Light bulb Captured Solly fleet

Hi y'all, thanks for letting me play. I guess I wasn't quite clear enough on my "planetary defense cube" thought. I'm starting with it in mind that there aren't any new build SD-s available, and even the retired Manticoran DNs and old SD's can't handle the DDM and MDM misiles easily either, and would require even higher trained crews than are available to Nuncio, Dresden, etc...

The point isn't that these SD's are stand up combatants, nor that they would ever leave their guard post around a planet, because their primary job is to blow the hell out of anything that can impact the planet indirectly, or to try to get their wedges in the way of impactors as much as possible. Had Sphinx had another half dozen tugs on station Yawata Crossing would likely not have been hit, right?

Crewing wise, I'd assumed a crewing of maybe 1500 MAX, so a system with a population into the millions or hundred millions would need less than 10,000 spacers, and many of them could be merchant class being trained up. I threw in the idea of limpeting pods to the SD hulls simply because that would be the easiest way to maintain them, and if anything bigger than a small pirate force came calling, it would be Rolands or a Sag-C as the command / fighting ship. At least until the defensive force was dust bunnies, and hopefully still no planetary impacts.

Think of this in "earth terms". You have six of these behemoths with all of the Honorverse energy weaponry, etc., at a range 4x that of the Moon's orbits, and supercomputers to calculate likely impactors. War's a coming and you'd really like your seven billion people to not get blasted back to the stone age by multiple multi-ton impacts. If I offered you those SD-s, would you want them or not?

Thanks again for still responding. This is quite enjoyable.

One more thought. In HOS (House of Steel), it indicates that the Janacek gang sold most of the old DNs, etc. to Grayson or have already dismantled or "reclaimed them". I'd also assume that after the Battle of Manticora PLUS the 2nd set of missiles (against the extended shipyards) in the Yawata strike, alot of those RMN ships no longer existed except as wreckage.

Which is why it's fun to think of "how do we defend our allies given that we need all of our own new build, and don't even have the yards to do that temporarily, our gusy have went and captured all these Solly POS (pieces of sh--) SDs, that are still as good or better than what anyone outside "our team", at least for now...

Okay, but here's the thing. On paper, this sounds like a really good idea. You have a bunch of active missile defense, those SDs are maneuverable enough to concentrate on a threat bearing should the need arise, and so you can be reasonably sure that noone will be lobbing RKVs at you without you at least having a chance at intercepting it.

But.

None of this actually requires SDs. It requires a sensitive enough sensor net to see the incoming RKV while it is still lightdays or at least lighthours out, and it requires platforms capable of firing ordnance of sufficient destructive power to destroy the RKV, or an impeller platform that you can put into the flight path of the RKV. A sensor array and a few Destroyers or LACs, basically. Things that are simply more in line with what a Verge system backed by the Manty Alliance can operate, and that are more easily available for deployment. At the same time, Destroyers and LACs can perform duties that these SDs simply can't by virtue of them being pretty much immobile. They can perform customs duty, they can secure the inbound and outbound trade, they can call for help if something too big too handle crosses the Alpha wall, while at the same time requiring only a fraction of the logistical support.

SharkHunter wrote:Hi y'all, thanks for letting me play. I guess I wasn't quite clear enough on my "planetary defense cube" thought. I'm starting with it in mind that there aren't any new build SD-s available, and even the retired Manticoran DNs and old SD's can't handle the DDM and MDM misiles easily either, and would require even higher trained crews than are available to Nuncio, Dresden, etc...

The point isn't that these SD's are stand up combatants, nor that they would ever leave their guard post around a planet, because their primary job is to blow the hell out of anything that can impact the planet indirectly, or to try to get their wedges in the way of impactors as much as possible. Had Sphinx had another half dozen tugs on station Yawata Crossing would likely not have been hit, right?

Crewing wise, I'd assumed a crewing of maybe 1500 MAX, so a system with a population into the millions or hundred millions would need less than 10,000 spacers, and many of them could be merchant class being trained up. I threw in the idea of limpeting pods to the SD hulls simply because that would be the easiest way to maintain them, and if anything bigger than a small pirate force came calling, it would be Rolands or a Sag-C as the command / fighting ship. At least until the defensive force was dust bunnies, and hopefully still no planetary impacts.

Think of this in "earth terms". You have six of these behemoths with all of the Honorverse energy weaponry, etc., at a range 4x that of the Moon's orbits, and supercomputers to calculate likely impactors. War's a coming and you'd really like your seven billion people to not get blasted back to the stone age by multiple multi-ton impacts. If I offered you those SD-s, would you want them or not?

Thanks again for still responding. This is quite enjoyable.

A couple of problems. A crew of 1500 is not enough to man one of these ships. Even minimal crewing is much higher than that. The second problem is that 10,000 spacers is a lot more than you seem to think. Those systems simply don't have that many. Even if they mothballed every single freighter the system owned, they wouldn't have enough spacers to crew the superdreadnoughts.

