Escort Carrier Modification

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

cthia wrote:I doubt very seriously, though, that a CLAC can tow its full complement of CLACs outside its hull. That is just too much extra volume to compensate, I'd wager. But I think it is interesting that doctrine includes hitching a ride with other ships just long enough to get out of the hotzone.

At any rate, you've probably got doctrine pegged. Except, you've got to allow for a doctrine for when the shit has hit the fan, and the entire quadrant is stinky. Heck, retrieving LACs could take a long time if there has been a deadly battle with huge RMN losses. There will be LACs staggering back to the CLAC, limping with damage.

Indeed, but in that case there are also many fewer LACs to be recovered. If the operation has been such a disaster that the CLACs have come under fire, the LACs themselves are probably almost all gone. They'd be the first line of defence for the forces attempting to withdraw.

They also have the highest acceleration of any known ship. So they could simply accelerate out-system to a predefined pick-up location a light-day out that the pursuers have no chance of overtaking in normal space. The pursuers would need to transition to hyperspace and engage the CLACs there, dividing their forces between the n-space harassers, the hyperspace ones, and whoever is left defending whatever was valuable in that system.

And, of course there are going to be times when CLACs will have to risk destruction to collect LACs.

You're not alone if you're thinking about the scene where Honor had to abandon Michelle.

It's far more likely the LACs would be abandoned in that case. A 5-million tonne ship with a thousand crew is far more valuable than a dozen or two LACs.

"The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few."

Pardon my bold.

Probably more often than not, I'd agree. But don't get too married to the notion. A bigger fraction of the available LACs could have been destroyed, but yet recovery could still be hellish for any particular CLAC. For instance, if Darius is discovered and three CLACs make the journey and 180 LACs are destroyed along with two CLACs, that still leaves 120 LACs for one CLAC to recover. Twenty over max. And, in such a hostile system with all kinds of toys, LACs may not be safe floating around in Shark and Whale infested waters.

Oh! And Ghosts!

cthia wrote:Probably more often than not, I'd agree. But don't get too married to the notion. A bigger fraction of the available LACs could have been destroyed, but yet recovery could still be hellish for any particular CLAC. For instance, if Darius is discovered and three CLACs make the journey and 180 LACs are destroyed along with two CLACs, that still leaves 120 LACs for one CLAC to recover. Twenty over max. And, in such a hostile system with all kinds of toys, LACs may not be safe floating around in Shark and Whale infested waters.

Oh! And Ghosts!

Which is exatly why the CLACs wouldn't stay at all. In a system where the attacker knows there are hidden sniping units, the CLACs would be both protected by escorting ships and would stay as little time as possible in normal space. They'd transition in, launch the wings, then transition out, to wait in hyperspace, under stealth. With hyperspace's lower visibility radius, those could withdraw.

They'd come back at a predetermined time and at a predetermined location to pick up any survivors. Somewhere where the pursuers would not be able to reach in the time it would take to recover the LACs.

But even in your scenario, I'd expect the LACs to be abandoned, even if it meant certain death at the hands of an enemy that does not honour the rules for prisoners of war, if there was too high a risk to the carriers. They wouldn't get to 2 CLACs destroyed and one waiting in the first place. The three would have left before it got too hot for them.

Or if two did get destroyed, then the third would leave.

One more thing: if the opponent is not going to honour proper treatment of surrendered forces, then those 120 surviving LACs will not surrender either. They will inflict maximum damage, however small that is.

That said, the current doctrine applies to the current CLAC designs.

RFC has said, IIRC, that the RMN is looking at possible designs and doctrines for a better protected close support CLAC, with a correspondingly smaller LAC wing, that would stay with the battle line and allow all the LACs (its own plus the ones conventional CLACs had dropped) to cycle through to rearm. (Since the LAC's relatively small magazines are its major weakness as an anti-missile screening unit)

Those close support CLACs, should the Manties decide they make sense, would need way to retrieve and launch LACs while potentially under active fire (and while maneuvering to stay tucked in with the battle line).

So many questions......Since the LACs that came with a give CLAC to a deployment point represent part of the mass the CLAC is designed to carry into hyperspace, why would it be a problem to "just" tractor them to the hull and take them into hyper as part of a hot extraction? They don't actually have to go "that far" in hyper to recover them. Unless they are actually in a gravity wave, they could change their vector right after entering hyper and after some amount of time in hyper drop to N-space for a short time to bring their brood inside before going back to hyper and running like hell. It truly doesn't matter which hanger a particular LAC ends up in...you can alway sort them out in a friendly environment.

