SWM wrote:Weird Harold, your habit of combining responses to a dozen people in a single post makes it extremely hard to respond to you.
You are rather new here on the forum, so I will give you a few hints. This topic has been discussed dozens of times over the last five years. We have talked out the points you have made, over and over and over. It is a very dead horse. David Weber himself has weighed in on it.
There is no need to use the ships as training facilities. They do not even have the kind of training facilities that would be needed. There are already training facilities available, and new ones can be built groundside a whole lot faster than they could put the necessary training equipment on these ships.
It is not possible to take out the grasers and other large equipment on the ships, because Manticore does not have any yards to do it. Any yards that exist are better used to build new ships.
We can assume that any useful materials that could be removed from the ships would be removed before they are scrapped. There is no need to worry about that.
If you sent all the ships to a single planet, they might have enough medical equipment to serve one city, no more. But it would be ridiculous to leave it on the ship and expect people to fly up to it. Why would you put a trauma center or emergency room in orbit instead of inside the city it is serving? No, it would be much faster to reach a facility inside the city. And it is ridiculous to maintain hundreds of ships in orbit, each with their own generators, requiring hundreds of people just to maintain the ship, just use one tiny section of the ship.
You are just dragging out the same arguments we have gone over already.
What you really mean to say is that you've drug this out many times. Those of us who are newbies haven't. May I suggest that we are here to explore our own ideas and responses to David's writing just as you did at our stage of the game.
These forums are tremendously educational and I've learned a lot. I'm new to the forums, but have been reading David for close to 20 years. So if I express an idea that you find old hat please grin and bear it. I'm sure that we newbies will grow out of it. By then you will have a new crop of newbies and get to explore those old hat ideas all over again!
In the meantime, nobody's life depends on this. It's fiction, after all.

Don