Post League Eridani

Yes, Manticore and Grayson lost a great deal of orbital fabrication capacity and a massive amount of their trained people employed in that fabrication and things like shipbuilding.

What they (at least Manticore didn't, not sure about Grayson because it was everything at the Blackbird complex area that was hit) was all the records which would have been backed up on a daily basis to ground locations at the planet which the stations, stand-alone-yards etc orbited. The latest versions of the software, manuals, production specs, blueprints etc would be less than a day out-of date as of the time of the strike.
The loss of the personal expertise and anything that was not actualy written down with explanations is the worst loss along with all those people including the civilians and military on the stations.
Since we are being told that Beowulf was able to set up replacement lines for the missiles, Keyhole etc along with various spare parts, and those missiles and things are working just fine---Beowulf can run the software supplied by Manticore to build the military and other equipment and set up the miocrilic circuitry to function with the existing RMN equipment.

We have to infer that Beowulf has also been manufactureing equipment to both replace lost equipment for Manticore AND the lost machines for Manticore to doing it's own manufacturing to build the machines to build the machines. If they are doing that, it is also probable that they are doing the same for Grayson. I don't think I remember it being specifialy stated that Grayson was getting the same help (though probably in lower numbers) but given that Grayson is essentially building the same equipment for military use and has just as much need to recover it is reasonable to think they are getting shipments as well.

How all of that is getting paid for is a seperate discussion. At a certain level, it is possible that Manticore is shipping the reprocessed (or at least in ground up bits) pieces of SLN wreckage to Beowulf as feedstock for the manufacturing. Manticore still has all that extraction capacity and that should include the capasity to scrap starships and render them down to usable metals etc.

Brigade XO wrote:Yes, Manticore and Grayson lost a great deal of orbital fabrication capacity and a massive amount of their trained people employed in that fabrication and things like shipbuilding.

What they (at least Manticore didn't, not sure about Grayson because it was everything at the Blackbird complex area that was hit) was all the records which would have been backed up on a daily basis to ground locations at the planet which the stations, stand-alone-yards etc orbited. The latest versions of the software, manuals, production specs, blueprints etc would be less than a day out-of date as of the time of the strike.
The loss of the personal expertise and anything that was not actualy written down with explanations is the worst loss along with all those people including the civilians and military on the stations.
Since we are being told that Beowulf was able to set up replacement lines for the missiles, Keyhole etc along with various spare parts, and those missiles and things are working just fine---Beowulf can run the software supplied by Manticore to build the military and other equipment and set up the miocrilic circuitry to function with the existing RMN equipment.

David appears to say that there is nothing that isn't precisely documented, nor is there any supply chain. Nothing is provided by 3rd parties, no sub-assemblies or parts. It's all made by the same giant general purpose fabrication system owned by the government.

kzt wrote:

Brigade XO wrote:Yes, Manticore and Grayson lost a great deal of orbital fabrication capacity and a massive amount of their trained people employed in that fabrication and things like shipbuilding.

What they (at least Manticore didn't, not sure about Grayson because it was everything at the Blackbird complex area that was hit) was all the records which would have been backed up on a daily basis to ground locations at the planet which the stations, stand-alone-yards etc orbited. The latest versions of the software, manuals, production specs, blueprints etc would be less than a day out-of date as of the time of the strike.
The loss of the personal expertise and anything that was not actualy written down with explanations is the worst loss along with all those people including the civilians and military on the stations.
Since we are being told that Beowulf was able to set up replacement lines for the missiles, Keyhole etc along with various spare parts, and those missiles and things are working just fine---Beowulf can run the software supplied by Manticore to build the military and other equipment and set up the miocrilic circuitry to function with the existing RMN equipment.

David appears to say that there is nothing that isn't precisely documented, nor is there any supply chain. Nothing is provided by 3rd parties, no sub-assemblies or parts. It's all made by the same giant general purpose fabrication system owned by the government.

No, that isn't what I said.

