Fall 1924: What will the Admiralty build next

kzt wrote:Well, no. The RMN has taken on the responsibility to patrol the entire verge when the kicked the SLN out of it. So they need a hypercapable fleet the size of the SLN’s FF to do it, as this is a very large space and much of it is months travel away from any RMN base.

So the peace dividend is ‘we need to double the budget of the RMN over what it was at the peak of the war, plus another 30 trillion each year for the next 5 years as we build the fleet.’

Sure, ok.

I’m not the guy who decided that the RMN should kick out FF and hence needs to take over the security role they provided.

Who else is going to do that? Or are pirate bases, slave colonies, raiders, and other such things the RMN has decided are OK as long as they carefully avoid finding out about them?

Theemile wrote:Heck, we don't even have a total list of what was destroyed during OB, let alone what construction from the intervening ~8 months survived. And anything we have on Haven or Beowulf is speculative. Supposedly, there were >600 SDs coming online in the next 6 months to a year after BoMa, from all of Haven's production facilities, with at least 300 more following soon behind.

(If that is correct, the number of SD(p)s built by Haven in 1918-1922 was insane - 332 were used for BoMa (plus 16 CLACs), with 80 or so SD(p)s left behind, and the RMN & GSN had already chewed up 60-70 during the war plus a handful of CLACS. From that, we know Haven built well over 500 SD(p)s and SD sized CLACs prior to BoMa, plus 900 SD(p)s plus an unknown # of CLACS - close to 1500 Ships in a little over 5 years.)

Yup. I think Haven had apparently 4 major yards at this time, with one of them (Bolthole) producing probably as many as the other three. It was definitely producing 600 ships per wave, which is indeed insane.

What the exact time chops are, I don't know. And I don't know how many were early enough in their construction that could be easily altered and sent to Beowulf for completion. I do know that sufficient were capable of conversion that no one lamented about needing to start a new build order to literally replace the ships just built, or the Haven production lines had gotten back to the places where they were turning out a continuous stream of SD(p)s

My guess is that no new pre-GA ships were laid down in Bolthole after those 600 left the yards. Those would have around the time Honor was visiting Haven for the peace agreements. There's a possibility that they did leave the yards before the actual peace agreements in May 1922, so Bolthole would have begun new construction, but even if so it was probably scrapped and restarted with GA tech sharing.

So between May 1922 and May 1924, I expect that all new Bolthole capital ship construction was of Keyhole II-equipped Invictus and Minotaur/Hydra. So if every single other yard was idling at this time, the GF added 600 wallers on top of the Python Lump. But that big number would easily be absorbed by Haven and Beowulf alone.

I really don't think the GA has any business retaining any SD at this point. It's going to have to mothball SD(P)s as it is.

kzt wrote:Who else is going to do that? Or are pirate bases, slave colonies, raiders, and other such things the RMN has decided are OK as long as they carefully avoid finding out about them?

That's exactly why the "SLN ban" isn't sustainable. There may have been a valid short-term reason to impose it, but those problems you name are exactly why Manticore can't actually uphold it indefinitely. They aren't going to build five thousand light cruisers to deal with something that they don't consider their problem, however much it was a consequence of their actions.

They get to blame the Alignment for genuinely causing the whole mess. Galton's revelation gives them a whole lot of credibility they wouldn't have had prior to the events of TEiF.

Again, it only has to last long enough for OFS to be thoroughly dismantled and the SLN cleaned up. Admiral Kingsford is already working on getting back out there as of TEiF. In the short meantime, will any (other) enemies of the League exploit opportunities? Yes. Such exploits will only help accelerate the SLN's inevitable return by demonstrating the need for them to do so.

cthia wrote:I only recall "eggshell" being used to describe SD(P)s. I thought the pod bay door was only a weakness, rather than the cause of its eggshell status.

Being thought of as both more survivable because of more armor AND as an eggshell seems contradictory.

Indeed. I'm not sure what comparison was being attempted when saying it was an eggshell. SD(P)s are indeed one big armour shell around a lot of empty storage space. For that reason, they are like eggshells. But despite the popular metaphors for eggshells, they are surprisingly good at resisting being cracked open.

