Light bulb Captured Solly fleet

This whole subject reminds me of the one in RL about nuclear proliferation. The more of those sds out there, the more dangerous the neighborhood becomes. The GA would be buying itself a whole bunch of trouble by selling off these units to folks who have much better places to use their meager resourses. Better to scrap 'em out or find nonlethal uses for them.

That's assuming they could maintain the things to start with..

Don

n7axw wrote:This whole subject reminds me of the one in RL about nuclear proliferation. The more of those sds out there, the more dangerous the neighborhood becomes. The GA would be buying itself a whole bunch of trouble by selling off these units to folks who have much better places to use their meager resourses

What, you would sell them off to the highest bidder? Of course not. I believe the demand will far outstrip the number of hulls they have. RMN will sell/give to those they wish to be their friends.

They do not have very many hulls. Quite a few, yes. Plenty? No.

J6P wrote:

n7axw wrote:This whole subject reminds me of the one in RL about nuclear proliferation. The more of those sds out there, the more dangerous the neighborhood becomes. The GA would be buying itself a whole bunch of trouble by selling off these units to folks who have much better places to use their meager resourses

What, you would sell them off to the highest bidder? Of course not. I believe the demand will far outstrip the number of hulls they have. RMN will sell/give to those they wish to be their friends.

They do not have very many hulls. Quite a few, yes. Plenty? No.

You sound like a guy at a gun show willing to sell ak47s to teenagers!

Don

n7axw wrote:You sound like a guy at a gun show willing to sell ak47s to teenagers!
Don

So, you believe the UN is the bees knees eh?

J6P wrote:

drothgery wrote:No, SLN SDs are worse than nothing. Because people with SDs will think they can fight SDs -- or at least BCs, with them -- and they can't do that. And because by the time you have trained the crew for an SD, you could have built a modern BC from scratch.

I realize a lot of people think the manpower and training issues in the Honorverse are ridiculous. Nonetheless, the Honorverse does in fact work that way. It is not the real world, and analogies to real-world warfare only go so far. In the Honorverse, it really does take two years to turn a very bright college student into a serviceable low-level enlisted man in the RMN in the middle of a shooting war. And the RMN almost certainly was working faster than almost anybody else in the Honorverse at this.

Are you for real? Say they do build their BC's from scratch in said miracle time of 2 years that not even the Manties can accomplish with the most efficient intact work force in the universe, ship design in hand, and orbital infrastructure, let alone someone without the above, but somehow got, from some fairy god mother, BC building plans with a nice fill in the color chart for rubes and nubes regarding ship building.

The Manties couldn't build a waller in two years (well, except the python lump of last Manty-built wallers we'll see for a while). A BC is another matter entirely; they can be built far more quickly (save for a Nike knock-off which is hardly necessary for a 'good enough' BC).

J6P wrote:Where the HELL are you going to get the crews. After all you just stated said world can't get said people... Of course even some backwater named Monica had more than enough personnel to man, crew several BC/SD's just fine from their "obsolescent ships" thank you very mcuh. Even Masada did. Knock Knock, anyone home? Only a plot miracle twist saved our dear hero. Get real.

Eh, the plot had Terekhov get overconfident and so end up in a situation where he needed to flush his missile pods instead of using them against the active 'Monican' BCs. If he'd been able to use everything he'd brought to the fight against the Monican warships, the golden BB he got would have been irrelevant; SLN BCs daren't holding up against Manticoran capital missiles.

Monica did not crew those SLN BCs just fine. They stripped their entire existing navy to man 4 BCs, and some of them were heavily crewed by Technodyne tech reps at the battle of Monica. And in any case it was a cruiser-level navy trying to many more and larger cruisers, not a LAC-level navy trying to man wallers.

Mesada most certainly did not man Thunder of God just fine; it was destroyed by a frigging CA less than half its size. Yes, said CA was commanded by Honor Harrington and probably a generation more advanced, but Sultans were pretty good hardware for their time. In fact Monica and Masada's experiences are proof of why trying to scale up too quickly is a very, very bad idea in the Honorverse. Again, the fastest practical scale-ups we've seen in the Honorverse have been done by Grayson and the Maya, and neither jumped into running capital ships without building an effective light force first.

drothgery wrote:Mesada most certainly did not man Thunder of God just fine; it was destroyed by a frigging CA less than half its size. Yes, said CA was commanded by Honor Harrington and probably a generation more advanced, but Sultans were pretty good hardware for their time. In fact Monica and Masada's experiences are proof of why trying to scale up too quickly is a very, very bad idea in the Honorverse. Again, the fastest practical scale-ups we've seen in the Honorverse have been done by Grayson and the Maya, and neither jumped into running capital ships without building an effective light force first.

