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Reserve Fleet

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Re: Reserve Fleet
Post by cthia   » Wed May 15, 2019 5:59 pm

cthia
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It must be stated that even though a reserve fleet can become obsolete, it can never become totally useless if you have enough of them and can man them. Pair them with the advantages of the MWJ and superior tactical and strategic thinkers.

Quantity is its own quality, especially if you have the mindset of a gorilla with a huge vocabulary, who's more than willing to throw around big words and notions like Parthian Shot. Like it or no, the SL could have hotwired all of those obsolete ships in the reserve and headed directly to Manticore and chucked thousands of missiles at the planet. I thought that was one of the main reasons Honor trashed them. They weren't without a possible use.

Before someone charges that the SLN/Mandarins weren't murderous "bastards." I agree that most of them were probably "legitimate" children.

Son, your mother says I have to hang you. Personally I don't think this is a capital offense. But if I don't hang you, she's gonna hang me and frankly, I'm not the one in trouble. —cthia's father. Incident in ? Axiom of Common Sense
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Re: Reserve Fleet
Post by MantiMerchie   » Thu May 16, 2019 8:21 am

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Theemile wrote:
Now? No one has touched those steam plants in over 25 years, making the youngest experience hand in his mid 40's, and the parts supplies are limited to what is at hand or can be custom made - no to mention, we've lost the tech to reline the gun barrels. it would be probably be easier to replace the power plants and the main battery than to rebuild that production capability - though not cheap at all.


While the Iowa 650 psi plants aren't in use, we are still running and training people on 900 psi marine steam plants. Iowa requires more manual control but principals haven't changes.

Sent from my LM-G710 using Tapatalk
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Re: Reserve Fleet
Post by pnakasone   » Fri May 17, 2019 6:45 pm

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cthia wrote:
Quantity is its own quality, especially if you have the mindset of a gorilla with a huge vocabulary, who's more than willing to throw around big words and notions like Parthian Shot. Like it or no, the SL could have hotwired all of those obsolete ships in the reserve and headed directly to Manticore and chucked thousands of missiles at the planet. I thought that was one of the main reasons Honor trashed them. They weren't without a possible use.


How about a kamikaze run? Use entire ships as missiles.A seven million ton ship hitting at good fraction of light speed would be devastating.Plan the attack formation right and it would be near impossible to prevent one from getting threw.
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Re: Reserve Fleet
Post by cthia   » Fri May 17, 2019 7:12 pm

cthia
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pnakasone wrote:
cthia wrote:
Quantity is its own quality, especially if you have the mindset of a gorilla with a huge vocabulary, who's more than willing to throw around big words and notions like Parthian Shot. Like it or no, the SL could have hotwired all of those obsolete ships in the reserve and headed directly to Manticore and chucked thousands of missiles at the planet. I thought that was one of the main reasons Honor trashed them. They weren't without a possible use.


How about a kamikaze run? Use entire ships as missiles.A seven million ton ship hitting at good fraction of light speed would be devastating.Plan the attack formation right and it would be near impossible to prevent one from getting threw.

Ships are a much larger target and far slower than missiles, and available in far fewer numbers than missiles. Kamikaze ships would be blown to dust bunnies far before they reached the planet. Missiles are available in hundreds of thousands, at least, traveling at a large percentage of C. No?

Besides, the lion's share of SL officers are cowards. Chuck and run is their MO, or, in modern parlance, a drive-by.

Son, your mother says I have to hang you. Personally I don't think this is a capital offense. But if I don't hang you, she's gonna hang me and frankly, I'm not the one in trouble. —cthia's father. Incident in ? Axiom of Common Sense
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Re: Reserve Fleet
Post by Armed Neo-Bob   » Sat May 18, 2019 4:29 pm

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cthia wrote:Ships are a much larger target and far slower than missiles, and available in far fewer numbers than missiles. Kamikaze ships would be blown to dust bunnies far before they reached the planet. Missiles are available in hundreds of thousands, at least, traveling at a large percentage of C. No?

