Light bulb Captured Solly fleet

Rakhmamort wrote:and how many small craft are there?

More than the one or two per ship needed as med-evac ambulances.

Rakhmamort wrote:instead of being available for walk in emergencies you have to travel out of the gravity well just to get that spurting artery fixed. not good...

Now you're just being silly. Captured ships would NOT replace existing trauma centers, they would augment existing centers. Just as most of the hospitals in southern Nevada send their most critical trauma victims to the regional trauma center at UMC, existing trauma centers would triage walk-ins and call for orbital med-evac if necessary.

Weird Harold wrote:According to my eBook reader, the word "Berth" or "Berthing" does not appear in Echoes of Honor. Are you sure about the reference.

Just off-hand, the only "berthing compartment" scene I can think of is Aubri Wanderman's first encounter with Randy Stileman in Honor Among Enemies -- that was a temporary, station-side holding dormitory. I've lived for an entire year-long overseas tour in worse.

My bad. I did indeed get the wrong book.

As for the berthing being temporary, it was indeed. Now that you have reminded me of Steilman, I remember the description of the compartment he shared with the others. Only 6 to a room, without giving the room size. Still way to crowded for me. Especially after living in something like those temporary quarters for three years and three deployments.

The E wrote:You're assuming that there's no money available ...

No I'm assuming that both the TQ and SEM have budgetary priorities that are skewed toward recovery from the Yawata Strike. I'm assuming that using the captured ships will save money that will be more useful applied to higher priority needs.


There are several discussions about the cost of the Yawata Strike, the cost of new ships, the economic effect of Case Lacoon and the costs of various projects in the TQ -- if you want all that pulled into a treatise, be my guest.

KNick wrote:As for the berthing being temporary, it was indeed. Now that you have reminded me of Steilman, I remember the description of the compartment he shared with the others. Only 6 to a room, without giving the room size. Still way to crowded for me. Especially after living in something like those temporary quarters for three years and three deployments.

We also have a description of accommodations on a couple of Havenite ships as well as enlisted quarters on HMS Wayfarer, but we're talking about putting students into a Solarian SD's accommodations:

Pearls of Weber
Status of the Solarian League Navy wrote:In general, however, "Fleet 2000" concentrates more on what might be considered the propaganda aspects of the initiative. The Navy has a large staff dedicated to the production of public information HD programs under the "Our Navy" heading to demonstrate to the general public the high caliber and dedication of Navy personnel, the professionalism of the Navy's officer corps, the incredible number of valuable services the Navy provides to the general populace of the League, and the sheer size and power of the Navy. And, also as a part of the "Fleet 2000" initiatives, the Navy has concentrated on the "sleekness" and visually obvious efficiency and modernity of its vessels. Control consoles are designed to look "sexy" and modern for the HD cameras even at some occasional expense in actual operational efficiency. Ship interiors are designed and fitted out to emphasize the quality of the living spaces of Navy personnel. And, in general, the SLN has a high quotient of glitz and glitter oriented around this major PR effort.

I'd guess that even the lowest ranker in the SLN has quarters on a par with HMS Wayfarer at the least and probably better -- as contrasted with my granddaughter's dorm room (with roommate,) where she doesn't have room to store a collapsed keyboard stand, or so she has complained.

So who is going to run these?

You are talking about training 60,000 people just to run the ships, with a minimal staff of 1000 per ship. It's not like they have a training program for training people to run obsolete foreign made ships. While you can steal spare parts off of the damaged ships, you don't have an support infrastructural. Normally this wouldn't be too big a deal, as the ships core systems are all trailing edge to obsolete, but someone seems to have blown up all the factories on Manticore along with the people you'd need to produce copies of the various parts.

The RMN has over 100 tube wallers that are in storage. These are not only better ships by every measure, the RMN have a lot of people who already know how to run all the equipment on these and have the training base to rapidly train more people on how to use them. Plus they have plans for all the parts for the ships.

kzt wrote:So who is going to run these?

You are talking about training 60,000 people just to run the ships, with a minimal staff of 1000 per ship.

I guess you missed my estimate that the whole plan hinges on getting 70,000-100,000 SLN enlisted POWs to give parole and accept jobs as harbor watch/maintenance crew. They are already trained on those systems and are otherwise a drain on TQ resources.

kzt wrote:The RMN has over 100 tube wallers that are in storage.

The Manticoran reserve is not in the Talbot Quadrant, would take months to re-commission, and can be better employed as rear area pickets since they are generally superior to SLN ships of the same class.

The idea is to provide whatever knowledge and capability as can be provided with minimal cost in Manticoran dollars, Manticoran equipment, or Manticoran personnel.

I'm sure Haven has mothballed ships that are second rate but still superior to SLN ships, too, but they are even further away than the Manticoran reserves or the couple of hundred SLN ships that survived Adm Filareta's misadventure.

The idea is to use what is "Here, Now, and Free" as a stopgap measure, not add major expenses to the next few SEM budgets.

But you haven't demonstrated conclusively that these vessels are "here, now, and free". They're here, yes, but free? Not by a long shot. You also have so far failed to demonstrate why these measures are needed so desperately right now that you need to get almost a hundred thousand POWs to sign on with the SEM, or why half a year or so of delay before proper measures can be taken is completely inacceptible.

What you're operating under is a variant of the sunk cost fallacy. You're seeing a bunch of shit that someone has sunk untold billions of Solarian credits into, and you're unable to accept that they're completely fucking useless for anything except target practice.

Short term measures are not a good thing to engage in right now. Throwing away money into short-term measures that noone actually needs is just blind actionism, "We must do something, this is something, therefore it must be done" on a grand scale.

What could possibly go wrong with a plan to place SDs in orbit around all the talbott planets, manned by SLN personnel? It's not like the SLN people you are recruiting might know how to employ a 6 million ton warship as a warship, right?

MaxxQ wrote: Additionally, there are some newbies (and even some that have been here for awhile) who have been told several times that something is a deceased equine, and yet they continue to flog it as if it should be self-evident that they are correct.

Telling people a question is settled doesn't do any good if they think they know something that wasn't considered by those who "settled" it. You have to be able to point them to where all of their points have been substantively addressed.

Otherwise, they think you're just another one of the "sheeple" who believe the earth is flat, and they're a Columbus who is going to prove you wrong.

Honestly I always thought they would make good training ships for the Marines. Practice in search and rescue and in securing SLN SD's that have surrendered. It seems like after all that there will be many times in the future that the Royal Marines will be boarding similar ships in the future.