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"Marine Carrier"

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Star Ship Troopers
Post by HB of CJ   » Mon Apr 07, 2014 6:02 pm

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Regimental Drop Ships carrying...1000 Star Ship Troopers. Whoops...already been done. Sorry. HB of CJ (old coot) :)
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Re: "Marine Carrier"
Post by TheMonster   » Mon Apr 07, 2014 8:43 pm

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crewdude48 wrote:Just count the t's at the end. Talbot the planet was introduced first. Talbott the cluster was introduced second.
Also, Talbot could be pronounced according to French orthography as "Tal-bow" (rhymes with "glow"), where RADM Pierre died, which helps to remember it's closer to Nouveau Paris.

This confusion is due to DW not being one of those authors who adheres to the "One Steve Limit" trope. He even comments in one of the books about how many planets' capital cities are named "Landing" or "First Landing". That makes sense. How many US states have a "Springfield"?

Of course there's a "Talbot" and a "Talbott". There's probably even a "Talbotte" out there somewhere for good measure.
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Re: "Marine Carrier"
Post by SWM   » Tue Apr 08, 2014 8:49 am

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TheMonster wrote:
crewdude48 wrote:Just count the t's at the end. Talbot the planet was introduced first. Talbott the cluster was introduced second.
Also, Talbot could be pronounced according to French orthography as "Tal-bow" (rhymes with "glow"), where RADM Pierre died, which helps to remember it's closer to Nouveau Paris.

This confusion is due to DW not being one of those authors who adheres to the "One Steve Limit" trope. He even comments in one of the books about how many planets' capital cities are named "Landing" or "First Landing". That makes sense. How many US states have a "Springfield"?

Of course there's a "Talbot" and a "Talbott". There's probably even a "Talbotte" out there somewhere for good measure.

Yeah, Talbot System and Talbott System are hardly the only points of confusion. There are several systems with identical names. In making my composite map (Almost ready to post the first public version!) I have found:

Slocum System in Silesia and Slocum System in Haven, plus Stocum System in Haven which was misprinted as Slocum in early paperbacks.

Hera System in Haven and Hera System in Silesia.

Sasebo System in Haven and Sasebo System in the Solarian League.

Casca System in Haven and Casca System in the old Manticoran Alliance (there's a big potential confusion!).
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Re: "Marine Carrier"
Post by SharkHunter   » Tue Dec 09, 2014 4:33 pm

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No doubt there's a need for an all-up assault force carrier "ship class", but likely not for very many ships "in the class".

Given that any marine carrier" is only going to go in-system arrive after the RMN has thorougly smashed any "space going opp force", that's not what massive quantities of marines were generally on ship to be use for, though they're good at it also. Meanwhile, RMN marines help "fight the ships in local mode", do damage repair, and "boarding enemy ships", like pirates, etc. Plus -- other than bombarding a planet from space, an Honorverse no-no -- are the only way to take out uppity bad guys, minions and ravaging hordes of Bad Guys or hopped up natives hiding down there under the atmosphere.

Any of the Marines are supposed to be pretty dang lethal. Thomas Theisman takes out St. Just's ground based forces with relatively few marines on a few assault shuttles with apparently mostly just State Sec casualties, because Capital Fleet already controls the orbitals. Honor's small force plus navy support stops an indigent invasion, etc., or the attack on Blackbird, the FAK, etc.

Think about Thandi's first thoughts as a potential Torch CNO is how few SLN marines and supporting forces it would require to take out a whole planetary garrison without getting all the slaves on the planet suicide bomb style killed in the man time.

So if your transport ship can't be attacked, in a circumstance where you needed say, twenty five hundred Marines, a single Atlas class passenger liner would do JUST fine for most operations.
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Re: "Marine Carrier"
Post by JeffEngel   » Tue Dec 09, 2014 5:30 pm

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crewdude48 wrote:
Dafmeister wrote:Talbot (how many t's?) Quadrant.


Just count the t's at the end. Talbot the planet was introduced first. Talbott the cluster was introduced second.

The final Junction terminus will go to the Talbottt Galaxy. :P
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Re: "Marine Carrier"
Post by JeffEngel   » Tue Dec 09, 2014 5:46 pm

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I've been thinking the RMN may want to explore ways of carrying out the sticky personnel-intensive operations the new automation-heavy ships have such trouble with with more automation, or more broadly-trained crews, rather than grabbing back at more people.

I have no objection to getting more people back aboard - if the RMN can get them. Certainly Talbott and Silesian are potential new and copious sources of personnel, but they are also new and copious personnel sinks as much as their defense soaks up shipping. And beyond that, finding Talbotters with adequate educational backgrounds and Silesians with the combination of political/personal reliability and relevant professional training/experience would be tricky.

