And if you said 'speed up' not 'build', and the ships already scheduled to come out during these 18 months even without any notional acceleration are enough to make up for a significant fraction of losses, where's the argument?
Actually, I'm now curious where the war is, since if they've managed to lose frigates at the rate of less than one per month I'm not convinced this qualifies as more than minor skirmishing. As you've generally agreed that each frigate's no more valuable than a Deimos, and the Alliance throws corvettes around like they're nothing, I'm not sure why I should actually care about frigates except for their scarcity.
What, heck no. It's made clear in the campaigns these guys are way more valuable than a Deimos. Two Deimos are still probably worth less than a Karuna - and heck the early-war Deimos probably couldn't even have matched Karunas at 2:1 ratios until they started slapping new armor systems and turret shielding onto them. Bleeding a frigate a month, maybe more, maybe less, plus cruiser losses means losing extraordinarily valuable warships and thousands of crew who are in general talented enough
not to jump their ships into the middle of a carrier battle group; it's something the UEF, with its relatively shallow trained personnel reserves, can't afford. The very fact that the Alliance throws its corvettes around like they're nothing is explicitly commented on as a marker of a huge difference in the way the UEF and the GTVA treat their forces - the GTVA is more inured to losses and is institutionally and strategically prepared to absorb them.
A frigate a month is pretty bad given how utterly conservative the UEF began to play things after the shock of losing Neptune. The GTVA was in strategic disarray and fighting an uphill battle, especially given the bruising its fighter corps took; the first 18 months of the war were hell for the Alliance because the UEF had so much depth and was able to be so careful in its deployments. The GTVA spent a lot of that time just cutting away the underbrush of the UEF's all-pervasive tracking net; it's easy to avoid losing frigates when you know just where the enemy is deploying and you can skedaddle. (Not to mention the issue of even getting to the frigates with the UEF's low-span high-intensity fighter corps giving you such a shockingly hard time.)
Every time a Karuna went down it was a major blow to the UEF and a major boost to the GTVA; proof that this was not the proverbial quagmire.
Are you or are you not disputing that the UEF has the ability to get a few frigates and a gaggle of cruisers out to replace some of its losses? Or is this just another manufactured argument?
Your ad hominem does you no credit, sir. If you really want to have this sort of ****slinging argument, fine, we can do that, but I've tried to treat you respectfully. You apparently have no interest in returning it judging from this and the rest of the post. I genuinely wish to understand and to point out possible problems with what you're saying. You appear to genuinely wish to belittle me.
Not so, but I'm sorry if I gave that impression. I appreciate your politeness, though.
Given that you've accepted the scenario you originally disputed, namely that ships lost in the war were replaced by ships produced - whether brand spanking new or refurbished - I'll move on to correct a few misconceptions.
I originally disputed that they could build sufficient new ships to replace losses. I still dispute this, and so apparently do you.
The exact wording was that there were losses which were replaced by wartime production. This is a pretty imprecise way of putting things, but it was a casual comment; it does not mean the rigorous 'ALL losses were FULLY replaced SOLELY by new hulls' which I think is what you're disputing.
You have no idea if this is true; it's backseat worldbuilding. I mentioned earlier that ships are easy to store, we're in agreement on that, but the fleet was clearly undergoing a pretty major transition; they might well have been in the middle of a building spree. See the last paragraph for why that might even be the most likely case.
If the fleet were actually undergoing this "pretty major transition" from some other hull types then why have they not called these ships back to service? If they're not transitioning from another hull type then we're still at the low-rate scenario. Maybe, as I observe below, they're phasing out the Sanctus force?
The Federation military has never been funded in proportion with the overall wealth of the Federation - the major transition could simply be adding more of the ships they think work in an effort to keep up with the boom. A major transition doesn't necessarily mean a transition from hull types; it could be a transition up into a more active role strategically, or in preparation for recontact. Even if it is a transition in major hull types, the old hulls could be useless; if they're Great War era ships they almost certainly are. Or, they were already scrapped before any replacements were available - policy that would probably draw as much argument from you as from some in the setting, but which is still very believable.
Same goes. You have no idea whether it has the spare economic wherewithal to do or not do anything. I'm personally inclined to think that military production would take some tooling up, but that the enormous amount of shipbuilding capacity present in Sol would lend itself to some pretty miraculous turnaround on that.
This is false. You have consistently stated that Sol's economy is going strong, as have other team members, as has WiH itself. This means low unemployment, factories are tenanted and working, money is flowing between people rather than being stored up. You cannot have it both ways, unless you don't understand economics.
