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[Nathan_]

Factories, workers, raw materials and so on. Manufacturing demand is elastic(agriculture by contrast is not and wouldn't likely get replaced), and as much as we can produce will find a use somehow, somewhere, in a fully geared up war economy. To use the WW2 example, America's economy did not plateau during the war, production kept rising despite just how much we were producing and throwing at everything.

That means we can pour cheap goods labeled in unintentionally but often hilariously bad Tradeglish into the Loroi Union and find a market. That's good for us, but how will that free up Loroi manufacturing for the war? We're adding production of miscellaneous low-tech goods, what we're replacing is cottage industries and stuff like clothing factories employing unskilled workers. They're generally not going to go on to work in high-tech automation-heavy starship component factories, and probably weren't competing with them for supplies in the first place. The factories we're taking over the production from aren't going to switch over to producing items that are holding up starship production.

The Loroi Union is apparently in a position where they need to do what we did in WWII, but are less well prepared to do so and are experiencing problems expanding production fast enough. Given their reproductive capabilities, their problem is almost certainly not lack of manpower, but is rather lack of raw materials, and even if we can completely replace Loroi manufacturing of a few items, I just don't see Terran goods as being made of the right things to save the Loroi enough raw materials to construct more ships.

Back to WW2, we supplied the soviets with just about everything, except tanks(the soviet ones were pretty damned good), which their economy was then able to focus on. You're focusing on chinese plastic crap and not on liberty ships, trucks, and other product analogs. A merchant vessel doesn't need a military drive pushing it forward, and human shipyards can build those and again, they will find use. The loroi shipyard that previously had to build their supply vessels gets to build a warship in turn.

In the comic we see that stormwitch's battlegroup is running low on war materiel, and it should be apparent that what they lack is quite simply everything. There is no way that 3 developed worlds with massive populations won't be a valuable contribution to either side.

[CptWinters]

Back to WW2, we supplied the soviets with just about everything, except tanks(the soviet ones were pretty damned good), which their economy was then able to focus on. You're focusing on chinese plastic crap and not on liberty ships, trucks, and other product analogs. A merchant vessel doesn't need a military drive pushing it forward, and human shipyards can build those and again, they will find use. The loroi shipyard that previously had to build their supply vessels gets to build a warship in turn.

Actually, the Soviets were supplied with thousands of British and American tanks. In many ways they were inferior to indigenous production, but their mechanical reliability was a large improvement over Soviet tank models.

[Mjolnir]

Also Mjolnir, I don't fully understand your tech distinction; if one group does not possess or has not developed an innovation, no matter how simple or novel it is, and then learns to employ it, is it still not a technological advancement? Could you clarify what you mean by high and low tech?

We're talking about glorified shovels and buckets and industry practices. It only needs your basic "digging tool producing" technological base, it doesn't have a long list of very specific prerequisite machinery and input materials.They might need some new equipment for larger scale, deeper reaching operations, but it'll all work in ways obviously familiar to the Loroi operating current mines. It's not fundamentally different, it's just an overall approach that's already been refined by experience. Their actual implementation of the machinery might well use higher technology than what ours would, but run it on coal burning steam or plasma pinch fusion or direct matter annihilation reactors, doesn't matter. A good part of it is the knowledge that it actually is practical to access those resources, beyond that we're mostly saving them some costly trial and error and getting them moving faster than they are on their own.

[Mjolnir]

Back to WW2, we supplied the soviets with just about everything, except tanks(the soviet ones were pretty damned good), which their economy was then able to focus on. You're focusing on chinese plastic crap and not on liberty ships, trucks, and other product analogs. A merchant vessel doesn't need a military drive pushing it forward, and human shipyards can build those and again, they will find use. The loroi shipyard that previously had to build their supply vessels gets to build a warship in turn.

In the comic we see that stormwitch's battlegroup is running low on war materiel, and it should be apparent that what they lack is quite simply everything. There is no way that 3 developed worlds with massive populations won't be a valuable contribution to either side.

We weren't technologically multiple generations behind the Soviets in WW2.

I would be surprised if the Loroi couldn't build ships with capabilities similar to Terran ships for substantially lower materials cost than the Terrans could, and for far less than the cost of a single warship, so I'm still doubtful about how much this would actually save. In addition, they need freight transport to be fast as well, to get materials to their destinations quickly with minimal time exposed to enemy attack. If using slow-poke Terran ships impedes timely shipment of required parts and materials, faster Loroi ships will be used...building an extra ship won't help if its parts don't arrive in time. The apparent limitations on our own ship-building capacity make this even more unlikely to be much help.