How much in the way of search and rescue drones, inspection drones, SLN-surrender-accepting drones, and Navy ratings with enough exposure to Marine training and equipment could the RMN manage? And how far might it take them? I vaguely recall from "With One Stone" a modest ship-controlling device, and that was quite a few years before present. Something like that could jack down the warm bodies a prize crew would take. Small counter-grav drones - which may do double-duty as recon devices for ground combat situations - could flit about on S&R ops. With tractor beams, they may be able to clear wreckage out of the way, and do double-duty for damage control as well. Even if they're not brainy enough to do that on their own, they could do the searching and be remotely controlled by a human for the delicate work. That human could be monitoring a number of them, and step in to put a human mind or touch in the loop in sequence as any of them come up to a task that calls for that.

Abigail Hearns' detachment liberating the captives at Saltash are at least an example of Naval ratings and equipment - under Mateo's supervision, at least - doing Marine work. They're clearly not ideal for it, but it's an example of fine making-do and maybe that making-do can be improved quite a bit, if the warm bodies and old-school Marine complements aren't in the cards.
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Re: "Marine Carrier"
Post by saber964   » Tue Dec 09, 2014 7:53 pm

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SharkHunter wrote:So if your transport ship can't be attacked, in a circumstance where you needed say, twenty five hundred Marines, a single Atlas class passenger liner would do JUST fine for most operations.



More than that for the Atlas class IIRC RMMS Artemis could carry 5000 passengers plus crew. So if she was converted to a long haul troop transport you could effectively double or triple her troop carrying capacity.

For example look at the RMS Queen Mary she carried 2100 passengers but during WWII as a troopship she could carry an entire infantry division of about 15-16,000 troops.
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Re: "Marine Carrier"
Post by Vince   » Wed Dec 10, 2014 12:26 am

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saber964 wrote:
SharkHunter wrote:So if your transport ship can't be attacked, in a circumstance where you needed say, twenty five hundred Marines, a single Atlas class passenger liner would do JUST fine for most operations.



More than that for the Atlas class IIRC RMMS Artemis could carry 5000 passengers plus crew. So if she was converted to a long haul troop transport you could effectively double or triple her troop carrying capacity.

For example look at the RMS Queen Mary she carried 2100 passengers but during WWII as a troopship she could carry an entire infantry division of about 15-16,000 troops.

If the limitation on passenger loads is room, yes. But if the limitation is life support, no.

You can pack troops in like sardines and then tell them to deal with the cramped quarters for a while, but you can't tell them to stop breathing, drinking, eating or using the waste facilities.

Keep in mind that terrestrial troop ships don't have to deal very much with life support on the open oceans. Fresh air (oxygen) is provided by the planet, drinking water is carried (or nowadays, distilled or created using reverse osmosis purification), food is carried for the short time it is needed unlike the Honorverse where rations may be needed for weeks or even months while a ship travels to its destination, and sewage can be discharged.

Honorverse ships have to provide all the life support needed to support the crew and passengers or troops. Vacuum doesn't give you anything in the way of life support.
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Re: "Marine Carrier"
Post by Jonathan_S   » Wed Dec 10, 2014 12:39 am

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Vince wrote:
saber964 wrote:
More than that for the Atlas class IIRC RMMS Artemis could carry 5000 passengers plus crew. So if she was converted to a long haul troop transport you could effectively double or triple her troop carrying capacity.

For example look at the RMS Queen Mary she carried 2100 passengers but during WWII as a troopship she could carry an entire infantry division of about 15-16,000 troops.

If the limitation on passenger loads is room, yes. But if the limitation is life support, no.

You can pack troops in like sardines and then tell them to deal with the cramped quarters for a while, but you can't tell them to stop breathing, drinking, eating or using the waste facilities.

Keep in mind that terrestrial troop ships don't have to deal very much with life support on the open oceans. Fresh air (oxygen) is provided by the planet, drinking water is carried (or nowadays, distilled or created using reverse osmosis purification), food is carried for the short time it is needed unlike the Honorverse where rations may be needed for weeks or even months while a ship travels to its destination, and sewage can be discharged.

Honorverse ships have to provide all the life support needed to support the crew and passengers or troops. Vacuum doesn't give you anything in the way of life support.
Totally agree. However I'd guess that as armed passenger carrier the Atlas liners are built with the possibility of battle damage involved. I'd be surprised if they didn't have significant redundancy in their life-support. Probably greater redundancy than even warships routinely have. (So as not to further risk the very expensive lives of their passengers should half (or more) of the life support plant suffer a mischief.

So if pressed into service as a troop transport I'd expect they could handle at least 2 or 3 times the number of troops as they normally handled passengers. Now that's still far short of the ratio the big ocean liners could achieve when converted to troop carriers, but it's still and impressive number of troops.
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Re: "Marine Carrier"
Post by Vince   » Wed Dec 10, 2014 2:18 am

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saber964 wrote:More than that for the Atlas class IIRC RMMS Artemis could carry 5000 passengers plus crew. So if she was converted to a long haul troop transport you could effectively double or triple her troop carrying capacity.

For example look at the RMS Queen Mary she carried 2100 passengers but during WWII as a troopship she could carry an entire infantry division of about 15-16,000 troops.
Vince wrote:If the limitation on passenger loads is room, yes. But if the limitation is life support, no.

