ThinksMarkedly wrote:Captain Golding wrote:Given the Success of Pods why not do away with the Larger tubes and provide an "external" POD Rack Space to carry Pods of Mk16's to supliment the Bow and stern tubes. Servicing the PODS may be a vacume operation restricted to N Space which would be less effective than the pod bays but I am sure that the needs to service pods has been reduced over the first generation.
External-only pods will probably be a bad idea. Limpeted pods are known to obscure sensors (and the other tubes), so they have to be employed on the first shot. They're good to make a big Alpha Launch at an enemy, but that's not a good solution for a ship if it's also the only shot it can fire. And mind you, even if it could decide to not fire all of them, it has to finish firing them all before the enemy missiles arrive, due to proximity kills.I Do think a Stretched Roland with room for 30~40 Marines would be a good idea. Also the Rolands carry room for a Flag Staff and Deck - if that was stripped out and repurposed (Even if in new builds) how big a Marine contingent could be shipped ?
That seems to be the direction the RMN is going to: the minimum viable combatant is something bigger than a Roland, which probably means the destroyer type itself is not long-term viable. So we should be talking about light cruisers here.
going from MAXXQ's drawings, a current Manty Pod is roughly 19x19x7 meters. A Roland has a length of 446m, a beam of 54m and a Draft of 45m, and a Chanson has a Length of 367m a beam of 43 and Draft of 25. While Rolands have more space inside their compensated volume to haul limpeted pods, Pods still take up lots of real estate. even if you were able to clear a space of other hardware and mount an exterior rack, it would be hard to find space to hold more than 1 or 2 pods - and stealing that much space would be at the cost of something (Firecontrol, sensors, sidewalls, etc.) as mentioned above.
If you are intending to get rid of tubes all together, and just rely on pods in a pod bay, anything smaller than a BC is just too small to carry (and fire) sufficient pods to make a difference - a 20 Pod bay launching just one pod at a time is 140m long (about 1/3rd of length of the Roland), has a the same firing rate (12 per salvo for the all Mk 25 pod version) and magazine size as the Roland, but places all the weapons in one basket, and can't fire a salvo size smaller than 12.
Besides, I'm fairly certain that even a single pod can't fit through a Roland's node ring.