Light bulb Captured Solly fleet

cthia wrote:Since SDs are two sections of redundant systems, why not just cut them in half and convert the wedge half into tugs. Manticore gets benefit of more tugs and the negative psychological impact to the League when they find out that their SDs are no more than overhauled Ford F-150 trucks.

That didn't work so well when they tried to split ships in 'A Call to Duty'.
Plus a huge difficulty in splitting as SD - all that armor.. (and likely less tractors than a true tug; not that it matters if you just want them for shield ships)

But also holding the nodes in hot standby, which you'd need for a shield ship, that going to run though their operational hours pretty quickly. Then your back to trying to do maintenance on unfamiliar systems without the logistics supply of spare parts.

Joat42 wrote:And there are engineers watching engine rooms today. Look at any larger vessel; for example a modern cargo ship, they always have people on watch in the engine control room. Their systems are almost totally automated but as soon something happens that the automation can't handle it gets expensive real fast if they don't have an engineer on watch.

No there aren't. You are confusing naval vessels with commercial. There is a reason that almost all vessels have their flag flown from Bahamas or Panama or some other country other than any western country as they do not require as astringent moronic standards for crew size and watch cycles where the crew does absolutely nothing(engine control room watch). The countries are not unionized idiots enforcing/requiring ancient outdated stupid regulations.

Modern commercial vessels have crew on the bridge and a guy who walks through the engine control room occasionally. Base crew size is 12 or 13 depending on if there is an onboard inventory guy(mind blank on his real name) who also contacts all the ports for final logistics support via satellite phone. It can be lower as well(8). Generally speaking: Captain, 1st officer on bridge, with third guy who is roaming. Checking engine room, containers, refrigeration containers, etc every couple of hours. 3 or 4 rotations of crew depending on route.

Crew size is increased past this IF and only IF the crew decides they wish to pay a dedicated cook, laundry, cleaner, type and then from there crew size increases if one keeps rooms available for passengers. Quite often crew size will be 13 or 14 for dedicated machinery maintenance repairmen(mechanical/electrician). Pick a guy up at or near home port and then they are onboard for a cycle of the route the ship normally takes doing repairs and scheduled maintenance.

PS. If a engine "dies" on a commercial vessel, the ship is scrapped generally. Especially with the new Air quality regs coming into the fore. Though if the ship is new enough, this is not the case.

wastedfly wrote:
No there aren't. You are confusing naval vessels with commercial. There is a reason that almost all vessels have their flag flown from Bahamas or Panama or some other country other than any western country as they do not require as astringent moronic standards for crew size and watch cycles where the crew does absolutely nothing(engine control room watch). The countries are not unionized idiots enforcing/requiring ancient outdated stupid regulations.

Modern commercial vessels have crew on the bridge and a guy who walks through the engine control room occasionally. Base crew size is 12 or 13 depending on if there is an onboard inventory guy(mind blank on his real name) who also contacts all the ports for final logistics support via satellite phone. It can be lower as well(8). Generally speaking: Captain, 1st officer on bridge, with third guy who is roaming. Checking engine room, containers, refrigeration containers, etc every couple of hours. 3 or 4 rotations of crew depending on route.

Crew size is increased past this IF and only IF the crew decides they wish to pay a dedicated cook, laundry, cleaner, type and then from there crew size increases if one keeps rooms available for passengers. Quite often crew size will be 13 or 14 for dedicated machinery maintenance repairmen(mechanical/electrician). Pick a guy up at or near home port and then they are onboard for a cycle of the route the ship normally takes doing repairs and scheduled maintenance.

PS. If a engine "dies" on a commercial vessel, the ship is scrapped generally. Especially with the new Air quality regs coming into the fore. Though if the ship is new enough, this is not the case.

Aren't most commercial ships now big slow turning direct drive Diesel engines? Those wouldn't seen to need to same kind of monitoring of a high pressure steam plant - much less a nuclear/steam plant.

I'm not sure you really want a gigawatt GRAVMAK fusion plant running without qualifies watch standees... Just a little different than a diesel plant; especially with respect to uncontrolled failure modes.

Jonathan_S wrote:I'm not sure you really want a gigawatt GRAVMAK fusion plant running without qualifies watch standees... Just a little different than a diesel plant; especially with respect to uncontrolled failure modes.

