1924 PD - Rebuilding the Solarian League Navy

tlb wrote:I doubt that they would be built by hand in any of the major worlds in the Solarian League and those would be the worlds with the clout to get the contracts. Perhaps it would be cheaper to use only a small number of plants building all of the LACs, but that might NOT be the best political solution.

Jet fighters are basically built by hand. There is an assembly line, but it makes a few a week at most. For example, 156 F-35s get built every year.

The economics are completely different when you are creating the infrastructure to make a million complex vehicles at each of a few sites over ten years than a few thousand sites to make a few hundred to a few thousand vehicles over each over ten years.

I wonder, So much will depend on the Political Enviroment.

The Various SDF's will probably push for more funding and importance, Especially those who's observers had been able to report on the developments out of the Haven Manti wars and already seen some internal improvements.

I could see a fracturing of the SL navies funds as different SDF's present their own cases for the funding with the "Evidence" that they were not asleep at the wheel as the SLN had shown its self to be. So yes multiple plants in multiple systems all trying to put together new designs based on "lessons from the Haven - Manti Wars". All competing for funds with the SLN proper and while some of them may actually produce something good most would not. Things like badly balanced designs with too many weapons and not enough magazine space, poor hability, Damage Control weaknesses etc.

Think of some of the designs for 3rd world cruisers between the Wars, Many had much better paper specs than the leading powers were actually building but actually had issues in service.

The SDF's probably bought a lot of equipment from the Giants like Technodyne but would always be under pressure to "build at home" where there was an existing shipbuilding industry.

It will be interesting to see which way RFC takes this. Clearly the RF have there own Shipbuilding facilities and design influence from MAlign. Still we do not know who else has such facilities.

Jonathan_S wrote:

cthia wrote:But those Shrikes were not capable of being produced in horrendous numbers, in the tens of thousands.

Remember, the SLN is a G I A N T that is no longer sleeping.

Think twenty to thirty thousand Shrikes.

Actually Shrikes almost assuredly were build in at least the (low) tens of thousands.

Just filling the LAC bays of the 148 CLACs listed in House of Steel would require 16,648 LACs. And that doesn't count spares, replacements for LACs lost in combat, LACs assigned to all the system defense LAC bases, etc. etc. etc. - And production of CLACs continued past that point (heck for Hydra it just says 94+)

Manticore and Grayson probably built at least 50,000 LACs and probably over 1/3rd of those were Shrikes.



Still, your point that the League could afford to build many many times as many is true. You were simply out a couple orders of magnitude in the number

Thanks for that!

I thought I was insane thinking the SL could produce LAC numbers in the 200k range. What's more is I thought all of you would think I was insane to think such a thing, so I pulled the punch on my post, so to speak.

My thinking was that the SL could easily produce ten times as many LACs as the GA on a bad day. And if the SL were to concentrate its efforts on building LACs only, that number should double or even triple. So, even if Honor did the math, those numbers would top off at around 2,000,000+ LACs!

Are Honor's numbers reasonable?

And if these LACs equal the Shrike design, that is a lot of hurt to another Navy.

One tactic the SL could adopt that was almost unused and unsuccessful in the LAC arena is LACs operating in pairs during dogfights. "I'm not leaving my wingman." Dogfighting originated in the Sol system. I think the RMN adopted some form of it initially, but later abandoned the tactic for reasons I can't recall. But I see no reason the SL cannot come up with some sort of tactical improvement on the LAC design overlooked by Haven and Manticore.

Question: Did Grayson ever produce a LAC? I do not recall that they did, which would be odd since the smaller powerplant is a Grayson design.

tlb wrote:I doubt that they would be built by hand in any of the major worlds in the Solarian League and those would be the worlds with the clout to get the contracts. Perhaps it would be cheaper to use only a small number of plants building all of the LACs, but that might NOT be the best political solution.

kzt wrote:Jet fighters are basically built by hand. There is an assembly line, but it makes a few a week at most. For example, 156 F-35s get built every year.

The economics are completely different when you are creating the infrastructure to make a million complex vehicles at each of a few sites over ten years than a few thousand sites to make a few hundred to a few thousand vehicles over each over ten years.

