Light bulb Captured Solly fleet

Problem is, the yards would need to be retooled for all the manty tech, or the ships built would be haven/andy level ships: still good, but not quite manty level ability. Haven and anderman build ships to their specifications and to fit their tech, so trying to build manty stuff would require going back to the beginning for the ships, and learning how the manties build their ships, as their tool specifications and work layout is probably different.

MAD-4A wrote:It just occurred to me what everyone missed - yes the Manty yards are gone, yes the Grason yards are gone, but they have 2 other allies with numerous, fully functional yards in the process of, or completed, retooling for Manty style automated systems. were talking the better part of 400 fully functional SDs. yea they're not at Manty level tech but are = or better to any 2-3rd string nation including the SL. They can just offer a trade - hulls for rework. Give the Andies say 150 fully functional SDs & they give back 50 fully rebuilt SDs with manpower reduction automation. Same for Haven. What they do with the hulls is either upgrade & boost their own fleets as 2nd line reserves or resell to 3rd parties. Sure there are plenty of buyers on the other side of the SL who would love to have a few SL level SDs.

Spacekiwi wrote:Problem is, the yards would need to be retooled for all the manty tech, or the ships built would be haven/andy level ships: still good, but not quite manty level ability. Haven and anderman build ships to their specifications and to fit their tech, so trying to build manty stuff would require going back to the beginning for the ships, and learning how the manties build their ships, as their tool specifications and work layout is probably different.

No, the yards do not have to be retooled.

Lets make this short and sweet. Well not sweet and not short.

Regarding manufacturing:

There are only very small portions of a manty ship that require new tools in non manty yards.
Compensators. Not important in MDM environment. Nice, but not important.

Micro fusion: Very important for missile/RD tech/ECM, but unimportant for building ships as this is fabricated elsewhere.
Beta Squared nodes: Gets back to acceleration: Nice feature, but not needed.
Alpha nodes: No different
Fusion rooms: No different
FTL nodes/communication: Very important, but is an add on to the ship. So, someones manufacturing facilities that produce ships does not equate to manufacturing facilities producing bolt on systems.
PDLC: Equal(slight tonnage penalty, grav lens tech)
Graser: Equal(see above)
Sidewall: No new breakthroughs here
Rad Shielding: Equal all around
Hypergenerator: No new breakthroughs
Armor: RHN/IAN is good enough, very slight tonnage penalty. I believe the % penalty is stated in SVW. Assuming RHN/IAN have not already copied that new armor in the last 20 years.

So, regarding BUILDING ships, the only "manty tech" are all bolt on systems outside of the compensator. The ships themselves, outside of the compensator, anyone can build and even the compensator, Erewhon, Haven, Alizon, and Andies are already building new compensator designs so even this is probably not true. Leaves Beta Squared nodes as the only true sticking point for building exact replicas. Everything else are installed systems.

In short, they can all build the ships. The missile systems that get installed on the ships they probably may not be able to build immediately. Of course Manticore is already building these systems in Trevors Star, so is a moot point. Beowulf is also building them as well.

Building the ships is easy. Just as it is today. The systems installed on the ships hulls on the other hand, is where all the $$$ disappears.

wastedfly wrote:

Spacekiwi wrote:Problem is, the yards would need to be retooled for all the manty tech, or the ships built would be haven/andy level ships: still good, but not quite manty level ability. Haven and anderman build ships to their specifications and to fit their tech, so trying to build manty stuff would require going back to the beginning for the ships, and learning how the manties build their ships, as their tool specifications and work layout is probably different.

No, the yards do not have to be retooled.

Lets make this short and sweet. Well not sweet and not short.

Regarding manufacturing:

There are only very small portions of a manty ship that require new tools in non manty yards.
Compensators. Not important in MDM environment. Nice, but not important.

