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
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[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)
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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.