Topic Actions

Topic Search

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: Google [Bot] and 34 guests

SLN Reserve

Join us in talking discussing all things Honor, including (but not limited to) tactics, favorite characters, and book discussions.
Re: SLN Reserve
Post by pnakasone   » Sun Apr 16, 2017 2:08 am

pnakasone
Captain of the List

Posts: 402
Joined: Mon Sep 28, 2015 11:21 pm

kzt wrote:You really think that a planet with 8 billion people can't scrape up 10,000 trained spacers, of whom about about 1000 need to understand by the time the ship is in service the basics of how to maintain and operate military grade hyperdrives.

Do you think that if I offered you a million dollars and a year you could recruit 50 people qualified to be a ship reactor operator from just the 330 million people in the US if I was paying $150,000/year to them?

And people in the US do things like grow old and die. Nobody on a core world does that. Most everyone who served in the SLN over the last hundred years is still alive and healthy. There are something like 20 million people in the SLN at any given moment, which means likely over 150 million vets.

And if you already understand how to operate and maintain a hyperdrive you can probably be taught how to manage a more complex version given a year of training. Since the entire US navy nuclear power training program from street to graduation is on the order of 18 months a year of retraining seems pretty viable.

So yeah, I think this is totally doable.


A question how much of a SLN ships crew is trained for engineering tasks need to maintain and run the system needed for FTL travel?


The biggest resource the SL lacks is time. It would take time to get in touch with SLN veterans that have the needed skills.
Top
Re: SLN Reserve
Post by kzt   » Sun Apr 16, 2017 3:33 am

kzt
Fleet Admiral

Posts: 11337
Joined: Sun Jan 10, 2010 8:18 pm
Location: Albuquerque, NM

pnakasone wrote:The biggest resource the SL lacks is time. It would take time to get in touch with SLN veterans that have the needed skills.

I'm running a planet that needs spacers. I'm pretty sure my tax people know who everyone who gets a SLN pension is. Many of the non-retired but still vets will belong to the 'SL legion' or whatever. There are likely to be license databases for people with certain skills, like there are for merchant seamen and aircraft mechanics. And if that fails I can pay the media to advertise that I'm paying above market rates if you have certain skills and want a job.
Top
Re: SLN Reserve
Post by Tenshinai   » Sun Apr 16, 2017 8:17 am

Tenshinai
Admiral

Posts: 2893
Joined: Tue Nov 02, 2010 8:34 pm
Location: Sweden

kzt wrote:You really think that a planet with 8 billion people can't scrape up 10,000 trained spacers, of whom about about 1000 need to understand by the time the ship is in service the basics of how to maintain and operate military grade hyperdrives.


When they´re used to having the MMM doing the job? And the military just having taken massive losses and tries to poach anyone that even looks like they could be a crewmember?

And no, it´s not just the people directly involved with the gear that will need retraining, they just need the most by far.

And training engineers and the like, not even captains REQUIRE as much training for their post. Ships engineers is something you´re going to need 2-3 years of training minimum, and 1-2 years retraining. And that´s if your education works at optimal, which it almost certainly does not, especially when you suddenly want to flood it with recruits.

It´s going to be a HUGE mess.

kzt wrote:Do you think that if I offered you a million dollars and a year you could recruit 50 people qualified to be a ship reactor operator from just the 330 million people in the US if I was paying $150,000/year to them?


Yes.

But that´s not a comparable situation.

So, lets add that the USN has just lost all its submarines and 5 years worth of newbuilt ones.
That you´re switching to a completely new reactor model.
Halve the average manpower quality of the USN.
Kill 9 out of 10 instructors, including retired ones.

And now we´re looking at 4-5 years just to get people that you wont be certain if they can do the job properly.

The Solarians do not have education for either navy or merchant fleet that is anywhere near proportional to their population size. And their retirees/not on active duty people don´t get enough training to stay fully effective.

Sure, give them 15 years or so and they will be able to start popping out more trained people than all other nations together, but when you don´t have 15 years, that´s kinda useless.

