The cruiser future in the RMN - another go

BobfromSydney wrote:The concept of a combatant being armoured against its own guns was something from the battleship era.

The Honorverse seems to be shifting to a point where weapons are completely outracing defences (Apollo). Will there be a similar shift to the change to guided missile warfare during the 50's-70's? Will they become similar to modern naval vessels: Thin hulled vessels with VLS missiles covered in expensive electronic warfare equipment and shaped for stealth?

Apparently not. David has said that the next phase of Honorverse ship development will be increasing the defenses, countering the increased offensive capability. In fact, a significant part of the reason for increasing the size of small ships to the hypothetical 300 kt cruiser is for defenses. So we are not yet at the stage where the navy gives up on passive defenses.

I don't know how I can make it any clearer than I already have.

I think we can all agree that warships are expected to fight equivalent ship types, right? We can also agree that eventually your opponent will figure out some way to equalize an unequal combat balance as shown in the Manty/Havenite wars?


Now the latest gen light RMN ships can fight older ship types that are heavier in class. The RMN believes in both of the above statements, so they are expecting future light opponents to have similar capabilities, yes? So, wouldn't it be smart to upgrade your light units in light of these expected upgrades to your opponents?

I'm not saying these new light ships should fight outside their class against even old ships unless they have to for some compelling reason. They are definitely not expected to fight next gen new ships of a higher class. But you should design your ships to beat equivalent classes, before those classes are put into service and you have to play catch up.

SWM wrote:

BobfromSydney wrote:The concept of a combatant being armoured against its own guns was something from the battleship era.

The Honorverse seems to be shifting to a point where weapons are completely outracing defences (Apollo). Will there be a similar shift to the change to guided missile warfare during the 50's-70's? Will they become similar to modern naval vessels: Thin hulled vessels with VLS missiles covered in expensive electronic warfare equipment and shaped for stealth?

Apparently not. David has said that the next phase of Honorverse ship development will be increasing the defenses, countering the increased offensive capability. In fact, a significant part of the reason for increasing the size of small ships to the hypothetical 300 kt cruiser is for defenses. So we are not yet at the stage where the navy gives up on passive defenses.

Exactly

Kizarvexis wrote:I don't know how I can make it any clearer than I already have.

I think we can all agree that warships are expected to fight equivalent ship types, right?

Um, no? Is there any Manty missile ship that could survive the attack of a similar ship? How could they possibly increase one ship's active and passive defenses enough to do so?
The solution thus far is to have a mix of ships, some handling offense and others defense. The LAC carrier, given time to deploy, has the anti-missile capability of a hundred destroyers.

Kizarvexis wrote:I don't know how I can make it any clearer than I already have.

I think we can all agree that warships are expected to fight equivalent ship types, right? We can also agree that eventually your opponent will figure out some way to equalize an unequal combat balance as shown in the Manty/Havenite wars?


Now the latest gen light RMN ships can fight older ship types that are heavier in class. The RMN believes in both of the above statements, so they are expecting future light opponents to have similar capabilities, yes? So, wouldn't it be smart to upgrade your light units in light of these expected upgrades to your opponents?

I'm not saying these new light ships should fight outside their class against even old ships unless they have to for some compelling reason. They are definitely not expected to fight next gen new ships of a higher class. But you should design your ships to beat equivalent classes, before those classes are put into service and you have to play catch up.

Nit: replace "beat" with "stand up to". That is, you should design your ships to stand up to equivalent classes. And David is planning that. That is the source of his hypothetical 300 kt cruiser with DDM, Keyhole-light, and increased point defenses--the minimum ship that can stand up to the future threat environment.

Bill Woods wrote:

Kizarvexis wrote:I don't know how I can make it any clearer than I already have.

I think we can all agree that warships are expected to fight equivalent ship types, right?

Um, no? Is there any Manty missile ship that could survive the attack of a similar ship? How could they possibly increase one ship's active and passive defenses enough to do so?
The solution thus far is to have a mix of ships, some handling offense and others defense. The LAC carrier, given time to deploy, has the anti-missile capability of a hundred destroyers.

Specialist ships have been shot down many times as why build two ships that have to stay in complement or one ship big enough to do the jobs of both like, offense and defense. The idea of a next gen CL in the 500,000 ton range is to put in defenses to survive attacks from equivalent size ships.

