New ships designs

Draken:
No, there is no formula that we know for how fast the compensator efficiency drops off. There was an old formula published in one of the books, but it didn't seem to match the numbers given in the stories. Also, 9 Mt is the old cutoff where the acceleration started dropping precipitously. With the current generation of inertial compensators, people on the forum have guessed that the current cutoff is around 10 Mt. We don't have any formula for the current compensators.

However, we do know that the compensator efficiency drops off very fast. If the drop starts at 10, then at 11 the maximum acceleration would be far lower than 250 gees--more like single digits, I think.

Theemile wrote:

fallsfromtrees wrote:Okay, I've looked through AAC and HoS. What does BC(L) stand for - I understand the battlecruiser, and I understand the BC(P) is a pod laying battle cruiser - I haven't been able to find out what the L stands for.

Large - it's a forumn reference, not a storyline reference.

It is used to designate a ship design which lies far outside the normal mass (and capability) ratings for it's class. So a Saganami C is a CA(L), as is a Havenite Mars class. A Roland is a DD(L).

I believe that David did use BG(L) in his 1920 ship chart which was posted in the Pearls, so the designator could be considered to have some canon status.

dreamrider

SWM wrote:Draken:
No, there is no formula that we know for how fast the compensator efficiency drops off. There was an old formula published in one of the books, but it didn't seem to match the numbers given in the stories. Also, 9 Mt is the old cutoff where the acceleration started dropping precipitously. With the current generation of inertial compensators, people on the forum have guessed that the current cutoff is around 10 Mt. We don't have any formula for the current compensators.

However, we do know that the compensator efficiency drops off very fast. If the drop starts at 10, then at 11 the maximum acceleration would be far lower than 250 gees--more like single digits, I think.

There isn't a published formula, but I took a best guess based off the work I did attempting to reconstruct the classic "pre-grayson" curve. That curve seems to line up pretty solidly with the various datapoints from the reference material, but extending it past 8.5 mtons is iffy and then modifying it again for the improved compensator is just compounding the guesses. But what the heck; here's what I got.

The newest ships in House of Steel seem to have an accel about 45% more that you'd expect from their tonnage. Taking that at face value, that also moves the inflection points of the curves further along (I don't have enough solid data points to be sure of that, but it seems likely since we see similar percentage improvements in both large and small ships). So say the critical drop off is improved from 8.5 mtons to 12.325 mtons - so, with the newest compensators we've seen, a CLAC that size should be able to still pull about 505g @100% (or 455g at the 90% rating the RMN is comfortable with).

But let's push this even further out into "no data" land and see how big it might be to get down to the 300g (I'm assuming at 90% power) that Draken was interested in. Assuming the drop off is still the 1g per 2,500 tons (past the critical tonnage) given in More Than Honor, a ship only 3% bigger (12.745 mtons) would already be down to 304g @90%.
If instead we assume that there's also a 45% improvement in the drop-off rate, that pushes us out to almost 5% bigger (12.925 mtons) for a 306g @90%.


It seems to me that unless the compensator improvements radically reshaped this "oversized" penalty curve that the minimal increases in "displacement" aren't worth giving up a 40+% advantage in acceleration.

So 12 Mtons CLAC would be great, especially with that speed. It couldn't have problem with 300 LACs or even more. But since we don't know how long that ship would be, we don't have any ideas how much launch bays you can put onto one broadside.

Draken wrote:So 12 Mtons CLAC would be great, especially with that speed. It couldn't have problem with 300 LACs or even more. But since we don't know how long that ship would be, we don't have any ideas how much launch bays you can put onto one broadside.

Why use a single 12Mton CLAC when 2 8Mton CLACs would give you more LACs and be faster?

Michael Everett wrote:

Draken wrote:So 12 Mtons CLAC would be great, especially with that speed. It couldn't have problem with 300 LACs or even more. But since we don't know how long that ship would be, we don't have any ideas how much launch bays you can put onto one broadside.

Why use a single 12Mton CLAC when 2 8Mton CLACs would give you more LACs and be faster?

Given the way scaling tends to work in the Honorverse for starting cost, operating costs, and crew, chances are the 1 12 Mton CLAC would be cheaper and less demanding of crew than the 2 8 Mton ones.

