"Obsolete SDs" Waste not...

saber964 wrote:Your overlooking several facts. In some of the countries you mention the military does a lot more than what it is in the U.S.. In several countries the military provides a law enforcement function than any kind of military one. In several African nations, because of poaching is so rampant in wildlife parks. The local military backs up game control officers. Also a lot of those countries what kind of equipment do they have? Is it APC's and tanks or Land Rovers and pickup trucks. Most African nations are so poor that any military equipment will so obsolete as to be ridiculous, like using 40-50 year old AK-47's and T-54/55's and how well maintained is that equipment is it serviceable and functional or is it a step above yard art.

You realize your argument just makes mine stronger?

Might notice, but if you do the math, it makes the "manning" issue an even bigger joke right?

Might notice, but slaves, don't appreciate being slaves. They don't give a damn if their equipment becomes yard art eventually. What they care about is that the equipment in question keeps them from being a slave for as long as it lasts.

Relax wrote:

saber964 wrote:Your overlooking several facts. In some of the countries you mention the military does a lot more than what it is in the U.S.. In several countries the military provides a law enforcement function than any kind of military one. In several African nations, because of poaching is so rampant in wildlife parks. The local military backs up game control officers. Also a lot of those countries what kind of equipment do they have? Is it APC's and tanks or Land Rovers and pickup trucks. Most African nations are so poor that any military equipment will so obsolete as to be ridiculous, like using 40-50 year old AK-47's and T-54/55's and how well maintained is that equipment is it serviceable and functional or is it a step above yard art.

You realize your argument just makes mine stronger?

Might notice, but if you do the math, it makes the "manning" issue an even bigger joke right?

Might notice, but slaves, don't appreciate being slaves. They don't give a damn if their equipment becomes yard art eventually. What they care about is that the equipment in question keeps them from being a slave for as long as it lasts.

No, it doesn't make your argument stronger - it makes it weaker. They are still using old surplus equipment because it's cheap to buy and USE. Just because something is given for free it doesn't mean there isn't an associated cost attached to the gift - and obsolete SD's are just a moneysink.

Manning something doesn't just mean add warm bodies unless you are talking about very simple tasks. And you haven't yet managed to explain who is going to pay for everything?

And what slaves are you referring to?

There are numerous examples of 1st world countries gifting for example new shiny tractors to poor countries in Africa, and the end result was that they sat rusting since nobody could afford the maintenance (or the fuel). The right thing would have been to give them draft animals.

You realize, obviously not, that those whopper stories you just told are complete BS? Have you ever even been to a 2nd/3rd world country...? Obviously not. Rusting junked tractors.. HAHAHAHAHAHAHA IF there are any such things it is because they have been repaired 400 times and worked to death till there is no possible way to repair them any longer. And NO, they are not using factory rebuilt parts either... Cost too much. What a joke. They make their parts.

Let me guess, you think people are stupid and can't figure out how to copy/make stuff just because they are in a poor country? Try traveling to Central America some day. Half the vehicles in the sticks are +30-50+ years old. Small "repair" shops who have an old furnace they smash old car wrecks into the desired shape to make/fix/repair broken parts. Same goes with computers etc.

News flash, when hungry, you figure out how to make things happen. You don't have to go get "educated" to figure out how stuff works. You just have to use it.

Relax wrote:You realize, obviously not, that those whopper stories you just told are complete BS? Have you ever even been to a 2nd/3rd world country...? Obviously not. Rusting junked tractors.. HAHAHAHAHAHAHA IF there are any such things it is because they have been repaired 400 times and worked to death till there is no possible way to repair them any longer. And NO, they are not using factory rebuilt parts either... Cost too much. What a joke. They make their parts.

Let me guess, you think people are stupid and can't figure out how to copy/make stuff just because they are in a poor country? Try traveling to Central America some day. Half the vehicles in the sticks are +30-50+ years old. Small "repair" shops who have an old furnace they smash old car wrecks into the desired shape to make/fix/repair broken parts. Same goes with computers etc.

News flash, when hungry, you figure out how to make things happen. You don't have to go get "educated" to figure out how stuff works. You just have to use it.

I was to Africa in the 80's, I do know what poverty looks like. Central America is affluent in comparison.

