SharkHunter wrote:munroburton wrote:
Roland: 188,750 tons
Average LAC: 21,000 tons
1 Roland = 8.9 LACs
For the sakes of simplicity, I'm sticking with the Shrike-B/Ferret mix.
9 of those would have a collective 72 CM and 108 PD. How would the double stack of 24 missiles fare against this defensive umbrella?
...
Plus the LACs also have excellent stealth, bow/stern walls, the best acceleration and maneuverability, Ghost Rider decoy missiles and EW... all to offset the fact that any single hit will be a kill.
The Roland will be facing 36-missile salvos. Sag-C, 92 missiles. Nike, 480. Well, assuming every LAC survives into their missile range, which they wouldn't.
IMO, the likely outcome of any of those scenarios would be mutual slaughter. The Roland might run out of ammo if the LACs feints a few times and the Nike might end up eating a few dozen grasers with its magazines nowhere near empty.
That's why I specified that outside of an ambush, it wouldn't happen. Consider that if a LAC weighs 20K tons, that's 9 LACs to match a Roland's weight vs 250 shipkillers. With the Sag-C, 24 LACs, vs. the number of missiles a Sag-C can drop and throw
Do you really think 9 or 24 LACS would survive multiple DDM launches at about maybe 10x their own missile range (the LAC shipkillers have to be pretty short legged), given the LACs also they'd need to stay somewhat clustered for mutual defense, making target acquisition even easier...
Against the RMN pen-aids and missile seekers, and an alert and highly competent Tactical section on the cruiser? I personally don't think so.
It's 72 CM and 108 PDC's against 24 DDM's at a time. Assuming comparable electronic warfare quality and skills (though, granted, the single larger unit may concentrate both a bit more), then yes, the idea IS that those 9 LAC's will survive multiple DDM launches, just because each 24 DDM salvo will generally fail to penetrate those active defenses. They're just too thick. The Roland is effectively counting on a golden BB - not to penetrate armor to something vulnerable, but to get past all the active defenses. (And, to a lesser extent, wedges, evasive maneuvers, and walls all around.)
Granted, outside an ambush, the LAC's may not be able to reach the Roland before it vanishes into hyper, either with empty magazines if it tried to engage or with full ones if it didn't bother.
It may come out differently if the Roland can stack a much larger salvo with rotating control channels and a staggered delay firing sequence. But then you've got worst accuracy and running the magazines dry becomes a still worse issue.
It may also come out differently in case of a light cruiser design with much deeper magazines, that's effectively using initial salvos to trade its own shipkillers for LAC CM's, and then face only the PDC's for the final salvos. It's maybe one of the better excuses for really deep magazines on a light combatant.
(I wonder too if this sort of thing may argue in favor of dual-drive Viper's - huge, granted, but their combined anti-LAC, anti-missile, fire-and-forget, very long range, very high speed, and extended missile defense capability may make them worth it. Replacing some of the shipkilling and some of the standard CM launchers with some for those on light combatants - at whatever ratios would apply - could give them a new niche in fleet combat compatible with their other missions.)
Seriously though, if you want to destroy a lot of LAC's, better to send a battlecruiser or at least load up heavily on pods. Either way, it's not the sort of mission for a workhorse cruiser.
