pd 1924 - Shape of Beowulf's fleet

Beowulf is already producing a lot of the equipmennt if not a lot of compleated ships for SEM along with missiles as part of helping rebuild the Manticor Home System industrial base and repair/replace warships ets.
They also have the same quandary as SEM (and Haven and the rest of the GA) of what the new design ships are going to have for missions. If they are talking with Manticore, they arelady know that the "warfighter" ships of the current generatios with DDM and MDM are light on crew for traditional Commerce Protection and are going to want to consider giveing them more crew and more endurance for longer deployments covering merchant shipping and maintianing active showing the flag where needed.
In the short term, Beowulf could use modern SEM ships what migh tbe going into reserve to let them have the DD/MDM capabilities and stay ahead of the Leage and most other navies but unless they have a prefernce for what their SDF should be configured for with local designer, they are fairly well paired with SEM. Remember, they are the ones responsible for the Sigma Draconus end of the Beowulf end of the wormhole to the Junction so it is in both their and SEM to have at least the portonf of the BSDF doing that job to now be at least recent SEM SD and support designs that would also now also include forts.......Just be obvious that the wormhole terminus is strongly defended.

We saw that at leat one of Beowulf's close traiding partnters was quietly looking to bump up their commerce and market shares at Beowulf's expence with the League problems. They may or may not have gotten that bit of informaton yet but they will need to conider that they are not going to be able to depend too heavily on SLN to carry any of the load of commerce protection for the Beowulf Daughter colonies (if in the the League or not).

CLACS for Beowulf would be a good idea along with LACS of their own.
How long can Beowulf keep running their pre-GL set of less-than-wall is possibly at least 5 years before anything is comming out of other than Technodyne shipbulding but the RA is the joker here since the likelyhood -which nobody will know about- that they will be able to deploy cataprhact variatints the League hasn't seen. We are going to find out in a few years how fast the SLN is gong to be able to improve on what they have seen but don't have the specs on. Except.....the SLN ships that went to Galton now have a lot of data on the GL tech seen from the point of being with the ships that used it vs being on the receiving end and that is going to be of great interest to their R&D people.

Beowulf is already producing a lot of the equipmennt if not a lot of compleated ships for SEM along with missiles as part of helping rebuild the Manticor Home System industrial base and repair/replace warships ets.
They also have the same quandary as SEM (and Haven and the rest of the GA) of what the new design ships are going to have for missions. If they are talking with Manticore, they arelady know that the "warfighter" ships of the current generatios with DDM and MDM are light on crew for traditional Commerce Protection and are going to want to consider giveing them more crew and more endurance for longer deployments covering merchant shipping and maintianing active showing the flag where needed.
In the short term, Beowulf could use modern SEM ships what migh tbe going into reserve to let them have the DD/MDM capabilities and stay ahead of the Leage and most other navies but unless they have a prefernce for what their SDF should be configured for with local designer, they are fairly well paired with SEM. Remember, they are the ones responsible for the Sigma Draconus end of the Beowulf end of the wormhole to the Junction so it is in both their and SEM to have at least the portonf of the BSDF doing that job to now be at least recent SEM SD and support designs that would also now also include forts.......Just be obvious that the wormhole terminus is strongly defended.

We saw that at leat one of Beowulf's close traiding partnters was quietly looking to bump up their commerce and market shares at Beowulf's expence with the League problems. They may or may not have gotten that bit of informaton yet but they will need to conider that they are not going to be able to depend too heavily on SLN to carry any of the load of commerce protection for the Beowulf Daughter colonies (if in the the League or not).

CLACS for Beowulf would be a good idea along with LACS of their own.
How long can Beowulf keep running their pre-GL set of less-than-wall is possibly at least 5 years before anything is comming out of other than Technodyne shipbulding but the RA is the joker here since the likelyhood -which nobody will know about- that they will be able to deploy cataprhact variatints the League hasn't seen. We are going to find out in a few years how fast the SLN is gong to be able to improve on what they have seen but don't have the specs on. Except.....the SLN ships that went to Galton now have a lot of data on the GL tech seen from the point of being with the ships that used it vs being on the receiving end and that is going to be of great interest to their R&D people.

#0 Beowulf's capability to produce ships in the next 5-10 years is ~zero: Their industrial capacity was gutted.

