CLACs

Roguevictory wrote:In that case the shift to missile focused warfare couldn't have been what made them obsolete since that occurred during the war. Which leaves us with no reasonable theory as to what caused them to become obsolete in the first place.

There were two reasons, one was that Silesian pirates increasingly got equipped with real light warships, and second that the RMN reevaluated the chance of an actual war. Frigates worked as policing units, they were already useless as combatants.

Ms. Midshipwoman Harrington:

Bajkusa wanted to continue the debate, if that was really what it was, but he had to admit that Dunecki had a point. A rather sizable one, in fact. Much as he loved Javelin, Bajkusa was perfectly well aware why no major naval power was still building frigates and why those navies which had them were retiring them steadily. They were the smallest class of hyper-capable warship, with a tonnage which fell about midway between a dispatch boat and a destroyer, and that gave them precious little room to pack in weapons. Indeed, Javelin was only a very little more heavily armed than a light attack craft, although her missiles had somewhat more range and she did have some magazine capacity, and she and her ilk no longer had any true viable purpose except to serve as remote reconnaissance platforms. Even that was being taken away from them by improvements in the remote sensor drones most navies regularly employed, and Bajkusa strongly suspected that the frigates' last stand would be as cheap, very light escorts to run down even lighter pirates . . . or as commerce raiders (or pirates) in their own right.

Roguevictory wrote:In that case the shift to missile focused warfare couldn't have been what made them obsolete since that occurred during the war. Which leaves us with no reasonable theory as to what caused them to become obsolete in the first place.

We do. They are too small and too under-powered. That is more than reasonable enough. Even the DDs have crept up in size to remain viable weapons platforms in the current combat conditions. I sincerely doubt the DD designs at the outset of OBS would still be usable for anything other than secondary roles.

Well, more accurately, it isn't missile combat as such, it was the laser head.

Before the laser head existed, it was a pretty reasonable strategy to more or less ignore incoming missiles, or at least invest only in some point defense, charge up using wedge as protection and fire with a laser. A ship with a wedge and a laser was a warship ("old-style" LAC designs such as Greysons and Masadans used are the minimum non-hypercapable ship built along those lines)

With the advent of the laser head, you needed real point defense and it was worthwhile to invest in a real broadside (3-4 missiles+spin your ship tactics to get a double-broadside off every 15 seconds or so...8 laser heads could do real damage to an enemy warship, and you couldn't close range fast enough to not die)

At that point you need a DD. Old-style LACs and frigates are now seen as worthless or at best vehicles for commerce raiding on undefended targets.

Now that we're getting MDMS in cruiser-sized platforms, SDM laser-head DD designs are pretty much obsolete...but not until everyone has cruiser-mdms. Thus the development of a "DD" (the Roland) that is larger than every light cruiser that served in the first Havenite war. It's also a transitional design, similar to BC(P)s...it can't survive its own weight of fire. Which means the smallest warship in the "everybody has MDM" era is likely going to be the size of a Star Knight heavy cruiser, although it might be called a DD, with glass-cannons like the Roland being called frigates.

What you will never see again in the honorverse is an armed courier boat being considered any kind of a serious warship..which is all frigates ever were. They may still exist, but they'll be seen as similar to Coast Guard vessels, which may have some military grade weapons but are intended to only face civilian smuggler-type opposition.

solbergb wrote:Well, more accurately, it isn't missile combat as such, it was the laser head.

Before the laser head existed, it was a pretty reasonable strategy to more or less ignore incoming missiles, or at least invest only in some point defense, charge up using wedge as protection and fire with a laser.

I had to rewrite my post since you'd covered some of it already Should have double-checked for new posts before composingI agree that the laser head was really the major factor that cause Frigates to become obsolete.

And I think Rakhmamort was being a little imprecise to say that the switch to missile dominated combat happened during the war. I believe it happened at different times for different classes; specifically it took much longer to become the dominant factor in waller combat than it did for FFs - CLs. Those light units had been adjusting to the new lethality of laserheads even pre-war.

Also in addition to the ability, against nukes, to charge in behind your wedge I'd point out that PDLCs were still pretty effective defense. And they don't have much logistics impact; which is nice for small ships.


I see several reasons why laserheads obsoleted the frigate.
For example if your PDLCs and wedge are your primary defenses you don't need to commit as many resources into killing missiles further out. So you don't need so many CM launchers, and don't need deep CM magazines.

But once you need to stop them cold by 30,000 km (laser head stand-off) PDLCs become much less effective; you have to take shots further out and you get a lot fewer potential shots against each missile. This forces you to invest more heavily in CMs.

