lyonheart wrote:I believe the textev later in War of Honor, plus AAC and David's posts, puts the Cimeterre at 25,000 tons, with the Alpha and Beta birds closer to 20,000 tons.
Since all previous LAC's were generally in the 10-11 KT range or less, and given RFC's condemnation of super or big LAC's in the pearls, I took the 30-40 KT size reference to be an indication of what size the peeps/RHN thought they needed to do the same things they knew the Shrike could, in part simply because we had no textev of any LAC's of such size.
Wow, my memory must be going.
I was going to say I didn't remember LACs that small, but then I went and checked my notes and did a trawl though the ebooks. Excluding the new Mantie designs here's what I found:
RMN Series 282-class (HoS): 17,750 tons (the improved LACs Honor took to Silesia) - although by this point you're getting density without corresponding increase in volume; these are smaller in every dimension that the preceding Highlander class, despite massing over 50% more
RMN Highlander-class (HoS): 11,250 tons
GSN Faith-class (HoS): 11,250 tons
SCN Mazur-class (SITS): 12,250 tons
RHN Program 13-class (Jaynes): 10,250 tons
RMN LAC <unknown>-class (OBS): "barely" 10,000 tons (Honor's first command)
GSN LACs <unknown>-class (HotQ): "barely" 11,000 tons
Masadan LACs <unknown>-class (HotQ): "barely" 9,000 tons
Nuncio LACs <unknown>-class (SoS): 18,000 tons
Nuncio LACs <unknown>-class (SoS): 15,000 tons
There were only 3 additional places (beyond the quote about Cord's clean-sheet design) that mentioned "huge" LACs.
Two of them were in the (identical) glossary entries in WoH and AAC
At All Costs / War of Honor: Glossary wrote:LAC—
Light Attack Craft. A sublight warship type, incapable of entering hyper, which masses between 40,000 and 60,000 tons. Until recently, considered an obsolete and ineffective warship good for little but customs duty and light patrol work. Advances in technology have changed that view of it.
The third was a conversation between Tourville and Honeker in AoV about Mantie "Super LACs"
Ashes of Victory: Chapter 13 wrote: "But like you, I was thinking about the hardware side of his report and wishing the Board had been given a chance to see it before it issued its official conclusions," the citizen admiral went on. "Not that it would have convinced the doubters . . . or even me—fully, I mean—I suppose. It just doesn't seem possible that even the Manties could squeeze a fusion plant, and a full set of beta nodes, down into a LAC hull and then find room to cram in a godawful graser like the one Diamato described, as well!"
"I've never really understood that," Honeker said, admitting a degree of technical ignorance no "proper" people's commissioner would display. "I mean, we put fusion plants into pinnaces, and isn't a LAC just a scaled-up pinnace, when all's said and done?"
"Um." Tourville scratched an eyebrow while he considered the best way to explain. "I can see why you might think that," he acknowledged after a moment, "but it's not just a matter of scale. Or, rather, it is a matter of scale, in a way, but one in which the difference is so great as to create a difference in kind, as well.
"A pinnace has a far weaker wedge than any regular warship or merchantman. It's enormously smaller, for one thing, not more than a kilometer in width, and less powerful. The little hip-pocket fusion plants we put into small craft couldn't even begin to power an all-up wedge for a ship the size of a LAC. Which is just as well, because they use old-fashioned mag bottle technology and laser-fired fusing that's not a lot more advanced than they were using back on Old Earth Ante Diaspora. We've made a hell of a lot of advances since then, of course, in order to shoehorn the plants down to fit into pinnaces, but the way they're built puts a low absolute ceiling on their output.
"Even the biggest pinnace or assault shuttle comes in at well under a thousand tons, though, and a worthwhile LAC has to be in the thirty- to fifty-thousand-ton range just to pack in its impellers and any armament at all. Remember that courier boats in the same size range don't carry any weapons or defenses and just barely manage to find someplace to squeeze in a hyper generator. A LAC may be smaller than a starship, but it still has to be able to achieve high acceleration rates (which means a military grade compensator), produce sidewalls, power its weapons—and find places to mount them—and generally act like a serious warship, or else people would simply ignore it. Which means that, like any starship, LACs need modern grav-fusing plants to maintain the power levels they require. And there are limits on how small you can make one of those."
The citizen vice admiral twitched a shrug.
"Of course, the designers can cut some corners when they design a LAC. For one thing, they don't try to build in a power plant which can meet all requirements out of current generating capacity. Ton-for-ton, LACs have enormous capacitor rings, much larger than anything else's, even an SD. They're a lot smaller in absolute terms, naturally, given the difference in size between the ships involved, but most energy-armed LACs rely on the capacitor rings to power their offensive armament, and a lot of them rely on the capacitors even for their point-defense clusters. And not even a superdreadnought has enough onboard power generation to bring its wedge up initially without using its capacitors. Just maintaining it once it is up, even with the energy-siphon effect when it twists over into hyper, requires a huge investment in power, and initiating the impeller bands in the first place raises the power requirement exponentially. So even when they're not doing anything else, most warships tend to have at least one fusion plant on-line to charge up their capacitor rings . . . and, of course, a LAC only has one power plant, and just keeping it up and running requires its own not insubstantial power investment.
"And that's why so many of our own shipyard people will tell you that anything like Diamato's 'super LACs' is flatly impossible. Either the damned things have to be bigger than Diamato thought they were, or else there's some serious mistake in his estimate of the destructiveness he claims they were capable of handing out."