#1 Beowulf had the HV's largest mapping, recon system force in the galaxy for further human expansion/exploration. This will not disappear anytime soon and they need $$$ to keep coming in. What happens to Jessyk? Audobon ballroom takeover for sure who are ~sponsored/essentially allies with Beowulf. They have merged effectively.

#2 Beowulf has a large international commerce sector

External Threats:

#3 SLN while currently hamstrung will NOT remain hamstrung for long. Too many jobs depend on protection/commerce. Ex SLN space is not going to turn into post Cold War Deuchland where their soldiers show up to NATO exercises with wooden "guns" while proudly chest beating about their balanced federal budgets... SLN population was not marched through Auschwitz completely demoralizing their population as inhuman/barbaric. SL space were side pieces. They are arrogant and want their prestige back. They will be building a navy... a big navy as they are thousands of worlds of proud arrogant pampered worlds in SL space.

#4 Rennaisance Factor is rising with hundreds of SDP's and taking territory.

#5 GA while currently allied may not be in the future with hundreds of SDP's of their own

#6 MAYA sector is currently building ~hundred SDP building and while they are "nice" now, who says they will remain so in the future?

#7 Beowulf has daughter colonies also surrounded by SL space who do not like them all that much.

A] Short term? Beowulf/colonies builds forts. A LOT of forts, since their geography resides inside the heart of SL space who may or may not be hostile towards them and therefore Beowulf will proportionally need FAR more forts than someone in say... the GA, far far away. Do forts at Galton have the new Grav plates for ~150G maneuvers? Since one now has MDM's with FTL, Stealthed Hastas's with FTL, and known Grazer based long duration super stealth MALIGN torpedoes, maneuver warfare using walls of battle with SD is DEAD and going inside hyperlimit is not exactly necessary in the short term unless you are looking to conquer and HOLD said territory. So why bother with the current impeller limitation 8Mton paradigm. May as well just build ~~16Mton forts and drop the SD class entirely. So they travel slowly between systems. Ok. Planning on conquering SL space anytime soon? [Yes/No]

B] Design and start building a modern DDM Cruiser ASAP for all of their extended mission requirements

Now WHAT is in the modern cruiser just from the selected tech shown in books SoSAG-->TEiF is the question. Beowulf was ~given those specs by Manticore so short term, same rough DD/cruiser everyone else in the GA is going to field shortly and be perfectly serviceable for several decades. Long term who knows. Depends on plot to get ROUL Harrington some action...

Relax wrote:#0 Beowulf's capability to produce ships in the next 5-10 years is ~zero: Their industrial capacity was gutted.

When did this happen? The destroyed orbitals were not manufacturing facilities, so far as I know. The SLN attack did destroy one small part of the manufacturing stream, but should be easily replaced. It did not stop the missiles being created for the Grand Alliance. Perhaps their service industries took a hit with the orbital destruction, but I am not aware of any evidence for a major loss of manufacturing.

??? Beowulf lost EVERYTHING other than one small portion of their orbital industry which was making the missiles. Missiles, not ships. Beowulf had EVERYTHING centralized unlike Grayson for instance.

How much can you build if Everything which goes into shipbuilding was destroyed, but the dry dock was left alone? Nothing is what.

How much can you build if all the shipbuilders who build ships at said existing drydock are now radiated dust? Nothing is what.

Relax wrote:??? Beowulf lost EVERYTHING other than one small portion of their orbital industry which was making the missiles. Missiles, not ships. Beowulf had EVERYTHING centralized unlike Grayson for instance.

How much can you build if Everything which goes into shipbuilding was destroyed, but the dry dock was left alone? Nothing is what.

How much can you build if all the shipbuilders who build ships at said existing drydock are now radiated dust? Nothing is what.

Where is the text for that?

Uncompromising Honor. Is a good read. Try it.

Relax wrote:Uncompromising Honor. Is a good read. Try it.

Ha, ha; good one. But you say the text is there and everything I read says the three destroyed orbitals were habitations, NOT FACTORIES. The SLN attacked military targets, but the Malign wanted revenge.

Half a dozen missiles got through the block ships and destroyed the number 2 nano-farm with 5 thousand deaths. Nano-farm 1 received easily repairable damage and only 5 hundred people died. Not a single hit to the missile production lines.

