What do you think the new Haven ships will look like?

Now that they have access to manticoran technology. I really doubt they will just be copy pasting manticoran ships. For one thing there are different economic factors at play. For another Shannon Foraker is likely to have a huge say in these designs. and she thinks differently then manticoran ship designers. As one example she's on record as saying she thinks manticoran's are a bit too obsessed with stuffing in all the bell and whistles.

Puidwen wrote:Now that they have access to manticoran technology. I really doubt they will just be copy pasting manticoran ships. For one thing there are different economic factors at play. For another Shannon Foraker is likely to have a huge say in these designs. and she thinks differently then manticoran ship designers. As one example she's on record as saying she thinks manticoran's are a bit too obsessed with stuffing in all the bell and whistles.

It has been a while since reading the books; but weren't the newest ships for both Manticore and Haven being built together in Bolthole and finished out at Beowulf? That does not seem to allow for a lot of difference between the two navies (which I thought was part of the point). Yes, Shannon will have a hand in the design; but for now it will be a common design.

Puidwen wrote:Now that they have access to manticoran technology. I really doubt they will just be copy pasting manticoran ships. For one thing there are different economic factors at play. For another Shannon Foraker is likely to have a huge say in these designs. and she thinks differently then manticoran ship designers. As one example she's on record as saying she thinks manticoran's are a bit too obsessed with stuffing in all the bell and whistles.

Originally, everything on Havenite ships was over engineered to brute force parity - the frame was physically bulkier, the armor was thicker and heavier. Missiles were larger to accommodate larger Capacitors to power the missiles, and larger warheads. The larger warheads contained more powerful nukes so when a missile hit (the hit % was lower due to more privative ECM systems and sensors), it did more damage.

This proved a successful strategy overall - when advanced tech was later available, using the mass and volume previously allowed for brute force approaches allowed for a much upgraded solution to be available with slight upgrades.

Meanwhile Manitcorian ships were "lightweight". Mass was spent on sidewalls instead of physical armor, because sidewall generators can be more easily swapped as technology evolved over the 50-300 year career of a ship than armor and framing. Manticorian lasers were much smaller for the same output, so Manticorian ships had more powerful energy weapons class for class then it's opponents. Overall, Manticore preferred to use advanced technology instead of brut force where ever possible.

Post GA, I don't see Havenite ships walking too far away from brute force engineering, it will surely be more limited than what we've seen to date, with elaborate Manticorian solutions being available in it's stead to create the best of both worlds.

There are at least two parts to any kind of answer.

I)- Is that Haven now has a lot of tech transfer from Manticore and SOME of that will alow them to reengineer some parts of the Haven industrial system which is building those ships. At least that is now true at Bolt Hole. A question is how long will that take to flow back to the various yards etc at Haven and it's other major production (military at least) centers.

Also, how long will it take the training/education in those areas to spread beyond Bolt Hole back to the same Yard and manufacturing areas in the systems that remain (do not choose to exit) the Republic of Haven now that they have the chance? Remember, there are a lot of points in the education systems of Haven and it member systems and there is still probably a wide range of levels of education, particularly on those annexed by force and kept down partially by hobbling the education of the locals.

2)- How much will the new tech and equipment change the size and configuration of the Haven ships? We haven't really been told if there were new designs for Haven when the Haven/Manticore hybrid ships were started. Are they building two sets of "upgraded" designed, one from the Haven original sets and one from the most current Manticore designs? Just the integration of the software to run the Manticore stuff on any (even newest) Haven designed has got to be massive. Even if they kept cranking out Haven design hulls the interiors are going to have gotten remapped to deal with changes in sizes of a lot of differnt components. That all really does require the engineers to figure out the best (practical) way to reconfigure what goes where even if you leave things like the energy weapons (and power runs) and missile launchers (and magazines and missile feed runs) in more or less the same locations. How does this affect the physical integrity and robustness of the hull etc. Complcated.
Certainly they are going to start (faster then they were doing when the War was on) recycling the oldest and least effective ships to supply materials. Not the least of the considerations is being able to stop much of the production of what are becoming legacy pair parts and replacements. It is possible to upgrade with "smaller" components to improve performance and longevity of units but I think they are going to run into the same situation that was announced by Runsforcellery about the Beowulf SDF----less expensive to just replace with new than try and retrofit.
That is not to say that Haven won't try to sell off a number of ships to it's former subjugated systems as part of their SDF even if those will more or less be positioned for anti-pirate or raid duty.
Another bit of this is how much are the post-Haven-Manticore-SL situations going to drive the mission statements for Haven's ships in some new directions. Like perhaps DD though Crusier size for commerce protection?