But that same standoff range makes the missiles easier to fool with ECM (because they don't get a close or as long a look at the target), but to take advantage you've got to put more ECM hardware on your hull (space and cost) and start carry more, and more capable, decoys (big size impact)

Finally if you don't expect your missiles to be decisive against other light combatants then you don't need to carry as many tubes or missiles yourself; again allowing a smaller ship to be viable. You carry enough to probe and keep them honest, or badly hurt a poorly defended pirate; but not as many tubes or as deep magazines as a fleet destroyer.

All that allows a smaller cheaper unit to still have reasonable endurance.


Also, in their own way, more capable recon drones were a double blow against Frigates. First they reduced the need for the cheapest scouts, as you could send fewer ships to a system and use drones to extend their reach. And second recon drones are pretty big and a Destroyer can carry and handle more of them than a Frigate, so the FFs were as well suited to the new drone oriented scouting paradigm.


With the move to laserhead combat all of a sudden your system costs go up (reducing the cost delta between small and somewhat larger ships) and you need more space (especially before the multifunction warheads came out; when you needed to carry dedicated laserheads and dedicated nukes) all of which pushes frigates toward obsolescence, at least against first line opponents. (Again due to their toughness, size, and amount of point defense they already carried this transition came later for wallers than for light units)


Now Manticore did continue to use their existing Frigates, especially in Silesia (where the opponents were far from first rate), as economy of force units. But even when Honor was posted on one I doubt it was considered a front line combat unit.

Howard T. Map-addict wrote:I also say "lack" and "clack."

When sending messages in battle, speed is important.
One-syllable Clack is faster than See-Lac.
Besides, See-Lac might be heard as "See The Lac."

So Lac, Clack, and Co-Lac.

HTM

(References to Clack make me think of Click and Clack from Car Talk)

That raises a different question for me. How much command inefficiency did Pierre introduce to the PRN when he required the "citizen" in front of ranks, and apparently did not permit the use of "skipper" (and by inference, "guns" or even "XO").

Consider "citizen captain" vs "skipper" (or even Shannon's "skip", IIRC). The former is 5 syllables, the second 2 syllables. IIRC, one of the TOs used "citizen captain" to warn of the approach of HH's stealthed ships at Hades.

-- Bob G

Rakhmamort wrote:

Roguevictory wrote:In that case the shift to missile focused warfare couldn't have been what made them obsolete since that occurred during the war. Which leaves us with no reasonable theory as to what caused them to become obsolete in the first place.

We do. They are too small and too under-powered. That is more than reasonable enough. Even the DDs have crept up in size to remain viable weapons platforms in the current combat conditions. I sincerely doubt the DD designs at the outset of OBS would still be usable for anything other than secondary roles.

Except it has to be something other than just size because RFC said that the size creep to remain effective would not apply to frigates for some reason.

In the past there was some role that Frigates were more effective at than Destroyers otherwise there would have been no point in designing Frigates in the first place. But we have no idea what that role was or what happened to make Frigates so ineffective at it that rather than design new Frigate models to compensate for the change the navies that could abandoned the type completely.

Honorverse warships are basically eelf-refueling in normal space if memory serves so small fuel tanks might be a weakness but wouldn't be a crippling one. Limited storage for missiles would be more of a problem but I fail to see why that would be a crippling weakness before the shift to missile focused warfare. Limited supplies and thus limiting operational range could be a larger issue.

And in any cae the limitations on fuel, missile, and supply storage would have all existed from the beginning. Indeed if engine fuel efficiency increased than the fuel problem would become lesser rather than greater. So what happened to make the existing weaknesses shift from being acceptable to being so unacceptable that rather than try to design new frigates for the modern battlespace the navies that could abandoned them in favor of destroyers?

And frigates could react faster to changes in situation than a recon drone could plus have the ability to fight back if needed so frigates would still outclass them as recon units in hostile territory.

Also based on the Chanson class Destroyers, which were designed alongside the Star Knight Class, and still in service in 1920 pd even if a pre obsolescence Frigate required 10 times the crew of a LAC its crew would still only be roughly one third the crew of a Destroyer. 3 Frigates crewed for the crew on one Destroyer seems like a very good deal to e since three units can obviously cover more of an area than one, and form groups if needed. And the three frigates would have equal or greater firepower since a Chanson only had three Lasers and 3 Missile tubes in its broadside, and even its Javelin successor class, which ended up being disliked and retired before the Chansons only had 6 missile tubes and two lasers per broadside.

