Silesian Centaur BLAC

Rincewind wrote:

Duckk wrote:No, this will never happen. David has been absolutely clear on this point. You do not compromise a warship's ability to take punishment by opening up giant holes in the hull for LAC bays. You are creating a useless manbearpig for a problem that does not exist.

But you create a hollowed out ship where all the really essential components such as reactors, command, living spaces & life support are all crammed into a tiny portion of the core hull thus rendering them even more susceptible to critical or fatal damage?

The hollow core of the SDP's only extends approximately 30-45% of the hull. In a superdreadnought, that's still a helluva lot of space to cram in all your reactors, and other stuff without putting it 'dangerously' close to the outside. Which doesn't even factor in that as superdreadnoughts they have extremely thick armor specifically BECAUSE they're expected to soak damage.


CLAC's, whether the RMN's Dreadnoughts or the Havenite Superdreadnoughts, sacrifice considerable amounts of their armor to squeeze in maximum LAC bays, which have at best a thin armor layer on their launch bay hatch. And suffer a lot more from having to find somewhere else to squeeze their critical systems with so many LAC bays that extend deeper into the ship than proper broadside weapons.

Somtaaw wrote:
The hollow core of the SDP's only extends approximately 30-45% of the hull. In a superdreadnought, that's still a helluva lot of space to cram in all your reactors, and other stuff without putting it 'dangerously' close to the outside. Which doesn't even factor in that as superdreadnoughts they have extremely thick armor specifically BECAUSE they're expected to soak damage.


CLAC's, whether the RMN's Dreadnoughts or the Havenite Superdreadnoughts, sacrifice considerable amounts of their armor to squeeze in maximum LAC bays, which have at best a thin armor layer on their launch bay hatch. And suffer a lot more from having to find somewhere else to squeeze their critical systems with so many LAC bays that extend deeper into the ship than proper broadside weapons.

30-45% is still a hell of a lot. If you look at pictures of the Invictus class in House of Steel it is over 50% of the main hull not including the stern taper & hammerhead; (I know, I measured it). By any standards that is an enormous amount of volume for any warship.

Perhaps the best way to describe it is by looking at the different design philosophy for Aircraft Carriers by both the United States & Royal Navy prior to & during the Second World War. US Carriers were designed to maximise the aircraft carrying potential & built their flight decks as superstructure, using their hanger decks as the strength deck. By contrast, British Carriers, particularly the Illustrious group, used the flight deck as the strength deck & had enclosed hangers. Certainly it cut down on the aircraft capacity & they were volumetrically much smaller... but they could take damage that would send a US carrier back to Pearl.

Rincewind wrote:

Duckk wrote:No, this will never happen. David has been absolutely clear on this point. You do not compromise a warship's ability to take punishment by opening up giant holes in the hull for LAC bays. You are creating a useless manbearpig for a problem that does not exist.

But you create a hollowed out ship where all the really essential components such as reactors, command, living spaces & life support are all crammed into a tiny portion of the core hull thus rendering them even more susceptible to critical or fatal damage?

I think the differences in this case are that:

1) You might do something that extreme when the payoffs are equally great. The podnaught, combined with ghost rider, was such a quantum leap in capability that performing such radical surgery on traditional ship designs could be justified. Skimper's latest frankenstein, on the other hand...

2) In the case of a podnaught, at least you aren't cutting dozens of giant holes in the massively thick outer armor belt that provides the ship's primary passive defense, and SDs are big. Even a pod core, while definitely representing a structural and design weakness, still leaves a lot of space for framing, armor, and systems both abeam and fore of it. Punching full-sized LAC bays (plus the keyhole fantasy) into a BC-sized ship, even one so large as a Nike, on the other hand...

MuonNeutrino wrote:
I think the differences in this case are that:

1) You might do something that extreme when the payoffs are equally great. The podnaught, combined with ghost rider, was such a quantum leap in capability that performing such radical surgery on traditional ship designs could be justified. Skimper's latest frankenstein, on the other hand...

