Convoy escorts - SPOILER for SNIPPET 8 of HFQ

pokermind wrote:You can always add one fore and aft here's a 10" fore and aft gun on turntable mount I designed for a USE ship in Eric Flint's 1632 verse.

<delete image>

Fore and aft guns below the fore and aft weather decks while main broad side armaments on same deck but out in the weather

Fore just bow mount should be able to be shoe horned in, and a 30 lb gun is much smaller than a ten inch gun. RFC I was showing a swivel mount I konow Kearsarge's two swivel guns were mounted amidships not in the bow. I was discussing a swivel gun in the bow for a schooner to provide chase armament and adding a larger gun to the broadside armament.

Poker

Look, there are all sorts of problems which people who are trying to figure out how to put heavy weapons on the Desnairian commerce-raiders are overlooking or ignoring.

Just for starters, you're trying to put ten pounds of . . . fertilizer into a five-pound bag. I will reiterate, these are small, fast, light displacement vessels. They are not 1,500-ton-plus frigates. That limits the weight of the guns they can carry. It's that simple.

Take the suggested pivot mount, for example. To make a pivot mount work, you have to have immensely strong bracing of the frame — and especially the deck beams — under the mount. The central pivot has to be heavily bushed, which requires a very heavy iron casting. The gun has to be long enough to take the muzzle outboard when it fires, or else you do this interesting little thing called setting fire to your own ship. To get that length of tube requires a heavy weapon. A heavy weapon requires a heavy carriage and heavy breeching, which — again — calls for heavy reinforcement of the vessel's structure.

In the Baltic during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, there were "galleys" armed with single heavy artillery pieces, usually fixed to fire only forward, and usually on skids rather than a conventional carriage. It was possible to mount such a weapon in an oared vessel of light displacement and shoal draft, but they were fair weather platforms in a body of water which is not exactly noted for the roughness of its average weather conditions. The majority of galleys – indeed, I'm tempted to say all of the galleys — which in Real World™ conditions mounted massive forward-firing batteries were built for Mediterrannean or Black Sea conditions, where (again) sea states were going to be very tame compared to typical Atlantic conditions. Among other things, that meant they could be built with different hull forms, much lower freeboards, and poorer stability than anything expected to survive outside the Strait of Gibraltar. Remember that during the Punic Wars virtually the entire Roman Navy was wiped out in a single storm; the galleys of Lepanto weren't a whole lot more stable and seaworthy than the Roman biremes and triremes.

On Safehold, galleys tended to be bigger — more like the "galleass" type, which was sort of a cross between a galley and an early galleon — but continued to carry no more than two masts and no headsails. That meant, among other things, that the weight of the foremast was farther aft and there was no bowsprit, which weighs about as much as the foremast on a typical sailing vessel. That both reduced weight forward substantially and cleared a firing arc which a sailing vessel simply does not possess. If you actually look at the bow chasers on most sailing vessels, you'll find that they don't actually fire directly ahead; instead, they fire either side of the bowsprit and headsails, which means a substantial portion of their firing arc is cut off, whereas a galley's forward batteries, with no rigging in the way, could actually fire at targets dead ahead of her.

(There's another, rather more esoteric difference between galleys and ships powered primarily by sail. Without going into all the abstruse details, when a ship is propelled by rowing, the oars tend to lift the bow. Sails, on the other hand, tend to drive the bow down, which decreases its effective buoyancy regardless of specific hull forms. As I say, it gets complicated, because certain sails will have a countervailing lifting effect under certain circumstances. Which sail does which varies with both weather conditions and the specifics of the ship's sail plan, however, and the rule of thumb that a sailing ship's propulsion drives her deeper into the water is going to govern under most circumstances.)

Another reason that galleys could carry heavy weapons forward was that in addition to a rather different distribution of internal weights as compared to a sailing vessel designed for oceanic conditions, the guns themselves were very crude. They were slow-firing, they had smaller crews than typical broadside-carriage mounted guns had a century or so later, and because they had no wheels on their carriages, they actually needed less room in which to recoil and damped recoil energy faster. The friction between the wheeless carriage and the deck braked weapon both more quickly and (contra intuitively) more gradually. On a wheeled carriage, the gun recoils relatively freely, with very little friction, until it hits the end of the breeching tackle, at which point all of the recoil energy which hasn't been absorbed by the sheer inertia of driving the gun back is transferred directly to the side of the ship in a single, massive shock. On a carriage without wheels, the entire bottom of the timber frame is in contact with the deck and friction begins adding itself to the weapon's inertia the instant it begins to recoil. What this means is that for a given weight of metal, a broadside weapon on a wheeled carriage — or in any other position on a wheeled carriage — requires a stronger structure in order to absorb the heavy jolt of recoil forces transferred abruptly to the fabric of the ship. The same thing is true with a pivot mount. Although the gun can be arranged to recoil on skids on the pivot (which helps), when that recoil energy is transferred to the ship far more of it is concentrated on the pivot pin of the mount, which is why the framing has to be so extraordinarily heavy under a pivot gun and why the pivot itself has to be so heavily bushed.