Remove your added complications and you can drop that to 10 years or less, and you can at least begin to get useful people out in numbers in "just" a few years.
Top
Re: SLN Reserve
Post by Somtaaw   » Sun Apr 16, 2017 12:43 pm

Somtaaw
Rear Admiral

Posts: 1184
Joined: Mon Sep 01, 2014 11:36 am
Location: Canada

Theemile wrote:
JohnRoth wrote:Depends on the proportion of time you actually spend traveling at speed. And that depends on how far you're going. For relatively short trips, the amount of time spent loading and unloading at the termini as well as the time spent accelerating and decelerating while shifting hyper bands can dominate your transit time.

Military hyperdrives and military particle shielding cost more, both in capital expense and maintenance expense.


But, there should be a class of "long haul" freighters for the long, well, hauls, utilizing mil spec hardware. But it just doesn't seem to exist.



Some of the freighters that stop off at Montana, let alone others, which only carry perishable gourmet foodstuffs are described as fast.

Which can only possibly be mid-sized freighters, that either use their size to cram in the oversized military hyperdrive and shielding without notably decreasing their cargo capacity or are larger than their civilian hyper counterparts but use the size difference to carry the same tonnage at higher speeds.

Then there's actually the differential in normal speeds, even assuming they grav wave surf most of the time, we've seen evidence that ships still have to fly on impellers between waves, and from hyper limits to their stations. So real fast freighters, or your notional "long hauls" are not only going to have military hyperdrives, but military style impellers and compensators.


Note: While we can be pretty certain outside of the JNMTC concept from In Enemy Hands upgraded some freighters to RMN military grade, I don't see them passing out their full military compensator advantage to their civilian merchant marine fleets, or even part of it so there isn't even a chance of knocking off a civilian freighter to reverse-engineer the compensator differences.

However, we know from the Sali Howle, among other ships received 'military grade' hyperdrives, which we can safely guess means Solarian military grade. If you have money, you can buy anything Solarian it seems, likely upto full compensators.
Top
Re: SLN Reserve
Post by kzt   » Sun Apr 16, 2017 12:54 pm

kzt
Fleet Admiral

Posts: 11337
Joined: Sun Jan 10, 2010 8:18 pm
Location: Albuquerque, NM

Tenshinai wrote:So, lets add that the USN has just lost all its submarines and 5 years worth of newbuilt ones.
That you´re switching to a completely new reactor model.
Halve the average manpower quality of the USN.
Kill 9 out of 10 instructors, including retired ones.

They are not new, or high tech, or sophisticated. What you would use are the more than 200 year-old design for the hyperdrive used on every SLN SD. It's an extremely stable well understood design that any core world can make. It's like talking about how cutting edge and sophisticated a turbocharged diesel is. Except that turbocharged diesels are only 100 years old and, unlike the SLN, you don't find many 100+ year old diesel engines in daily use.
Top
Re: SLN Reserve
Post by Jonathan_S   » Sun Apr 16, 2017 3:59 pm

Jonathan_S
Fleet Admiral

Posts: 8269
Joined: Fri Jun 24, 2011 2:01 pm
Location: Virginia, USA

Somtaaw wrote:Some of the freighters that stop off at Montana, let alone others, which only carry perishable gourmet foodstuffs are described as fast.

Which can only possibly be mid-sized freighters, that either use their size to cram in the oversized military hyperdrive and shielding without notably decreasing their cargo capacity or are larger than their civilian hyper counterparts but use the size difference to carry the same tonnage at higher speeds.

Then there's actually the differential in normal speeds, even assuming they grav wave surf most of the time, we've seen evidence that ships still have to fly on impellers between waves, and from hyper limits to their stations. So real fast freighters, or your notional "long hauls" are not only going to have military hyperdrives, but military style impellers and compensators.
If you assume a route that requires 2 months in hyper the impact of the military hyperdrive dwarfs the other components for long hauls.

