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the total loss of the refitted class after their single use, whether they're destroyed by enemy action or finally withdrawn from service.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.