BB(P/C) for rear area security

SWM wrote:I should clarify. After looking for the citations to support this, I don't find an explicit statement that the Roland cannot stand up to its own fire. I do find several statements which imply it, however. There are numerous statements that the Roland is a transitional type, and implications that the RMN would not have made the compromises incorporated into it during peacetime. He says in several places that the Roland is vulnerable, and that the navy is looking toward a future with larger ships to reduce that vulnerability.

And one of their vulnerabilities is that their missile armament is clustered such that any hit on the bow or stern is quite likely to knock 50% of it out.

At this time, based on character thoughts from SoS, we think you'd need something basically the size of a Sag-C to eliminate that particular vulnerability and go back to distributed and cofferdammed broadside Mk16 launchers.

Also it's been speculated that some more defense optimized smaller variant of the Keyhole drone may be developed; you likely still need something larger than a current CL (or Roland DD) hull to mount those on. But they might increase it's survivability enough to justify the larger, more expensive, hull.

SWM wrote:I can't tell whether you are being deliberately obtuse or not. Of course the opposing ship would have to have offbore capability, and the ability to stack missiles.

The old definition of standing up to its own fire (which is the phrase David Weber has used in discussing it) obviously meant a broadside. With the new tech, standing up to one's own fire just as obviously means more than just a single broadside. A Roland would not fire a mere 12 missiles, therefore, a Roland standing up to a Roland has to expect more than 12 missiles. David has said, over and over again, that a Roland cannot stand up to its own fire, and that Manticore considers this a serious flaw.

By Manticore's own standards, a Roland is an inadequate design. During peacetime, when the rest of the galaxy is catching up to Manticore, the RMN will not design a new destroyer unless it can meet the test of standing up to its own fire.

*Sigh*

So, now we´re back at the point where almost no ship in existance is adequate.
I guess that means they wont be building ANY new ships then?

Just about any ship that CAN multistack and/or do the hopping control channel thing can put more missiles downlane than itself could ever defend against.

A larger ship vs itself might survive, but it can´t handle the firepower.

Can an Invictus survive the firepower of another Invictus all by itself? Really doubt it. So it also fails the test.
And that´s even before adding Apollo into it.

This test also ignores wether the test for the ship in question is relevant. For another very flawed comparison, how many WWII destroyers do you think could survive a "normal" spread of torpedoes that most DDs of the time were capable of?
None at all. Some of the more extreme DDs, like the IJN Shimakaze, had FIFTEEN Long Lance torpedo tubes. That´s enough to sink 15 DDs, or 5 fullsize CARRIERS. Or 2 battleships.

And once more, my exaggeration about a battleship fleet isn´t as much exaggeration as it was meant as.

Tenshinai wrote:

SWM wrote:I can't tell whether you are being deliberately obtuse or not. Of course the opposing ship would have to have offbore capability, and the ability to stack missiles.

The old definition of standing up to its own fire (which is the phrase David Weber has used in discussing it) obviously meant a broadside. With the new tech, standing up to one's own fire just as obviously means more than just a single broadside. A Roland would not fire a mere 12 missiles, therefore, a Roland standing up to a Roland has to expect more than 12 missiles. David has said, over and over again, that a Roland cannot stand up to its own fire, and that Manticore considers this a serious flaw.

By Manticore's own standards, a Roland is an inadequate design. During peacetime, when the rest of the galaxy is catching up to Manticore, the RMN will not design a new destroyer unless it can meet the test of standing up to its own fire.

*Sigh*

So, now we´re back at the point where almost no ship in existance is adequate.
I guess that means they wont be building ANY new ships then?

Just about any ship that CAN multistack and/or do the hopping control channel thing can put more missiles downlane than itself could ever defend against.

A larger ship vs itself might survive, but it can´t handle the firepower.

Can an Invictus survive the firepower of another Invictus all by itself? Really doubt it. So it also fails the test.
And that´s even before adding Apollo into it.

