Reporters on Galton

penny wrote:Since Galton has been conquered, will the GA take Galton's warships as prizes? They should have some use to someone, even Torch.

Prizes, yes. Just like they did for the 300-odd ships that survived the Second Battle of Manticore, out of the 437 that Filareta delivered on a platter.

Use, them? No. They'll be dismantled, explored and investigated, like the Solarian ships were. Any technological distinctiveness from the Galton Navy will be added to their own. After that, maybe they can be recycled for parts.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:
Prizes, yes. Just like they did for the 300-odd ships that survived the Second Battle of Manticore, out of the 437 that Filareta delivered on a platter.

Use, them? No. They'll be dismantled, explored and investigated, like the Solarian ships were. Any technological distinctiveness from the Galton Navy will be added to their own. After that, maybe they can be recycled for parts.

It is possible that the interim use by Grayson of Haven prizes was primarily do to a combination of the relatively lower level of complexity and the plug-and-play maintenance described as being used by Haven with the lower education levels by the average Havenite spacer. Grayson was swapping out all sorts of things in the RHN SDs etc it got and it may have been cheaper and faster to upgrade the former Haven ships -with RMN tech either supplied or starting to be produces by Grayson- than to build anything that sized from scratch given that they didn't have the capacity (or time) to built out their own yards for warships.
Use them short term but concentrate on building capacity for their own new construction. Almost everything pulled out of the RHN ships would have been recycled for new construction of something. Make replacement parts, build the yard facilities, start building new ships to RMN inspired or actual designs.
They were making do with functional warships even if they had to swap out and upgrade a lot of things. For Grayson, it was picking up your enemies weapons and using them against the foe in the short term and at worst were on an actual par with what Haven was mostly then using.
That would be vastly unlike the SL ships of Fillerta or what was captured out in Talbot since they were well behind the tech levels of Manticore and effectively deathtraps when facing RMN modern ships.
And this bleeds into the earlier threads of turning over captured (mostly surrendered) SLN ships as the nucleus of local SDFs for systems leaving the League or now free of OFS "protection" using Frontier Fleet to keep off pirate scum and aggressive neighbors. Short term solutions. Just like all sorts of surrendered but operable SLN ships from Fillertas fleet being used as materials for (initially Beowulfs) recovery manufacturing for rebuilding Manticore's orbital and other facilities and the defeated fleet (that were not already inoperable) from Talbott flown at least to Manticore for scrapping. Remember what happened to Bing's ships-- those not destroyed immediately when Mike shows up had a couple of examples flown off for more detained examination but the rest just had their computers slagged and left in orbit until Frontier Fleet might be able to get around to completely redoing the computer systems.
Funny, nobody commented on it was likely everything except the life support and reactor management computers or just what a massive challenge for the local system to gear up to having to TOW all those warships well out from the planet and get them into stable orbits before the orbits they were in when Mike showed up started to degrade....big smile.

Brigade XO wrote: It is possible that the interim use by Grayson of Haven prizes was primarily do to a combination of the relatively lower level of complexity and the plug-and-play maintenance described as being used by Haven with the lower education levels by the average Havenite spacer. Grayson was swapping out all sorts of things in the RHN SDs etc it got and it may have been cheaper and faster to upgrade the former Haven ships -with RMN tech either supplied or starting to be produces by Grayson- than to build anything that sized from scratch given that they didn't have the capacity (or time) to built out their own yards for warships.

Quite clearly, the DuQuesnes that White Haven captured at Third Yeltsin were repairable and put to use in both the RMN and GSN. RFC has said that it's easy to build things once you have the plans for your fabricators, so the trick is having them, the plans and the spare capacity. I suspect the plans themselves were also mostly Solarian in nature, which the RMN would have had access to, at least until the self-imposed embargo kicked in. And I think this is the big deal for why those ships were pressed into service: at the time, adding 30 ships of the wall to the navies in question was a major contribution to their active fleet rosters and reduced the pressure on their own yards to build the replacement ships.

But as soon as those were built, the DuQuesnes were decommissioned and recycled.

Use them short term but concentrate on building capacity for their own new construction. Almost everything pulled out of the RHN ships would have been recycled for new construction of something. Make replacement parts, build the yard facilities, start building new ships to RMN inspired or actual designs.

Ayup.

That would be vastly unlike the SL ships of Fillerta or what was captured out in Talbot since they were well behind the tech levels of Manticore and effectively deathtraps when facing RMN modern ships.