In order to build an effective oceanic commerce-raider, you have to produce a vessel which: (1) can survive typical "Atlantic" conditions and (2) is fast enough and handy enough to both overtake merchantmen and evade enemy warships or (3) powerful enough to defeat — easily — any convoy escorts/warships it's likely to encounter. (If it can't defeat the aforesaid escorts/warships without taking major damages and/or personnel losses of its own, it will be forced to return to base even if it scores a significant tactical victory. Sort of like what happened with Bismarck after she sank the Hood.) This means that you have to build either all-up Safehold "galleons" (i.e., vessels which are as powerful as the big American 44's of the War of 1812) or else small, agile, shallow draft, relatively cheap vessels (i.e., preferably schooners, but possibly 18- to 22-gun brigs). Anything which falls between those extremes is very poorly suited to the commerce-raiding role, and anything bigger than the galleon is going to be too slow in average wind conditions and far, far, far too expensive (and not in money alone) to be used in a guerre de course strategy in anything like useful numbers.

For all practical purposes, that means that any mainland-built commerce-raider is going to be no bigger than 500 to 800 tons at the outside. By the time that vessel is built, rigged, provisioned, and manned for any sort of extended operational endurance (especially if it's going to carry sufficient personnel to provide a useful number of prize crews), the space left over inside the hull for armament is going to be limited. By the time that vessel is designed for speed and maneuverability — even more important, in many ways, than armament for a commerce-raider — the tonnage and volume constraints get far worse because of the hull forms required to provide those qualities.

As far as mounting weapons "on the weather deck" and "on the main deck," you can't do that on a ship of this light a displacement. Even if you could, the "below the weather deck" mount would be maybe three feet above the waterline . . . which means that if the vessel heeled or rolled, the gun muzzles would be underwater and the ship would be filling through the open gunports, and that would be in calm weather.

A warship — for that matter, any ship — is a complete, complex package in which seaworthiness, stability, displacement, freeboard, weatherliness, speed, maneuverability, and armament are all vital components. This is especially true for any sail-powered warship, and no one's galleys on Old Earth were ever designed to survive in typical Atlantic conditions. For that matter, not even Charis' galleys were designed to do that on Safehold; they were simply designed to fight in heavier weather conditions than anyone else's. So comparisons between what might have been possible with a galley design using cruder guns on completely different mountings and a vessel intended to survive, maneuver, and (hopefully) fight in actual oceanic conditions are, to put it as simply as possible, meaningless.

You could, if you so chose, build a schooner with a pair of moderately heavy pivot-mounted muzzleloaders between the fore and mainmasts. You could probably get them all the way up to the Church's 28-pounders, which would permit you to fire a fairly anemic explosive shell. They would be usable only on the broadside, however, and they would eat up the tonnage needed for any useful broadside weapons, which means a commerce-raider so armed would be a sitting duck for any of the Charisian schooners (with carronade broadside armament and a single, conventional long gun on the pivot) it was likely to meet. It simply wouldn't have the weight and volume of fire to fend off the Charisian, and the rate of fire would be overwhelmingly in the Charisian's favor . . . not to mention the fact that all of the schooner's carronades would be capable of firing explosive shells — heavier explosive shells — once she got into range. And I should also point out that the difference between the effective range of long guns and carronades is nowhere near so great as the simple numbers might seem to indicate, and that the effective range comes down rather drastically as the size of the vessels mounting the weapons decreases and they become increasingly lively gun platforms. So, in theory, your 28-pounder would have a maximum range of about 2,500 yards compared to the carronade's maximum range of about 500 yards. In fact, the long gun would have an effective range of about 1,200-1.500 yards, and the carronade's maximum range would stay 500 yards, because the factors decreasing the long gun's range apply equally to both guns. That is, accuracy begins dropping off very steeply after about 500 yards . . . which happens to be the carronade's maximum range, anyway. Further, carronades tended to be more accurate across their range because the shorter gun tubes both allowed and required bores that were "truer" when the guns were reamed out at the foundry and they had reduced windage because (1) with the truer — and straighter — bores their tolerances could be made closer without risking a gun that "choked" on a mis-sized round shot once it began fouling in action and (2) additional care could be/was taken to make their shot as tight-fitting as possible to trap more of the propellant's powder behind it and improve accuracy specifically because they were shorter-raged.

What this means (he said, apologizing for the digression ) is that there are very few examples from Real World™ naval actions between similarly sized combatants in which an armament of long guns gave one of them a significant range and/or tactical advantage over the other. The most famous example of the weakness of a carronade armament against one of long guns was USS Essex's engagement in the War of 1812, which basically was fought out at anchor inside the harbor of Valparaíso against two opponents (HMS Phoebe and HMS Chubb:40x32-pounder carronades and 6 long 12s for the Americans versus 20 long 18-pounders, 10 long 9-pounders, 2 long 6-pounders, 18x32-pounder carronades, and 10x32-pounder carronades for the Brits). That is scarcely the model which is going to apply to a blue water commerce-raider on Safehold.

You folks are just going to have to trust me when I tell you that you cannot build a sail-powered pocket battleship. For that matter, the Germans' Real World™ pocket battleships turned out to be far less effective than their designers and proponents had hoped (or their adversaries had feared) they would be. In order for a commerce-raiding strategy to succeed, you must have presence over a wide area, and the investment in a ship large enough and powerful enough to carry the armaments people are suggesting will simply be too expensive in both time, money, materials, and weapons to permit that sort of presence.

