New Manty ship ideas.

Lord Skimper wrote:Your now the Manty "neobarb" Commander. Your Destroyer escort group, Three Rowlands, two of the new AMC Trojan class Cruisers and 6 freighters are plodding along.

So a random convoy through someone elses system is going to bring along an escort that costs as much to build (and probably more to operate) as an SD(P) division.

Doesn't seem to make economic or military sense to me...

munroburton wrote:The hybrid CLAC and pod-layer has already been done. One such ship was Honor Harrington's last starship command.

A CLAC has a heavily armoured core and broadsides dotted with hangar bays. A SD(P) has heavy armour wrapped around a hollow core.

If you want both capabilities, you need to give up most of the armouring and end up with half a LAC wing and half a SD(P)'s pod load.

On paper, that's not such a bad idea. If all the LACs are Katanas, the hybrid would have less combat sustainability for greatly improved missile defense.

One of the problems comes back to the reduced armour. This is going to be a fragile vessel, even comparing with the CLAC. A SD(P) takes about 250 missile hits to be mission-killed. The hybrid would probably be closer to 150, maybe 100 and chances of a golden BB would be higher, not to mention the LAC bays are the first things to be damaged.

... if you design the ship as a highend SD, you might not loose to much of either Pod- and LAC-capacity ... and both LACs and (Apollo)-Pods are "Ranged Weapons" ...
Such a "Midway-Class" SD(P)-CLAC might be used as a Long-Range-Support-Division (2 ships) to either an Invictus-Class Battlesquadron; supplying Katanas for Missile-Defense (Manty-Battle-Squadrons being still down to 6 ships due to lack of replacements) or as Missile-Backup/Guardian to DN-CLAC-Squadrons, relieving Invictus/Medusa-Class-ships from this task ...
One critical question: how wide can the beam of the ship inside the impellerbands get without leaving the impeller-constraints ... if you can make the beam broad enough, you might fit a 2/3rds to nearly complete Pod-load in addition to 1-1,5 Standard LAC complements ... they might look "a bit broad in the beam" but pack enough punch in a long range fight to release normal SD(P)s from Carrier-Escort-Duty

yanessa wrote:... if you design the ship as a highend SD, you might not loose to much of either Pod- and LAC-capacity ... and both LACs and (Apollo)-Pods are "Ranged Weapons" ...
Such a "Midway-Class" SD(P)-CLAC might be used as a Long-Range-Support-Division (2 ships) to either an Invictus-Class Battlesquadron; supplying Katanas for Missile-Defense (Manty-Battle-Squadrons being still down to 6 ships due to lack of replacements) or as Missile-Backup/Guardian to DN-CLAC-Squadrons, relieving Invictus/Medusa-Class-ships from this task ...
One critical question: how wide can the beam of the ship inside the impellerbands get without leaving the impeller-constraints ... if you can make the beam broad enough, you might fit a 2/3rds to nearly complete Pod-load in addition to 1-1,5 Standard LAC complements ... they might look "a bit broad in the beam" but pack enough punch in a long range fight to release normal SD(P)s from Carrier-Escort-Duty

Our understanding is that compensator efficiency is controlled by compensated volume, and that ship (by and large) fill the available volume as efficiently as possible.

If you make a ship 'fatter' it's max acceleration should fall exactly as if you simply enlarged it's entire diameter to match it's beam. If my understanding is correct there's no real advantage to making a 'fat' ship; you might as well just make an overall larger one.



But all that said, I never understood the benefit (in a battle squadron) to a hybrid design compared to simply attaching a couple of CLACs to the unit. You don't need to design and build an expensive, relatively fragile, hybrid compromise, and having your CLACs be separate platforms from your SD(P)s allows you the potential flexibility of placing them out of the line of fire or even detaching them to hide in hyper while heading in system.

Obviously the situation was a bit different for the Wayfarer-class AMC since they operated solo; which capital ships never do.

Of course, an SD could have 60 self-towing LACs within its wedge without compromising its acceleration.


...what? Those SDs in the battle of Manticore totally towed 600 pods each within their wedge. And if a pod is 1/10 the size and mass of a LAC...

As David has said before, it's entirely possible to limpet a few LACs to the hull in case of emergency. As a matter of routine you wouldn't do it because there's no means of supporting those LACs. The carrier (or at least basing facilities) is a vital part of the LAC doctrine because they give the crews a place to rest, train, and maintain the LACs.

Belial666 wrote:Of course, an SD could have 60 self-towing LACs within its wedge without compromising its acceleration.

But as we know (from when the Masadans tried this stunt back in HotQ), doing so means that the LACs cannot be manned, and will probably require some amount of nontrivial maintenance at their destination, since their internals were never built to survive high acceleration for prolonged periods of time.

Different Edit:methodology. One is towed by the ship one is limpeted to the ship.:edit

Think of the Hawkwing in "Let's Dance" in If Fire Forged.

Have fun,
T2M

The E wrote:
But as we know (from when the Masadans tried this stunt back in HotQ), doing so means that the LACs cannot be manned, and will probably require some amount of nontrivial maintenance at their destination, since their internals were never built to survive high acceleration for prolonged periods of time.

thinkstoomuch wrote:Different Edit:methodology. One is towed by the ship one is limpeted to the ship.:edit

Think of the Hawkwing in "Let's Dance" in If Fire Forged.

Remind me what the practical difference is. In both cases, the towed/limpeted ship has its impellers offline and thus cannot use its compensators, which means that it's either running without a crew or at an acceleration rate the grav plates can handle.

The E wrote:

thinkstoomuch wrote:Different Edit:methodology. One is towed by the ship one is limpeted to the ship.:edit

Think of the Hawkwing in "Let's Dance" in If Fire Forged.

Remind me what the practical difference is. In both cases, the towed/limpeted ship has its impellers offline and thus cannot use its compensators, which means that it's either running without a crew or at an acceleration rate the grav plates can handle.

An SD just has a larger volume of compensated space around it than a old BC does. It allows the LAC to nestle against the SD and be inside the compensated field - ie no force is felt by the ship's movement.

In HoQ, the LACs were tractored behind the BC, inside the hyper field but outside the compensated field - they felt the full forces of the ship's movement.