kzt wrote:So how much space do you have per Marine on a LSD?
Lets look at the Harpers Ferry class.
16,708 tons full load. 609 feet long and 84 feet beam.
Crew of 22 officers, 397 enlisted. 402 marines with 102 surge possible. It carries almost 5000 tons of cargo for the marines.
Do you think they have a gym that can accommodate 500 marines at the same time? How often do the marines whose M1A1 tanks are carried get a chance to practice live fire?
Here's the rifle range on an LSDI suspect that it is possible to find some place on the outside of a ship in the Honorverse where you can shoot at things that are in a safe direction.
Rincewind wrote:Actually, there is evidence that the RMN ships do carry weapons ranges. Admittedly these are mainly pistol or sidearm ranges as shown in Field of Dishonor but as even a light cruiser like Agni carries one then a specialised marine assault ship should certainly be able to. As for the lethality of the marines pulse rifles these could have their muzzle velocity stepped down to allow for the confined space.
darrell wrote:or incorporate armor in the backstop.
The question is how big is the rifle range on a queens ship. for a ship that has no marines like a roland, it would not need to be bigger than 1 lane, which would allow all 83 crew an average of 2 hours per day. 3' wide, 50' long is all you would need.
If you had a company of marines you would want 12-15 lanes so one squad can practice at the same time. And you would only need one range, which can be shared by the marines and ships crew.
I doubt very much that ships like
Agni (RMN CL, shown to have an internal range at the end of chapter 21 of Field of Dishonor) use armor in the backstop, at least as the primary backstop (problems with bouncers or ricochets come to mind). Instead I suspect they incorporate a system similar to that used in Harrington House's weapon range:
Honor Among Enemies, Chapter 3 wrote:Any semi-automatic pistol was a technological antique, but this one was more so than most. In point of fact, its design was over two thousand T-years old, for it was an exact replica of what had once been known as a "Model 1911A1" firing a ".45 ACP" cartridge. It was quite a handful, with an unloaded weight of just under 1.3 kilograms in Grayson's 1.17 standard gravities, and the recoil was formidable. Its antiquity didn't make it any less noisy, either, and despite their ear protectors, more than one of the armsmen on the neighboring firing lanes winced as the 11.43-millimeter slug rumbled down range at a mere 275 MPS. That was a paltry velocity, even beside the auto-loaders to which the Grayson tech base had been limited before the Yeltsin System joined the Alliance, much less the 2,000-plus MPS at which a modern pulser punched out its darts, but the massive fifteen-gram bullet still reached the end of its twenty-five-meter journey with formidable kinetic energy. The jacketed slug exploded through the equally anachronistic paper target's "X" ring in a shower of small, white fragments, then vanished in a fiery flash as it plowed into the focused grav wall "backstop" and vaporized.
The deep, rolling "Boom!" of the archaic handgun cut through the high-pitched whine of the pulsers again, then a third time, a fourth. Seven echoing shots thundered with precise, elegant timing, and the center of the target disappeared, replaced by a single gaping hole.
Admiral Lady Dame Honor Harrington, Countess and Steadholder Harrington, lowered the pistol from her preferred two-hand shooting stance, checked to be certain the slide had locked open on an empty magazine, and laid the weapon on the counter in front of her before taking off her shooting glasses and acoustic ear muffs. Major Andrew LaFollet, her personal armsman and chief bodyguard, stood behind her, wearing his own eye and ear protection, and shook his head as she pressed a button and the target hummed back towards her. Lady Harrington's hand cannon had been a gift from High Admiral Wesley Matthews, and LaFollet wondered how the GSN's military commander in chief had discovered she would like such an outré present. However he'd figured it out, he'd certainly been right. Lady Harrington took the noisy, propellant-spewing, eardrum-shattering monster to the range, whether aboard her superdreadnought flagship or here at the Harrington Guard's outdoor small arms range, at least once a week, and she seemed to draw almost as much pleasure from the ritual of cleaning it after each firing session as she did from battering everyone else's ears with the thing.
Italics are the author's, boldface and underlined text is my emphasis.
