Light bulb Captured Solly fleet

Weird Harold wrote:

stewart wrote:or use those same 10K spacers to man 15 or 20 (probably 15) captured Galdiator CA's, which can cover 15 systems as anti-piracy or, operating in pairs cover 7 to 10 systems and exercise against each other.

Since the Gladiator class CA is a manpower heavy SLN design, I suspect you could only man 8-10 gladiators with 10K spacers.

I couldn't find any crew-size stats for any CA class from before Manticore began to automate much of their ships. I'm guessing a Heavy Cruiser would take a quarter of an SD's manning -- about 1500 for a SLN design.

-----------------

I was estimating 750-1000 for the crew since the Manpower/Silesian mercenaries at Refuge were able to man them and operate them fairly competently.

-- Stewart

fallsfromtrees wrote:

kzt wrote:The minor detail that those LACs have an 18 month reactor life with 36 months to a new reactor, plus no replacement nodes or any other spare part is a kind of a big problem that David is handwaving away.

I don't know where you got the 18 month reactor life. From Echoes of Honor, chapter three

Our present estimate is that a Shrike's original power core should be good for about eighteen T-years, which means the only practical limitation on the class's endurance will be her life support."

That's years, not months.

---------------------

18 years is realistic as well (no-handwavium involved)
Enterprise (CVN-65) had 20yr cores in her 132MW Pressurized Water Reactors.

-- Stewart

fallsfromtrees wrote:

Our present estimate is that a Shrike's original power core should be good for about eighteen T-years, which means the only practical limitation on the class's endurance will be her life support."

That's years, not months.

That was stated to be a typo. Of course the entire concept behind the fission vs fusion is absurd, ("bunkerage" - give me a break - a few tons of hydrogen has more potential energy than 20,000 tons of refined plutonium 239) but it gets really, really absurd at 18 years.

Well, do we know the actual mass of bunkerage fuel? approximating the energy use might allow us to declare whether it truly could possibly be 18 months or years, or estimate a better point inbetween....

kzt wrote:That was stated to be a typo. Of course the entire concept behind the fission vs fusion is absurd, ("bunkerage" - give me a break - a few tons of hydrogen has more potential energy than 20,000 tons of refined plutonium 239) but it gets really, really absurd at 18 years.

fallsfromtrees wrote:

Our present estimate is that a Shrike's original power core should be good for about eighteen T-years, which means the only practical limitation on the class's endurance will be her life support."

That's years, not months.

kzt wrote:That was stated to be a typo. Of course the entire concept behind the fission vs fusion is absurd, ("bunkerage" - give me a break - a few tons of hydrogen has more potential energy than 20,000 tons of refined plutonium 239) but it gets really, really absurd at 18 years.

Is that in a pearl or an info dump somewhere? Textev?

Warning, this is a bit of a text wall post. you have been warned.

I was re-reading the Honor-verse series from book 1, and came across a piece of GOLD for the usage of captured Solly (crap) ships.

Solution: Evacuation ships for any form of base, especially ones out on a frontier. These would have lower defenses than somewhere like Home Fleet (Manty or Havenite), or places like Blackbird & Bolthole.

Evidence: In The Short Victorious War, the repair base at Hancock had approximately 11 thousand personnel, and because Manticoran tradition seems to extend to allowing family to also move in. Battlecruiser Squadron 5, plus her heavy cruiser screen, and the squadron or so of light cruisers and unspecified quantity of tincans. Also including the minelayer squadron of 5 . This task group could only lift out approximately 60-70% of Hancock's population, mostly aboard the Minelayers and the BC's.

Further evidence is nearly any Manticoran Fleet Base, especially poor Grendlesbane who's been attacked repeated, and evacuated at least twice, once pre-Buttercup and again during Operation Thunderbolt. Grendlesbane Station at the time of Operation Thunderbolt, had over forty-two thousand personnel captured, not counting the priority ones evacuated by the defending Admiral Higgins.


Solution elaborated: If I recall correctly (I'll hunt for additional TextEv as I read back through the series), there was nothing wrong with Solarian hardware, especially with their nodes. So rip out their inertial compensators, replace it with the Manticoran/Grayson designed ones. This gives a considerably faster escape ship, than the would-be aggressors from the SLN could catch. You could get away with ripping out some of the weapons for even more life support. However leaving at the very least the beam weapons, and perhaps one-in-four of the missile launchers, with ONLY canister, for missile defenses would be a smart choice.

Ship choices would be nothing smaller than CA's, although really I'd think nothing smaller than the Battlecruisers. This balances out speed (since it's meant as an oversized life boat) versus carry load. But with Manticoran compensators, even the SD's would make amazingly good lifeboats. Even just 4 SD's would be enough to carry out most bases that were in systems attacked in overwhelming force, and evacuate 100% of the base population + dependents.

