TWTSNBN: hmm, maybe this soup could be thinner...

munroburton wrote:I know Honorverse economics are screwy, but I find it difficult to believe that refitting sixteen 90,000 ton units would be prohibitively expensive. With over 100 grav lances througout the fleet, they already had an infrastructure for it which would have been maintained right up until Oyster Bay blew it away, simply to keep the Homers' GLs in working order(they also retained the Gladiators until 1920).

It's not prohibitive, it's just not cost-effective. The refit would cost too much for obsolete ships. Don't forget that refitting also takes slip space, something they could be using for building or fitting out a brand new light cruiser or destroyer. So you have to add the cost of opportunity to the equation too. My guess is that it simply wasn't worth it: if you had the build slip, the budget, the personnel, and materials available to perform the refit, you'd simply instead do something else with those, for a more practical gain.

Not cheap, but a price worth paying if it resulted in a certain number of enemy SDs blown away despite the total loss of the refitted class after their single use, whether they're destroyed by enemy action or finally withdrawn from service. ~2mt of light cruisers for, well, even a light battle squadron of dreadnoughts masses almost forty million tons.

That's a huge bet on an unknown. That's for a very, very slim probability of success, counting on Peeps ignoring a ship in their path. Meanwhile, such a ship cannot serve its original purpose of screening a fleet, even if it kept in formation, because it lost a portion of its broadside.

Also, the RMN does not throw its people under the bus. If there's a low probability of success and high probability that the ship is simply going to get blown apart (because it has its wedge down but isn't surrendering), that mission would not be launched.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

munroburton wrote:I know Honorverse economics are screwy, but I find it difficult to believe that refitting sixteen 90,000 ton units would be prohibitively expensive. With over 100 grav lances througout the fleet, they already had an infrastructure for it which would have been maintained right up until Oyster Bay blew it away, simply to keep the Homers' GLs in working order(they also retained the Gladiators until 1920).

It's not prohibitive, it's just not cost-effective. The refit would cost too much for obsolete ships. Don't forget that refitting also takes slip space, something they could be using for building or fitting out a brand new light cruiser or destroyer. So you have to add the cost of opportunity to the equation too. My guess is that it simply wasn't worth it: if you had the build slip, the budget, the personnel, and materials available to perform the refit, you'd simply instead do something else with those, for a more practical gain.

Not cheap, but a price worth paying if it resulted in a certain number of enemy SDs blown away despite the total loss of the refitted class after their single use, whether they're destroyed by enemy action or finally withdrawn from service. ~2mt of light cruisers for, well, even a light battle squadron of dreadnoughts masses almost forty million tons.

That's a huge bet on an unknown. That's for a very, very slim probability of success, counting on Peeps ignoring a ship in their path. Meanwhile, such a ship cannot serve its original purpose of screening a fleet, even if it kept in formation, because it lost a portion of its broadside.

Also, the RMN does not throw its people under the bus. If there's a low probability of success and high probability that the ship is simply going to get blown apart (because it has its wedge down but isn't surrendering), that mission would not be launched.

Another point hinted at, but not fully followed, is this is only a warfighter - it has few roles outside of it's few useful battles.

The RMN, not knowing exactly when war would start (though most outside the political opposition was insist it was an inevitability), would want to use these light cruisers AS light cruisers - they would send them to Silesia as convoy escort and to fight piracy, where they would significantly under perform. It also means that they would be out of place when they are actually needed - and not available in mass to do their intended roles. Yes, they could be assigned to home fleet... until something happened and 1 or 2 was peeled off for the best of reasons - then more and more... Or they could be mothballed - in which case they could be defrosted on the advent of war - and not be available for 3-4 months as they are brought back to service.

In reality, a squadron of gelded CLs isn't going to be able to accomplish much more tactically that a squadron of BCs can't accomplish - and if that maneuver at 3rd Yeltsin was some Homer's attempting to sneak some daggers in the backs of the SDs on the Flank, I doubt some CLs could have done sufficiently better that it would have mattered. So would swapping 8 CLs for a single SD really turn the tide of a battle? (yes, yes... depends on the timing and the SD in question.)

Theemile wrote:Another point hinted at, but not fully followed, is this is only a warfighter - it has few roles outside of it's few useful battles.

The RMN, not knowing exactly when war would start (though most outside the political opposition was insist it was an inevitability), would want to use these light cruisers AS light cruisers - they would send them to Silesia as convoy escort and to fight piracy, where they would significantly under perform. It also means that they would be out of place when they are actually needed - and not available in mass to do their intended roles. Yes, they could be assigned to home fleet... until something happened and 1 or 2 was peeled off for the best of reasons - then more and more... Or they could be mothballed - in which case they could be defrosted on the advent of war - and not be available for 3-4 months as they are brought back to service.

In reality, a squadron of gelded CLs isn't going to be able to accomplish much more tactically that a squadron of BCs can't accomplish - and if that maneuver at 3rd Yeltsin was some Homer's attempting to sneak some daggers in the backs of the SDs on the Flank, I doubt some CLs could have done sufficiently better that it would have mattered. So would swapping 8 CLs for a single SD really turn the tide of a battle? (yes, yes... depends on the timing and the SD in question.)