What I said was that there weren't any components whose plans weren't backed up safely in multiple locations, inclufing on-planet sites (basic security requirement of Her Majesty's Government for all suppliers. These people are serious about stuff like that; remember the planetary backups for Weyland), and components were produced in printers which may or may not have been owned by the Government. In fact, most of the printers belonged to private entities (like, oh, the Hauptman Cartel), although the Government did own what by present day standards would have been an enormously productive chunk of the infrastructure.

I've never said that the didn't lose an enormous chunk of their skilled work force, either. In fact, that's the most crippling aspect of the attack, at least in the short term. It's also what made Pritchart's return of all the personnel captured at Grendelsbane so important.

runsforcelery wrote:What I said was that there weren't any components whose plans weren't backed up safely in multiple locations, inclufing on-planet sites (basic security requirement of Her Majesty's Government for all suppliers. These people are serious about stuff like that; remember the planetary backups for Weyland), and components were produced in printers which may or may not have been owned by the Government. In fact, most of the printers belonged to private entities (like, oh, the Hauptman Cartel), although the Government did own what by present day standards would have been an enormously productive chunk of the infrastructure.

I've never said that the didn't lose an enormous chunk of their skilled work force, either. In fact, that's the most crippling aspect of the attack, at least in the short term. It's also what made Pritchart's return of all the personnel captured at Grendelsbane so important.

Is that the whole story on manufacturing? I did not think that an entire ship (not even a LAC or courier boat) was "printed" all at once. I thought that the construction printers produced assemblies and subassemblies (and sub-sub-subassemblies) which still required some macro assembly; hence the amount of people involved, not just for maintenance and upgrades. For instance there might be an assembly line for the fusion plants used in the larger ships. Is this wrong?

tlb wrote:

runsforcelery wrote:What I said was that there weren't any components whose plans weren't backed up safely in multiple locations, inclufing on-planet sites (basic security requirement of Her Majesty's Government for all suppliers. These people are serious about stuff like that; remember the planetary backups for Weyland), and components were produced in printers which may or may not have been owned by the Government. In fact, most of the printers belonged to private entities (like, oh, the Hauptman Cartel), although the Government did own what by present day standards would have been an enormously productive chunk of the infrastructure.

I've never said that the didn't lose an enormous chunk of their skilled work force, either. In fact, that's the most crippling aspect of the attack, at least in the short term. It's also what made Pritchart's return of all the personnel captured at Grendelsbane so important.

Is that the whole story on manufacturing? I did not think that an entire ship (not even a LAC or courier boat) was "printed" all at once. I thought that the construction printers produced assemblies and subassemblies (and sub-sub-subassemblies) which still required some macro assembly; hence the amount of people involved, not just for maintenance and upgrades. For instance there might be an assembly line for the fusion plants used in the larger ships. Is this wrong?

I think I already addressed this in another thread after someone jumped all over "the missiles are assembled robotically" comment to suggest that I was saying that was how they built everything.

The printers produce components: period. Most of the sub-assemblies (and some of the "big ticket" items, like Apollo missiles, for example) are then built "assembly line" by robotic assemblers which are permanently mated with the printers dedicated to producing their components. First World star nations (like Manticore, Beowulf, most of the League worlds, etc.) use a lot of robotics in their shipyards --- there have been quite a few references to "construction" robots, I believe. More backward star nations (like pre-Alliance Grayson) use a lot more muscle power. This is not to say that First World shipyards us no "hand-fitted" parts, but they use very, very, very few of them compared to pre-Alliance Grayson.

One of the big elements in Manticore's edge in shipbuilding and munitions production was that the SKM had improved incrementally at almost every stage of the process, including (especially) printer capabilities and better and more efficient use of robotics. In effect, they had "automated" a lot more of the sub-assembly "assembly line" aspects of the job and improved on the versatility and numbers of construction robots. (This is also part of the reason they were able/willing to reduce damage control personnel and rely on remotes to handle combat damage in their newer classes.)

