Tenshinai wrote:JeffEngel wrote:I'm certainly not claiming that the ability to withstand damage is meaningless.
No, but i think you severely underestimate the issue. And maybe i should have been clearer about it.
The extra crew are not valuable because they man weapons in case of control links breaking, they are valuable because the represent a dispersal across the ship of people capable of doing repairs during combat.
People able of taking over if bridge connections are more or less lost, or take over completely if the bridge is just gone...
Something which we have seen in the books, again and again to be of critical importance.
Ships are not a digital status entity, unless heavily overmatched by enemy attacks, damage will tend to be a gradual issue.
For that, you're not really talking about an on-mount crew. Heck, locked into the weapon mounts, those crews represent the
worst case for the floating damage control capability you're bringing up here.
I haven't much issue with damage control crews. I think they're the very best shipboard use of the Marines, for instance, or the cadre for Naval ratings being made to do Marine work (coming at it from the other direction). They're also the personnel pool for the search and rescue parties and will likely make up, directly or indirectly, the "slush fund" for prize crews. But I don't think on-mount weapon crews are doing that duty now - they're horribly placed for it, with the specific exception of damage to their weapon mount that
is repairable in battle (or at least controllable), by them, from there,
and leaves them alive and able.
Reducing crew not at all and pulling every one of them back into roaming DC parties would be an improvement. You could surely make the mounts themselves more durable without provision for work spaces in them. In fact though, I think you would do better still putting some or all of those personnel (by count, not specifically) aboard other ships or in the Marine Corps than in damage control. And for that matter, I've got high hopes that miniaturization and automation will work as force multipliers for the DC and prize crews too, allowing them to do as well or better with no more or fewer people - and that the cruiser will be the sort of ship to make the most out of those advances.
JeffEngel wrote: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.
Sure. And when damage hits the area, ALL the links are still roughly in the same area, simply because they have to be, meaning that having extra control links only slightly reduces the risk of loosing all of them, while having more crew greatly increases the chance that someone can repair a link.
Having more crew able to roam does; having more crew locked in there, not so much. And if you take that much damage there, so that all likely routes of control to the system are lost - what are the odds that you will still have a working weapon, working power for it,
and a working crew on it? It's in only that sort of miracle situation that the on-mount crew is doing more good than redundant control links - or, for that matter, more good than a roaming DC party.
JeffEngel wrote: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.
Quite, not disagreeing with that. My point however is that this simply shows that BCPs are not correctly used, and should not be used as regular BCs.
Well yes - this is an area where we're both more disagreeing with RFC than we're disagreeing with one another.
Ie. it´s basically a doctrinal error of thinking, not a problem with the BCPs being "bad ships".
It probably does not help either that the BC(L) is so much larger than the BC(P) and likely that much more expensive, proportionately, at least.
RFC demonstrates that in the battle Henke got captured in. HH COULD have used the BCPs there in a way that would have been near optimal for them, but choose not to, and got whipped for it.
What i´m referring to is the taskforce that later turned out to be minelayers. If placed in that situation myself, i would almost certainly, every time, have the BCPs drop the hammer on the "oldies" taskforce, because they could handle that and would keep them from interfering with my maneuvering, no matter how inferior they looked, they could still get in the way and be a nuisance at just the time i don´t need there to be a nuisance.
If the BCPs shot themselves dry to accomplish that? Who cares? If they did, they could then rejoin the wallers as extra defensive firepower. They would still have accomplished something, and thanks to their rapid fire ability, they would likely have been able to accomplish it quickly, ie minimizing risks.
My second choice would have been to have them be used to fatten up the wallers salvoes, for this they would be much more ineffective overall, but that is part of the design, they simply cannot be expected to do precision shooting.
