Light bulb Captured Solly fleet

Weird Harold wrote:If you had read my posts, you'd understand that I'm not advocating using the captured ships as warships, but am advocating using them as campuses for a non-military school to address the "under-education" problem.

There are enough school buildings, or you can construct them on the planet. What you need is teachers, human beings, not million ton battle steel monstrosities.

Whitecold wrote:There are enough school buildings, or you can construct them on the planet. What you need is teachers, human beings, not million ton battle steel monstrosities.

Which part of Here, Now, and Free are you having trouble with?

Yes, there is a need for teachers/trainers. That is true whether the school is brick and mortar in a gravity well or in a re-purposed space ship.

Teachers need lesson plans and equipment (like computers.)

Building campuses and buying equipment costs money; parking a SLN SD in orbit only costs fuel and all of the equipment and lesson plans for general or specialized education are in place.

One thing I would point out with your plan. There is no need for a campus to improve the educational system of most of the Verge planets. (This includes the Talbott Quadrant.) All that is needed is connectivity. In A Beautiful Friendship, one of the reasons Stephanie's parents made her join the hang gliding club was to learn "people skills", I.E. how to handle people face to face rather than just over the net.

If a proper interface can be developed to allow access, those computers (and any teaching material) would be much better off tied into the local net, where more than just your 6000 - support staff - maintenance personnel can make use of them. Also, not even students would put up with the living standards aboard ship. (Read the description of the berthing compartment aboard the RMN Minotaur in Echoes of Honor.) For that matter, it would take yard time and space to create the classrooms as there are not any spaces that could be conveniently used. (Or at least not more than 1 or 2.)

As for the medical equipment, if it can be removed and power requirements met planet side, all the sickbays combined would be needed to make a difference on a planet like Dresden. As for using that equipment as teaching aids, there is no point in teaching someone to use equipment if there is only one set of equipment on the whole planet to be used.

Weird Harold wrote:Of the thirteen systems in the Talbot Quadrant, only three or four have medical establishments capable of producing and administering Prolong. Some of the more hardscrabble systems are just relearned germ theory.

Please give us a citation on that, some text evidence, cos I don't remember it.

Also, the medical facilities in an SD will not help you administer prolong to anyone, that's not what they're built for.

Secondly, how is first-line Solarian medicine "sub-par?" The capacity of captured SLN ship's medical department may well be numerically inadequate, but the quality is far from "sub-par."

They're subpar, because they're mounted inside a fucking superdreadnought. I thought that much would be obvious; if you have a really good emergency medical facility that requires you to transport patients into orbit before care can begin, that's not a good emergency medical facility. Having to pack people into shuttles is kinda inefficient when you can just build normal hospitals.

If you had read my posts, you'd understand that I'm not advocating using the captured ships as warships, but am advocating using them as campuses for a non-military school to address the "under-education" problem.

And that idea, in a nutshell, is stupid. These ships are inefficient in that role, way more inefficient than real schools and training facilities are, and utterly limited in terms of what can be taught with them.

Ask yourself: Are any of the BBs left over from WW2 used to teach car mechanics? Or structural engineers? Or electronics techs? Or IT professionals? Because that's what you're advocating, in a nutshell.

Weird Harold wrote:

Whitecold wrote:There are enough school buildings, or you can construct them on the planet. What you need is teachers, human beings, not million ton battle steel monstrosities.

Which part of Here, Now, and Free are you having trouble with?

Yes, there is a need for teachers/trainers. That is true whether the school is brick and mortar in a gravity well or in a re-purposed space ship.

Teachers need lesson plans and equipment (like computers.)

Building campuses and buying equipment costs money; parking a SLN SD in orbit only costs fuel and all of the equipment and lesson plans for general or specialized education are in place.

First, mothballed Manty ships are also free, here and now. But what exactly makes you think a warship is an ideal educational facility for general education? A warship will have a few briefing rooms, but that does not make it an university. You want lecture halls, computers, close to where people already live, instead of putting them in a space station where you have to maintain life support.

Weird Harold wrote:
Which part of Here, Now, and Free are you having trouble with?

