Topic Actions
Topic Search
Who is online
Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 33 guests
Light bulb Captured Solly fleet
| Re: Light bulb Captured Solly fleet | |
|---|---|
by Dafmeister
» Thu Apr 17, 2014 7:55 am
|
|
|
Dafmeister
Posts: 754
|
At the very least, stop using the FF designator. FF already has a meaning - Frigate.
|
| Top | |
| Re: Light bulb Captured Solly fleet | |
|---|---|
|
by Hutch
» Thu Apr 17, 2014 8:35 am
|
|
|
Hutch
Posts: 1831
|
First, welcome to the Forum, gmg2dave (I am another member of the Dread and Secret Society of Daves...
 .Your first post shows you have more than a little knowledge of the Honorverse, and hopefully the 'opposing points of view'   won't put you off--it's a dedicated and sometimes (verbally)combative bunch we have here, but in general they are good folks.Now, my comments:
While you are quite correct that he doesn't have wallers, in A Rising Thunder (or was it Shadows of Freedom?) he tells Governor Barregos that Erewhon has already replaced his losses from the Battle of Torch and also have the Arsenal Ships coming to him, along with the Erewhon BC(P)'s due in a few months. So with that much firepower, I am not sure Roczak will see much value in the Solarian SD's. As others have noted, the sudden appearance of SLN SD's lost by Filareta suddenly showing up in Maya Sector is liable to bring more interest from the SL than Roczak or Barregos want right now. And with the Erewhonese ships that they already have, I doubt any...aquisitive..neighbors are going to get very far.
I see your point, but simulator and classroom training can probably do the same, and again, as others have pointed out, manning a 6000-person warship is not a small task if that takes a large percentage of your trained spacers.
Well, I won't put it past him, but I think with the ships he already has and that he will be getting, plus the Caudron of Ghosts chapters where he tum-de-tum-di-tum  , I don't think he will find the reward worth the risk.We shall see--eventually. IMHO as always. YMMV. ***********************************************
No boom today. Boom tomorrow. There's always a boom tomorrow. What? Look, somebody's got to have some damn perspective around here! Boom. Sooner or later. BOOM! -LT. Cmdr. Susan Ivanova, Babylon 5 |
| Top | |
Governor Berregios (SP) has at his disposal a number of fleet units, but to the best of my knowledge, and I may very well be wrong here, he is currently limited to OFS battle cruisers and has no ships of the wall. His partnership with Erewhon will lead to him getting modern SD(P)'s in 2 years, but until then he has nothing. Which leaves him in the position of hoping that the wheels don't come off before then, and that he has no need of anything heavier if things do go pear shaped on him.| Re: Light bulb Captured Solly fleet | |
|---|---|
|
by SWM
» Thu Apr 17, 2014 12:24 pm
|
|
|
SWM
Posts: 5928
|
Please do not use the symbol FF for Fast Freighter. FF is the designation for Frigate. You will badly confuse everyone if you continue using FF this way. --------------------------------------------
Librarian: The Original Search Engine |
| Top | |
| Re: Light bulb Captured Solly fleet | |
|---|---|
|
by Brigade XO
» Thu Apr 17, 2014 2:51 pm
|
|
|
Brigade XO
Posts: 3238
|
The idea of takeing one or more SLN SD and "roughly" converting it to a prison hulk or dorm does have some merit.
Unload all the missiles and counter missles in the tubes and magazines pluse spair parts for same. Physicaly take out all of the graser & laser lenses and lensing controls except perhaps some of the point-defence stuff (anti-debris etc). Pull out enough Nodes to keep the ships from either creating a wedge or a sail. Strip the armories and take away all of the small craft except those needed for the job the SD will fill. Shut down all but one reactor (and remove critical parts (the same ones from including all the spars). Deal with the controls for the reaction thrusters, communications- except very short range- and anything else you can think of that could be used to cause problems. Now put some some 12,000 pows on board and have them- under SLN officers- reconfigure spaces for bunking and food and exercise etc. Do it manually, don't leave them much in the way of power equipment, cutting gear, etc. Leave the medical facilities You could even do the same thing as a dormitory except that you would let the people living there do the modifcation work with power equipment. Think of the possibilties for Urban Legends……Crazy Bob who lives in the mantainence passages and forgotten nooks and cranies of the SLN Solly Poo. Lives by scrounging things from the mess halls and a forgotten aux. hydroponics bay complex that got walled off but is connected to ships power, water and other environmental systems. Nobody sees him but there are strange sounds down unused passageways and "someone" will swap bits of ship junk for things left unsecured. Or the Phanotm CPO who never surrendered but now haunts the unused spaces of the SLN Big Assed Bird. Bodies have been found with their throats slit and "Death to Manticore" written on the passageway wall next to the corpse. |
| Top | |
| Re: Light bulb Captured Solly fleet | |
|---|---|
|
by kenl511
» Thu Apr 17, 2014 3:31 pm
|
|
|
kenl511
Posts: 353
|
Welcome to the Forums, first one is usually on the rest of the inmates. A) I agree with the idea of using the SDs as worker housing at the start of reassembling the stations. 1) Life Support redundancy would support larger numbers than the crew list. 2) There are areas internal to the SDs (magazines, stores rooms, etc.) which could be easily converted to machining shops, fabrication centers and housing. 3) They have power supply well in excess to need. B) Attaching booms to the SDs also allow up to four stand alone ship construction frames for larger ships and variable number of smaller ships simultaneously. Otherwise, I agree with Theemile's signature. Ain't there a line about professionals and logistics? |
| Top | |
| Re: Light bulb Captured Solly fleet | |
|---|---|
|
by The E
» Thu Apr 17, 2014 4:18 pm
|
|
|
The E
Posts: 2704
|
