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Corvette Thoughts.

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Corvette Thoughts.
Post by Roguevictory   » Sat Sep 13, 2014 3:17 am

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I was re-reading Beginnings today and a couple of something came to mind.

What is a Corvette? The Honorverse wiki just says it is a small warship used for system defense purposes with no greater detail. I have a few theories but can't find anything to confirm or deny them.

1: A non-Hyper capable warship designed for longer cruises and missions then a LAC(More supplies, more crew that kind of thing) Most likely IMO

2: A Hyper capable warship smaller then a Frigate. Least Likely IMO since everything I've read talks about how the reason Frigates were phased out is the they were too small to carry the equipment and weapons a Hyper capable warships needs to be able to take on another warship.

3: A Hyper capable warship between a Frigate and a Destroyer in size. That IMO would fit with what the wiki says about them being a stopgap until Manticore could start building Destroyers and Light Cruisers though that leaves the question of why are they never mentioned in the main series even if they went the way of the Battleship and Frigate especially since if they were larger then a Frigate some would probably still be in service when the main series starts since the retirement of the RMN's Frigates had only been completed a short time (less then two decades) before the series began.

4: A Hyper capable warship intended to fulfill some role specialized enough that the ship models were given their own subclass rather then being grouped with the Frigates or Destroyers based on their mass. Possible but then the question of what special role they filled remains. Scouting perhaps?
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Re: Corvette Thoughts.
Post by Duckk   » Sat Sep 13, 2014 7:46 am

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A corvette is an obsoleted type. They are the precursors to the LAC.
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Re: Corvette Thoughts.
Post by Vince   » Sat Sep 13, 2014 11:40 am

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We might see a corvette in A Call to Duty (or in subsequent books in the Manticore Ascendent seris).

This is just my guess (I don't have the E-ARC).

A Call to Duty is scheduled for release October 2014 (dead-tree edition). Last day to order as part of the Monthly Baen Bundle (all electronic formats) is 15 September 2014. (Monthly Baen Bundles can only be purchased at Baen Ebooks.) First day to purchase as an individual title (all electronic formats) is 16 September 2014.
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Re: Corvette Thoughts.
Post by Jonathan_S   » Sat Sep 13, 2014 12:35 pm

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Duckk wrote:A corvette is an obsoleted type. They are the precursors to the LAC.
Yep. I get the impression they were kind of like a non-hyper capable frigate.

So like a LAC they have no hyper generator, but unlike a LAC they would have fairly conventional weapons fits for the era; not (for example) less capable single-shot box launchers instead of tubes.


Now I don't know if that means they'd be able to match the accel of a contemporary frigate or, if like a LAC, they mounted less powerful nodes that weren't capable of maxing out their compensators. We really don't have much to go one - they're only mentioned in 3 books: The Travis Long short story and novel and then a single passing mention in Honor Among Enemies ("According to Honor's intelligence files, Schiller's heaviest unit was a corvette, and nothing that small would want to irritate anything which mounted a ship of the wall's grasers.")

Kind of hard to judge anything from centuries old data and a passing mention.
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Re: Corvette Thoughts.
Post by saber964   » Sat Sep 13, 2014 5:53 pm

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My impression is the modern Frigate is probably about the size of a early destroyer like the Noblesse or Falcon classes we know from the textev that they have a marine complement of at least 2 squads.

The reason I am speculating look at the tonnage creep by todays standards a WWII era Fletcher class DD was 2300 tons and a Buckley/Evarts class DE about 1100 tons. A Spruance class DD weight in at 7800-8700 tons and a Perry class FFG 4700 tons and the new Zumwalt class DD weight in at 14000 tons. The Spruance class is the size and weight of a WWII era light cruiser and some heavy cruisers classes and the Zumwalts are as big as some light cruisers and most classes of heavy cruisers.
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Re: Corvette Thoughts.
Post by HungryKing   » Sat Sep 13, 2014 6:03 pm

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At some point someone from bu9 posted what the first corvettes owned by manitcore were, they lacked energy weaponry but had more launchers, a third again (which were box launchers for both as far as I could tell).
One of things I do recall is that they lacked not only hyper drives, but also spin sections, so they probably were tactically fleeter (assuming equal gen compensators and equivalent wedges).
LACs evolved from corvettes as the minimal distance between impeller rings shrunk. Neither type were ever intended for extended combat survivability.
It should be noted that modern LACs have evolved back into the traditional 'corvette' size bracket.
Jonathan_S wrote:
Duckk wrote:A corvette is an obsoleted type. They are the precursors to the LAC.
Yep. I get the impression they were kind of like a non-hyper capable frigate.