Speaking for myself, I'm having trouble with the 'Free' part. The ships have been acquired free of charge, true, but that's only part of the total cost. You've got to crew it for the trip to whichever Talbott system you want to send it to (unless you're planning to only use the ships Crandall surrendered and keep them all in Spindle), fill the bunkers, provide all the consumables for the journey etc. Then you've got to provide at least a basic crew to keep the ships running while on station, ongoing supplies of fuel and consumables, not to mention all the spare parts which aren't common with anything in the GA's inventories, so they'll have to be designed and built from scratch, as will their production lines at a time when Manticore and (one assumes) Grayson are going flat out rebuilding production capability for their first-line equipment.

Using these ships in any way that requires them to be remotely operational is going to be a money sink. That money would be better spent upgrading and expanding the Talbott Quadrant's existing training facilities, and their general educational base. By the time the trainees are ready for space-side training, the GA will be in a position to provide them out of their own resources. Or they'll be so screwed that all the trainees in Talbott won't save them.

KNick wrote:One thing I would point out with your plan. There is no need for a campus to improve the educational system of most of the Verge planets. (This includes the Talbott Quadrant.) All that is needed is connectivity. In A Beautiful Friendship, one of the reasons Stephanie's parents made her join the hang gliding club was to learn "people skills", I.E. how to handle people face to face rather than just over the net.

If a proper interface can be developed to allow access, those computers (and any teaching material) would be much better off tied into the local net, where more than just your 6000 - support staff - maintenance personnel can make use of them.

Agreed. Where the capability to use the captured ship's computers as servers, that would be preferable for a majority of students. OTOH, there are opportunities for apprenticeships and other hands on training.

However, some of the Talbot systems, like Nuncio, don't have the infrastructure -- yet -- to support online education:

Shadow of Saganami
Chapter 16
(arrival on Nuncio) wrote:"It's a pleasure to greet you in person, Captain," Wexler was saying. "It's just not the same, somehow, over a com link." His mouth twisted in a wry smile. "Of course, half of our local coms don't even have visual, so I suppose I shouldn't complain, since the President does have that capability on all of his lines."

KNick wrote:Also, not even students would put up with the living standards aboard ship. (Read the description of the berthing compartment aboard the RMN Minotaur in Echoes of Honor.) For that matter, it would take yard time and space to create the classrooms as there are not any spaces that could be conveniently used. (Or at least not more than 1 or 2.)

You might be surprised at how many conference rooms, briefing rooms and purpose built classrooms might be found on an SD -- especially a Solarian SD.

I will have to look up the berthing compartment in Echoes of Honor, but It can hardly be more cramped than my granddaughter's dorm room, or worse than the open-bay barracks I lived in for the first couple of years service.

Some of the smaller SLN ships won't be suitable for student housing, but might be suitable for some of the hands-on engineering classes on a day student basis.

KNick wrote:As for the medical equipment, if it can be removed and power requirements met planet side, all the sickbays combined would be needed to make a difference on a planet like Dresden. As for using that equipment as teaching aids, there is no point in teaching someone to use equipment if there is only one set of equipment on the whole planet to be used.

With the shuttles that come with the starships, it is probably faster to lift a casualty to orbit than it would be to transport them to a ground-side trauma center.

If you're following my posts there would be more than one set of equipment:

Weird Harold wrote:There are thirteen systems in the Talbot Quadrant; Three of which have educational systems even close to Old Kingdom standards. There are seventy captured SLN SDs plus the screening elements. That works out to a dozen or so ships per system that needs an educational and/or medicinal boost. Reserve a few for cannibalization to keep the rest habitable -- not in service, just habitable. That's around five to ten times what Manticore can afford to provide in the near term.

I doubt that future educational systems will shave much off the six to ten years required to become a fully qualified doctor of medicine. The medical departments, can train new medical personnel while acting as Trauma/Diagnostic Centers. By the time medical personnel are trained well enough to move out there should be additional euipment on hand. Whether of local design and manufacture (with the aid of shipboard machine shops and/or ground-side duplicates built by shipboard machine shops) or imorted from Manticore, the remnants of the Solarian League, or some closer source, like Rembrandt.

In the short term, there will be more medical equipment than medical personnel. Importing medical personnel is almost as urgent as importing teachers/trainers. The captured SLN ship can provide modern equipment and facilities for those imports cheaper than importing the necessary equipment and building facilities.

