Light bulb Captured Solly fleet

Dafmeister wrote:Where: Beowulf.

That would certainly be the best source of Medical equipment and knowledge. But since Beowulf is/was the premier Medical establishment in the solarian league, why wouldn't the captured task force have Beowulfan equipment?

Dafmeister wrote:How much: Cost price, assuming it's not outright given in aid to an old friend and ally.

Cost price is more than "it's right there in this fleet we've captured.

Dafmeister wrote:When: Flight time from the Lynx terminus to the relevant Talbott system, plus a day or two for Junction transits and in-system travel.

Doesn't that assume the equipment is just sitting in warehouses in sufficient quantities to upgrade an entire system? There's not going to be a lag time to manufacture an entire quadrant's worth of equipment?

Dafmeister wrote:As for manpower requirements, there's absolutely no shortage of trained manpower for the RMN. THe shipyards won't be finishing new hulls for several months yet, while Saganami Island is completely untouched and the reduction in merchant fleet activity means BuPers can recall far more reservists from civilian service than previously.

Mission of Honor
Chapter 30 wrote:"The loss of life aboard the space stations themselves is currently estimated at five-point-four million,"...

...

"To be honest, what's going to hurt at least as badly as the hit our physical plant's taken is the workforce we've lost." She nodded her head slightly in Abercrombie's direction. "... For all intents and purposes, we've just lost our orbital infrastructure's entire skilled labor force—aside from the Weyland survivors—which completely disrupts our existing emergency plans. ...."

The manpower problems stem from rearranging things to reconstruct a skilled orbital workforce. I would expect that to counteract the increased availability of merchant spacers.

Dafmeister wrote:In short, as others have said, using the SLN ships for training fulfills an urgent need that doesn't really exist.

It is mostly an alternative to "lets scrap this junk" because RFC said there are no shipyards in the TQ and the SEM doesn't plan to build any -- especially the military grade yards needed to break up SDs.

Dafmeister wrote:Furthermore, I think you're overestimating the parlous state of the Old Kingdom's economy. Yes, it's taken a massive blow, but the war with Haven is over, <yada, yada, yada>

The Grand Alliance's economy is fine, but the other members are carrying the majority of the economic load at the moment.

The SEM and especially the Old Kingdom has lost most of its industry and a large chunk of its junction fees and lost all of the taxes from the RMM -- and possibly incurred liability for non-delivery penalties caused by Case Lacoon.

Militarily, the GA is covering the gaps in the Old Kingdom economy. But the GA is a military alliance, not an economic one -- the TQ educational and medical lacks aren't the GA's problem except as they impact the SEM military

Dafmeister wrote:Regarding using the ships as hospitals, that idea has more merit,

I wish I could take credit for that idea; the original suggester just did a drive by posting 15 or 20 pages back.

Dafmeister wrote:but it would depend on the ships' capabilities. My impression is that a warship's sickbay, at least in the RMN, is there for low-level care most of the time and acute trauma care in battles - essentially, a combination of a GP clinic and an ER.

An SDs med bay would serve all of a hospital's for a city of 6,000 (or small town, if you prefer. ) Honorverse medicine, aka quick heal, means there isn't a big need for hospitalizations for routine injuries. The majority of it's capacity would be optimized for damage control/Trauma Care

Dafmeister wrote:Long-term care, whether of the injured or the sick, is a job for hospital ships and 'shore' installations, be they groundside or orbital.

An SDs med bays would fill that role for the whole task force on long deployments. Especially for "covert" deployments or exercises testing the ability to work out of integral resources. It wouldn't often be required to fill that role, but it would have the reserve capacity to do so.

Dafmeister wrote:Is there much use in giving Talbott systems one or two spaceborne ERs, when there won't be the facility for follow-up care until the groundside hospitals are built/upgraded? Especially when there's no evidence in text of a healthcare crisis in the Quadrant? Yes, healthcare is worse than in the Old Kingdom or the League, significantly worse on some worlds; that's not the same as having a population ravaged by disease and infant mortality.

