SLN, and MAlign playing catch up with Manticoran superiority

Joat42 wrote:

Fireflair wrote:Something which hasn't been brought up is the sheer size of the SLN. With thousands of systems and an economic engine that is stupendous, they can afford to run thousands of R&D projects to catch up. If each system has just 5 projects and there's 3-4 overlapping projects between systems, there's still a massive number of R&D projects with a huge amount of funding behind them.

What funding does the SLN have now? They can't use the verge as a piggy-bank any more, plus every ship they have (left) is obsolete.

Just remember the stipulations Honor made to the SL and how that will affect R&D and navy build-up.

The verge wasn’t funding the SLN. It was funding the various corps and corrupt members of the bureaucracy. They got the FF to support their operation via political influence and bribes. The ~1500 industrialized core systems is what funds the SLN.

So the verge becomes pirate kingdom central and the SLN won’t even notice other then it lost about 2/3rds of the territory it has to patrol. And the MA influenced ‘journalists’ write endless stores about how the Manties have turned the peaceful, safe happy verge under the SL into a hellscape since the SLN withdrew it’s 10,000 vessels and the RMN wished them all the best of luck. Which will probably have more than a kernel of truth.

Theemile wrote:Of course, that was during a period where you NEEDED to have access to the engines to maintain them every few hours to keep them running.

It's insane to think that at the start of WWII, a plane engine had a lifespan of a couple hundred of hours between major rebuilds, and mid-war jets had an average lifespan of 30-50 hours between rebuilds. GE's first jet (copy of the British) had a lifespan of just 30 hrs - the engineers couldn't believe this and lowered the operational temps (and thrust) to get a 80-100 hour lifespan.

The typical modern RC jet engine has a between overhaul time of about 25 hours. Which is fine if you are putting it in a one-way attack drone. I would guess that it they charged $25,000 for the engine instead of $2,500 you could get hundreds or thousands of hours.

munroburton wrote:
With skinsuits any starship's crew can conduct external maintenance. But yeah, any LAC that can't be fixed by cable ties or duct tape should go back to its hangar bay.

Probably not around the part of a LAC housing the reactor. You only need to shield the crew, the reactor will be hot and I suspect the area rearward of the biology shield will be unhealthy, even on the outside of the hull.

kzt wrote:

munroburton wrote:
With skinsuits any starship's crew can conduct external maintenance. But yeah, any LAC that can't be fixed by cable ties or duct tape should go back to its hangar bay.

Probably not around the part of a LAC housing the reactor. You only need to shield the crew, the reactor will be hot and I suspect the area rearward of the biology shield will be unhealthy, even on the outside of the hull.

Though the honorverse had some kind of rad shield projected screens. They wouldn't need to economize on radiation shielding the way, say, the NB-36H did -- where the lead shielding only protected the crew areas forward of the reactor and allowed radiation to spread to the sides and rear.

So it's quite possible that the reactor is fully enclosed within rad shields -- if for no other reason than to avoid the negative material and electronic effects the radiation would have on the structure and equipment within any unshielded parts of the LAC.


That said, I double even CLAC level maintenance messes with things close to the fission reactor. If the reactor area has a fault you'd sideline the LAC and take or ship it back for a full-up yard to deal with. (Or you toss it overboard and scuttle it, if it wasn't safe to transport) Either way, that's why you carry some spares.

Jonathan_S wrote:

kzt wrote:Though the honorverse had some kind of rad shield projected screens. They wouldn't need to economize on radiation shielding the way, say, the NB-36H did -- where the lead shielding only protected the crew areas forward of the reactor and allowed radiation to spread to the sides and rear.

So it's quite possible that the reactor is fully enclosed within rad shields -- if for no other reason than to avoid the negative material and electronic effects the radiation would have on the structure and equipment within any unshielded parts of the LAC.


That said, I double even CLAC level maintenance messes with things close to the fission reactor. If the reactor area has a fault you'd sideline the LAC and take or ship it back for a full-up yard to deal with. (Or you toss it overboard and scuttle it, if it wasn't safe to transport) Either way, that's why you carry some spares.

With something as small and unarmored as a LAC, it wouldn't surprise me if the reactor was ejectable - which I'd assume you'd try before scuttling the whole LAC. Of course, with how they are built, Scuttling the whole LAC is not that big an issue.

kzt wrote:Probably not around the part of a LAC housing the reactor. You only need to shield the crew, the reactor will be hot and I suspect the area rearward of the biology shield will be unhealthy, even on the outside of the hull.

You also don't want this radiation source to compromise the stealth of your ships at a distance. If we're talking about high-energy neutrons and other particles, they would be travelling at a significant fraction of the speed of light. And if we're talking about gamma radiation, then it's the speed of light. Either way, those may collide with interplanetary dust and produce emissions again... literally glowing in the dark. It may be faint, but you don't want this to be more visible than whatever else you couldn't already shield.

Slowing the high-energy output is form of rad shielding and probably improves the reactor efficiency if you can reuse that energy anyway. They may still have irradiated material that is a biological hazard after a few hundred hours of operation and must be properly replaced and decontaminated aboard the mothership, though.

I haven't read the entire thread, so do forgive any 'johnny come lately' symptoms that might occur.

At any rate, and I'll say it again, there is a foolproof way for the SLN to drastically cut the time that would be needed to equal the RMN's tech. Join the GA! Then they can outgrow the GA if need be.

penny wrote:I haven't read the entire thread, so do forgive any 'johnny come lately' symptoms that might occur.