SWM wrote:

Kizarvexis wrote:I don't know how I can make it any clearer than I already have.

I think we can all agree that warships are expected to fight equivalent ship types, right? We can also agree that eventually your opponent will figure out some way to equalize an unequal combat balance as shown in the Manty/Havenite wars?


Now the latest gen light RMN ships can fight older ship types that are heavier in class. The RMN believes in both of the above statements, so they are expecting future light opponents to have similar capabilities, yes? So, wouldn't it be smart to upgrade your light units in light of these expected upgrades to your opponents?

I'm not saying these new light ships should fight outside their class against even old ships unless they have to for some compelling reason. They are definitely not expected to fight next gen new ships of a higher class. But you should design your ships to beat equivalent classes, before those classes are put into service and you have to play catch up.

Nit: replace "beat" with "stand up to". That is, you should design your ships to stand up to equivalent classes. And David is planning that. That is the source of his hypothetical 300 kt cruiser with DDM, Keyhole-light, and increased point defenses--the minimum ship that can stand up to the future threat environment.

But the smallest size ship with the Mk 16 DDM in the broadside is a 483,000 ton Sag-C. Granted, DDMs were put into the Roland, but with unacceptable vulnerabilities to damage taking out half the missile tubes per the RMN officers. So we are talking about a next gen ship larger than the 300,000 ton notional ship that RFC has said may not be built anyways as DDs may be going away as a class as they can not fit in enough defenses to survive in the new more dangerous environment.

Kizarvexis wrote:But the smallest size ship with the Mk 16 DDM in the broadside is a 483,000 ton Sag-C. Granted, DDMs were put into the Roland, but with unacceptable vulnerabilities to damage taking out half the missile tubes per the RMN officers. So we are talking about a next gen ship larger than the 300,000 ton notional ship that RFC has said may not be built anyways as DDs may be going away as a class as they can not fit in enough defenses to survive in the new more dangerous environment.

I'm just telling you what David said. He indicated that the 300 kt notional cruiser would have DDMs, and that this was the smallest the Manticoran planners at that time thought could do the job. Note that this was a Manticoran thought exercise--"What missions will be necessary for future light ships? What features will be the minimum necessary for those ships in the future threat environment when everyone has keyhole and DDM/MDM capability? What is the minimum ship that might be able to carry those minimum features?"

SWM wrote:

Kizarvexis wrote:But the smallest size ship with the Mk 16 DDM in the broadside is a 483,000 ton Sag-C. Granted, DDMs were put into the Roland, but with unacceptable vulnerabilities to damage taking out half the missile tubes per the RMN officers. So we are talking about a next gen ship larger than the 300,000 ton notional ship that RFC has said may not be built anyways as DDs may be going away as a class as they can not fit in enough defenses to survive in the new more dangerous environment.

I'm just telling you what David said. He indicated that the 300 kt notional cruiser would have DDMs, and that this was the smallest the Manticoran planners at that time thought could do the job. Note that this was a Manticoran thought exercise--"What missions will be necessary for future light ships? What features will be the minimum necessary for those ships in the future threat environment when everyone has keyhole and DDM/MDM capability? What is the minimum ship that might be able to carry those minimum features?"

I agree with all that. And in other info that a Sag-C is the smallest ship to have DDMs in a broadside arrangment. And that RMN thought is not happy with the vulnerability of the Roland combined arrangment. And that the DD may not be a viable ship class like the FF as they are too small to carry the necessary DDMs and defenses expected of the new light warship. JeffEngle went with a try at a new larger than 300kt warship and I threw in my 2 cents as well.

Jonathan_S wrote:Going back to the AAC scenario, at 150 million km the ballistic phase for a full up MDM is at least 520 seconds (more if the target maneuvers clear of the straight line path). But in that time even a current Havenite SD can likely displace less than a million km. That's apparently enough to get clear of the targeting basket for the missile's terminal seeker; but only because the control loop is too laggy at that range to properly cue the missile. At ranges you'd actually used non-Apollo MDMs, less than 1/2 that range, that's much less of an issue.


I don't accept that any (non-Apollo) ballistic shot has to have crap accuracy just because one insanely long-ranged one would.

You have to realize that Mk-23s can run with a ballistic component too. Which allows you to plot a ballistic segment that won't allow the target to exit the seeker FoV, but is kind of close. This inherently means that a DDM MUST have a ballistic segment that allows the target to exit the seeker FoV.