Twenty-seven seconds later, Beowulf Gamma, the third largest orbital habitat in the Beowulf System, ceased to exist, along with 9.5 million human beings... including a Mesan gamma line named Harold Simmons Gilchrist.

tlb wrote:

Relax wrote:Uncompromising Honor. Is a good read. Try it.

Ha, ha; good one. But you say the text is there and everything I read says the three destroyed orbitals were habitations, NOT FACTORIES. The SLN attacked military targets, but the Malign wanted revenge.

Half a dozen missiles got through the block ships and destroyed the number 2 nano-farm with 5 thousand deaths. Nano-farm 1 received easily repairable damage and only 5 hundred people died. Not a single hit to the missile production lines.

Twenty-seven seconds later, Beowulf Gamma, the third largest orbital habitat in the Beowulf System, ceased to exist, along with 9.5 million human beings... including a Mesan gamma line named Harold Simmons Gilchrist.

That matches my recollection. And the text describing Beowulf Alpha includes some tidbits that seem to support this

Uncompromising Honor wrote:Beowulf Alpha had expanded over the centuries in carefully planned additions, each incorporated into the existing structure only after carefully considering its impact upon the entire station, and strict zoning requirements had insured that it was home to very little heavy industry. There was a lot of light industry, dedicated to consumer-oriented products, but Beowulf had always tended to segregate its heavier industry—and the accidents which could occur on those sorts of industrial sites—away from its residential areas. Part of that segregation was inevitable, the sort of thing one might have seen in any star system. In Beowulf Alpha’s case, that meant its light industrial modules were located on the long engineering and support booms stretching out from the main platform like the legs of some glittering spider, but the system’s resource extraction facilities were almost all associated with the Diomedes Belt and the gas refineries around Enlil, the gas giant seventy-three light-minutes from the system primary. And most of the star system’s shipyards and supporting infrastructure orbited the planet Cassandra, eight light-minutes outside the orbit of Beowulf itself, because they were so much closer to both the Diomedes extraction platforms and the hyper-limit.There was quite a bit of industry in Beowulf orbit anyway—Ivaldi of Beowulf maintained its primary nano farms and molycirc tanks there, for example, and the main production lines for the Mark 23 and Mark 16 had been distributed among Ivaldi’s three Alviss platforms—but the really heavy industry was farther out for the most part, handier to the belt and the refineries. The volume closer to the planet was dominated by residential habitats, with Beowulf Alpha as the prime example. Alpha was first and foremost a home for its twenty-two million inhabitants, although it had also housed both Adrienne Warshawski University and the Warshawski Center for Applied Astrophysics for the better part of seven hundred T-years. It was home to close to two hundred other civilian research facilities and laboratories, as well, not to mention the George Benton Center for Interstellar Studies, with a galaxy-wide reputation for the depth and breadth of its scholarship.

The revenge attack destroyed the habitats Beowulf Alpha, Beowulf Beta, and Beowulf Gamma -- and clearly aimed to cause maximum civilian loss of life. Yes destroying their light industry, and even more-so the university and research facilities, will be a blow to Beowulf's economy and industry. But only those three orbitals were destroyed -- and most of their light industry was probably locally consumed within the same orbital - so you'd also lose much of the demand for the lost production.

But this was NOT an attack on their shipbuilding, their heavy industry, their resource extraction, etc. Those quite possibly might have also been vulnerable to this type of attack -- but blowing up yards and workers wouldn't satisfy the Detwiler boys' need to lash out irrationally in retaliation for the death of their father -- so they went for terror bombing instead. As such the attack wiped out millions of Beowulf's people, but even there was unlikely to have killed any noticeable fraction of the people involved in those other industries. (Those are just located too far from Beowulf orbit to be practical for workers to live on Alpha, Beta, or Gamma and commute to work in those stations orbiting other planets or out in the belt -- so even off-shift workers of those other stations and platforms wouldn't have been caught in the destruction)

Relax wrote:Uncompromising Honor. Is a good read. Try it.

tlb wrote:Ha, ha; good one. But you say the text is there and everything I read says the three destroyed orbitals were habitations, NOT FACTORIES. The SLN attacked military targets, but the Malign wanted revenge.

Jonathan_S wrote:That matches my recollection.

Thank you for the extract. I only have digital copies through Mission of Honor, so it is harder to verify if I remembered correctly in the later books. I appreciate people who quote supporting text when making broad statements.