I'd have expected the comparison to work more for BC(P)s (the Agamemnons) than to SD(P)s, because those have much less armour.

At any rate, why not build your weapons for your terrain. Terrain can include a stealthy enemy. An LD can get inside Apollo's longer reach nullifying its advantages.

Well, pretty sure everything is in Apollo range now

Indeed, LDs can get within SDM range without being detected, possibly even all the way into energy range if the target isn't taking precautions. So we have to ask the question: can we build a ship that can survive energy range attack? There are three possible outcomes:

First, that the SD(P)s are sufficiently armoured already and have a high chance of surviving an unexpected energy-range attack. In this case, there's no point in changing the design. The second case is that not even old style SDs or even a more armoured version of those can survive the expected attack, in which case there's also no point in changing anything.

The only case where it would make sense to change is if you can improve the armour that would significantly improve survivability ratio against these new conditions.

Even if we suspected that it would be the case -- and I don't know that we can make this statement -- they certainly can't yet.

If you are taken by surprise at knife-fighting range, you better be survivable.

Agreed.

Why would that design make it just a defensive ship? Apollo is just as deadly on an SD design. The ship would simply be more survivable up close.

I don't think humongous salvos are going to win the war against a stealthy opponent.

You may have a point against a stealthy opponent, but that's not the only opponent possible. The GA doesn't know if the MAN has a second Galton-like fleet somewhere. In fact, we don't know for sure -- we think they don't, based on the fact that the MAN didn't have anything bigger than a light cruiser until a few years ago. They'll also have to go against fixed and very unstealthy defences around the MAlign hideout, whenever they manage to find it.

Against a stealthy opponent, a larger throw weight may help too. Remember that "quantity has a quality of its own," after all. With more missiles flying, it's possible to spread them sufficiently that the chance of passing close enough to the enemy that the Apollo sensors penetrate the stealth is high enough.

I think you do have a point about having ships that can survive an encounter with an LD, but I don't think it's an SD. Unfortunately, I don't have a much better idea of what it would be. Maybe just having enough escorts below the wall protecting said wall is sufficient to defeat the knife-fighting-range attack.

cthia wrote:I only recall "eggshell" being used to describe SD(P)s. I thought the pod bay door was only a weakness, rather than the cause of its eggshell status.

Being thought of as both more survivable because of more armor AND as an eggshell seems contradictory.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:Indeed. I'm not sure what comparison was being attempted when saying it was an eggshell. SD(P)s are indeed one big armour shell around a lot of empty storage space. For that reason, they are like eggshells. But despite the popular metaphors for eggshells, they are surprisingly good at resisting being cracked open.

I'd have expected the comparison to work more for BC(P)s (the Agamemnons) than to SD(P)s, because those have much less armour.

Through Mission of Honor, I can only find two instances of that description being applied; neither is a reference to an SD(P). The original quote is by Honor and is about Light Attack Craft and the second is by Michelle in the ruins of her own ship: a BC(P).

Honor Among Enemies, chapter 5:

Traditional light attack craft were considerably inferior to hyper-capable warships for many reasons. Their small size left no room for hyper generators, so they couldn't translate into or out of h-space. Nor could they mount Warshawski sails, which meant they couldn't be employed inside the grav waves starships normally rode even if they could somehow be gotten into hyper in the first place. Their relatively weaker impeller wedges and sidewalls also made them more fragile than larger warships, and they were too small to pack in worthwhile amounts of armor or sufficient armament for sustained combat. They were eggshells armed with hammers, equipped with heavy missile loads for their displacement, usually in low-mass, single-shot box launchers, and against most opponents about the best they could hope for was to get their missiles off before they were annihilated.
But the new LACs the Star Kingdom had been laying down over the last four T-years (also, Honor admitted, as one of Hemphill's brainstorms) were a whole new breed. BuShips had made enormous strides in inertial compensator design, building on the original research Grayson had undertaken when no one would tell them how compensators worked.