We'd both be better off if the Terrans simply shipped raw materials to the Loroi, but the war may not last long enough for us to ramp up our productivity enough to matter in even that limited respect.

[NOMAD]

so that would be a No on helping out as a supply support for the Loroi then !

But given our current capacsity ( both in ships, knowledge of our area of space, tech and production) what can be done ( I know this question has been asked before, alot of times, but want can be done)

Side note: during the sam conflict, their were cases where less perofrming aircraft and vehicle found a good niece in teh Soviet AO ( IE the P39 and p-63 Corba's family gain quiet alot of fame and likeing form soviet pilots) while the GPA ( amphipious jeep model) was also very popular with the Soviet scout core.

Thus, their might be something we have the Loroi can find a use for ?

[Nathan_]

We weren't technologically multiple generations behind the Soviets in WW2.
If using slow-poke Terran ships impedes timely shipment of required parts and materials, faster Loroi ships will be used...building an extra ship won't help if its parts don't arrive in time. The apparent limitations on our own ship-building capacity make this even more unlikely to be much help.

We aren't hopelessly behind the Loroi logistically either. The system for insuring constant delivery of goods is a supply chain, not putting bigger and more wasteful engines on ships that don't need them.

[elizibar]

I would be surprised if the Loroi couldn't build ships with capabilities similar to Terran ships for substantially lower materials cost than the Terrans could, and for far less than the cost of a single warship, so I'm still doubtful about how much this would actually save. In addition, they need freight transport to be fast as well, to get materials to their destinations quickly with minimal time exposed to enemy attack. If using slow-poke Terran ships impedes timely shipment of required parts and materials, faster Loroi ships will be used...building an extra ship won't help if its parts don't arrive in time. The apparent limitations on our own ship-building capacity make this even more unlikely to be much help.

We'd both be better off if the Terrans simply shipped raw materials to the Loroi, but the war may not last long enough for us to ramp up our productivity enough to matter in even that limited respect.

Building one extra ship won't help. Building ten extra ships will. If you're moving bulk goods (raw materials, foodstuffs, etc.) the speed that they need to get to their destination doesn't matter nearly as much as if you're resupplying the front line. A lot of boring, routine rear-area transport could be handled by slower (really at crossing distances of just a few to ten AU, 2 or 3 Gs of acceleration is pretty okay for this kind of cargo running) human-made "junk" ships.

Let me quote Arioch here to establish a base time of about a week to cross a system under normal transit speed:

System transit speeds need to be up around 1% lightspeed (3,000 km/s) if you want to be able to cross the system in less than a week, and I wouldn't want ships to have to waste too much fuel slowing down before every jump. On the other hand, you want the couriers to be able to get up to jump speed relatively quickly from their relay bases; 1,000 km/s takes a little bit less than an hour at 30G. So we need a pretty wide range of possible jump speeds.

So you're looking at, for the terran clunker using a paltry 1 G of acceleration starting from a dead stop in deep space...

speed = time*acceleration

time to reach cruising speed = .1c / 1 G = 3000 km/s / (9.8 m/s / 1000 m/km) = 306122.449

So about 85 hours to get up to your cruising speed (yes I'm ignoring some details but they don't really change the comparison of 85 hours to 2.8 hours at 30 G to reach the same speed). And then another 85-ish to decelerate to whatever the correct orbital velocity is for the planet you're circling. So call it "an extra week of transit" time for your bulk goods. I'm sure there's plenty of shipping in the Loroi Union that could be handled by these kinds of ships without any noticeable loss of efficiency for the Loroi's industry. This would free up faster Loroi-(or allied-) shipping to directly supply those industries that are time critical as well as troops at the front line, gives the humans something to do that makes them a useful ally for the war effort, and it doesn't depend on any exchange of actual technology by either side (surely a plus for the xenophobic Loroi).

Other secondary industries could be offloaded onto the humans, like making Loroi Standard Military Boot Polish Color 7, freeing up the Loroi chemical industry to make more useful and higher tech things (like Super Duper Bug Spray). Unless the Loroi require their boot polish to use highly advanced nanotech so that it auto-polishes itself on the boot for a couple weeks, this sort of simple, but essential, industry can be outsourced. Make those silly humans do it, so the proud Loroi civilians can make better, shinier things that require their level of technology.

