Reserve Fleet

Do not underestimate the energy of a 500,000 ton tanker moving at 15 knots. It will just run over a ship of that size.

Jonathan_S wrote:

cthia wrote:It must be stated that even though a reserve fleet can become obsolete, it can never become totally useless if you have enough of them and can man them. Pair them with the advantages of the MWJ and superior tactical and strategic thinkers.

Quantity is its own quality, especially if you have the mindset of a gorilla with a huge vocabulary, who's more than willing to throw around big words and notions like Parthian Shot. Like it or no, the SL could have hotwired all of those obsolete ships in the reserve and headed directly to Manticore and chucked thousands of missiles at the planet. I thought that was one of the main reasons Honor trashed them. They weren't without a possible use.

Guess that depends on what you mean by totally useless. After all against unarmed civilians a Phalanx of Greek Hoplites is darned effective. But you'd need unimaginable numbers of them to threaten a modern military and logistically unsupportable numbers to have a good chance of running down and eliminating even a African militia. (And then there are paradigm shifts; how many of them would you need to threaten an aircraft carrier?)

How many USS Monitors, or HMS Victories would it take to run down and stop a modern oil tanker? Or could even a thousands of HMS Warrior (1860) successfully slug it out with Bismark or Tirpitz?

Okay, they may not be totally ineffective because you can still use them to beat up civilians - but they're effectively ineffective against any military.


However what I think your general point was, which is armed military vehicles / ships can have a very long tail of usefulness in secondary roles; especially if used en mass is true. Just not IMHO to the extreme you stated

But, would murderous bastards gone temporarily insane, really need such an unimaginable number of them to threaten a modern military's charge, the planet and infrastructure? With an obscene amount of chucked missiles? A crime of passion.

kzt wrote:Do not underestimate the energy of a 500,000 ton tanker moving at 15 knots. It will just run over a ship of that size.

I do not believe that you can do a quick turn in an oil tanker, so I expect that both Victory (if there is a good wind) and the Monitor could avoid being run over; but the Monitor would probably be swamped by the wake. Both ships could rake the tanker's bridge, so the thickness of the hull is not material.

cthia wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:After all against unarmed civilians a Phalanx of Greek Hoplites is darned effective. But you'd need unimaginable numbers of them to threaten a modern military and logistically unsupportable numbers to have a good chance of running down and eliminating even a African militia. (And then there are paradigm shifts; how many of them would you need to threaten an aircraft carrier?)

But, would murderous bastards gone temporarily insane, really need such an unimaginable number of them to threaten a modern military's charge, the planet and infrastructure? With an obscene amount of chucked missiles? A crime of passion.

Well if this was Star Trek and a few of these insane hoplites were beamed simultaneously next to every sensitive piece of infrastructure I guess they could do a lot of damage very quickly, before anybody could respond. Electrical generators don't appreciate sharp pointy electrically conductive objects being jammed into them. Neither do computer's and networking devices in data centers, phone switching rooms, electrical transformers, etc. OTOH buried oil pipelines and dams are going to ignore anything a hoplite can do in just an hour or two.

Not sure what you think they're going to do to the planet in a short time period - though I guess enough of them could do some ecological damage pretty quickly (chopping down forests or killing off all the animals they can reach) (Ok, if someone with advanced space ships used them as c-fractional bombardment missiles they'd do a number on the planet -- but no more so than any other similar size and density object)


But if they have to form up in a few spots and march to the infrastructure they want to destroy their low speed of advance is going to drastically limit the damage they can do before encountering and being destroyed by a modern military.

tlb wrote:

kzt wrote:Do not underestimate the energy of a 500,000 ton tanker moving at 15 knots. It will just run over a ship of that size.

I do not believe that you can do a quick turn in an oil tanker, so I expect that both Victory (if there is a good wind) and the Monitor could avoid being run over; but the Monitor would probably be swamped by the wake. Both ships could rake the tanker's bridge, so the thickness of the hull is not material.

HMS Victory might carry light swivel guns, and certainly carries musket armed troops. So she could fire on the tankers bridge even though her main guns wouldn't have a prayer of angling high enough to hit it from within their effectively aimed range.

But USS Monitor doesn't appear to have much elevation possible on her guns either (that would require larger opening in the gunhouse armor -- and for no purpose given her intended combat role), and doesn't carry lighter weapons or naval infantry. I don't think she'd really be able to lob shot or shell high enough to hit a tanker's bridge...

kzt wrote:Do not underestimate the energy of a 500,000 ton tanker moving at 15 knots. It will just run over a ship of that size.

tlb wrote:I do not believe that you can do a quick turn in an oil tanker, so I expect that both Victory (if there is a good wind) and the Monitor could avoid being run over; but the Monitor would probably be swamped by the wake. Both ships could rake the tanker's bridge, so the thickness of the hull is not material.