This test also ignores wether the test for the ship in question is relevant. For another very flawed comparison, how many WWII destroyers do you think could survive a "normal" spread of torpedoes that most DDs of the time were capable of?
None at all. Some of the more extreme DDs, like the IJN Shimakaze, had FIFTEEN Long Lance torpedo tubes. That´s enough to sink 15 DDs, or 5 fullsize CARRIERS. Or 2 battleships.

And once more, my exaggeration about a battleship fleet isn´t as much exaggeration as it was meant as.

That is not completely accurate. [edit]I believe[/edit] Both the Nike and Saganami-C can meet the standard.

But, you are correct that the current SD(P)s cannot stand up to their own fire. And Manticore is aware of that, and is working to redress that problem, too. David has talked quite a bit about that both in the books and on this forum. I'm sure you've read some of those posts. No one has bothered bringing that up in this thread because we have been talking about David's statement that sometime in the future, the smallest ship in Manticore's order of battle might be 300,000, and might not include destroyers. Superdreadnoughts are not relevant to that topic.

Whether WWII ships could meet that standard is entirely irrelevant. WWII is not the Honorverse. Laserhead missiles are not marine torpedoes. Manticore has its own standards, which have nothing to do with wet-navies. And David Weber is the one who created that standard and is planning the future ship designs of Manticore. WWII has nothing to do with it.

No one has bothered bringing that up in this thread because we have been talking about David's statement that sometime in the future, the smallest ship in Manticore's order of battle might be 300,000, and might not include destroyers.

The Sag-C is nearly 500kt, not 300kt, and it is what was used as comparison for smallest future ship.

300kt is almost small enough to actually be a "light unit". Ie, big enough to do it´s job without being too freakin expensive to be available in enough numbers.

Superdreadnoughts are not relevant to that topic.

BS.

SDs are made to FIGHT as their primary mission! While light units have fighting as something they MAY need to do, it´s not even a secondary priority, and yet you demand bigtime fighting ability for lights but say it´s irrelevant for the heavies that are designed to fight? Oh please!

That is not completely accurate. [edit]I believe[/edit] Both the Nike and Saganami-C can meet the standard.

Seriously?

I very much doubt that, even before they use their 40/80 flatpack missile pods the ships are designed to be able to carry with them.
And if you´re going to allow multilaunching and whatever to be a "fair test" then you can´t exclude pods either.

Remember, this is equal tech and crew levels, no dumbing down thanks to Manty magic.

Oh, the ships might not *BOOOM* and disappear in an cloud of fire, but one optimized or maximized salvo and i very much doubt that the recipient equal will be in a condition to do a whole lot more fighting.

Whether WWII ships could meet that standard is entirely irrelevant. WWII is not the Honorverse.

Yes i know, just returning the favour from earlier posters in the thread. Guess why i called it very flawed?

However, you still missed the primary point of why i included the comparison anyway.

And David Weber is the one who created that standard and is planning the future ship designs of Manticore.

Yup, his universe and rules of course. But within the confines of those as far as i can see, the idea of adjusting the smallest ship size upwards by over 60% as the absolute minimum and according to most posters more like by over 150% is flawed.

Because for one thing, you then end up facing a situation similar to several current real world wet-navies, an inability to have enough numbers of ships.

Doesn´t matter if you have the worlds best 10kt DD capable of doing everthing you might need as well as being main combatants, when what you need is 5 DD with 1/10 the individual capabilities.


And of course, i could easily argue that even earlier ships failed your viability test.
Simply because of changed implementations of technology.
Multilaunch while rolling and use hopping targeting to get the biggest swarm of missiles in the shortest possible time on target, and there are some serious questionmarks about most ships i´ve looked at from singledrive times.

Yeah, DDMs and MDMs have made it worse, but then, there´s already been a serious size creep to account for that.
The warhead upgrades will need a bit more creep, hence my suggestion that the next generation future DD will end up in the 200+kt area, big enough to survive a few stray missiles but relying more on defenses than being able to absorb damage.

Because even the Sag-C needs some luck to handle that.