Same thing for the Galton Navy: those ships are much technically inferior to what the GA can produce, so there's no point in putting them in service. And unlike both of the earlier occasions, the yards in the GA member systems have spare capacity to build if they need to build more.

Remember what happened to Bing's ships-- those not destroyed immediately when Mike shows up had a couple of examples flown off for more detained examination but the rest just had their computers slagged and left in orbit until Frontier Fleet might be able to get around to completely redoing the computer systems.

I don't remember a discussion of those ships leaving New Tuscany. There was a discussion of the investigators from Tenth Fleet analysing them on-site, then tripping the tamper protection devices that basically melted their molycirc computers back to sand. It isn't said, but I would expect them to have removed the ammunition that had been stored aboard.

Whether New Tuscany took possession of them or whether the SLN had to send someone (through the Junction!) with new computers to get those ships to a yard under their own power.

Funny, nobody commented on it was likely everything except the life support and reactor management computers or just what a massive challenge for the local system to gear up to having to TOW all those warships well out from the planet and get them into stable orbits before the orbits they were in when Mike showed up started to degrade....big smile.

They weren't in orbit when Mike showed up. Byng led them on an attack run on Tenth Fleet, which led to his ship (and only his ship) being blown out of space. The rest then surrendered and Tenth Fleet's marines came aboard. I don't think Tenth Fleet would have brought them to a close orbit of New Tuscany because there was no reason to do that and many reasons not to, including that the New Tuscany government was not their ally. They'd have brought close to the planet to make it easy for the crews to evacuate on pinnaces, but far enough not to disturb commercial space operations near the planet.

Brigade XO wrote:

ThinksMarkedly wrote:
Prizes, yes. Just like they did for the 300-odd ships that survived the Second Battle of Manticore, out of the 437 that Filareta delivered on a platter.

Use, them? No. They'll be dismantled, explored and investigated, like the Solarian ships were. Any technological distinctiveness from the Galton Navy will be added to their own. After that, maybe they can be recycled for parts.

It is possible that the interim use by Grayson of Haven prizes was primarily do to a combination of the relatively lower level of complexity and the plug-and-play maintenance described as being used by Haven with the lower education levels by the average Havenite spacer. Grayson was swapping out all sorts of things in the RHN SDs etc it got and it may have been cheaper and faster to upgrade the former Haven ships -with RMN tech either supplied or starting to be produces by Grayson- than to build anything that sized from scratch given that they didn't have the capacity (or time) to built out their own yards for warships.
Use them short term but concentrate on building capacity for their own new construction. Almost everything pulled out of the RHN ships would have been recycled for new construction of something. Make replacement parts, build the yard facilities, start building new ships to RMN inspired or actual designs.
They were making do with functional warships even if they had to swap out and upgrade a lot of things. For Grayson, it was picking up your enemies weapons and using them against the foe in the short term and at worst were on an actual par with what Haven was mostly then using.
That would be vastly unlike the SL ships of Fillerta or what was captured out in Talbot since they were well behind the tech levels of Manticore and effectively deathtraps when facing RMN modern ships.
And this bleeds into the earlier threads of turning over captured (mostly surrendered) SLN ships as the nucleus of local SDFs for systems leaving the League or now free of OFS "protection" using Frontier Fleet to keep off pirate scum and aggressive neighbors. Short term solutions. Just like all sorts of surrendered but operable SLN ships from Fillertas fleet being used as materials for (initially Beowulfs) recovery manufacturing for rebuilding Manticore's orbital and other facilities and the defeated fleet (that were not already inoperable) from Talbott flown at least to Manticore for scrapping. Remember what happened to Bing's ships-- those not destroyed immediately when Mike shows up had a couple of examples flown off for more detained examination but the rest just had their computers slagged and left in orbit until Frontier Fleet might be able to get around to completely redoing the computer systems.
Funny, nobody commented on it was likely everything except the life support and reactor management computers or just what a massive challenge for the local system to gear up to having to TOW all those warships well out from the planet and get them into stable orbits before the orbits they were in when Mike showed up started to degrade....big smile.

I didn't think RFC was consistent about refitting SDs. Grayson seemed to be able to do it with no real fuss. And even the RMN did it a few times, IINM. Anyway, I thought the prohibiting factor was if the designs were too different from each other. Were Galton's SDs pod layers? Do we know if they were heavily automated?

Anyway, they can be put into service for systems that are crying for something. Their missile tubes ought to be big enough.

