Jonathan_S wrote:Rednek731 wrote:But is that the biggest they have? Can it be SD sized and carry more people and shuttles? An SD can be as big as 9 million tons. Although I guess regardless of whether or not they do, my question is still answered but I'm still curious if it's possible or if there are size limitations on a ship that acts purely as a transport.
You could make a transport at big as an SD. But the rules of war in the Honorverse around planetary combat are closely modeled after the 'practicable breech' rule for fortresses.
Once you control the planet's orbitals (equivalent of a practicable breech in a fort's walls) they either surrender (in which case you send down a small occupation and peacekeeping force) or you bombard them from space until they do surrender (or I guess until everyone is dead).
And even if they surrendered falsely to lure ground troops into a hopeful guerrilla war the idea is that your relatively small numbers of troops are still supported by the 'big guns' of orbital bombardment.
So there isn't a perceived need for dropping and supporting hundreds of thousands of troops. So most people opt for smaller, cheaper, assault transports and system control cruisers so they have the flexibility to send them to multiple destinations (or if a massive assault is needed for some reason you simply assign more and more or your small transports to it)
But from a technical standpoint, sure you
could build a 10 million ton assault transport ship with vast hangers to drop hundreds of shuttles and pinnaces for all the troops you're carrying. But nobody (that we've seen) does.
There
is one scenario where such a capability
might be required. From all the posts & the literature I have read the scenario is about capturing one of the home systems of your enemy. If you show up you call for their surrender & if they don't you use kinetic weapons on them until they do.
However!
What about a scenario where an enemy has captured one of your own systems (or that of an ally) & then deeply entrenched themselves in amongst that planet's infrastructure? Sure, you
could use kinetic weapons but then you would be blowing up most of the planet's infrastructure &/or population; (sort of like the old saying, 'We had to kill them to save them'). In those circumstances you might have to send a ground force in to winkle the occupiers out without doing to much damage to the planet or inflicting too many collateral deaths amongst your own citizens or your allies, (hopefully).
On a side point, would it not be advantageous to have a few squadrons of sting ships to carry out interdiction and close air support? I know pinnaces
can carry these missions out but it always struck me as risking them (& their crews) unnecessarily when a group of one man sting ships could carry them out & probably have a better survival rate: (Read the example of how Quentin Saint James won his Parliamentary Medal of Valour in the
Honorverse Companion, page 323 for an example of one such situation).