Besides, the lion's share of SL officers are cowards. Chuck and run is their MO, or, in modern parlance, a drive-by.

A bit of a broad brush, there, isn't it?

Sorry, but who (aside from Byng) were the cowards?
Aside from Byng's Battle Fleet Staff, we got a look at
Captain Warden Mizawa, SLNS Jean Bart; along with his tac officers, including Lt Askew;

Other members of Byng's Squadron: Admiral Sigbee, who took in the orphaned Askew, recognized the SLN's inferiority, and surrendered--but didn't just roll over, and sent urgent dispatches home (all she could do, really.)

Commodore Thurgood, assign to Madras Sector, and his staff;

Rear Admiral Pyun, from Genovese Sector (cashiered by Coomssioner Floyd after Zunker);

and while she was contemptible, not even Sandra Crandall was a coward.

Arrogant, frequently stupid, or whatever, but most of them actually were doing their jobs (ie., dying for plot reasons).


Even the Battle Fleet officer Scotty ran into in whatever unpronounceable system it was, was trying to do his job, not cutting and running.

They'd be cowards if they were running when they actually had a chance, but under the circumstances, you're a bit harsh. Not that they are not otherwise contemptible for moral reasons. . . . :)

Rob
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Re: Reserve Fleet
Post by runsforcelery   » Sat May 18, 2019 5:13 pm

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Okay, about reserve fleets.

Until and unless pod-deployed munitions become obsolete, then maintaining a reserve of pod-layers makes a lot of sense. One of the advantages of the SD(P) is that, like a current day USN aircraft carrier, you can change out the entire main battery by changing out the air group/missile pods.

Diving a little deeper:

I don't know if you've noticed, but the rate of change in compensator efficiencies has been dropping steadily for the last couple of in-universe years. It's still climbing, but it's climbing at a much lower rate, and inertial compensators are one item that can be changed out pretty easily, so differences in acceleration rate can be dealt with.

Molecular circuitry is a lot less finicky than current-day electronics. Note that usually when something electronic breaks in the Honorverse it's because someone broke it, not because it simply failed. Obviously, heavy usage is going to burn up designed lifetime, but molecular circuitry (Honorverse style) doesn't do a lot of degrading when it's left unused. That isn't to say that there wouldn't be some failures in systems which have been left mothballed for years and years, but the failure rate would be far lower than one would anticipate out of our current-day systems.

One of the things that BuShips did in designing the newer classes was to take cognizance of the fact that things like EW systems, FTL coms, etc., had been changing rapidly for years. So, the more recent ship classes were designed around modular systems, wherever possible, and space was allocated to allow for substantial growth. Energy weapons, broadside missile tubes, counter missile launchers, and other "ported" weapons are a lot trickier, because of the armor systems which might have to be removed/modified if the original weapons are replaced or upgraded. Even there, the SEM's designers tried to allow a margin for growth, although they recognized that success would be a lot more problematical.

The problems that the Sollies had with their Reserve Fleet came in several levels, and the SEM is aware of all of them. One may assume that in any reserve planning on Manticore's part, they would do their best to avoid the Sollies errors. A (partial) catalog of those errors would include:

(1) They simply hadn't done routine maintenance, hadn't cycled ships in and out of reserve status, and had made no attempt to keep onboard systems current.

(2) The ships of the Solarian Reserve Fleet had not been designed with the expectation that technology would be changing significantly. As a consequence, no one worried about "growth space" for new systems or modular installations which could be (relatively) quickly changed out for modern hardware. Replacing and updating would have required a huge investment in yard time to rip out and obsolete systems and then somehow shoehorn in more modern ones.

(3) The ships of the Reserve had old-style inertial compensators, which might have been changed out . . . assuming that the SLN had possessed newer and more efficient compensators to change out. It didn't.

(4) The SLN had never actually expected to need the Reserve. It was a sort of strategic security blanket, the massive threat looming ominously in the background, and officially its units were kept up to modern standards by rotation into and out of active service. In fact, that wasn't happening, because . . . well, because the Invincible Solarian League Navy was invincible, and no one could possibly be insane enough to challenge it.