So like a LAC they have no hyper generator, but unlike a LAC they would have fairly conventional weapons fits for the era; not (for example) less capable single-shot box launchers instead of tubes.


Now I don't know if that means they'd be able to match the accel of a contemporary frigate or, if like a LAC, they mounted less powerful nodes that weren't capable of maxing out their compensators. We really don't have much to go one - they're only mentioned in 3 books: The Travis Long short story and novel and then a single passing mention in Honor Among Enemies ("According to Honor's intelligence files, Schiller's heaviest unit was a corvette, and nothing that small would want to irritate anything which mounted a ship of the wall's grasers.")

Kind of hard to judge anything from centuries old data and a passing mention.
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Gets Confusing
Post by HB of CJ   » Sat Sep 13, 2014 6:17 pm

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Superdreadnought, dreadnought, battleship, battle cruiser, heavy cruiser, light cruiser, destroyer, frigate, corvette. This does not include other ship types that might be larger or smaller including, transports, fleet replenishment ships, tankers, LAC carriers, service ships of all types and descriptions, escort LAC carriers, escort cruisers, destroyer escorts, frigate escorts and possibly corvette escorts. Wow.

Perhaps a corvette is the smallest possible hyper capable war ship with some offensive and defensive capability? No armor. No survival ability? Probably under 30,000 tons with a crew of 12 or so? Dunno. Consider it also a type of large LAC with hyper capability? Dunno that either. Probably just too small and weak to be any good in the Honorverse for sure. I love this forum. HB of CJ (old coot) Cm.
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Re: Gets Confusing
Post by Theemile   » Sun Sep 14, 2014 4:29 pm

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I got T. Pope to comment on it about a year ago. A corvette is an obsolete sublight warship class massing about 25-50 K tons - essentially a Frigate or small DD without hyper capability.

Seen in the Manticore Ascendant stories, they were a popular design back then for system defense (several were delivered to Manticore by freighter to back up the original 4 frigates. The only recent mention of them is in Schuler in Silensia, a Manty merchant cartel (Dillingham?)has several there to protect their mining interests - the lack of hyperdrives got around the Silensian's objection to privately owned warships. We never got an answer, but the modern ships might just be a DD sans hyperdrive.

Essentially they are HACs, and most will find it uneconomical to build one currently, where for a few dollars more they could field a FG or DD with the same weapons capabilities but able to serve many more roles.

Here is a link to that previous discussion:
http://forums.davidweber.net/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=4483&p=104769&hilit=+corvette#p104769
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Re: Gets Confusing
Post by Roguevictory   » Mon Sep 15, 2014 2:57 am

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Thanks for all of the information Theemile.
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Re: Gets Confusing
Post by SWM   » Mon Sep 15, 2014 1:35 pm

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HB of CJ wrote:Superdreadnought, dreadnought, battleship, battle cruiser, heavy cruiser, light cruiser, destroyer, frigate, corvette. This does not include other ship types that might be larger or smaller including, transports, fleet replenishment ships, tankers, LAC carriers, service ships of all types and descriptions, escort LAC carriers, escort cruisers, destroyer escorts, frigate escorts and possibly corvette escorts. Wow.

Perhaps a corvette is the smallest possible hyper capable war ship with some offensive and defensive capability? No armor. No survival ability? Probably under 30,000 tons with a crew of 12 or so? Dunno. Consider it also a type of large LAC with hyper capability? Dunno that either. Probably just too small and weak to be any good in the Honorverse for sure. I love this forum. HB of CJ (old coot) Cm.

It has been established that a corvette was not hyper-capable. But I'd like to correct a couple assumptions made in the above post.

The text states in a number of places that a frigate is the smallest possible hyper-capable warship, with no armor, barely any defenses, and no survivability. Since it has weapons, it is necessarily larger than a dispatch boat--and a dispatch boat is itself larger than the numbers you suggest. The smallest dispatch boat is 40,000 tons, and has a crew of 12 or 15. The low end of a frigate is around 50,000 tons, and a much larger crew to handle all the sensors, weapons, and maintenance. It is not possible to put a hyper generator in a 30,000 ton craft, whether or not it has weapons.
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