You can pack troops in like sardines and then tell them to deal with the cramped quarters for a while, but you can't tell them to stop breathing, drinking, eating or using the waste facilities.

Keep in mind that terrestrial troop ships don't have to deal very much with life support on the open oceans. Fresh air (oxygen) is provided by the planet, drinking water is carried (or nowadays, distilled or created using reverse osmosis purification), food is carried for the short time it is needed unlike the Honorverse where rations may be needed for weeks or even months while a ship travels to its destination, and sewage can be discharged.

Honorverse ships have to provide all the life support needed to support the crew and passengers or troops. Vacuum doesn't give you anything in the way of life support.
Jonathan_S wrote:Totally agree. However I'd guess that as armed passenger carrier the Atlas liners are built with the possibility of battle damage involved. I'd be surprised if they didn't have significant redundancy in their life-support. Probably greater redundancy than even warships routinely have. (So as not to further risk the very expensive lives of their passengers should half (or more) of the life support plant suffer a mischief.

So if pressed into service as a troop transport I'd expect they could handle at least 2 or 3 times the number of troops as they normally handled passengers. Now that's still far short of the ratio the big ocean liners could achieve when converted to troop carriers, but it's still and impressive number of troops.

I don't think even the Atlas's could pack in 2 times their normal passenger load, let alone 3 times. Keep in mind that life support costs money, mass and volume to build and run for a passenger liner (civilian designed, built, owned and operated) in the Honorverse, so carrying 3 times the life support that you need for your normal crew complement and passenger load just doesn't make sense, when the odds are you will never use the ship to carry that big a load and therefore will never make the extra money spent back. The bean-counters (accountants and financial officers) would go nuts at the idea.

Examining the life support from the PRN Longstop transport ships (which were designed from the outset as 'military' transports) suggests that passenger liners have about 20% extra life support capacity as a buffer in case something goes wrong:
Echoes of Honor, Chapter wrote:"On a brighter note," she went on, "look at all the personnel lift we get our hands on if we manage to pull this off." She nodded at the data on the five Longstops-class transports the warships would be escorting. "They're providing enough lift for a full seventy thousand slave laborers, assuming Tresca could find that many in so short a time, plus another forty-one thousand technicians and supervisory personnel and twenty-four thousand SS ground troops— and that doesn't even count the additional eight thousand SS support personnel attached to the intervention battalions. That's over a hundred and forty thousand total, and according to the readouts, these ships are actually designed to provide life support for forty thousand people each, exclusive of their own crews, so StateSec is planning on running them light."

***Snip***

"Looking at the numbers from The Book, you're right, Sir," Fritz Montoya said. Honor had called the doctor in for the meeting expressly to address the life support question, and now he turned to look at all of them. "But the transports were designed around a lot of reserve environmental capacity. We could increase a Longstop's load from forty thousand to about fifty without stretching its life support dangerously. In a pinch, I'd be willing to call it fifty-six or maybe even fifty-seven. I wouldn't want to go much over that unless it was for a very short hop, but the enviro plants should carry the atmospheric load for that many as far as we need. The worst problem will be physical overcrowding, because that many people need a lot of cubage, and the ships' other waste processing systems will be heavily strained. But these are military transports. They're also designed to carry heavy combat equipment, and we could probably beef up the reclamation equipment by cannibalizing all the shuttles and pinnaces sitting here on Styx and adding their enviro plants as strap-on backups in their cargo spaces. It wouldn't be pretty or elegant, but there ought to be enough air to go around when we finish."
"I hadn't thought about the shuttles, Fritz," McKeon admitted, and pursed his lips with a faraway look.
"You're right about the Longstops" he went on. "They're way too slow to be used as anything we'd consider a true assault transport, but they are configured to carry all of their embarked troops' equipment as well as just the personnel. If we dump all the other hardware out of their vehicle holds, we could probably pack three or four dozen shuttles and pinnaces into each of them. For that matter, they've probably got around that many of their own already stowed in their boat bays, and if we've got 'em, we could even park a lot of them on the hull exteriors. Remember that Peeps go in for a lot more small craft docking ports than we do."
"You're thinking about putting people aboard them instead of the transports?" Ramirez asked.
"No, I was thinking more of connecting all of them to the ships' internal environmental systems as sort of secondary plants, or maybe booster stages."
"But even without that, Fritz's numbers would get us up to over two hundred and eighty-five thousand," Honor said, looking up from where she'd been scribbling numbers on an old-fashioned scratchpad.
"It would," Cynthia Gonsalves agreed. "But I don't like it. Even assuming Alistair's notion about using the shuttles and pinnaces works, it'll be a fragile, jury-rigged piece of work. And if we go with no safety margin, we create a situation in which if any part of the environmental plant does go down, people die." She sounded troubled, and Honor opened her mouth to reply, but Jesus Ramirez spoke up before she could.
Italics are the author's, boldface text is my emphasis.
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