Dafmeister wrote:Speaking for myself, I'm having trouble with the 'Free' part. The ships have been acquired free of charge, true, but that's only part of the total cost. You've got to crew it for the trip to whichever Talbott system you want to send it to (unless you're planning to only use the ships Crandall surrendered and keep them all in Spindle), ...

I am only considering the ships Adm Crandall brought to Spindle. I am, however, planning on dividing them equally (or possibly proportionally according to need) among the TQ systems. A portion of each allocation would be designated as parts source.

Personnel for a ferry crew and consumables are items that are going to be paid for anyway. Perhaps not in ferrying or maintaining the ships, but somewhere in the process of improving education and medicine in the TQ.

It should be obvious that I'm not advocating a permanent solution, just the cheapest most capable interim solution I can think of.

Whitecold wrote:First, mothballed Manty ships are also free, here and now.

No, they may be free, but they aren't "here" "now" in the Talbot Quadrant. You may note that I haven't made any claim on any of Adm Filareta's ships -- that's because ferrying them from Manticore to the various Talbot Quadrant systems would make them "not free"

The same "not free" logic would apply to Manticoran mothball fleet, plus the cost of taking them out of mothballs and the minor detail that they are more useful as active warships than as school ships.

Whitecold wrote:But what exactly makes you think a warship is an ideal educational facility for general education?

Who described them as "Ideal" -- they aren't. What they are is turn-key ready to train civilians instead of spacers.

My brother completed most of his doctorate while a quartermaster's mate on a "Boomer" (missile submarine)

I spent 21 years in the USAF either training or being trained.

Extrapolating from my experience and my brother's, I would expect a high tech warship to be chock full of educational material and its computers to be full of facts and tutorials a la the internet.

It is unlikely that a system like Nuncio would have to specifications and theory of operation of a gravity compensator anywhere on the planet, but I guarantee you that any warship in any navy will not only have that info, but will have a training syllabus and a qualification test in its computers.

Taking all of that equipment and knowledge out of its armored shell is difficult and (probably) expensive. Using it place with all of the connections and power supply needed makes more sense to me than trying to make the systems work in some new (probably expensive) venue.

The E wrote:

Weird Harold wrote:Of the thirteen systems in the Talbot Quadrant, only three or four have medical establishments capable of producing and administering Prolong. Some of the more hardscrabble systems are just relearned germ theory.

Please give us a citation on that, some text evidence, cos I don't remember it.

This is the initial back-story on Nuncio, because I happen to have that e-book open. I think the comment about germ-theory was about Dresden from Helga Boltitz viewpoint.

Shadow of Saganami
Chapter 16 wrote:None of the people left behind on Basilica had survived, and over half of those they'd managed to transfer had died during their first winter on Pontifex. The half which survived—less than sixteen percent of their original expedition—had fought desperately to cling to the technology they still had, but it had been a long, bitter struggle, and the dreadful death toll of the colony's first few years had killed too many trained technicians, too many teachers. They'd regressed to an early steam-powered level before they managed to arrest the agonizing slide downward, and there they'd stayed for generations. Now, six centuries after mankind first landed on Pontifex, and two centuries after the Nuncians had been rediscovered by the rest of humanity, the planetary population was barely three hundred and fifty million, and its technological capabilities and educational system were far inferior to the ones Grayson had attained before joining the Manticoran Alliance.

The E wrote:Also, the medical facilities in an SD will not help you administer prolong to anyone, that's not what they're built for.

The medical department of a SD should be comparable to a modern real-world super-carrier. In disaster relief operations, super-carrier med-bays have substituted for and/or augmented land-based hospitals. Often they are more capable than land-based hospitals in third world countries.

There is no particular reason to expect that an SD medical department couldn't do anything a well-equipped ground based hospital can do -- including administering prolong therapies and regeneration. Someplace like Bassingford might be able to do more or better, but only because of personnel advantages rather than equipment differences.

The E wrote:They're subpar, because they're mounted inside a fucking superdreadnought. I thought that much would be obvious;

That's exactly why I would expect them to have up-to-date Solarian medical technology and databases. If we were talking about nothing but century old destroyers, you might have a point.

