Fall 1924 - The changes of ship roles

Jonathan_S wrote:

Relax wrote:Traditional Warship Roles include:

Presence: Fort, but not realistic. Most star systems have no one living. A long term monitoring Drone working via solar power is required. Stealth required.

Interesting. I tend to view Presence missions more along the classic Royal Navy lines, an complement to the Show the Flag mission -- being seen patrolling near rivals; port visits to allies and friendly nations; participating in exercises with their navies, and otherwise being seen as continuing to show and interesting in keeping an eye on your friends and potential enemies. (With said port visits including throwing tours or parties on the ships, often in support of your diplomats)

Show the Flag is the rarer visits by your big units, often in conjunction with a major diplomatic event; while Presence is the day to day, well, being present.


Friends are reassured that you still care and are paying attention. Potential friends feel confidence that you'll be in position to help them. And potential enemies see that you still have interest in the area and likely aren't going to sit still should they decide to try to expand at the expensise of your friends, or even your remote territories *cough* Falklands *cough*. (Where its said that the UK's decision to withdraw it only ship assigned to the south Atlantic, HMS Endurance, was one of the things that helped the Argentine military rulers that the UK wouldn't actually dispute the lost of the islands)

(All this is why submarines are nearly worthless at presence missions. They can be great for surveillance or intel gathering, and having them near to hand should a potential enemy pick a fight is right helpful. But the very stealth that makes them so good at those missions means they do a poor job at maintaining relationships by being seen to be around)


Now these presence missions normally aren't carried out day to day by your most powerful ships. It's enough that there's a steady stream of smaller ships -- and that your potential enemies know that even though they could defeat one of those, that all that would do is summon the wrath of the rest of your navy down upon their head.


What you're calling presence I'd call more like covert surveillance.

From a USN ~1900 point of view, Shanghai based gunboats were the "Presence" mission ships, the Great White Fleet was a "Show the Flag" mission.

Relax wrote:

Wall Adjunct: Logistics, common civilian hull design for containerized cargo that one can easily bolt on additional components from a 2nd fusion plant, to sidewall generators to CM launchers etc in whatever number required for a variety of tasks that can keep up with the fleet.


LAC distribution: There will not be LAC's going forward. Their role is utterly obsolete in the age of FTL control links

LAC's, CL's, BC, CLAC are obsolete due to FTL/MDM: Add hyper capable Fort. SD'P becomes a REAL BC via wet navy definition.

PS: CA's will have larger Marine complements all other classes will be minimized. Possible DD/CL combined with empty space allowed for marines

Wall Adjunct is different than Fleet train - Traditionally, the Wall adjunct mission is usually taken by BBs, BCs and CAs to fill in for a missing DN/SD/BB in the formation, to "Pad" the formation with smaller ships whose job is to guard the open aspects of the Waller's wedges, thicken the throw weight of the wall (with missiles which have the same range performance), and thicken the inner missile screen.

The perfect example of a current Wall adjunct is the Grayson BC(p) - according to David, Grayson usually keeps them tied to their walls, or as a waller replacement. In pre-first war formations, BCs and CAs were used by most navies in this role - The Havenites specifically built some of their BCs for this giving them limited endurance, instead of designing for independent maneuvers (which they did anyway... but hey - talk about real world needs trumping theoretical plans.)

As For LACS - you make a good point, but LACS are in everyone's strategic plans - in TEIF, Kingston is planning on building LAC carriers and upgraded LACs For the SL, it makes sense, you can build early non-optimized LAC carriers on a Merchie hull, design oversized, modular bays that can take various LAC designs, and throw dozens of projects together to build a 25Kton design of no more than x,y,z dimensions with a forward focused armamant, designed for external maintenance, limited endurance (a week or so), and as many off the shelf components as possible. Pick the winners for limited use, then iterate several times. If you run the program right, you can probably have something "decent" (from an SLN hardware PoV), inside of 24 months. Such designs can be pumped out in the millions from dozens of factories, giving the SLN a next gen piracy defense quickly, to back up the big Cataphract-C Pods used for defense.

For GA navies - the LACS are still seen as important for in-system anti-piracy patrols, freeing hyper combatants to other roles, and they have taken over the screening role from DD/CLs. Their raider role against 1st tier navies/targets is probably in the dustbin, though everything outside the GA is still vulnerable to them, and will be for at least 5-10 years.

Speaking of presence; I'm reminded of the start of the Russo-Japanese war, and the prelude to the Battle of Chemulpo Bay; off of present day Inchon Korea.

