Light bulb Captured Solly fleet

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

A freighter load of Havenite System defense missiles with a turn-key Moriarty system.

kzt wrote:

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.

Yes, but the fact that you sold shoes means that you won't need a lot of tech training to be replaced. As callous as it might sound, there was a fairly high percentage of people aboard those stations (Vulcan and Hisphaestus) who won't have to be trained to be replaced.

So, we can divide the population for present purposes into two groups of people, the actual trained work force which will have to be reconstituted and the supporting community which gathered around to provide the goods and services that workforce would need, ranging from janitors to grocers to however many people were needed to keep the schools going. We could subdivide further, but that should be enough for now.

So what percentage of that would constitute the actual trained workforce that would need to be trained and to gain experience to function in those critical roles that were lost with the Yawata Strike? I'm no numbers guy, but my WAG is going to be 40% of the total lost to the strike. Rounded roughly, 5.8 million were lost, including both space stations and orbital yards. That comes to a trained workforce of 2.32 million.

Replace those 2.32 million and the rest of the community assembles itself around them.

So, I think that kzt does have a point, but perhaps not quite as drastic as he portrays. By the time you consider the Wayland workforce, the returned workers from the Grendelsbane yards and what can be recruited from places like Beowulf, things could come together quicker than we might think. Bear in mind that those workers couldn't go back to work immediately even if they were available tomorrow. The space stations and yards have to be replaced, using help that will gain both experience and training on the job. That will allow time for training others to be ready once their jobs are available.

I think that the way it will actually work out is that there isn't going to be a shortage of trained personnel. By the time the physical plant is replaced, people will be available for the jobs as they come up. A majority of those people will be Manticoran. But a fairly substantial percentage will be from elsewhere. Recruitment will be incremental but ongoing.

And kzt, about those vacations, IIRC, Manticore got it's latest generation of SDPs out of the building slips a few weeks before the Yawata Strike. Kind of a nice time for a rather large group of shipyard people to be catching their breath before the next project, don't you think?

Don

Not to mention the fact that the workers at bolthole are 100% trained

George J. Smith wrote:Not to mention the fact that the workers at bolthole are 100% trained

... on Havenite tech. Which is superior to the SL, etc. but inferior and incompatible with Manticore's at least short term, to the extent that Harkness was able to dominate a BC's mainframe with hacking from a hand-held computer. As good as Bolthole's workforce and Foraker are, that still doesn't mean, "send 'em the plans and they're up to speed on building RMN technology".

Being a little bit geeky to explain, let's say I'm a great Havenite dBase programmer, and now it's time to code in C#, or Rosie the Riveter and now I'm to use the tools required to cut titanium for the SR-71, or the composites on the FA-18 or newer. Sure, I'll get up to speed more quickly than George the gas station attendant, and "get it" in terms of quality control, but it's still not uber quick. Upgrading the Havenite tech isn't going to be an overnight operation, which is why short term they are probably going to exchange the knowledge for inertial compensator and micro-fusion tech for SD-P hulls, etc.

SharkHunter wrote:

George J. Smith wrote:Not to mention the fact that the workers at bolthole are 100% trained

... on Havenite tech. Which is superior to the SL, etc. but inferior and incompatible with Manticore's at least short term, to the extent that Harkness was able to dominate a BC's mainframe with hacking from a hand-held computer. As good as Bolthole's workforce and Foraker are, that still doesn't mean, "send 'em the plans and they're up to speed on building RMN technology".

I don't think that that particular episode is anywhere near representative of what current Havenite tech standards are. Hell, it probably wasn't even representative of what the tech standards were in the regular navy of the time.

(Personally, I always felt that particular episode to be screamingly unrealistic; it works as part of the narrative, but what Harkness does with computers is squarely in the realm of Hollywood hacking)

George J. Smith wrote:Not to mention the fact that the workers at bolthole are 100% trained

Sure, to build RHN ships. As was pointed out by the guy running the RHN, they are two generations behind the RMN in tech. They can't make the equipment to make the equipment to build modern gear.

n7axw wrote:
Yes, but the fact that you sold shoes means that you won't need a lot of tech training to be replaced. As callous as it might sound, there was a fairly high percentage of people aboard those stations (Vulcan and Hisphaestus) who won't have to be trained to be replaced.

Sorry, the shoe salesman was on vacation, the guy who aligns grav comm systems on KH2 was not.

kzt wrote:

n7axw wrote:
Yes, but the fact that you sold shoes means that you won't need a lot of tech training to be replaced. As callous as it might sound, there was a fairly high percentage of people aboard those stations (Vulcan and Hisphaestus) who won't have to be trained to be replaced.