Where does what you say in the paragraph here contradict what was said in the paragraph quoted? Industry breeds industry, and especially with such excellent materials and manufacture technique, there's no reason a yard already full up on one type of order couldn't
immediately drop what it was doing and handle reworking, or even components of a brand new hull. You can get a lot done with distributed manufacture.
The economy is not just strong but growing, and growth implies readiness to exploit new options, both at the strategic level and in terms of the base technology involved in constructing spacecraft. Low unemployment, a skilled labor force, tenanted factories, high technology and flowing money imply an agile industrial base, and the great advantage of the Ubuntu modeling technique is that the forces of the economy aren't unwieldy; you can drop an incentives package or pull some strings and almost immediately move liquidity where it needs to be.
And even so this isn't necessary; even producing three new frigate hulls which wouldn't require any additional mobilization at
all, which makes that whole line of argument interesting but unessential.
Such strong assumptions from so little information! Baseless. I wouldn't have been so generous with the build times, not at all, but I expect they could easily finish more like three a year because each of the major states has its own shipbuilding capability. It might be closer to six. The Karuna was a rising star in the fleet, a successful design with political backing, and the fleet as a whole was moving in a direction that favored building frigates.
Possible, but on the other hand that would imply that they had some kind of plan to replace the Sanctus force fairly rapidly, which would be expensive. There aren't very many Sanctus either (approximately 120 or so if I remember the fleet comp thread) so if you're replacing them all with Karuna's you'll end up with fewer unless you expand the budget, and they're supposedly not doing that. A rate as high as six a year doesn't sound sustainable since that'd mean you're decommissioning at least a tenth of the Sanctus force a year, possibly more, and that rapid a transition to a totally new platform instead of a merely upgraded one will leave serious cracks in the institution.[/quote]
There seems to be an assumption here that the navy is maintaining a static footprint, but the navy could be adding ships overall, not decommissioning at a significant rate whatsoever, and still shrinking compared to the overall merchant force or the space required to coverage. There's also the possibility that assets are being moved from planetside bases to frigates. For that reason I don't think this idea of replacing the Sanctus force is at work here. The imminent move on the Saturn territory as a site for major colonization seems much more likely as a driver of additional frigate orders.
Even with the military in a police role, remember that Sol has an infrastructure to match the entire GTVA. A Karuna is not actually vastly more work than a Deimos, and the GTVA turns those out by the bucketload with far more of its economy devoted to the military. For the entire UEF to manage only one Karuna a year would be require the military to have been cut a lot further than it actually was.
You keep going on about infrastructure, but you're missing the point: infrastructure buys you nothing. Factory space buys you everything, including the ability to build more factories. And factory space is already committed if their economy is going strong. It will take time to retask it and for that to take effect. The last time somebody poured all their resources into naval construction like this it took four years to show.
Infrastructure buys you everything, including more ships 'Factories or yards as centralized points of manufacture aren't solely and singularly meaningful here; they're just an element of a whole reaction chain, including skilled zero-g labor, robotics, supplies of raw material from asteroid corrals and tugs, navigation. Factories don't have to make new factories, or even the parts involved; specialized workshops can do that, which means no retasking required.
Moreover, that comment about committed factory space, retasking and taking effect, seems to be missing the point I was making here, which I'll restate: for the entire Federation to manage only one Karuna per year
even before the outbreak of war would require the military to have been cut even further than it actually was
before contact was reestablished. No notional retasking is even involved.
Again, I'm not sure what you're arguing here; we've established already that it's perfectly plausible they had enough ships already in build to make up for a fair fraction of their losses.
Oh and I forgot the basic math! If there are about 40 Karunas and Narayanas up and running in Sol, and the design has been in production for **** it let's say 20 years, they've got to be managing at least two a year on average, and that distribution's probably skewed heavily. The 1-6 range is just for the sake of argument, my money's still on 3 or so per year.
Now this is a solid argument.
Thank you, I appreciate it.
Every Kumari and Arcadia installation has the yard space required to build a frigate; they're hardly short on these alleged 'vast shipyards'. The bigger Faslane installations aren't working on Solarises (at least not that we know of) so they're free as well, whether to build an assload of tiny stuff or a few frigates. Zero-g engineering in particular is favorable here because it scales so well; this notion of a shipyard that can 'only do frigates' just isn't relevant.
This is also a solid argument, but given the stated rush to Saturn most of these would already be tasked to build civilian shipping. Military craft have drastically different requirements and will require some significant retooling, unless you're arguing that naval architecture has regressed to pre-1700s and warships are no longer significantly different from civilian ships. Given their greater size and durability, that would seem very unlikely.
