Dilandu wrote:runsforcelery wrote:
When Rock Point thinks about tying down half the navy, he's talking about numbers of hulls, not tonnage, and so long as the attackers and the targets are wind powered, there's really no need to add screw-driven ships to the mix. Would they be nice to have? Sure they would! Are they necessary? Not so much.
I disagree. The sail ships is always controlled by wind, so they have (from the steamships point of view) enormous problem with maneuvr. The lesser quantity of screw ships would do the job of much greater number of sailing units.
And after all, the screw gunboats are nessesary for coastal operations. You may go in coastal war without battleships. But without gunboats? No, no and with all respect - no.
Add 10-12 carronades to, say, one merchy out of three in each convoy as a backup threat to the raiders, and the problem gets a lot more manageable.
Er, against the Church long guns (possibly with shells)? With all respect, the carronades became useless as soon as shell guns appeared and make possible to destroy the wooden ships with only long-range hits.
Escorts have to be big enough to make success against them problematical for the raiders.
Er, for what reason? One screw gunboat with a few of rifled guns would be able to deal with almost any number of sail shooners or galleons.
At the moment, steam and armor are more vital to the ships expected to engage shore targets or enemy "line-of-battle" ships, and that's where their emphasis is likely to be placed for the foreseeable future.
Well, probably this is inevitably for any navy, that live on principle "
let's put all eggs in one big backet" - for example, a KH basket - instead of building a reasonable number of middle and light units first.
(Please, forgive me that pun, but the situation was so magnificent, than to miss the opportunity would be unthinkable
)
As i recall, in Crimean War the Russian Empire definitely wasn't a industrial superpower, and in therms of productional capabilites was probably no more than Charis. But... she was able to build forty screw gunboats in less than a year.
Okay, are you even remotely considering the nature of the
threat when you start prescribing the best
defense?
The Desnairian raiders are
light craft. That means schooners and brigs, not galleons, and that means that they are
not going to be armed with long guns capable of firing explosive shells. They don't have the displacement to carry them. So that means that they are going to be firing either carronades (which means they have to come into range of other carronades) or else they're going to be firing solid shot from long range, probably from 12-pounders or lighter, and not even the Charisians have produced explosive shells for smoothbore muzzleloaders that like. They might —
might — have one or two heavier long guns, but they aren't going to be any heavier than, say, 24-pounders, nor do they have to be any heavier than that to deal with most merchantmen.
As far as sailing ships always being controlled by the wind, so are the
attackers.
The Royal British Navy understood convoy escort tactics under sail very well, and they did it very effectively.
For a large convoy, you assign one or two powerful cruisers — frigates or, in the case of Safehold, galleons armed on two decks — supported by a larger number of light cruisers — brigs, small ship sloops, or, in the case of Safehold, schooners. The heavy ships are held to windward of the convoy, placed to intercept any attacker running down on the wind and, if necessary, to themselves sail downwind
through the convoy to deal with the highly unlikely (indeed, outright bizarre) possibility of an attacker trying to beat up to windward to engage the convoy. Any of these heavy ships would be able to deal with
any attacker the Desnairians or anyone else could
conceivably get to sea, and the Charisians have scores of them that don't currently have a wooden battle fleet to fight.
The light ships (the schooners) are distributed more widely about the convoy to play sheepdog and keep a lookout for potential threats. (Given the speed of sailing vessels, under most conditions of visibility where the raiders are likely to spot the convoy, they should themselves be spotted hours before they can actually attack.) The majority of the light ships will also be held to windward of the convoy, however,
because that's the only axis from which a realistic threat can be posed. Assuming that they are at least as maneuverable as their opponents (and, in fact, they will almost invariably be
more maneuverable, given the designs and the crews involved), the only way that an attacker is going to get past them is to provide more attack platforms than the escorts can intercept — that is, to swamp them through sheer force of numbers. That's unlikely to happen to any future convoys, assuming the Charisians organize moderately large ones, for a lot of reasons, but it conceivably could. It
is what happened to the convoy Rock Point is thinking about, but that convoy was organized before the nature of the Desnairian threat, and its escort was both understrength
and taken by surprise by the number of attackers. In the less than likely eventuality that the escorts of some future convoy are similarly swamped, the merchantmen in the convoy who are equipped with carronades and naval gun crews to man them provide a backstop to the escorts. They constitute "armed merchant cruisers," if you will, embedded in the convoy proper, and a carronade armament would pose a major threat to any light cruiser Desnair is capable of building.
These are well understood, highly effective tactics for commerce protection of
convoys. The real threat of the commerce-raiding tactics being adopted by someone like Desnair isn't to escorted convoys (under normal circumstances); it's too ships sailing
individually, and that's what makes the strategy dangerous to Charis and Siddarmark. By forcing Charis to concentrate shipping in the convoys which can be escorted, the entire Charisian merchant fleet — and its ability to support the Army's logistics — is significantly compromised at a time when that logistic support is particularly critical. This means that Charis needs to be able to organize the largest possible number of adequately escorted convoys, since each of those convoys can then be
smaller (since there will be larger numbers of convoys, there need to be fewer hulls in each of them), which will restore necessary flexibility to shipping schedules. That means that it is far wiser of Charis to rely on the sail-powered escorts she already has rather than build a
much smaller number of more efficient steam-powered escorts
which can then escort a much smaller number of convoys. Commerce protection is all about
numbers and how broadly the escorts can be deployed, not brute firepower and tactical superiority concentrated in a far smaller number of places simultaneously.
Why in the world would the Imperial Charisian Navy divert steam-powered vessels to a task which can be adequately performed by sailing vessels when they have a multitude — indeed, a plethora — of
sail-powered vessels
already in commission which can be immediately assigned to the task? Would steam powered ships be more efficient? Of course they would. Assuming, of course, that you built a steam-powered ship with sails to give it the endurance to stay with a convoy of sailing ships, in which case you have to get into lifting screws or else have a vessel
which can't keep up with the convoy under normal sail conditions because of the drag of its propeller. But
efficiency isn't necessarily the same thing as
adequacy, and the emphasis of the Imperial Charisian Navy's modern, powerful vessels is going to be on crushing powerful, concentrated opposition (whether afloat or ashore) where armor and gunpower are going to be absolutely at a premium while the ships which are far less capable of facing that kind of opposition — but are fully capable of dealing with any force of commerce-raiders ever built on Safehold — get on with the task of protecting commerce.
Frankly, this is a no-brainer from the Charisian perspective.
