Black market arms post league collapse.

Just started watching operation Odessa on Netflix about an attempt to sell a russian submarine to a drug cartel in the 90's. And it made me think about what might happen to the massive amount of ships/missiles/small arms/ect that might get left behind, lost, or stolen.

Add in the inevitable warlords, and opportunistic planetary governments I have a feeling there will be a booming arms trade. Especially as the majority of the solarian ships are outdated so the league wont want them but smaller organizations will be able to buy them and get hardware they never had before.

ThisName1 wrote:Just started watching operation Odessa on Netflix about an attempt to sell a russian submarine to a drug cartel in the 90's. And it made me think about what might happen to the massive amount of ships/missiles/small arms/ect that might get left behind, lost, or stolen.

Add in the inevitable warlords, and opportunistic planetary governments I have a feeling there will be a booming arms trade. Especially as the majority of the solarian ships are outdated so the league wont want them but smaller organizations will be able to buy them and get hardware they never had before.

Well, saying "it will happen" is kind of stupid since it was already happening before the SLN was defeated. Lots of Verge warlods got their hands on SLN surplus, usually through transstellars patrons. Manpower was doing that but there's no reason to think it was the only. Technodyne probably had a great cash flow selling decommissioned units and pocketing the money that the SL paid to break the ship up.

What's going to change is that suddenly there'll be a lot more independent planets and suddenly the Verge won't have the "protection" of the Frontier Fleet. And you could be right that a shrunken SL could be like when the USSR broke up and dissolved, leaving the member republics with a portion of the Soviet military, including some nuclear weapons (Ukraine agreed to give its cache up to Russia in exchange for Russia never invading Ukraine...)

I know some stuff was being sold but not to the level that I think it would get too. I can see superdreadnoughts getting sold.

So, you didn't get the memo about The Black Market?

ThisName1 wrote:I know some stuff was being sold but not to the level that I think it would get too. I can see superdreadnoughts getting sold.

I don't think so. Remember that during the Havenite Civil War, nothing bigger than a BC went missing. Some of the local warlords kept SDs that they had under their control, but the point was that no BB, DN or SD slipped control.

More importantly, manning and running an SD, especially a manpower-intensive design such as the SLN ones, is no trivial task. You don't suddenly get 6000 trained crew to operate such a ship, not even 2000 for a skeleton crew. Where is a would-be warlord going to get people to man that ship?

And with such a large personnel size on-board, it's also hard for the ship's CO to abscond with the ship: the crew might revolt (and remember that only the Battle Fleet had SDs, so the average crewperson and junior officer didn't get too involved with politics and transstellars).

Not even Manpower gave Monica SDs. They gave only BCs.

And everyone knows those SDs are white elephants. They're not going to be any good against a serious navy and would otherwise consume resources that could be split into a trio of BCs or a squadron of CAs.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

ThisName1 wrote:I know some stuff was being sold but not to the level that I think it would get too. I can see superdreadnoughts getting sold.

I don't think so. Remember that during the Havenite Civil War, nothing bigger than a BC went missing. Some of the local warlords kept SDs that they had under their control, but the point was that no BB, DN or SD slipped control.

More importantly, manning and running an SD, especially a manpower-intensive design such as the SLN ones, is no trivial task. You don't suddenly get 6000 trained crew to operate such a ship, not even 2000 for a skeleton crew. Where is a would-be warlord going to get people to man that ship?

And with such a large personnel size on-board, it's also hard for the ship's CO to abscond with the ship: the crew might revolt (and remember that only the Battle Fleet had SDs, so the average crewperson and junior officer didn't get too involved with politics and transstellars).

Not even Manpower gave Monica SDs. They gave only BCs.

And everyone knows those SDs are white elephants. They're not going to be any good against a serious navy and would otherwise consume resources that could be split into a trio of BCs or a squadron of CAs.

If you're a tinpot dictator of a moderately prosperous outer shell world, with 3 or 4 close neighbors each slightly less prosperous than yourself, a couple of old Solly SDs gives you a lot of opportunity.

A few SDs, even ones outclassed by a front of the line Manty Heavy Cruiser, would still dominate your neighborhood so long as the Manties don't show up. And, of course, anyone in such a position would try to assert enough control over their neighbors so that when the Manties finally show up in 2 to 4 years the neighbors are led by pliant toadies and you can keep control.

Erls wrote:If you're a tinpot dictator of a moderately prosperous outer shell world, with 3 or 4 close neighbors each slightly less prosperous than yourself, a couple of old Solly SDs gives you a lot of opportunity.

A few SDs, even ones outclassed by a front of the line Manty Heavy Cruiser, would still dominate your neighborhood so long as the Manties don't show up. And, of course, anyone in such a position would try to assert enough control over their neighbors so that when the Manties finally show up in 2 to 4 years the neighbors are led by pliant toadies and you can keep control.