I think your first sentence contradicts your second; given the stated rush to Saturn and the corresponding need for extended military projection, doesn't it seem reasonable that most of these military shipyards, prepared to handle the drastically different requirements of military ships, would be handling the pressing need for more military ships?
The numbers you're using are simultaneously too generous (in my book) and asspulled. We just don't know how fast they can retool, whether any retooling is necessary, how fast they can build a frigate from scratch - engineering in the setting is at the point where major structural repairs happen in days or weeks. You're speaking with great confidence about a topic where we have no confidence at all.
You're assuming things about my speech again. You should really stop.
Fair enough.
You're also making assumptions which don't follow. Simply compare civilian craft and military craft in WiH. A Karuna is vastly more durable and much larger than most transports or freighters, so clearly military ships are built to very different standards. Retooling is necessary. Are you arguing that the railguns which are UEF ship's main weapons do not carry serious implications structurally to the ship that has to carry them? You can just use any old cargo hold as a magazine and the rounds magically get to the gun? Come now, you're not that naive. Warships are very different creatures from civilian ships.
But the notion of retooling is resident itself in a specific techbase where the common yard's equipment is inherently inadequate to meet the requirements of military ships. It's possible, but we have to
assume in order to take it as fact - it's also possible that your average Kumari has on hand the foundries and equipment required to make military-grade shipping right in its slips, simply because this standard of gear is actually neither rare nor expensive (technology has outpaced its own demands), or because the Federation has made a policy to render all its civilian shipyards military-ready, whether for future manufacturing or because they want their system patrol craft to be able to repair anywhere, any time.
The difference in durability between a freighter and a frigate can be explained by means other than the manufacturing equipment in the yard; it may be more cost-effective to build civilian-grade, but easy to bump up to military-grade rapidly if sufficient funding rolls in, or if stocks of whatever refined material are released, or if the simple formulae required to build at military levels are declassified (or just distributed through secure channels, whereas formerly they were restricted to only the yards working to meet the fairly low* military demand). Even given that warships are very different creatures, we can't assume that the means of production are very different - the limiting factors in warship production may be demand, or other elements of the logistical chain not located at the yard but also not subject to rapid latencies.
If this is true, all the yards have to do to start work on a frigate hull is eject whatever they were working on, accept that Nautilus-load of material that just jumped in twenty minutes ago after the market lit up with emergency secure shipping contracts, find bunks for the military team moving in to help with the proprietary classified elements of the forges, and get to work.
I'd make an analogy to Homeworld - the phased disassembler arrays there could build any ship to its required specifications, but if there was no demand for all ion cannon frigates, all the time, said arrays wouldn't necessarily produce resource collectors with warship-grade armor just because they
could; they'd build collectors with collector-grade armor because it was cheaper, and faster, and that kind of armor worked for the design.
(Federation fighters have always been fluffed as being somewhat cantankerous and hard to build, coming from specialized places - but the warships on the other hand have always been noted for being very logistics-friendly and sustainable.)
You've made repeated statements about the Sol economy being strong, which carries certain implications about the general state of factories and employment and shipbuilding. I've built on that knowledge, and the knowledge of major shipbuilding initiatives in reality and how they worked.
But I think both of our lines of argument lead to the same place. In a scenario where most of the loss replacements come out of mothballs, or from ships already in build we don't even have an argument. In a scenario where most of the replacements come from scratch - which isn't even necessary! - you say that the factories are busy, they'd take time to retool for warships, and that the latencies would therefore be very high.
But if the warship production capability already exists, organically, in every yard, or even in a
majority of yards, and also in the component suppliers for the yards, and if the expertise also exists along with stockpiles of the material required for warships, you have a much more agile system. You just need to vacate whatever you're working on, reprogram your drones with the new Fleet stuff, accept the raw materials if you're a component supplier or the components if you're a shipyard, and get to work. When your yards are all built to high standard, because that standard is both efficient and economical at producing large amounts of civilian shipping and capable of tackling smaller amounts of military shipping, and when your workforce and expertise are largely robotic, retooling just isn't as much of a challenge.
The very fact that so many shipyards were targeted during the Earth Blitz is evidence of this. The GTVA wants that infrastructure. It arguably
needs it. It would not blow it up if there weren't reason to think it could make a significant contribution to the war effort
during the time of the actual war. Granted, a lot of that was probably contributions to the all-important merchant marine, but part of the reason the merchant marine is such a fearsome strategic force is because it enables the Federation's high-ceilinged, highly agile infrastructure - which, I'd contend,
does buy you something.
