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[WPV non-spoilers] Cruiser squadrons

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[WPV non-spoilers] Cruiser squadrons
Post by ThinksMarkedly   » Thu Feb 09, 2023 9:40 pm

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In one of the stories, taking place after the fall of the High Ridge government and the Janacek Admiralty, we hear about an 8-ship cruiser squadron. This is a newly assembled squadron, but does this mean that the White Haven Admiralty went back to 8 ships? I don't remember anywhere in the texts in AAC or since about a change or about the number of ships in each squadron. We do hear a lot about short and mixed squadrons in the war with the League, so that's not confirmation or refutation.

The other thing is about the ships in this squadron. The text says
What Price Victory? wrote:Fearless, Druid, Star Warrior and Apprentice were older Star Knights.


Any name there rings a bell? I'll give you a hint: it's not Star Warrior. Or Druid or Apprentice. The only question is if this is CA-286 or if this is a new hull with the same name after CA-286 was towed to port, because after all the name is in the List of Honor.
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Re: [WPV non-spoilers] Cruiser squadrons
Post by Jonathan_S   » Fri Feb 10, 2023 1:03 am

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ThinksMarkedly wrote:In one of the stories, taking place after the fall of the High Ridge government and the Janacek Admiralty, we hear about an 8-ship cruiser squadron. This is a newly assembled squadron, but does this mean that the White Haven Admiralty went back to 8 ships? I don't remember anywhere in the texts in AAC or since about a change or about the number of ships in each squadron. We do hear a lot about short and mixed squadrons in the war with the League, so that's not confirmation or refutation.

The other thing is about the ships in this squadron. The text says
What Price Victory? wrote:Fearless, Druid, Star Warrior and Apprentice were older Star Knights.


Any name there rings a bell? I'll give you a hint: it's not Star Warrior. Or Druid or Apprentice. The only question is if this is CA-286 or if this is a new hull with the same name after CA-286 was towed to port, because after all the name is in the List of Honor.
Different ship classes had different sized squadrons. High Ridge dropped the wallers and BatCruRons from 8 ships to 6 -- though SftS says White Haven increased at least the 106th Battlecruiser Squadron (Michelle's Nikes being sent to Talbot) so it had "eight units, not six."

Here's what HoS has to say (wish I found this before trawling through some of the other books looking for details)
House of Steel wrote:Squadrons in the RMN are permanent administrative units, not necessarily tactical units, although there is a distinct tendency for squadrons of cruisers and larger warships to be kept together as much as possible. Thus a Destroyer Squadron might consist of sixteen destroyers operating in four separate divisions of four ships each, deployed light-years apart on an as-needed basis. The fact that light units routinely need to be detached as escorts, scouts, couriers, etc., helps to explain why their unit organization is so much more flexible than that for larger units, which are not so likely to be detached.
Cruisers fall into a special category as the medium combatant jack-of-all-trades. Cruisers very seldom operate as complete squadrons unless assigned to a task force or fleet organization, and, even there, the task force or fleet commanding officer has a distinct incentive to detach individual heavy cruisers or divisions of light cruisers for all sorts of tasks.
Prior to 1902 PD, both heavy cruisers and battlecruisers were organized more according to their mission than their type. The two most common squadron sizes are eight-ship squadrons
integrated into the screen and twelve-ship squadrons tasked for independent operations, though recent years have seen frequent changes in these sizes, often to match the smaller battle squadrons.
Ships of the wall have historically been organized into eight-ship battle squadrons, a practice which was phased out in favor of a six-ship squadron during the Janacek Admiralty as a largely
political maneuver, though (unlike most Janacek “reforms”) the practice has been maintained due to the increased tactical flexibility the smaller squadrons offer


---
[edit: ignore this paragraph; I'd missed where the other 12 BCs, 3 divisions, had gone]
And I just noticed that back in HotQ White Haven talks about taking "two full squadrons of battlecruisers" to Grayson, and yet he shows up with only "four battlecruisers, supported by twelve lighter ships". That's might be two divisions of BCs; but it's certainly not 2 squadrons (though my SftS Michelle's 8 BC squadron appears to be split into just 2 4-ship divisions)
[/edit]

But in SVW the BC squadrons assigned to Hancock were are 8 ship formations; as was Van Slyke's squadron of heavy cruisers; though I guess that follows as those BCs & CAs were technically assigned to screen the wallers stationed there.
Last edited by Jonathan_S on Fri Feb 10, 2023 10:35 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: [WPV non-spoilers] Cruiser squadrons
Post by Jonathan_S   » Fri Feb 10, 2023 1:26 am

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ThinksMarkedly wrote:The other thing is about the ships in this squadron. The text says
What Price Victory? wrote:Fearless, Druid, Star Warrior and Apprentice were older Star Knights.