2) In the case of a podnaught, at least you aren't cutting dozens of giant holes in the massively thick outer armor belt that provides the ship's primary passive defense, and SDs are big. Even a pod core, while definitely representing a structural and design weakness, still leaves a lot of space for framing, armor, and systems both abeam and fore of it. Punching full-sized LAC bays (plus the keyhole fantasy) into a BC-sized ship, even one so large as a Nike, on the other hand...

An escort/light carrier might have it's uses, an escort carrier/battlecruiser combo would get you a crappy BC and a worse CLAC(light).

Having a dedicated carrier on a BC hull might give you the ability to send out 3 squadrons of LAC's with the squadron that was tasked to help Mobius rather than sending a dedicated fleet carrier with 4 times the LAC's.

It's clearly a prototype design - The updated follow-on will be the Orange-class. After all, Orange is the new BLAC...

jchilds wrote:It's clearly a prototype design - The updated follow-on will be the Orange-class. After all, Orange is the new BLAC...

We've already got enough problems with Mandarins, thank you, without adding any more members of the Orange family, thank you.

Sigs wrote:

MuonNeutrino wrote:
I think the differences in this case are that:

1) You might do something that extreme when the payoffs are equally great. The podnaught, combined with ghost rider, was such a quantum leap in capability that performing such radical surgery on traditional ship designs could be justified. Skimper's latest frankenstein, on the other hand...

2) In the case of a podnaught, at least you aren't cutting dozens of giant holes in the massively thick outer armor belt that provides the ship's primary passive defense, and SDs are big. Even a pod core, while definitely representing a structural and design weakness, still leaves a lot of space for framing, armor, and systems both abeam and fore of it. Punching full-sized LAC bays (plus the keyhole fantasy) into a BC-sized ship, even one so large as a Nike, on the other hand...

An escort/light carrier might have it's uses, an escort carrier/battlecruiser combo would get you a crappy BC and a worse CLAC(light).

Having a dedicated carrier on a BC hull might give you the ability to send out 3 squadrons of LAC's with the squadron that was tasked to help Mobius rather than sending a dedicated fleet carrier with 4 times the LAC's.

Agreed - there's a possible role for a smaller dedicated CLAC, but that's basically all it's going to be able to do. At most it might have a small amount of fire control to use MDM pods to support the LACs, but no more, if even that much.




Combo carrier/shooter ships are inherently worse at both jobs than a ship dedicated to one or the other.
The only time comboing like that is worthwhile is when the technologies in use are just that good or are good enough*, and/or volume/mass is not a meaningful concern, meaning you're building something big enough that it doesn't matter.
*This can sometimes mean that the benefits of having or downsides to not having carrier capability outweigh the loss of onboard shooting capability.

In order for a combo carrier/shooter to function effectively in the Honorverse, I suspect you'd probably need to figure out how to make pinnace/assault shuttle/sting ship sized small craft viable threats to regular warships.
Or be building something so massive that the inherent inefficiencies in a combo ship are outweighed by the amount of ship you have. It's remotely possible that a Lenny Det might be big enough to be in the right size range for a combo carrer/shooter to work, since it's got internal graser torp tubes, but it might still be too small.

The smallest ship I could possibly see being refit into some Light Carrier LACs, is a battleship. All numbers I quote below are directly from the wiki, because I don't have anything better for resources.

Most battlecruisers pre-Nikes were like the Reliant which as a maximum length of 713m and a maximum beam of 91m. Shrikes on the other hand are 71m long, and 20m beams. Simple math says the LACs would be forced into a sideways on docking bay, and even doing that you're not quite able to fit in 9 LACs nose to tail on the flank of the BC, even if you excluded the service bays. If you figure the service bays add a total of ~14m for an even 85m per LAC docked, you get about 6 or 7 LACs per broadside because the hammerhead requirements interfere. When you figure as well that the Reliant has an 81m draft but the Shrikes are 20m + service bays call it 25m height per Shrike. So you can pack at most, 14 Shrikes (or Ferrets, Katana's or Cimeterres) along each broadside of a Reliant, that works out to 3x 8 LAC squadrons plus 4 backups (the original Minnie carried 12 squadrons + 4 backups). Now we don't have the exact dimensions of the Nike Class, but it's 2.5 megatons which is almost three full times the size of the Reliants.

