HFQ Official Snippet #9

Hi Don,

The drop in trade with the continents may have encouraged more merchant seamen to join the navy, and so there may be more to serve on the schooners than thought, and RP may consider reducing the number of galleons if necessary to distribute the crews for schooners if it becomes that critical.

Before HFaF, the Raw Meat post put pre-jihad Charisian galleons at 2753, averaging 1300.4 tons each, before any new additional construction, so if most of that was involved in continental trade [~93% of population] that's some 2560 ships; most of which should still be available despite the focus on the empire's internal trade, ie plenty to deal with war cargo convoys to Siddarmark, possibly one every 5day or two since Charis can't be making that many munitions yet; so much may still be food or replacement agricultural machinery etc.

If a convoy leaves every 5day on a trip of ~35 days, there would be something near 14 convoys going both ways between Charis and the SR at any time, assuming loading and unloading can be done in a 5day, which might explain why the escort was so light though previous escorts mentioned in MTaT etc were much heavier, they were much bigger convoys and the current ones might only be a dozen or two.

Convoys may be great, but even a good convoy system removes the ship's annual carrying capacity by 50%, due to all the time in port waiting for all those scheduled to arrive.

Thus compelling all the EoC's merchant ships into convoys can have a devastating effect on the EoC's economy, if it isn't dealt with soon.

L

n7axw wrote:

PeterZ wrote:*quote="n7axw"*I'm back beating on my convoy escorts drum again. I'm experiencing a bit of tension between Rock Point's internal ruminations in this snippet and RFC's posting in the Convoy Escorts thread where he claims there are lots of light craft, presumably schooners, available.

The only reconciliation I can see right now is there are still lots of schooners still in the hands of the privateer consortiums left over after everybody elses merchant traffic was wiped out. There must have been dozens of the things, maybe more. That would explain why Rock Point is currently short of hulls if the ICN havn't yet snarfed those up.

Anybody else with ideas?

Don*quote*

The more limiting factor is manpower. I believe those hulls are available, but the number of sailors are not. Not everyone that would serve on a privateer will want to join the ICN. Those consortiums might have been willing to sell the hulls, but were the sailors willing to join the ICN? Even if they were, until recently there was not enough money to pay for more sailors.
Now that those constraints have been lessened, perhaps more of those ships will be purchased for the ICN or contracted as convoy escorted.

Hi PeterZ,

A good thought and a possibility I hadn't considered.

Reflecting on that, I would note that the EOC has relied on recruitment rather than impressment which would imply that the shortage of manpower is not too critical.

Also, given the embargo, I wonder if there might not be a pool of unemployed seamen, since internal markets probably don't completely replace trade lost on the mainland.

Don

n7axw wrote:Graydon wrote:
[devastate the Desnarian coast with ironclads]

My response:

The coastline is too long. The best ICN can hope to do is to do is suppress the raider building with raids and hope that they can burn shipyards faster than the Desnairians can build them. They don't have to put the shipyards near settled communities. You find yourself and isolated cove, import the help...and build.

The last four dukes had adopted policies which favored both the fisheries and the coastal trade

, to quote the snippets.

It sounds like this particular coast is all maritime transport, especially considering how hard a Desnarian aristocrat would look for something, anything, else before investing in fish. So I think a reprise of the British tactics against the French during the Napoleonic wars would work.

The French didn't have much interior development; no canals to speak of, and poor roads, especially along the Mediterranean coast, so they were heavily dependent on coastal shipping for industry. If you "take, sink, burn, or destroy" the coastal shipping, there isn't going to be much economic activity along that coast. If you do this on an "everything that floats" basis while burning down all the established towns, the population can flee or starve.

That's a lot harsher than the Empire of Charis has been so far, but it's certainly not something they'd have any trouble doing with those City-class ironclads.

Oh My! Oh My!
Troops specially trained in mountain/winter warfare. The AoG is in for shock when they run into these guys.

Desnair is about to get a huge surprise when several ironclads show up off there coast and rain destruction. Who is going to die of shock first? The inquistion, the desnair nobles or someoneelse? When they realize the true scope of Charis steel production abilities!
Do they have antacid for the slew of heart problems that are about to occur?

I WANT THE FULL BOOK NOW. A NICE OOPSIE BOOK WOULD BE NICE NOW TILL THE PRINT VERSION IS RELEASED.

