Light bulb Captured Solly fleet

Kzt does have a valid point. But even if it does take longer, my real point is that Manticore is not stuck with it's present situation forever. The manufacturing base is being rebuilt. The workforce is inexperienced, but will gain both training and experience on the job. The estimate given the queen in the aftermath of the Yawata strike was, IIRC, 4 years, by Hamish who I am sure did some consulting with people competent to judge such things.

But if it takes longer, say 5 or 6 years or even a bit longer, the basic point stands. I am not going to argue about arithmetic. And I might add, this was before anyone was aware of the help available from outside sourses such as Beowulf.

Don

Hi MunroBurton,

This something we've been arguing at the bar ever since OB was first revealed.

All the people not working and not living on the stations should have survived [except Yawata of course].

Manticore with its 22.45 hour day, apparently only works a quarter day or 5.5-5.6 hours, which given its wealth may not be surprising, so the other three quarters of the staff who were not living on the station should have been fine.

Those on vacation of 2 weeks minimum would mean around 4% of the workforce, or 160-200,000 people plus the 40,000 from Grendlesbane for around 5% minimum for supervisors.

I've done the math before but 5 minutes in a shuttle capable of only 200 G's acceleration [150 seconds acceleration and deceleration each] would get you to the space stations [at ~40,000 km altitude], so from almost anywhere on the planet even with atmospheric maneuvering 6-10 minutes would be plenty, so commute times are potentially pitiful by our standards, and humans being human I'd expect at least 10-12% of the workers to prefer ground side because the spouse or kids do, etc.

So besides the probable Beowulf volunteers, the supervisor ratio might be only 1 to 4 or 5, along with all the robots or drones checking to make sure all the 'welds' or chemical bonding is correct.

Indeed, should we consider this crisis an opportunity to use and create even more automation in the construction process?

How much might be done by millions of remote volunteers monitoring or operating the construction pods and their AI's?

L

munroburton wrote:

kzt wrote:*quote="n7axw"*
As for what Manticore lost in the Yawata Strike, all of that will be recovered... extreme outside about four years. And that was before Beowulf started pitching in. Then they will be making LACs and everything else better than ever.
*quote*
Really?

How long does it take to take a college graduate EE to become a lead chip designer for Intel?

Would you consider a guy who was hired off the street qualified to be the lead welder or head of weld QC on a nuclear missile submarine? How much experience do you think is appropriate for those jobs?

Would you like to fly in a jet where the most experienced guy on the design team has less then 4 years and this was the only aircraft they have actually built? This includes the guy building the flight control logic and designing the engines. Would you feel comfortable taking your family on vacation on it?

For every job you can think of, the maximum experience they will have is less then 4 years.

Using the 10,000 hours rule as a basis, it would indeed take about four years(with very few days off) to train up a new workforce.

But for the first two to three years, expect them to make a lot of mistakes. It may turn out that the "transitional" classes - the Rolands, Sag-Cs, as well as the 'python lump' wallers - are so well built they outlast whatever is produced in those four years ahead for Manticore. Barring enemy action, Buckleyish accidents or another radical technological revolution which ends the missile's usefulness as a weapon, of course.

Hi Don,

KZT does have a point.

But RFC has posted elsewhere much or most of rebuilding the capability or previous capacity will be completed within 5 years.

For us, ie those living here, need to figure out what RFC's priorities during that time will be.

Granted the odds of figuring correctly are as bad as always.

L

n7axw wrote:Kzt does have a valid point. But even if it does take longer, my real point is that Manticore is not stuck with it's present situation forever. The manufacturing base is being rebuilt. The workforce is inexperienced, but will gain both training and experience on the job. The estimate given the queen in the aftermath of the Yawata strike was, IIRC, 4 years, by Hamish who I am sure did some consulting with people competent to judge such things.

But if it takes longer, say 5 or 6 years or even a bit longer, the basic point stands. I am not going to argue about arithmetic. And I might add, this was before anyone was aware of the help available from outside sourses such as Beowulf.

Don

munroburton wrote:Using the 10,000 hours rule as a basis, it would indeed take about four years(with very few days off) to train up a new workforce.

But for the first two to three years, expect them to make a lot of mistakes. It may turn out that the "transitional" classes - the Rolands, Sag-Cs, as well as the 'python lump' wallers - are so well built they outlast whatever is produced in those four years ahead for Manticore. Barring enemy action, Buckleyish accidents or another radical technological revolution which ends the missile's usefulness as a weapon, of course.

It's even worse, as you can't start training someone until you have somewhere with equipment to train them on. But training isn't so much the deal as experience. I'd guess the average production worker who was killed had 10 years of actual experience, with the leads having 20+, quite possible a hell of a lot more. The the design and production engineers blown up probably had 20+ years on average, with the senior people probably 40+ as the RMN has been in a near-wartime state for a long, long time.