A CLAC doing a recovery of its birds does not seem to need to stop acceleration. The challenge is getting the LACs close enough - without wedge on wedge destruction- such that EACH hanger can lock onto a LAC with the tractor equipment and the LAC shut off the its wedge and be pulled into the hanger. You have CLAC local tactical control such that it can see (if even on instruments) and each LAC has it's IFF transponder (which could be on very low power at that point). So EACH hanger has got to have some individual method of working with any single LAC to bring it into a hanger and shut the door. Otherwise you will not be able to do things like "flush" the full complement even if it is in some staggered launch sequencing. You have 80 bays, you are going to have 80 bay presser/tractor sets and individual operation ability -probably oversee by some part of the CLAC's tactical operations in a sort of mini-astro control scenario.

As far as a rendezvous point after deploying LACs (with our without going inside the hyperlimit) If you are going to have a hot extraction point outside the hyper limit, you are still going to have the CLAC showing up relative to the rendezvous point such that it would be able to run up it's hyperdrive cycle and get the hell of out Dodge if it's brood's survivors were tracked out to the pickup and there was a warship waiting right behind them to pick off the CLAC.

Tactics. All Tactics.

Brigade XO wrote:So many questions......Since the LACs that came with a give CLAC to a deployment point represent part of the mass the CLAC is designed to carry into hyperspace, why would it be a problem to "just" tractor them to the hull and take them into hyper as part of a hot extraction? They don't actually have to go "that far" in hyper to recover them. Unless they are actually in a gravity wave, they could change their vector right after entering hyper and after some amount of time in hyper drop to N-space for a short time to bring their brood inside before going back to hyper and running like hell. It truly doesn't matter which hanger a particular LAC ends up in...you can alway sort them out in a friendly environment.

If you're outside a grav wave there's no need for that drop to N-space.

We saw in HAE that even the LACs Wayfarer carried back then had no trouble operating in hyper when in a rift (aka not in a 'wave). That's how Honor was able to detach them to cover the hiding Atlas-class liner while Wayfarer lured the pursuing BC away. The LACs seem to be able to do everything on their own in hyper except
a) enter/survive a grav wave and
b) change hyper bands/leave hyper.
[edit courtesy of Theemile] c) detect grav waves. (They'd have no reason to mount a Warshawski detector/scanner)[/edit]
(I mean, they've got the same sensor range limitations a larger warships would in hyper; but that's not going to affect them when close enough to begin docking procedures)

So the LACs can un-tractor themselves and them come in for docking in hyper just about as easily as they can in N-space. (Again, assuming they're not in a grav wave)

Brigade XO wrote:A CLAC doing a recovery of its birds does not seem to need to stop acceleration. The challenge is getting the LACs close enough - without wedge on wedge destruction- such that EACH hanger can lock onto a LAC with the tractor equipment and the LAC shut off the its wedge and be pulled into the hanger.

Yes, it does need to stop acceleration, or at the very least reduce it to 50 gravities or less so the gravity plates on the LACs operate. Anything higher than that and the crew on the LACs will die the moment they turn their wedges off, which also removes their gravity sump for the compensators. A ship's compensator field is at best a few tens of metres from the hull, whereas a LAC's wedge is going to be km wide. It has to turn the wedge off in order to approach the CLAC.

And it would be extremely unwise to even bring an LAC with wedge inside the CLAC's wedge if the former is evading. There's a chance of wedge-on-wedge collision that simply vaporises the LAC (which is bad) or wedge-on-CLAC collision (which is worse).

OTOH, if the issue is escaping into hyperspace, how close do the CLACs have to be for the hypergenerator to take them along?

ThinksMarkedly wrote:Yes, it does need to stop acceleration, or at the very least reduce it to 50 gravities or less so the gravity plates on the LACs operate. Anything higher than that and the crew on the LACs will die the moment they turn their wedges off, which also removes their gravity sump for the compensators. A ship's compensator field is at best a few tens of metres from the hull, whereas a LAC's wedge is going to be km wide. It has to turn the wedge off in order to approach the CLAC.

And it would be extremely unwise to even bring an LAC with wedge inside the CLAC's wedge if the former is evading. There's a chance of wedge-on-wedge collision that simply vaporises the LAC (which is bad) or wedge-on-CLAC collision (which is worse).

OTOH, if the issue is escaping into hyperspace, how close do the CLACs have to be for the hypergenerator to take them along?

