Armed Neo-Bob wrote:I did some of that for Marksman/Maya/Erewhon. You waded through a lot of speculation.
How big a ship is, depends on the navy and the mission.
In TOF, the second chapter, Luiz Roszak is talking to one of Barregos' civilian minions about ship sizes being inflated by both sides in the Havenite Wars; and the fact that no one on Old Earth was paying attention.
A good question here is, what constitutes a battlecruiser in the Honorverse? RFC has made the point about the new destroyers not being light cruisers; did you notice that the Wolfhound is almost exactly the size of the older Apollo? Even though Roland is the ship he is writing about, the gravitic signature of the Wolfhound is going to lead someone into a fatal mistake.
The purpose of the battlecruiser is to have a ship to kill the armored cruiser. The Sword class is listed in the teaser for SITS on the CD; RMN vessels not in the stories are in HoS. They seem to fall mostly into the 200 to 300K ton range. Roszak is kind enough to mention that his Marksman (286K tons) is larger than most Sollie heavy cruisers. All things being equal, that would make most of those older cruisers similar to the Truncheon or Prince Consort classes for weapons fit; with 5-8 missiles, a similar number of beam weapons, and some degree of point defense (which may be skewed toward defense against contact nukes).
A ship to kill those could well be a somewhat more heavily armored cruiser with a 50% increase in offensive systems and armor, and in the pre-RMN universe, that ship with 12 missiles and 12 Beam weapons would probably be around the sizes given for the Saganamis and the Mars classes.
It was only the Manti miniaturizing of tech that let them put that offensive power into the (two-decker) Star Knight. The original Mars was a Havenite attempt to duplicate the offensive power of that ship; against a Saganami in their same tonnage range, a Mars doesn't do so well.
How many navies have ships like that will be up to RFC; but the existence of ships of that size/capability might be why the Sollies deployed a ship as large and heavily armed as the Indefatigable in the first place; if nothing out in the Verge could match a heavy cruiser, they wouldn't have bothered with battlecruisers.
Well, maybe they would have, just for the ego boost.
Rob
And I would say, in general, a battlecruiser should
1) Have offenses and defenses such that it has a better than even chance against it's own weight in CAs (much less lighter units) - So Reliant should be capable of taking on 3 Star Knights (slight tonnage advantage to the CAs) with good chance of success.
2) Be tough enough to raid systems with modest levels of system defenses. That's not being able to take on full up forts, or waller squadrons. But something like Blackbird base (but fought intelligently) shouldn't be enough to prevent them from raiding nearby.
3) Capable of at least holding their own, ton for ton, against enemy BCs.
4) Be small enough to retain the acceleration and maneuverability necessary to (with good ship handling)
a) have a reasonable chance of cutting off CAs, while
b) also having a reasonable chance to evade DNs or SDs. (obviously any ship can build up a vector that doesn't let them evade an late detected enemy - but baring bad luck or poor scouting be able to evade)
5) For the RMN, have the endurance for lengthy unsupported cruises for the purpose of raiding enemy commerce and tertiary systems. (So large missile magazines, lots of stores, lots of fuel, etc)
6) Be big enough to accomplish all the above, while being no larger so that it is still affordable enough to build in numbers.
(And I'm probably forgetting some)
Some of those abilities are most easily met by a larger platform. If you make it bigger, it generally becomes tougher, can mount more missiles, more defenses, and more stores.
Others are most easily met by a smaller platform. Making it smaller makes it cheaper (allowing you more of them), and gives better acceleration (letting them better chase and flee).
So you're always trading off one against the other. Better compensators give better acceleration, but unless something else changes (or you're planning to exploit a presumably temporary tech edge) that doesn't automatically justify building larger. After all you don't want to count on the accel edge forever, and if everybody gets faster you're back to where you were.
The BC(P)S and BC(L)s grew larger because it was required to meet the new threat environment. In my opinion they'd have had to do that to remain viable even
if better compensators hadn't come along.
(Though it probably would have been amusing to have them able to crush any SLN ship they could catch, but only be able to run down DNs and SDs; because the SLN ships hadn't undergone the same growth spurt yet
)