The American privateers of the War of 1812 were as effective as they were primarily because, at the beginning of the war, the Brits were still tied down in European waters by the need to protect their commerce closer to home and worry about the French Navy. By 1814, when Napoleon had begun his involuntary vacation at Elba and the French Navy was no longer a problem, the privateers had been driven almost entirely from the seas by a combination of convoy tactics, aggressive "hunter killer" operations (as we'd probably call them today), a close blockade of the Chesapeake (where most of the privateers were built), and landing operations to burn privateers on the stocks and to eliminate the shipyards capable of building more of them. Great Britain never managed to completely eliminate them, but she certainly managed to transform them from a major threat into a minor (if occasionally painful) irritant.

The Church doesn't have the advantages which the Americans enjoyed in 1812-1813. The Desnairians and other mainland practitioners of guerre de course are much more in the position of the French in both the monarchy's and Napoleon's wars against the United Kingdom, and those strategies — while painful to the English and capable of constraining Britain's operations — were never decisive. It's extremely unlikely that the similar operations being carried out by Desnair will be any more successful (if as successful as) was the case for France. They do pose a significant threat to Charis' ability to support army operations on the mainland flexibly and efficiently, and they will have a major impact on the availability of Charisian naval forces for offensive operations in places like the Gulf of Dohlar, which is much farther from the decisive combat theaters. They will also constrain Charisian building, manning, and deployment strategies, and in proportion to the investment they require in men, money, and materials they are almost certainly the most cost effective means of attacking the commerce and maritime flexibility which are critical to Charis' success and survival.

The problem for the Desnairians is that the "most cost-effective" strategy is not necessarily the same thing as a winning strategy.

Edited because I realized I'd posted the wrong draft of the original post. What happens when little things like your daughters' volley ball team's end-of-season dinner intervenes.

runsforcelery wrote:SNIP

Edited because I realized I'd posted the wrong draft of the original post. What happens when little things like your daughters' volley ball team's end-of-season dinner intervenes.

I really appreciate these expositions - thanks

Hello RunsForCelery!

"Wow! Cool! Neat!"

Thanks very much for such an exposition on so many aspects of commerce warfare, it's fascinating.

The fate of the USS Essex immediately came to mind early in your comparison and I notice the USS Firefly, Captain Porter's next command, seems far closer to your Desnari commerce raiding schooner as it was a 300 ton brig of just 14 guns only 109 feet long etc.

However, I was under the impression that American privateers were still quite a nuisance in 1814, even in the Irish Sea; to wit tripling or quadrupling British marine insurance rates, if insurance could be found, due to greater losses than during just the Napoleonic wars [~1811, before the American 1812 war] while the rest of Europe was benefiting from the peace and resumption of trade, generating some internal political pressure to end the American war quickly, that among other things privateers had captured something like ~1350 ships, nearly all merchants and something like 24,000+ prisoners, roughly 4 times what the US Army captured, and while that may have been only ~2.5% of the British merchant fleet, it was far better than anyone else had ever done in tweaking the British Lion's tail.

Granted that reducing many of the privateer shipyards was one reason for the RN's ongoing Chesapeake Bay campaigns [echoed on Safehold], and the RN captured about half of the privateers or ships with 'letters of marque' [which were very easy for a merchant captain to get] most prizes were taken by 10% or less, echoing U-Boat experience.

Thus despite the end of Napoleon and the RN's ability to concentrate on the US, our privateers were still harassing British shipping even as Washington was being burned; Lloyd's reported 2 US Navy warships and several privateers had captured 108 British prizes that month alone, including even in the Thames estuary, with the year's total at or near the 400 of 1813, more than the 300 of 1812, though that was in just over 6 month's.

While news of the Treaty of Ghent reached most of the US by February 1815, the last privateers didn't return until June, with another 250 prizes for that near half-year!

So while the RN may have considered it successfully protected most of its convoys, losses to privateers were at best only about 1% in any single year; it obviously could have been much worse, pushing Britain to get the rest of Europe to condemn and end the practice in 1856.

L

runsforcelery wrote:

pokermind wrote:You can always add one fore and aft here's a 10" fore and aft gun on turntable mount I designed for a USE ship in Eric Flint's 1632 verse.

<delete image>

Fore and aft guns below the fore and aft weather decks while main broad side armaments on same deck but out in the weather

Fore just bow mount should be able to be shoe horned in, and a 30 lb gun is much smaller than a ten inch gun. RFC I was showing a swivel mount I konow Kearsarge's two swivel guns were mounted amidships not in the bow. I was discussing a swivel gun in the bow for a schooner to provide chase armament and adding a larger gun to the broadside armament.

Poker

Look, there are all sorts of problems which people who are trying to figure out how to put heavy weapons on the Desnairian commerce-raiders are overlooking or ignoring.

Just for starters, you're trying to put ten pounds of . . . fertilizer into a five-pound bag. I will reiterate, these are small, fast, light displacement vessels. They are not 1,500-ton-plus frigates. That limits the weight of the guns they can carry. It's that simple.

Take the suggested pivot mount, for example. To make a pivot mount work, you have to have immensely strong bracing of the frame — and especially the deck beams — under the mount. The central pivot has to be heavily bushed, which requires a very heavy iron casting. The gun has to be long enough to take the muzzle outboard when it fires, or else you do this interesting little thing called setting fire to your own ship. To get that length of tube requires a heavy weapon. A heavy weapon requires a heavy carriage and heavy breeching, which — again — calls for heavy reinforcement of the vessel's structure.