Micro fusion: Very important for missile/RD tech/ECM, but unimportant for building ships as this is fabricated elsewhere.
Beta Squared nodes: Gets back to acceleration: Nice feature, but not needed.
Alpha nodes: No different
Fusion rooms: No different
FTL nodes/communication: Very important, but is an add on to the ship. So, someones manufacturing facilities that produce ships does not equate to manufacturing facilities producing bolt on systems.
PDLC: Equal(slight tonnage penalty, grav lens tech)
Graser: Equal(see above)
Sidewall: No new breakthroughs here
Rad Shielding: Equal all around
Hypergenerator: No new breakthroughs
Armor: RHN/IAN is good enough, very slight tonnage penalty. I believe the % penalty is stated in SVW. Assuming RHN/IAN have not already copied that new armor in the last 20 years.

So, regarding BUILDING ships, the only "manty tech" are all bolt on systems outside of the compensator. The ships themselves, outside of the compensator, anyone can build and even the compensator, Erewhon, Haven, Alizon, and Andies are already building new compensator designs so even this is probably not true. Leaves Beta Squared nodes as the only true sticking point for building exact replicas. Everything else are installed systems.

In short, they can all build the ships. The missile systems that get installed on the ships they probably may not be able to build immediately. Of course Manticore is already building these systems in Trevors Star, so is a moot point. Beowulf is also building them as well.

Building the ships is easy. Just as it is today. The systems installed on the ships hulls on the other hand, is where all the $$$ disappears.

I'd nitpick your sidewalls statement to say that bow and buckler walls are pretty new (though Haven at least already had figured out the former).

And based on one of the statements from SoS it seems that the impeller rooms/nodes need to be refitted to be compatible with bow/stern walls.

Not a problem for Haven though, since they've already figured out how to do that. And presumably the Andies were already given that tech if they hadn't.


But in general you're right, overall ship building is close enough to work ok. That's one reason the plan to have Haven build the hulls and major systems for the new GA SD(P)s was workable. They might not be up to producing Keyhole, much less Keyhole II, but there's nothing really wrong with their basic ships.
(Though sub-wallers might be a slightly different story, supporting DDMs and cramming in everything else you need might be harder in those)

Sigs wrote:Those SD's are obsolete, the SD's the Andermani Empire has are at equivalent or slightly lower level than the RMN and it might end up more expensive and time consuming to build up the SLN SD's to modern standards than just build new once.

NO! They are not obsolete! As I tried to explain before, they do not have to be better than the best the RMN has ,they just have to be as good/or better than the best they will face.
Let see if I can give you an example for you to understand;
If you attack me with a stone knife, I don't have to go get a M27 Infantry Automatic Rifle with extended magazine and explosive incendiary tracer ammo to stop you, all I need to stop you is a stone spear, I don’t even need an atlatl.
They are already the best that the SLN had to send. With a few mods and Mk-16s, they will be better than anything the SLN could send. They don't even need Keyhole, they just need to be stationed with ships that have it. They will add their throw weight in for long range (to be passed off to other ships with Keyhole/Apollo) just as the Podnoughts do with most of their pods, and if things do get to a knife fight, well they certainly have an advantage there, even putting themselves in-front to cover the Podnoughts. Adding Keyhole would certainly be possible though. They can also be used in the 2nd string role, scattered though the Confed, relieving Manty (& Andi) constructs from garrison duty to be transferred to the front. A hundred Manty upgraded Nevadas patrolling the Confed would put the ka-bash on ANY thought of sending FF BCs/CAs in as raiders. The SL may be deff-dumb&blind (by choice or stupidity) as to the capabilities of Manty/Andi ships but they KNOW what a Nevada can do & NO FF BC admiral is going into a system (with even a single, let alone) a squadron of Nevadas patrolling there. He’s going to turn quietly around and race back home as fast as his comps can take him! They don't even have to ALL be fully manned & operational 1-3 or 1-4 can be fully worked up with the rest running on skeleton crews & the SL ammo in the tubes as their only shots to give the appearance that the system is defended.
Let me ask you this; if you were a FF BC captain, and you entered a system where you detected 3 ships you absolutely IDed as Scientist-class SDs, with Manty transponders, patrolling around. would you attempt to raid that system, even If you had intel reports stating that only 25% of the Manty captured Nevadas were actually operational. would you risk one or more of them BEING an operational one? (hint: if you answered yes then you have no business being in a command chair.)
Same for the Haven back water/rear borders where they stripped the old BBs from that they lost during the war (& they don't have the manpower issues that the Manties have).

