Weird Harold wrote:Rakhmamort wrote:One or 2 space ambulances is too few to even justify keeping a space based hospital running.
One or two
dedicated ambulances are enough. There's nothing that says other captured small craft or local civilian craft can't transport patients, too.
If each ambulance only transports one patient every three hours, who stays for an average of five days, it could max out a 600 bed trauma ward in 30 days or so. When you factor in referrals from ground-side hospitals that can be transported in batches of 30-40 per trip in non-dedicated ambulance-shuttles, the question becomes where do we put all the patients, not how will we aver keep this place full?
We can argue forever on the adequacy of 2 small crafts serving as ambulances for 1 hospital ship. I say nay, you say yea. Unless somebody puts one in operation, we won't know. Frankly speaking, two shuttles means 1 in operation and the other is in for maintenance. Or are you going to say a shuttle going up and down the atmosphere is not going to need a lot of downtime?
Since you already pointed it out, keeping the equipment in space will encounter 'space' problems. You can't simply build more rooms out there. You don't have that problem in the ground .
We are not even taking into consideration the visitor volume for the patients. Hardscrabble planet, you think anyone can just grab a space taxi?
Rakhmamort wrote:I really don't see a reason why said medical facilities in SDs cannot be removed and relocated groundside.
They can be -- if you're willing to take the time and spend the money to expand existing facilities or build new ones. That assumes you can provide Solarian Standard power and don't need to custom manufacture interconnecting cables.
You are willing to put in thousands of man hours to interview and filter enough POWs to man the SDs and you are talking about effort? Even if the existing hospitals don't have a dedicated wing for the new equipment, they will find some space for that and use them while new structures are built. Ceramecrete is cheap. Building on the ground has a lot more advantages that setting up shop in space.
Rakhmamort wrote:Not only are you not spending a lot of resources and manpower to keep the SD operating, ...
THE SD? I thought I'd made it fairly clear that I'm not talking about a single ship.
I thought I'd also made it fairly clear that I'm talking about utilizing more than the medical resources.
And it has also been made clear that as training facilities go, they would be expensive sinkholes of funds. You can keep just 1 ship in orbit around the main deployment node where every batch has to go for familiarization. That is all you need. Not one for every planet that trains soldiers. Not all of them are going to do boarding action and even if they do, their suits will be loaded with the schematics of the ship they are boarding.
It has also been pointed out that training people in tech that they won't use is stupid. I'm not going to teach somebody COBOL programming then send them off to build apps for iPhones.
Rakhmamort wrote:As for augmentation, augmenting what trauma centers? I thought you said they are for planet s that don't have medical facilities? If the planet already has a trauma center, wouldn't it be more logical to augment their equipment rather than have them pack the patients into orbital ambulances. Take them 1 floor up or down instead of sending them to space.
Now you're being willfully dense.
Every planet in the TQ has some level of medical trauma center(s) even if they aren't up to SLN standards. The orbital medical facilities augment existing hospitals for cases that can't be solved with Quick-heal and a bandaid. How much augmentation any given system needs will vary, but few of the TQ systems couldn't benefit from access to a functioning SLN medical department.
The ship's systems work NOW where they are. Moving them ground side takes time, money and doesn't guarantee they'll work in a new location.
Getting crew and providing continuous guards for them for each SD is a constant drain on manpower. Those guards can be doing something else, like being cadre to the soldiers being trained groundside.
It is also funny why you keep thinking those equipment won't run groundside? Them techs who can disassemble the equipment and put them back again are too stupid to read instructions on how to power the hardware? That is simply silly.
Rakhmamort wrote:Bringing the equipment into the trauma center gives that center permanent upgrades. Keeping those equipment in a ship destined for the breakers is just delaying the disassembly of said equipment from the ship, not to mention the trouble of relocating the patients already there before they can recycle its materials.
If the medical resources were the only resources in the discussion you might have a small point. With the other resources also fully exploited, a captured ship might delay its date with the breakers for a year or three. A year or three which gives ground-side time to invest in the needed infrastructure to support the functions temporarily housed in captured SLN ships.
It is not a small point. Keeping those SDs active will be a drain on resources. If they were within shouting distance of the pre pod manty ships, maybe they have some training value, but they are not. Too many manpower requirements even for a skeleton crew and the need for enough guards to keep them in line, add fuel expenditures to keep the thing running plus it's small craft plus maintenance of everything else.
Just remove what you can take from the ships and place it groundside. No security needed for captured personnel screwing it. Who may choose to make the fusion bottle go critical or make the ship take a dive into the planet with wedges up. Or use the energy weapons to take out approaching small crafts as a sign of defiance.
Keeping it up is just borrowing trouble.
