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SLN Reserve

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Re: SLN Reserve
Post by Theemile   » Mon Mar 20, 2017 1:03 pm

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Somtaaw wrote:
Jonathan_S wrote:First I think you're slightly underrating the warheads on LAC missiles - they're going to be dangerous to at least a CL and probably a CA.
But even against and SD, where I agree they're not going to get hits against it's vitals, you can still seriously reduce it's effectiveness with non-penetrating hits. It isn't only drive nodes that can't be armored. The sensor arrays are surface mounted, as are fire control links, and PDLCs. Weapons hatches are armored, but direct hits are likely to render that weapon at least temporarily out of action - by jamming the cover closed if nothing else.

So enough pin pricks can send even a mighty SD back to the yards to get it's exterior mounts repaired or replaced.


But Theemile has a good point about LACs normally being used to augment heavier defensive forces. The missiles from the LAC might not be able to hit an SD's vitals, but even before they start hitting and eroding your point defense and tracking capabilities they tend to obscure the bigger nasties capital missiles that the system's forts, moon bases, or own SDs might be throwing.

Yes, given a little time, you can distinguish between them. But the one-shot swarm of LAC missiles can still make it harder to stop the enemies first wave of heavy missiles. And if they hit and degrade the sensors and point defense, well, that just gives the defenders a better chance of winning the missile fight and causing the attackers to break off before the clash of energy range combat.



All that side mounted fire control is protected by the sidewalls. And LAC missiles were/are tiny, and prior to the Trojan series, can't possibly have had warheads larger than a megaton or two (after all, Manticore Mark 16's as last as 1909 were only 15 Mtons, and those are cruiser weight)

Even assuming you launch at point blank, look how easily CA Fearless and CL Apollo just ate up the missiles 3 LAC's launched. Would have been even more efficient if McKeon's destroyer Troubadour had involved in the missile defense, but at that time he was too far forward, and busy rolling ship to avoid the low beam count (I'd have to double check, but out of the 3 shots, only 1 hit wasnt it?)

Even with enourmous numbers of LAC's, you'd have to get quite a few missiles through the active defenses, and up-the-kilt or down-the-throat to actually deal damage to anything more important than superficial armor damage on the hammerheads. Which after all, are the second most heavily armored portion of a warship, after the broadsides.

I might be able to grant LAC's beams might still be a threat to light cruisers, but heavy cruisers and up would be for all intents just about immune to LAC's. Their sidewalls are just too powerful for most LAC weapons (don't remember if Fearless managed to get sidewalls up in Grayson against the Masadan LACs). Even with crossing the T, LAC's would die in swarms to the heavy hammerhead defenses and they still aren't guaranteed to get those "golden BB" node hits.

By the time you involve capital ships of battlecruiser or larger, they actually almost could totally ignore LAC's as long as they keep doing minor course corrections to prevent a LAC from trying to slip inside their wedge for missile launches on their drive nodes from inside the wedge/sidewalls.


You forget that prior to 1880, combat was done with contact nukes. Even DD scale missiles carried contact nukes larger than the Tzar Bomba, so if any missile got through, it was going to do serious damage. Also, not all LACS carried wimpy missiles, some designs carried Capital class missiles. These "eggshells armed with sledgehammers" carried fewer missiles in the trade off for more effective missiles.

Essentially, LACS were the 19th century PD missile pods. They were the only way to get thickened salvos out into mobile combat. In mobile combat, they were cheap attrition units which could be used to overwhelm a target with numbers and multiple firing angles.

A trio of LACS could salvo 15-30 missiles (twice), enough to overwhelm many point defenses, so they were a threat that had to be respected when they were deployed with other units.
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RFC said "refitting a Beowulfan SD to Manticoran standards would be just as difficult as refitting a standard SLN SD to those standards. In other words, it would be cheaper and faster to build new ships."
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Re: SLN Reserve
Post by Tenshinai   » Mon Mar 20, 2017 2:29 pm

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You forget that prior to 1880, combat was done with contact nukes. Even DD scale missiles carried contact nukes larger than the Tzar Bomba, so if any missile got through, it was going to do serious damage. Also, not all LACS carried wimpy missiles, some designs carried Capital class missiles. These "eggshells armed with sledgehammers" carried fewer missiles in the trade off for more effective missiles.

Essentially, LACS were the 19th century PD missile pods. They were the only way to get thickened salvos out into mobile combat. In mobile combat, they were cheap attrition units which could be used to overwhelm a target with numbers and multiple firing angles.

A trio of LACS could salvo 15-30 missiles (twice), enough to overwhelm many point defenses, so they were a threat that had to be respected when they were deployed with other units.