I think modifying more Courageous-class CLs like Fearless would be a bad idea. And remember, that wasn't Hemphill's plan -- the plan was to prove out the concept on Fearless and then build a new modern cruiser designed around the GL.

However, if sent to Silesia on anti-piracy patrols a ship like Fearless might not have done too badly. Most pirates are flying absolute crap, and Fearless kept all her defenses (such as they were). Normally an RMN CL, even a old one, is a massive overmatch in survivability and lethality vs a Silesian pirate.

So, yeah, only a couple missile tubes per broadside is hardly ideal, but the RMN was sending old destroyers to Silesia too, like Chansons. Those're decades newer than the Courageous-class but only carry 3 missiles in their broadsides. (But admittedly, even on 10,000 fewer tons the DD mounts and extra CM & extra PDLC on said broadside)
And in an energy range fight (beyond GL or ET range) Fearless would be worse off that a Chanson, being a bigger target and having only 1 laser to the DD's 3 lasers (and both seeming to carry the same size, 60cm, of laser)

Still, while not up to what an unmodified Courageous could do in Silesia, or even quite up to what a newer but still 3 decade old DD can do, a ship like Fearless would likely still do just fine.

Theemile wrote:Another point hinted at, but not fully followed, is this is only a warfighter - it has few roles outside of it's few useful battles.

And is that such a bad thing? It's not even accurate either, the Rolands came with less multi-mission capacity than CL-56 had and would have utterly failed to meet the non-combat duties which Pavel Young dumped onto Fearless.

HoS shows us that the RMN was seeded with special subclasses. The Talismans, "Nightstick", Broadswords and Crusaders all entered service at least a quarter of a century before the CL-56 refit. The concept of a 16-ship class/subclass isn't forbidden.

Theemile wrote:The RMN, not knowing exactly when war would start (though most outside the political opposition was insist it was an inevitability), would want to use these light cruisers AS light cruisers - they would send them to Silesia as convoy escort and to fight piracy, where they would significantly under perform. It also means that they would be out of place when they are actually needed - and not available in mass to do their intended roles. Yes, they could be assigned to home fleet... until something happened and 1 or 2 was peeled off for the best of reasons - then more and more... Or they could be mothballed - in which case they could be defrosted on the advent of war - and not be available for 3-4 months as they are brought back to service.

The RMN not knowing when the war would start is exactly why the CL-56 project was explored in the first place. They were sitting in a very dangerous phase of their pre-war buildup, where they did not yet have enough conventional forces to hold the entire PN off, but that PN was becoming intensely aware of that buildup's efficacy and was starting to do something about it.

The RMN would be silly to operate those as conventional light cruisers. That risks giving away their secret, if they end up lancing and torpedoing a pirate in some Silesian system full of opportunists. They should be tied to the MBS and only released to places like Hancock or Yeltsin's Star when the Admiralty's war warnings started going out.

Or even just kept in Manticore while White Haven took all those battle squadrons away to Yeltsin, in case the Peeps showed up there instead. That's what a big gamble looks like, not the sunk costs of sixteen cruisers which might never be used.

Jonathan_S wrote:I think modifying more Courageous-class CLs like Fearless would be a bad idea. And remember, that wasn't Hemphill's plan -- the plan was to prove out the concept on Fearless and then build a new modern cruiser designed around the GL.

Sure, why not? It's still not breaking the shipyards' backs to produce a few dozen specialised <100,000 ton warships from scratch, rather than refitting them.

munroburton wrote:The concept of a 16-ship class/subclass isn't forbidden.

This particular class is forbidden by the author. Why are you dragging this dead horse to the water, since you are are not able to make it drink? Whatever benefit you might imagine is all fan-fiction.

tlb wrote:

munroburton wrote:The concept of a 16-ship class/subclass isn't forbidden.

This particular class is forbidden by the author. Why are you dragging this dead horse to the water, since you are are not able to make it drink? Whatever benefit you might imagine is all fan-fiction.

Q) I have a great idea about the grav lance-
A) I promise you that whatever it is, it's not something we haven't heard before. David is adamant about the limitations of the system. It is a near certainty that whatever the idea is, it isn't going to work.

I'm speculating within those limitations, not inventing lance-armed treecats in marine power armour or whatever.

What I'm trying to point out is that there was a slim chance of the one-trick pony managing to drink:

munroburton wrote:As far as the Peeps were concerned, a standard vintage Courageous-class killed their Q-ship. There's no reason for them to know of the CL-56 refit, so theoretically it might have worked against them once(or repeatedly as long as nobody lived to tell the tales).

We've seen single-trick technologies elsewhere, with varying degrees of success and/or failure. The Triple Ripple worked well its first time, then was doomed to fail thereafter. Does that mean the RHN shouldn't have tried it?

How about Galton's graserheads? Their mistake may have been not sending every graserhead they had in their first salvo. Or the Alignment's spider ships and torpedoes, upon which the jury is still waiting for more evidence?