I'm sure the dictator will want SDs, no doubt about that, even discounting all the issues I posted above about paying for the ship and its upkeep, not to mention running it.

But I don't think there'll be a lot of sale of those ships, even in the black market. SDs are good deterrents, which means the neighbours need to know they are there. Either that or the dictator goes conquering, at which point their existence becomes known and the Galactic Police will come repossess those ships.

I understand the danger: there's still about a thousand SDs that were in active service in the SLN that are totally obsolete. They'll be replaced over the next 30-50 years. There's a huge opportunity for losing a ship once it's sent to the breakers.

I don't think any ship in the reserve is useful to be sold. They're a lot easier to lose, but they're also less useful in the first place. The cost of un-mothballing the ship is likely beyond any tinpot dictator.

In any case, I expect SDs to be highly traceable, since there aren't that many shipyards building them in the first place and the SLN mustn't have been selling export versions. No one except the SLN is likely to misplace one of them. And since the SLN has an added incentive to clean up its act to not get another visit by Honor, I don't expect a sale to occur more than a few times before the pipelines are caught up.

I'm sure it's going to happen--but remember it's all SLN stuff. Any GA cruiser can eat it for lunch.

Loren Pechtel wrote:I'm sure it's going to happen--but remember it's all SLN stuff. Any GA cruiser can eat it for lunch.

I think it's going to happen below the wall only. There were thousands of DDs, CLs and CAs in Frontier Fleet that were in the Verge and need to be recalled. Those were sufficiently far from politics and sufficiently close to the sources of corruption to just ignore the recall order and stay behind in the systems they were "defending".

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

Erls wrote:If you're a tinpot dictator of a moderately prosperous outer shell world, with 3 or 4 close neighbors each slightly less prosperous than yourself, a couple of old Solly SDs gives you a lot of opportunity.

A few SDs, even ones outclassed by a front of the line Manty Heavy Cruiser, would still dominate your neighborhood so long as the Manties don't show up. And, of course, anyone in such a position would try to assert enough control over their neighbors so that when the Manties finally show up in 2 to 4 years the neighbors are led by pliant toadies and you can keep control.

I'm sure the dictator will want SDs, no doubt about that, even discounting all the issues I posted above about paying for the ship and its upkeep, not to mention running it.

But I don't think there'll be a lot of sale of those ships, even in the black market. SDs are good deterrents, which means the neighbours need to know they are there. Either that or the dictator goes conquering, at which point their existence becomes known and the Galactic Police will come repossess those ships.

I understand the danger: there's still about a thousand SDs that were in active service in the SLN that are totally obsolete. They'll be replaced over the next 30-50 years. There's a huge opportunity for losing a ship once it's sent to the breakers.

I don't think any ship in the reserve is useful to be sold. They're a lot easier to lose, but they're also less useful in the first place. The cost of un-mothballing the ship is likely beyond any tinpot dictator.

In any case, I expect SDs to be highly traceable, since there aren't that many shipyards building them in the first place and the SLN mustn't have been selling export versions. No one except the SLN is likely to misplace one of them. And since the SLN has an added incentive to clean up its act to not get another visit by Honor, I don't expect a sale to occur more than a few times before the pipelines are caught up.

Actually, 1/2 the new build SLN SDs went directly into the Reserve, and every SD transitioning from the Active Fleet into the Reserve was first upgraded to the current build standard before mothballed, so there is a good portion of the Reserve that is actually MORE advanced than the average Active Fleet ship, with 2x the # of ships with top tier tech going into the Reserve as Active Fleet. Also there is an initiative to upgrade the oldest ships in the Reserve to the top tech standard, so it is possible that for every 1 new standard ship in Active Fleet, there are 3 added or converted in the Reserve.

(The work rate on the Reserve ships upgrades has not been mentioned, nor has it been mention if the ships are fully upgraded to just run through a cost expedient partial upgrade to get them close to current standards (as we know, 2/3rds of the reserve SDs still retain at least some autocannon for defense, a config that was still semi viable until 1850 or so.)

We Know Erewhon bought Solarian DNs pre-war - They could just be Scientists properly Labeled. So some Export wallers were made. However, only 24 or so (~1% of Honorverse navies) field 1 squadron or more of wallers (BB-SDs), so there are only a handful of sources for ANY waller, ex-SLN or not. Pre-1923, all SLN wallers for 250 years had been moved to the reserve - not the breakers. ~250 years ago all the DNs in the reserve had been sold off or broken up, but given the era, I suspect those DNs looked very similiar to the original config of the Ad Astra class, so smallish (~3.5-4.0 Mtons) and still mounting lots of energy weapons and autocannon for defense. and even a pristine one would be totally outclassed.

Until 1920, the SLN was in the business of shutting down every smaller power's navy, and selling a destabilizing weapon system like this would be against their ethos. If it had happened, it would be in their best interest to find the source, shut it down, and reclaim the lost property.