munroburton wrote:Jonathan_S wrote:We [fans of David Weber's Honorverse] don't really have facts on most Andermandi ships (beyond the tidbits in the novels; like their SDs tend to run a little small) and we won't until the Honorverse Companion which covers the Andies is released.
IIRC, their "smaller" SD was a ~7.5mt unit designed to operate as part of fast missile wings supplementing a more conventional wall. Both classes would be obsolete in the pod-layer era.
Needless to say, I'm one of those eagerly awaiting the other companion books.
I don't see anything about that class being part of a fast wing, but I might well have missed it.Honor Among Enemies wrote:that the Seydlitz-class ships like Derfflinger were a half million tons smaller than the RMN's own Sphinx-class, which made them a tad over three-quarters of a million tons lighter than the newest Gryphon-class ships, but that still brought Rabenstrange's flagship in at well over seven million tons.
[snip]
Her armament was also arranged differently, the mounts segregated into a single, relatively light graser deck between two very heavy missile decks, and Honor pursed her lips in a silent whistle. Derfflinger was already smaller than an RMN SD, and the magazine capacity for that many tubes had obviously cut deep into mass which might have been used for energy weapons. But while the ship would be far weaker in energy-range combat than one of her Manticoran counterparts, she also carried half again the missile broadside of a Sphinx. Honor had known that from her briefings, but actually seeing it was still something of a shock. She could see several advantages to the armament mix, but Derfflinger would find herself in serious trouble if an enemy managed to close with her.
[snip]
Derfflinger's lower mass would let her pull a higher acceleration than a Gryphon, assuming equal compensator efficiency, and that liveliness was perfectly suited to the missile-heavy doctrine the IAN seemed to have adopted.
Given the specs, and pulling from HoS for the numbers on the two referenced RMN designs gives us:
Seydlitz-class
tonnage: ~ 7.5 mtons
broadside: 54 missiles
At that tonnage you'd expect her to have about a 10 - 11 g accel advantage over a pre-war Sphinx-class at 100%, or 7.5g at 80%; about 2% quicker.
That doesn't really seem like enough to totally control the engagement range, not without a somewhat compliant enemy and careful handling of vectors. But while they last the broadsides would be nasty, and presumably the IAN backed those use with a reasonable number of PDLCs and CM tubes (especially since they were planning on missile focused combat) It'll be interesting to see those specs in the relevant Companion and see how they stack up against both Gryphons and the early pod-layers.