Yes, they make their own parts to some extent - the simple ones. Some parts you can't just manufacture out of old parts. Making parts for a diesel pump for example requires exact tolerances and the correct materials. It's nothing you build in a shack out of melted car parts. And the things they use are old, really old. Any modern car or tractor has electronics up the wazoo to function, that's something you can't make. Trying to use a electronics module from another vehicle? Sorry, that doesn't work anymore since they are keyed to the vehicle these days.

But my example with the tractors given to countries in Africa is true. I suggest you read 'Mechanization And Maize: Agriculture And The Politics Of Technology Transfer In East Africa'

In the end, comparing junk vehicles in poor countries to very high tech wallers (although obsolete in Honorverse) is just plain silly.

And I'm still curious, how do you propose to fund and man this gifting of wallers? Just saying that manning them isn't a problem doesn't answer the question.

And people doesn't just learn to run a waller by magic. Will doesn't equate knowledge. Hunger doesn't equate knowledge. Hunger only means that you will do anything to survive which is a very short term goal. Short term goals tend to have negative long term effects. Which kind of defines the vicious cycle of poverty.

Where do you get crews?
Anywhere in the Grand Alliance. Sidemore would be especially glad...... In return they get personnel trained at Manticore, Grayson, and Beowulf. The Talbott cluster worlds too. There are tens of thousands stuck on relatively poor back waters and world governments that cannot afford the training programs to make competent spacers, technicians, fabricators, and programmers.

What do you do with hulls that are obsolete as Super Dreadnaughts? Repurpose them into something else, of course. It has a vast hull, military inertial compensator, and everthing is in used but otherwise quite servicable.

First hull repurposing.... Gut the hull of the SL capital missile system, remove the SL directed energy weapons, remove the SL EW equipment and counter missile systems. Rip out the SL radar / lidar systems.

There is a theme here. Gutting out the SL capital missile launchers, magazines, and associated equipment frees a tremendous amount of internal volume.

Then install two Manticoran or Grayson fusion bottles, as a separate but, complete power system from the SL fusion bottles powering all else. This ensures that there isn't compatibility issues with hardware and software. The Alliance power systems power the Alliance systems. The SL power systems power only ship systems like impellers, sidewalls, and all other systems.

Install magazines and launchers that can put out enough counter missiles to blunt the tremendous pod launched attack waves. The volume taken up be capital missile systems repurposed to counter missiles leaves room for more separate or parallel targeting processor computers. One repurposed SD putting out the CM return fire of a squadron of SDs essentially. Back it up with Keyhole 2 and additional EW platforms. In a classic dorsal / ventral stack on a traditional eight ship squadron, as an addition to, not taking away ships from the squadron so as not to lose the volume of fire.

Troop ships.... A SD as a platform for Marines... Gut the capital missile system, then replace with deck space for Marines to live and train. Room for additional boat bays. This would assist deployed fleets in the armed boarding actions and securing ships for prize crews. A lack of Marines has been critical at the Battle of Manticore 1 and 2.

Hospital ships..... Gut the capital missiles and replace that volume with a hospital.... the casualties in these podnaught duels are staggering and the volume is getting bigger. Traditional ships do not have the doctors or the critical care staff to handle casualties in the thousands. It is better for morale to move the wounded off ship to percieved better care too.

Training platform......... Gut the capital missile system and add classrooms, simulators, a copy of the ATC tank, and living quarters. It isn't cost effective to ship junior officers, Senior and junior noncomms, and enlisted off for refresher training or academy training due to promotion. The added benefit is training with allies, such as Sidemore, Zanzibar, or Erewhon that may not have such sophisticated systems or as much joint operational experience.

Longer endurance surveillance... An SD hull has the space to perform missions lasting months if not years. Positioning these in areas of critical intelligence gathering, such as beyond the hyperlimit of Sol, would be a huge plus for the GA facing off with the League. Stocked with Ghostrider recon platforms, and stealthed pinnances or assisted by first line DDs these can stay on station for months observing capital world defenses, ship strengths, and production platform outputs.

CLAC escorts..... Removing the capital missile system, the improving the counter missiles, laser clusters, and EW systems along with radar/lidar and computer processors. These protect the vulnerable CLAC from Podnaught missile fire and with mounted energy weapons keep DDs, CLs, and CA at distance. Using much of the internal volume leaves space for additional boat bays and quarters for SAR crews that can rescue LAC crews or send help to stricken vessels. Having room for a large Marine contingent is helpful. This frees up more modern vessels for "the Wall".