The very design of the BCPs says that this is a ship with which you massfire a big chunk of poorly directed missiles, to overwhelm hostile defenses by numbers, and then RUN AWAY.[/quote]I've just been re-reading At All Costs and the use of light warships by Eight Fleet has been a bit perplexing. (This is less about the BC's of either sort than the CA's, CL's, and DD's.) I'm not talking about the excellent - textbook even - use of light cruisers for recon and carrying messages up into hyper. I'm talking about the CA's, CL's, and DD's moving out with the fleets in-system. The addition to point defense is meager; they're not maneuvering to extend the sensor net (RD's and LAC's have that covered); they're not contributing to firepower or even assuming control of any missiles in excess of control capacity of launching units. Mostly, when missiles lose lock, the smaller warships are serving as
decoys with people aboard, with very little hope of withstanding any hits from capital ship missiles.
It's hard to believe that they could not have done more good scouting in the low hyperspace bands for hidden fleets, using ECM to pretend to be more wallers or just BC's coming in from a different part of the system periphery early on, gaslighting the defenders of more star systems with recon for attacks that wouldn't take place, outright raiding the least-defending systems, commerce raiding, or just being sent out to Silesia or Talbott. Anyway, pardon the tangent.
It´s a guerilla warfare hit and run unit most of all. The only time you even try to use it like a regular BC is when you already have the enemy outclassed. Or when you are so outclassed yourself that even an alphastrike( all pods in one salvo) wont do anything to the enemy even with good luck.
From the books it´s clear that those who have BCPs do not understand this, but my point is that again, this is a flaw in thinking and doctrine, not in the ships.
That may be unfair to the GSN to start, but yeah, along the way, their independence of doctrine seems to have been lost to the RMN in this regard.
And, hehe, yes a Sag-C might be able to hurt a BCP, sure... But what do you think would happen to a Sag-C if a BCP alphastrikes it? Sure, 90% of missiles probably miss, at least.
But the Saggie just isn´t going to survive that first strike, meaning that the BCP will only get hit by what the Saggie could fire off before the BCP storm of missiles fly the distance between them.
I'm not saying it's going to do much, or even that two of them would. But a Nike will be able to laugh at their efforts much more, even with far less weaponry in reply, and being able to swat cruisers with as much ease and as little danger as we swat flies (the BC(L) way of life) fits the RMN BC model better than being able to swat them with as much danger as we swat very small dogs and with as much ease as we swat... microorganisms (the BC(P) way of life).
In addition, as commerce raider or commerce protectors, the BC is going to be fighting on a moving battlefield that it will not control long after a victory there, and one which may be in hyperspace or even a grav wave. (Rarely, yes, but not so rarely as to have strictly zero legitimate impact on design.) Picking back up pods won't be easy or possible there, so a BC(P) can lose effectiveness over time more easily, and it won't be able to use pods in a grav wave at all. The BC(L) won't be using its missiles there either, granted, and the BC(P)'s aft hatch is going to be well protected by the aft sail, but the broadside energy weapons will finally have a use again and the BC(L) is going to be much better able to fight in that environment in general design.
None of which is intended to disagree at all that the benefits of the BC(L) over the BC(P) are misstated and BC(P)'s are misused. I suppose the BC(L) is harder to misuse, but goodness, you can avoid promoting to admiral people who will make that sort of mistake.
And yeah, that´s horribly inefficient use of missiles and it´s quite possible that the amount of missiles spent on killing that Saggie together costs more than the Sag-C, but the BCP lives with little or no damage, the Sag-C is still very very dead.
I expect this is why the RMN(as well as RFC) wouldn´t think of using it like this, it´s bloody wasteful and completely contrary to the way the RMN prides itself of operating, but that doesn´t mean it cannot work.
Just that the very thought of even trying is probably anathema to a RMN or Grayson crew.
I bet the Havenites might consider it though.
But they´re more likely to try to have two BCs at the point of contact instead i think.
And a BC(P) or two is likely an excellent way to do rear-area defense, as a worthy successor to the RHN's battleships. Even if it's overwhelmed, it's got an excellent chance of being able to leave the system without ammo but alive, to support retaking it and certainly to have exacted a high price out of a small force for taking it.