Just what physical (mostly visual) appearance are the differences between Haven, Manticore IAE, SL and other major entities and do they really matter?

Theemile wrote:Originally, everything on Havenite ships was over engineered to brute force parity - the frame was physically bulkier, the armor was thicker and heavier. Missiles were larger to accommodate larger Capacitors to power the missiles, and larger warheads. The larger warheads contained more powerful nukes so when a missile hit (the hit % was lower due to more privative ECM systems and sensors), it did more damage.

This proved a successful strategy overall - when advanced tech was later available, using the mass and volume previously allowed for brute force approaches allowed for a much upgraded solution to be available with slight upgrades.

And of course the Haven equipment historically also tended to need to be somewhat physically larger due to having to be designed to be maintained by less skilled crews

Echoes of Honor: Ch. 22 wrote:Peep installations tended to be bigger than Manticoran ones, largely because they used more plug-in/pull-out components. Peep techs weren't up to the sort of in-place maintenance Manticoran technicians routinely performed, so the practice, wherever possible, was to simply yank a malfunctioning component and send it to some central servicing depot where properly trained people could deal with it.

To support plug-in/pull-out components you need to arrange the mechanism so there's access to pull and replace the things (presumably without requiring skilled disassembly) which makes it bigger. But then the need to rationalize your replacement component supply requires a higher level of commonality, so the same plug-in component is used in a variety of equipment -- likely requiring compromises in the equipment as it's not tailored for any one of them.

Of course there were still entire devices that Manticoran ships would carry spares for -- but, even so, the expectation that the crew themselves could probably rebuild the failed internal component should allow you to carry fewer full replacements as you'd expect to often be able to swap in the spare then rebuild the failed one to act as a new spare.

And of course having to carry a bunch of extra plug-in replacement components means you need more internal ship volume dedicated to carrying those extra components; which further (slightly) drives up the size of the ship compared to a Manticoran design.


And as much as the restore Republic has done to improve their navy, I'm not sure they'd have been able to raise the skill level of their long service engineering techs to the point of switching over to Manticoran style repairs. (OTOH given the steadily reducing crew sizes of modern RMN ships they may have adopted a more plug-in replacement style simply because they don't have enough manpower anymore to "waste" it on repairing things that could just be swapped instead. So maybe the new shared GA designs find a happy medium between the old Haven style and the old Manticore style of design and repair.

Since constrained dimensionally by RFC's in house "physics", they will look identical from a far distance just like all other ships in the HV and more than likely is one reason why the Honorverse will never be syndicated to TV. The ships look like double ended sex objects...

Relax wrote:Since constrained dimensionally by RFC's in house "physics", they will look identical from a far distance just like all other ships in the HV and more than likely is one reason why the Honorverse will never be syndicated to TV. The ships look like double ended sex objects...

David once said he never made the connection mentally when he was writing the books

My feeling is that we'll see two phases of ship design for the GA.

The first, which overlaps with the war with the SL and thus we're already well into, is where they simply take the current best design and build the same for everyone, with minor evolutions. That's the Invictus / Harrington II class SDs, Nike-class BC and probably what the RMN/GSN had been designing for their next-gen CA for after the Saganami-C. Foraker and Hemphill will work together to improve the designs a little, but it'll be mostly unchanged in the near term. Their skills will instead be used in making the production process faster and in the long-term.