(5) Most of the mobilization plans envisioned having a minimum of one to two T-years leadtime. It would have taken that long simply to spin up the needed personnel, and that was assuming that the SLN had gone to immediate crash mobilization, retraining of reservists, and training of new recruits.

(6) Most importantly, every ship of the Solarian Reserve was decades old and could not be refitted as a pod-layer. It was physically impossible to do anything of the sort, which meant that in an era of pod-launched missiles, they would have been restricted to the pods they could deploy on tractors. Even if they'd been just as tough defensively as their opposition, that would have been a crippling tactical disadvantage.

The RMN has learned a lot over the last twenty years or so, and in a prolong society, conserving that knowledge is going to be at least a little easier than in a pre-prolong society. Indeed, the problem is going to be avoiding a situation in which lessons learned become dogma received, and the only way to avoid that is to create an institutional bias towards iconoclasm. It's unlikely that even the RMN can avoid losing its edge, but as long as it continues measuring itself against a realistic appreciation of its peer competitors, it should be able to remain sharp enough. Among other things, the RMN has no intention of maintaining a reserve fleet that doesn't cycle through active service on a regular basis and schedule. The Star Empire is prepared to spend the funds and invest the industrial capacity to do that, and the RMN is revamping its attitude towards Reserve status for its personnel to better reflect the realities of prolong-era careers. If you'll recall, Manticore had already begun the practice of cycling admirals through Admiralty or staff billets and active fleet command as early as Basilisk Station. What they are looking at now is a system under which personnel who choose to go the Reserve track will be recalled to active service for a minimum of two T-years at a time on a rotating basis. At the moment, it's looking like reservists will have about five years between recalls, during which they will simulator train two or three times a year. They'll be paid a percentage of their active duty base pay (not half-pay) and have access to Navy services for themselves and their dependents during the interval between activations.

The object here is to have enough readily available personnel with recent active experience and training under their belts to fully man the first tranche of ships activated from the Reserve. Training programs will be spun up to speed to produce the additional personnel needed for subsequent activation waves until the entire Reserve has been demobilized, modernized (where needed) and stood up.

At the same time, ONI, BuPlan, and BuTrain will — hopefully — be keeping a finger on the pulse of potential adversaries' war-fighting technology and doctrine, both in order to keep the RMN's active war-fighting capability current and to ensure (in so much as is humanly possible) that Manticore doesn't get ambushed by someone else's paradigm-smashing innovations.

Now, of course, if I were to allow all of this to work as smoothly as Manticore obviously hopes it will work, it would undermine the challenge I might throw at Our Heroes™ in some future novel. Of course, I would never be so evil as to make sure that it doesn't work smoothly, now would I?


"Oh, bother!" said Pooh, as Piglet came back from the dead.
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Re: Reserve Fleet
Post by kzt   » Sat May 18, 2019 8:46 pm

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No, never.

As a thought, the two options for a reserve are individuals in the reserve or units in the reserve. US experience on the Army and Air Force side is that decently run units who have been together for years using familiar gear provide better crisis service than random groups of people thrown together and handed new equipment they are only vaguely familiar with.
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Re: Reserve Fleet
Post by cthia   » Sun May 19, 2019 10:26 am

cthia
Fleet Admiral

Posts: 14951
Joined: Thu Jan 23, 2014 1:10 pm

Armed Neo-Bob wrote:
cthia wrote:Ships are a much larger target and far slower than missiles, and available in far fewer numbers than missiles. Kamikaze ships would be blown to dust bunnies far before they reached the planet. Missiles are available in hundreds of thousands, at least, traveling at a large percentage of C. No?

Besides, the lion's share of SL officers are cowards. Chuck and run is their MO, or, in modern parlance, a drive-by.

A bit of a broad brush, there, isn't it?