More like exawatt.

And if things go bad in a way that the automation can't catch they will likely go bad far faster then human decision cycles take.

Jonathan_S wrote:Aren't most commercial ships now big slow turning direct drive Diesel engines? Those wouldn't seen to need to same kind of monitoring of a high pressure steam plant - much less a nuclear/steam plant.

I'm not sure you really want a gigawatt GRAVMAK fusion plant running without qualifies watch standees... Just a little different than a diesel plant; especially with respect to uncontrolled failure modes.

You do not want a human in an event chain no matter what the power plant type. Any event chain with a human as a deciding factor will always fail. Guaranteed 100% to fail.

No nuclear plant today runs with a human in the event chain. None. Nuclear power plants have watch details to alert the mechanics to start fixing some triple redundant system that already auto switch to a backup that still has a backup. Not even Russian ones have humans in the loop anymore. Such power plants have 2 phases. How much power is desired with an auto start/stop, and auto shut down in case of emergency with triple redundant TFT sensors(9 of them). This will be true on a fusion plant as well. Coal fired steam turbine plants are not operating with a human in the event loop. All the watch person does is alert someone if there is a mechanical failure for repair and if an earthquake happens destroying part of the facility where the automatic shut down sequence cannot self engage. Natural gas fired steam turbines do not even have a watch at all other than overall security detail. Giant Diesel powered generators do not even have the security detail.

There is no way even an incompetent engineer is going to have a human operating a fusion plant let alone a competent one. None. Not even the Navy operates with a human in the loop. They were the last to operate this way. I suppose some Chinese or Russian sub may operate that way still.

See Chernobyl why you do not want a human operator. 3 mile island showed how even rudimentary automatic shut down processes save the day without human involvement to screw up by the numbers. Same with the Fujik???spelling??? disaster. The automatics saved the day even when the engineers screwed the pooch initially. Turned a mega disaster into only a disaster. Of course then the human engineers did a final screwjob.

The ONLY reason there will ever be an "engineering" watch on a fusion reactor is for damage control on a military ship. Damage can cause perfectly good automatic machinery to not work as expected. On a commercial ship, do not have this problem and RFC's engineers standing "watch" in the power plant compartment is a waste of human resources.

Anyways, real world clash with RFC universe. Hey, its space Opera not science.

kzt wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:I'm not sure you really want a gigawatt GRAVMAK fusion plant running without qualifies watch standees... Just a little different than a diesel plant; especially with respect to uncontrolled failure modes.

More like exawatt.

And if things go bad in a way that the automation can't catch they will likely go bad far faster then human decision cycles take.

And we have the example of an inexperienced watch stander in Shadow of Saganami. The results are left as an exercise for the reader.

kzt wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:I'm not sure you really want a gigawatt GRAVMAK fusion plant running without qualifies watch standees... Just a little different than a diesel plant; especially with respect to uncontrolled failure modes.

More like exawatt.

And if things go bad in a way that the automation can't catch they will likely go bad far faster then human decision cycles take.

I do not want a kilowatt nuclear power plant operated by a human being! Guaranteed 100% failure.

fallsfromtrees wrote:And we have the example of an inexperienced watch stander in Shadow of Saganami. The results are left as an exercise for the reader.

Only if you throw basic engineering principles away and bury your head in the sand. Sure, we can take what RFC wrote as true.

wastedfly wrote:

fallsfromtrees wrote:And we have the example of an inexperienced watch stander in Shadow of Saganami. The results are left as an exercise for the reader.

Only if you throw basic engineering principles away and bury your head in the sand. Sure, we can take what RFC wrote as true.

Since we are talking about using obsolete was ships fromhis universe, don't you think we should be playing by his rules. If you don't like his rules, go write your own universe - it's a free country.

cthia wrote:Since SDs are two sections of redundant systems, why not just cut them in half and convert the wedge half into tugs. Manticore gets benefit of more tugs and the negative psychological impact to the League when they find out that their SDs are no more than overhauled Ford F-150 trucks.

I'll assume you are making a joke here.

But what do you mean by "SDs are two sections of redundant systems"? Is that just part of the joke?