But, as has been pointed out, that's not actually something that the SEM currently needs. By the time these SDs become available, the reconstruction effort is already in full swing, and whatever seed platform was needed was manufactured or brought in from the other Termini of the Junction, or one of the SEMs trading partners. Basically, regenerating the manufacturing capacity is already going on, there's no need to divert manpower to jury-rig something out of a bunch of old SDs. [/quote]B) Attaching booms to the SDs also allow up to four stand alone ship construction frames for larger ships and variable number of smaller ships simultaneously. [/quote] Unproven assumption. There is nothing anywhere in the text that would indicate that doing something like that is a practical thing to do. |
| Top | |
| Re: Light bulb Captured Solly fleet | |
|---|---|
|
by SWM
» Thu Apr 17, 2014 4:25 pm
|
|
|
SWM
Posts: 5928
|
1) Magazines cannot "be easily converted" into anything. Magazines are not walk-in spaces--they are filled with mechanical handling gear. Don't think of a warehouse, think of the inside of a vending machine. You can't just break all that equipment down and haul it out through the vending slot. You have to open the entire thing up. In the case of Honorverse ships, that basically means cutting through the hull. There are some areas inside that could be converted into fabrication centers, like the mess hall and exercise areas. But not as many as you think. 2) Manticore is already well along in rebuilding the shipyards. They've been working at it for eight months. They have already solved any problems with housing workers. Prisoner detention is a possibility, though, if there is a prison crunch. We don't know that there is; the Havenite prisoners from BoMA were housed somewhere, and those facilities became available before Filareta arrived. --------------------------------------------
Librarian: The Original Search Engine |
| Top | |
| Re: Light bulb Captured Solly fleet | |
|---|---|
|
by n7axw
» Thu Apr 17, 2014 6:11 pm
|
|
|
n7axw
Posts: 5997
|
B) Attaching booms to the SDs also allow up to four stand alone ship construction frames for larger ships and variable number of smaller ships simultaneously. [/quote] Unproven assumption. There is nothing anywhere in the text that would indicate that doing something like that is a practical thing to do.[/quote] There probably isn't a whole lot of rerigging needed to use them as dorms. Just reposition them and make sure nobody has access to the systems that make thing go or the weapons systems. They were carrrying 6000 people in what I presume to be reasonable comfort, after all. As for whether or not they are needed, kzt's post earlier in this thread gave me a quite a bit of food for thought. Given the way he details the difficulty of rebuilding the industrial base, sds may well not be needed. The logical extension of kzt's point is that it is going to take time, and probably a good deal of it, before the problems he details can be overcome which in turn would meam that there will be comparatively few people working out in space, probably rebuilding the shells for Hysphasteas, Vulvan, and Wayland. If that is true it probably would make more sense to build the housing as you go, expanding it as needed. I think some of us here are badly over optimistc on how long it will take to build shipyards capable of turning out actual warships. And remember that SEM is not counting on that. Building of warships as well as most of R&D people have been shipped off to bolthole. The more technically advanced stuff is for near to intermediate term future going to Beowulf. It is going to take a quite a while for things to be back to normal at Manticore, gang. Don |
| Top | |
| Re: Light bulb Captured Solly fleet | |
|---|---|
|
by Theemile
» Fri Apr 18, 2014 12:02 pm
|
|
|
Theemile
Posts: 5381
|
I hate to Necro a topic that has been dead a couple of days, but I hit on an important point last night while re-reading SoF, that is extremely germain to the Automation question. The RMN has NEVER retrofitted a class with sufficient automation to reduce the crew size. We have never once seen or heard of the legacy fleet ships with any added technologies to reduce their crews - yet at the same time the new construction they serve beside have crews 50-80% smaller than they have. This automation streak has been going on for roughly 10 years - through the final stages of the 1st war, the "peace" between the wars and the entire 2nd war. And yet, we see a deployemnt of 4 RMN ships in 1922 - 2 Sag C CAs, 1 Roland DD and 1 Chanson DD, and the largest crew is on the Chanson - and this is not atypical, evrey one of the dozens of legacy ships we have seen in RMN forces still have nearly their full complements. This tells me that crew reduction "automation" in warships is akin to rebuilding the ship - a redesign of the spaces and the various components themselves is required, and not just something you can drop in during a routine maintenance cycle or install on the fly. IF even some warship automation was easy, we would see retrofits made for the legacy fleet to free up some of those bodies. Dropping the crew size of the 50+ surviving Star Knights just 10% would free up enough manpower to man 25-30 Sag-Cs, doing the same across the fleet would free up 100s of thousands of men. The simple fact is warships already have massive amounts of automation and redundancy, just the needed resilancy and redundancy bring issues (like extreme cofferdaming) that merchants don't deal with. To reduce crews and provide for extreme autonomous damage control is a whole additional level of technology. So introducing Warship automation to the SLN ships would not be a minor task, but probably SD shipyard level work. In the end, a minor crew reduction may cost more than buying a new ship. ******
RFC said "refitting a Beowulfan SD to Manticoran standards would be just as difficult as refitting a standard SLN SD to those standards. In other words, it would be cheaper and faster to build new ships." |
| Top | |
| Re: Light bulb Captured Solly fleet | |
|---|---|
|
by kzt
» Fri Apr 18, 2014 1:08 pm
|
|
|
kzt
Posts: 11360
|
The way you reduce crew sizes on the SLN Sds is abandon functions. For example, mount crews. That means if things break they stay broken until someone can get to them. But if you are not short of weapon mounts that might be a viable trade-off.
|
| Top | |