Light bulb Captured Solly fleet

n7axw wrote:I am challenging your sense of time here. From Ywatta Strike until final scenes in COG is a matter of months, probably less than a year. To be sure Haven returned those workers captured at Grendlesbane and I am sure they went right to work, but your notion of current progress sounds a wee bit optimistic to me.

Assuming the Honorverse wiki timeline is correct (I haven't tried to double-check it); it's about 8 months.
Feb 1922 PD - Operation Oyster Bay
June 1922 PD - The Second Havenite-Manticoran War officially ends / Filareta's attack
October 1922 PD - Events from last chapter of CoG

So the rebuilding is 5 months along before any SLN SDs become available in the Manticore System. OTOH the rebuilding is 5 months along before the Grendlesbane workers could have been returned.

I've no idea if, by that point, they'd rebuilt enough to make utilizing SDs as worker dormitories and power sources redundant. (Although given that 5 month span I do suspect if they were going to use SDs for that they would have already fired up some of the mothballed reserve RMN SDs)

Alizon wrote:What I am hearing here from many posters is that there is ample construction capacity available from any number of sources which make the use of an SD impractical. For whatever it's worth, this is certainly not the picture painted following the Alignment's attack.

No, the Star Empire's industrial base has been nearly completely trashed. No one's arguing this (though given some help, they're rebuilding fast).

The thing is that
1) What Manticore already has is more than sufficient to defeat the combined forces of every other conventional navy in human space without Apollo, combined. And the only conventional force without Apollo that's even remotely a threat (Haven) is allied with Manticore at this time.
2) Haven has a huge, huge amount of undamaged shipyards. Hundreds of SDs under construction.
3) The SLN SDs are really, really, really, bad.

Jonathan_S wrote:

n7axw wrote:I am challenging your sense of time here. From Ywatta Strike until final scenes in COG is a matter of months, probably less than a year. To be sure Haven returned those workers captured at Grendlesbane and I am sure they went right to work, but your notion of current progress sounds a wee bit optimistic to me.

Assuming the Honorverse wiki timeline is correct (I haven't tried to double-check it); it's about 8 months.
Feb 1922 PD - Operation Oyster Bay
June 1922 PD - The Second Havenite-Manticoran War officially ends / Filareta's attack
October 1922 PD - Events from last chapter of CoG

So the rebuilding is 5 months along before any SLN SDs become available in the Manticore System. OTOH the rebuilding is 5 months along before the Grendlesbane workers could have been returned.

I've no idea if, by that point, they'd rebuilt enough to make utilizing SDs as worker dormitories and power sources redundant. (Although given that 5 month span I do suspect if they were going to use SDs for that they would have already fired up some of the mothballed reserve RMN SDs)

Oh yes, that would be a better solution if, in fact, the RMN had any left. Remember High Ridge systematically went about scrapping the RMN for profit. Even relatively new non-pod laying SD's were turned into razor blades.

Now guess where the rest of the mothball fleet would have been located? That's right, docked to or very nearby the huge orbital stations and which were destroyed or badly damaged right along with them. As such, expect for older RMN SD's where were sold or loaned to their allies, I doubt there are more than a very few left.

And 8 months. We're talking about decades and decades of concerted effort and a staggering amount of wealth generated by gate fees (which have been virtually stopped)to build what has been destroyed. Manticore has just lost practically all of it's industry which means massive economic displacement (read Great Depression like displacement). What is 8 months when you're talking about attempting to replace that and where are you going to find the funds to have everyone across the region build it back for you (as if they could).

And yes, you have the most advanced warships in the galaxy and how long is it going to take just to regain enough capacity to build the spare parts to keep them operating or with enough expendable ordinance. How do you replace the one's you are inevitably going to loose. How will you even be able to build enough of your whiz bang super weapons to keep that edge. What happens if you have to go back to capacitor driven missles and your edge gets steadily eroded by the Solly's. You can't be comfortable when you're standing still and everyone who is trying to kill you is trying to catch you as fast as they possibly can.

At best, all it gives you is some temporary breathing room but nothing more.

Anyway, at what point do you get a little desperate and start looking for resources in places you wouldn't have considered otherwise?

You know, using the SD's as dormitories or whatever can be done. The caveat is that it can't costs more manpower to do it than compared to other conventional means.