Graydon wrote:

n7axw wrote:Graydon wrote:
[devastate the Desnarian coast with ironclads]

My response:

The coastline is too long. The best ICN can hope to do is to do is suppress the raider building with raids and hope that they can burn shipyards faster than the Desnairians can build them. They don't have to put the shipyards near settled communities. You find yourself and isolated cove, import the help...and build.

The last four dukes had adopted policies which favored both the fisheries and the coastal trade

, to quote the snippets.

It sounds like this particular coast is all maritime transport, especially considering how hard a Desnarian aristocrat would look for something, anything, else before investing in fish. So I think a reprise of the British tactics against the French during the Napoleonic wars would work.

The French didn't have much interior development; no canals to speak of, and poor roads, especially along the Mediterranean coast, so they were heavily dependent on coastal shipping for industry. If you "take, sink, burn, or destroy" the coastal shipping, there isn't going to be much economic activity along that coast. If you do this on an "everything that floats" basis while burning down all the established towns, the population can flee or starve.

That's a lot harsher than the Empire of Charis has been so far, but it's certainly not something they'd have any trouble doing with those City-class ironclads.

It might work. But if I were the Desnairians, I would stockpile the materials back far enough for the ironclads to be unable to get at them and then after the ironclad moved through, move in and rebuild. Use the folk driven from their homes as manpower for your projects. The ironclads may come back, but a day late and a dollar short. The French coast wasn't nearly as long as my impression of Desnair's. That would be more comparable to Brazil's.

Don

lyonheart wrote:Hi Don,

The drop in trade with the continents may have encouraged more merchant seamen to join the navy, and so there may be more to serve on the schooners than thought, and RP may consider reducing the number of galleons if necessary to distribute the crews for schooners if it becomes that critical.

Before HFaF, the Raw Meat post put pre-jihad Charisian galleons at 2753, averaging 1300.4 tons each, before any new additional construction, so if most of that was involved in continental trade [~93% of population] that's some 2560 ships; most of which should still be available despite the focus on the empire's internal trade, ie plenty to deal with war cargo convoys to Siddarmark, possibly one every 5day or two since Charis can't be making that many munitions yet; so much may still be food or replacement agricultural machinery etc.

If a convoy leaves every 5day on a trip of ~35 days, there would be something near 14 convoys going both ways between Charis and the SR at any time, assuming loading and unloading can be done in a 5day, which might explain why the escort was so light though previous escorts mentioned in MTaT etc were much heavier, they were much bigger convoys and the current ones might only be a dozen or two.

Convoys may be great, but even a good convoy system removes the ship's annual carrying capacity by 50%, due to all the time in port waiting for all those scheduled to arrive.

Thus compelling all the EoC's merchant ships into convoys can have a devastating effect on the EoC's economy, if it isn't dealt with soon.

L

Hi Lyonhart,


The most critical thing at the moment is to make sure that the Empire's military supplies are adequately covered even if some of the stuff has to wait on the docks making sure that it isn't exposed to the raiders in inadequately escorted ships. That much they can probably manage.

The rest is obviously important too, but I suspect that rapid naval expansion would soon cover the problem.

Don

n7axw wrote:

PeterZ wrote:I am not so sure. The hulls required to support the war effort has been huge. That demand and the demand for trading with the member nations and Siddermark suggests that the Charisian merchant marine is as busy if not more so than pre jihad. That might not be true indefinitely, but certainly true right now.

Impressment will limit merchant capacity and exacerbate the issues Rock Point is considering in his internal monologue.

I'm not so sure... I can agree that their galleon carrying capacity might be pretty tight.

But schooners? I know that some schooners have been purchased for dealing with scouting and such... But they are not really cargo bearing vessels and up to this business with the Desnarian commerce raiders, what would they have been doing?

As for manpower, I was presuming that those unemployed seamen, if there are any, might be willing to volunteer. After all, it does sound better than unemployment.

Just thinking a bit further, the manpower crisis for armed forces in the mainland seems to be over. It would be a far more efficient use of recruits for Charis at this point to shunt their recruits over into the navy. 10,000 men added to the army would be a mere drop in the bucket in terms of what happens on the mainland. 10,000 men would make a huge difference for those light combatants that the navy needs.

Don

oh, I don't know: scouting, coastal patrols, carrying dispatches, picketing major enemy ports, acting as signal relays for the main fleet . . . little things like that.