MAD-4A wrote:Let me ask you this; if you were a FF BC captain, and you entered a system where you detected 3 ships you absolutely IDed as Nevada class SDs, with Manty transponders, patrolling around. would you attempt to raid that system, even If you had intel reports stating that only 25% of the Manty captured Nevadas were actually operational. would you risk one or more of them BEING an operational one? (hint: if you answered yes then you have no business being in a command chair.)
Same for the Haven back water/rear borders where they stripped the old BBs from that they lost during the war (& they don't have the manpower issues that the Manties have).

If I were a FF officer dedicated to the preservation of the League and had more than skimmed the reports from New Tuscany, Spindle, 2nd Manticore and the termini skirmishes, then yes. I'd rather take on two squadrons of captured Nevadas over one of Nikes anyday, especially as I'd also have access to reports of the Yawata Strike which would indicate that the RMN had absolutely nowhere to refit any of those captured ships with their fancy technology.

Another reason for that opinion, though it may not be immediately apparent to SLN personnel, is the ability to kill far more trained personnel. A Nevada BC is going to be carrying between two and three thousand crew - a RMN SD(P) has around 1500 warm bodies. I may sound like a butcher, but it's very simply that each fully crewed captured Nevada the RMN sends back out and gets destroyed by SLN is 3,000 people who won't be going back home to man the RMN's newer construction.

Oh, sure, it can be argued that some ship is better than no ship. But I don't buy that argument for a minute, not after the RMN lost a quarter million lives aboard obsolete wallers during First Manticore.

MAD-4A wrote:NO! They are not obsolete! As I tried to explain before, they do not have to be better than the best the RMN has ,they just have to be as good/or better than the best they will face.
Let see if I can give you an example for you to understand;
If you attack me with a stone knife, I don't have to go get a M27 Infantry Automatic Rifle with extended magazine and explosive incendiary tracer ammo to stop you, all I need to stop you is a stone spear, I don’t even need an atlatl.
They are already the best that the SLN had to send. With a few mods and Mk-16s, they will be better than anything the SLN could send. They don't even need Keyhole, they just need to be stationed with ships that have it. They will add their throw weight in for long range (to be passed off to other ships with Keyhole/Apollo) just as the Podnoughts do with most of their pods, and if things do get to a knife fight, well they certainly have an advantage there, even putting themselves in-front to cover the Podnoughts. Adding Keyhole would certainly be possible though.

I'm intrigued about the possibility of building something very like the Mk-16 - a "cruiser" sized DDM the new horrific grav-pinch laserheads - able to fit in and fire from SLN capital ship missile launchers, with only modest modifications to those launchers. But this idea really depends on such missiles being suited to those launchers, and while I don't know enough to rule that out, I'm certainly not going to take the possibility for granted, either. Systems to charge their capacitors, and to retain some safety under fire while doing so, would need to be built in and that's not trivial.

They can also be used in the 2nd string role, scattered though the Confed, relieving Manty (& Andi) constructs from garrison duty to be transferred to the front. A hundred Manty upgraded Nevadas patrolling the Confed would put the ka-bash on ANY thought of sending FF BCs/CAs in as raiders. The SL may be deff-dumb&blind (by choice or stupidity) as to the capabilities of Manty/Andi ships but they KNOW what a Nevada can do & NO FF BC admiral is going into a system (with even a single, let alone) a squadron of Nevadas patrolling there. He’s going to turn quietly around and race back home as fast as his comps can take him! They don't even have to ALL be fully manned & operational 1-3 or 1-4 can be fully worked up with the rest running on skeleton crews & the SL ammo in the tubes as their only shots to give the appearance that the system is defended.

Ah, there's the rub though: the crew requirements. Manticore's a single system. They've been strained to the bone crewing the ships they have with extensive automation built in nowadays. You're talking about refitting - more or less expensively, in terms of time, facilities, money, and personnel - old, obsolete SLN ships to be much less obsolete but definitely second-line, while requiring vastly more crew each to be effective relative to the first-line units Manticore or Grayson would otherwise be crewing. And while Haven's manpower is less tightly strained, it's likely a limiting factor for them too, for their own first-line units, again much better than SLN hardware, or SLN hardware after refits and with some sort of specially produced DDM.