Sorry, but who (aside from Byng) were the cowards?
Aside from Byng's Battle Fleet Staff, we got a look at
Captain Warden Mizawa, SLNS Jean Bart; along with his tac officers, including Lt Askew;

Other members of Byng's Squadron: Admiral Sigbee, who took in the orphaned Askew, recognized the SLN's inferiority, and surrendered--but didn't just roll over, and sent urgent dispatches home (all she could do, really.)

Commodore Thurgood, assign to Madras Sector, and his staff;

Rear Admiral Pyun, from Genovese Sector (cashiered by Coomssioner Floyd after Zunker);

and while she was contemptible, not even Sandra Crandall was a coward.

Arrogant, frequently stupid, or whatever, but most of them actually were doing their jobs (ie., dying for plot reasons).


Even the Battle Fleet officer Scotty ran into in whatever unpronounceable system it was, was trying to do his job, not cutting and running.

They'd be cowards if they were running when they actually had a chance, but under the circumstances, you're a bit harsh. Not that they are not otherwise contemptible for moral reasons. . . . :)

Rob


Not as broad a brush as I'd like to use, but my art teacher says be nice. So . . .

My apologies, you are absolutely correct to call me on it. I'm just venting. Seems there are a few good men left, even right here in the forum. It's simply that the subject is one of my pet peeves in the Honorverse. The charge isn't limited to the Solarians either. I accused the Havenites of the exact same thing before such officers as Theisman, Shannon, Pritchart and others began to assert themselves. "About damn time," I screamed on many occasions.

My idea of heroes are people like Shannon, who won't stand idly by and be a part of any disgusting crap committed against innocent, undeserving people in the name of following orders, and still manage to calmly snuggle their pillow at night. Parthian Shot is disgusting. Kewing planets is disgusting. Only cowards can carry out such orders, IMO.

To be fair, Admiral Kingsford, right at the end under pressure of Honor threatening to collect on a balloon payment, finally exposed a little of the backbone I would associate with running down a hero's back, or at least, of someone capable of the right morals, scruples and values . . .

UH wrote:“What do you mean you won’t go out and fight?!” Malachai Abruzzi barked.

snip

“I mean there are over one-point-three million men and women on my ships-of-the-wall, alone, Mister Permanent Senior Undersecretary, and that I have no intention of seeing them butchered for absolutely nothing,” Kingsford said now, his flat voice a cold and level contrast to Abruzzi’s quivering fury.

“Then why the hell do we even have a Navy?” Abruzzi spat.

“Why, you have a Navy to do all those dirty little jobs you need done in the Protectorates.” Nathan MacArtney’s face went as dark and congested, as outraged, as Abruzzi’s, but Kingsford wasn’t done. “You have a Navy you and your colleagues sent into a war it can’t win. You even have a Navy you can order to completely destroy the economies of completely neutral star nations. But you don’t have a Navy so I can murder the men and women under my command because you don’t have a frigging clue what else to do. Does that answer your question, Mister Permanent Senior Undersecretary.”

“Then we’ll fucking remove you from command and put someone with some guts into it!” Abruzzi snarled. “And then we’ll put you in front of a frigging court-martial and shoot your sorry arse for cowardice in the face of the enemy!”

“That’s your option,” Kingsford said. “And if that’s what you want to do, you go right ahead. But you’re not going to find another admiral who will do what you want. The Navy’s done dying just because the lot of you have been too damned stupid and too damned arrogant to listen to the people who have been trying to get you to stop this goddamned war you started—you, not them—since before it even began!”

Good for you Admiral Kingsford. Good for you! If you'll notice, his own arse wasn't what mattered to him. Anything less than that is a coward in my book. But again, it's just me and my raving ranting lunacy. Everyone knows the maker didn't use the common schematic when wiring my brain. I'd like to think a litter of cats would bond with me. LOL

Son, your mother says I have to hang you. Personally I don't think this is a capital offense. But if I don't hang you, she's gonna hang me and frankly, I'm not the one in trouble. —cthia's father. Incident in ? Axiom of Common Sense
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Re: Reserve Fleet
Post by cthia   » Sun May 19, 2019 10:56 am

cthia
Fleet Admiral

Posts: 14951
Joined: Thu Jan 23, 2014 1:10 pm

runsforcelery wrote:Okay, about reserve fleets.