A Russian protected cruiser, Varyag, and gunboat, Korietz, were stationed there, as normally was the Japanese protected cruiser Chiyoda. Just prior to the declaration of hostilities the Japanese sent a force consisting of the armored cruiser Asama, protected cruisers Takachiho, Naniwa, Niitaka and Akashi, 8 torpedo boats, and some troopships to reinforce Chiyoda. Anchored near the Russians on the day in question were the 3 neutral protected cruisers, the British HMS Talbott, the French Pascal, and Italian Elba[1]

The evening of Feb 8, 1904 Japanese moored their troopships near the Russians and proceeded, until about 3am, to disembark 4 battalions of troop into the neutral port. Then all the Japanese ships, bar Chiyoda, withdrew from the harbor and Chiyoda sent a notice to the Russian and the neutral warships that a state of war now existed between Japan and Russian and basically said -- if the Russian ships don't come out to their doom please move your neutral ships well clear of them so you're in no danger. Mind you, the neutral warships would only be in danger if the Japanese violated the rules of neutrality by attacking those Russian ships while they were in a neutral port.

IIRC common rules of neutrality (though I'm not sure if they'd yet been enshrined by treaty as international law) gave hostile warships 24 hours grace within a neutral port before they must leave or be interred for the duration -- and I know by WWII there was also enshrined a minimum interval between departures of ships hostile to each other; which could extend the 24 hour limit (if 24 hours after arrival would put your departure too close to the last departure of an enemy's ship your stay was extended until that minimum interval period was reached). Also depending on how biased the neutral nation was being something they wouldn't start the 24 hour clock until an opposing warship showed up and gave them notice. But still, in no case did overstaying that time permit a belligerent to attack the ship in that neutral port. The allowable responses to a neutral country allowing hostile ships to overstay their time were diplomatic, unless you wanted to declare war on them too, in which case the port wasn't neutral any longer.


Anyway, back to Korea. Despite being significantly outgunned by the Japanese squadron those 3 neutral warships' captains conferred and basically told the Japanese "No thanks -- this is a neutral port, we're not moving, and you're not going to do a thing about it". And the Japanese didn't. They'd likely win such a fight, but the presence of 3 neutral warships willing to stand up was sufficient to ensure that the rules of neutrality were followed.

Though in the end the Varyag and Korietz, against the advice of the 3 neutral captains, did take their ships out to face, or at least try to break past, the overwhelming Japanese cruiser force. They failed and retreated, heavily damaged, back into the harbor, near the neutral warships, where the Russian crews then scuttled Varyag and blew up Korietz.

---

The little, primarily sail powered, US gunboat USS Vicksburg was also there but anchored in a distant part of the harbor and apparently played no role in these activities

Theemile wrote:

Relax wrote:

Wall Adjunct: Logistics, common civilian hull design for containerized cargo that one can easily bolt on additional components from a 2nd fusion plant, to sidewall generators to CM launchers etc in whatever number required for a variety of tasks that can keep up with the fleet.


LAC distribution: There will not be LAC's going forward. Their role is utterly obsolete in the age of FTL control links

LAC's, CL's, BC, CLAC are obsolete due to FTL/MDM: Add hyper capable Fort. SD'P becomes a REAL BC via wet navy definition.

PS: CA's will have larger Marine complements all other classes will be minimized. Possible DD/CL combined with empty space allowed for marines

Wall Adjunct is different than Fleet train - Traditionally, the Wall adjunct mission is usually taken by BBs, BCs and CAs to fill in for a missing DN/SD/BB in the formation, to "Pad" the formation with smaller ships whose job is to guard the open aspects of the Waller's wedges, thicken the throw weight of the wall (with missiles which have the same range performance), and thicken the inner missile screen.

Hrmm, never picked up on that definition in the books! That much is obvious

Ok, so in my "future", the current SD'P becomes a true BC under wet navy definition(same "guns" much faster, less armor) and is now the wall adjunct to the Slow Hyper capable massive armored Forts which blow past the ~8Mton compensator impeller limit.

Jonathan_S wrote:Speaking of presence; I'm reminded of the start of the Russo-Japanese war, and the prelude to the Battle of Chemulpo Bay; off of present day Inchon Korea.

That is one war I keep reading about, yet everytime I have the opportunity either I lose interest, or life happens. Thanks for the history.

As for Presence, it is a moving target depending on scenario under your definition. Personally, I think this should just be under show the flag. Regarding HV, I posted what I did about presence as there are millions of stars that while not populated, are valuable and someone will claim ownership as that is how Humans work. It also provides a "buffer" of sorts(not really due to Hyperspace), but from a policing point of view of government pukes trying to justify their budgets... I could easily see them putting multi decade long term drones in systems claiming ownership. Especially the ones with very large asteroid belts etc.