Information I'd love to know

Fox2! wrote:Even though Unconquered is minimally functional, that still means she needs reactor, power generation and distribution, some minimal damage control, communication, life support, services (mess, supply, medical and dental, Masters at Arms, personnel, etc.). So, 250 to 500 crew, including an Exec who is actually command qualified. A lot of these may be people who are on pre-retirement assignment, restricted duty, or first term. Probably not a lot of mid rank petty officers and commissioned officers.

Why would she need a functional, powered up reactor? Why can't she be on "ground" power, an umbilical connected to the main station where she's moored to. I imagine most ships not in active service are on ground power anyway, Unconquered would be no different. Ditto for mess services: why would you want to eat aboard the ship, instead of on station?

I agree some technicians are needed to make sure power distribution and life support are working through the sections where people should be present, but that's a self-reinforcing proposal: you need people to make it possible for people to be there. The fewer people you want to keep, the fewer people you need. And the only people you really need are the maintenance technicians that must be going through the ship every now and then.

I also don't think those are your general technicians. We're talking about maintaining a 350-year-old ship, with commensurate technology. As much as RFC told us that innovation had stagnated for centuries, it hasn't in the past 20, so whatever they're teaching right now at the technical schools won't work on Unconquered. You actually need specialised people.

In conclusion, whoever was aboard Unconquered wouldn't be sufficient to fly her, much less put her in a dangerous situation of intercepting debris in chaotic trajectories. Any qualified personnel who could have done that could just as easily get to another ship nearby.

--snipping in a couple spots--

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

Fox2! wrote:Even though Unconquered is minimally functional, that still means she needs reactor, power generation and distribution, some minimal damage control, communication, life support, services (mess, supply, medical and dental, Masters at Arms, personnel, etc.). So, 250 to 500 crew, including an Exec who is actually command qualified. A lot of these may be people who are on pre-retirement assignment, restricted duty, or first term. Probably not a lot of mid-rank petty officers and commissioned officers.

In conclusion, whoever was aboard Unconquered wouldn't be sufficient to fly her, much less put her in a dangerous situation of intercepting debris in chaotic trajectories. Any qualified personnel who could have done that could just as easily get to another ship nearby.

Pretty much in agreement -- but my understanding is that Unconquered is "as fightable as it was when Edward Saganami or Ellen D'Orville was aboard". Meaning they could fire up the impellers and move the ship within a short period of time as a "just in case our wedge needs to get between yon debris and whichever city on planet before other ships can get there to do the same thing.

AKA I'm giving Unconquered a temporary shining moment "just in case".

SharkHunter wrote:Pretty much in agreement -- but my understanding is that Unconquered is "as fightable as it was when Edward Saganami or Ellen D'Orville was aboard". Meaning they could fire up the impellers and move the ship within a short period of time as a "just in case our wedge needs to get between yon debris and whichever city on planet before other ships can get there to do the same thing.

AKA I'm giving Unconquered a temporary shining moment "just in case".

That might mean they keep her engines and her non-expendable armament in working condition (I imagine there are no more missiles left, since it wouldn't make sense to produce them any more). That doesn't mean they are powered up, since keeping the impellers active, even on stand-by, would mean reducing their life time and thus increasing maintenance costs. Unless we're lucky that OB happened at the time one of the planned power ups was happening.

We know from the Manticore Ascendant novels that it takes about 40 minutes to fire up the impellers on a 16th century PD ship. Unconquered is CL-16, which means it was launched later than "A Call to Duty" takes place, probably late 16th or early 17th century, but I wouldn't expect the power up time to be significantly better. And this assumes the reactors are running.

An interesting tidbit is that there's a minimum power generation for a fusion reactor. Below that, the reaction fizzles out. That's why I said I would expect Unconquered to be on ground power, not internal. Maybe ships have a smaller reactor for long periods of inactivity (like an aeroplane's APU), but then we're still talking about using this generator to feed plasma and power to the main reactors, before you can start the impellers. At least keeping hydrogen aboard shouldn't be difficult and it doesn't decay naturally, like fission reactor fuels do (though because the atoms are so tiny, it does escape and trickle-vent off to space).

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

Fox2! wrote:Even though Unconquered is minimally functional, that still means she needs reactor, power generation and distribution, some minimal damage control, communication, life support, services (mess, supply, medical and dental, Masters at Arms, personnel, etc.). So, 250 to 500 crew, including an Exec who is actually command qualified. A lot of these may be people who are on pre-retirement assignment, restricted duty, or first term. Probably not a lot of mid rank petty officers and commissioned officers.

