Do we actually need SD(P)s?

ThinksMarkedly wrote:
Why are we dismissing the thousands of non-fighting ships in system and focusing on RMN war-fighting ships? True that most civilian ships can't be actually involved in the rescue part of search-and-rescue (lest there be two ships that now need rescuing), but they can help with the search part: find big chunks of wreckage that are still radiating heat from a distance and tag it. They can also transport the least severe cases from the wreckage to orbital and ground hospitals, allowing the hospital ships and those with sickbays and infirmaries to focus on those that need more urgent care.

The debris cloud itself can be dealt with after SAR is concluded. The tugs can go and collect or destroy any relevant pieces.

I doubt there are thousands of ships in system that are capable of helping in a matter of hours.

Every civilian ship that could get their wedge up would have run for the hyperlimit. So all the ready ships have bolted.

A lot of the ships in the system are shut down - cold and dark, since the reason they are in the system is that trade was shut down and they are trying to keep from going broke. Which means laying off the crew and shutting down everything. I have no idea how long it takes to bring a ship up from cold and dark, but I'd expect at least hours once you get a crew on board. Once you hire the crew...

There are lots of small craft, but most of them are local traffic running around the inhabited planets. They don't run off into deep space. So I doubt many of the crew are confident about running anything like this, when it requires operating at tens of thousands of km per hour light hours out from the Manticore. I have no idea how many have long-term life support capability when they mostly run 30 minute flights.

It's like trying to get a fleet of New York harbor ferries out to help a disaster in Bermuda. Can they do it in theory? Sure, but it's a big deal and lots of things can go fatally wrong.

Will they try? Sure, but it takes organization and support for them. They don't have the sensors of a military pinnance or assault shuttle, or the training.

kzt wrote:There are lots of small craft, but most of them are local traffic running around the inhabited planets. They don't run off into deep space. So I doubt many of the crew are confident about running anything like this, when it requires operating at tens of thousands of km per hour light hours out from the Manticore. I have no idea how many have long-term life support capability when they mostly run 30 minute flights.

See the aftermath of Hypatia for what Search and Rescue might look like. Debris mitigation might look the same.

Just the Navy is going to have hundreds of small craft available for such duties in short order. Ships like Hexapuma and Warlock that were in for repairs; the ships themselves are not fit for service but their small craft compliments would be. Comb out the pinnaces and assault shuttles of all the ships in for repairs at both Sphinx and Manticore and you'd get a pretty respectable S&R fleet. Add in the compliments of any ships near enough to commissioning that they have small craft aboard. Add in the scores of small craft the Navy uses for everyday business running people up and down from the stations and around to various other military facilities. Add in the flight lines of the Navy flight training schools and Marine bases.

And finally, add in all the LACs that weren't able to scramble fast enough to join Home Fleet's last stand. We're never told how many that might be, but it's implied that the number is substantial. Hundreds, certainly.

All of that is military grade hardware kept ready for use on short notice. No lengthy reactivation required, all with military sensors and mostly with permanently assigned crews who know how to operate them. Coordinating all of that would be a nightmare task but the raw lift capacity available is immense, even without tapping civilian craft.

Galactic Sapper wrote:
Just the Navy is going to have hundreds of small craft available for such duties in short order. Ships like Hexapuma and Warlock that were in for repairs; the ships themselves are not fit for service but their small craft compliments would be. Comb out the pinnaces and assault shuttles of all the ships in for repairs at both Sphinx and Manticore and you'd get a pretty respectable S&R fleet.

Though normally if a ship is in for service most of the crew isn't aboard. Its a good time to let them go home and see families, get detached for training, or even get transferred to another ship/position (letting BuPers leave that slot unstaffed until the ship is nearly scheduled to be returned to service)

So it'll take a little while to recall the small craft crew. And of course when the ship's down for major maintenance that's also a good time to pull major overhauls on the small craft - so a fair number of them may be unservicable when the emergency comes along.

Still, yes, given time you can get people back and most craft buttoned back up and out assisting. But I wouldn't be surprised if it took at least half a day to get a significant number of craft underway from ships stood down for refit/repair.

Fox2! wrote:

Loren Pechtel wrote:
It wouldn't make much sense for there to be another fleet out there and the pods are unfired, it would take a major fleet to get through.

Just in the off chance that there is yet a third Haven't fleet hanging around in hyper, how about just sending off the CLs and non-Roland DDs? I don't remember off-hand if the light forces engaged in their own private little war of annihilation or not.

Yup, there's no reason at all not to send out the light forces.

Jonathan_S wrote:Still, yes, given time you can get people back and most craft buttoned back up and out assisting. But I wouldn't be surprised if it took at least half a day to get a significant number of craft underway from ships stood down for refit/repair.