Until and unless pod-deployed munitions become obsolete, then maintaining a reserve of pod-layers makes a lot of sense. One of the advantages of the SD(P) is that, like a current day USN aircraft carrier, you can change out the entire main battery by changing out the air group/missile pods.

Diving a little deeper:

I don't know if you've noticed, but the rate of change in compensator efficiencies has been dropping steadily for the last couple of in-universe years. It's still climbing, but it's climbing at a much lower rate, and inertial compensators are one item that can be changed out pretty easily, so differences in acceleration rate can be dealt with.

Molecular circuitry is a lot less finicky than current-day electronics. Note that usually when something electronic breaks in the Honorverse it's because someone broke it, not because it simply failed. Obviously, heavy usage is going to burn up designed lifetime, but molecular circuitry (Honorverse style) doesn't do a lot of degrading when it's left unused. That isn't to say that there wouldn't be some failures in systems which have been left mothballed for years and years, but the failure rate would be far lower than one would anticipate out of our current-day systems.

One of the things that BuShips did in designing the newer classes was to take cognizance of the fact that things like EW systems, FTL coms, etc., had been changing rapidly for years. So, the more recent ship classes were designed around modular systems, wherever possible, and space was allocated to allow for substantial growth. Energy weapons, broadside missile tubes, counter missile launchers, and other "ported" weapons are a lot trickier, because of the armor systems which might have to be removed/modified if the original weapons are replaced or upgraded. Even there, the SEM's designers tried to allow a margin for growth, although they recognized that success would be a lot more problematical.

The problems that the Sollies had with their Reserve Fleet came in several levels, and the SEM is aware of all of them. One may assume that in any reserve planning on Manticore's part, they would do their best to avoid the Sollies errors. A (partial) catalog of those errors would include:

(1) They simply hadn't done routine maintenance, hadn't cycled ships in and out of reserve status, and had made no attempt to keep onboard systems current.

(2) The ships of the Solarian Reserve Fleet had not been designed with the expectation that technology would be changing significantly. As a consequence, no one worried about "growth space" for new systems or modular installations which could be (relatively) quickly changed out for modern hardware. Replacing and updating would have required a huge investment in yard time to rip out and obsolete systems and then somehow shoehorn in more modern ones.

(3) The ships of the Reserve had old-style inertial compensators, which might have been changed out . . . assuming that the SLN had possessed newer and more efficient compensators to change out. It didn't.

(4) The SLN had never actually expected to need the Reserve. It was a sort of strategic security blanket, the massive threat looming ominously in the background, and officially its units were kept up to modern standards by rotation into and out of active service. In fact, that wasn't happening, because . . . well, because the Invincible Solarian League Navy was invincible, and no one could possibly be insane enough to challenge it.

(5) Most of the mobilization plans envisioned having a minimum of one to two T-years leadtime. It would have taken that long simply to spin up the needed personnel, and that was assuming that the SLN had gone to immediate crash mobilization, retraining of reservists, and training of new recruits.

(6) Most importantly, every ship of the Solarian Reserve was decades old and could not be refitted as a pod-layer. It was physically impossible to do anything of the sort, which meant that in an era of pod-launched missiles, they would have been restricted to the pods they could deploy on tractors. Even if they'd been just as tough defensively as their opposition, that would have been a crippling tactical disadvantage.