Exactly. And in a system with a MAJOR SLN base, and probably far beyond 10B population, there´s likely to be MANY LACs as part of the in-system forces.

So, even if each base with a BF reserve only has a single active squadron of SD/DN in defense, adding 2-4 dozen LACs to that makes for a crapload of extra punch.
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Re: SLN Reserve
Post by saber964   » Tue Mar 21, 2017 6:57 pm

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If you want an idea of where SLN reserve fleets are likely located look to current day for probable answers. Th U.S. maintains its reserve fleets on or near major naval bases. IIRC currently the USNDRF maintains reserve fleets at

West Lock Pearl Harbor HI
Bremerton WA
Sansune Bay CA (located north end of SF bay)
James River VA
Beaumont TX(?)
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Re: SLN Reserve
Post by Somtaaw   » Wed Mar 22, 2017 9:13 am

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saber964 wrote:If you want an idea of where SLN reserve fleets are likely located look to current day for probable answers. Th U.S. maintains its reserve fleets on or near major naval bases. IIRC currently the USNDRF maintains reserve fleets at

West Lock Pearl Harbor HI
Bremerton WA
Sansune Bay CA (located north end of SF bay)
James River VA
Beaumont TX(?)



It's a really massive stretch to assume that the SLN would operate even remotely like the real USN does. After all, the USN doesn't have a "reserve" fleet 50% larger than it's entire active navy :roll:

Between that Active:Reserve ratio, and the attitude of Battle Fleet to Frontier Fleet, let alone the Battle Fleet to SDF, I can't actually see Battle Fleet putting the majority of it's bases in someone else's star systems.

With how they've been ignoring the Constitution, the first base or two would be in someone else's star system, but the majority are going to be in unclaimed space, which would make that system owned entirely by the Federal Government, without some bothersome (and nosy) local amateurs to bring attention to allegedly active squadrons that should be manned, and aren't.
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Re: SLN Reserve
Post by Somtaaw   » Wed Mar 22, 2017 9:26 am

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Theemile wrote:
Somtaaw wrote:
All that side mounted fire control is protected by the sidewalls. And LAC missiles were/are tiny, and prior to the Trojan series, can't possibly have had warheads larger than a megaton or two (after all, Manticore Mark 16's as last as 1909 were only 15 Mtons, and those are cruiser weight)

Even assuming you launch at point blank, look how easily CA Fearless and CL Apollo just ate up the missiles 3 LAC's launched. Would have been even more efficient if McKeon's destroyer Troubadour had involved in the missile defense, but at that time he was too far forward, and busy rolling ship to avoid the low beam count (I'd have to double check, but out of the 3 shots, only 1 hit wasnt it?)

Even with enourmous numbers of LAC's, you'd have to get quite a few missiles through the active defenses, and up-the-kilt or down-the-throat to actually deal damage to anything more important than superficial armor damage on the hammerheads. Which after all, are the second most heavily armored portion of a warship, after the broadsides.

I might be able to grant LAC's beams might still be a threat to light cruisers, but heavy cruisers and up would be for all intents just about immune to LAC's. Their sidewalls are just too powerful for most LAC weapons (don't remember if Fearless managed to get sidewalls up in Grayson against the Masadan LACs). Even with crossing the T, LAC's would die in swarms to the heavy hammerhead defenses and they still aren't guaranteed to get those "golden BB" node hits.

By the time you involve capital ships of battlecruiser or larger, they actually almost could totally ignore LAC's as long as they keep doing minor course corrections to prevent a LAC from trying to slip inside their wedge for missile launches on their drive nodes from inside the wedge/sidewalls.


You forget that prior to 1880, combat was done with contact nukes. Even DD scale missiles carried contact nukes larger than the Tzar Bomba, so if any missile got through, it was going to do serious damage. Also, not all LACS carried wimpy missiles, some designs carried Capital class missiles. These "eggshells armed with sledgehammers" carried fewer missiles in the trade off for more effective missiles.

Essentially, LACS were the 19th century PD missile pods. They were the only way to get thickened salvos out into mobile combat. In mobile combat, they were cheap attrition units which could be used to overwhelm a target with numbers and multiple firing angles.

A trio of LACS could salvo 15-30 missiles (twice), enough to overwhelm many point defenses, so they were a threat that had to be respected when they were deployed with other units.



Ok, I can concede LAC's might possibly have had slightly larger warheads than the laserhead's Manticore (or Haven) were fielding in their light warships. But they had to give up their "missile swarm" to do so, if I recall there was a passage in either HotQ or HAE, that said LAC's gave up multiple missile cells to get single better performing missiles.