Manticore has an extreme lack of skilled labor and if you have to use say 100 workers per SD to keep everything running that's 100 workers less for something more important.

Getting dedicated "workers barracks" up and running should be a simple matter compared to sinking huge amounts of work into SD's so they can be utilized as barracks.

Alison's portrayal of the situation pretty much matches my own. As I recall, the estimate for rebuilding was something like four years to build back. That didn't count on Beowulf's help or the workers returned from Haven, but still we are looking at a lot of time.

Second, I will agree with the conventional wisdom that Manticore is militarily secure at the moment, presuming they can guard against another Yawatta strike. But there is another subject that gets overlooked here. That is the devastating blow to Manticore's civilian economy, a strong share of which was trashed along with the military building capacity. In fact billions are being lost each day until that capacity can be rebuilt.

So the situation IS URGENT! If running a few dozen SD's over to where things are being rebuilt and putting in extra berthing and utilizing other useful features of the ships, I say they should get at it. It is simply maximum use of readily available resources in the here and now.

Don

Alizon wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:So the rebuilding is 5 months along before any SLN SDs become available in the Manticore System. OTOH the rebuilding is 5 months along before the Grendlesbane workers could have been returned.

I've no idea if, by that point, they'd rebuilt enough to make utilizing SDs as worker dormitories and power sources redundant. (Although given that 5 month span I do suspect if they were going to use SDs for that they would have already fired up some of the mothballed reserve RMN SDs)

Oh yes, that would be a better solution if, in fact, the RMN had any left. Remember High Ridge systematically went about scrapping the RMN for profit. Even relatively new non-pod laying SD's were turned into razor blades.

Now guess where the rest of the mothball fleet would have been located? That's right, docked to or very nearby the huge orbital stations and which were destroyed or badly damaged right along with them. As such, expect for older RMN SD's where were sold or loaned to their allies, I doubt there are more than a very few left.

I tend to doubt that Manticore would waste the relatively limited slip space on their stations on mothballed ships. Much more likely they're in a parking orbit well clear of the stations or their traffic. (It's not like wet-navy ships that have to be anchored or tied up alongside)

Jonathan_S wrote:Assuming the Honorverse wiki timeline is correct (I haven't tried to double-check it); it's about 8 months.
Feb 1922 PD - Operation Oyster Bay
June 1922 PD - The Second Havenite-Manticoran War officially ends / Filareta's attack
October 1922 PD - Events from last chapter of CoG

So the rebuilding is 5 months along before any SLN SDs become available in the Manticore System. OTOH the rebuilding is 5 months along before the Grendlesbane workers could have been returned.

I've no idea if, by that point, they'd rebuilt enough to make utilizing SDs as worker dormitories and power sources redundant. (Although given that 5 month span I do suspect if they were going to use SDs for that they would have already fired up some of the mothballed reserve RMN SDs)

Using the captured warships as housing, runs into the question of is it better than what the current workers are using? I suspect that much of the current workforce is using the Honorverse equivalent of RVs and tents for housing with prefab dorms being setup when Filareta's Fiasco happens.

Castenea wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:Assuming the Honorverse wiki timeline is correct (I haven't tried to double-check it); it's about 8 months.
Feb 1922 PD - Operation Oyster Bay
June 1922 PD - The Second Havenite-Manticoran War officially ends / Filareta's attack
October 1922 PD - Events from last chapter of CoG

So the rebuilding is 5 months along before any SLN SDs become available in the Manticore System. OTOH the rebuilding is 5 months along before the Grendlesbane workers could have been returned.

I've no idea if, by that point, they'd rebuilt enough to make utilizing SDs as worker dormitories and power sources redundant. (Although given that 5 month span I do suspect if they were going to use SDs for that they would have already fired up some of the mothballed reserve RMN SDs)

Using the captured warships as housing, runs into the question of is it better than what the current workers are using? I suspect that much of the current workforce is using the Honorverse equivalent of RVs and tents for housing with prefab dorms being setup when Filareta's Fiasco happens.

I have no text evidence to add here, but whose to say they aren't considering it? Or consider that those workers from Grendlesbane just got home shortly before Filareta's little adventure. So those sds hadn't yet come into Manticore's possession. So in order to get them on the job, you need to house them somewhere...roughly 45000 people as I understand. As for prefab housing, if your manufactoring is trashed, where is it to come from? And bear in mind that such housing needs to be in space near where the construction zones will be.

