FriarBob wrote:
OK so let's just write a bloodbath where an enemy with LESS people charges into dying glory attempting to drown a superior enemy with blood. Get real, man! EVERY country in history has had two choices, superior numbers or superior firepower. The team without superior numbers has literally no choice but to choose option B.
And the reality was, that the right choice was superior logistic, which allowed to amass superior numbers.
Yes, they 'wasted' that metal on a ship they didn't truly *need*. Except that they did. They expected to use it to beat the snot out of truly fortified positions such as Dohlar.
Except that the same function could be done with simple gunboats MUCH earlier, and much more cost-effecitve. Because suppressing the coastal fortifications with long-range fire simply does not work well. Cue Dardanelles operation; the enormous concentration of firepower did not helped allies much.
The simple truth is, that forts did not float. The number of shells that hit the area of the fort are irrelevant to fort firepower. Only shells that hit guns are count. And gun positions are MUCH smaller than shells dispersion area. To suppress the forts with long-range gunfire you need to saturate them with multiple hits - and this is better achieved with multiple smaller ships, than some big.
True the 'overwhelming firepower' and 'superweapon' concept is common (ish) in his writing. But they also weren't stupid about it. They didn't build this at the expense of regular ships they needed.
They done exactly that.
They lost one of the (stupid) sail ironclads to Dohlar exactly because they pumped all their efforts in wunderwaffe, not bothering for providing their sail fleet with even steam TUGS.
'Yeah but Weber *could* have written it differently and yeah he just did as he did because he wanted to play with his superweapons.' .
Yes, this is exactly right)
Horse crap. He was trying to write a story that was believable, and to do that he had to write an opponent that wasn't completely composed of drooling morons
P-lease! RFC is extremely prone of enemy degradation syndrome!
They even had plans (and ships on the ways) for a triple-decker conventional ship. Essentially the British Man of War / Ship of the Line concept.
But not for steam tugs and gunboats. Which essentially demonstrated everything.
Once the plan got shot to hell (because again the enemy wasn't completely composed of drooling morons and had the basic common sense to have spies stealing their shell tech) only then did they cut the ships down and make sail-powered ironclads. Because once shells entered the game now they actually did need them after all.
Yeah, and the idea of sail-powered ironclad is, to put it simply, make no sense. Building invulnerable ship with its propulsion plant open to enemy shots? No navy on Earth made such mistake. In fact, one of the reason why steamships were so much better than sailships is exactly because their propulsion was under decks, and could not be easily disabled.
And plus the guy might have figured he shouldn't plan on writing for 50+ more years, and he wanted to move the series along without boring his readers to tears by writing seven more books before getting to ironclads and steam-powered ships. Not proven, of course, but if so I highly support the idea. I'd like to read HIS writing of the end of this series rather than have his daughter (or nephew or grandson or whatever) have to finish it after his death (like Frank Herbert and many others).
With all respect, but I have other examples of authors who done the same things much better. Do you read "Destroyermen" of Taylor Anderson? Try it. It handles the same "extra-fast tech development" much more realistically, with both sides hitting bottlenecks, problems and often being forced to use outdated weaponry simply because it is already in mass-production & switching onto the new one would took too much time.