JeffEngel wrote: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
Neither have hyperspace capability. Meaning that to deploy them you either need a CAPITAL SHIP, or SOME kind of ship anyway, just to deliver drones. Making them redundant anyway, because the DD would include drones as well.
I was talking specifically about the in-system fleet screen and recon role. Hyper-space capable drone tending is precisely the sort of place where it overlaps the CL role - and the CL, built for more endurance and stores, is going to do that better than the DD.
JeffEngel wrote:and by the fact that the effective warship floor is jacked up so much by DDM and Keyhole tonnage/dimension requirements.
You are not going to get a CL with effective Keyhole platforms any more than you´re getting a DD with it. We know that dual drive missiles can be squeezed(barely) into a ship at a good deal less than 200kt. But the Roland being too limited overall is why i previously noted that a nextgen DD should be in the 200-300kt range.
DD role, CL role - abandon the tonnage associations. The RMN certainly has. I'm assuming that even miniaturized Keyhole I is going to take something in the 300 kton range, but more likely the 400 kton+ one, and that broadside DDM fire is going to take something about the size of a Saganami-C. That puts the hypercapable warship floor up into the 400-500 kton range, and whatever you're going to call it, it's going to be that large.
If you're figuring an effective warship can do without Keyhole I or that it can be miniaturized a lot more
and if you figure that the Roland's hammerhead launchers will remain entirely acceptable or that the effective smallest hypercapable warship can still do without DDM's, then you figure on a much lower warship floor than I do. I'm not sure where we may differ on the relevant assumptions. I suspect we're differing on how we want to use the 'destroyer' and 'light cruiser' labels.
However, this would probably not be a "fleet DD", ie something you bring into a fleet on fleet battle, except possible as far off scouting, because you can´t build something survivable for this environment without making it much bigger.
Yes. And I don't think there's enough demand for that warship to bother with a design for it in a major navy. Better to use something that can do other things too, so that DD role gets absorbed into the CL one.
While the nextgen CL would be the smallest ship fully capable of going "everywhere".
You design the DD to be able to stand up to ships its own size, and ONLY that, and then focus on making sure it can handle all the roles it needs to be able to.
DDs essentially becomes a mix of scout/patrol/policing/etc, for whom combat is clearly a secondary mission.
In a historical sense, if you think of the 18th century naval warfare, the DDs would be the sloops, capable of longranged distant duties as well as combat, but definitely focused on the noncombat duties.
I think what you are describing there is pretty much what the Honorverse refers to as a light cruiser. That's what I'm talking about. The Honorverse destroyer isn't meant for the long-range duties - that's a cruiser, typically a light one if you're not assuming a much stronger emphasis on combat too. Granted, the larger Honorverse DD's have been getting tapped for long-range duties more and have been more capable of them, but that's another way of saying that the DD/CL distinction has been eroding badly as warship sizes increase.
JeffEngel wrote: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.
Almost exactly my thought, agreed. Hence my statement about how it isn´t really the DD mission disappearing, it´s the heavy cruiser(because how a CL will have to be so big anyway, it mostly eats up the tonnage range for where a CA should end up to not be either a CL nor a BC).
I expect an attempt at a nextgen CA would end up just about anywhere in the 600kt-1Mt area, and based on what´s been said about what ships cost to run, at that point you might as well build a Nike or two Sag-C sized CLs instead.
Right. The next-gen CA - if it's going to be much more combat-capable than the effective-warship-floor hypercapable unit, whatever that one's called - is likely to be a Nike, more or less, or close enough. It'd be less misleading to call it a BC.
If there's only one major warship niche there belong the insouciant, cruiser-killing, wall-fleeing BC, the light/heavy cruiser distinction won't remain. I'm just betting that the role of it is going to resemble the current light cruiser's more than the heavy's, and the
size of it current CA's (or old BC's!) more than anything else current.