So let's be generous, and say each LAC normally has Patriot 3x3 missile cells for it's small, underperforming missiles. And since they were broadside combatants, and they were certainly less than 500m in length, 5 or 6 cells per broadside? To get the larger contact nukes, they'd give up a considerable amount of 'decoys', not to mention a lot of the swarm factor if each LAC that changes to pure large contact nukes is only providing the same missile count as an all up destroyer, for virtually the same crew count, while being far more easily killed.

I just have a little trouble figuring how LAC's could be associated with essentially being living missile pods given the size of missiles, whether laserhead or contact nuke. Especially since it took until OBS for even Manticore to start engineering small enough that a single missile could act in both contact nuke and laserhead roles right? And we have textev that a single missile for that CL Fearless, which should be the same size for destroyers (and LACs), was at least 60+ tons, when one broke loose on Harkness and crushed MacBride's pelvis [or am I confusing OBS with HotQ?]

If small boom/burns were that big, then even a LAC isn't going to field more than perhaps 12 between both broadsides, which wasn't going to be a significant combat multiplier to having another all-up destroyer firing almost as many, but having a higher survival rate.
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Re: SLN Reserve
Post by Jonathan_S   » Wed Mar 22, 2017 10:39 am

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Somtaaw wrote:Ok, I can concede LAC's might possibly have had slightly larger warheads than the laserhead's Manticore (or Haven) were fielding in their light warships. But they had to give up their "missile swarm" to do so, if I recall there was a passage in either HotQ or HAE, that said LAC's gave up multiple missile cells to get single better performing missiles.

So let's be generous, and say each LAC normally has Patriot 3x3 missile cells for it's small, underperforming missiles. And since they were broadside combatants, and they were certainly less than 500m in length, 5 or 6 cells per broadside? To get the larger contact nukes, they'd give up a considerable amount of 'decoys', not to mention a lot of the swarm factor if each LAC that changes to pure large contact nukes is only providing the same missile count as an all up destroyer, for virtually the same crew count, while being far more easily killed.

I just have a little trouble figuring how LAC's could be associated with essentially being living missile pods given the size of missiles, whether laserhead or contact nuke. Especially since it took until OBS for even Manticore to start engineering small enough that a single missile could act in both contact nuke and laserhead roles right? And we have textev that a single missile for that CL Fearless, which should be the same size for destroyers (and LACs), was at least 60+ tons, when one broke loose on Harkness and crushed MacBride's pelvis [or am I confusing OBS with HotQ?]

If small boom/burns were that big, then even a LAC isn't going to field more than perhaps 12 between both broadsides, which wasn't going to be a significant combat multiplier to having another all-up destroyer firing almost as many, but having a higher survival rate.

You're underselling the LAC's missile loadout significantly.

House of Steel shows that the final old-style LAC Manticore built, the Highlander-class, in fact mounted a pair of 6-cell one-shot launchers on each broadside - 12 missiles per broadside; 24 total. Even the missile-heavy RHN Bastogne-class DD's only mount 8, and the next highest I see on a DD is a 6 missile broadside.
Heck, until the Star Knight and Mars class CAs even heavy cruisers didn't mount close to 12 missiles per broadside.

And Jayne's says the Peep's Program-13 LAC actually mounted 14 [edit: 16] missiles per broadside.


Sure, like a pod they were single shot launchers so once you've dumped both broadsides against any real target its time to run away - but they can dump a lot of missiles from a relatively tiny and cheap platform.

There's a lot of crew and equipment a DD carries that a LAC doesn't. It wouldn't surprise me if you could afford to build and operate 3-5 LACs in lieu of a destroyer.
Last edited by Jonathan_S on Wed Mar 22, 2017 12:01 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Re: SLN Reserve
Post by Theemile   » Wed Mar 22, 2017 11:49 am

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Jonathan_S wrote:
Somtaaw wrote:Ok, I can concede LAC's might possibly have had slightly larger warheads than the laserhead's Manticore (or Haven) were fielding in their light warships. But they had to give up their "missile swarm" to do so, if I recall there was a passage in either HotQ or HAE, that said LAC's gave up multiple missile cells to get single better performing missiles.

So let's be generous, and say each LAC normally has Patriot 3x3 missile cells for it's small, underperforming missiles. And since they were broadside combatants, and they were certainly less than 500m in length, 5 or 6 cells per broadside? To get the larger contact nukes, they'd give up a considerable amount of 'decoys', not to mention a lot of the swarm factor if each LAC that changes to pure large contact nukes is only providing the same missile count as an all up destroyer, for virtually the same crew count, while being far more easily killed.

I just have a little trouble figuring how LAC's could be associated with essentially being living missile pods given the size of missiles, whether laserhead or contact nuke. Especially since it took until OBS for even Manticore to start engineering small enough that a single missile could act in both contact nuke and laserhead roles right? And we have textev that a single missile for that CL Fearless, which should be the same size for destroyers (and LACs), was at least 60+ tons, when one broke loose on Harkness and crushed MacBride's pelvis [or am I confusing OBS with HotQ?]