All of this just reinforces the logic and practicality of using OLDER and less capable ships you already have for secondary and tertiary etc level missions. You don’t usually need the most modern, capable, largest units to do things like convoy escorts against garden variety pirates. You don’t even need the most modern DD or CAs for this. You need a warship that is capable of handling pirates.
This is why the older ships are getting assigned to Silesia. It is NOT expected that they will have to deal with Aldermani warships. They MAY have to deal with former ConFed warships or those that used to belong to one or another local system navy/SDF and have gone out on their own. At this point it has sounded like Admiral Sarnow and his forces have a handle on knowing what local legitimate warships (of the ConFed or local systems) either still exist or have been destroyed or are “missing” and may be operating as pirates. A number of these seem to have already been pressed into local RMN service. Most should already be capable for dealing with the converted transport type of pirate.
Even if it had the manufacturing capability right now or when it is reestablished, SEM is going to be building NEW units inline with its current and projected future needs. That is NOT to say that they are going to quickly scrap all the old stuff. Some of these older ships are still going to have useful lives measured in decades. They will be repaired and upgraded as long as it is both reasonable and feasible.

In at least one instance of the deployments for Lacoon II we find the Task Force commander taking special care to position an older and less capable ship well back in the formation. Why is it there at all? Because RMN doesn’t have enough of the new most modern designs with the top of the line weapons and systems to do the missions. But it does have some fairly capable older ships AND those things are not exactly harmless. They can still play a role in both offence and defense in a mixed force situation. They also provide more than the appearance of a larger force. SLN would expect to see DDs as part of such a force and these are separate threats that they would have to honor those threats. One more counter-missile platform that also support part of the sensor perimeter and drone shell is helpful, particularly if it can also fight. Would an older RMN DD stand against a SLN CA or BC being used as a probe at what the SLN commander might recognized as a soft spot in the RMN deployment? No, it would send out the warning and probably do a fighting withdrawal into closer support of other ships. On the other hand, whatever is coming after it is going to have to deal with RMN weapons and counter-measures so it could be a costly probe to get the SLN ship damaged or badly beaten up trying to chase down an “old” DD.

SWM wrote:But, you are correct that the current SD(P)s cannot stand up to their own fire. And Manticore is aware of that, and is working to redress that problem, too.

But that's not exactly the correct measure for wallers. As DW has stated many times, ships of the wall are designed to fight in the wall. They are not designed to engage in one-on-one battles. So the question is not whether an SD(P) can stand up to its own fire; it's whether an entire squadron of SD(P)s and its accompanying LAC wing can defend against the fire that same squadron can put out. This assumes a CLAC is attached to each squadron. The exact numbers in a large fleet engagement will of course vary.

Since we have explicit textev from Second Manticore that a single RMN/GSN LAC has equivalent anti-missile capability to a SLN DD, we have to look at how well those LACs can defeat the kind of Apollo salvoes that a squadron of podnaughts can control.

I'm unable to remember whether any of the sims have shown how that particular battle would turn out. I'd like to think the Admiralty has asked Honor's staff to game that one out in the Crusher and turned the sim replays over to Hemphill to hash out with Foraker when she gets to Bolthole.

TheMonster wrote:I'm unable to remember whether any of the sims have shown how that particular battle would turn out. I'd like to think the Admiralty has asked Honor's staff to game that one out in the Crusher and turned the sim replays over to Hemphill to hash out with Foraker when she gets to Bolthole.

IIRC, Henke and Oversteegen carried out those simulations, with Oversteegen defending against an Apollo-armed force with everything available in the RMN's arsenal bar Apollo itself. We didn't see it happen, but comments by the characters afterwards suggest Oversteegen got trashed, though he gave Henke a few lumps of her own.

But that's not exactly the correct measure for wallers. As DW has stated many times, ships of the wall are designed to fight in the wall. They are not designed to engage in one-on-one battles. So the question is not whether an SD(P) can stand up to its own fire; it's whether an entire squadron of SD(P)s and its accompanying LAC wing can defend against the fire that same squadron can put out. This assumes a CLAC is attached to each squadron. The exact numbers in a large fleet engagement will of course vary.