Because these former SLN ships are not expected to fight, they would not need dedicated crews, which just enhances their lifeboat potential. Scientist-class Solarian SDs; which the GA has captured many of; have crews of over 6000. So just two divisions of Scientist-class, gives a possible evacuation load of 24,000 without breaking a sweat. If you crammed people in, similar to how BCS5 at Hancock would, you could probably pack upwards of 40,000 personnel about just 4 ships.

Further evidence is nearly any Manticoran Fleet Base, especially poor Grendlesbane who's been attacked repeated, and evacuated at least twice, once pre-Buttercup and again during Operation Thunderbolt. Grendlesbane Station at the time of Operation Thunderbolt, had over forty-two thousand personnel captured, not counting the priority ones evacuated by the defending Admiral Higgins.

The only time anyone got to Grendlesbane was for Operation Thunderbolt. The Peeps started working the approaches during Operation Scylla, but they never attacked the system directly. Plus, Caparelli diverted some SD(P)s from Operation Buttercup expressly to protect the fleet base and its environs.

As for the idea of using the SLN ships as evac vessels, there's no one who can do the refits. All of Manticore's and Grayson's few remaining bases are needed in maintaining the fleet and rebuilding. Haven's compensator tech is not as good as Grayson and Manticore. Even if they did have equivalent tech, the time and effort would be far better suited in upgrading their SD(P)s to their maximum capability, not wasting time on SLN SDs.

Duckk wrote:

Further evidence is nearly any Manticoran Fleet Base, especially poor Grendlesbane who's been attacked repeated, and evacuated at least twice, once pre-Buttercup and again during Operation Thunderbolt. Grendlesbane Station at the time of Operation Thunderbolt, had over forty-two thousand personnel captured, not counting the priority ones evacuated by the defending Admiral Higgins.

The only time anyone got to Grendlesbane was for Operation Thunderbolt. The Peeps started working the approaches during Operation Scylla, but they never attacked the system directly. Plus, Caparelli diverted some SD(P)s from Operation Buttercup expressly to protect the fleet base and its environs.

As for the idea of using the SLN ships as evac vessels, there's no one who can do the refits. All of Manticore's and Grayson's few remaining bases are needed in maintaining the fleet and rebuilding. Haven's compensator tech is not as good as Grayson and Manticore. Even if they did have equivalent tech, the time and effort would be far better suited in upgrading their SD(P)s to their maximum capability, not wasting time on SLN SDs.

I stand corrected on the Grendlesbane being hit more than once than. And as far as "upgrading" the SLN ships, you don't really have to give them much of a compensator upgrade to make them faster than standard SLN. And if used purely for evacuation purposes you don't need much of a speed increase to run away, and hyper out. Even just a 5-10% boost, should be sufficient to allow even an SD to run away.

Or the GA could just use the Nevada's (crew space for 3,000, compared to the Reliant Nike of HH2 at Hancock with only 2100). You'd need to keep a full squadron of 8 to have roughly the same loading as 4 Scientist SD's, but you'd also have far more speed.

Technically speaking you don't even need to upgrade the compensators at all. Replace all missiles with canister, and detail upto a squadron of SLN ships to every base immediately, just to have hyper-capable evacuation ships. Upgrades to compensators would simply be a bonus, and could be done at any fleet base that has repair slips.

Even old generation compensators, from ships that are being sent to the breakers are better than stock SLN, so while you're stripping any ships from First Haven War, those compensators are being recovered anyways.

Classes off-hand that I think were loosely being sent to the breakers, include Hancock-era Homers and Reliants from Manticore, Sultan's and Mars from Haven for Battlecruisers, and I'd imagine any Gryphon or Sphinx class from the same era would also be in the process of recovery from age.

I'm the lead cheerleader of "doing something with the SLN SDs", but it's completely nuts to come up with a plan that requires rebuilding them.

They are useful in theory because there are right there and available. If plan for making use of them requires any sort of significant interior or engineering modification it is a bad plan. If the plan doesn't revolve around the fact that they are really tough warships it's almost certainly a bad plan.

kzt wrote:I'm the lead cheerleader of "doing something with the SLN SDs", but it's completely nuts to come up with a plan that requires rebuilding them.

They are useful in theory because there are right there and available. If plan for making use of them requires any sort of significant interior or engineering modification it is a bad plan. If the plan doesn't revolve around the fact that they are really tough warships it's almost certainly a bad plan.

Well using them in my latest thought just consists of; armored, hyper-capable lifeboats. Zero engineering needs (unless of course, as duckk pointed out, the compensators get upgraded too).

Although compensator upgrades should be relatively easy, and any recovery of older (by Manticoran standards anyways) are still newer, and better than stock SLN, which leads to a slight speed increase, which further leads to better escape ability.

Other than the compensator, the SLN ships (Im only looking at possible usage of the Battlecruisers, and possibly the SDs) require absolutely zero drydock time. Ammunition time maybe, just to swap out the laserheads for even more canister, but that's something that can be performed in a matter of hours for an entire squadron.