Hi Don,
I believe we had Sharpfield in OAR thinking about the 5-6 galleons in the Chisholm Navy, obviously unarmed supply ships, but no hint they were bough or built elsewhere may indicate Chisholm has shipyards able to build more than galleys, which it evidently did, remember how King Sailys died.
I suspect there have been many old Charisian investors willing to invest in building the empire's infrastructure in each part, especially when its subsidized.
We also have textev that Siddarmark is building schooners to help patrol its coasts against the commerce schooners, so enough schooners may soon be available as direct escorts.
The Maikelberg type medium cruiser with 4X6" guns seems best for the commerce raider hunter mission, particularly in terms of cost, but competes for the few large engines.
Time for several different steam engine assembly lines!
Besides the new steel plant almost finished at Maikelberg, there's the one at Tellesberg, tripling Charis's steel production soon [we've been reading about them for 3 books, so no complaints about them being surprises, please], relieving the pressure on steel production exclusively for the war effort.
For now, a single Eraystor or 'city' ironclad with each convoy ought to be enough of a deterrent once word gets back, though it will be a while, but we don't have any figures on how many there are in the city class.
Despite the green timber galleons being retired a couple books back, and some captured NoG and Harchong turned into troop ships, the ICN ought to have some where between 100-150 galleons in commission, so if over half are on convoy duty and Sharpfield has ~34, there are still 2-3 dozen available to increase those convoy escorts, albeit at some reduction to the size of the ICN's home and station fleets.
Once DE and EHM pass Hanth, it'll be time for those sailors and particularly the gunners at Thesmar etc, plus the marines in southern Siddarmark to return to sea, if indeed there is a shortage of sailors for the ICN.
Blockading the approaches to the convoys heading to the republic using the relatively narrow channels around Tarot is one method, but will Rock Point consider using the SNARC's to set fire and destroy some of the commerce schooners that are never heard from again?
If more simply don't come back, for whatever reason, it might deter others, and when the other ironclads are reported, it will be assumed those unexplained that didn't come back met them earlier.
L
n7axw wrote:Hi Drak,
You might be right. But consider. Corisande, Emerald, Chisholm and Tarot all had docking slips capable of building galleys. Of the four, we have no text ev for Chisholm or Emerald building galleons.
That means all four have personnel with experience at ship building and the building slips are in place. So it's not as though you would be starting from scratch. You would need to send in teams from Charis, yes. But the purpose of those teams would be to introduce Sir Dustyn's design and supervise its implementation, not to teach the locals their trade. I would personally expect that once you got things under way, it would go more quickly than you might expect. I would start out by building light combatants such as schooners that can be built in greater numbers in a given time frame.
Where I would expect a bottleneck would be with the artillery needed to arm the hulls you build. Right now the army is soaking up everything that the major iron works can produce. But there is a new plant going in at Chisholm and Coisande had some capacity for producing cannon. Maybe a couple of lines could be developed for producing the smooth bore cannon the schooners would need. And for that matter arming the merchant galleons that are the privateers intended prey. I wonder how many guns could be put on a galleon before you start having hogging and other safety related problems.
Don