If small boom/burns were that big, then even a LAC isn't going to field more than perhaps 12 between both broadsides, which wasn't going to be a significant combat multiplier to having another all-up destroyer firing almost as many, but having a higher survival rate.

You're underselling the LAC's missile loadout significantly.

House of Steel shows that the final old-style LAC Manticore built, the Highlander-class, in fact mounted a pair of 6-cell one-shot launchers on each broadside - 12 missiles per broadside; 24 total. Even the missile-heavy RHN Bastogne-class DD's only mount 8, and the next highest I see on a DD is a 6 missile broadside.
Heck, until the Star Knight and Mars class CAs even heavy cruisers didn't mount close to 12 missiles per broadside.

And Jayne's says the Peep's Program-13 LAC actually mounted 14 missiles per broadside.


Sure, like a pod they were single shot launchers so once you've dumped both broadsides against any real target its time to run away - but they can dump a lot of missiles from a relatively tiny and cheap platform.

There's a lot of crew and equipment a DD carries that a LAC doesn't. It wouldn't surprise me if you could afford to build and operate 3-5 LACs in lieu of a destroyer.



In addition, consider the layout of a current shipkiller. The forward 1/2 is dominated by the warhead. The current warhead has 3 parts - a grav generator, the Nuclear bomb, and (for a LAC/DD/CL missile) 3-4 laserheads. Each of these laserheads is ~3 meters long, and the group takes up a volume 5-6x the size of the nuke.

On a Boom/Burn missile, that 6-7 Mton bomb is replaced with one that fills the space the laserheads would have used. Now, we have a Nuclear warhead with a 30-50 Mton yield, with a grav generator designed to focus the explosion onto the target.

When flushed en-mass from multiple platforms you can overwhelm point defenses of targets and secure hits. And LACs were deployed in squadrons of 6, usually operating in 3 ship groups. Combined with other warships, they could quickly overwhelm a target.

And Jonathan UNDERRATED the PRN LACs, they had 2x8 missile boxes on each broadside, for a broadside of 16 and 32 missiles overall.
******
RFC said "refitting a Beowulfan SD to Manticoran standards would be just as difficult as refitting a standard SLN SD to those standards. In other words, it would be cheaper and faster to build new ships."
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Re: SLN Reserve
Post by Jonathan_S   » Wed Mar 22, 2017 12:05 pm

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Theemile wrote:And Jonathan UNDERRATED the PRN LACs, they had 2x8 missile boxes on each broadside, for a broadside of 16 and 32 missiles overall.

Oops. Yep, I misread, or mistyped, 16 as 14 somehow.


Also, for what it's worth, the Silesian Mazur-class LAC from the SITS shipbooks is listed as a 12 missile broadside, as were the first improved Manticoran LACs, the Series 282-class that Honor took to Silesia aboard Wayfairer.

So pretty clearly those one-shot launch cells let you really pack in the missiles on a little boat like a LAC.
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Re: SLN Reserve
Post by saber964   » Fri Mar 24, 2017 5:25 pm

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Somtaaw wrote:
saber964 wrote:If you want an idea of where SLN reserve fleets are likely located look to current day for probable answers. Th U.S. maintains its reserve fleets on or near major naval bases. IIRC currently the USNDRF maintains reserve fleets at

West Lock Pearl Harbor HI
Bremerton WA
Sansune Bay CA (located north end of SF bay)
James River VA
Beaumont TX(?)



It's a really massive stretch to assume that the SLN would operate even remotely like the real USN does. After all, the USN doesn't have a "reserve" fleet 50% larger than it's entire active navy :roll:

Between that Active:Reserve ratio, and the attitude of Battle Fleet to Frontier Fleet, let alone the Battle Fleet to SDF, I can't actually see Battle Fleet putting the majority of it's bases in someone else's star systems.

With how they've been ignoring the Constitution, the first base or two would be in someone else's star system, but the majority are going to be in unclaimed space, which would make that system owned entirely by the Federal Government, without some bothersome (and nosy) local amateurs to bring attention to allegedly active squadrons that should be manned, and aren't.



I'm thinking more like out of sight out of mind in the SLN's thinking. Take the Sol system the SL/N probably has major bases across the system. Namely Earth Mars and probably Jupiter with research on Saturn moon Titan but what about putting a reserve anchorage in orbit around Neptune or Uranus.
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Re: SLN Reserve
Post by George J. Smith   » Fri Mar 24, 2017 5:28 pm

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I would think it would be prudent to have the reserve anchorages inside the hyper limit.
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