I say this because during the war with the SL they needed ships fast, and this without the yards in the MBS after the Yawata Strike. They also needed to modernise the Beowulf fleet, which was completely obsolete by GA terms. The Havenite fleet of SD(P)s will probably stay for a long while (they had 1000 of those!), but no more will be built (no more have been built since whatever was already in the pipeline after the ink was signed in Landing City) and below the wall and especially below BC we may see fast replacing with adapted Manty tech.

The second phase is the long-term, when there is no more time pressure to upgrade and when the genius of Shannon & Sonja will have borne fruit. At that time, we may see divergences between the many components of the GA beyond outfitting, with some navies going for one type of design or one emphasis on the design compared to the others, according to their needs and philosophy.

We may never see this. This depends on how far in the future we have still to go before the series ends, and how much of this is needed to find & fight the MAlign.

The replacement of the Beowulf SDF fleet is actually not that much of a problem if you consider that what is coming out of Bolt Hole -at least for the Manticore side of ships for RMN- is still state of the art. It is not unreasonable that some of that new production could be used to replace BSDF ships on a 1-1 basis (with a caveat or two) and Beowulf recycling the decommissioned ships at home to produce military equipment to build more at home.
The caveat that would stand out is how does Beowulf see the needs for replacements in terms of ship classes and how well the current production ---at Bolt Hole, Beowulf and what is in hopefully nearly in completion as far as restart of Naval ship construction at Manticore--- matches those needs. Yes, Beowulf could be very happy with modern "Manticore" designed SDs since those are the heavy firepower ships. Thing is, we are given the impression that Beowulf also was a Star Nation with a bunch of allied daughter colonies plus other allies and they had a decent size merchant marine. With the turmoil in the changes to the SL with systems leaving it and a massively reduces SLN to provide commerce protection within the smaller SL and presently none at all outside what ends up being the SL (per the terms of the agreement dictated by Harrington) Beowulf and others are going to have to pick up that kind of protection.
Sure, a brand new current Manticore SD to replace their existing SDs puts them massively ahead of all but the GA, but we have no idea how things are going to evolve. The same things with the present set of "warfighter" DD though BC that Manticore has been building. the same thing applies but the "warfighters" have a set of drawbacks that mean that they are not as suitable for Commerce Protect and long term cruising such as the earlier design - centered on commerce protection- had in terms of things like Marines and longer term endurance to spend a lot of time a way from bases patrolling and running down leads as well as directly dealing with pirates. Things like lack of ability to put aboard Prize Crews (with Marines) to take the captured ships back to bases etc. Starships still have considerable value and just scuttling them doesn't make a lot of sense if you can 1) return them to owners --and collect the insurance reward, recover and return the cargos, bring the surviving pirates back and extract information about baseing, fences, supply points and corruption that allowed them to operate.

We know Beowulf had been doing all that manufacturing for rebuilding the orbital stations and yards and fabrication areas of the same for Manticore plus cranking out military equipment/parts for RMN etc. Sure, Manticore has been apparently supplying them with recycled materials from SLN (and earlier PRHN ships) as well as paying for manufacturing costs. But Beowulf has needs of it's own and just getting RMN ships now -either new or "lightly used may not actually meet some of their needs.

At the same time, Beowulf will have to go on an energetic program to retrain a lot of people on this "new" equipment since they may have trained with units of the current version of RMN equipment using their old "Beowulf" SDF ships, but now they will need to transition to the actual equipment.

We know from a scene when Fleet Adm. Marianne Holmon-Sanders is talking to Adm. Truman that the SD(P)s "are coming". I think this is a discussion shortly before Adm. Tsang tries to force the transit through the wormhole during Operation Raging Justice, but I also recall this discussion happening twice. I also don't think I am entirely right here, because during Raging Justice Beowulf hadn't yet seceded so wouldn't be promised any new ships. Anyway, should be easy to find "Holmon-Sanders" in the books.

But your question about what's below the wall remains. Then again, we have that question for the RMN too, so the question is in the air for all of them.