Why would she need a functional, powered up reactor? Why can't she be on "ground" power, an umbilical connected to the main station where she's moored to. I imagine most ships not in active service are on ground power anyway, Unconquered would be no different. Ditto for mess services: why would you want to eat aboard the ship, instead of on station?

I agree some technicians are needed to make sure power distribution and life support are working through the sections where people should be present, but that's a self-reinforcing proposal: you need people to make it possible for people to be there. The fewer people you want to keep, the fewer people you need. And the only people you really need are the maintenance technicians that must be going through the ship every now and then.

I also don't think those are your general technicians. We're talking about maintaining a 350-year-old ship, with commensurate technology. As much as RFC told us that innovation had stagnated for centuries, it hasn't in the past 20, so whatever they're teaching right now at the technical schools won't work on Unconquered. You actually need specialised people.

In conclusion, whoever was aboard Unconquered wouldn't be sufficient to fly her, much less put her in a dangerous situation of intercepting debris in chaotic trajectories. Any qualified personnel who could have done that could just as easily get to another ship nearby.

Do we know if Unconquered is moored to the station, or in independent orbit? Her survival of Oyster Bay strongly suggests that she was on her own.

Snipping in a few more places

SharkHunter wrote:--snipping in a couple spots--

ThinksMarkedly wrote:
In conclusion, whoever was aboard Unconquered wouldn't be sufficient to fly her, much less put her in a dangerous situation of intercepting debris in chaotic trajectories. Any qualified personnel who could have done that could just as easily get to another ship nearby.

Pretty much in agreement -- but my understanding is that Unconquered is "as fightable as it was when Edward Saganami or Ellen D'Orville was aboard". Meaning they could fire up the impellers and move the ship within a short period of time as a "just in case our wedge needs to get between yon debris and whichever city on planet before other ships can get there to do the same thing.

AKA I'm giving Unconquered a temporary shining moment "just in case".

As a museum ship, Unconquered would have to be habitable. If she is in independent orbit, she needs the occasional orbit adjust to keep her in the correct position, either under her own power, or assisted by a tug or three. There might be missile bodies on board, but they will not be fueled, and surely won't have the fusion weapon components installed.

Even if she is moored to and drawing power from, a station, she'll still need local power distribution, HVAC, and communications and data handling.

If she is open to the public, even if only occasionally, there would be the equivalent of a Park Ranger aboard, just as on Constitution, the Arizona Memorial, and at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, for civilian law enforcement.

I'll go along with a parked museum ship with it's own orbit.
If not, and she was attache to the primary orbital station around Manticore, she is/was part of the debris that rained on the planet unless destroyed by one of the AstroControl Tugs or other ship's wedges.

Same goes with any of the majority of disbursed yards (though I doubt they would put a museum ship attached to a stand-alone yard) as they were also targets.

What wasn't targeted was ships in temporary parking orbits and similar things as they could not be counted on to remain in those nice predictable orbits over the time it was going to take for the Oyster Bay strike to come all that way in from where the pieces were launched.
There has also been an earlier discussion about this and one of the conclusions was that the Alignment didn't have enough weapons (or systems to deliver them) available that could be delivered to the targets predictable targets in each of the binary system pieces and Grayson. Something like an static museum ship outside of traffic lanes wasn't worth something that could otherwise be used to hit one of the dispersed yards or Naval Stores or weapons storage stations.

Pending RFC making a definitive statement she is probably still in orbit and funtional at least as a museum. Note she was not included in any of the discussion amoung the characters of what was destroyed and you think somebody would have offered that up of the Alignment had specificaly hit one single non-manufacturing museum ship when they didn't get all of the live but not currently working dispused shipyards.

Brigade XO wrote:I'll go along with a parked museum ship with it's own orbit.
If not, and she was attache to the primary orbital station around Manticore, she is/was part of the debris that rained on the planet unless destroyed by one of the AstroControl Tugs or other ship's wedges.

There were (and I can say this with certainty) more stations in orbit around Manticore, even if we've never heard of them. A planet technologically advanced like Manticore would have multiple industrial and commerce nodes, with warehousing and transshipment services. HMSS Hephaestus may have been the primary and biggest (and maybe bigger by more than an order of magnitude), but it wasn't the only. In peace time, there would have been no need to put all the eggs in the same bastket.

