, a warship or a pirate. A Q-ship would use that cover, too.
The problem is, it is very difficult to hide a warship.

Most of the pirate encounters we have seen in the Honorverse has been from ambush. The Pirate lies dogo inside the hyper limit where it expects a merchie to come by. Once the merchie gets close enough, he fires off its wedges and chases it down.

That's the only way to approach a cautious merchant ship. No merchant skipper will allow an unknown ship to approach his ship beyond orbit of a planet. Too easy to sneak a pirate in such an unknown ship. It doesn't matter about the prirate's wedge.

From that perspective, SLN ships are as likely to ambush a merchant ship than any other imperllar wedge driven space ship. Actually it might e better than merchant designs because of their better sensor suite. The SLN uses a manpower intensive design to fight battles against another warship. Does the SLN warship require the same sized crew to simply navigate between stars? Likely not. As you state the SLN cruiser is a target for a GA warsip of nearly any size. A pirate in an old SLN cruiser won't fight and won't escape a chase against the GA, it only wins if it doesn't every meet a GA ship. The extra life support in those cruisers merely facilitates having extra prize crews.

These same facts apply to ALL the Silesian pirates prior to Silesia's annexation, yet piracy was rampant in the Confederacy. As rampant as it will be using ex-SLN units will be in the Verge and ex-Protectorate regions of the Honorverse.

PeterZ wrote:Absolutely. Those systems enacting such laws won't get access to the majority of the resources being exported by the ex-Protectorates. They will have to either extract the needed resources locally or find another supplier. Because these laws limit the size of the supplier base these systems have access to, their costs will go up. That increase may or may not be acceptable to the importing transstellars' customer base.

Protectorates are not part of the SL. And it's the protectorates problem if they can't sell stuff, the SL will survive without silverwood just fine.

kzt wrote:

PeterZ wrote:Absolutely. Those systems enacting such laws won't get access to the majority of the resources being exported by the ex-Protectorates. They will have to either extract the needed resources locally or find another supplier. Because these laws limit the size of the supplier base these systems have access to, their costs will go up. That increase may or may not be acceptable to the importing transstellars' customer base.

Protectorates are not part of the SL. And it's the protectorates problem if they can't sell stuff, the SL will survive without silverwood just fine.

I would think most OFS Goveners & thier bank accounts consider themselves part of The SL - Not to mention all the SL ground forces they control who consider themselves part of The SL

Nimitz

kzt wrote:

PeterZ wrote:Absolutely. Those systems enacting such laws won't get access to the majority of the resources being exported by the ex-Protectorates. They will have to either extract the needed resources locally or find another supplier. Because these laws limit the size of the supplier base these systems have access to, their costs will go up. That increase may or may not be acceptable to the importing transstellars' customer base.

Protectorates are not part of the SL. And it's the protectorates problem if they can't sell stuff, the SL will survive without silverwood just fine.

If that was true, then there wouldn't have been the caterwauling of transstellars losing money as the WHJ network was closed down to SL shipping.

There is a price advantage provided by the ex-Protectorates supply of exported resources; basic resources, not just exotic luxury items. Recall all the resource extraction facilities in those Verge and Protectorate worlds. They don't just supply for local consumption. The resources being produce are being exported. Further recall that something over half of the Solarian import/exports used Manty shipping and that imports/exports was not a negligible part of the Solarian League economy. That disruption had impacted (I believe) 15% of the SL GSP. Much of that impact may be manageable with substitution but not all of it.

Those obstinate Core worlds erecting barriers will also not participate in the massive demand for infrastructure expansion the Protectorates will be needing. As those worlds begin to invest in themselves and not simply ship out their wealth to the Core Worlds, they will need to import technology.
They will need more technology than the GA worlds can provide. Being hard cases will cost Core Worlds money. That creates a incentive for other core Worlds to become accomodating. The Core Worlds' economies are large enough that if a sizable minority of them actively participate with the ex-Protectorates, a majority of those exports will purchased and shipped by the SEM for mutual advantage.

RFC pretty well sates that the Solarian League was a satisfied economy with slow growth rates. They need to invest outside the League to find good rates of return. They also can't afford to invest massive amounts of capital in expensive infrastructure that can't generate sufficiently large returns. Expensive resource extraction assets that generates resources that can't provide a high enough profit are simply too unatractive for private investors and too expensive for a system's government to take on by itself.

kzt wrote:

PeterZ wrote:Absolutely. Those systems enacting such laws won't get access to the majority of the resources being exported by the ex-Protectorates. They will have to either extract the needed resources locally or find another supplier. Because these laws limit the size of the supplier base these systems have access to, their costs will go up. That increase may or may not be acceptable to the importing transstellars' customer base.

Protectorates are not part of the SL. And it's the protectorates problem if they can't sell stuff, the SL will survive without silverwood just fine.

The discussion is weird. First you all are assuming that the Solarians will simply sell their ships. That would be very bad business. They need trade. Selling ships whose only real use is for fighting would either lead to more piracy or navies that would probably not like them.

They could better use those fighters as the carrot to keep a lot of planets inside the League or at least associated with it. They could fight pirates. A lot easier than going into the business. Remember that if ships escape pirates, crews could probably describe the pirate ships well enough to make certain people understood that these were from the Sollie government.

Pirates only really work when they have infrastructure. That's why Silesia was their real home. There were others but not many. When the Haven old-line hardcores left, it was over politics.
That should not really happen in the Solarian League.