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Courvosier II-class pod battlecruiser : MLU

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Courvosier II-class pod battlecruiser : MLU
Post by Captain Golding   » Mon Sep 05, 2022 5:05 am

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We know from House of Steel that the Courvosier II-class pod battlecruiser's have 6 tubes in their broadsides and 4 in their bow.

This is 1919+ so predating the Sag- C and Nike and also Keyhole II.


So What Missiles fit in those tubes ? Not Mk16 because they were not available at the time and even if they were in Development the High Ridge government had closed the information feed.

Assuming these were the previous generation of CA/BC tubes then I would assume ER-SDM's of some kind.

Of course Grayson being Grayson all up tubes for Mk23's might be possible.

Now Blackbird is wiped out (Oyster Bay) but the near orbit platforms are still available so Grayson has not lost all it's space industry.

So we can't build new but some form of mid life update is possible.

What would you do ? Remembering that your volume is fixed so something will have to come out for bulky things to go in.
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Re: Courvosier II-class pod battlecruiser : MLU
Post by tlb   » Mon Sep 05, 2022 8:20 am

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Captain Golding wrote:Now Blackbird is wiped out (Oyster Bay) but the near orbit platforms are still available so Grayson has not lost all it's space industry.

Question about the premise; isn't Grayson going to be included in those who will be getting new ships from Bolthole and Beowulf?

The author's quote about the cost of bringing an SLN SD up to Manticore standards being more than the cost of building a new SD seems appropriate here. If the ships can fire Mark-16 pods, then I would not do anything to them.
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Re: Courvosier II-class pod battlecruiser : MLU
Post by Captain Golding   » Mon Sep 05, 2022 9:54 am

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Yes Grayson may be getting unified new ships via the GA Pipeline.

Thing is there is a lot of other people queued up for those ships and I also read the Grayson's Independent streak as saying they will want to get back into shipbuilding asap.

Also I suspect the Unified GA BC will be more a Nike BC than a BC(P).

So where do they start with that ? Building minor vessels like DD's and refitting existing ships as they rebuilt the skills and infrastructure they lost in OB. They need a Fleet Base infrastructure to support their existing fleet even if they get new deliveries from the Havenite shipyards. Also those hulls will need fitting out.

Looking at HoS the GSN is very light on under the wall vessels compared to their count of SD's and CLAC's.
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Re: Courvosier II-class pod battlecruiser : MLU
Post by ThinksMarkedly   » Mon Sep 05, 2022 11:40 am

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Captain Golding wrote:Yes Grayson may be getting unified new ships via the GA Pipeline.

Thing is there is a lot of other people queued up for those ships and I also read the Grayson's Independent streak as saying they will want to get back into shipbuilding asap.


Both things are true. And Grayson has a far outsized Navy for a single-system polity. They don't need anywhere near that many ships to defend their system, especially not with reliable allies nearby. So they don't need new ships in the foreseeable future. They actually need to decommission and transfer some of those that they do have. Beowoulf would be happy with three dozen second-hand Courvoisier II and Harrington II, and have the money to pay for them and man them, without breaking the Protector's Bank.

So where do they start with that ? Building minor vessels like DD's and refitting existing ships as they rebuilt the skills and infrastructure they lost in OB. They need a Fleet Base infrastructure to support their existing fleet even if they get new deliveries from the Havenite shipyards. Also those hulls will need fitting out.

Looking at HoS the GSN is very light on under the wall vessels compared to their count of SD's and CLAC's.


Indeed they need to be more balanced now. So I think you're right they will now build below-the-wall ships, but not for the reason in your previous paragraph. They have the skills, they don't need to relearn anything. And you don't need to make small slips as a stepping stone to big slips. So they will make DD- and CL-sized slips because they want to.
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Re: Courvosier II-class pod battlecruiser : MLU
Post by tlb   » Mon Sep 05, 2022 11:48 am

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ThinksMarkedly wrote:Indeed they need to be more balanced now. So I think you're right they will now build below-the-wall ships, but not for the reason in your previous paragraph. They have the skills, they don't need to relearn anything. And you don't need to make small slips as a stepping stone to big slips. So they will make DD- and CL-sized slips because they want to.

He may be right about the training needed, because of the people lost due to the Oyster Bay strike.
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Re: Courvosier II-class pod battlecruiser : MLU
Post by ThinksMarkedly   » Mon Sep 05, 2022 7:45 pm

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tlb wrote:He may be right about the training needed, because of the people lost due to the Oyster Bay strike.


Fair enough, I'd ignored the fact that the strike took the people, not just the infrastructure. They do indeed need to get people to go through the courses and learn on the job.

But they already have all the courses and techniques and manuals. They need to relearn only what was tacit knowledge and train those people. Indeed a few low-scale projects would help out on that, but it's mostly a time problem. And they don't need to go up the full size scale: after a dozen destroyers or so, most of the tacit knowledge that can be shared is already relearnt. Everything else is going to be type-specific: figuring out the specifics of a CA won't help build an SD.
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Re: Courvosier II-class pod battlecruiser : MLU
Post by kzt   » Mon Sep 05, 2022 9:00 pm

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ThinksMarkedly wrote:But they already have all the courses and techniques and manuals. They need to relearn only what was tacit knowledge and train those people. Indeed a few low-scale projects would help out on that, but it's mostly a time problem. And they don't need to go up the full size scale: after a dozen destroyers or so, most of the tacit knowledge that can be shared is already relearnt. Everything else is going to be type-specific: figuring out the specifics of a CA won't help build an SD.

Right. Tell me about why it took 8 years and 69 million to produce a new batch of FOGBANK after a layoff of 11 years, despite having manuals and an actual pilot plant.