It's less about "lower materials cost" and more about "well these primitives have a bunch of shipyard slips that can build things (transports) we can use even if they're inferior, which lets us use our own ship building capability more effectively for the war effort" and "they can make lower quality but acceptable copies of some of our non-combat equipment like uniforms." (And then the Loroi discover japanese pornography, internet memes, and viral videos and their civilization commits suicide as it descends into a mass of screaming telepathic minds, lolcat images, and angry men hitting computers.)

I think it's somewhat obvious that the Loroi don't have a lot of spare shipbuilding capacity, either because they lack the infrastructure or the raw materials. Digging up ore or smashing asteroids to get it shouldn't be hard at all for their tech level, so the actual supply of raw materials shouldn't be much in doubt. The infrastructure though? It's implied somewhat that they have supply issues in the comic (and elsewhere in the various discussions on the board as well for what that's worth), so if the bottleneck is in supplying their troops, well, we can help with that by supplying slower, but still useful, transport capacity. If the bottleneck is in the actual infrastructure of building the ships due to a lack of facilities, well, we can help relieve that by building slower transport ships so they can use their limited capacity to build combat ships instead of so many transports. Even if the relief is rather limited, I don't think a sane military planner is going to turn down any chance to get a few extra warships to the front line during a life-or-death struggle.

And now I'm starting to ramble...

[fredgiblet]

so that would be a No on helping out as a supply support for the Loroi then !

Not on a vast level, I stand by my statement in previous threads that we will likely end up supplying local bases, our contribution to the main warfront will likely be minimal, however we will be able to ease logistics significantly by supplying bases in our region with basic goods that we CAN provide.

[discord]

as has been said a million times before, amateurs talk about strategy, professionals talk about logistics, the loroi have logistical problems(as proven by lack of ordnance shown in the comic), ANY help there should be appreciated.

and two or three human bulk transports could do the job of a single loroi one, leaving it for jobs which require more speed(supplying the fleet).

on a side note...the loroi do like their personal space....the comparison with human claustrophobia subs of old, and not much better spaceships seem to indicate a design flaw(from a ship performance pov.) among the loroi....true, long deployments and crew mental health are issues...

[TrashMan]

And then the Loroi discover japanese pornography, internet memes, and viral videos and their civilization commits suicide as it descends into a mass of screaming telepathic minds, lolcat images, and angry men hitting computers.)

[Imbrooge]

I never understood the idea that the Terrans could only be a useful meaningful contributor by fighting on the frontlines and not establishing stable supply lines and other logistics.

EDIT: It's not like they have a magical new element we don't have access to so whatever materials they have we could resonably replicate. Except for like something like organic compounds maybe.

[anticarrot]

I think a comparison question to humanity's contribution would be, "How easily could Victorian level industry help the current US Navy?"

If that's accurate, then it's possible. Ship are still essentially made of wielded steel, and wielding is something the victorians would have no trouble picking up. The victorians could possible (for example) easily build 90% of the weight of an Arleigh Burke destroyer (hull, wiring, plumbing, general fittings) knocking one out every few months, if the USN could supply the actual electronics, gas turbines, cannon barrels, missiles and launch cells. A single US freighter could fit out 10 victorian hulls.

Of course there would the problem of ITAR, with the US government congenitally not trusting it's closest allies with even supposedly civilian technology. It's very likely the military assets that the USN would need to deploy in order to trust the victorians with this arrangement would outweigh the contributions for a rather long time.

[elizibar]

I think a comparison question to humanity's contribution would be, "How easily could Victorian level industry help the current US Navy?"

If that's accurate, then it's possible. Ship are still essentially made of wielded steel, and wielding is something the victorians would have no trouble picking up. The victorians could possible (for example) easily build 90% of the weight of an Arleigh Burke destroyer (hull, wiring, plumbing, general fittings) knocking one out every few months, if the USN could supply the actual electronics, gas turbines, cannon barrels, missiles and launch cells. A single US freighter could fit out 10 victorian hulls.

Of course there would the problem of ITAR, with the US government congenitally not trusting it's closest allies with even supposedly civilian technology. It's very likely the military assets that the USN would need to deploy in order to trust the victorians with this arrangement would outweigh the contributions for a rather long time.

