Revisiting a Gryphon refit.

Jonathan_S wrote:I guess it's possible that the spring style they leaked of a Flight III Gryphon was actually part of a more serious study on a next-gen non-pod SD designs.

I always figured the Benji the Great design was what the next gen of Manticorian SDs would have looked like. The Steadholder Devinski is a Moded Gryphon design with initial war experience driving it's changes and the Benji is a Streached Devinski. Depending on the viewpoint, a Gryphon flight III could either reflect the Devinski's updates, or jump to the greater firepower of the Benji.

The E wrote:I think that's just a function of the RMN having to rationalize their production capacity. Concentrating on one very good design makes logistics a hell of a lot easier, not to mention that it makes individual Wallers and BatRons much more uniform (A BatRon composed of several different ship designs will, for example, have to conform to the maximum speed attainable by the slowest ship).

Not "speed"; "acceleration". Any ship with mil-spec particle shielding has pretty much the same max speed. How fast they reach that speed (acceleration) is the difference between an SD and a DB.

At the strategic level, there isn't a lot of difference between the mobility of DDs and SDs. The former might shave a few hours off a week-long trip compared to the latter. At the tactical level, the difference in acceleration can be quite significant.

OK keyhole is out.

Mk41 might not need it. Saganami C can reach out to 30 40 50 M Km range.

The Mk41 should be triple 9-9.5 M Km, 27-28.5 M Km fully powered. Longer with ballistic phases.

Alternatively a Cataphract, would that fit in a Gryphon tube? As long as it isn't bigger it should fit. The Cataphract is better than the SLN missiles after all.

There are 200 SL SD full of them plus the fast Freighters full of reloads. Should be more than enough. For awhile. Until the refits for the Mk41's and internals are done on all the ships. As pointed out it will take time, while taking half and put the Cataphracts in shouldn't take much time at all.

Steadholder Denevski and Benjamin the Great could also be added as well as the Minotaur's. Replacing them with 60-80 of the out of favour with the Manties BC (P). Which Grayson seems to favour plus a handful of Mk23 Hydra.

The Minotaur CLAC with the same Mk41 missiles would benefit the Gryphon Sphinx SD one could add in the Command Samothrace. The Denevski and Benjamin and the Grayson Minotaur CLAC would give a force of 256 ships. 24 Minotaur CLAC would bring 2400 LAC Shrike B Ferret and Katana. Add 10 Mk41 Flight 1 Hydra and you increase the forces in Silesia to 100-112 LAC per system and 6-7 SD upgraded.

Once again initial crews can comes from Silesia and trained for the System Guard of Silesia. Silesia System Guard? Silesia Protectorate Guard?

One other "option" might be to make a close defense Highlander / 282 series, LAC with a conning tower Latch or dock or what have you. On the bottom of the SD's. Once you cut the big holes in the "floor" of the ships for inner access. Several 2-6-12 such LAC could be locked in and carried on the bottom of the ships.

Close Defense Craft. 120-140 meters long 20-23 meters wide / tall. LAC Lasers with Point defense option and PD and CM or perhaps with lesser 0.5+ keyhole telemetry links. No broadside mounting needed. Optimised for Mk41 use. Not quite Katana but those would be there too. Limiting to 2 such CDC Keyhole 0.5 craft they will enhance defense and offer a Keyhole like option. With Beta Squared Nodes the can use the FTL without problem.

Gryphon and its ilk are ships of the wall.



New telemetry upgrades perhaps maybe a few
Ghost Rider optimised for telemetry links? No Keyhole no CM PD replacement but upgrades should work. Software is a molycurcuit board replacement so that shouldn't be a problem.

I'm still hazy on how big the missile tubes of the Gryphon was / is. Presumably smaller than a Mk41. Is the Mk41 bigger around or just longer.

Inner bulkheads and retrofits through the top or bottom would be the idea points of entry. Yes it would be quite extensive but as long as one is fighting the SLN these ships will be fine. Also against the Alignment Fortes SD(P) are going to end up in Energy range without pod abilities. Energy Torpedo's would, however, be a lovely weapons to fight up close against non wedged stealth ships. Of course the Manties don't know this yet.

