OBT Forum

  My working premise, assuming I'd given the TCN its WarShips again, was that the Concordat had managed to retain perhaps half a dozen hulls, all frigates or smaller, probably all of the Concordat class - it made up almost a third of the TCN in canon, and simple logistical realities would mean they'd almost have to be of the same class, so the Concordat class becomes the logical choice. 

That makes sense- according to TR3057R all of the Winchesters were destroyed and the only other canon vessels larger then the Concordat that we know are the Wagon Wheel and Dart.

A single WarShip yard would have remained operational to produce parts for the few operational vessels; during the League years it would have been microscopically overseen (to make sure the Taurians didn't get any funny ideas), and in the post-Coup era production of new WarShip hulls would have been politically and economically untenable.

I don't think that you need a "warship yard" to maintain the ships- a drydock would do the job and from the SLDF's view the drydock would not be able to build new warships.  Actually we know the TC had a number of jumpship repair facilities even in the 3020s- it's mentioned somewhere in HB:MPS but I don't have my notes handy to cite the reference right now. 

- Additional thought: perhaps the TC in the Virginia War universe were trying to set up their own construction programme for regular JumpShips, but couldn't do it for lack of money/resources/foreign expertise.  (Ironically, having that Concordat yard mentioned above means they've retained the skill-set to build WarShips, but are starting from scratch when it comes to 'civilian-core' designs.  There are many paths to a 'technological backslide', after all.  )

Now that would be an interesting twist- able to build warships and compact core jumpships but not conventional ones.

how d'you think Paul Davion would react to a Taurian offer of 'we'll trade you: you get our captured (and long-hidden) Davion-II destroyer, we get your Concordat frigate'? 

What do you expect from Davions....

partly by the fact that TTBOMK, the previous descriptions of the Reunification War didn't mention anything about fighting in the Badlands region. 

But all of those books were written before we knew the Badlands was part of the TC- with all of the raiding going on by the Concordat Navy it just makes sense that they would use the badlands as a hiding spot.  But oh well....

When you say the graziani has a landing ship variant, you don't mean they have the ability to land on planets, do you?

When you say the graziani has a landing ship variant, you don't mean they have the ability to land on planets, do you?

  Ha!    No, more like the Robinson or Kyushu class: they carry large parasite complements, which deliver their embarked troops to the planet's surface while the transport itself remains in orbit.  Infantry are delivered by assault shuttles; reflecting the archaic design of this model of compact-core vessel, 'Mechs are delivered by internally-carried parasite-craft of the Tigersnake class, essentially 'DropShips' without actual KF booms.

  There's always been a very lively sort of dynamic going on between the Salernan Prince and his 'vassals' the Dukes.  On the one hand, the Salernan Crown is 'supreme' over the Dukes only because they let it be; the Council of Dukes approves the accession of each Prince, and they generally select for Princes who leave them alone to run their estates as if they were more-or-less independent nations.  By the same token, long-standing ironclad laws and ancient traditions that are almost as binding mean that the Prince has a monopoly over certain military technologies (including modern JumpShips and 'Mechs), and the Princes have always done their best (often successfully) to limit the Dukes' access to modern equipment and keep them focused on squabbling with each other, in order to forestall a full-blown overthrow of the Cavaretta Dynasty.
  Thus, instead of the cheap and modular JumpShip/DropShip paradigm, which would be far more efficient from a logistical and economic point of view, even their civilian JumpShips are in fact compact-core freighters (and each hull costs them a fortune!) that still use a design-principle that died out everywhere else centuries ago.
  Feudal dynastic politics, folks.  What are you gonna do? 

Quote from: lrose on July 27, 2011, 11:04:39 AM

I know they did not want to do something silly like put a shipyard there (unless they intended to give it to the WOB) but the whole there's a planet there that the Taurians controlled and no one went there during the war is just stupid.  It sounds like the perfect place to tie down the SLDF -keep them hunting the remnants of the fleet, which keeps them from say attacking the Hyades Cluster.

That always bothered be about the Badlands after reading H:RW. The single counter I can think of that "might" explain the Badlands away post-Reunification War is that the technologies required to maintain colonization of the world were no longer available during the long years of the Succession Wars.

Then again, my counter is that's the planet - not an orbital shipyard.

It's a matter of explaining how a shipyard or repair facility was placed in the Badlands after the Reunification War. I hate to lean on them, but using Amaris's Periphery build up as a working example, it's possible the TC could have constructed the facility prior to the New Vandenburg Rebellion. That could give you the facility and the location.

  Interesting point.  Of course, the counter-argument would draw its strength from Amaris' readiness to throw the Taurian Freedom Army to the wolves Kerensky in furtherance of his own agenda: given the way 'rogue' Taurian WarShips kept cropping up throughout the Star League era, Aleks K would have made destroying such a facility one of his primary objectives during the Periphery Uprising, and Amaris would've been quite happy to oblige him in order to keep him out of the way.
  Still, I'll let the idea stew in the back of my head for a while and see what happens. 

Also depends how you spin it.

Amaris supposedly provided training and material support. That doesn't necessary mean he was privy to everything. Even when the SLDF was starting to make major headway against the TFA thanks to Amaris's intel, they still managed some success. This leads me to believe he wasn't involved in everything, but enough. So a Badlands facility or other types is/could be possible.

  Well, here's the latest iteration of the .pdf.  I've improved the layout a little and expanded several topics, including a full listing of the TCN's capital-ship OOB and a summary of their military industry, but the main reason I put this together was nailing down their ground-forces deployments, specifically which regiments were posted where (so I know what sort of holes will be made if certain things happen).

  For the record, I've pegged the end of the TC's economic 'slide' to about 2805 or so, broadly similar to how things went in the BTSD universe; up to that point, Nicoletta and then Semyon Calderon were trying to save as many 'cows' as they could, with mixed success, and worrying a little less about 'guns and/or butter'.  It's taken two generations of Taurian leadership for the Concordat's situation to come back onto an even keel, and more than ten years to bring the TDF back into a more-or-less fighting trim after Semyon's War proved how catastrophically rusty they were, but they're finally there.