In the Baltic during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, there were "galleys" armed with single heavy artillery pieces, usually fixed to fire only forward, and usually on skids rather than a conventional carriage. It was possible to mount such a weapon in an oared vessel of light displacement and shoal draft, but they were fair weather platforms in a body of water which is not exactly noted for the roughness of its average weather conditions. The majority of galleys – indeed, I'm tempted to say all of the galleys — which in Real World™ conditions mounted massive forward-firing batteries were built for Mediterrannean or Black Sea conditions, where (again) sea states were going to be very tame compared to typical Atlantic conditions. Among other things, that meant they could be built with different hull forms, much lower freeboards, and poorer stability than anything expected to survive outside the Strait of Gibraltar. Remember that during the Punic Wars virtually the entire Roman Navy was wiped out in a single storm; the galleys of Lepanto weren't a whole lot more stable and seaworthy than the Roman biremes and triremes.

On Safehold, galleys tended to be bigger — more like the "galleass" type, which was sort of a cross between a galley and an early galleon — but continued to carry no more than two masts and no headsails. That meant, among other things, that the weight of the foremast was farther aft and there was no bowsprit, which weighs about as much as the foremast on a typical sailing vessel. That both reduced weight forward substantially and cleared a firing arc which a sailing vessel simply does not possess. If you actually look at the bow chasers on most sailing vessels, you'll find that they don't actually fire directly ahead; instead, they fire either side of the bowsprit and headsails, which means a substantial portion of their firing arc is cut off, whereas a galley's forward batteries, with no rigging in the way, could actually fire at targets dead ahead of her.

(There's another, rather more esoteric difference between galleys and ships powered primarily by sail. Without going into all the abstruse details, when a ship is propelled by rowing, the oars tend to lift the bow. Sails, on the other hand, tend to drive the bow down, which decreases its effective buoyancy regardless of specific hull forms. As I say, it gets complicated, because certain sails will have a countervailing lifting effect under certain circumstances. Which sail does which varies with both weather conditions and the specifics of the ship's sail plan, however, and the rule of thumb that a sailing ship's propulsion drives her deeper into the water is going to govern under most circumstances.)

Another reason that galleys could carry heavy weapons forward was that in addition to a rather different distribution of internal weights as compared to a sailing vessel designed for oceanic conditions, the guns themselves were very crude. They were slow-firing, they had smaller crews than typical broadside-carriage mounted guns had a century or so later, and because they had no wheels on their carriages, they actually needed less room in which to recoil and damped recoil energy faster. The friction between the wheeless carriage and the deck braked weapon both more quickly and (contra intuitively) more gradually. On a wheeled carriage, the gun recoils relatively freely, with very little friction, until it hits the end of the breeching tackle, at which point all of the recoil energy which hasn't been absorbed by the sheer inertia of driving the gun back is transferred directly to the side of the ship in a single, massive shock. On a carriage without wheels, the entire bottom of the timber frame is in contact with the deck and friction begins adding itself to the weapon's inertia the instant it begins to recoil. What this means is that for a given weight of metal, a broadside weapon on a wheeled carriage — or in any other position on a wheeled carriage — requires a stronger structure in order to absorb the heavy jolt of recoil forces transferred abruptly to the fabric of the ship. The same thing is true with a pivot mount. Although the gun can be arranged to recoil on skids on the pivot (which helps), when that recoil energy is transferred to the ship far more of it is concentrated on the pivot pin of the mount, which is why the framing has to be so extraordinarily heavy under a pivot gun and why the pivot itself has to be so heavily bushed.

In order to build an effective oceanic commerce-raider, you have to produce a vessel which: (1) can survive typical "Atlantic" conditions and (2) is fast enough and handy enough to both overtake merchantmen and evade enemy warships or (3) powerful enough to defeat — easily — any convoy escorts/warships it's likely to encounter. (If it can't defeat the aforesaid escorts/warships without taking major damages and/or personnel losses of its own, it will be forced to return to base even if it scores a significant tactical victory. Sort of like what happened with Bismarck after she sank the Hood.) This means that you have to build either all-up Safehold "galleons" (i.e., vessels which are as powerful as the big American 44's of the War of 1812) or else small, agile, shallow draft, relatively cheap vessels (i.e., preferably schooners, but possibly 18- to 22-gun brigs). Anything which falls between those extremes is very poorly suited to the commerce-raiding role, and anything bigger than the galleon is going to be too slow in average wind conditions and far, far, far too expensive (and not in money alone) to be used in a guerre de course strategy in anything like useful numbers.

For all practical purposes, that means that any mainland-built commerce-raider is going to be no bigger than 500 to 800 tons at the outside. By the time that vessel is built, rigged, provisioned, and manned for any sort of extended operational endurance (especially if it's going to carry sufficient personnel to provide a useful number of prize crews), the space left over inside the hull for armament is going to be limited. By the time that vessel is designed for speed and maneuverability — even more important, in many ways, than armament for a commerce-raider — the tonnage and volume constraints get far worse because of the hull forms required to provide those qualities.

As far as mounting weapons "on the weather deck" and "on the main deck," you can't do that on a ship of this light a displacement. Even if you could, the "below the weather deck" mount would be maybe three feet above the waterline . . . which means that if the vessel heeled or rolled, the gun muzzles would be underwater and the ship would be filling through the open gunports, and that would be in calm weather.

A warship — for that matter, any ship — is a complete, complex package in which seaworthiness, stability, displacement, freeboard, weatherliness, speed, maneuverability, and armament are all vital components. This is especially true for any sail-powered warship, and no one's galleys on Old Earth were ever designed to survive in typical Atlantic conditions. For that matter, not even Charis' galleys were designed to do that on Safehold; they were simply designed to fight in heavier weather conditions than anyone else's. So comparisons between what might have been possible with a galley design using cruder guns on completely different mountings and a vessel intended to survive, maneuver, and (hopefully) fight in actual oceanic conditions are, to put it as simply as possible, meaningless.

