Somtaaw wrote:one of the issues with trying to come up with lightbulb ideas is everyone likes to trot out rfc's statement/comment that the SLN ships are "pretty useless for warships"... yet insist every single possible lightbulb must have only military application.
Well that the SLN ships have to be only military uses, and that only the SD's have possible usage, and ignoring the far higher number of captured lighter ships, the battlecruisers and heavy cruisers, plus other escorts.
That's throttling a lot of possible ideas, and until an application ever is applied to the books, regardless of how the forum sweats keep arguing it's a dead horse; ideas will keep popping up.
I'll just leave off with, last time I actually piped up how one could use the SLN ships as evac, an argument was "how would Grand Alliance personnel be trained on SLN crap?"
Answer: How much training, exactly, does it take when 100% of military personnel, regardless of the Navy they serve, are equally 100% effective at operating merchant craft recaptured from pirates?
This is especially true for Manticoran and Andermani Navies, who have large merchant fleets, and usually end up in Silesia. This implies that at a general level, all ships are fairly universal for controls.
Now before anyone jumps to try and say "well thats merchant ships, not Navy!" TextEvidence to support this for NAVAL ships is also in HH7&8, where Honor + other prisoners with only a few minutes to familiarize with Havenite pinnaces, not only:
a) flew down to the planet on controlled, unpowered entry to the atmosphere
b) ran ground attack on Styx, and took out a full up impeller-drive dispatch boat, with pinnace missiles.
With all that said; using the SLN warships is definitely possible, for just about any purpose, from evacuation ship, to tugboat, to plain derping around ramming into asteroids for lulz. Without making use of dedicated training.
Regarding the PRH pinances in the book In Enemy Hands:
You are correct regarding your point a, the escapees only had a limited amount of time to familiarize themselves with the pinannces.
However your point b is incorrect, the escapees had months on Styx to familiarize themselves with the pinannces before they executed both the ground attack on Styx and took out the dispatch boat.
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There is a difference between able to operate equipment and being able to operate it under combat conditions:
Shadow of Saganami, Chapter 58 wrote:Lieutenant Julio Tyler staggered as Typhoon shuddered. The engineering officer was in charge of Power One, the battlecruiser's forward fusion plant, and he went pale as damage alarms screamed. Power One was far enough aft and heavily enough armored to make it highly unlikely any cruiser-sized laser head could reach it. But from the sound of the alarms, these laser heads were ripping much deeper than they should have.
Tyler swallowed hard and looked around the brightly lit, spacious compartment. He'd been transferred into Typhoon's company three days after the rest of her crew to replace a man who'd managed to fall down an emergency ladder and break his hip, and he knew the rest of the battlecruiser's engineering department wasn't overly impressed with him. He was used to that jealous reaction to his rapid promotion. Relatively few officers made it to senior lieutenant's rank before their twenty-first birthday, but Tyler had always tried to do his job. To actually deserve the fast-track promotions his last name earned.
Yet this time, he was painfully aware of his shortcomings. In the last two weeks he'd begun finding his way around, well enough, at least, that he was pretty sure his ratings and petty officers were no longer laughing behind his back. And he had to admit the Technodyne technicians were right; Typhoon's power rooms really were laid out better, with controls that were easier to use. They just weren't the controls Tyler had spent three and a half T-years learning like the back of his own hand aboard the cruiser Star Fury.
As he listened to the alarms howl, he hoped the damage control parties had learned their equipment better than he'd learned his.
* * *
...Snip...
* * *
Typhoon shuddered as a second wave of X-ray daggers bored through her armor. She should have stopped more of them—all of them—with her lavish anti-missile defenses, but she couldn't see them. Her point defense lasers had become dependent upon relayed tracking reports from Cyclone and Hurricane, and that simply wasn't adequate against targets coming in so fast. -Especially not targets as elusive as Manticoran Mark 16 missiles. Fresh -damage reports inundated her bridge, and her acceleration faltered as four of her beta nodes blew.
Power surges cascaded through her systems, starting in Impeller One and Laser Three. Automatic circuit breakers stopped most of them, but three of the breakers themselves had been knocked out. Rampant energy surged past them, and a broadside graser's superconductor ring blew, shattering internal bulkheads and adding its own massive power to the surge.
The surge that came roaring down the graser's main feed trunk and straight into Power One.
The untamed torrent of energy thundered into the compartment, and an already nervous petty officer leapt back as his control panel blew up. He fell to the decksole on the seat of his pants as electrical fires danced through the control runs, and an alarm began to scream.
* * *
...Snip...
* * *
"Captain, this is Tyler, in Power One!" the young voice in Captain Schroeder's earbug was raw with terror. "We're losing containment on Fusion One!"
"Shut it down!"
"Sir, I'm trying, but—"
Janko Horster's face went white as Typhoon blew up.
That shouldn't have happened, a small, stunned corner of his brain insisted. Not to a battlecruiser!
"Allah!" the Technodyne rep whispered. His face glistened with sweat now, and his hands shook. "How—?"
"No telling," Horster said harshly. "A freak hit. Somebody in a fusion room who punched the wrong button. Maybe God just got pissed at us! But it's not going to help them much in another sixty seconds!"
Italics are the author's.