The text does suggest a lack of modern trauma care -- ie Henry Kreitzman's missing fingers -- and that is where the SDs would add the most capability. If you don't use the berths for in resident students and rotate the harbor watch shifts as commuters in ground-side quarters then you've got most of the 6000+ berths for long-term care -- low grav long term care at that if you turn the grav plates down.

Dafmeister wrote:In this environment, does using the SLN ships, at no small cost (crewing, fuel, maintenance, screening of the SLN prisoners you're proposing to use - and wouldn't that be a propaganda gift to the Mandarins if spun the right way?), make sense, when those ships are going to start being superseded in a few months to a year by purpose-built groundside facilities?

I don't think the cost is nearly as high as people claim. Running all three fusion reactors, the wedge, sails and hyper generator with a full crew and weapons hot, is going to take a pot-load-of-pot-loads full of money for fuel rations, crew, and maintenance.

Setting a harbor watch, running one fusion plant with the drive systems and weapons locked out, not nearly so expensive. I can't quantify the savings, but not using the most power hungry systems is going to mean almost nil fuel use.

Dafmeister wrote: Whatever happens, any money invested in the SLN ships is only going to be providing a return short-term; the question is whether that return will justify the cost. I, and others here, don't think it will; you clearly think it will. Without any hard numbers, it's impossible to say for sure.

BTW, who says the education and/or medical care would be free? I don't get the impression that medical care or education is provided gratis in the Honorverse.

Patient/student fees could go a long way to defraying the cost of operating the ship(s) -- fees wouldn't cover the full cost or it would become elitist but they could certainly be consistent with local fees.

Dafmeister wrote:You've certainly come up with a more interesting idea for how to use these ships than certain others

Like the sig line says -- I've got answers! sometimes they're even good answers that match the questions.

Dafmeister wrote:this feels to me like a solution looking for a problem.

No it's a solution to a problem that doesn't really exist. RFC made the decision to scrap any captured sollie ships way back at Adm Byng's demise. This is all just killing time until the next book.

Whitecold wrote:Weird Harold, why do you think Manticore lacks the capability to provide medical equipment or consumer electronics?
All that stuff is civilian equipment, which can be imported, and produced. The Yawata strike only destroyed the space stations, which held the yards and armament factories. Manticores civilian industry is ground side, where the vast majority of people live, and therefore want to work. Also Manticore still has a giant merchant fleet, control of the wormholes and money able to buy civilian equipment.

Not according to this David Weber guy.

kzt wrote:

Whitecold wrote:Weird Harold, why do you think Manticore lacks the capability to provide medical equipment or consumer electronics?
All that stuff is civilian equipment, which can be imported, and produced. The Yawata strike only destroyed the space stations, which held the yards and armament factories. Manticores civilian industry is ground side, where the vast majority of people live, and therefore want to work. Also Manticore still has a giant merchant fleet, control of the wormholes and money able to buy civilian equipment.

Not according to this David Weber guy.

Yep, it took out the equivalent of the heavier manufacturing capacity for Ford, GM, Chrysler, Caterpillar, John Deere, International Harvester, Cummings, GE and Westinghouse along with Boeing, Northrup, Lockheed-Martin, General Dynamics and Newport News shipyards.

Even ground side light industries are dependant on materials and components that were manufactured in the orbiting stations.

I still think that two resources to help rebuild Manticore and Grayson's orbital infrastructure are the cargos on merchant ships recalled by Case Lacoon (was this intentional) and raiding the more recalcitrant and militant SL systems to dismember their orbital infrastructure and haul it home.

Imagine a fleet of 12 SD(P)s, 3 CLACs, 12 Nike, 12 Saginami Cs, 12 Rollands, and 200 large freighters coming across the hyper limit to loot and pillage your village.

Weird Harold wrote:

Theemile wrote:Fine - use SDs to educate people.

Wouldn't you use the ~255 Manty Pattern SDs in RMN and Grayson service first? The software is already the same, the work flow is the same, the parts commonality is the same, the.....

No. I don't know how many ways I can make this point: I don't give a damn about the military nature of the ships, I care about the educational database and systems.

Who cares? Those things are almost entirely software. Oyster Bay had zero impact on Manticore's ability to produce more of that.