No easy answers here. Add into that housing is only a narrow slice of the challenge. Decisions have to be made on how projects are going to proceed so the jobs can be created. And Manticore is going to have to train new workforce to replace the million ++ lost in Yawatta strike. Fabrication needs to be provided for. Everything is going to be in short supply for a long time.

Forget about modifying the sds at all. If moving say 10 of them into position to house those 45000 workers plus maintainence people, wouldn't it be worth it?

Don

Alizon wrote:What I am hearing here from many posters is that there is ample construction capacity available from any number of sources which make the use of an SD impractical. For whatever it's worth, this is certainly not the picture painted following the Alignment's attack.

What is depicted is the utter destruction of all of the significant orbital constructs and orbital industrial infrastructure, an infrastructure which too generations of remarkable effort to build in the first place. Worse, if the books are to be believed, practically all of Manticore's heavy industry was located in these orbital bases.

And the Manticore's system represents as majority of the industrial capacity of the Empire ... and it's gone. This includes pretty much all of the shipyards and of those that survive, all of the industries which made the parts that those shipyards assembled are gone.

David portrays the situation as a disaster, but then it's only a minor bump in the road.

Part of this appears to me that David has no idea as to how hard it is to actually do manufacturing. Not only is the the manufacturing base gone, he's got the entire supply chain GONE. The insanity with Mycroft is part of this. He seems to think that it's a trivial project to have some 3rd party use new equipment to build a major modification of the most complex system the RMN had using people who have never built even the grav communication systems, much less the entire fire control arrays. Then someone will write an enormous amount of code the weld this into a coherent distributed system controlling thousands of MDMs, which are both the most deadly and stupid weapons in existence. And they are going to deploy this in months?

You have plans for the proprietary military specific parts, but not the standard commercially available parts. All the standard off-the shelf parts that were used to build the system are GONE. You can't buy them, and you don't have design plans. You have part numbers from a manufacturer, who is out of business, all their equipment is dust, and all the design engineers are DEAD. So you'll have to choose replacement vendors, from off-world. Whose equipment isn't really identical to brand x, even though the specs are almost the same. So when you you assemble the system it doesn't work quite right. Or more actually, every subsystem doesn't work quite as expected. It gets to be lots of fun when you hook them all together. Too bad the QA guys are all dead....

They are going to be lucky to have someone produce just the communication modules for kh2 that work to spec and have passed the acceptance tests in a year. You can't even start to test the system until every component has completed testing, and you can't really start to test the computer code until you at least have multiple prototypes in operation.

Consider how long it will take to get people who can design the molecular circuits they use. Note that all the people who understood how to build these are dead. All the people who know how to build the equipment that you use to make the molecirs are dead. All the people who know how to design the equipment you use to design molycircs are dead. All the people who know how to design the equipment that you need to build the production equipment to build molycircs are dead.

So where will you start? Note that it takes about 4 years to graduate a new engineer, who is most certainly not qualified to lead any of these projects, and typically needs years of practical experience under the supervision of more experienced engineers. Who are all dead.

Damned if I know how this is supposed to work.

n7axw wrote:

SWM wrote:Manticore is already working on the new shipyards, and has been for quite a while. Some of the smaller shipyards are probably nearly completed. Manticore does not appear to need more housing for construction workers. By the time the superdreadnoughts could be modified to allow the use proposed, the new shipyards will already be working on ships.

I am challenging your sense of time here. From Ywatta Strike until final scenes in COG is a matter of months, probably less than a year. To be sure Haven returned those workers captured at Grendlesbane and I am sure they went right to work, but your notion of current progress sounds a wee bit optimistic to me.

As for the sds, most of their basic functions are already being controlled by computer. For such things as maintaining life support and orbital station keeping, they would do as is. My notions of automotion had more to do with routine maintenence tasks normally performed by humans. I wouldn't defend that very strongly because you might be right. Energy use is a valid concern. But what we are talking about is a temporary expedient not a permanent solution.

Don

Yes, it is less than a year since the Yawata Strike. But just after the Yawata Strike, White Haven said that the first new light ships should be coming out of the yards in two years. And that was before Haven and Beowulf started helping reconstruction. In order for that projection to hold true, some of the shipyards have to be getting close to completion by now. The capital-ship yards are certainly already started, as well.