You can't replace that with classes, you have to spend the time out in the real world making actual mistakes to learn. Except now there isn't anyone more experienced to catch them before they make it out to the fleet.

lyonheart wrote:Hi MunroBurton,

This something we've been arguing at the bar ever since OB was first revealed.

All the people not working and not living on the stations should have survived [except Yawata of course].

Manticore with its 22.45 hour day, apparently only works a quarter day or 5.5-5.6 hours, which given its wealth may not be surprising, so the other three quarters of the staff who were not living on the station should have been fine.

Those on vacation of 2 weeks minimum would mean around 4% of the workforce, or 160-200,000 people plus the 40,000 from Grendlesbane for around 5% minimum for supervisors.

I've done the math before but 5 minutes in a shuttle capable of only 200 G's acceleration [150 seconds acceleration and deceleration each] would get you to the space stations [at ~40,000 km altitude], so from almost anywhere on the planet even with atmospheric maneuvering 6-10 minutes would be plenty, so commute times are potentially pitiful by our standards, and humans being human I'd expect at least 10-12% of the workers to prefer ground side because the spouse or kids do, etc.

That's all very nice, but no.

"In addition, we've lost better than ninety-nine percent of the labor force of all three stations. For all intents and purposes, the only real survivors we have are people who, for one reason or another, were off-station when the attack hit. Most of them," he added heavily, "also lived aboard the stations, which means virtually all of them have lost their entire immediate families. That means it's going to be quite some time—and rightly so—before their morale recovers to a point at which they can really be considered part of the labor force again."

Given that they yards were on a sprint to produce another wave of ships and the vast majority of production slips were in fact building ships, this wasn't a great time to take vacation.

"At this moment, my best figures are that fifteen of them—none of which had units under construction—are undamaged" Note that they didn't kill sites that were idle, and there were only 15 of them.

Also note that the people killed were everyone on the stations. The people doing actual production work are going to be a fraction of them, as the rest are family members, bartenders, kindergarten teachers and all the support staff you would find in a navy town. The fact that you sold shoes to the RMNs expert on aligning grav arrays on KH2s doesn't imply to me that you are going to be a lot of help rebuilding the industrial base if you were lucky enough to be on vacation.

kzt wrote:I'd guess the average production worker who was killed had 10 years of actual experience, with the leads having 20+, quite possible a hell of a lot more.

Luckily, Beowulf, Haven, The Andermani, Erewhon, and the crews of Fleet repair bases like Hancock have plenty of experience to train new hands.

All of that is irrelevant, because Manticore doesn't need to supply military aid to verge and successor states out of it's own resources. HAven alone has sufficient shipyards and experienced workers to provide LAC and Moriarty system defense sets to needy systems. Not that Haven will need to provide all of the miltary assistance assets by itself, either.

There is going to be a thriving arms market in the Solarian successor states and captured SLN ships are going to be the very last choice of any system seriously concerned about defense. Any reasonably competent acquisitions bureau is going to be looking for anything that can defeat obsolete SLN tech and you won't be able to give away SLN ships.

Weird Harold wrote:Luckily, Beowulf, Haven, The Andermani, Erewhon, and the crews of Fleet repair bases like Hancock have plenty of experience to train new hands.

Sure, if you want to build Haven tech base ships haven can show you how to build Haven style fusion reactors. If you want to go that route you should just build Haven ships. Haven can even ship you the fabrication tools for that. There might be a bit of a training issue...

The Andies can't build most of the cool RMN tech. For example, they can't build Mk23s at all, much less Apollo. No compact fusion reactors etc. David said the post OB an RMN contact team was urgently sent to the IAN with a complete technical documentation package so they could start production, but there is a lot of stuff to build to build the production tooling to build missiles, then you have to run at least an abbreviated testing program on them.

Hancock station can show you how to install a fusion reactor, but they don't fix or build them. They get packaged new ones from the factory. Hence I tend to have serious doubts about exactly what skills they offer to someone building all the parts for the ship.

Hi Castenea,

No one, at least KZT and me are arguing that you need an SD to swat pirates.

There are pirates, and then there are system invaders and occupiers, with far larger forces than a minuscule pitiful pirate ship, for which something more than LAC's are needed; they may have been pirate swatting for some decades already.

But if you were on the leadership council of a core world with several billion citizens [8-10 B] who had heretofore relied on the SLN to protect you from any serious invader, then suddenly it was gone and you all discovered you had some greedy neighbors or near neighbors.

What do you do?

"What do you do?" -Karl Malden

I suspect treaties with those that can provide the protection over the interim period while you arm yourself will be part of it, but having physically manifested protection everyone can see will be important to settle the public, something more than some more funny looking LAC's.

I suspect the SD > BC etc equation will be used quite a bit.