Weird Harold wrote:

crewdude48 wrote:I will point out that your mantra of "here, now, free" is partially false. It is true for Spindle, but that is one of the more advanced worlds of the Quadrant. To all of the other systems the ships are "there," and will not be here "until" you can find a crew willing, able, and trusted to transport them, after they have been stocked up on perishables and bunkerage which "cost money."

I've been applying that mantra to the TQ as a unit. I know that it will cost some amount of money to move the ships -- although I would assert they probably don't need bunkerage or much beyond perishables -- if that. They weren't planning on refueling or restocking when they arrived, were they?

For Nuncio or Dresdin, a ship in Spindle orbit might as well be in Sol orbit.

snip

crewdude48 wrote:Once demilled, how many spacers do you need per ship to move it to the desired world?

I've been figuring the same number Adm Gold Peak left aboard when she had them abandon ship -- approx 1/6 or 1,000/SD. That's probably high but given the solarian designs, maybe not.

It takes a lot fewer people to make sure a ship is habitable until it can surrender than it does to navigate through hyperspace. Considering that they intentionally avoided automation, I doubt that they could go out system with less than 1500, and probably closer to 2000

crewdude48 wrote:If the bulk are going to be paroled SLN spacers, how many RMN/RMMC personnel will you need to assign to command/guard them?

Depends on how paranoid the people in charge are? Eventually, every SLN sailor will have a local shadow called an "apprentice" which would reduce purely security manning to about 1:10 or 1:20.

Once they get to the target system, then they would have local apprentices, but what about on the voyage there? That would be the time when somebody would try to grab the ship. A quick Google shows current U.S. prisons have a ratio of 1 guard to every 4.5 to 6.7 prisoners, and people are calling that undermanned. At one guard per 5, at 1500-2000 crew that is 300-400 Manticoran personnel per SD. For 40 SDs that is at least Twelve thousand personnel!

snip

crewdude48 wrote:How are the less advanced planets going to keep the ship fueled once it gets there? Considering they had navies consisting of LAC's I don't think they have that much fueling capacity on hand.

I would expect that the SLN ships won't require much fuel just to maintain habitability and station keeping. The shouldn't need more than one Fusion Plant in operation for a harbor watch status. They definitely won't be using the full redundant power capacity when the drives and weapons are all shutdown and/or disabled.

If you want to keep these thing in LPO (low planetary orbit; it can only be LEO when it is around earth) they better not have all of the drives shut down. they need to have station keeping drives at the very least. Also, I suspect that SLN SDs are not exactly fuel efficient. One at station keeping levels will probably burn noticeably more fuel than an LAC on maneuvers.

crewdude48 wrote:Aside from a 1 month head start, why is this a better idea than sending learning machines from Manticore in one of the merchant ships that are sitting around? They probably have some older models sitting in store rooms all around the system.

Because Manticore is rebuilding from the Yawata Strike. Finding and shipping older model learning machines -- if they exist -- would divert time and money from rebuilding.

That "if they exist" is key; I know what keeping 6,000+ spacers trained and providing career advancement materials implies about an SDs teaching capacity. I don't know when the SEM will be able to provide the same capacity or how long it will take.

the Govenment says "Hay, could eveybody check your supply closets? We are willing to pay above scrap value for outdated learning equipment." Then tell a merchant skipper that they will pay cost plus for him to ship them to Quadrant worlds. I really doubt that this could possibly cost more than manning the SLN SDs.

snip
The captured SLN ships represent a "bird in the hand" against "two that might be in some bush six months to two years down the road."

Have you ever heard of the sunk cost fallacy? You buy a ticket for a concert for a band you don't like for a friend, but he does not want it and won't pay you back for it. So your choices are
A) use the ticket and go see a band you don't like or
B) waste the ticket and stay home and enjoy your self.

Most people would say "Well, I have the ticket, I had better use it." However, in both cases you have payed for the ticket, so the cost of the ticket can be eliminated for the consideration. Your choices then become
A) go see a band you don't like or
B) stay home and enjoy your self.

Putting all of the extra capital into getting these ships where you want them and setting them up as classrooms is throwing good money after bad. It is not as efficient as putting the capital into a business on Spindle to make molicerc manufacturing machines and sending them to Dresden, or Machine shop tools on Montana and shipping them to Nuncio. And considering how much of the MMM is sitting on their thumbs, you could get some good prices on transportation too.

