BB(P/C) for rear area security

At 1st Manticore, Haven showe up with a modified version of the standard SLN plan- massive number of ships and weapons capable of totally swamping your opponent. In this case all the towed missile capacity in the maximum number of ships they could divert to the attack.

This is exactly the kind of thing that King Roger was trying to keep from happening. He knew that the best hope was to delay-as long as possible with the hope of streaching it many decades- Haven making the decision that it could sucessfully engage Manticre in an open-war with a strike at the Home System. He wanted a fleet big enough and with the capasity to convince Haven that Manticore could defend itself, partialy by making the cost of an attack against the Home System (and the follow-up retaliation) not something that Haven would be willing to try.

Home Fleet's defences were saturated and overwhelmed by the massive amount of fire from the Haven forces. That can happen to any given ship or formations of ships. In the case of 1st Manticore, RMN had other combatants (8th Fleet etc) available and with both the skill, guts, and capacity to break the Haven fleet after that initial disaster with Home Fleet getting overwhemed and destoyed by volume of fire.

Go forward to 2nd Manticore. Fillerta shows up with the largest (certainly in terms of amount of metal) fleet SLN has ever committed to a single action and he is additionaly equiped with a crapload of pods containing the new and (for SLN) state-of-the-art heavy missiles. 300 of the Wall plus screen. Classic SLN approach even without the Fleet waiting to try and come through the Junction.

The difference?
Not only do the RMN and RHN weapons systems outrange the SLN weapons by at least 2x, RMN has FTL recon drones and Apolo fire control and the defensive and counter-measure systems including those thousands of LACs in counter-missile roles ARE/WERE capable of stopping the SLN initial crash launch of all the pods and all the shipboard launchers that engaged at the same time or in the follow-on shooting by SLN.

Fillerta's fleet, by their own doctrine and what they thought was the situation in the Manticore system, should have been able to brush aside the "remnant" forces of RMN after whatever (Oyster Bay) wrecked the system infrastructure and (they thought) destroyed much if not all of the Home Fleet and sucessfully demand surrender of the System.
What happened is not quite like showing up and trying to cross a 2000 yd open field with a company of archers against two battalions of modern infantry equipeed with 400 20mm chain guns (and a crapload of ammunition) defending from steel and concrete hardened positions.
OOPS doesn't begin to cover it.

TheMonster wrote: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.

And a DD, unlike a waller is not designed for battle as it´s primary value or role.

So why should DDs suddenly be demanded to stand up to some rather uncertain expectation NOW, when it was never a requirement before, nor is it really a useful test for what they´re designed or expected to do.

TheMonster wrote:which just underscores the wide variety of assignments a DD is expected to have.

Which in turn underscores that you need a lot of them.

By the books, Manticore already have a long history of having not enough light units, the size creep during the story has been alleviated by production improvements, but trying to replace all DDs with something at 500kt, that´s a recipe for exaggerating the "too few" problem to ridiculous(and disastrous) levels.

SWMs suggested 300kt MIGHT be low enough to not break the bank but it´s probably still a stretch.

Tenshinai wrote:So why should DDs suddenly be demanded to stand up to some rather uncertain expectation NOW, when it was never a requirement before, nor is it really a useful test for what they´re designed or expected to do.

There's nothing "sudden" about it. The current DD design is only acceptable short-term, until potential adversaries start arming their DDs and pirate ships with DDMs and the fire control to handle the larger salvoes that have become more commonplace at the larger levels. A Roland is fine until an enemy fields an equal ship against it.

The demand is rational because there is already hyper-capable ship that can't stand up to a DD's fire, but can pull as much accel as a DD can. It's called a "dispatch boat", and it can be built and manned in far larger numbers than DDs for the same investment in materials, labor, and manpower.

Once the new stations are up and running, the RMN will be in a position to build ships faster than they can train news crews for them, at which time they'll go back to decommissioning older ships to get those crews, and calling up reserves from the RMMM (who aren't carrying much freight now as a result of Lacoön). The additional crew requirements that will go along with making the successor to the Roland able to survive its own firepower ought to be substantially less than replacing them all then they're lost in their first engagement.

kzt wrote:

drothgery wrote:And the RMN was reasonable to assume the RHN was not capable of attempting something like Beatrice, because if it failed, they'd lose the war. What they didn't count on was that revealing Apollo made it clear to Theisman that they were going to lose the war if Manticore got its new wall of battle, presumably built for Apollo, out of the yards.

No, you are mixing capabilities and intent.

They should have been perfectly aware that they had the CAPABILITY to do it. If not, everyone running ONI needs to get fired. Deep operations have been a thing for a while in the Honorverse.

They may well have decided that they don't won't do it, which is INTENT.

