John Prigent wrote:We've already seen a number of occasions in various books where the lack of a proper Marine complement on smaller ships has been a distinct problem. Boarding actions against pirates come to mind, but there's also a problem when a ship is captured and Marines are needed as guards for he original crew while a few Navy people fly the ship, but there aren't enough Marines so the Manty ship has to operate with a dangerously reduced crew. DDs and CLs aren't big enough to carry the Marines needed for anti-piracy work, so CAs and other large ships will still be needed - unless piracy suddenly stops which doesn't seem likely.
Cheers
John
KNick wrote:As I see it, the only advantage an SD(P) or a CLAC has over a DD or CL is it's Marine compliment. This will hold true unless another navy (other than allies) put a successful design in space. And how often do you actually need a full battalion of Marines? In the event of a natural disaster, maybe. Then it might be good to have a whole bunch of uninvolved but motivated personnel. Or SAR after combat, if the damaged ship still has people feeling rambunctious. For most other situations a company or maybe a platoon works just fine.
Once some kind of peace deal is worked out, the SDs and CLACs will be the first to be mothballed. Manticore will probably be able to keep 8-10 DDs or CLs in service for the same personnel and maintenance costs, equating to more hulls in more places, able to do more missions. If completely new weapons systems are developed, it might be necessary to design new capitol ships. otherwise "good enough" is good enough.
At the end of the day, most of the new classes were designed to destroy enemy warships which the Rolands, Sag-Cs and Nikes seem to do extraordinarily well. They were designed and built after a decade of war in which there was relatively little need for Marines. There's a reason they're cross-trained as damage control personnel.
According to House of Steel, the RMN deployed four dozen Kamerling-class system control cruisers in and after 1921, each of which carried three Marine companies. Unfortunately, packing in enough life support and small craft capability reduces its offensive power to less than that of an Avalon-class light cruiser, despite being almost twice as voluminous - and building a Kamerling requires the same slip that could build a Sag-C.
We haven't seen many Marines late in the series because most of them are in Silesia where planetary populations are much more fractious than in Talbott.
Werrf wrote:munroburton wrote:All we definitely know about the Detweilers: Spider drive superdreadnought capable of firing graser torpedoes internally, acceleration limited by grav plating(no better than the Sharks). We don't know anything else except the MAlign is building dozens of them.
We don't know that they're superdreadnought-sized either. Without the limiting factor of compensator efficiency, they could be effectively any size. I've always understood them to be larger than SDs.
Ok - reinforces my point about how little information on them there is. We know they're big, slow, supposedly invisible to current sensors and are equipped with powerful weapons. We have no textev on what fills the Detweiler's hull - how many missile/torpedo/CM launchers, grasers, point defense clusters, drones, etc..
Until they start shooting at the RMN, we won't know how they stack up. Even the
Mesans don't know because they seem to be assuming nobody will be able to detect them, despite surviving Weyland crew, Bolthole and a Mesan defector working together on precisely this issue with all the motivation in the galaxy.
If a GA sensor drone gets close enough to a spidership for non-gravitic sensors to detect them,
if it manages to transmit this data to a mother ship and
if this ship manages to get away, the spider ship is almost certainly busted. That's
if the MAlign deploys them against the GA again. Most implications are they're intended for use against the League.
There's always a possible "coincidence" as well, like four Peep BCs dropping out of hyper inside energy range of a DN in SVW and a destroyer squadron getting caught by a Peep attack force while on training manoeuvres near the hyper limit. Pretty much demonstrating the difference between a lucky CO and a good CO - the DN's captain was snoozing in his/her quarters whilst the officer with the lowest tac scores had the watch and the DesRon CO died in action despite getting most of her squadron away.