Weird Harold wrote:

Relax wrote: SLN ships will not be used as hospitals where your family cannot visit in a timely and INEXPENSIVE fashion.

A ride on a contra-grav shuttle when they are available would be inexpensive if there are a reasonable number of them. Since they are around the size of a large airliner, I would expect that one per hospital making four trips a day would accommodate any needing a ride to orbit.

Re: the bolded part... I have three words for you - "The Great Resizing".

To expand on that, what it means is that despite it saying that in OBS, and maybe some later books, it's wrong. Even David has admitted that and it's been addressed.

A pinnace is roughly 30-31 meters long (see my links below), an assault shuttle may be as much as twice that in length. A cargo shuttle would be roughly the same size as an assault shuttle.

Still, I suppose I can grant that there would be enough lift capacity for family members to visit.

OTOH, I disagree that it would be quicker and easier to get someone to a trauma center in orbit than it would be to a ground-based center. Watch the approach video linked below (the Fearless Flyby vid). Takes about a minute to dock, once lined up, right? I guarantee that that's basically sped up, and that a real life approach and docking would take far longer than that, even with computer control. On the order of 15 minutes or so.

I have my pinnace approaching the boat bay at 5m/s, which IRL, would be *way* too fast. Current approach and dock procedure times can be measured in hours, including the unmanned Dragon from SpaceX. I'm not saying that it'll take that long 2000 years from now, but it will definitely take longer than I depicted in my video.

That doesn't even take into account the time to run out the boarding tube, get it pressurized, then transport the injured person through a zero-g environment (the boarding tube) to the lift(s), *then* transporting to the med bay. From the point of the docking arms attaching to the pinnace/shuttle/whatever to the injured person getting to the med bay, my estimate is roughly 15 minutes.

Let's say that that things have improved enough in 2k years that an approach to the boat bay and docking arms takes 15 minutes after lining up in orbit. Let's also say, using your estimated time from earlier in the thread, that it takes 40 minutes to get to the ship in orbit.

Well, now we're already at 70 minutes total.

Oh, wait. Nobody's discussed anything about how the injured person gets *to* the pinnace/shuttle/whatever. For simplicity's sake, let's say that there's a ready shuttle at key locations (probably major hospitals) around the planet. How do we get the injured person to the shuttle?

1) An ambulance (ground- or air-based, doesn't matter) that is sent to the site of the accident, then drives (flies?) back to the hospital. Depending on how fast these things are, I would say that total round trip might be as much as 30 minutes, probably even longer for rural areas (forex: the Harrington family home is pretty far from any built up areas - how long do you think it would take for an ambulance to get the from the nearest medical facility?).

2) The evac shuttle flies itself to the location, then goes directly to orbit from there. This has possibilities, as with countergrav, there's no worry about landing on a building rooftop that may not be rated to handle the weight (as with current medevac choppers), but it's still going to take time to get the person to the rooftop. What about areas where the evac shuttle can't fit? These things are pretty large. Sure, you can land them in a convenient parking lot and ambulance the injured party to the shuttle, but that also takes time.

Time.

That's the crux of the entire issue. For traumas (as you yourself said that this would be for), you need to get the injured party to the medical facilites as soon as possible. Well, from what I wrote above, we're looking at roughly an hour and a half to two hours from the initial emergency call to getting the injured party to the med bay in orbit. That's basically a best-case scenario, where the ambulance run is short.

As opposed to a roughly 30 minute round-trip time (again, times will vary - I'm just rounding an average for nearby and rural ambulance runs) for an ambulance to get the person to a ground-based trauma center.

As for whatisname's fingers, I'm pretty sure he could have had them regrown prior to the events in the book if he wanted to. It's not like the Talbotters were completely cut off from civilization, and I believe he's a rich guy politician, so he could have afforded travelling to one of the other systems in Talbott for regen, or even to a system outside of the Talbott cluster.. Obviously, regen can work even after something has been amputated for some time, as they would have used it for Honor's arm, if she was capable of using the regen treatments. I suspect he hasn't regrown them as some sort of badge of honor.

