Axelrod and SKM relationship

Theemile wrote:
Again, the full story about the Free Brotherhood would be an interesting short story. It panicked a young Manticore enough to purchase a potent fleet, and hire 15,000 professionals to man it (and allow those 15,000 people into their small culture.)

It seems I missed something - where in the text does it state the SKM hired 15K merch to deal with the Free Brotherhood?

Fox2! wrote:

Theemile wrote:
Again, the full story about the Free Brotherhood would be an interesting short story. It panicked a young Manticore enough to purchase a potent fleet, and hire 15,000 professionals to man it (and allow those 15,000 people into their small culture.)

It seems I missed something - where in the text does it state the SKM hired 15K merch to deal with the Free Brotherhood?

I think it's the implication. They bought 9 lightly-used, 200-300k-tonne battlecruisers, at a time when the RMN must have only had frigates, corvettes and destroyers. How would they crew those ships in the first place?

It's the same as the Royal Torch Navy in the 1920s. They didn't have enough personnel, let alone skilled personnel, to man the captured heavy cruisers that the State Sec in Exile force brought. Or again similar to the GSN right after signing the Treaty of Alliance with Manticore: they had a few very obsolete destroyers. The rapid expansion in all those cases was only possible with importing personnel along with the new ships.

The difference for Grayson is that they had a population of 3 billion at the time and extensive space-borne industry, so educating the new recruits to take up Navy positions wasn't too difficult. And they still did that on Manticore.

Torch had a very un-educated population who decided to immigrate: Manpower didn't teach their slaves to run ships. And Manticore of the late 1400s had a tiny population, barely bigger than those that had debarked from the Jason colony ship, and still catching up with the last 7 centuries of tech development.

So, perhaps 15,000 trained spacers many of who may or may not have been military veterans to crew 9 battle cruisers.....and run the logistics of keeping them and the support infrastructure (plus bringing it into existence on the scale needed) in working order. Hell of a bump in the potential for Manticore to build out it's orbital infrastructure and capacity.

Brigade XO wrote:So, perhaps 15,000 trained spacers many of who may or may not have been military veterans to crew 9 battle cruisers.....and run the logistics of keeping them and the support infrastructure (plus bringing it into existence on the scale needed) in working order. Hell of a bump in the potential for Manticore to build out it's orbital infrastructure and capacity.

Similar sized ships in 1900 (The Mars and Star Knight) needed about 1000 crew on the ship. I'm not sure of how the logistics would work.

If it's set up as an expeditionary force it would need freighters, tankers, repair ships etc. And a source of parts and ordinance, which are unlikely to be mobile.

So 15K seems reasonable, but Manticore would be completely unable to sustain a 'modern' fleet for long without massive investments into ship building and manufacturing and the massive training program needed to train people to run this. And fully integrating the fleet into the military of the SKM along with modernizing and upskilling the Navy.

You'd essentially have to accept that they group you brought in are the navy, and the SKM military gets assigned to support them. This isn't impossible, but it isn't simple or easy either.

KZT, Thinks Markedly and Brigade XO,

Thanks for your answers and analysis.

At the start of the Manticore Ascendant series, Manticore does NOT have enough local capacity to do much more than maintain a couple of the larger ships in operation and most of the rest of them are almost mothballed. They are not yet building much in the way of spare parts and are importing things like the impellers and hyperdrives. Recall that - interesting- drive to cut a BC in half and make two impeller driven in-system patrol and rescue ships. The RMN is nowhere near a size to crew all of the ships they have (most in the storage mode) and they , if I recall correctly, are having to buy their missiles from other systems.
So while Manticore has a relatively lot of ships, they have not maintained much of what they may have had nor continued to develop the local industries nor support the Navy beyond a shadow of what they would need to actually bring everything into commission and operate them all with any kind of efficiency. Or have sufficient experienced officers etc to take them into combat. They simply found attention diverted away from threat of attack since not much has happened in years and years. Money has been diverted away from the Navy and we see political machinations to essentially convert the Navy into an impeller based in-system patrol force. We have now books in Manticore Ascendant and Manticore is still way behind the curve if they are going to bring themselves back up to the level at which they first had all those BCs. They are, however, working at it with the improvements in growing the Navy in terms of spacers and in pushing manufacturing of things they need to start building their own -at least commercial shipping- and maintaining/improving the existing ships.