Half a day is a long time, but probably fine. The first responders will probably be the ready tugs and dedicated SAR ships, which will board the most compromised ships, while the tugs give a shove to the most intact pieces of ships to cancel their escape vectors (by "shove" I mean it probably takes 5 hours at 150 G). Since those ships are unpowered and have no compensators running, the ships must be brought inside the wedge of the tug so the tug's compensator field can surround them. And that is indeed on top of the 10+ hours of acceleration and deceleration to match vectors in the first place.

This is actually such a daunting task that I don't know if cancelling escape vectors is a good idea. Each hulk means 15 hours of a tug's time: 5 to decelerate the hulk sufficiently, some 7 or 8 hours to accelerate again and then 3 hours to decelerate for 0-0 intercept with the cloud again. It might be best to execute SAR at whatever base vector the debris cloud is moving out of your system.

Jonathan_S wrote:

Galactic Sapper wrote:
Just the Navy is going to have hundreds of small craft available for such duties in short order. Ships like Hexapuma and Warlock that were in for repairs; the ships themselves are not fit for service but their small craft compliments would be. Comb out the pinnaces and assault shuttles of all the ships in for repairs at both Sphinx and Manticore and you'd get a pretty respectable S&R fleet.

Though normally if a ship is in for service most of the crew isn't aboard. Its a good time to let them go home and see families, get detached for training, or even get transferred to another ship/position (letting BuPers leave that slot unstaffed until the ship is nearly scheduled to be returned to service)

So it'll take a little while to recall the small craft crew. And of course when the ship's down for major maintenance that's also a good time to pull major overhauls on the small craft - so a fair number of them may be unservicable when the emergency comes along.

Still, yes, given time you can get people back and most craft buttoned back up and out assisting. But I wouldn't be surprised if it took at least half a day to get a significant number of craft underway from ships stood down for refit/repair.

Sure. But not all of them will have been stripped yet (IIRC Hexapuma and Warlock only reached the repair dock a week or so before the battle, so crews might not have been reassigned yet), or ships stuck awaiting dock space but too damaged to join Home Fleet, or ships just finishing construction/major repair that have a crew but aren't yet capable of leaving dock. etc. might still have small craft in serviceable condition. Maybe you'd only get twenty or thirty percent of the establishment complement that are space worthy from those sources, but the numbers still add up quickly.

In addition, the BCs left chasing Havenites at the terminus could load up and ferry the small craft assigned to the forts into range. The light pickets at the other six termini could do the same for the light craft of those forts as well as dropping their own. Even an obsolete light cruiser like Fearless would have had three (four?) pinnaces to add to the S&R fleet, so the cruiser forces at Lynx, Gregor, Beowulf, et. al. could have still made a reasonable contribution.

Admittedly, a lot of that would require local commanders to act on their own initiative to get those craft into range within the first few hours. But the resources are there.

Anyhow, I think I've made my point: The S&R is a huge task that will absorb essentially every asset that you can throw at it for days, maybe a week+. Nobody is going to be worried about missile pods or other ordinance or tech except as an EOD issue for the S&R teams during this time.

After you decided you have saved everyone who can be saved then you transition to recovery. Which is going to be conducted out in the Kuiper Belt, so that's not a trivial task either.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:This is actually such a daunting task that I don't know if cancelling escape vectors is a good idea. Each hulk means 15 hours of a tug's time: 5 to decelerate the hulk sufficiently, some 7 or 8 hours to accelerate again and then 3 hours to decelerate for 0-0 intercept with the cloud again. It might be best to execute SAR at whatever base vector the debris cloud is moving out of your system.

I do agree that canceling escape vectors is not feasible, I was never suggesting that. Rather, I'm saying that we have clouds of debris heading in a few directions, the tugs etc would only be keeping the debris from spreading, not keeping it from heading to the stars. While the MAlign very well might try to sneak in and grab loose debris they're not going to try it on a cloud of debris with a couple of cruisers standing watch. There's no way the MAlign is going to risk one of their Sharks in combat--if one was lost without being vaporized there goes two of their three important tech secrets.

kzt wrote:Anyhow, I think I've made my point: The S&R is a huge task that will absorb essentially every asset that you can throw at it for days, maybe a week+. Nobody is going to be worried about missile pods or other ordinance or tech except as an EOD issue for the S&R teams during this time.

After you decided you have saved everyone who can be saved then you transition to recovery. Which is going to be conducted out in the Kuiper Belt, so that's not a trivial task either.

It will absorb every asset capable of actually doing it. That leaves an awful lot of craft that at most haul S&R parties to the scene, they might as well be corralling debris when they aren't doing anything else.

Was SD(P)s possible before the current level of automation?