The same can also be said for prosthetics, if he doesn't regen.

You make it sound like that if only those poor helpless backwards people had proper medical facilities, there would be no deformities or permanent injuries.

Emily Alexander-Harrington might have something to say about that.

When I started the post, I imagined some far off systems taking a waller or two to completely refurbish. My view was a way to jump start some shipyard and manufacturing industries. While it would be not be cost effective, the long term view is a system could learn alot about building wallers without making a huge investment. (It does not have to be just wallers...it could be some of the smaller ships!) Now, some of fellow posters have offered some alternative ideas that in the short term would make uses of the out date ships.

I definitely could see a waller being used to help train up prospective recruits on a variety of jobs. Many the wallers have medical facilities that far in advance than anything in the local systems. The machine shops would be available for local light orbital industries and could be used to train students.

Money is not the problem. Many systems within the GA need help in upgrading their medical, educational, military, and industrial institutions. Repurposing this equipment would definitely be upgrade for many of systems within and outside of the GA. I see many of the ideas offered within this thread as a diplomatic, economic, military, humanitarian, and educational benefit to many systems.

Not one answer is the solution to the problem but a myriad of answers is the solution to a number problems within and outside of the GA!

Weird Harold wrote:I don't think the cost is nearly as high as people claim. Running all three fusion reactors, the wedge, sails and hyper generator with a full crew and weapons hot, is going to take a pot-load-of-pot-loads full of money for fuel rations, crew, and maintenance.

Setting a harbor watch, running one fusion plant with the drive systems and weapons locked out, not nearly so expensive. I can't quantify the savings, but not using the most power hungry systems is going to mean almost nil fuel use.

Actually there's some funny stuff going on with Honorverse fusion reactors (tied into why they don't scale well into LACs - which seem to get a small fraction of the power output of a DD at a fairly high percentage of their fuel use). [edit 1: I see crewdude48 made a similar point]

It's quite possible that there's a minimum fuel consumption to keep an SD sized grav pinch fusion reactor up and stable that's significantly higher than you might expect.

I wouldn't be surprised if an SD designed for a 4 month deployment (where remember, it can siphon power from its wedge or sail) would, at a minimum safe power output on a single reactor, drain it's full hydrogen reserves flat in 10 - 15 months.
[edit 2: and that's without having to use any hydrogen in reaction thrusters for station keeping]


And SLN designs, which don't appear to be optimized for extended duration deployments away from support facilities may not even have been designed to go 4 months without resupply.

Weird Harold wrote:

n7axw wrote:I wonder if perhaps Weird Harold's idea becomes a bit more comfortable forgetting about using SLN personnel, except, perhaps for medical and educational purposes. I bet that each of the systems could come up with a couple of hundred or perhaps even more folks who could be trained for harbor watch ...

The intent has always been to "apprentice" local to the SLN Harbor watch and use the Parolees as trainers and teachers. I haven't clearly articulated that point, but I never really thought Parolees would be a complete or permanent solution -- especially since the whole idea is to offer educational opportunities to the locals.

n7axw wrote:As for the POWs, German soldiers in WW2 sometimes were sent to the midwest to POW camps and were offered the opportunity to work on farms as gainful employment.

That was probably a subconscious inspiration for using POWs/Parolees -- at least I did know about the practice. I was thinking more of recent reading set against the royal navy's actions and practices ca 1780-1900. (The Alan Lewrie series by Dewey Lamdin if anyone is interested.)

Regarding the German POWs in WWII: The work a POW can be made to do under the Geneva conventions is limited. They can erect housing for themselves, can garden to improve their diet and other activities to benefit themselves. Any other activity CANNOT be military related, and it absolutely may NOT benefit their captors in military terms. (You can have them put up the barracks you intend to house them in, and the kitchens you will feed them from, and even have them cook the food you provide them, but you can't have them erect the fencing or guard towers keeping them imprisoned.)

You CAN put POWs to work for purely civilian activities (assisting bringing in the harvest comes to mind), but the POWs MUST BE volunteers and you have to PAY them (not sure how much, but its over and above "room & board").

I would expect similar terms in the Deneb Accords.