JeffEngel wrote:I'm intrigued about the possibility of building something very like the Mk-16 - a "cruiser" sized DDM the new horrific grav-pinch laserheads - able to fit in and fire from SLN capital ship missile launchers, with only modest modifications to those launchers. But this idea really depends on such missiles being suited to those launchers, and while I don't know enough to rule that out, I'm certainly not going to take the possibility for granted, either. Systems to charge their capacitors, and to retain some safety under fire while doing so, would need to be built in and that's not trivial.

You basically touched on it there at the end. Mk16s use microfusion reactors, not capacitors, and we're told that it's a major refit to change launchers (at least if you want any safety; because the fusion launchers require extensive new armor cofferdamming around them so the missiles don't chain reaction if one gets hit after it's reactor's ignited)

And we know that the 3-drive capacitor powered MDMs were big; they didn't fit in existing feed tubes or launchers.


Now it might be possible to build enough capacitors to handle a 2-drive capital ship missile into something that could fit into existing launchers. But I tend to doubt it because, if you could, why wouldn't Manticore have done so already as a pretty cheap and easy way to increase the effectiveness of their remaining legacy SDs?

MAD-4A wrote:

Sigs wrote:Those SD's are obsolete, the SD's the Andermani Empire has are at equivalent or slightly lower level than the RMN and it might end up more expensive and time consuming to build up the SLN SD's to modern standards than just build new once.

NO! They are not obsolete! As I tried to explain before, they do not have to be better than the best the RMN has ,they just have to be as good/or better than the best they will face.

They are obsolete. They are the worst wallers in use by anyone in the Honorverse. There are less advanced space navies in Honorverse, but they don't have any wallers at all. Even less technically advanced navies have had better-designed wallers for decades (first Havenite war era People's Navy ships are the most notable example here). And wallers serve no purpose except to fight other wallers (or top-tier fixed defenses -- which will shred SLN wallers, too); they're much too expensive (both in terms of money and manpower) to operate for any other reason.

drothgery wrote:They are obsolete. They are the worst wallers in use by anyone in the Honorverse. There are less advanced space navies in Honorverse, but they don't have any wallers at all. Even less technically advanced navies have had better-designed wallers for decades (first Havenite war era People's Navy ships are the most notable example here). And wallers serve no purpose except to fight other wallers (or top-tier fixed defenses -- which will shred SLN wallers, too); they're much too expensive (both in terms of money and manpower) to operate for any other reason.

What is the threat environment? Most do not have CA's, so the real threat are pirated SLN CA, BC etc. Anyone with a real navy will roll over a ramshackle couple of SD's or BC's.

So poor sod would be better off buying one SLN SD, than trying to find and man a bunch of ex SLN BC's on the scrap market. Fewer personnel. But what is the initial cost? Due to $$$, better off with BC's. But we are talking about hundreds of Core planets who have NO defenses. They have $$$$$ and nothing else.

Multiple BC's verses even a single SD is a losing proposition. http://infodump.thefifthimperium.com/en ... ngton/78/1

So, if initial $$$ is not a problem and they need a snap their fingers solution to pirates, a singular ex SLN BC/SD will cover the basis against pirates. It also gives their ignorant designers a starting point assuming buying modern plans are not available for basic technology regarding Grasers, PDLC's, etc.

MAD-4A wrote:It just occurred to me what everyone missed - yes the Manty yards are gone, yes the Grason yards are gone, but they have 2 other allies with numerous, fully functional yards in the process of, or completed, retooling for Manty style automated systems. were talking the better part of 400 fully functional SDs. yea they're not at Manty level tech but are = or better to any 2-3rd string nation including the SL. They can just offer a trade - hulls for rework. Give the Andies say 150 fully functional SDs & they give back 50 fully rebuilt SDs with manpower reduction automation. Same for Haven. What they do with the hulls is either upgrade & boost their own fleets as 2nd line reserves or resell to 3rd parties. Sure there are plenty of buyers on the other side of the SL who would love to have a few SL level SDs.

I don't think people have missed this point. The problem is that, as has been stated many times, the cost of modifying a Solarian ship to Manticoran or Andermani standards is more than the cost of building a new ship from scratch.