P.S. I hope I am not fueling a future thread about what to do with "Captured MAN junk." We had fifty-leven threads about what to do with Captured Solly junk.

penny wrote:I didn't think RFC was consistent about refitting SDs. Grayson seemed to be able to do it with no real fuss. And even the RMN did it a few times, IINM. Anyway, I thought the prohibiting factor was if the designs were too different from each other. Were Galton's SDs pod layers? Do we know if they were heavily automated?

Anyway, they can be put into service for systems that are crying for something. Their missile tubes ought to be big enough.

P.S. I hope I am not fueling a future thread about what to do with "Captured MAN junk." We had fifty-leven threads about what to do with Captured Solly junk.

Galton had some SD(P)s. That's why I mentioned the League would almost certainly like those if the GA would be willing to turn them over (which I can't see them doing).
Even if the League didn't actually operate them, simply pulling them apart to gain design inspiration and reverse engineer some key functionality would give their domestic SD(P) design and production a leg up.

And I think RFC has been fairly consistent about refitting SDs.

In wartime, when the tech level and capabilities are comparable to your own SDs, it can be worth doing as a stopgap measure even though they'll be more expensive to operate than domestic SDs AND a headache from a training and logistics standpoint. That's because starting with an SD that's roughly comparable to your own you can refit one with a lot less yard time (and possibly in much less capable yards) than you'd need to build a new domestic SD. And, in wartime, it's worth the cost to save the time.

But once the captured SD falls too far behind the tech curve -- say it can't fire MDMs, or can't roll pods, then the refit time to get it up to a comparable effectiveness radically increases. Increases to the point were it might almost take longer to refit than it'd take to build a domestic SD/SD(P) from the ground up. At that point the time savings (if any) aren't worth it for what, even after refit, will be an inferior unit.

(Note the same is true for refitting your own SDs. That's why even under High Ridge's misguided government Manticore quickly realized that refitting their pre-pod SDs to even just be MDM capable was a fool's errand. What you got wasn't remotely worth the time and cost)

Jonathan_S wrote:

penny wrote:I didn't think RFC was consistent about refitting SDs. Grayson seemed to be able to do it with no real fuss. And even the RMN did it a few times, IINM. Anyway, I thought the prohibiting factor was if the designs were too different from each other. Were Galton's SDs pod layers? Do we know if they were heavily automated?

Anyway, they can be put into service for systems that are crying for something. Their missile tubes ought to be big enough.

P.S. I hope I am not fueling a future thread about what to do with "Captured MAN junk." We had fifty-leven threads about what to do with Captured Solly junk.

Galton had some SD(P)s. That's why I mentioned the League would almost certainly like those if the GA would be willing to turn them over (which I can't see them doing).
Even if the League didn't actually operate them, simply pulling them apart to gain design inspiration and reverse engineer some key functionality would give their domestic SD(P) design and production a leg up.

And I think RFC has been fairly consistent about refitting SDs.

In wartime, when the tech level and capabilities are comparable to your own SDs, it can be worth doing as a stopgap measure even though they'll be more expensive to operate than domestic SDs AND a headache from a training and logistics standpoint. That's because starting with an SD that's roughly comparable to your own you can refit one with a lot less yard time (and possibly in much less capable yards) than you'd need to build a new domestic SD. And, in wartime, it's worth the cost to save the time.

But once the captured SD falls too far behind the tech curve -- say it can't fire MDMs, or can't roll pods, then the refit time to get it up to a comparable effectiveness radically increases. Increases to the point were it might almost take longer to refit than it'd take to build a domestic SD/SD(P) from the ground up. At that point the time savings (if any) aren't worth it for what, even after refit, will be an inferior unit.

(Note the same is true for refitting your own SDs. That's why even under High Ridge's misguided government Manticore quickly realized that refitting their pre-pod SDs to even just be MDM capable was a fool's errand. What you got wasn't remotely worth the time and cost)

According to HoS, Manticore refitted 21 Haven and Dusquesne SDs and 5 Nuevo Paris Dreadnaughts captured early in the war and used them in secondary and tertiary systems behind the front lines, and none of them saw battle. All the former Havenite SDs were sold to Grayson after the first war, and them (and Grayson's remaining 10 Desquesne SDs) were placed in reserve, along with the 22 surviving Steadholder Denevski SDs and the 34 former RMN Victory SDs which Grayson also purchased). All of which were pulled out of reserve and manned with RMN crews after the 2nd war started, then slowly placed back in reserve as new construction required crews to man them.