One of the big drawbacks of this is that it consolidates failure points in the system. Another is that it's expensive in terms of the flexibility of the entire system's infrastructure. You have a smaller number of highly efficient nodes producing critical sub-assemblies at a very high rate of speed, so you get high-volume output but the entire building process is more vulnerable because of what happens if you lose one or more of those nodes. In addition, each of the nodes is tied into at least one (and often more than one) of your printers which then cannot be retasked or used for anything else without breaking down the entire "assembly line" to which it is assigned. One reason the service facilities at Trevor's Star could produce only a low volume (comparatively speaking) of Apollo MDMs post Oyster Bay was that they were configured for maximum flexibility, given the nature of the repairs and maintenance called for by their designed roll, rather than maximum efficiency in terms of high-volume, high-speed output of only one or a very few items.

runsforcelery wrote:I think I already addressed this in another thread after someone jumped all over "the missiles are assembled robotically" comment to suggest that I was saying that was how they built everything.

Thank you, I missed the other thread. Finding information in the Forum is not as easy as finding it in the Pearls.

tlb wrote:

runsforcelery wrote:I think I already addressed this in another thread after someone jumped all over "the missiles are assembled robotically" comment to suggest that I was saying that was how they built everything.

Thank you, I missed the other thread. Finding information in the Forum is not as easy as finding it in the Pearls.

You're welcome. I don't think I'd addressed it in that much detail in the other thread because it wasn't the question I was focused on answering at the time. In the other thread (or might even have been an earlier iteration of this one), the focus was on interchangeability of parts importing industrial capacity from "foreign" tech basis and why that wasn't an issue in Honorverse fabrication.

runsforcelery wrote:

tlb wrote:Thank you, I missed the other thread. Finding information in the Forum is not as easy as finding it in the Pearls.

You're welcome. I don't think I'd addressed it in that much detail in the other thread because it wasn't the question I was focused on answering at the time. In the other thread (or might even have been an earlier iteration of this one), the focus was on interchangeability of parts importing industrial capacity from "foreign" tech basis and why that wasn't an issue in Honorverse fabrication.

Welcome back to your own forum!

Check your messages.

runsforcelery wrote:

kzt wrote:David appears to say that there is nothing that isn't precisely documented, nor is there any supply chain. Nothing is provided by 3rd parties, no sub-assemblies or parts. It's all made by the same giant general purpose fabrication system owned by the government.

No, that isn't what I said.

What I said was that there weren't any components whose plans weren't backed up safely in multiple locations, inclufing on-planet sites (basic security requirement of Her Majesty's Government for all suppliers. These people are serious about stuff like that; remember the planetary backups for Weyland), and components were produced in printers which may or may not have been owned by the Government. In fact, most of the printers belonged to private entities (like, oh, the Hauptman Cartel), although the Government did own what by present day standards would have been an enormously productive chunk of the infrastructure.

I've never said that the didn't lose an enormous chunk of their skilled work force, either. In fact, that's the most crippling aspect of the attack, at least in the short term. It's also what made Pritchart's return of all the personnel captured at Grendelsbane so important.

How many of those Honorverse 3 D printers that supplied parts for the RMN are owned by so filthy rich woman named Honor Harrington?

I get the impression that while parts are fabricated on 3D printers, some assembly may be required. Smallish, mass produced items such as MDMs, DDMs and missile pods are probably assembled by robotic systems. Larger items such as warships are probably assembled by those hardsuited workers Weber has written so much about.

I suspect that not all Honorverse 3D printers are created equal.
Some are bigger than others.
Some are faster than others.
Some have the capability to place particles or even individual atoms more precisely than others.

This last attribute differentistes the truly high tech polities (Manticore, Grayson (years after HotQ), Beawulf, SL core worlds, Andermandi) from the neobarbs such as Silesia, the Verge, Grayson (before HotQ when Honor Harrington brought all of the goodies), and the PRH.

Consider the huge difference in capabilities and cost of 3D printers on the market today. Currently, they range in price from a couple hundred dollars to two and a half million. Up to a 25 thousand times price differential.

Able to print novelty items to cabins, to office buildings and sections of bridges. Don't forget the learning curve. Engineers are needed to operate these things.