Why are you so worried about planetary impacts? Not even the Mesan Alignment is interested in Eridani Edict violations, except against Torch. It doesn't require superdreadnoughts to stop planetary impacts. In fact, superdreadnoughts are probably a poor choice for that--they aren't nimble enough.

SWM wrote:A couple of problems. A crew of 1500 is not enough to man one of these ships. Even minimal crewing is much higher than that. The second problem is that 10,000 spacers is a lot more than you seem to think. Those systems simply don't have that many. Even if they mothballed every single freighter the system owned, they wouldn't have enough spacers to crew the superdreadnoughts.

And if they did, they likely wouldn't have the money to pay for these SD-shaped things.

Why are you so worried about planetary impacts? Not even the Mesan Alignment is interested in Eridani Edict violations, except against Torch. It doesn't require superdreadnoughts to stop planetary impacts. In fact, superdreadnoughts are probably a poor choice for that--they aren't nimble enough.

There's that too. Let's be clear here: If one of the major powers in the Honorverse (and quite a few minor ones) wants to kill a planet, nothing short of the intervention of a bigger power will stop them. The way the Honorverse is set up makes it painfully easy to set up a planetkilling attack, while at the same time making effective defense against such an attack very costly.
However, everyone in the honorverse knows this, and the Eridani Edict was worded to be effective despite this (because it guaranteed retaliation by a third party that, at the time, was too big to be materially affected by any single RKV attack). The thing is that EE violations aren't particularly useful tools in warfare. You attack a system to liberate its population, or gain access to a strategic location, or gain access to a particular unique ressource that system has (like, a big medical knowledge base. Or a wormhole. Or a particularly juicy asteroid belt to mine). None of these goals is served by making the system inhabitable; doing so only makes it harder to extract whatever it is you wanted (Of course, this only holds true if the attacking party is rational, see HotQ for a demonstration of what happens if it isn't).

Really good points --> especially about the fact that the crewing for the SD's would still be too high, and that lighter combatants, if available, could still blow the hell out of any planetary impactors AND likely avoid attack better than a tech outdated SD, and it fits the current story arcs.

I was re-reading HotQ and even the Star Knight class's wedges would be big enough -- interposed in the right position, to cover a huge angle of impactors, leaving her to use chase and forward armament and counter missiles on the rest. And a lithe little ship would be swifter to get in position, sort of like the cruisers that Rozak positioned to defending Torch from near orbital position, and the remaining force around Spindle for the same reason. One ship wouldn't stop C-fractional strikes, but that wasn't part of my scenario for planetary defense. Thanks!

Just build the Death Star and be done with it, between them they will probably have enough armorplast and if you canibalize most of their weapons you can build the super laser, or in this case as it would be more practical and avoid the copyright suit from Disney a super graser.

Weird Harold wrote:

n7axw wrote:Just to play devil's advocate out of boredom... Another way of phrasing your point above is that they are a significant threat against any system but the ones you listed above... which just happens to include most of the human occupied galaxy!

As cited in Themiles' signature:

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Duckk wrote:Since the idea of using the SLN ships has come and gone for several years now, I thought I'd solicit David's comments on this topic:
<snip>
As far as weapons platforms go, they’re pretty useless
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Part of the reason for RFC's opinion is that the quality and lethality of SLN ships -- especially SLN SDs -- is very much over-rated. So much over-rated that they may, in fact, be inferior to pirates, privateers, and SDF ships of comparable size.

SLN ships probably come closest to their reputation inside
energy range but even there, they're likely a generation or two short of modern standards.

Hi Harold,

I did say I was playing the devil's advocate, didn't I?

The most obvious counter for your statement, however, is that what goes for modern is defined by the Haven sector. Move away from that and the SLN Sds are probably in the hunt. They are obviously not useful for dealing with privateers and pirates, most of whom are cruiser class and below. And, they may not stand up ship to ship with some of the more modern SDFs. But how many of those are around? Not many. So what can they do? Probably a squadron or two could serve as the core for a system wanting to establish its own SDF in the light of the new realities. Biggest problem would be establishing the support structure to keep the ships around. That could be a real poser and the most expensive part of the project.

So there!! Don't I make a wonderful devil's advocate?!!



Don

I say, resale to breakaway and fringe Soly systems.

Which calculates to 2,250,000 missile pods, which could take out the SLN, the MAlignment, and both Death Stars.

Of course, it coudl be that Honor was employing the "Spock Gambit", i.e.;

Savak: You lied!
Spock: I exaggerated.

[/quote]

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But as Gustav Andermann (and Eloise Prichart) noted -- Honor is not a good liar ; but she doesn't have to be.

-- Stewart