I am certain that you participated in the thread that was discussing how it could be that Beowulf would be able to quickly begin production of Apollo missiles after Oyster Bay. That is where (I believe) RFC explained how sophisticated manufacturing processes worked on major industrial systems in the Honorverse. It can be thought as enormous 3D printers making objects with great precision that are robot joined into sub-assemblies, which are then robot assembled into products with a minimum of manual labor; mostly humans are there to supervise. Artists might create things by hand, but generally speaking industrial processes do not.

Once the Navy gets an assembly line for LAC's working, then those specifications can be used to clone the process at any Core world with equivalent technology.

cthia wrote:
Question: Did Grayson ever produce a LAC? I do not recall that they did, which would be odd since the smaller powerplant is a Grayson design.

Katanas were a full Grayson design - the RMN canceled their Dogfighting LAC design interwar, while the Graysons pursued their Katana after the projects were split during the HighRidge separation of the Manty/Grayson R&D programns.

cthia wrote:Question: Did Grayson ever produce a LAC? I do not recall that they did, which would be odd since the smaller powerplant is a Grayson design.

The Katana dogfighting LAC was a purely Grayson design -- and so they must have built it themselves while the Janacek admiralty was still dismissing the necessity of one.

House of Steel implies that they build their own Shrike-Bs (with some, unspecified, differences) -- but oddly is silent on GSN Ferrets.

And then under their LACs it also lists their pre-Alliance Faith-class system defense unit.

tlb wrote:That is where (I believe) RFC explained how sophisticated manufacturing processes worked on major industrial systems in the Honorverse. It can be thought as enormous 3D printers making objects with great precision that are robot joined into sub-assemblies, which are then robot assembled into products with a minimum of manual labor; mostly humans are there to supervise. Artists might create things by hand, but generally speaking industrial processes do not.

Once the Navy gets an assembly line for LAC's working, then those specifications can be used to clone the process at any Core world with equivalent technology.

Which completely contradicts his talk about how you need a special yard to make SDs vs 8mt freighters or how producing single piece armored hulls required this very sophisticated advanced capability.

tlb wrote:That is where (I believe) RFC explained how sophisticated manufacturing processes worked on major industrial systems in the Honorverse. It can be thought as enormous 3D printers making objects with great precision that are robot joined into sub-assemblies, which are then robot assembled into products with a minimum of manual labor; mostly humans are there to supervise. Artists might create things by hand, but generally speaking industrial processes do not.

Once the Navy gets an assembly line for LAC's working, then those specifications can be used to clone the process at any Core world with equivalent technology.

kzt wrote:Which completely contradicts his talk about how you need a special yard to make SDs vs 8mt freighters or how producing single piece armored hulls required this very sophisticated advanced capability.

That may be, but it does not affect anything when building a LAC. Producing single piece armored hulls could still require a very sophisticated advanced capability, because some sort of nanite bath is acting as the printer (if I remember correctly, it certainly is not being done manually); which feeds into the difference between a freighter and a big warship.

kzt wrote:Which completely contradicts his talk about how you need a special yard to make SDs vs 8mt freighters or how producing single piece armored hulls required this very sophisticated advanced capability.

Does it? Even though you can 3D print modules, building a military ship that must survive extreme battle conditions compared to a civilian ship must inherently be somewhat different. A civilian ship for example, don't have meters upon meters of battle armor that needs specialized tools and methods to be joined properly. A civilian ship doesn't have plasma conduits running all over to power weapon systems.

I have no doubt a military slip can build civilian ships, but not vice versa.

Joat42 wrote:

kzt wrote:Which completely contradicts his talk about how you need a special yard to make SDs vs 8mt freighters or how producing single piece armored hulls required this very sophisticated advanced capability.

Does it? Even though you can 3D print modules, building a military ship that must survive extreme battle conditions compared to a civilian ship must inherently be somewhat different. A civilian ship for example, don't have meters upon meters of battle armor that needs specialized tools and methods to be joined properly. A civilian ship doesn't have plasma conduits running all over to power weapon systems.

I have no doubt a military slip can build civilian ships, but not vice versa.

I believe this can be summed up in 2 statements

1) Some assembly required (and some products need more than others)

2) Not all Nanites are equal (Different Nanite technologies are required to build different output technologies.)