You could, if you so chose, build a schooner with a pair of moderately heavy pivot-mounted muzzleloaders between the fore and mainmasts. You could probably get them all the way up to the Church's 28-pounders, which would permit you to fire a fairly anemic explosive shell. They would be usable only on the broadside, however, and they would eat up the tonnage needed for any useful broadside weapons, which means a commerce-raider so armed would be a sitting duck for any of the Charisian schooners (with carronade broadside armament and a single, conventional long gun on the pivot) it was likely to meet. It simply wouldn't have the weight and volume of fire to fend off the Charisian, and the rate of fire would be overwhelmingly in the Charisian's favor . . . not to mention the fact that all of the schooner's carronades would be capable of firing explosive shells — heavier explosive shells — once she got into range. And I should also point out that the difference between the effective range of long guns and carronades is nowhere near so great as the simple numbers might seem to indicate, and that the effective range comes down rather drastically as the size of the vessels mounting the weapons decreases and they become increasingly lively gun platforms. So, in theory, your 28-pounder would have a maximum range of about 2,500 yards compared to the carronade's maximum range of about 500 yards. In fact, the long gun would have an effective range of about 1,200-1.500 yards, and the carronade's maximum range would stay 500 yards, because the factors decreasing the long gun's range apply equally to both guns. That is, accuracy begins dropping off very steeply after about 500 yards . . . which happens to be the carronade's maximum range, anyway. Further, carronades tended to be more accurate across their range because the shorter gun tubes both allowed and required bores that were "truer" when the guns were reamed out at the foundry and they had reduced windage because (1) with the truer — and straighter — bores their tolerances could be made closer without risking a gun that "choked" on a mis-sized round shot once it began fouling in action and (2) additional care could be/was taken to make their shot as tight-fitting as possible to trap more of the propellant's powder behind it and improve accuracy specifically because they were shorter-raged.

What this means (he said, apologizing for the digression ) is that there are very few examples from Real World™ naval actions between similarly sized combatants in which an armament of long guns gave one of them a significant range and/or tactical advantage over the other. The most famous example of the weakness of a carronade armament against one of long guns was USS Essex's engagement in the War of 1812, which basically was fought out at anchor inside the harbor of Valparaíso against two opponents (HMS Phoebe and HMS Chubb:40x32-pounder carronades and 6 long 12s for the Americans versus 20 long 18-pounders, 10 long 9-pounders, 2 long 6-pounders, 18x32-pounder carronades, and 10x32-pounder carronades for the Brits). That is scarcely the model which is going to apply to a blue water commerce-raider on Safehold.

You folks are just going to have to trust me when I tell you that you cannot build a sail-powered pocket battleship. For that matter, the Germans' Real World™ pocket battleships turned out to be far less effective than their designers and proponents had hoped (or their adversaries had feared) they would be. In order for a commerce-raiding strategy to succeed, you must have presence over a wide area, and the investment in a ship large enough and powerful enough to carry the armaments people are suggesting will simply be too expensive in both time, money, materials, and weapons to permit that sort of presence.

The American privateers of the War of 1812 were as effective as they were primarily because, at the beginning of the war, the Brits were still tied down in European waters by the need to protect their commerce closer to home and worry about the French Navy. By 1814, when Napoleon had begun his involuntary vacation at Elba and the French Navy was no longer a problem, the privateers had been driven almost entirely from the seas by a combination of convoy tactics, aggressive "hunter killer" operations (as we'd probably call them today), a close blockade of the Chesapeake (where most of the privateers were built), and landing operations to burn privateers on the stocks and to eliminate the shipyards capable of building more of them. Great Britain never managed to completely eliminate them, but she certainly managed to transform them from a major threat into a minor (if occasionally painful) irritant.

The Church doesn't have the advantages which the Americans enjoyed in 1812-1813. The Desnairians and other mainland practitioners of guerre de course are much more in the position of the French in both the monarchy's and Napoleon's wars against the United Kingdom, and those strategies — while painful to the English and capable of constraining Britain's operations — were never decisive. It's extremely unlikely that the similar operations being carried out by Desnair will be any more successful (if as successful as) was the case for France. They do pose a significant threat to Charis' ability to support army operations on the mainland flexibly and efficiently, and they will have a major impact on the availability of Charisian naval forces for offensive operations in places like the Gulf of Dohlar, which is much farther from the decisive combat theaters. They will also constrain Charisian building, manning, and deployment strategies, and in proportion to the investment they require in men, money, and materials they are almost certainly the most cost effective means of attacking the commerce and maritime flexibility which are critical to Charis' success and survival.

The problem for the Desnairians is that the "most cost-effective" strategy is not necessarily the same thing as a winning strategy.

Edited because I realized I'd posted the wrong draft of the original post. What happens when little things like your daughters' volley ball team's end-of-season dinner intervenes.

For the love of celery, snip long posts when you quote them!!!!

runsforcelery wrote:

pokermind wrote:You can always add one fore and aft here's a 10" fore and aft gun on turntable mount I designed for a USE ship in Eric Flint's 1632 verse.