I don't recall RFC mentioning things more than maybe 9.5 to 10 Mtons for the next generation capital ships though. And sheer stupendous size is likely to be less mission critical for a CLAC than for SD(P)'s - huge individual throw weights and mind-boggling survivability are critical for wallers but just nice for a CLAC whose place in the wall is more a nice extra than anything else. Speed for them is also a lot more important than it is for a waller.

I do think that the DN-scale CLAC is more a niche unit than the general purpose one of a mature doctrine, and I'd expect the RMN to follow the Grayson and RHN lead with larger CLAC's in the future - especially given how fast their SD(P)'s are nowadays and how fast they will be in hyper once they're built with streak drives. (Though that last isn't likely in the next generation of capital ships - maybe the one after.)

Michael Everett wrote:

Draken wrote:So 12 Mtons CLAC would be great, especially with that speed. It couldn't have problem with 300 LACs or even more. But since we don't know how long that ship would be, we don't have any ideas how much launch bays you can put onto one broadside.

Why use a single 12Mton CLAC when 2 8Mton CLACs would give you more LACs and be faster?

Smaller CLACs give you more hulls, which lets you send them on more simultaneous missions.

Larger CLACs have an advantage when you need a lot of LACs, like in the defense against Fillareta. Smaller CLACs let you project power into more places. They also can keep up with task groups that only have battlecruisers or regular cruisers.

JohnRoth wrote:

Michael Everett wrote:
Why use a single 12Mton CLAC when 2 8Mton CLACs would give you more LACs and be faster?

Smaller CLACs give you more hulls, which lets you send them on more simultaneous missions.

Larger CLACs have an advantage when you need a lot of LACs, like in the defense against Fillareta. Smaller CLACs let you project power into more places. They also can keep up with task groups that only have battlecruisers or regular cruisers.

Yep, but in 1960 typical carrier weight around 50kT and in 1970 it was 100kT so heavier CLACs will be only matter of time. And bigger carrier could have heavier armor, more point defense, less crew, more LACs and it could have bigger Marines detachment. And typical carrier should have similar tasks as current Marines transport ship for example USS America, big marines detachment, a lot of landing crafts, some air support, big flag deck, a lot of communication links. Also in Honorverse it should carry a lot of satellites and kinetic strike ability. Also Marines really need any transport/assault ships, because if they need to transport they must buy freighters for that and dedicated ship for them would be cheaper in long term.

Also Marines really need any transport/assault ships, because if they need to transport they must buy freighters for that and dedicated ship for them would be cheaper in long term.

The Marines already have their own dedicated transports and command cruisers, like the Broadsword. They're described in House of Steel.

The larger size CLAC tends to put too many of your eggs in fewer baskets.

Your differences in crew size is in two basic components. The primary weapons of a CLAC are the LACs. For those you need their crews, their ground crews, and their admin staff . The CLAC itself will need it's own crew. That crew- as you scale up the size, will grow abit though it will probably grow more in the area of direct support of the LACs such as mess capacity, added environmental personel and people who deal with the magazines/missile tech/and general logistics management (parts for the LACs.

The smaller CLAC provides a more flexable fleet unit.
Just changing a present 100 LAC design to become a Marine Assault Ship would cut the number of LACs it could carry and you would have significant changes to the interior design and what it carries for small craft such as Assault Shuttles. Essentialy a compeat new design.

While I like the Escort CLAC with perhaps 30 LACs, (analog of the WW II US Escort or Jeep Carrier but with better protection) that isn't the way DW says he is going. Perhaps a larger version of the existing Marine Assault Ship with a intrigral LAC component such as the USS Tarawa (LHA-1) with LACs in place of the helps.

A CLAC with 300 LACs is a really big target with more significant loss potential. Recall that if you lose the CLAC in a raid, you are probably going to lose the LACS and their crews either to LAC desctruction or surrender. 3 CLACs at 100 LACs each gives you more flexibility. If you need 300 LACs, send 3 @ 100 CLACs. Otherwise you have three units that can be given missions at three seperate locations. This follows the same logic as building more units from DD to BC to cover commerce protection/ raiding/ scouting and be able to cover more places at one time.