Sorry, the shoe salesman was on vacation, the guy who aligns grav comm systems on KH2 was not.

What we're coming down to is "Real World" happenings and "David's Narrative" happenings.

In the Real World, knowledge workers (of today) can work 12,000 miles from the manufacturing plants they run or Computers they use. People go on business trips, are sent out for training on new procedures and techniques, go on vacations and sick leave, commute to work from ridiculous distances, and arbitrarily decide to take their wives out to dinner and a show in another city when they are off shift. Industry and business are spread all over the planet fairly evenly and take up a large & of the population.

In David's Narrative, appearantly, they don't do those things. They are focused on their work and then go home to their space station appartment. All knowledge workers work and live at the work sites, and meetings with other companies are electronic. And no one on the ground has any role in the manufacturing base, which only uses ~ 1% of the population.

Now, parts of David's narrative are internally inconsistant - for example 99% of the workforce on the 3 stations cannot be killed when all of Weyland's workforce survived - but that could be just an example of the speaker announcing preliminary findings when it takes days to correlate all the data for a full picture.

KZT is arguing from the "facts" of David's narrative and the expanded info he has shared with us. And that reality meets fiction on fiction's pages... reality takes a back seat to fiction's plot.

David has never said 100.00000% of the workforce was killed. Of course there were people off station at the time the attacks went in. I dunno what your guys' jobs look like, but at mine I'd estimate only about 5-8% of the employees are out of the office at any given time. In no way would those 5-ish percent be able to reconstitute my employer's business should something happen to the other 95%.

I would also point out that remote working, work-at-home, etc. is overhyped. For example, Yahoo made waves when they cut back the remote worksite privileges of its employees. Subsequent research into that change has shown that getting everyone together physically yields a number of benefits in productivity and employee engagement. Just because remote work might be convenient for you doesn't make it good for the company, and that would go doubly for a wartime environment.

Duckk wrote:David has never said 100.00000% of the workforce was killed. Of course there were people off station at the time the attacks went in. I dunno what your guys' jobs look like, but at mine I'd estimate only about 5-8% of the employees are out of the office at any given time. In no way would those 5-ish percent be able to reconstitute my employer's business should something happen to the other 95%.

I would also point out that remote working, work-at-home, etc. is overhyped. For example, Yahoo made waves when they cut back the remote worksite privileges of its employees. Subsequent research into that change has shown that getting everyone together physically yields a number of benefits in productivity and employee engagement. Just because remote work might be convenient for you doesn't make it good for the company, and that would go doubly for a wartime environment.

Duckk - we actually have it from the assesment from after OB:

"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."

Obviously the 99% is flawed from the start because of Weyland's survivors. If you figure each worker gets 2 weeks of vacation each T year (and a 40 hr 5/7 week at that), an average of 4% of the workforce is on vacation at any random time. 40 hour weeks means 3 daily shifts - which means 2/3rds of commuters are not in the stations (and Yes, I have many co-workers which commute >1.5 hours each way daily). Figure 1 week a year per worker for training (2%), and 1 week for various personal leave (2%) - that's alot of variability in where workers are. Counting the Weyland survivors (assuming they only made up 20% of the total workforce), it's possible that ~30% of the workforce survived.

As for Knowledge workers, I'm not talking about working from home - their offices could be anywhere on the planet and they still contribute. Personally, I run over 300 telecomunications devices on 4 continents. My longest ping time is a device in Singapore (210 ms) - if we have to use a sat link, that jumps to ~630 ms - the links between any of the planet space stations any any point on the ground will be similiar (depending on the location of the space station. My small team in the States (with a contracted offshore backup crew) are the only ones who monitor and control all these systems for my company. There is no need for me to be at any of those sites to run the hardware - I do it all from my desk.

Our engineers are able to video conference between our R&D centers and plants and see production issues via video in realtime to fix issues as a group - without sending the various specialists to said plant. They are able to bring in specialist partners from our hardware manufacturer's as well to allow them to collaborate in problem solving or planning. Architects, designers and engineers do not need to be onsite - modern 2015 technologies allow teams to collaborate remotely. I can only see the use and capabilities of these technologies increasing.

Sorry, not to rant, but even today, knowledge and skills are dispersed. While the cinstruction workers need to be onsite, the knowledge workers can be elsewhere, and much of the knowledge retained.