<delete image>

Fore and aft guns below the fore and aft weather decks while main broad side armaments on same deck but out in the weather

Fore just bow mount should be able to be shoe horned in, and a 30 lb gun is much smaller than a ten inch gun. RFC I was showing a swivel mount I konow Kearsarge's two swivel guns were mounted amidships not in the bow. I was discussing a swivel gun in the bow for a schooner to provide chase armament and adding a larger gun to the broadside armament.

Poker

Look, there are all sorts of problems which people who are trying to figure out how to put heavy weapons on the Desnairian commerce-raiders are overlooking or ignoring.

Just for starters, you're trying to put ten pounds of . . . fertilizer into a five-pound bag. I will reiterate, these are small, fast, light displacement vessels. They are not 1,500-ton-plus frigates. That limits the weight of the guns they can carry. It's that simple.

Take the suggested pivot mount, for example. To make a pivot mount work, you have to have immensely strong bracing of the frame — and especially the deck beams — under the mount. The central pivot has to be heavily bushed, which requires a very heavy iron casting. The gun has to be long enough to take the muzzle outboard when it fires, or else you do this interesting little thing called setting fire to your own ship. To get that length of tube requires a heavy weapon. A heavy weapon requires a heavy carriage and heavy breeching, which — again — calls for heavy reinforcement of the vessel's structure.

snip

I can see ways you COULD cram the big chase gun onto one of these commerce raider hulls, the issue is that it is seriously not feasible.

the way you would have to do it would involve swapping out sections of wood hull for metal IE iron or steel, to get the required strength, (which would be heavy) the biggest problem is that the relevant mainland nations do not have the steel production it would require.

I just reread the series a couple weeks ago, and the mainland nations were trying to figure out a counter for the mortars using steel barrels because they were using cast iron for rifles barrels because they couldn't come up with the steel to make a useful amount of guns.

the fact of the matter really in a lot of ways is the mainland is still dealing with at a guess ~14th century iron and steel production technologies, while Charis (and soon Sidermark is working with ~18-19th century iron and steel production technologies. Obviously with some kinks thrown in.

My point is that the church and the loyalists are still working with iron foundries that are making batches of iron best measured in lbs (it may be 10's and hundreds of lbs per batch but still. )

Charis is now making batches of iron (especially in the Howsmith foundries) that its practical to measure in tons per batch, and they are using a few tricks from modern steel production.

at least that was my impression.

the other thing that just came out was the suggestion of introducing air tooling vs electrical or steam, as an upgrade from old fashioned belt and shaft drive tooling.

and just thinking about that gave me a "mind blown" moment because I can actually vaguely imagine just how much its going to boost the Charisan Empire's production once all those tools come fully online.

To give an example that others can visualize think of trying to shape a part with a chisel, and file vs using an air powered grinder...
the chisel and file person might take over an hour to do 1 part, the grinder person is going to do the same part in say under 10 minutes. and they can apply those advantages pretty soon at multiple levels of their manufacturing process if not all of it.

Guardiandashi wrote:

I can see ways you COULD cram the big chase gun onto one of these commerce raider hulls, the issue is that it is seriously not feasible.

the way you would have to do it would involve swapping out sections of wood hull for metal IE iron or steel, to get the required strength, (which would be heavy) the biggest problem is that the relevant mainland nations do not have the steel production it would require.

I just reread the series a couple weeks ago, and the mainland nations were trying to figure out a counter for the mortars using steel barrels because they were using cast iron for rifles barrels because they couldn't come up with the steel to make a useful amount of guns.

the fact of the matter really in a lot of ways is the mainland is still dealing with at a guess ~14th century iron and steel production technologies, while Charis (and soon Sidermark is working with ~18-19th century iron and steel production technologies. Obviously with some kinks thrown in.

My point is that the church and the loyalists are still working with iron foundries that are making batches of iron best measured in lbs (it may be 10's and hundreds of lbs per batch but still. )

Charis is now making batches of iron (especially in the Howsmith foundries) that its practical to measure in tons per batch, and they are using a few tricks from modern steel production.

at least that was my impression.

the other thing that just came out was the suggestion of introducing air tooling vs electrical or steam, as an upgrade from old fashioned belt and shaft drive tooling.

and just thinking about that gave me a "mind blown" moment because I can actually vaguely imagine just how much its going to boost the Charisan Empire's production once all those tools come fully online.

To give an example that others can visualize think of trying to shape a part with a chisel, and file vs using an air powered grinder...
the chisel and file person might take over an hour to do 1 part, the grinder person is going to do the same part in say under 10 minutes. and they can apply those advantages pretty soon at multiple levels of their manufacturing process if not all of it.

Actually, you still couldn't cram any useful number of them into a hull the size of the ones we're describing. It's not just a factor of how heavily built the hull is, although that's certainly a factor. It's also a matter of how much displacement you have to support the weight of the gun itself and how that affects stability, freeboard, and seaworthiness. There's simply an upper limit on how much weight of armament you can load aboard the ship.

