[STICKY] Sneak peek of Uncompromising Honor

Dauntless wrote:I thought the flogging of this dead horse ended when it was shown in the early snippets that the RMN are puling off useful weapons, like the grasers, and then scrapping the rest of the ship.

the GA doesn't want them in any shape or form be it warships or merchies or something inbetween.

I failed to specify, I was looking at Solly use of Solly wallers. Sorry for the confusion. The Sollies are lacking in cargo hulls, not the GA. If THIS has been flogged to death, I missed all the entertainment.

TheMadPenguin wrote:I failed to specify, I was looking at Solly use of Solly wallers. Sorry for the confusion. The Sollies are lacking in cargo hulls, not the GA. If THIS has been flogged to death, I missed all the entertainment.

Yes it has been.

The drives and reactors might be useful stuck in new hulls if you are in urgent need of freighters, but they will be very manpower intense freighters.

TheMadPenguin wrote:

drothgery wrote:Solly wallers are in fact useless.
Anyone proposing using an Honorverse warship as anything other than a warship seriously underestimates
- how much more expensive a warship is to operate than a merchant ship (even with RMN automation levels, leaving the Marines home, and not manning any of the weapons)

Cost is zero, they're already built. I did not propose new construction of the same old.

I wasn't talking about cost to construct. I was talking about cost to operate. Keeping an Honorverse warship running is much more expensive than keeping an Honorverse merchant ship running even if you aren't keeping the weapons systems active. They take more people to minimally run, who have to have more specialized training. The components do not last as long. Etc.

drothgery wrote:I wasn't talking about cost to construct. I was talking about cost to operate. Keeping an Honorverse warship running is much more expensive than keeping an Honorverse merchant ship running even if you aren't keeping the weapons systems active. They take more people to minimally run, who have to have more specialized training. The components do not last as long. Etc.

Plus honorverse freighters have cargo bays that you can fit a Nimitz class aircraft carrier in. Actually, you can LOSE a Nimitz class carrier in the cargo bays. The bays shown in a presentation at Honorcon were (iirc) hundreds of meters wide and half a kilometer long. Each bay.

Warships are built with massively armored bulkheads that tightly subdivide the ship. There are no large empty spaces on the ship. Other than the magazines, which is only useful if your cargo is roughly SLN missile sized.

I'd guess the cargo hatches are designed to handle 5-10 meter wide objects that are roughly square. Which rules out the standard Honorverse shipping container, which are something like 10m x 10m x 50m IIRC.

The SLN SDs are nearly useless for anything that doesn't require a massively armored vessel. I'll argue there ARE uses for them, but only for people who are kind of desperate.

TheMadPenguin wrote:

Dauntless wrote:I thought the flogging of this dead horse ended when it was shown in the early snippets that the RMN are puling off useful weapons, like the grasers, and then scrapping the rest of the ship.

the GA doesn't want them in any shape or form be it warships or merchies or something inbetween.

I failed to specify, I was looking at Solly use of Solly wallers. Sorry for the confusion. The Sollies are lacking in cargo hulls, not the GA. If THIS has been flogged to death, I missed all the entertainment.

Since the others spoke of the other limitations of using Sollie wallers, like the massive crews (even just for ferrying), I'll address the other idea you mentioned - external cargo.

Yes, missile pods are carried externally, but they are fairly small (in comparison) and they still run into the biggest ship size limitation - the compensator field. The field only extends a few meters from the skin of the ship (some places more, some places less, and varies from design to design).

If a pod, or externally carried object, extends outside the field, it becomes a drain on acceleration. In the early books, when early pods were deployed (or if too many were carried), they were deployed outside the compensator field, and became a drain on acceleration. In those early battles, just a dozen or so 12 missile pods could cut a SD's acceleration by 25% or more, and expose the tractored pods to 300Gs of force.

Also, if an object was against the hull, but too large to fit inside the compensated field, you will have a grav shere line, where on one side the cargo pod and contents have zero Gs against them, and on the other are under 300Gs of acceleration. Every part of every cargo would have to be rated for this. This would even cause issues on bulk ore shipments, let alone mixed cargos.

RFC said "refitting a Beowulfan SD to Manticoran standards would be just as difficult as refitting a standard SLN SD to those standards. In other words, it would be cheaper and faster to build new ships."

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I count this as approx. 5 floggings of the SLN Hull dead horse over 2 BLOGS (Baen's Bar and here)

Best solution I have seen is re-purpose the SLN CA's -- Gladiator class as approx. equiv to early Sag-A's, and the other small boys as a "Coast Guard" system defense / anti-piracy force for Talbot and Silecia with the BC's and SD's as good sources or refined scrap metal.

BTW one old nickname (among others) for CVN-65 was "Quarter-Mile Island".....

-- Stewart

Having read the hardback...

There's a lot of stuff I do not remember from the EARC. It's great. The tale reads much better on paper.

It's a truly fine novel, with a wonderful ending.