If we assume a 4 mton freighter on a 1 month transit (and some rounding off of numbers).
Full civilian
20 hours @ 210 gees = 0.5 c [1]
0.5c in the Delta bands = 1089 c
Transit time 1 month (30 days)

Military hyper generator only
20 hours @ 210 gees = 0.5 c
0.5c in the Theta bands = 2500 c
Transit time 13 days (saved 17 days)

Military hyper + rad shielding
24 hours @ 210 gees = 0.6 c
0.6c in the Theta bands = 3000 c
Transit time 11 days (saved 3 extra days less about 8 hours)

Full military
14 hours @ 360 gees = 0.6 c
0.6c in the Theta bands = 3000 c
Transit time 11 days (saved 10 extra hours)

And if the system you're leaving has a hyper wave the acceleration time savings are reduced by about a factor of 10.

Providing freighters military grade acceleration is almost certainly never cost effective[2]. Some fleet train units will accept the costs to provide reasonable tactical mobility - but that's not really an economic decision.

The rad shielding to increase the top speed in hyper from 0.5 to 0.6 c might well be worth it, but the vast majority of the time savings comes solely from the access to higher hyperspace bands.

----------
[1] Deceleration time need not be considered because in excess of 99% of the ship's velocity will be lost dropping through the hyper bands to n-space.
[2] To be fair, if you have to change hyper bands mid-course , or transit areas subject to rogue waves, you may need to accelerate more than once per journey - that could cause the acceleration period to add to to a bit more of the total. However on any sane route that'll be a small fraction of the total transit time. I also ignore the difference in transit time inside the solar systems; but that adds up to less than time it takes to acceleration to top speed.
Last edited by Jonathan_S on Mon Apr 17, 2017 9:26 am, edited 1 time in total.
Top
Re: SLN Reserve
Post by Tenshinai   » Sun Apr 16, 2017 6:45 pm

Tenshinai
Admiral

Posts: 2893
Joined: Tue Nov 02, 2010 8:34 pm
Location: Sweden

kzt wrote:They are not new, or high tech, or sophisticated. What you would use are the more than 200 year-old design for the hyperdrive used on every SLN SD. It's an extremely stable well understood design that any core world can make. It's like talking about how cutting edge and sophisticated a turbocharged diesel is. Except that turbocharged diesels are only 100 years old and, unlike the SLN, you don't find many 100+ year old diesel engines in daily use.


Compared to what the merchant shipping is using? Yes they are.
And if the SLN could spare several hundred ships engineers to use as teachers assistants and trainers, it wouldn´t be nearly as big of an issue. But they´re kinda busy with having died en masse lately, so they´re a bit shorthanded.
Top
Re: SLN Reserve
Post by Somtaaw   » Sun Apr 16, 2017 9:30 pm

Somtaaw
Rear Admiral

Posts: 1184
Joined: Mon Sep 01, 2014 11:36 am
Location: Canada

Jonathan_S wrote:
Somtaaw wrote:Some of the freighters that stop off at Montana, let alone others, which only carry perishable gourmet foodstuffs are described as fast.

Which can only possibly be mid-sized freighters, that either use their size to cram in the oversized military hyperdrive and shielding without notably decreasing their cargo capacity or are larger than their civilian hyper counterparts but use the size difference to carry the same tonnage at higher speeds.

Then there's actually the differential in normal speeds, even assuming they grav wave surf most of the time, we've seen evidence that ships still have to fly on impellers between waves, and from hyper limits to their stations. So real fast freighters, or your notional "long hauls" are not only going to have military hyperdrives, but military style impellers and compensators.
If you assume a route that requires 2 months in hyper the impact of the military hyperdrive dwarfs the other components for long hauls.

If we assume a 4 mton freighter on a 1 month transit (and some rounding off of numbers).
Full civilian
16 hours @ 210 gees = 0.5 c [1]
0.5c in the Delta bands = 1089c
Transit time 1 month (30 days)

Military hyper generator only
16 hours @ 210 gees = 0.5 c
0.5c in the Theta bands = 2500 c
Transit time 13 days (saved 17 days)

Military hyper + rad shielding
24 hours @ 210 gees = 0.6 c
0.6c in the Theta bands = 3000 c
Transit time 11 days (saved 3 extra days less about 8 hours)

Full military
14 hours @ 360 gees = 0.6 c
0.6c in the Theta bands = 3000 c
Transit time 11 days (saved 10 extra hours)

And if the system you're leaving has a hyper wave the acceleration time savings are reduced by about a factor of 10.