Your estimates for steel production on the mainland are low. I've said this again and again, but Safeholdians aren't really working with the fourteenth century technology that people seem to believe they are working with. They been producing crucible steel in relatively small lots but iron in quantities much more comparable to the levels of the early eighteenth century even before Howsmyn came along and began pushing iron production upward. For example, go back and take a look in one of the earlier books (to be honest, I don't remember exactly which one at the moment) and you'll see a reference to "black heart" iron. This is something that we didn't see much of in the Real World™ until the late seventeenth century, although it had been around for hundreds of years prior to that in small quantities. It's also called "malleable iron," and it is actually superior to wrought iron in some respects. The first quantity production of it in the United States wasn't until sometime in the first couple of decades of the nineteenth century (I'd have to go check to nail it down any closer than that), and it never actually supplanted cast iron ("white" iron) or wrought iron because the annealing process required a very experienced ironmaster and very close judgment of temperatures. Safehold has "black heart" iron, in addition to cast iron, production on a quantity basis (albeit relatively load quantities). I mention this not to indicate that they are producing sixteen million tons of iron a year but simply as an indication of the sophistication of their "do it by rote" technological capabilities even before Howsmyn, Merlin, and Owl are added to the mix. The difference between the starting platforms readers seem to be assuming — fourteenth century, for example — and the starting platforms Safehold actually has is the true basis for the . . . optimistic assumptions about industrialization rates I've made throughout the series.

As for the advantages of the machine tools available to Charis, and that instance your suggested example of the multiplier effect is actually substantially lower than the reality. The waterpowered machinery Howsmyn had already come up with, complete with all of the drive shafts and transmission belts, had already improved the productivity of his workforce by somewhere around 300-350%, by my estimate. Note that in this case I'm talking about things like machining operations on a per-man-hour basis, not things like iron and steel production, mining production, et cetera, where the increase is actually considerably higher even than that. What the new machinery is going to do is to permit him to incorporate that level of per-man-hour productivity increase into every stage of the production process, rather than restricting it to a few centralized stations in each manufactory. And what that means is that it will probably improve his current (as in immediately prior to the introduction of the pneumatic machine tools) production rate by almost as much as that rate had already improved his pre-waterpowered production rates. In other words, by my estimate, a single manufactory worker in one of Howsmyn's facilities is going to be as productive as around 12 workers in a pre-Howsmyn manufactory. When you add that to the sheer scale of his enterprises, you begin to understand how Charis can hope to stay ahead of the curve. It should be noted, however, that this same metric indicates that 12 workers in a Mainland manufactory could equal the production of one worker in a Howsmyn manufactory, and the Mainland still has a vast advantage in total manpower. Of course, that advantage is eroding with the loss of Siddarmark, but because of Clyntahn's pre-jihad pathological suspicion of Siddarmark, Siddarmark was never really involved in the Church's tooling up process except as a provider of raw materials. That means, of course, that the loss of the Republic hasn't had a significant impact on the Church's available labor force.

All of this stuff is noodling around in the back of my brain when I look at the economic, industrial, and military power of the opponents fighting one another on Safehold. The degree to which it makes it into the books in the infamous "info dumps" is another matter, of course. In fact, it's interesting to me that despite my tendency to "info dump," so many readers continue to assume a fundamentally lower starting tech level for Safehold than I have attempted to make clear from the beginning the planet actually possesses.

Hmmmmmmmmmmmm . . . maybe a 150,000-word info dump for the next book . . . .

Yeah! That'd work!

lyonheart wrote:Hello RunsForCelery!

"Wow! Cool! Neat!"

Thanks very much for such an exposition on so many aspects of commerce warfare, it's fascinating.

The fate of the USS Essex immediately came to mind early in your comparison and I notice the USS Firefly, Captain Porter's next command, seems far closer to your Desnari commerce raiding schooner as it was a 300 ton brig of just 14 guns only 109 feet long etc.

However, I was under the impression that American privateers were still quite a nuisance in 1814, even in the Irish Sea; to wit tripling or quadrupling British marine insurance rates, if insurance could be found, due to greater losses than during just the Napoleonic wars [~1811, before the American 1812 war] while the rest of Europe was benefiting from the peace and resumption of trade, generating some internal political pressure to end the American war quickly, that among other things privateers had captured something like ~1350 ships, nearly all merchants and something like 24,000+ prisoners, roughly 4 times what the US Army captured, and while that may have been only ~2.5% of the British merchant fleet, it was far better than anyone else had ever done in tweaking the British Lion's tail.

Granted that reducing many of the privateer shipyards was one reason for the RN's ongoing Chesapeake Bay campaigns [echoed on Safehold], and the RN captured about half of the privateers or ships with 'letters of marque' [which were very easy for a merchant captain to get] most prizes were taken by 10% or less, echoing U-Boat experience.

Thus despite the end of Napoleon and the RN's ability to concentrate on the US, our privateers were still harassing British shipping even as Washington was being burned; Lloyd's reported 2 US Navy warships and several privateers had captured 108 British prizes that month alone, including even in the Thames estuary, with the year's total at or near the 400 of 1813, more than the 300 of 1812, though that was in just over 6 month's.

While news of the Treaty of Ghent reached most of the US by February 1815, the last privateers didn't return until June, with another 250 prizes for that near half-year!

So while the RN may have considered it successfully protected most of its convoys, losses to privateers were at best only about 1% in any single year; it obviously could have been much worse, pushing Britain to get the rest of Europe to condemn and end the practice in 1856.

L

Ah, I trust you did note the part where I said (emphasis added):

runsforcelery wrote:The American privateers of the War of 1812 were as effective as they were primarily because, at the beginning of the war, the Brits were still tied down in European waters by the need to protect their commerce closer to home and worry about the French Navy. By 1814, when Napoleon had begun his involuntary vacation at Elba and the French Navy was no longer a problem, the privateers had been driven almost entirely from the seas by a combination of convoy tactics, aggressive "hunter killer" operations (as we'd probably call them today), a close blockade of the Chesapeake (where most of the privateers were built), and landing operations to burn privateers on the stocks and to eliminate the shipyards capable of building more of them. Great Britain never managed to completely eliminate them, but she certainly managed to transform them from a major threat into a minor (if occasionally painful) irritant.