Given how few SDF's have SD's, there will be many more that want them now, and rich core systems can certainly afford them [onetime M$5-6 payment per citizen etc].

Since complete manning isn't needed if its to spend all its time in system, ie something closer to the 2/3 HH used at Cerberus, if the system found a couple thousand with some kind of military experience who could train up; out of 8-10 billion that means only one out of 4-5 million or around 10-12 times the rough current ratio of the SL to the active SLN warship crews [~22 M from ~11 T], not counting tens of thousands of ex and current freighter crews etc, figuring around 100 per member as a bottom estimate.

Which ought to provide enough freighters to provide trade at the rate of a couple arriving and leaving with the nearest 3-4 neighbors etc.

I'd expect the alliance with the GA to include trainers who've considerable experience, ie decades, with similar systems, and given millions of such veterans providing a couple thousand for the current 108 untouched BF SD's ought to be ridiculously easy given the 600+ old wallers they still have.

It's quite possible there would be a few other warships as part of the deal, probably old GA warships, now obviously obsolete to the GA; but the emphasis here is on the BF SD's that still make much better if not excellent scarecrows to those lurking 'crows', ie system raiders/invaders.

Given the time of vulnerability, many systems will want something obvious to scare away the system raiders.

What besides the GA's own old wallers do you suggest?

Another thread might be in order.

L

Castenea wrote:

kzt wrote:*quote="Torlek"*
The whole discussion about finding an use for these SDs is a prime example of the sunk cost fallacy.

No, it's because there is a bottleneck in production. If your option is learning how to use mediocre mostly obsolete hardware that will likely be able to stop the average pirate from moving in and taking over your planet or prayer, which are you choosing?*quote*
KZT, you are disregarding three problems with the SDs, the planets that will want more ships cannot attempt to acquire those currently in GA possession and remain part of the SL. SDs are the wrong ship for pirate swatting (at best a sledgehammer where a flyswatter will do, at worst the pirates fly rings around them). Then there is the issue of can the proposed recipients of the ships man and maintain them?

I suspect that a handfull of the surrendered SDs will be taken by powers friendly to Manticore for destructive testing, with the rest becoming scrap. What most of the soon to be former SL systems need is subwaller units, and the text ev suggests that the reserve fleets are light in these units.

kzt wrote:

Weird Harold wrote:Luckily, Beowulf, Haven, The Andermani, Erewhon, and the crews of Fleet repair bases like Hancock have plenty of experience to train new hands.

Sure, if you want to build Haven tech base ships haven can show you how to build Haven style fusion reactors. If you want to go that route you should just build Haven ships. Haven can even ship you the fabrication tools for that. There might be a bit of a training issue...

"Haven Tech" is more than sufficient to serve the export arms market which is what you propose for the captured SLN ships. There's time to train workers for production of full-up "Manticore Tech" production because Manticore has enough ships and missiles to cover the gap before Beowulf and San Martin ramp up missile production lines.

Surplus and export versions of any ships other than SLN would be a better deal than a "free" SLN SD.

There is an argument to be made that David is trying to have things both ways with the destruction of the stations. I'd argue that the destruction of the stations and the industrial facilities and staff combined with the loss of all trade to the vast majority of the human population is an event that would take at least a generation to recover from and would have an impact on the scale of the great depression on Manticore.

You have to rebuild the entire production chain, from the guys who produce the dust and oils you need to polish metal, though the myriad of pumps and valves to complete assemblies like fusion reactors before you can build anything. Or you have to base your entire industry (military construction and otherwise) on parts imported from another system and them do the redesign needed to accommodate the slight differences and hope they never decide they don't like you.

And at the same time you have to train the people who will do this work.

Consider if every intel plant blew up as did the design centers, along with every part and tool supplier for every plant and the designers for those tools and parts. All you have are some corporate HQ, websites and the finance and HR people. Where do you go from here?

You can't even start to build a replacement Intel plant (price of a new plant is about $2 billion last I heard), much less train the staff until you have the details for your replacement production equipment in, which you won't have until you have gotten someone to build it, which can't happen until someone builds production plants for them and had someone build the production equipment and train people to run it. This is years of downtime and huge capital expenses you need to make with no income.

What would actually happen is every single company involved would go Chapter 7, as they have no assets or income streams to pay off their huge debts and their insurance carriers either say "act of war - no money" or go bankrupt.

In the case of Manticore it wasn't just one major industrial company and their suppliers, it is EVERY company that makes a physical product.

Missiles are not the real issue for the RMN; nodes, spare parts and expendables like recon drones are the real issue. You only use missiles in combat, you slowly burn up your nodes all the time you are not parked in orbit with your wedge down, while your recon drones burn through both nodes and fusion reactors. Does the RMN in the books act like their logistics chain is a problem?