The RMN has learned a lot over the last twenty years or so, and in a prolong society, conserving that knowledge is going to be at least a little easier than in a pre-prolong society. Indeed, the problem is going to be avoiding a situation in which lessons learned become dogma received, and the only way to avoid that is to create an institutional bias towards iconoclasm. It's unlikely that even the RMN can avoid losing its edge, but as long as it continues measuring itself against a realistic appreciation of its peer competitors, it should be able to remain sharp enough. Among other things, the RMN has no intention of maintaining a reserve fleet that doesn't cycle through active service on a regular basis and schedule. The Star Empire is prepared to spend the funds and invest the industrial capacity to do that, and the RMN is revamping its attitude towards Reserve status for its personnel to better reflect the realities of prolong-era careers. If you'll recall, Manticore had already begun the practice of cycling admirals through Admiralty or staff billets and active fleet command as early as Basilisk Station. What they are looking at now is a system under which personnel who choose to go the Reserve track will be recalled to active service for a minimum of two T-years at a time on a rotating basis. At the moment, it's looking like reservists will have about five years between recalls, during which they will simulator train two or three times a year. They'll be paid a percentage of their active duty base pay (not half-pay) and have access to Navy services for themselves and their dependents during the interval between activations.

The object here is to have enough readily available personnel with recent active experience and training under their belts to fully man the first tranche of ships activated from the Reserve. Training programs will be spun up to speed to produce the additional personnel needed for subsequent activation waves until the entire Reserve has been demobilized, modernized (where needed) and stood up.

At the same time, ONI, BuPlan, and BuTrain will — hopefully — be keeping a finger on the pulse of potential adversaries' war-fighting technology and doctrine, both in order to keep the RMN's active war-fighting capability current and to ensure (in so much as is humanly possible) that Manticore doesn't get ambushed by someone else's paradigm-smashing innovations.

Now, of course, if I were to allow all of this to work as smoothly as Manticore obviously hopes it will work, it would undermine the challenge I might throw at Our Heroes™ in some future novel. Of course, I would never be so evil as to make sure that it doesn't work smoothly, now would I?

Hey, I was right about the podlayer!

It seems like having the ability to swamp any enemy's defenses is a good thing. But I had reservations. If the yield in warheads increases dramatically, won't podlayers be the least survivable design? Though I suppose the trade off would be six of one, half dozen of the other?

Son, your mother says I have to hang you. Personally I don't think this is a capital offense. But if I don't hang you, she's gonna hang me and frankly, I'm not the one in trouble. —cthia's father. Incident in ? Axiom of Common Sense
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Re: Reserve Fleet
Post by Brigade XO   » Sun May 19, 2019 8:51 pm

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Posts: 3114
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Location: KY

At the moment, podlayers give you the best path to be able to deploy new- larger sized missiles and/or other improvements without massive ship refits. You might have to shrink the number of missiles per pod but you mostly face the constraints of: size of the pod bay doors, reconfiguring the pod magazines/holds and their pod handling equipment: your equipment for energizing the pods before deployment.
To some extent, improvements on number of missle tactical channels shouldn't take up that much more space but perhaps the adding enough computing power to manage it will have to deal with some creative growth.

From the story line, the RMN had a fair handle on what they currently have, and the capability/mission capacity in the present theaters and threat situations they know about. There is references to new designs in the pipeline. There is also the indiction that new building will be done with an eye to what is projected to be needed now and spread over those classes now in service to provide replacements on some schedule.
There has been a lot of conversation here about the ability to use both older ships with less capable weapons than the MDM's and the need to add more of the current "war fighting" rather than push more than some lower level number of upgraded designes (to MDM) of what would be Commerce Protection or Patrol mission with longer range and deeper magazines. What they are going to ultimatly will have to be decided on the perception of need for RMN to maintain a much expanded role in commerce protection and peacekeeping.
Peacekeeping, I have come to hate that term. It is better than gunboat diplomacy but only a bit. RMN is going to have to back up the terms and conditons of the Treaty signed with the League and having a substantial number of ships caplable of long duration patrol missions with MDM and related systems.
In the short run, they can use many of the older or less than MDM ships in places like Silesia and Talbot for enforcing things like the Silesia addition to the Empire. That level should handle garden variety pirates and even DD level commerce raiders. How fast that situation changes is going to depend on how fast others develope the more capable missiles or aquire them from places like Technodyne (which still exists and has it's Yelden systems yards/manufacturing) or the RF begins to push outward and eventualy displays levels of tech they can be provided by the Alignment.
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