Once the Rolands come into play things change but the problem is Frigates were stated to be obsolete long before that happened. Given the solid data though even if a frigate had 1 missile tube and 1 laser per broadside, a group could match if not outgun a contemporary RMN Destroyer, and probably do even better against a PRH or SLN Destroyer.

Roguevictory wrote:shift from being acceptable to being so unacceptable that rather than try to design new frigates for the modern battlespace the navies that could abandoned them in favor of destroyers?

And frigates could react faster to changes in situation than a recon drone could plus have the ability to fight back if needed so frigates would still outclass them as recon units in hostile territory.

Opens a can. Hey, maybe this Joe will open 6.

0) Scouting = information gathering; not fighting
1) Frigates are not faster than RD's.
2) Frigates are not stealthier than RD's
3) RD's do not have to fight at all
4) You are supposed to get the information out, not fight:
RUN mother CHICKEN!
5) If RD dies, no big deal. They are relatively cheap
6) RD's can stay in system and loiter far cheaper than FF
***** #6 should really be #1 *****

May as well ask, why not abandon destroyers and build only CA's. If, DDM MK-16G ships become defacto standard in Honorverse, it will, baring an exceptional defensive sidewall uptick, even the DD/CL will go the way of the dodo bird.

So, what happens in naval braid and eggs land? They used to have LAC, FF, DD, CL, CA, BC, BB, DN, SD classes. Means all those juicy officer ranks now are compacted as well. Due to changes in warfare some of those classes classic tonnage size differentiation vanishes. So now we have fewer classes. Ego problems unite!

One has to remember that due to broviating bombastic pompous bureaucratic horn tooting, are you(Joe 6 pack Public with PR and Janes in tow) now going to eliminate the higher classes of ships or lower classes of ships? Duh! As a Pompous bureaucratic broviating bombastic eggs and braids you are going to eliminate the lower classes even though your new "lightest" ship class is in reality a FF. It is an FF because the politicos are always looking for pork money. Pet vote buying projects in their constituency require slush funds. Where do they go looking for the money? The defense bill of course. So, the navy is forced to buy smaller more numerous hulls than what they really want.

True today. True tomorrow. True in the Honorverse.

J6P wrote:May as well ask, why not abandon destroyers and build only CA's. If, DDM MK-16G ships become defacto standard in Honorverse, it will, baring an exceptional defensive sidewall uptick, even the DD/CL will go the way of the dodo bird.

RFC has suggested relatively recently that he's not sure the 300Kton 'notional destroyer' he'd been talking about will ever actually exist, and something similar to a Sag-C may become the bottom-end hyper-capable warship. Me, I kind of think that reflects the reality that as tough as a Sag-C is, in an environment where everyone has something similar to Mk 16s, it really can only do a CL's job; it just doesn't have the manpower for the traditional heavy cruiser role. Whether that means filling the gap with a ~1 Mton 'CA' or breaking down and using Nikes when you need more personnel on the job, I don't know.

drothgery wrote:

J6P wrote:May as well ask, why not abandon destroyers and build only CA's. If, DDM MK-16G ships become defacto standard in Honorverse, it will, baring an exceptional defensive sidewall uptick, even the DD/CL will go the way of the dodo bird.

RFC has suggested relatively recently that he's not sure the 300Kton 'notional destroyer' he'd been talking about will ever actually exist, and something similar to a Sag-C may become the bottom-end hyper-capable warship. Me, I kind of think that reflects the reality that as tough as a Sag-C is, in an environment where everyone has something similar to Mk 16s, it really can only do a CL's job; it just doesn't have the manpower for the traditional heavy cruiser role. Whether that means filling the gap with a ~1 Mton 'CA' or breaking down and using Nikes when you need more personnel on the job, I don't know.

Yup those, carefuly delegated roles of the far more numerous classes of ship will become a smorgeshboard in the new classes of ship. BB vanished when folks built DN's. DN vanished when folks built SD. FF vanished with the advent of a semi powerful laser warhead. DD/CL vanish with the advent of the more powerful MK-16G. Leaves at most 4 classes. Traditional LAC/CA/BC/SD tonnagges remain. Of course this is in BUWEAPS land. Now try advocating this in procurement land. Bureaucrats are not happy when their naval ship hull build cost inflates by 200% or more percent for the same number of hulls. There will be major push back.

My guess in politics land; BCL's will become a VERY small class and a much smaller, far more numerous hull will become the de-facto FF/DD/CA/BC. Will not happen under war time budget, but in peace time? Sure.