Sure, and if they had bought a light cruiser like you think they should have done and crewed it with the same skill they showed with the BC it would have been a LOT shorter book because Fearless would have crushed it like a bug. Which is why using really tough ships is very helpful to semi-competent navies. They can compensate for your mistakes to a large extent.

kzt wrote:Sure, and if they had bought a light cruiser like you think they should have done and crewed it with the same skill they showed with the BC it would have been a LOT shorter book because Fearless would have crushed it like a bug. Which is why using really tough ships is very helpful to semi-competent navies. They can compensate for your mistakes to a large extent.

But if they only had a light cruiser, even as crazy as Masadans are, they never would have thought fighting someone with a heavy cruiser was a good idea. And if someone their own weight picked a fight with them, they might well win.

drothgery wrote:

kzt wrote:Sure, and if they had bought a light cruiser like you think they should have done and crewed it with the same skill they showed with the BC it would have been a LOT shorter book because Fearless would have crushed it like a bug. Which is why using really tough ships is very helpful to semi-competent navies. They can compensate for your mistakes to a large extent.

But if they only had a light cruiser, even as crazy as Masadans are, they never would have thought fighting someone with a heavy cruiser was a good idea. And if someone their own weight picked a fight with them, they might well win.

So, you are arguing against your own argument? Folks should buy up SLN SD's, BC's. Gotcha. Welcome.

Hi Weird Harold,

Technodyne of Yildin, is probably ranked rather high on the GA's target list since they're a major contractor for the SLN, building SD's among other things.

Whether the GA comes through their wormhole, or arrives from hyper TIY is toast, Being such a big transtellar, I'm sure they have subdivisions all over the SL, but I don't think they will be overlooked either.

Granted as part of the MAlg, some of it will continue despite disappearing aka 'Houdini', but even via smuggling their market share is going to plummet.

L

Weird Harold wrote:

J6P wrote:1) Have to have fire control
2) Said fire control has to exist somewhere
3) Other side knows you have to have said fire control
4) Everyone knows pods are somehow very susceptible to EMP
5) Even ballistic missiles set to detonate at a certain time/distance will take out said PODS.
6) Even if they do not take out said pods, they send ballistic missiles against your defenseless Fire control center which was thrown together with local materials and civilian grade shielding etc.

System defense pods do need fire control (a la Mycroft or Moriarty) and Pods are susceptible to proximity kills. They can also decimate an attacking fleet as was demonstrated to Honor at Solon.

When combined with low-cost LACs, they can provide enough toughness to dissuade aggressors and send them looking for easier conquests.

The problem for most SL systems is that they are used to "paying" someone else to protect them. The GA can offer to replace the SLN and provide a turnkey Pod/LAC system defense setup similar to Beowulf is installing or they've installed for Manticore Alliance members. Or they can refer systems to the Andermani or Erewhonese for comparable systems. Technodyne could probably make a decent showing in the system defense market, but they'd probably spend more than they make trying to break the security protocols on GA tech.

Relax wrote:

drothgery wrote:But if they only had a light cruiser, even as crazy as Masadans are, they never would have thought fighting someone with a heavy cruiser was a good idea. And if someone their own weight picked a fight with them, they might well win.

So, you are arguing against your own argument? Folks should buy up SLN SD's, BC's. Gotcha. Welcome.

???? Having only what you can effectively use will keep you from trying things that will actually get you killed. That's a good thing.

I've argued that you should only buy or build what you can reasonably operate, and that given what it takes to reasonably operate wallers (operating wallers in insufficient numbers to form a wall of battle being somewhat silly) anyone who could actually effectively operate the SLN SDs any time soon has no use for them, with the possible exception of an SDF that's already operating SLN wallers (and even that's unlikely; a handful more isn't likely to make much difference, they wouldn't have the trained personnel for a lot more, and they could create better hardware than SLN wallers in the time it would take to train the personnel they'd need to operate the SLN wallers).