Any name there rings a bell? I'll give you a hint: it's not Star Warrior. Or Druid or Apprentice. The only question is if this is CA-286 or if this is a new hull with the same name after CA-286 was towed to port, because after all the name is in the List of Honor.
Actually - apropos of nothing - there actually is a ship named 'Star Warrior' that shows up in the 'The Service of the Sword' story from the anthology of the same name; an Erewhonese destroyer lost to the "pirates" that Oversteegen eventually tangles with.

Though HotQ seems to make it clear the Honor was able to sail HMS Fearless back to Manticore "Admiral White Haven had summoned her for a final, routine meeting before she took Fearless home". Then Honor had nearly a full T-year of medical leave getting patched up; which is where we pick up at the start of SVW.
As CA-286 was brand new, and one of Manticore's latest heavy cruisers it would have made sense, in that peacetime environment, to have patched her up and (since that wouldn't take as long as Honor's recovery) handed her over to another captain. Sure, we don't hear anything about her after that point, but if HMS Warlock could make it all the way through the first way and end up helping face down ex-SLN BCs at Monica there's no reason HMS Fearless couldn't have similarly survived.

OTOH if they'd decided CA-286 was beyond economical repair, or if they'd patched her up and then she'd been lost in the first couple years of the war (before the Edward Saganami cruisers supplanted the Star Knights as Manticores newest and most powerful heavy cruisers) then her name, as one on the List of Honor, likely would have been assigned to the next new Star Knight.

So unless RFC weighs in there's likely no way to know whether or not this was CA-286
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Re: [WPV non-spoilers] Cruiser squadrons
Post by ThinksMarkedly   » Fri Feb 10, 2023 1:27 am

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Jonathan_S wrote:And I just noticed that back in HotQ White Haven talks about taking "two full squadrons of battlecruisers" to Grayson, and yet he shows up with only "four battlecruisers, supported by twelve lighter ships". That's might be two divisions of BCs; but it's certainly not 2 squadrons (though my SftS Michelle's 8 BC squadron appears to be split into just 2 4-ship divisions)

But in SVW the BC squadrons assigned to Hancock were are 8 ship formations; as was Van Slyke's squadron of heavy cruisers; though I guess that follows as those BCs & CAs were technically assigned to screen the wallers stationed there.


I guess that, as it wasn't a fleet unit, BatCruRun 17 that White Haven took to Grayson must've been a mixed fighting force spearheaded by its battlecruisers. That is, the administrative unit itself included the supporting screening units.
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Re: [WPV non-spoilers] Cruiser squadrons
Post by ThinksMarkedly   » Fri Feb 10, 2023 1:30 am

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Jonathan_S wrote:So unless RFC weighs in there's likely no way to know whether or not this was CA-286


The story actually gives the answer, but I won't spoil it here.
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Re: [WPV non-spoilers] Cruiser squadrons
Post by Robert_A_Woodward   » Fri Feb 10, 2023 2:46 am

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ThinksMarkedly wrote:
Jonathan_S wrote:And I just noticed that back in HotQ White Haven talks about taking "two full squadrons of battlecruisers" to Grayson, and yet he shows up with only "four battlecruisers, supported by twelve lighter ships". That's might be two divisions of BCs; but it's certainly not 2 squadrons (though my SftS Michelle's 8 BC squadron appears to be split into just 2 4-ship divisions)

But in SVW the BC squadrons assigned to Hancock were are 8 ship formations; as was Van Slyke's squadron of heavy cruisers; though I guess that follows as those BCs & CAs were technically assigned to screen the wallers stationed there.


I guess that, as it wasn't a fleet unit, BatCruRun 17 that White Haven took to Grayson must've been a mixed fighting force spearheaded by its battlecruisers. That is, the administrative unit itself included the supporting screening units.