The important thing to remember is that such an attempt by the RMN to use Hemphill's lance cruisers did not have to succeed. It could have gone as poorly as Styles, Yeargin or Santino's last battles, just to hammer the point home. Or someone else could have tried it upon the RMN; the nearest we got to this was Admiral Pierre's battlecruisers emerging inside energy range of HMS Bellerophon and dying outside of grav lance range.

Ultimately, the last page of this board only goes back to 2014. Searching for "grav lance" produces 536 posts with matches, out of 108,480(and 25 of those are now in this thread). It's just fundamentally odd that we're absolutely not allowed to discuss it anymore for all of time as long as we ultimately affirm that it was not a feasible multi-use weapons platform. Without OBS, there's no Honorverse and it's the natural starting point for new readers.

munroburton wrote:It's just fundamentally odd that we're absolutely not allowed to discuss it anymore for all of time as long as we ultimately affirm that it was not a feasible multi-use weapons platform. Without OBS, there's no Honorverse and it's the natural starting point for new readers.

The one thing that we are certain about is that the author hates TWTMNBN and I am sure that if he were a younger man there would be a new edition of OBS that creates a different reason for Honor to be at Basilisk and a different way that she defeats the Q-ship. In the meantime we created a dead-horse thread to educate all the new members of the forum and prominent in it is the grav-lance.

So why not work on new missions for frigates in the Royal Manticore Navy or something else that is equally useful?

tlb wrote:The one thing that we are certain about is that the author hates TWTMNBN and I am sure that if he were a younger man there would be a new edition of OBS that creates a different reason for Honor to be at Basilisk and a different way that she defeats the Q-ship. In the meantime we created a dead-horse thread to educate all the new members of the forum and prominent in it is the grav-lance.

What new members? I've disliked that dead horse thread since it was put up. It's so unwelcoming to those newbies, whose natural starting point is OBS itself. You wouldn't see Star Wars banning discussion of the Death Star's fatal flaw. No, they eventually made a movie which explains how that flaw came to be.

So why not work on new missions for frigates in the Royal Manticore Navy or something else that is equally useful?

That is a thread you could start. Besides, Manticoran-built frigates already returned, they are operated by the Royal Torch Navy.

The dead horse itself arguably died when RFC decided to have Honor say "By the way, we're bringing drone LACs out soon" during TEIF. What's more, with the mighty Solarian Navy temporarily lying on its back, the lid's off everywhere else. All those unnamed waller navies, whether they have Alignment connections or not, may start casting around for the most insanely convoluted and unworkable superweapons their politicians can be impressed into authorising the purchase of.

And none of those have to work, not even the first time.

munroburton wrote:What I'm trying to point out is that there was a slim chance of the one-trick pony managing to drink:
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We've seen single-trick technologies elsewhere, with varying degrees of success and/or failure. The Triple Ripple worked well its first time, then was doomed to fail thereafter. Does that mean the RHN shouldn't have tried it?

One big difference is that in none of those you were putting a ship with a crew of 200 on the line for that trick. The RMN will not do it.

And you've made it worse by placing 16 ships instead of just 1 in the path of the wall. That goes from "one trick pony" to "asymptotically indistinguishable from zero tricks pony."

The other big difference is that the Havenites and the Alignment had to come up with something to even the battle field against the RMN's tech advantage. The RMN did not find itself in those circumstances.

tlb wrote:The one thing that we are certain about is that the author hates TWTMNBN and I am sure that if he were a younger man there would be a new edition of OBS that creates a different reason for Honor to be at Basilisk and a different way that she defeats the Q-ship. In the meantime we created a dead-horse thread to educate all the new members of the forum and prominent in it is the grav-lance.

munroburton wrote:What new members? I've disliked that dead horse thread since it was put up. It's so unwelcoming to those newbies, whose natural starting point is OBS itself. You wouldn't see Star Wars banning discussion of the Death Star's fatal flaw. No, they eventually made a movie which explains how that flaw came to be.

tlb wrote:So why not work on new missions for frigates in the Royal Manticore Navy or something else that is equally useful?

munroburton wrote:That is a thread you could start. Besides, Manticoran-built frigates already returned, they are operated by the Royal Torch Navy.

The dead horse itself arguably died when RFC decided to have Honor say "By the way, we're bringing drone LACs out soon" during TEIF. What's more, with the mighty Solarian Navy temporarily lying on its back, the lid's off everywhere else. All those unnamed waller navies, whether they have Alignment connections or not, may start casting around for the most insanely convoluted and unworkable superweapons their politicians can be impressed into authorising the purchase of.

And none of those have to work, not even the first time.

Here is the operative statement from the dead-horse thread:

While Frigates will continue to be used by small Honorverse navies, major navies have abandoned the type as functional requirements require larger and larger hulls to be survivable in the current munitions reliant combat environment.

So the author never said "no frigates anywhere", just "no frigates in a major navy anymore'.

Similarly drones are permitted, what the author has limited is fully autonomous space craft; but that line could pushed as you suggest. Mainly the author has limited AI-systems, because he wanted to focus on people.

The author wishes he had never introduced TWTMNBN; but if you don't care about his wishes, that is your prerogative. But the weapon is stupid and "energy torpedoes" are so Star Trek.