Refitting the internals will allow for the crew reductions, compensator upgrades, automations, new larger better command decks, luckily everything about these ships is known, where everything is etc...

And again we're faced with the question that you've never answered:

Why should the RMN refit a Gryphon-class ship when this will produce a ship that is still below current RMN standards, when for a fairly small extra cost in time and resources they can build an Invictus?

Dafmeister wrote:And again we're faced with the question that you've never answered:

Why should the RMN refit a Gryphon-class ship when this will produce a ship that is still below current RMN standards, when for a fairly small extra cost in time and resources they can build an Invictus?

Or even better, if it is vital to get a decently capable ship out to the boonies, build the theoretical DN-P that has been mentioned. Its build time should be roughly the same as the Gryphon refit time, and it is slightly cheaper to build and man than an Invictus, plus the added design time to get it ready for production won't be much more than the added design time to get a Gryphon ready to be gutted.

If the need is so urgent to get a decent MDM throwing waller out to secondary systems but not so urgent that doing it right with an Invictus, then at least do it right enough with a DN-P

fester wrote:

Dafmeister wrote:And again we're faced with the question that you've never answered:

Why should the RMN refit a Gryphon-class ship when this will produce a ship that is still below current RMN standards, when for a fairly small extra cost in time and resources they can build an Invictus?

Or even better, if it is vital to get a decently capable ship out to the boonies, build the theoretical DN-P that has been mentioned. Its build time should be roughly the same as the Gryphon refit time, and it is slightly cheaper to build and man than an Invictus, plus the added design time to get it ready for production won't be much more than the added design time to get a Gryphon ready to be gutted.

If the need is so urgent to get a decent MDM throwing waller out to secondary systems but not so urgent that doing it right with an Invictus, then at least do it right enough with a DN-P

In the current situation, with manty heavy cruisers capable of taking on solly SDs, what reason would make it 'vital' to send a capital ship instead of a squadron of cruisers? building the cruiser squadron would be much faster than one big capital ship.

Rakhmamort wrote:In the current situation, with manty heavy cruisers capable of taking on solly SDs, what reason would make it 'vital' to send a capital ship instead of a squadron of cruisers? building the cruiser squadron would be much faster than one big capital ship.

Only the Saganami-C with MK16G might do that. The rest of the time, they're going to need pods and a defensive location, unless their ammo ship is intended to enter the system.

Heavy cruisers might be able to beat down on SDs, but this isn't going to be true forever. Eventually SDs will stop sucking so badly and the first cruiser to try engaging them will get blown apart as much as Pierre Jr's battlecruisers.

Rakhmamort wrote:In the current situation, with manty heavy cruisers capable of taking on solly SDs, what reason would make it 'vital' to send a capital ship instead of a squadron of cruisers? building the cruiser squadron would be much faster than one big capital ship.

No one said there is a reason to build DN(P)'s, only that this would be better than refitting Gryphons. Neither idea is a good investment of resources compared to building SD(P)'s

Whitecold wrote:

Rakhmamort wrote:In the current situation, with manty heavy cruisers capable of taking on solly SDs, what reason would make it 'vital' to send a capital ship instead of a squadron of cruisers? building the cruiser squadron would be much faster than one big capital ship.

No one said there is a reason to build DN(P)'s, only that this would be better than refitting Gryphons. Neither idea is a good investment of resources compared to building SD(P)'s

Besides, although I'm very skeptical of Honorverrse/real world analogies, in the real world when you have a 'cheap' and 'expensive' military vehicle that are designed to serve similar roles, what ends up happening is that only the cheap one gets built in volume, and it ends up not saving much money if any.

Whitecold wrote:No one said there is a reason to build DN(P)'s, only that this would be better than refitting Gryphons. Neither idea is a good investment of resources compared to building SD(P)'s

What do you call a DN(P)? A SD(P) with a half load of pods.

It's probably a little more complex than that, but the ship is still going to need a pair of keyholes, armoured pod core(since BC(P)s have demonstrated the necessity for these), broadside and chase weapons, sensors, sidewalls, external armour and so on. When you build that much warship, you might as well go the whole hog.