Jonathan_S wrote:HMS Victory might carry light swivel guns, and certainly carries musket armed troops. So she could fire on the tankers bridge even though her main guns wouldn't have a prayer of angling high enough to hit it from within their effectively aimed range.

But USS Monitor doesn't appear to have much elevation possible on her guns either (that would require larger opening in the gunhouse armor -- and for no purpose given her intended combat role), and doesn't carry lighter weapons or naval infantry. I don't think she'd really be able to lob shot or shell high enough to hit a tanker's bridge...

According to Wikipedia, the USS Monitor participated in the Battle of Drewry's Bluff. Although not able to elevate her guns enough from close range, the Monitor could shoot at the fort on top of the bluff (about 200 feet above the river) from longer range.

As for the HMS Victory, they just have to time the volley to the roll of the ship which will allow the main guns to shoot higher.

tlb wrote:According to Wikipedia, the USS Monitor participated in the Battle of Drewry's Bluff. Although not able to elevate her guns enough from close range, the Monitor could shoot at the fort on top of the bluff (about 200 feet above the river) from longer range.

As for the HMS Victory, they just have to time the volley to the roll of the ship which will allow the main guns to shoot higher.

Thanks. I stand (well; sit) corrected.

Relax wrote:

kzt wrote:The point of a reserve is provide the ability to fairly rapidly mobilize additional combat units faster then you can build equipment and train people to man them.

Depending on what the decisions at the political/strategic level, you might well use one generation old equipment. This is what the people you are staffing the reserve are trained to use and its a low cost option. And realistically, people who are well trained in the past generation can much more rapidly be retrained to use more modern gear vs recruiting and training from scratch new recruits.

Yes, and one thing I do not think I have seen discussed in this thread and is one reason many WWII ships who were okay from a hull structural perspective, were scrapped.

Reason: Once your reserve personnel are old enough, out of the service, long enough they cannot be quickly retrained and it is just as quick to train new guys/gals. Therefore, keeping the old ships which are more than likely obsolete and need a refit will not have a crew so half of the whole reason to have said reserve and save time/money, disappears. So, how does prolong effect this thinking? Obviously with more modern units, tactics have RADICALLY changed even though 100% of the personnel would still be young enough to work. But, sorry, if you have not done something for 30 years, you are essentially back at square one point one. Not quite 1.0 but darned close.

Addage, Old dogs do not learn new tricks..... you get set in your ways is very true, how does prolong address this problem.... hrmmm I think this is just handwaviumed....

There are two forms of a reserve that can be used in the Honorverse, one is the western model (Canada/US) and the second is the Former Soviet/Warsaw model.

The Western model trains the personnel up to a certain standard and maintains that training throughout their career and continues training and allowing experience to build up.

The Warsaw Pact model gave their reserve a substantial edge initially with 1-3 years of training depending on the country and then only periodic call ups over the next 20-30 usually once every few years.

What a reserve for a navy in the honorverse would need is people who are trained to the same level as their regular force counterparts and continue with training over the year rather than forgetting the reservists until war breaks out. Having high readiness ships that the reserve crews will utilize on a rotation allows them to retain their training and experience even if they don't get mobilized for 50 years. Granted they won't be to the same standard as a regular force crew but they will be close enough that intensive workup after mobilization should make them a competent crew.

cthia wrote:And the argument was, actually, "changes in basic tech."

Sorry guys, but for what its worth, I agree with Harold. Take two 8 cylinders and marry them together makes sixteen cylinders, an altogether different engine. The fact that the eights already existed doesn't matter. Ghost Rider was a new "FTL deployable weapon" operating on an entirely different battlefield. A missile is a missile isn't exactly true, or the SL Cataphracts would have been equally dangerous. A new paradigm means a new weapon. At the end of the day, the fact that you can reuse parts off the shelf is irrelevant. IMO.

The basic technology doesn't change though, which means that the person trained to operate the basic version of the tech can operate the more advance version of the tech, probably not to the same standard or to the maximum potential but they can be operated just the same.

Beowulf would most likely be able to operate a Havenite or Manticoran SD(P) without any training from the RMN or the RHN again definitely not to the same degree of efficiency or to the same standard but they will be able to operate an SD(P) and work on improving their expertise with the new systems.

Sigs wrote:The basic technology doesn't change though, which means that the person trained to operate the basic version of the tech can operate the more advance version of the tech, probably not to the same standard or to the maximum potential but they can be operated just the same.

Beowulf would most likely be able to operate a Havenite or Manticoran SD(P) without any training from the RMN or the RHN again definitely not to the same degree of efficiency or to the same standard but they will be able to operate an SD(P) and work on improving their expertise with the new systems.

There is a big jump from capacitor-driven, tube-launched tech to fusion powered, pod launched, FTL guided, highly automated systems.

Maybe Havenite tech could be reverse engineered but there would still be a pretty steep leaning curve. The older the tech, the steeper the learning curve.

The tech level is much less important than keeping training current.