So the Mk-23 ship just obliterates that Mk-16 ship without taking effective return fire.

Tenshinai wrote:

JeffEngel wrote:The other big operating cost reduction I have in mind is a lot more radical, but given the nature of the mission and evolving RMN practice, I think it's got a shot at acceptance. The idea is to eliminate on-mount weapon crews for the missile launchers and grasers at least. They're only back-ups in case damage eliminates the ability of those weapons to fire from central control. I submit that that is not essential to the mission of the smallest effective warship. You would lose some ability to take mediocre shots under some damage conditions, all of which usually obtain, if at all, only when you're losing badly already.

That is just not correct. That is stating a belief that either the ship remains in pristine condition, or the battle is a loosing one.

One of the primary differences between military and non-military ships has always been the ability to continue to function despite battledamage, and while it looks good on paper, heavily cutting down on that ability is going to make your suggested ships severely crippled from the start.

Oversimplified, such a change would effectively mean that you need twice as many ships in any battle that isn´t a curbstomp. In any real battles, you MUST expect to take damage.

Of course you do. But you're putting a lot of lives on the line - especially on the line, way out near the surface of the ship, specifically toward enemy fire - and using up volume to house them and keep them warm, fed, and breathing, along with all the money for them and their support stuff - all of which represents resources that could address battle damage in some other fashion. For instance, you could use the people, money and volume to support more armor, sidewalls, point defense, ECM, or increasingly redundant control lines to those weapons.

I'm saying that, when a ship takes damage, it's very rare that it is both losing central control links to a weapon and still having a hope of winning that battle. It is only then that that on-mount crew is doing anything to win that battle, and even then, it's only to the extent that their rather ineffective fire, without the support of central fire direction, is doing any good.

And meanwhile, that capacity is sucking up a whole lot of people, tonnage, and money. I submit that any or all of those could do a lot better good either avoiding or withstanding that damage in the first place (in one of many ways, including sheer armor to suck it up), or contributing to more ships performing this mission.

I'm certainly not claiming that the ability to withstand damage is meaningless.

JeffEngel wrote:And back-up links should be easy enough with that spare tonnage, though that's maybe one place where the 1980's vision of the future on which the series is based diverges from a 2015 vision of it.

There´s a huge difference between "a link", and a reliable, hard to damage, hard to kill link...

There certainly is. And the tonnage represented by supporting that on-mount weapon crew can certainly support another form of hard to damage, hard to kill link. I advice the RMN to see about buying one of those for (at least) the ships where much of their duty isn't about retaining energy weapon mounts for even desperate fire under pounding.

JeffEngel wrote:I think they can go for both, given the cruiser mission. Just reducing missile throughput increases time it takes to empty magazines (which is taken as an unalloyed good when RFC compares the BC(L) to the BC(P) - not something I can agree with

Quite so. Saying that is just stating that whoever is in command of doctrine doesn´t understand how to use the BCPs. For a modern/semimodern battlefield analogy, they would be divisional sized units of rocket artillery. Except without the ability to reload much. And i might add that the Soviets used division sized artillery units in WWII with devastating effects when employed properly.


BCPs wont ever be able to effectively guide all they can fire, but seriously, who cares? That´s like trying to have them act as extra launchers for the wall, totally negating their speed advantages, which is pretty much wasting them.

I think that RFC may have stated the rationale for the BC(L) over the BC(P) poorly. The battlecruiser is meant to be able to survive distant encounters with wallers; avoid serious encounters with them; hunt down cruisers and blow them away with ease and without being threatened seriously by them; and to mop up system defenders that aren't waller-equivalent.

To do that, having far more firepower than it takes to blow away cruisers starts to become more than the mission requires, and if you buy that at the cost of being able to laugh off what cruisers can do to you, you're not suiting the BC role anymore, at least, not that RMN conception of it. That's the issue with a BC(P): a Saganami-C could put a hurt on it; distant encounters with a waller can easily toast a BC(P); and the need to recover pods to carry on raiding means that the BC(P) cannot just run off as need be. Duration of fire really hasn't got much to do with it - mostly it is about the relevant necessary toughness and dangerousness. Any podlayer is going to be more dangerous than a BC needs to be, and any BC-size-range podlayer is going to be less tough and able to move right along freely and carry on raiding, as a BC is meant to.

