ThinksMarkedly wrote:There are at least three problems with that, two of them glaring. One is that to crew 16 to 32 Courageous or other ill-fitted light-cruisers means you are not crewing 16 to 32 properly-fitted light-cruisers that could do the job of light-cruisers as escorts in the wall of battle. The Courageous couldn't fire the latest missiles either, so they would complicate logistics further.
The RMN started decommissioning their Courageouses in 1902 and completed their disposal during the war, in 1909. The basic idea is that those vessels which were retired between 1902 and 1905 would have instead been refitted. Even 32 of them isn't much more than the crews of one or two SDs, that's not an outright impossibility for BuPers.
The second problem, and a glaring one which has been discussed to death, is that the grav lance only works at insanely short distances. We never got the account of the Third Battle of Yeltsin, but at First Hancock there was never such an opportunity. The mines got close, but the mines aren't 100k-tonne ships that still had reactors powered up. There's little reason that the Peeps would allow a single ship to get that close, much less 16 to 32 lying across their path.
There's exactly one reason, the same one which led to Fearless' only success during the wargames; they don't know about the threat
yet. I am not saying those cruisers could blow up Chin's dreadnoughts
and then run over to Seaford Nine and try it again. If Admiral Parks orders that, he's the one who should face a court martial.
One detail we do have from Third Yeltsin is that a battlecruiser squadron attempted to creep around Parnell's flanks... and failed. That was the window of opportunity, if it existed, for a Fearless squadron to strike, assuming it was positioned to take advantage of the Peeps rolling/turning away from White Haven's capital ships.
As for First Hancock, that minefield ambush is exactly when they show themselves, strafing the Peeps as they pass and then running away on a reciprocal course. As I pointed out, this is not really a net gain for the RMN; they would have destroyed Chin's DNs instead of capturing them.
The third problem and other glaring one is what happened to Honor during the war games: it worked only once. So there's no way the tactic would take out more than one ship, even assuming it worked once.
I suggest re-reading the training exercises of BatCruRon 5 during SVW. They practiced simultaneous energy-range gunnery as a squadron fighting another imaginary squadron. The possibility of a Fearless squadron doing this exists.
The gap between ships in a battle wall was relatively tiny. If any part of it is within GL/ET range, pretty much of all it is. The problem of sneaking eight CLs into range isn't that much more difficult than the initial problem of sneaking just one there.
Anyway, this will be my only post in this because it is a dead horse. Let's not beat it.
It's mostly a joke.
Thing is, I don't remember any beatings which were adminstered after HoS came out - and that told us the RMN had 14 SDs, 34 DNs and 86 BCs with grav lances for
decades. CL-56 was a viable concept, within a very limited number of uses.
The laserhead might have finally killed the concept off for good, but it was a slow death of a thousand incremental cuts which wasn't completed until the podlayer was pioneered. Even with towed pods, fleets still had to finish battles in energy ranges(or run away).