However, we do have dimensions on the old Havenite Triumphant BB's, 1168m length, 159m beam and 145m draft. The original Minotaur was 1131m length, 189m beam and was with 175m draft and managed to pack LACs in nose in. Very similar lengths & beams, so reduce the total LAC count from 100 to 80, and you're fielding 10 full squadrons. This all on a platform that would be marginally faster than the original Minotaur, and without rearranging too much in the way of internals.


But that's all mostly irrelevant, the best size for a CLAC is a superdreadnought. the Dreadnought sized Minotaurs plus later iterations still bring close to 100-120 LACs per DN CLAC, while the Havenite Aviary class bring over 250 LACs without breaking a sweat. Anything much smaller than the DN, or a redesigned BB is too small to pack in the launch bays, AND pack in the megatons upon megatons of ammo for the LACs, and the flight crews, the maintenance crews, the crew for the CLAC itself, the hydrogen bunker for the CLAC, and the list goes on.

And the Nike class are pocket Battleships, even if they have the 'flight' characteristics of a battlecruiser, they're still just as big as small battleships. So pointing out the Nike class could be redesigned into CLACs is functionally identical to my already pointing out the Triumphant BB's could do it and bring a meaningful load, 10 squadrons which would probably work out to 1 or 2 squadrons of Shrikes, and 2-5 squadrons of Ferrets, and the remainder of Katanas.

Somtaaw wrote:And the Nike class are pocket Battleships, even if they have the 'flight' characteristics of a battlecruiser, they're still just as big as small battleships. So pointing out the Nike class could be redesigned into CLACs is functionally identical to my already pointing out the Triumphant BB's could do it and bring a meaningful load, 10 squadrons which would probably work out to 1 or 2 squadrons of Shrikes, and 2-5 squadrons of Ferrets, and the remainder of Katanas.

10 squadrons kind of misses the point that only two or three squadrons of Shrikes or Ferrets would be needed for convoy protection or anti-piracy operations. You're trying to build fleet carrier numbers into an escort carrier.

Weird Harold wrote:

Somtaaw wrote:And the Nike class are pocket Battleships, even if they have the 'flight' characteristics of a battlecruiser, they're still just as big as small battleships. So pointing out the Nike class could be redesigned into CLACs is functionally identical to my already pointing out the Triumphant BB's could do it and bring a meaningful load, 10 squadrons which would probably work out to 1 or 2 squadrons of Shrikes, and 2-5 squadrons of Ferrets, and the remainder of Katanas.

10 squadrons kind of misses the point that only two or three squadrons of Shrikes or Ferrets would be needed for convoy protection or anti-piracy operations. You're trying to build fleet carrier numbers into an escort carrier.

They're pirates, one salvo from pretty much anything destroyer or bigger kills them. That's why the possible plug-and-play LAC bays into merchants serves far better than a dedicated ship ever could.

Because they don't operate convoy's in time of peace, and in time of war you still can't convoy everywhere, even if it's only a two ship convoy, consisting of one escort and one merchy. And Silesia is Manticoran territory now, excluding what is now Andermani territory. If Manticore could be emplacing local LAC squadrons to the Talbott cluster within months of the Constitution signing, they'd have already deployed en masse to Silesia.

So every merchy that's arriving has local LAC forces that know their estimated schedules, and could already be in space in the rough sphere to escort them in and out of the hyper limit. Which means the only time you need LACs to truly guard you, is either a bunch of pirates actually ganged up and tagged you in hyper (the Wayfarer sim where there were no less than 8 heavy cruisers and 2 "missile freighters") where a mere 2 or 3 squadrons isn't going to achieve much, or it's the commerce raid policy of the Mandarins (again entire squadrons of CAs and BCs).