However i think a better idea for this CL of yours is to INCREASE missile throughput per launcher, as you are reducing the number, this combined with the offbore launchers means you retain much of the tactical ability of a larger ship.

I'm sure faster launchers would be greatly appreciated; I just haven't a suggestion for how to bring that about.

RFC wrote:Frankly, I haven't made my mind entirely up, but I'm thinking the classic DD role/mission no longer applies and we'll be looking at simply deleting that class and going with a single cruiser niche below the Nike. I'm not saying that's the way things will happen, but the truth is that most of the DD/CL/CA screening roles for the battle fleet are nonstarters in an MDM/DDM universe. What is going to be needed is a platform that can be built in sufficient numbers to deploy everywhere you need it (which implies as cheap and small as possible) and yet remain survivable enough to do its job in peacetime and wartime alike (which implies not-cheap and not-small). As always, the designer's unenviable challenge will be to somehow reconcile those conflicting requirements.

I get the feeling that RFC is looking at this too strictly adhering to the common RMN idea of jack of all trades.

A small warship will NEVER be able to stand up to anything remotely powerful with the advent of MDMs and pods, end of story.

But the requirements for small warships does not need to include such. Trying to include it anyway is letting the powercreep become far too great(or the desirecreep perhaps).

That´s just going the "oooh shiny" path again, because really, did anyone expect a pre MDM DD to fight a pre MDM waller? Eh, NO!

So why is such thinking taken into account for a nextgeneration DD/CL/CA?

Yes a nextgen light warship needs to be able to defend itself vastly better than earlier ones, but noone expected previous generation CLs to surive against BCs, why should next generation be different?

A small patrol/scout/recon/delivery boy etc warship needs to be able to fight LACs, pirates and ships of its own size, nothing more.

Ships of its own size though are going to have their own DDM's, likely with the horrific Mod G warheads or the like before long. I take it that that, and the future miniaturized Keyhole I, set the tonnage floor for serious warships. What I'm working on here is figuring out how to build one of those so that the operating expenses - the biggest limiting factor to having and operating as many as you are likely to need - can be kept down, far below the Saganami-C. Part of that means jumping up and down on mission-creep wherever it appears, and the worst of that, as I see it, is expecting every bit of warship tonnage and expense to be about making it the toughest, most dangerous warship duelist it can be - and that's not what a cruiser has to do. I think designers have to do that precisely to avoid:

Otherwise you just end up with Nike-sized ships patrolling every little backwater starsystem, at ridiculous costs.

Based on current knowledge?
I would expect the future to include a DD at 200-300kt(for when you really just need a hyper capable presence), a CL/CA at 400-600kt and maybe a CA somewhere not so much larger.

Because really, the missions for DDs isn´t what is disappearing, but rather that of the heavy cruiser, as anything smaller than a Nike is going to have a hard time surviving in a fleet on fleet engagement anywhere near the wall.

I think the CL mission profile is the safest one to persist. The DD profile, where it doesn't overlap the CL one, is threatened by the use of LAC's and recon drones, and by the fact that the effective warship floor is jacked up so much by DDM and Keyhole tonnage/dimension requirements. What you would still use a DD for, you're likely to let a CL do just because it's also around to do a lot more.

The heavy cruiser - well, yes, with the Saganami-C representing a fine heavy cruiser but still representing nearly the same operating expenses as a Nike BC(L) five times its tonnage... I'm inclined to say that designers should quit trying to optimize cruisers for combat the way they do battlecruisers, making any future cruisers effectively light ones, even at 400-500 ktons. Facing off against a counterpart as a peer combatant remains a consideration, but you have to recognize that the role of a warship in this tonnage range is so much more than butt-kicking. The peer combatant is also likely to devote a lot of tonnage to stealth, sensors, drones, Marines, and extended stores, with weaponry the usual duty of which is putting pirates, not other warships, out of business and defenses meant to save the cruiser as it gets away from battlecruisers and sufficient to laugh off the attacks of those pirates, or LAC's.

Something too much like the Saganami-C is going to be overgunned for all the missions it would ordinarily be able to survive; undergunned for taking on BC's; and - most critically - overpriced for the workhorse work of a peacetime navy. But something of that size would be perfectly well suited for light cruiser work, with a different set of design expectations.