Providing freighters military grade acceleration is almost certainly never cost effective[2]. Some fleet train units will accept the costs to provide reasonable tactical mobility - but that's not really an economic decision.

The rad shielding to increase the top speed in hyper from 0.5 to 0.6 c might well be worth it, but the vast majority of the time savings comes solely from the access to higher hyperspace bands.

----------
[1] Deceleration time need not be considered because in excess of 99% of the ship's velocity will be lost dropping through the hyper bands to n-space.
[2] To be fair, if you have to change hyper bands mid-course , or transit areas subject to rogue waves, you may need to accelerate more than once per journey - that could cause the acceleration period to add to to a bit more of the total. However on any sane route that'll be a small fraction of the total transit time. I also ignore the difference in transit time inside the solar systems; but that adds up to less than time it takes to acceleration to top speed.


Then there must be some step between conventional civilian, and full blown military performance for the fast freighters mentioned in the Shadows books. Away from my PC atm, so I'll have to hunt down the references, but they were usually mentioned in reference to Montanan beef.

The perishable/gourmet foodstuffs seemingly have enough of a market investing in freighters with a superior speed, and utilizing the wormhole networks is smart money.
Top
Re: SLN Reserve
Post by Bill Woods   » Sun Apr 16, 2017 9:45 pm

Bill Woods
Captain of the List

Posts: 571
Joined: Tue Jun 11, 2013 12:39 pm

Jonathan_S wrote:
16 hours @ 210 gees = 0.5 c [1]

24 hours @ 210 gees = 0.6 c

14 hours @ 360 gees = 0.6 c
Maybe I'm missing something, but my calculator says from a standing start,

23.4 hr* @ 210 gees = 0.5 c
30.3 hr @ 210 gees = 0.6 c
17.7 hr @ 360 gees = 0.6 c

[*] Time measured on the planet; ship time is a bit less.
----
Imagined conversation:
Admiral [noting yet another Manty tech surprise]:
XO, what's the budget for the ONI?
Vice Admiral: I don't recall exactly, sir. Several billion quatloos.
Admiral: ... What do you suppose they did with all that money?
Top
Re: SLN Reserve
Post by Weird Harold   » Sun Apr 16, 2017 11:15 pm

Weird Harold
Fleet Admiral

Posts: 4478
Joined: Thu Apr 24, 2014 10:25 pm
Location: "Lost Wages", NV

Somtaaw wrote:Then there must be some step between conventional civilian, and full blown military performance for the fast freighters mentioned in the Shadows books. Away from my PC atm, so I'll have to hunt down the references, but they were usually mentioned in reference to Montanan beef.


Theoretically, a system that can reach the Eta band -- higher than "normal" civilian drives in the Delta Band but lower than "normal" Military drives -- should be fairly simple to build. That would constitute a "fast freighter" without being "full-blown military." The same would be true for shields and compensator.

Such ships wouldn't be of much use as fleet train assets since they can't keep up with "full-blown military" ships. They would be good commercial vessels for passenger or high-value shipments. They'd be immune to most pirates in hyper, because typical pirates can't reach the Eta band and most military transits are in the Theta band.

The main question is can commercial carriers recoup the added cost of better hyper-generators, shields, and compensators.


Somtaaw wrote:The perishable/gourmet foodstuffs seemingly have enough of a market investing in freighters with a superior speed, and utilizing the wormhole networks is smart money.


Perishable/gourmet foodstuffs is a limited market. You'd have to seriously undercut the pricing of existing suppliers while simultaneously amortizing a more expensive ship.

Even an armed ship like Pirate's Bane is only profitable in Silesia (pre-partition) because nobody's going to pay a premium for armed transport when there's no real threat to be armed against.
.
.
.
Answers! I got lots of answers!

(Now if I could just find the right questions.)
Top

Return to Honorverse