Spare parts? Pfft.. Beowulf. Salvage from other units. Some units are new or better maintained as stay as a ship. Others are picked apart like the Boneyard at Davis Monthan AFB.

Trained personnel... recruit from the Talbot cluster, Pheonix, Haven sector worlds, and Sidemore; train as necessary. Beowulf's educational system along with experts from Grayson or Manticore can turn them out in months as spacers and technicians. Those worlds are going to jump at the chance to get those people trained for the benefit of their own economies.

Substandard systems? Replace.. Subsystems will be coming off of assembly lines faster than complete hulls can be built...... Need 20 radars for a new Podnaught build 200 and get those SL SDs on track.

The entire hull is honeycombed with armor barriers made of meters of the toughest and strongest material the SLN could find. It's like repurposing Hoover dam, now that Lake Mead has dropped so much, to be a giant warehouse - "all" you have to do is scoop out the concrete.

kzt wrote:The entire hull is honeycombed with armor barriers made of meters of the toughest and strongest material the SLN could find. It's like repurposing Hoover dam, now that Lake Mead has dropped so much, to be a giant warehouse - "all" you have to do is scoop out the concrete.

Which means little in the examples given. The volume taken up in any of those examples is far less than the volume consumed by capital missiles, the launchers, the power and telemetry relays, and the magazines themselves.

In some instances, that compartmentalization is beneficial, for example hospitals and troop ships.

You're missing the point. The problem isn't that there's not enough volume. The problem is that in order to remove things to free up said volume, you have to *cut up* all that meters-thick armor, and that's such a ridiculously arduous task that there's very little point in bothering. Every one of those missile launchers you want to remove, every one of those magazines, every one of those energy weapons, every one of those power and circuitry runs, they're all embedded in that honeycombed armor matrix which is specifically *designed* to be as resistant to disassembly as humanly possible. You can get at them to service them, yes. If you want to start wholesale *removing* them, though, especially if you want to reconfigure the hull volume they occupied for something *else*...? Well, good luck.

And even in the cases where you might still want some compartmentalization, it's highly unlikely that you want that *exact* compartmentalization. Missile transfer tube sized openings probably won't make for good people-highways, for example. Humans generally want flat layouts of decks, not oddly shaped recesses originally designed for the guts of a graser.

Think back to The Short Victorious War, where Nike needed to have a reactor housing pulled and replaced. We're only talking *battlecruiser* armor and compartmentalization here, not superdreadnaught, and it *still* ended up being easier to cut up from below, through dozens of individual decks and significantly more circuitry runs, than to try to go through the armor. And Nike was still in yard hands for something like 12 weeks, for that *single* replacement. The modifications you're talking about are extensive enough to be effectively complete rebuilding, and there's just no point in bothering when the end product is likely to cost more, take longer to build, and still be inferior in effectiveness to just building brand new ships that are actually designed for the roles you want to put them to.

And just where are these rebuilding operations supposed to be taking place, anyway? Last I looked, the manties and graysons have roughly zero spacedock slips right now, and even once they *have* rebuilt some, they're going to be occupied with stuff a hell of a lot more important and useful than jury-rigging white elephant solly SDs into shitty knockoffs of real warships or auxiliaries. Ditto for haven's shipyards. And very few other people will have anywhere *near* the shipyard capability required for that sort of project - it's just not the sort of thing anyone not engaged in the capital warship construction business needs.

If all of these arguments sound well polished, that's because they are. The number of suggestions about these SDs that have foundered on the rocks of 'rebuilding SDs from the keel out is *hard*, yo' are probably too numerous to count.

It is not what can be done that is the question. But what can be done cost effectively? Unless your are saving a significant amount in time and money why bother re-purposing the obsolete SDs when you can build new ships that will be built from the start more effective for their rolls.

As with so many other posts on this topic, all of these points have already been discussed and found to be unworkable.

ArmySGT. wrote:What do you do with hulls that are obsolete as Super Dreadnaughts? Repurpose them into something else, of course. It has a vast hull, military inertial compensator, and everthing is in used but otherwise quite servicable.

SDs are built for one thing only. That being the toughest, most hard-hitting weapons platforms that can be built. Turning them into anything else requires rebuilding to such an extent that doing so is no longer economical.