Storm from the Shadows, chapter 2:

"Admiral," Horn's voice was hoarse, her face tight with strain and fatigue, "I think it's time to start evacuating everyone who has access to a life pod."
Michelle felt her own face turn masklike, but managed to hold her voice to an almost normal conversational pitch.
"It's that bad, is it?" she asked.
"Maybe worse than that, Ma'am." Horn rubbed her eyes for a moment, then looked back out of the display at Michelle. "There's just too much wreckage in the way. God only knows how all four rails can still be up, because we've got breaches clear through to the missile core in at least four places. Maybe as many as six. Commander Tigh still can't even tell us where the control runs are broken, much less when he might be able to get the after ring back up."
Well, that seems to be a fairly emphatic answer to the great fragility debate, doesn't it, Mike? a small voice said in the back of Michelle's head. Under the circumstances, it's a mystery to me why we didn't go up right along with Patrocles and Priam. What was that phrase Honor used? "Eggshells armed with sledgehammers," wasn't it? Of course, she was talking about LACs at the time, not battlecruisers, but still . . .

Note that an SD(P) was weaker than a regular SD, but then they added an extra layer of armor around the cavity used to store the pods; so that may no longer be true.

munroburton wrote:That's exactly why the "SLN ban" isn't sustainable. There may have been a valid short-term reason to impose it, but those problems you name are exactly why Manticore can't actually uphold it indefinitely. They aren't going to build five thousand light cruisers to deal with something that they don't consider their problem, however much it was a consequence of their actions.

Well, you know, this is the SLN that can just say no. 'Sorry, that isn't part of our mission any more, so we are no longer budgeted for that kind of deployment.'

kzt wrote:Well, no. The RMN has taken on the responsibility to patrol the entire verge when the kicked the SLN out of it. So they need a hypercapable fleet the size of the SLN’s FF to do it, as this is a very large space and much of it is months travel away from any RMN base.

So the peace dividend is ‘we need to double the budget of the RMN over what it was at the peak of the war, plus another 30 trillion each year for the next 5 years as we build the fleet.’

It's not like the FF patrolled the entire verge. They had effectively zero presence in Talbott before the discovery of the wormhole terminus; though they'd recently expanded to Meyers and OFS was starting to look Talbott's way. And technically Manitore, Grayson, all the minor 1st war alliance partners, Haven, Silesia, the Andies, etc. are all part of the Verge and the League's seemingly never sent a patrol out that way.

(And the entire Maya sector - Shell, not even out in the verge, got nothing larger than a heavy (or possibly light) cruiser)

Despite having thousands of ships, FF seems to have mostly been a response force and acted as heavies for OFS takeover and control of systems. Now I guess that might have had an indirect effect of suppressing piracy by capturing system wealthy enough to be worth preying on - or to potentially act as fences. But it also spend a lot of FF ships in keeping occupied systems firmly under the thumb of OFS -- rather than out patrolling for pirates or running escort or anything beneficial.
(And of course we know from captured data of their computers that some of the "pirates" that were operating in the verge were FF ships targeting certain system's traffic as part of supporting OFS -- so banning FF would reduce piracy in those areas)

Frankly most of the verge seems too poor and dispersed for pirates to survive off of. FF didn't seem to be patrolling there and there scarcely seems to be need for the RMN to do so either.



Basically FF has the assigned mission of playing cop in the areas in and around the League's border -- but it doesn't seem to have devoted the majority of its ships or effort into actually doing so.

Jonathan_S wrote:(And the entire Maya sector - Shell, not even out in the verge, got nothing larger than a heavy (or possibly light) cruiser)

Roszak was the highest SLN officer in the Maya sector and all he had was a Destroyer Flotilla. Despite the name, that appears to have included some light cruisers too, because he was going around aboard one. Thought it was also true that Maya was an atypical example in that it had no trouble spots and it needed no FF enforcement action.

The Madras sector had much heavier throw of metal, all the way up to battlecruisers, but that was probably also because the MAlign pushed the SLN to send those, including in support of Crandall. There was one in the sector capital, in Meyers, plus four more destroyed in Saltash, and the 17 that were captured or destroyed in New Tuscany (that was Byng). If I were to guess, I'd say that the BC in Meyers was the only one that really belonged to the sector detachment; all other units were not under the sector command.

Unfortunately, those are the only two sector fleets we know of.

We know that FF had a LOT of BCs. IIRC, as many BCs as they had cruisers and destroyers. I don't remember what was the explanation for this, or if one was provided.