At any rate, and I'll say it again, there is a foolproof way for the SLN to drastically cut the time that would be needed to equal the RMN's tech. Join the GA! Then they can outgrow the GA if need be.

I'm not sure the GA would allow the SLN to join.

But in the next years, certainly a new meshwork of treaties between the SLN, the GA (and/or individual GA members), and other players like Maya, Torch, (reformed) Mesa, Renaissance Factor etc. will form, and the SLN will be a big, but equal partner amongst those other star nations and alliances. Also, Beowulf and some of its neighbours will most probably create some kind of alliance. Similar regional alliances will form in other areas, following the example of Maya, RF and Beowulf.

The GA had a short term purpose: Fighting against the Mesan Alignment. It also has no real formal foundation, it's more or less an agreement of Action between the governments of Manticore, Haven, Grayson, Anderman and Beowulf. It's not meant to grow into something sustaining.

Nevertheless, the relationships between the GA members will surely stay close, see those ideas of Pritchart about trade union and mutual citizenship between Manticore and Haven, which will be a bilateral contract between those two nations. I don't see Grayson joining into things like mutual citizenship soon, due to their conservative establishment, but they will continue to have a close relationship with Manticore and now also Haven. Manticore and Anderman will need to cooperate closely due to their intermixed territories in Silesia. We'll see how the relationships to actors like the Republic of Monica and New Tuscany will form in the future.

About technology access: Even as the SLN is now reformed, it's so big and still has lots of remnants of corruption and Mesan Alignment spies everywhere. So the GA won't want the SLN to catch up with their technology, to prevent the knowledge from reaching any bad guys.

markusschaber wrote:About technology access: Even as the SLN is now reformed, it's so big and still has lots of remnants of corruption and Mesan Alignment spies everywhere. So the GA won't want the SLN to catch up with their technology, to prevent the knowledge from reaching any bad guys.

And an alliance is no guarantee of technology sharing, nor even of providing combat vehicles which you might attempt to reverse engineer.

The US doesn't currently share nukes or their technology with its allies. And for most of the cold war, while it did have nukes pre-positioned in Europe to be turned over to other NATO air forces in the event of a nuclear war with the USSR, they were held under the control of armed US military personnel until they got the order to turn them over. (So they weren't available for, say, Germany to reverse engineer) And the US never provided its best stealth technology to allies, hence no export of the F-117, B-2, or F-22.

And in the Honorverse we know that Manticore's ally Erewhon only got the less capable Mantie-lite tech package, and it seem Alizon and Zanzibar got even less than that.

So even if the SLN entered into an alliance with Manticore or the GA that doesn't guarantee them access to more modern tech or equipment -- and I agree with your statement that the GA wouldn't want to hand over that tech.

markusschaber wrote:

penny wrote:I haven't read the entire thread, so do forgive any 'johnny come lately' symptoms that might occur.

At any rate, and I'll say it again, there is a foolproof way for the SLN to drastically cut the time that would be needed to equal the RMN's tech. Join the GA! Then they can outgrow the GA if need be.

I'm not sure the GA would allow the SLN to join.

But in the next years, certainly a new meshwork of treaties between the SLN, the GA (and/or individual GA members), and other players like Maya, Torch, (reformed) Mesa, Renaissance Factor etc. will form, and the SLN will be a big, but equal partner amongst those other star nations and alliances. Also, Beowulf and some of its neighbours will most probably create some kind of alliance. Similar regional alliances will form in other areas, following the example of Maya, RF and Beowulf.

The GA had a short term purpose: Fighting against the Mesan Alignment. It also has no real formal foundation, it's more or less an agreement of Action between the governments of Manticore, Haven, Grayson, Anderman and Beowulf. It's not meant to grow into something sustaining.

Nevertheless, the relationships between the GA members will surely stay close, see those ideas of Pritchart about trade union and mutual citizenship between Manticore and Haven, which will be a bilateral contract between those two nations. I don't see Grayson joining into things like mutual citizenship soon, due to their conservative establishment, but they will continue to have a close relationship with Manticore and now also Haven. Manticore and Anderman will need to cooperate closely due to their intermixed territories in Silesia. We'll see how the relationships to actors like the Republic of Monica and New Tuscany will form in the future.

About technology access: Even as the SLN is now reformed, it's so big and still has lots of remnants of corruption and Mesan Alignment spies everywhere. So the GA won't want the SLN to catch up with their technology, to prevent the knowledge from reaching any bad guys.

I agree, the GA would probably NOT be interested in sharing their tech with the SLN. Fortunately for the SLN (and unfortunately for the GA) the SLN has plenty of high tech polities within it's borders, and they have the advantage of KNOWING that the GA has developed this and that bit of tech, they won't be starting blind. And that is definetely going to make it easy for them to direct their research in the appropriate directions to develop their own versions.

Fortunately for the GA (and UNfortunately for the SLN, and MAlign) the GA has a significant advantage in already having all this tech, and undoubtedly be poised to improve on it, and will also have proven developement teams researching new and unknown tech advancements to (hopefully) stay one jump ahead.

Of course the other side has their own researchers capable of developing tech in new untried directions on their own. Witness the spider and streak drives, and who all knows what else might be developed from the fertile minds of high tech geniuses.

Being a Manticoran fan boy, I am counting on our two resident tech gurus (Sonja, and Shannon) to keep the GA in new and improved high tech goodies to stay in the lead.

Take that MAlign!