So just where, exactly, did I say in any of this that the American privateers weren't still taking plenty of prizes in 1814? It's true that the tempo of American privateering in 1814 was higher than in 1813, but the privateers who were doing all of that privateering were primarily the ones which had been built and gotten to sea in 1813 or earlier. That is, the Brits had largely succeeded in choking off the flow of new privateers, and they were steadily whittling down the numbers of existing privateers, which means that the rate of increase was actually dropping even as the absolute number of prizes went up. Moreover, the number of prizes taken per privateer was declining radically. The privateers who took the vast majority of the prizes after mid-1813 were purpose-built ships like Rattlesnake and Prince de Neufchateau — big (relatively) and powerfully armed schooners, for the most part, built on the "Baltimore clipper" model more often than not — and very few more of them were getting to sea. Had the war continued into 1815 or later, even fewer of them would have gotten to sea. One of the primary reasons for the attack on New Orleans was to neutralize the city as a base for privateers, since it was much more difficult to seal off all the various passes out of the mouth of the Mississippi River than it was to blockade the Chesapeake. (That threat to his financial prosperity was one of the big reasons Jean Lafite turned to to help defend the city, after all.) It failed, but I strongly suspect that had the war continued it would have been attempted a second time, possibly successfully, or else the Brits would have seized island bases or enclaves along the Gulf coast — rather as the Federal Navy did with Biloxi during the Civil War — to use as bases to interdict privateers operating out of the river. None of that really affects the sense of what I said about the effectiveness of the American privateers or their ability to pose a "major threat" beyond 1814, however.

I'm unclear as to whether or not your conclusion that "it obviously could have been much worse" is an indication that you feel the Brits weren't actually getting on top of the situation (as I believe they were) or if you are saying that the level of threat to Britain "could have been much worse" if the Royal Navy hadn't been getting on top of it. In either case, my conclusion that all of the privateers moving against British commerce in 1814 were merely "a minor (if occasionally painful) irritant" stands, as does the validity of my analogy between the fact that the British were never significantly handicapped in their military or commercial operations against the United States in the course of the war by American commerce-raiders. The protests of the merchants of the City of London are an example of the way in which an asymmetrical campaign attacks not the fundamental ability of a more powerful opponent to conduct successful military operations but rather the willingness of that more powerful opponent to do so. Neither the American privateers nor the Church privateers represent (or represented) the sort of existential threat to their opponents which the U-boats presented to England in both world wars.

Which is rather the point I was attempting to make.

runsforcelery wrote:
Hmmmmmmmmmmmm . . . maybe a 150,000-word info dump for the next book . . . .

Yeah! That'd work!

You shouldn't make suggestions like that here. We would agree. It probably wouldn't help the book reviews though. The last one I read complained the concerto wasn't too good, when she was reading a symphony with full orchestration.

Had the war continued into 1815 or later, even fewer of them would have gotten to sea.

Hm, but would Royal Navy be able to mantain the close blockade? After all, in 1815 the US navy would have his first ship-of-the-line in comission, and probably the construction of "Demologos" would be finished (and she was a pretty good reason not to mantain the blockade close to shore, after all!).

Dilandu wrote:

Had the war continued into 1815 or later, even fewer of them would have gotten to sea.

Hm, but would Royal Navy be able to mantain the close blockade? After all, in 1815 the US navy would have his first ship-of-the-line in comission, and probably the construction of "Demologos" would be finished (and she was a pretty good reason not to mantain the blockade close to shore, after all!).

The RN knew about the USN plans, and the chances of the US liners accomplishing much in 1815-16 wasn't all that great. They were very powerful ships, but they also suffered from low freeboard (their lower gunports were all but useless in a seaway), and the biggest of them were being built on the Great Lakes, where they would have been . . . less than useful. The Brits had scads of experience with blockading French and Spanish seaports (each of which contained several times as many liners as the entire US building program), and with Canada and Bermuda they had bases plenty close enough to keep an eye on the ports where the US liners might be found. Besides, the US ships were being built in ports scattered along the Eastern seaboard; each of them could have been sat upon by a single squadron of British liners without too much trouble. As for the Brits' ability to keep an eye on American ports, look what happened when Decatur tried to take President to sea late in the war.

As for Demologos, I realize you're a technophile , but the odds of her being completed and being sufficiently decisive to lift the blockade of New York (as opposed to materially aiding in New York's defense) was . . . slim, let us say.

Nope, if the war had continued past 1815, the British experience in exerting sea control would have put extremely heavy pressure on the US, and it would have taken years for the USN to build up a battle fleet capable of meeting the RN at sea or breaking a systematic blockade of the East Coast. Exactly what all the ramifications of a long war might have been is impossible to say, of course, and it's a fascinating what-if question, but ultimately it was unlikely the war would have ended any way except the way it did, absent Napoleon's successful return to power.

The key point was that Britain accepted that it wasn't going to defeat the US in North America, and that acceptance stemmed in no small part from the Duke of Wellington's declining to accept the North American command and pointing out that the US really offered no single, clear target which would force the Americans to give in. After all, England had already taken and burned the US capital and the stupid Yankees had declined to surrender.