Install magazines and launchers that can put out enough counter missiles to blunt the tremendous pod launched attack waves. The volume taken up be capital missile systems repurposed to counter missiles leaves room for more separate or parallel targeting processor computers. One repurposed SD putting out the CM return fire of a squadron of SDs essentially. Back it up with Keyhole 2 and additional EW platforms. In a classic dorsal / ventral stack on a traditional eight ship squadron, as an addition to, not taking away ships from the squadron so as not to lose the volume of fire.

This is Skimper levels of silly. Several things you did not take into account.
-The only people who can build this are also the only people who can throw enough missiles to be a concern for modern missile defense.
-The fleet defense role is currently being shifted towards LACs
-There is a strong dislike against special purpose ships among all the first-class navies
-It takes longer to do the refit than the conflict is likely to last
-The facilities that are able to do the refit are currently tasked with building proper state of the art ships (Speaking of Havenite or Andermani yards here), or are busy rebuilding themselves (RMN and Grayson)

Troop ships.... A SD as a platform for Marines... Gut the capital missile system, then replace with deck space for Marines to live and train. Room for additional boat bays. This would assist deployed fleets in the armed boarding actions and securing ships for prize crews. A lack of Marines has been critical at the Battle of Manticore 1 and 2.

A lack of Marines as boarding parties, yes. Which, given that both of these battles happened at Manticore, had more to do with the scale of the attacks and the total manning of the RMMC in the system than any particular deficiency in modern ship designs.
Marine landing ships and assault transports already exist (see the Kamerling class); they are nowhere near SD scale, because they do not need to be. The only reason to build them like that would be to put them on the frontline together with proper BatRons, and they would make rather attractive targets that way (Think about it: Marine landings only happen once the attacker has thoroughly secured the orbitals; Marine transports are better placed in the fleet train rather than the fleet proper.). As for boarding parties: SDs in general don't need that much. They are needed more in the patrol vessels, the Cruisers and Battlecruisers.

Hospital ships..... Gut the capital missiles and replace that volume with a hospital.... the casualties in these podnaught duels are staggering and the volume is getting bigger. Traditional ships do not have the doctors or the critical care staff to handle casualties in the thousands. It is better for morale to move the wounded off ship to percieved better care too.

There aren't that many wounded people in Honorverse capital ship combat to make this worthwhile, and the cost of this compared to building a hospital ship based on a starliner design (which are about Battlecruiser size) isn't worth it.

Training platform......... Gut the capital missile system and add classrooms, simulators, a copy of the ATC tank, and living quarters. It isn't cost effective to ship junior officers, Senior and junior noncomms, and enlisted off for refresher training or academy training due to promotion. The added benefit is training with allies, such as Sidemore, Zanzibar, or Erewhon that may not have such sophisticated systems or as much joint operational experience.

If additional training bases are needed, why not build Saganami Island satellite campuses on planets? The only reason to place something like this on a ship is to have it be mobile, something a military academy doesn't really need to be.

Longer endurance surveillance... An SD hull has the space to perform missions lasting months if not years. Positioning these in areas of critical intelligence gathering, such as beyond the hyperlimit of Sol, would be a huge plus for the GA facing off with the League. Stocked with Ghostrider recon platforms, and stealthed pinnances or assisted by first line DDs these can stay on station for months observing capital world defenses, ship strengths, and production platform outputs.

In the first Havenite war, Haven made a long-term strategic surveillance scheme work using nothing but non-ghost rider drones and a couple of light cruisers and destroyers to get data dumps every week or so. No need for something as large as an SD.

Also, this sort of strategic intelligence can be gathered using normal HumInt means. No large-scale fleet deployments needed.

CLAC escorts..... Removing the capital missile system, the improving the counter missiles, laser clusters, and EW systems along with radar/lidar and computer processors. These protect the vulnerable CLAC from Podnaught missile fire and with mounted energy weapons keep DDs, CLs, and CA at distance. Using much of the internal volume leaves space for additional boat bays and quarters for SAR crews that can rescue LAC crews or send help to stricken vessels. Having room for a large Marine contingent is helpful. This frees up more modern vessels for "the Wall".

There are two types of CLACs. Ones that are designed to stay in the Wall, and use their own missile defense to enhance the wall's capabilities, and ones that stay outside the hyper limit and are thus able to escape into hyper should a missile swarm come looking for them.

Neither needs dedicated SD-scale escorts.