ThinksMarkedly wrote:Jonathan_S wrote:I think you might be overstating the lack of new weapons and technology over the proceeding 3 centuries. From IIF we know that impeller missiles (first prototypes 1246 PD followed "soon" by "smaller more practical drives"), sidewalls (1260s? PD "roughly a decade after [practical?] impeller missiles], sidewall penetrators (1298 PD) are all well beyond 3 centuries old.
But now "The stage was now set for an arms development race that has continued for the last seven hundred years. Military spacecraft designers devised increasingly effective ways to deceive, destroy, or block the attacking missiles. Weapon designers invented increasingly effective seekers, sidewall penetrators, and warheads. The evolutionary development over the period between about 1300 and 1800 was sometimes punctuated by bursts of revolutionary activity that introduced competing technologies on both sides of the offensive/defensive divide." [IFF]
Next on mentioned is still more than 3 centuries old; the inertial compensators (1412 PD)
You can't use examples of technology advancement over 3 centuries old to prove that there was significant development in the last 3 centuries.
That wasn't my intent. I was mentioning those, and specifically noting they predated the time period in question, just to remind everyone of the baseline tech that existed
before the technological changes of the 3 centuries in question. To, as the quote went, "set the stage" for my argument.
ThinksMarkedly wrote:I'm not saying there was no development at all. I'm saying there wasn't much significant development, meaning the strategies and tactics of battle remained unchanged. There was nothing to upset the cart -- or at least nothing that wasn't countered and thus restored the
status quo. Besides, with few to no large-scale wars, there was nobody actually trying any new ideas.
We know for a fact in this period the SLN decayed, going from unquestioned superior force to lazy layabout. They actively avoided and even suppressed any development that would nullify their advantages, precisely because they wanted the existing strategies to remain successful.
From your list before the laserhead:
Pure fusion (grav pinch) warhead (1650s PD) -- allowing warhead's of unheard of yields to be fitted into missile bodies (allowing them to overload and burn out sidewalls).
Altering fusion fuels to gain a bit of standoff range and tune the resulting radiation (1669 PD)
Impeller drive counter missile (1701 PD)
Point defense laser weapons (1780s PD)
nuclear gravitically directed energy weapon (NGDEW) (1806 PD) -- improved direction shaping and increased standoff range for sidewall burning warheads.
RMN achieves 8-10,000 km warhead standoff range for sidewall burning (1826 PD)
I don't see anything revolutionary. The increase in stand-off range is countered by the impeller-drive CM, which can reach out and stop shipkillers at longer range too. And the overall battle strategy remains the same: hammer with missiles to degrade sidewalls until you close to energy weapons range.
Anyone at this time that might have suggested using a thousand missiles in a salvo from 8 million km out would be considered a lunatic. The Manticore class SD had 22 missile tubes in the broadside. So even if they stacked a double launch, you'd need 22 ships to fire 968 missiles. The RMN had three of those. Even if you include all the missile tubes of the 11 Ad Astra DNs and of the 16 Thorson-class battleships, they wouldn't add up to enough tubes.
And of course glossed over in that list is a steady back and forth of advances in ECM, jammers, decoys, sidewalls, sidewall penetrators, warheads, point defense autocannon, improved laser clusters, steady upward creep in maximum compensator tonnage, etc. etc., each temporarily tilting the advantage towards attack or back to defense. All of that is enough innovation within the stagnant tactical "plateau" that you probable had more than just the fringe feeling that some new design, fully buying into the latest advance, might shake things up and provide a major advantage.
So if not a full blown jeune école movement during that whole period there was probably always at least the nucleus of such a movement within the RMN and it would have waxed and waned in size and influence through the many decades.
Sure, every time something new came up, someone would stand up and declare that war-fighting would have changed forever and would have been indistinguishable from before. But it didn't, both because none of those were independently sufficient to achieve that and because there was no war to put the theories into practice. So the jeune école prior to the late-19th century improvements would have been dismissed as irrelevant, if it existed.
That would contribute to the other side of the argument, that war-fighting had plateaued and that it was best to stick to tried and true methods. Or that there was nothing new to be learned.
With the benefit of hindsight its easy to see that the impeller driven CM countered the more powerful warheads, and that none of these innovations fundamentally upset the apple cart. But those counters didn't arise instantly, in the case of the CM it took over 30 years. That seems the blink of an eye when looking back over 3 centuries, but that's an entire generation of warship designers (remember this is way before prolong) that are dealing with the fact that offense of vastly more powerful warheads seems to have trumped the defense of sidewalls. Yes some of them would be looking for ways to add defenses to counter the more powerful warheads. But I've no doubt that some proclaimed the era of the battleship is dead and since ships can't survive modern warheads we need to instead build many more small ships so we lose less of our fleet for each hit, they're better able to evade, and we can swarm the old obsolete designs with our fast cheap missile boats carrying missiles with warheads far more powerful than the capital ship missiles of just a few years ago!
It looks like a revolutionary technology... until a few decades later when the counter comes out. And now big ships able to carry lots of impeller powered CMs can wipe the floor with your swarms of frigates.
So sure, it's easy to look back from here and say any previous jeune école movements were wrong. (Though -- as with the original French ideas of torpedo boats -- if a war had happened at just the right time, before counters could be developed and rolled out, the jeune école designs would have most likely worked and proved to be the destabilizing influence that their proponents claimed).
And for that matter, podlaying wallers, MDM, and FTL fire-control are all a decade or less old. In a couple more decades who knows that countermeasures might come out to swing the balance strongly back in favor of defense and restore the old stylized slugging matches. It's just this time a war came along at just the right time for one side to benefit from the well timed destabilization.