Back in HotQ Thunder and Principality could bring anything within 6 km of their hulls with them when they enetered hyper (if they redlined their generators). A CLAC should be good for at least that. (Though for some reason HotQ specifically said that 6 km was if they were at rest; so I'm not sure what impact velocity or acceleration might have on that generator zone size)

Of course even 6 km is still far too close to come with an active wedge, so the LACs would need to drop wedges and coast/thruster/tractor close enough to get hypered out.


OTOH I suspect a compensator field might stretch more than 10s of meters (at least if you're willing to drop your acceleration). An SD can tow 10 pods within its wedge without impacting its acceleration (so, presumably within the normal shape of the compensation field)

Flag in Exile wrote:superdreadnoughts were big enough they could actually tractor the pods inside their wedges, where they had no effect at all on acceleration

But an SD can tow more if it doesn't tuck them all in, but back there they're reducing its acceleration (presumably through distorting its compensator field)

Still, thinking about it some more, the compensation field probably can't protect the LAC from the acceleration of getting speared in passing by the CLAC's tractor, even if the LAC is close enough to be fully within that compensated zone. After all while the field somehow protects the ship (and its occupants) from the drive's acceleration it doesn't prevent people or objects within the ship from having intertia and experiencing acceleration due to things like human muscles or grav drivers. So whether or not the LACs within the field if a tractor tries to nearly instantly adjust its velocity by any significant amount it's probably going to go very badly for LAC and crew (assuming the tractor mount doesn't just catastrophically fail from the abuse)

Still, if plotted correctly a LAC should be able to overtake from astern, on a parallel course that's just slightly off to the side of the CLAC; it could then cut its wedge and if the navigators plotted everything right the continued acceleration of the CLAC would cause the velocities would match just as the LAC was abreast of the CLAC. If it's close enough at that moment to be within the CLAC's compensator field it could safely be grabbed without the CLAC dropping its accel. But now we're back to how large can that field be, and how close would a captain be willing to let a 20,000 ton ballistic LAC get to his precious CLAC (even if the courses never intersect)?

Are "we" saying that CLACs can tow their full complement of LACs? I don't think so. That would be compensating for twice the designed volume. I doubt that CLACs can tow a fifth of its complement of LACs. If so, then CLACs would often arrive on scene towing LACs as warships used to tow pods.

"CIC has identified a CLAC sir. And with her low accel she's towing a full complement of LACs."

But I suppose that if the ability exists, it is reserved for emergencies. At any rate, what the hell does "tractored hard against the hull" actually mean? It sounds like the opus of a very heavy metal band and a lot of scraping and nerve-racking heavy metal against heavy metal banging.

cthia wrote:Are "we" saying that CLACs can tow their full complement of LACs? I don't think so. That would be compensating for twice the designed volume. I doubt that CLACs can tow a fifth of its complement of LACs. If so, then CLACs would often arrive on scene towing LACs as warships used to tow pods.

"CIC has identified a CLAC sir. And with her low accel she's towing a full complement of LACs."

But I suppose that if the ability exists, it is reserved for emergencies. At any rate, what the hell does "tractored hard against the hull" actually mean? It sounds like the opus of a very heavy metal band and a lot of scraping and nerve-racking heavy metal against heavy metal banging.

Well, the LACs have their own tractors - so they're tractoring themselves to the ship's hull.
But sure - as long as you don't care about acceleration (as in your acceleration is probably below 50 gees) you can have about as many LACs as you want hanging off your sides.

Basically useless for strategic deployment. But if all you need is to get them close for a couple minutes as you jump the lot into Hyper, and then commence normal docking it's doable. But strictly an emergency measure.


(Just like a WWII cruiser could tow an aircraft carrier. But you don't see then towing carriers into battle because they could only do so at about 4 knot; and probably using more fuel than if both ships were steaming normally in company. It's strictly an emergency measure to try to drag a disabled ship clear of the combat zone.)

Ya'll are forgetting that LAC's are basically disposable in the first place. Eggshells armed with hammers with tiny crews, remember?

They are a force multiplier and a way to extend the engagement envelope with a higher degree of success than long range missile fire. If they get to flush their magazines or survive long enough to make a strafing run (even if they don't get to fire their main gun), then they have served their purpose and anything they do beyond that is gravy.

In a defensive role, they are mobile point defense outposts and manned decoys (although, the latter is just the nature of missile combat in the Honorverse rather than by intent). If a Shrike eats a missile aimed at a SD, then that's one less hit a SD can potentially take.

If you have 120 LAC's and can only carry 100, then you take the crews off of the most damaged or most inconveniently located 20- if you can because trained crews are harder to replace than any ship- and abandon the LAC's with a self destruct activated and get out of Dodge with the big, expensive and harder to replace carrier and it's much larger, harder to replace crew.