I don't think the loroi would let a minor ally do any construction on combat worthy vessels that would be crewed by loroi or using loroi technology in any way, hence why I limited my comments above to support/logistical construction. It's not glamorous but by god we can do it.

[Trantor]

I think a comparison question to humanity's contribution would be, "How easily could Victorian level industry help the current US Navy?"

If that's accurate, then it's possible. Ship are still essentially made of wielded steel, and wielding is something the victorians would have no trouble picking up. The victorians could possible (for example) easily build 90% of the weight of an Arleigh Burke destroyer (hull, wiring, plumbing, general fittings) knocking one out every few months, if the USN could supply the actual electronics, gas turbines, cannon barrels, missiles and launch cells. A single US freighter could fit out 10 victorian hulls.

Of course there would the problem of ITAR, with the US government congenitally not trusting it's closest allies with even supposedly civilian technology. It's very likely the military assets that the USN would need to deploy in order to trust the victorians with this arrangement would outweigh the contributions for a rather long time.

I don't think the loroi would let a minor ally do any construction on combat worthy vessels that would be crewed by loroi or using loroi technology in any way, hence why I limited my comments above to support/logistical construction. It's not glamorous but by god we can do it.

And already do it good enough. Bulk-carriers with an acceleration of 6G like the Bell would certainly do.

And another thought: Loroi are unlikely to give us their top-engine tech. But maybe some of the other races may help us out. Barsam come to my mind, maybe even the Historians?

[fredgiblet]

And already do it good enough. Bulk-carriers with an acceleration of 6G like the Bell would certainly do.

I don't think our bulk carriers are going to be anywhere near 6g, you are comparing a military scout vessel against a freighter, there's going to be a significant acceleration difference.

[elizibar]

And already do it good enough. Bulk-carriers with an acceleration of 6G like the Bell would certainly do.

I don't think our bulk carriers are going to be anywhere near 6g, you are comparing a military scout vessel against a freighter, there's going to be a significant acceleration difference.

Well they don't need to be that 'fast'. 1 or 2 g is plenty of acceleration for a rear area cargo hauler.

[Trantor]

And already do it good enough. Bulk-carriers with an acceleration of 6G like the Bell would certainly do.

I don't think our bulk carriers are going to be anywhere near 6g, you are comparing a military scout vessel against a freighter, there's going to be a significant acceleration difference.

Yes, you´re right. Maybe not Bulk, but medium-priority cargo.
But i´m certain that we get help developing the next generation of freighters.


I mean, this is a total war. Which implies that there´s only a military solution - victory or death.

Assumed humanity joins Loroi, chances increase that our side wins.
And we know about the historians being macchiavellistic. So, if the Loroi win, there must be another antipode to them. If only in "emergency".
That´d be us.

[Voitan]

I wonder how far apart everyone is in relation to each other in regards to their FTL ability?

Because from what I can I tell, everyone is on a equal footing in that regard, and with that alone, anyone with FTL is usefull and able to contribute to a galactic war.

[TrashMan]

I think a comparison question to humanity's contribution would be, "How easily could Victorian level industry help the current US Navy?"

I don't think that difference is accuarate. the development of technology flows differetnly in different eras. Differences can be bigger or smaller.

For comparison, victorian era military didn't have large industry, their best ships shouldn't even scratch a WW2 battleship at point blank range (you could park a dozen ofhhtem arond a BB and let them fire till their cannons melted), they couldnt' fly, etc, tec...

In contrast to that, Loroi technology is more refined that human tech, but it's not that different. In other words, we can do everything the Loroi can, but not as efficient.

[Trantor]

I think a comparison question to humanity's contribution would be, "How easily could Victorian level industry help the current US Navy?"

I don't think that difference is accuarate. the development of technology flows differetnly in different eras. Differences can be bigger or smaller.

For comparison, victorian era military didn't have large industry, their best ships shouldn't even scratch a WW2 battleship at point blank range (you could park a dozen ofhhtem arond a BB and let them fire till their cannons melted), they couldnt' fly, etc, tec...

But that´s not the point. Victorian society was only one step from industrial society.
I´d go with anticarrot: Show them how to do welding instead of riveting, and they catch up fast enough to provide good assistance on low-level-tech.

In contrast to that, Loroi technology is more refined that human tech, but it's not that different. In other words, we can do everything the Loroi can, but not as efficient.

Even better.