Pacifier Production

General


High performance craft like pacifiers can only be made at a specialist factory - although a local colonial ship repair yard might be able to build a few from spares provided it isn't busy working on repairing starships.
Limiting Factors in Pacifier production

  • Materials technology - high stress high performance materials are not readily available in colonial quadrants. Most have to be imported from the Home Systems.
  • Skilled workforce. In the absence of a pacifier production industry, the skills and expertise needed is in short supply in colonial quadrants.
  • Key parts (such as high performance engine parts, HELLs etc). Some spares are kept, but the vast majority of these components come from the home systems.
  • The correct machine tools and tooled-up factories - otherwise, single pacifiers could be hand-built by craftsmen - but rather a slow process.

Production Capacity


Specialist pac-factory (home systems only) 1 sqn per 100 days
Shipyard (home systems only) 1 sqn per 150 days
Repair Yard (capacity 4 pacifiers per ship-equivalent) 1 sqn per 250 days
Orbital Station Maintenance Facility not possible

Notes and assumptions:


1. Human space has a total of 12 specialised pac-factories, all in Quadrant 0 - 2 at Sol, 2 at New Venus, 2 at New Mars, one at Asteel, one at Truimphant, one at Centaur, one at Wolf359, one at New Agama, one at Sirius. Each factory has spare capacity of 20 sqadrons per year.

2. Using repair yards to build pacifiers has the consequence of reducing capacity for repairing major vessels.

3. The failure rate of pacifiers not in combat is around 10% per year. This means that with a universe-wide pacifier holdings of around 5000 pac squadrons, humanity needs to build the equivalent around 500 sqns per year just to stay even.

Transportation


A Class 5000 cargo ship can carry 2 squadrons of pacifiers in transportation mode (i.e. crated up). There are always some of these arriving in a quadrant to replace normal losses.

Pacifier Pilots


Industrial capacity to build pacifiers is easily increased. Pilots are less easy to come by, since they need highly specialised training and not every volunteer is suitable.

Training a pac pilot to maximum efficiency takes a year. Pilots can be taken up from existing space pilots, but they are no more likely to be up to the task than a raw recruit. A pacifier can be flown by an ordinary pilot, but its combat potential is about 10% as a result.

In an emergency like the First Exterminator War, there were very large numbers of volunteers, certainly outstripping need.

Even if one in a thousand volunteers are suitable for training, even colony worlds, dependent as they are on space activity, will generate tens of thousands of volunteers, which produce the numbers of pilots required, the key bottlenecks here are:

  • The size of the training organisation and equipment and services to support it.
  • The availability of training cadre and experienced pilots as instructors. Computers can do a lot of the training, but humans are needed at certain key stages.
  • Cost of additional live training flights and training pacifiers and suitable training ranges etc.
  • The Pacifier Corps training organisations are in the Home Systems. The training centres in the colonial quadrants are usually for 'top up' training and maintaining skills of pilots already posted to the quadrant. To train 'in quadrant' needs a major expansion of training facilities, and taking up significant numbers of experienced pilots from front line service to serve as trainers.

Robot Pacifiers


In addition, there are combat autopilots available. These are like the Combat Robots used by the Marines, in that they can do combat pacifier flying, but need to have humans about most of the time. CA-Pacifiers are unpopular in all human navies for many reasons, mainly cultural. They use BRIGHT-SLAVE class robot brains. It is assumed that a CA-Pacifier has about 80% of the combat power of a normal human-piloted pacifier. The CA-Pacifier costs a deal more than a standard machine, but doesn't need a pilot, and takes about the same time to build as a standard type.

Deployment


Major system orbitals often has at least one PAC squadron (8 operational - 16 available) permanently attached.

Some worlds have more than one main 'port' orbital station - typically 'Rich' and above - and these have often have double complements.

In addition, a Carrier carries 8 Pacifiers in peacetime (16 war complement).

Whilst all PAC pilots are trained to operate off a Carrier, those based on stations usually need a 15-day refresher course before they can become fully effective in a changed role.

See also Carrier Pacifier



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