Deep operations are one thing. Using more than half of the entire RHN in one attack is another matter. They did not have the capability without running insane risks. Theisman had no expectation the RMN would try anything like it either; if they did, they would not have been able to launch Beatrice because half of its ships would have been needed in Haven.

Haven only did it because it was the only option that had a chance of winning the war before they got Buttercup-ed again.

Tenshinai wrote:Which in turn underscores that you need a lot of them.

By the books, Manticore already have a long history of having not enough light units, the size creep during the story has been alleviated by production improvements, but trying to replace all DDs with something at 500kt, that´s a recipe for exaggerating the "too few" problem to ridiculous(and disastrous) levels.

But Manticore isn't doing that. 2/3 of the missions for light warships in the Honorverse have been taken over by LACs in first-line Navies (or will be in the long run); sub-BC(L) ships are no longer needed as screening elements or in any long-term system defense role. And with the ability to post LACs permanently in every system in Silesia, they will no longer have anywhere near the piracy problem in places where the only option is hyper capable escorts (and even there, RFC has proposed a 'LAC module' for freighters, as attacks on commerce in a grav wave are extremely rare and difficult to do). And the roles where it needs light warships (scouting, detached raiding, etc.) are ones where running into near-peer enemy ships are more likely, not less.

TheMonster wrote:There's nothing "sudden" about it. The current DD design is only acceptable short-term, until potential adversaries start arming their DDs and pirate ships with DDMs and the fire control to handle the larger salvoes that have become more commonplace at the larger levels. A Roland is fine until an enemy fields an equal ship against it.

And again you ignore the point completely.

Why was it ok for a DD to be unable to "stand up to itself" before, and not now?

TheMonster wrote:Once the new stations are up and running, the RMN will be in a position to build ships faster than they can train news crews for them, at which time they'll go back to decommissioning older ships to get those crews, and calling up reserves from the RMMM (who aren't carrying much freight now as a result of Lacoön). The additional crew requirements that will go along with making the successor to the Roland able to survive its own firepower ought to be substantially less than replacing them all then they're lost in their first engagement.

And you seriously expect greater tonnage to NOT have any effect what so ever on maintenance costs? Riiight.

TheMonster wrote:The demand is rational because there is already hyper-capable ship that can't stand up to a DD's fire, but can pull as much accel as a DD can. It's called a "dispatch boat", and it can be built and manned in far larger numbers than DDs for the same investment in materials, labor, and manpower.

You want dispatch boats, effectively unarmed and utterly incapable of defense, to be deployed instead of DDs... Ships that doesn´t have the sensors or manpower to handle pretty much ANY of the missions light units are needed for.

Dispatch boats are not just not focused on combat, they are explicitly NON-combatants!

drothgery wrote:But Manticore isn't doing that. 2/3 of the missions for light warships in the Honorverse have been taken over by LACs in first-line Navies (or will be in the long run)

And if Manticore had still consisted of a single starsystem, you would have a perfectly valid point. IF.

drothgery wrote:sub-BC(L) ships are no longer needed as screening elements

That is almost certainly a flawed position.

drothgery wrote:And with the ability to post LACs permanently in every system in Silesia, they will no longer have anywhere near the piracy problem in places where the only option is hyper capable escorts

You forget something. It´s not in "every system", it´s in "every settled system".
While i certainly agree that the combination of Manties and Andies there will drastically cut down on pirating, it wont disappear completely, and the main routes between systems are where the pirates that manage to survive, will try to catch targets, ie in hyper.

Remember where Tourville hid when he was there, in an uninhabited system in the area.
It´s not obvious, but there is likely more non-settled systems than settled ones in most areas of space.

drothgery wrote:And the roles where it needs light warships (scouting, detached raiding, etc.) are ones where running into near-peer enemy ships are more likely, not less.

Scouting is VERY much about NOT running into any enemies at all. If a scouting unit gets into combat, it failed its primary mission.

Raiding will obviously require heavier ships, which means there´s even fewer light ships total left for the boring jobs.

Tenshinai wrote:

drothgery wrote:But Manticore isn't doing that. 2/3 of the missions for light warships in the Honorverse have been taken over by LACs in first-line Navies (or will be in the long run)

And if Manticore had still consisted of a single starsystem, you would have a perfectly valid point.

You do realize the Haven sector powers have these things called CLACs which let them bring LACs along with their fleets, and even if a system doesn't have an existing station that's workable as a LAC base, they have designs for prefabbed ones they can ship in, right?

Tenshinai wrote:

drothgery wrote:sub-BC(L) ships are no longer needed as screening elements

That is almost certainly a flawed position.

Nothing between a LAC and BC(L) should be anywhere close to a clash between wallers. This has been pretty well established at this point.