By the height of the Napoleonic Wars, the Royal Navy had expanded to over 600 ships, only 175 of which were ships-of-the-line, and that represented a drop of around 20% of its peak line-of-battle strength. In effect, the RN had effectively defeated the French battle fleet — rather the position Charis is in right now vis-à-vis the Church — but had been forced into an enormous expansion of lighter vessels because of all the hundreds of things navies do beyond simply fighting battles.

Taking the ratio between British ships-of-the-line (the equivalent of the Charisians' "galleons") and their lighter units, you get a ratio of roughly 2.5 frigates, brigs, sloops, et cetera to every ship-of-the-line. In the Imperial Charisian Navy, effectively all of those functions "below the line" are carried out by schooners, and at the moment the Charisians have multiple hundreds of them in service.

Trust me, they been finding things to keep themselves busy doing, but if it turns into a matter of providing convoy escorts against a serious threat to the Empire, they're available for that, too.

PeterZ wrote:But Charisian tech supremacy must erode or the stories become military porn.

I believe that South Harchong and Desnair might confront some stark realization upon examining that cargo.

1-neither nation can duplicate the percision of these designs.
2-that the captured ships weren't better protected suggests the other cargo ships carried similar weapons and ammo. Neither Desnair nor South Harchong can produce those quantities at anything like affordable costs.
3-when the ICA and RSA are all armed with these weapons, they will cut through the jihadi forces like a hot knife through butter.
4-if commerce raiding does not stop these weapons from getting into Siddermark, fighting the heretics will be suicide.

These realizations might lead to a couple of conclusions.
1-If the heretics are unbeatable, might that not mean God DOES support their cause?
2-This possibility might be enough rationale to encourage Mahris to back away from the Jihad.
3-If there are further setbacks in the war, the Howard nations have to consider the possibilities.

InvisibleBison wrote:Aside from steam engines (or more precise information about how to make them than was in that briefcase the Church got in LaMA), the only specific idea I had was some industrial information intended for Siddarmarkians, though I don't know how likely it would be for such info to be shipping on an army cargo ship, if it was shipping at all. My comment was more expressing vague apprehensions about the erosion of Charis's tech supremacy.

Hi Peter,

I don't agree. What was said is that without standardization of measurements, the parts from one "manufactory" would not fit with another. With 5,000 M96 rifles, they can use actual working parts as templates. If they spread the parts to suppliers, and require the manufactured parts to be identical within the margin of difference that Zhwaigair measured with the earlier rifles, they probably can make their own rifles.

As for cartridges, the only thing that was new technology with the cartridges, was the design and the creation of machinery to do the manufacturing process.

If they captured a steam engine then they will be able to bypass, design steps, stress calculation, testing, and go straight to manufacturing. They already captured the Charis' current steel making process.

James

While burning out the entire Desniarian coast is a way to stop the raiders, it's not something you would need those ironclads for. The ironclads are more something you would use to assault a well defended position, like say Desnair the city

Something that has been nagging at me for the last day or two since I read this: Why would a Charisan merchant ship allow themself to be boarded?

In a regular conflict, sure. The merchant ship is taken as a prize and the crew is held till either exchanged or until the war ends. But this war is not a regular conflict where the rules of war are being observed. This is a holy war in which all Charisans have been declared as heretics. Right now, the best outcome for Charisan seamen in the event of being captured is a quick execution (which is what the snippet says happened to the crews of the captured ships). The other possible fate is being put to the question and dying slowly and with great pain.

So, if your possible outcomes are either 1. A summary execution or 2. Slow death by torture, then why surrender at all? If your merchant ship is armed, then fight to the death. If unarmed, why not scuttle your ship to prevent capture?
*edited once

Henry Brown wrote:Something I have been nagging at me for the last day or two since I read this: Why would a Charisan merchant ship allow themself to be boarded?

In a regular conflict, sure. The merchant ship is taken as a prize and the crew is held till either exchanged or until the war ends. But this war is not a regular conflict where the rules of war are being observed. This is a holy war in which all Charisans have been declared as heretics. Right now, the best outcome for Charisan seamen in the event of being captured is a quick execution (which is what the snippet says happened to the crews of the captured ships). The other possible fate is being put to the question and dying slowly and with great pain.

So, if your possible outcomes are either 1. A summary execution or 2. Slow death by torture, then why surrender at all? If your merchant ship is armed, then fight to the death. If unarmed, why not scuttle your ship to prevent capture?

Or set a scuttling charge big enough to take out your attacker. (Scuttling a sailing ship without bilge penetrations for an engine or toilet involves hacking a hole in the bottom with a chisel - a couple of hours work at best, or a sizable explosive charge).