The E wrote:if you have a really good emergency medical facility that requires you to transport patients into orbit before care can begin, that's not a good emergency medical facility. Having to pack people into shuttles is kinda inefficient when you can just build normal hospitals.

You're not considering the problem from the viewpoint of a counter-grav civilization. It is faster and gentler to take a trauma victim to orbit than to stay in atmosphere with the buffeting and speed limitations you'd encounter.

Also, the medical department of a warship should be optimized for trauma care -- aka battle damage. I wouldn't bet the farm on a SLN medical bay being truly trauma ready, but it should at least be designed to handle battle damage.

Given the choice of a long ground ambulance ride to a hospital or a quick ride to orbit on counter-grav, I know which I'd prefer. Not to mention the difference in tech levels between a "neobarb" hospital and a modern solarian clinic.

The E wrote:And that idea, in a nutshell, is stupid. These ships are inefficient in that role, way more inefficient than real schools and training facilities are, and utterly limited in terms of what can be taught with them.

I take it you've never dealt with military career education courses?

Those captured ships may not be as efficient as Landing University on Manticore, but they are orders of magnitude more efficient than what many of the Talbot Cluster system have ready to hand.

They are "a bird in the hand" as opposed to "a big flock when the eggs hatch." They are neither perfect nor permanent, but as an immediate solution to bootstrap a better education system, they (or the knowledge they contain) are worth their displacement in gold.

The E wrote:Ask yourself: Are any of the BBs left over from WW2 used to teach car mechanics? Or structural engineers? Or electronics techs? Or IT professionals? Because that's what you're advocating, in a nutshell.

The "BBs left over from WW2" are 70 years out of date and there has never been a need for them as school ships. That isn't the case with the captured SLN ships; the captured SLN ships are orders of magnitude more modern than the average tech base in the Talbot Cluster -- let alone poor planets like Nuncio.

Each of those captured SLN ships contains technical knowledge that Haven paid through the nose for just 30 years ago. They also contain nearly as much information as the internet does.

As pointed out earlier, using them as servers for distance/online courses would be better than restricting students to in-residence aboard ship, but simply scrapping those shops without using the knowledge they contain would be criminal. Recovering their data for eventual brick and mortar schools would be ideal, but systems like Nuncio don't currently have the capacity to download everything to ground-based information systems.

Whitecold wrote:You want lecture halls, computers, close to where people already live,...

PS: A mere battle cruiser like HMS Nike
had at least three gymnasiums and a swimming pool to go with admiral''s and captain's quarters with dining rooms big enough for a significant percentage of ships officers to dine together. Quarters and dining rooms that would no longer be needed for their original purpose.

A Solarian SD would need a lot more than one "admiral's quarters" given the rank inflation in the SLN.

I'm not sure just how ubiquitous computer terminals are on solarian designs, but I would expect at least one terminal in every compartment. That seemed to be the pattern on PNS Tepes, IIRC.

Weird Harold, your habit of combining responses to a dozen people in a single post makes it extremely hard to respond to you.

You are rather new here on the forum, so I will give you a few hints. This topic has been discussed dozens of times over the last five years. We have talked out the points you have made, over and over and over. It is a very dead horse. David Weber himself has weighed in on it.

There is no need to use the ships as training facilities. They do not even have the kind of training facilities that would be needed. There are already training facilities available, and new ones can be built groundside a whole lot faster than they could put the necessary training equipment on these ships.

It is not possible to take out the grasers and other large equipment on the ships, because Manticore does not have any yards to do it. Any yards that exist are better used to build new ships.

We can assume that any useful materials that could be removed from the ships would be removed before they are scrapped. There is no need to worry about that.

If you sent all the ships to a single planet, they might have enough medical equipment to serve one city, no more. But it would be ridiculous to leave it on the ship and expect people to fly up to it. Why would you put a trauma center or emergency room in orbit instead of inside the city it is serving? No, it would be much faster to reach a facility inside the city. And it is ridiculous to maintain hundreds of ships in orbit, each with their own generators, requiring hundreds of people just to maintain the ship, just use one tiny section of the ship.

You are just dragging out the same arguments we have gone over already.