Besides, Hephaestus was mostly military. As a museum ship, one would expect there to be tourists, so it doesn't make sense for them to visit Hephaestus to get to Unconquered. Moreover, docking at Hephaestus had to be at a premium during the wartime construction, especially during the Python Lump. Having a dock or slip occupied by Unconquered would be a waste of resources.

So unless she was struck by the debris, I think there's a good chance she's still around.

A cylinder several hundred KM long with lots of branches has a LOT of surface area. I doubt they were short of docking space.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:Besides, Hephaestus was mostly military. As a museum ship, one would expect there to be tourists, so it doesn't make sense for them to visit Hephaestus to get to Unconquered. Moreover, docking at Hephaestus had to be at a premium during the wartime construction, especially during the Python Lump. Having a dock or slip occupied by Unconquered would be a waste of resources.

kzt wrote:A cylinder several hundred KM long with lots of branches has a LOT of surface area. I doubt they were short of docking space.

I thought that I recalled Hephaestus was also the main dock for passenger liners; one person mentioned as dying there in the Yawata Strike was the female Solarian reporter that has just arrived in system.

Admittedly Shadow of Saganami, chapter 2 describes it like this:

HMSS Hephaestus was always crowded, especially now. With the abrupt, disastrous resumption of the war with Haven, the largest single shipyard the Navy owned was running at well over a hundred percent of its designed capacity. The destruction of the Grendelsbane satellite yards—and all the partially built warships in them—only made Hephaestus' frenetic pace even more frenzied.
The concourses were an almost solid mass of humanity, with civilians employed by the various contractors piling in on top of the military personnel assigned to—or simply passing through—Hephaestus. Getting through the massive space station's main arteries in anything remotely resembling a hurry was effectively impossible.

But then there is Mission of Honor, chapter 29:

The girl was incredibly bright and even more curious than most nine-year-olds, and she'd been one question after another ever since their shuttle delivered them to Hephaestus. To be honest, much as he loved her and as happy as her keen wittedness normally made him, John was looking forward to getting her settled aboard the ship to Beowulf, where there'd be no convenient windows and she could ask her questions of the ship's library.
"What are you talking a-" he began, turning and looking through the transparent wall of the personnel tube which had been provided to give tourists a panoramic view of the station's huge bulk.
He never finished the question. There wasn't time. There was barely enough time for him to begin to reach for Jennifer, to feel Laura and twelve-year-old Miguel at his back, to experience the first terrible flicker of a father's utter helplessness, and then the explosion tore the tube apart around them.

...snip...

The Mesan graser which incinerated Passenger Concourse Green-317 terminated Jennifer Rivera's reflections upon her career prospects along with her, Manfred O'Neill, and four hundred and nineteen other arriving passengers from the Hauptman Lines starship Starlight.
Approximately three-hundredths of a second later, Starlight, her crew of twenty-eight, and the two hundred through-passengers to Sphinx who hadn't disembarked, followed them into destruction.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

Brigade XO wrote:I'll go along with a parked museum ship with it's own orbit.
If not, and she was attache to the primary orbital station around Manticore, she is/was part of the debris that rained on the planet unless destroyed by one of the AstroControl Tugs or other ship's wedges.

There were (and I can say this with certainty) more stations in orbit around Manticore, even if we've never heard of them. A planet technologically advanced like Manticore would have multiple industrial and commerce nodes, with warehousing and transshipment services. HMSS Hephaestus may have been the primary and biggest (and maybe bigger by more than an order of magnitude), but it wasn't the only. In peace time, there would have been no need to put all the eggs in the same bastket.

Besides, Hephaestus was mostly military. As a museum ship, one would expect there to be tourists, so it doesn't make sense for them to visit Hephaestus to get to Unconquered. Moreover, docking at Hephaestus had to be at a premium during the wartime construction, especially during the Python Lump. Having a dock or slip occupied by Unconquered would be a waste of resources.

So unless she was struck by the debris, I think there's a good chance she's still around.

I would have said the same about multiple stations as well, but David corrected me during discussions about Oyster Bay. All production in Manticore happened on those 3 stations. There are forts, yes. Habitats in Manticore B space for 350 million folks, but none of them manufacture anything or are in Gryphon orbit. No space stations, or anything that could be repurposed for manufacturing in planetary orbit for any of the 3 planets. Every module in orbit was part of one big station. No other warehouses other than those at the junction. No manufacturing stations near the orbital smelters (which are near the asteroid belts). Nada. Nothing...