Yeah but then you´re going situation, doctrine and mission specific.

If you do that for DDs, well they´re not meant to face anything like themselves one on one either so then it´s irrelevant. Again.

Why should DDs be tested unrealistically but not SDs, or vice versa.

Tenshinai wrote:Yeah but then you´re going situation, doctrine and mission specific.

...
Why should DDs be tested unrealistically but not SDs, or vice versa.

The difference is that DDs, and other below-the-wall ships, are designed to operate solo and in smaller-than-squadron penny packets, while wallers are not. Despite the political pressure from the Talbott Quadrant to split up the wallers assigned to 10th Fleet, Gold Peak rightly refused to do so. A ship of the wall's job is to stand in the wall of battle, so it's designed to do that, and a good flag officer keeps that in mind.

The only reason why Hercules was given a solo assignment to Spindle is that it is functionally no longer a ship of the wall. It is instructive that Khumalo passed tactical control of the "Anvil" element to Terekhov at the Battle of Spindle rather than stupidly pull rank and run a tacnet his "flagship's" systems couldn't handle. Given how much time Khumalo spends dirtside, they really ought to build him and his staff offices close to the Governor's residence, and recognize that his job is more akin to a Quadrant equivalent of a Space Lord than it is a fleet commander.

It does have plenty of berthing, training, armory, and small craft to support the Marine contingent permanently assigned to Spindle, and the flag deck accomodations to handle meetings with Talbott Station personnel, that don't need to be done dirtside, and certainly has a deterrent effect on pirates (knowing even an obsolete SD is in orbit around Spindle ought to keep pirates and slavers the hell away from the system) but not significantly more deterrent than, say, Hexapuma had once the pirates knew where to expect her. (Recall the efforts to which the Kitty's crew went to make her look like a fat, slow merchie with a failing node running scared so as to sucker the pirates into "Abattoir" at Nuncio.)

Even if occasionally a flag officer does bend to pressure and slice off SD(P)s without CLAC escort, that's only being done when there's no expectation that they'll actually encounter an equivalent enemy, so it doesn't affect the design decisions BuShips should be making. If you honestly think an enemy is going to have SD(P)s defending a system, you don't send penny packets against it. With the development of Mycroft, you won't send them alone to defend a system alone against SD(P)s either. Instead of a CLAC, the LAC element might arrive in freighters along with the LAC base and Mycroft modules, and the construction team to assemble everything together, and some ammunition ships, with the SD(P)s expected to provide upstream fire control via their KH2s to the system-defense pods until the Mycroft system goes on line, but you just don't send wallers alone anywhere.

Different rules are justified because an SD(P) is not just a DD writ large; it's designed for a completely different mission, in which it operates as part of an integrated task force that includes a screening element mostly comprising LACs but also a few DDs (due to the need for flankers for the formation in hyper that can check out adjacent sub-bands, and to carry messages to any additional elements left behind on a downward dranslation such as in Meyers), which just underscores the wide variety of assignments a DD is expected to have.

TheMonster wrote:But that's not exactly the correct measure for wallers. As DW has stated many times, ships of the wall are designed to fight in the wall. They are not designed to engage in one-on-one battles. So the question is not whether an SD(P) can stand up to its own fire; it's whether an entire squadron of SD(P)s and its accompanying LAC wing can defend against the fire that same squadron can put out. This assumes a CLAC is attached to each squadron. The exact numbers in a large fleet engagement will of course vary.

It's been pretty clearly demonstrated at BoM that RMN ships are not sufficiently survivable against mass MDM fire. If all of home fleet had consisted of the same mass of BC(P)s they would have done quite a bit more damage to Haven and died pretty much just as fast. So the RMN option is either to plan on their SDs having a combat lifetime of under 15 minutes or finding a better solution to the defensive issue.

They have chosen B, but exactly what this consists of has not been shown. And given the path of the books, I have no idea when they will possibly run into a situation where they will need to demonstrate this capability.