Tenshinai wrote:

drothgery wrote:And with the ability to post LACs permanently in every system in Silesia, they will no longer have anywhere near the piracy problem in places where the only option is hyper capable escorts

You forget something. It´s not in "every system", it´s in "every settled system".
While i certainly agree that the combination of Manties and Andies there will drastically cut down on pirating, it wont disappear completely, and the main routes between systems are where the pirates that manage to survive, will try to catch targets, ie in hyper.

You seem to forget that barring oddball hyperspace conditions, it's all but impossible to catch someone in hyper, which is why virtually all piracy (and battles between real navies) takes place in normal space. And why would commercial traffic go to an uninhabited system? Hyperspace doesn't work that why. Meanwhile, if a fleet is using one as a staging area, they have CLACs.

drothgery wrote:

Tenshinai wrote:You forget something. It´s not in "every system", it´s in "every settled system".
While i certainly agree that the combination of Manties and Andies there will drastically cut down on pirating, it wont disappear completely, and the main routes between systems are where the pirates that manage to survive, will try to catch targets, ie in hyper.

You seem to forget that barring oddball hyperspace conditions, it's all but impossible to catch someone in hyper, which is why virtually all piracy (and battles between real navies) takes place in normal space. And why would commercial traffic go to an uninhabited system? Hyperspace doesn't work that why.

Plus over half the problem with piracy in Silesia was corrupt system governors allowing pirates to fence their loot, get supplies, and repair their ships. With Manticore in charge all that support infrastructure is denied to the pirates.

A major military's fleet, or even commerce raiding force, can call on enough support auxiliaries and logistical shipping to maintain a presence in a deserted star system without drawing on the services of any surrounding systems. A pirate ship or even a resistance movement's privateers cannot. They don't have the capital in the first place to acquire those wilderness support capabilities; and even if they did the cost of using them would eat away any profit they might be making.


And that's before we even get to drothgery's very correct point about the difficulty in detecting and intercepting any unit while in hyper.

Tenshinai wrote:

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.

I already pointed out the infodump where David described 300kt as the probable size of the smallest RMN warships, but I will show it to you again, with emphasis added:

David said:
The Manties are perfectly prepared to continue using transitional types â?? and types which will become highly vulnerable once the other side has MDMs â?? very aggressively and offensively as long as their range advantage allows them to do so without prohibitive casualties, but they are already looking towards the next generation of warships and warship design. Hence the internal studies which are suggesting a 300,000-ton platform as the minimum to perform the light cruiser/destroyer role. In fact, what is probably going to happen is that the destroyer as a type will effectively disappear, with its independently deployable role reverting to the cruiser and its fleet screening role going to the LAC groups. In that respect, the Roland is every bit as much a short-term, transitional type as the BC(P) ever was, and the Admiralty's internal thinking reflects that. They are absolutely great, galaxy-beating ships to have… as long as the other side doesn't have ships with comparable weaponry.

So 300,000 is not my value, it is David's value.

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!

All I said is that the question of superdreadnought survivability is irrelevant to the question of whether 300kt becomes the smallest RMN ship. Please tell me how that is BS?

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.

Yes, seriously. I do believe that. I disagree that tractored pods should be counted in the hypothetical test, because you would only carry those pods when you knew exactly when and where you were about to enter battle. It is irrelevant to the typical mission assigned to light destroyers and light cruisers. They would not be carrying pods, and would be facing equivalent opponents with pods.

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.

I didn't ignore it, I said the comparison does not apply, and apparently you agree. If you believe it does apply, you'll have to explain a bit clearer because I don't see it. If you knew the argument was flawed, then you should not have used it. If you were "returning the favor from earlier posters in the thread", then you shouldn't have aimed it at my post.

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.

David agrees that the small ships need to concentrate on not getting hit rather than absorbing the damage. The increase in size is not to add better armor--it is to add better defenses to prevent those hits. And he thinks that 300kt is the minimum size which can provide sufficient active defenses in that future environment. In particular, he said:

David said:The 300,000-ton notional ship they're looking at acquires a very large percentage of its total tonnage from additional defensive elements, including a scaled down version of the Keyhole One platform. As you guys will see in A Rising Thunder, Manticore is already investing considerable effort in defensive doctrine and tactics to deal with the threat of MDMs and even Apollo, despite the fact that no one else has that combination of capabilities. The same thing is true where the Mark 16 is concerned, and the architects and the defensive system designers are considering the new threat parameters in the designs they are proposing.

As for not having enough ships, you are making a flawed comparison when you say "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." In Manticore's opinion, 1/10 the individual capability is insufficient capability. Manticore does not see a situation where they would want a ship with 1/10 the capability. If they did, they would still have been building frigates early in the war.

SWM wrote:All I said is that the question of superdreadnought survivability is irrelevant to the question of whether 300kt becomes the smallest RMN ship. Please tell me how that is BS?

It is called arguing for arguments sake. This discussion went there LONG ago.

Thanks both of you for such prolific obfuscation.

Now, back to lurking, and uggg, work.