Admiral White Haven took 16 battlecruisers to Grayson in _The Honor of the Queen_. Four groups of 4 did crash translations spaced around the Yeltsin system hyper limit. His flagship was part of the group that was closest to Grayson.
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Re: [WPV non-spoilers] Cruiser squadrons
Post by Jonathan_S   » Fri Feb 10, 2023 10:33 am

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Robert_A_Woodward wrote:Admiral White Haven took 16 battlecruisers to Grayson in _The Honor of the Queen_. Four groups of 4 did crash translations spaced around the Yeltsin system hyper limit. His flagship was part of the group that was closest to Grayson.
Oops. Thanks for the correction. I see that now; I just hadn't scrolled far enough back -- I saw the 4 BCs open long ranged fire on Thunder of God, but hadn't gone back 2 more pages to see
Honor of the Queen wrote:He’d spread his battlecruisers by divisions, spacing four separate formations about Grayson’s side of the primary as they translated from hyper to give himself the best possible coverage, and brought them into n-space in a crash translation. [...]
Reliant’s own division had come in with Grayson directly between them and Yeltsin, covering the most important arc of the half-circle
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Re: [WPV non-spoilers] Cruiser squadrons
Post by Theemile   » Thu Feb 16, 2023 1:50 pm

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Jonathan_S wrote:
But in SVW the BC squadrons assigned to Hancock were are 8 ship formations; as was Van Slyke's squadron of heavy cruisers; though I guess that follows as those BCs & CAs were technically assigned to screen the wallers stationed there.


In Jaynes RMN, BC and Heavy Cruiser squadrons are 4 divisions, and each division being 2-3 CA or BC. (For administrative Squadrons). So Pre-war, both could be as large as 12 ships.
******
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Re: [WPV non-spoilers] Cruiser squadrons
Post by Brigade XO   » Thu Feb 23, 2023 10:43 am

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Honor may have taken the "patched up" old light crusier Fearless from Basilisk to Manticore but that would have been the end of that hull. Aside from the brutal beating the ship took (lets not even get into ejecting the reactor to survive) she had already been mangled by pulling out so much of the normal weaponry to install the "weapon that shall not be named" and I supposed had added energy torpedoes as the designated weapon to go with WTSHBN.

Get the ship and crew home, recycle the ship. Honor gets a brand new Heavy Cruiser with the same name as he next ship.
Not clear in the book but there didn't seem to be anything like a breaker's yard at Basilisk--- things like that would have to be in the future after the Shifting of Political Reality that the Peeps attempt to steal the system and the build-up began to place an actual Fleet basing operation there to support RMN and ancillary commercial development to handle increased merchant traffic. In the book there was a brief side discussion of what would have normally have been done for an engineering casualty that the Sirius claimed to be- one option was to get parts and techs shipped in (possibly with a repair ship) or a vague talk about something big enough to take Sirius though a wormhole to an existing commercial yard such as exists in the Manticore Binary System.
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Re: [WPV non-spoilers] Cruiser squadrons
Post by Jonathan_S   » Thu Feb 23, 2023 10:59 am

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Brigade XO wrote:Honor may have taken the "patched up" old light crusier Fearless from Basilisk to Manticore but that would have been the end of that hull. Aside from the brutal beating the ship took (lets not even get into ejecting the reactor to survive) she had already been mangled by pulling out so much of the normal weaponry to install the "weapon that shall not be named" and I supposed had added energy torpedoes as the designated weapon to go with WTSHBN.

Get the ship and crew home, recycle the ship. Honor gets a brand new Heavy Cruiser with the same name as he next ship.
Not clear in the book but there didn't seem to be anything like a breaker's yard at Basilisk--- things like that would have to be in the future after the Shifting of Political Reality that the Peeps attempt to steal the system and the build-up began to place an actual Fleet basing operation there to support RMN and ancillary commercial development to handle increased merchant traffic. In the book there was a brief side discussion of what would have normally have been done for an engineering casualty that the Sirius claimed to be- one option was to get parts and techs shipped in (possibly with a repair ship) or a vague talk about something big enough to take Sirius though a wormhole to an existing commercial yard such as exists in the Manticore Binary System.

Right - but we were only talking about the new Star Knight-class heavy cruiser HMS Fearless (CA-286) after limping back from Grayson.
The status of the Courageous-class light cruiser HMS Fearless (CL-56) after Basilisk Station wasn't in question; we know she was scrapped.

We don't/didn't know what happened to the modern heavy cruiser after Honor flew her home.
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