Of course those ships were originally refitted when the tech (and ship design and doctrine) was not too divergent between the navies, and had been slowly updated (adding advanced comps, ftl comms, advanced firecontrol, ecm, etc.) to stay relevant with the RMN/GSN ships of the same generation they were supposed to be operating with.

Even refitting a newly captured Desquesne in 1912 would have questionable - the time and effort it would take to bring it up to the standards of it's older compatriots would have been exorbitant and might not have saved much time and cost over a new build ship.

(Conversations like this are why I have not changed my signature in awhile.)

ThinksMarkedly wrote:
I don't remember a discussion of those ships leaving New Tuscany. There was a discussion of the investigators from Tenth Fleet analysing them on-site, then tripping the tamper protection devices that basically melted their molycirc computers back to sand. It isn't said, but I would expect them to have removed the ammunition that had been stored aboard.

Whether New Tuscany took possession of them or whether the SLN had to send someone (through the Junction!) with new computers to get those ships to a yard under their own power.

They weren't in orbit when Mike showed up. Byng led them on an attack run on Tenth Fleet, which led to his ship (and only his ship) being blown out of space. The rest then surrendered and Tenth Fleet's marines came aboard. I don't think Tenth Fleet would have brought them to a close orbit of New Tuscany because there was no reason to do that and many reasons not to, including that the New Tuscany government was not their ally. They'd have brought close to the planet to make it easy for the crews to evacuate on pinnaces, but far enough not to disturb commercial space operations near the planet.

Once 10th Fleet took what they wanted for examples and perhaps one of each type of ship for tearing down lever of inspection, they slagged the computers and left them, with the crew on New Tuscany. At that point about the only thing New Tucany could have done would be to scrap them- no way SLN was going to let them repair them even if it were possible for NT to do that with local tech. Disposition of the weapons- particularly the missiles- was not talked about that I remember and I'm not sure they ships were going to be good for anything unless completely refurbished at New Tuscany by SLN repair ships- which would have been a long and painful job.
Two thought on that.....FIirst is that if they didn't also slag the systems of the missiles (yeah, the warhead are more problematical but the could have "just" fired everything in the tubes and magazines off in a direction above or below the ecliptic and self-destruct at then of run. The energy weapons could have had their systems slagged along with the other computers. Second is that if they didn't want to scram the reactors so there were no containment failures, then they could have just included all the life support in the computer self destruct and left all that junk in whatever orbits they were parked in till the SLN decided what to do with them........but it wasn't necessary to the plot beyond destroying the computer systems and leaving the FF crews essentially stranded at New Tuscany as a burden on them and forcing SLN to retrieve their people.
Eliminating the SLN ships was the important part along with the lesson that RMN was much better in experience, vastly better equipment and tactics along with the point that Manticore didn't need or want to slaughter SLN spacers.

Brigade XO wrote:Once 10th Fleet took what they wanted for examples and perhaps one of each type of ship for tearing down lever of inspection, they slagged the computers and left them, with the crew on New Tuscany. At that point about the only thing New Tucany could have done would be to scrap them- no way SLN was going to let them repair them even if it were possible for NT to do that with local tech. Disposition of the weapons- particularly the missiles- was not talked about that I remember and I'm not sure they ships were going to be good for anything unless completely refurbished at New Tuscany by SLN repair ships- which would have been a long and painful job.

Did they slag the computers or even just wipe them (so a complete reload would make the ship operable again)? I say because we know that they are salvaging SD class grasers for use, so it depends on where the salvage yards are. If they want to move them to Manticore; that would be easier, if they could move under their own power.

tlb wrote:Did they slag the computers or even just wipe them (so a complete reload would make the ship operable again)? I say because we know that they are salvaging SD class grasers for use, so it depends on where the salvage yards are. If they want to move them to Manticore; that would be easier, if they could move under their own power.

The wording on the text is that it was more than just wipe. It was a tamper protection, which renders them inoperative without a major yard to restore. I don't think you could simply load the OS back from backups.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:The wording on the text is that it was more than just wipe. It was a tamper protection, which renders them inoperative without a major yard to restore. I don't think you could simply load the OS back from backups.

However, that does not sound as though the computers were slagged either. Tamper protection sounds as though the computers might be slagged, if an unauthorized access is attempted. If the computers were slagged, then it is unnecessary to talk of tamper protection. So I do not understand from this description what was really done. Was this for both Byng's and Crandall's ships?