The map is not the territory. Would you be confident sending your family on a plane to New Zealand after you personally and solely repaired it's engines, the first two jet engines you ever worked on, based solely on the manual?
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Re: Courvosier II-class pod battlecruiser : MLU
Post by Jonathan_S   » Mon Sep 05, 2022 10:12 pm

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kzt wrote:Right. Tell me about why it took 8 years and 69 million to produce a new batch of FOGBANK after a layoff of 11 years, despite having manuals and an actual pilot plant.

The map is not the territory. Would you be confident sending your family on a plane to New Zealand after you personally and solely repaired it's engines, the first two jet engines you ever worked on, based solely on the manual?
From the non-classified info released it appears to have been a combination of at least 4 major things, not all of which should apply in the Honorverse.
1) The original manufacturing process was very poorly documented.
2) The original suppliers had changed their process during the hiatus, resulting in differences in trace impurities in the delivered materials.
3) Most of the original workers had retired - leading to a loss of institutional knowledge.
4) The manufacturing facilities had been dismantled and new ones had to be built.
5) The workers who'd build the original manufacturing facility were even longer retired.

So they had to try to reverse engineer / reinvent the original process, figure out what kind of facility was needed to make it, actually build that facility, then repeatedly make and test sample until they worked out the mistakes in their attempts to recreate the poorly documented original process (and part of the issue was that it turned out the original process relied on the old trace material -- something even the original workers didn't realize)

However if the production line had remained open then when that trace material changed they'd have started getting failed batches and could hopefully have quickly narrowed down that one unrealized variable that changed on them.



With the death of so many workers and the destruction of the Blackbird yards I'm sure there was some institutional knowledge. OTOH not all workers would have been killed, the recently built facilities should have been better documented, the instructors that trained the workers are (AFAIk) mostly doing that at Grayson and so would still be there to train new workers. Oh, and I'd certainly hope that thousands of years in the future the Honorverse would have a more solid lock on trace elements and would know their impact in the production.

Plus of course, while Manticore also suffered a major loss, there's a high commonality of tech base and component production lines -- and even the ship assembly is heavily inspired by the recent transfers of Manticoran tech (even if Grayson preferred dispersed soft yards instead of hard yards). So the two systems can help fill in each others knowledge holes. Also the naval repair ships, and even the engineering sections of most warships, have detailed knowledge of nearly every component of a ship -- I don't think there's anything whose construction is quite as tightly held a secret as one critical material in the US nuclear arsenal.

So it shouldn't take anything like the 8 years it took to reconstruct FOGBANk. (Also getting yards back up and running is probably a higher priority and more time critical than getting life extension programs for nukes going -- and so more money and more manpower is likely to be thrown at it which should help rebuild faster)
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Re: Courvosier II-class pod battlecruiser : MLU
Post by ThinksMarkedly   » Mon Sep 05, 2022 10:25 pm

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kzt wrote:Right. Tell me about why it took 8 years and 69 million to produce a new batch of FOGBANK after a layoff of 11 years, despite having manuals and an actual pilot plant.

The map is not the territory. Would you be confident sending your family on a plane to New Zealand after you personally and solely repaired it's engines, the first two jet engines you ever worked on, based solely on the manual?


That's neither here nor there.

I'm not arguing it will be easy. It can be made easier (for a relative value of "easier") with an import of engineers from Andermani and Havenite shipyards and from Weyland, re-hiring retirees or those who'd moved on to other jobs, etc. But it won't be easy.

I'm arguing that they don't need to build all the ship types below the size of an SD in order to be able to build an SD. What is specific to an SD can't be learnt outside an SD, what's specific to the ships below the size of an SD isn't going to be useful. What's useful are the things that are common to all ship types and scale up, so they will probably learn the ropes of those after doing a couple of DDs, then trying to scale up to a couple of CLs and a CA. In order to find out what can scale up to an SD, they have to try and build an SD, (re-)learning what does and what doesn't apply.

So they don't need to build hundreds of DDs, CLs and CAs in order to re-learn how to build SDs. They will build lots of DDs, CLs and CAs because they want to.
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Re: Courvosier II-class pod battlecruiser : MLU
Post by Theemile   » Tue Sep 06, 2022 9:32 am

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Captain Golding wrote:We know from House of Steel that the Courvosier II-class pod battlecruiser's have 6 tubes in their broadsides and 4 in their bow.

This is 1919+ so predating the Sag- C and Nike and also Keyhole II.


So What Missiles fit in those tubes ? Not Mk16 because they were not available at the time and even if they were in Development the High Ridge government had closed the information feed.

Assuming these were the previous generation of CA/BC tubes then I would assume ER-SDM's of some kind.

Of course Grayson being Grayson all up tubes for Mk23's might be possible.

Now Blackbird is wiped out (Oyster Bay) but the near orbit platforms are still available so Grayson has not lost all it's space industry.

So we can't build new but some form of mid life update is possible.

What would you do ? Remembering that your volume is fixed so something will have to come out for bulky things to go in.


We've actually never been told. The original Medusas, Minotaurs, and Harringtons were armed with Mk 41 Tubes (Big capacitor missiles), and we've never been told if these were also designed to launch Mk 23s as well - it's possible because the pods bays on those designs were designed to spin up Fusion pods as well as the original Capacitor pods. If the tubes cannot handle mk 23s, the refit to Mk 23 tubes is close to the cost of a new hull, which may be a driver to put these older designs in the reserves quickly.

Due to the timing, I would assume Courvosier IIs got Mk 23 tubes, like Harrington IIs, but interwar builds could have gotten the older Mk 41 capable tubes.
******
RFC said "refitting a Beowulfan SD to Manticoran standards would be just as difficult as refitting a standard SLN SD to those standards. In other words, it would be cheaper and faster to build new ships."
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