PeterZ wrote:Build steam merchant ships to out run the privateers. That solves that problem. Destroyers are good to fight other steam warships. At the moment there are no enemy warships that steam merchies can't out run. Which emphasizes the primary need for heavy cruisers and battleships to destroy fortified bases.
doug941 wrote:Not arguing that the ICN shouldn't have cruisers, they should. But for convoy escorts against the church's privateers, cruisers are the wrong answer. For the amount of materials, you can make one cruiser or several destroyers. Cruisers would be needed to go against the BASES, DDs to go against the SHIPS. As a Terran example, BB/CA distant escorts were used against the threat of the Tirpitz and Scharnhorst, destroyers against the U-boats. An ICN destroyer with 3-4" guns and possibly a couple of torps would eat a church privateer for breakfast.
When sufficient steam engines are available, steam powered merchies become the norm. Until then, you have to work with what you have.
People are actually thinking about the wrong thing here, I suspect. Destroyers weren't really the "escort of choice" even during WWI and WWII: they were the best
available escorts present in sufficient numbers to do the job.
Unless/until someone introduces torpedoes, the DD has no function, really. What's needed is what were called "cruising vessels:" gun-armed ships with sufficient range and endurance to stay with a convoy all the way to its destination, fast enough to stay with the convoy and (hopefully) to run down or at least stay in contact with any commerce raiders who come along, powerfully armed enough to pose at least a significant threat to any raider (better if it can destroy the raider, but inflicting crippling damage will still drive it back into port), and cheap enough to build in sufficient numbers. This is not the description of a destroyer; it is the description of a small cruiser. The main reason for that is bunkerage. The hull has to be big enough to fit in the power plant and the fuel to feed it
plus the weapons. Especially with coal-powered vessels, bunkerage is the Achilles heel of almost any design. The "High Seas Fleet" actually lacked the endurance to operate anywhere outside the North Sea (hence the British confidence that even if it was called the "High Seas Fleet" it was really Tirpitz' riskflotte designed solely to threaten the RN in its home waters). In the absence of a torpedo armed ship type (and absent
good torpedoes to put aboard it) there's no real point building a destroyer type (relatively short ranged, limited seakeeping capacity [compared to larger types], with only a relatively light gun armament.
Coal is a less efficient fuel than oil, which means you get between 1/2 and 2/3 as much range on the same horsepower per ton of coal as you do per ton of oil. Perhaps even more to point in some respects is that an oil-fueled ship isn't dependent on the endurance of its stokers to maintain full speed. When the
Goeben was running away from the British in the Med in 1914, one of her advantages was that she had her full wartime complement on board whereas the British ships still had their pre-mobilization peacetime complements, which meant the Germans had more and better trained stokers. Of course,
Goeben also had unresolved boiler problems which should have offset that, but the Brits didn't know it and they credited her with a speed of 27 knots when she could barely do 20 except in very short bursts (which put even more strain on her boilers and aggravated their problems further). By straining her stokers to the breaking point (literally; one of them died and several were permanently crippled) she managed to break contact with the British armored cruisers at a critical juncture with a burst of speed she could never match again later in the chase. In the process, however, she’d confirmed the Brits' erroneous speed estimate, which had serious consequences at a later date because they "knew" they couldn't catch her. With oil-fired boilers on both sides, Admiral Souchon couldn't have pulled that off.
Once oil comes along (if it does, on Safehold), it becomes possible to build smaller escorts with the sorts of ranges required for oceanic commerce escort. Until that time, cruisers are feasible and destroyer-sized ships aren’t. (I would point out that USN and IJN DDs in WW II were effectively the size and power of most WW I scout cruisers, specifically because of the endurance demands placed upon them when they were designed. That’s why they were always bigger than British DDs designed for Med and Atlantic service.)
I would also point out that as late as 1914, analysis of the changes in propulsion and weapons had demonstrated pretty conclusively that commerce raiding was no longer a viable threat to the side with the superior seapower. It was pointed out ─ correctly ─ that a raider’s endurance was so limited using coal, and that coaling anywhere except in a proper port was so time consuming and uncertain, that if a raider was cut off from a secure, fairly close-at-hand base, it would be unable to inflict significant damage on the enemy before it was destroyed or lack of fuel starved it to death. The “cruiser warfare” rules of the Declaration of Paris also figured in that analysis, of course, but the technical side of it was perfectly well taken . . . until the u-boat came along. In 1914, however, only a handful of people (among them Jackie Fisher) could imagine the still new, fragile, and untested submarine being used as a commerce destroyer, in no small part because of the "cruiser warfare" rules the Declaration of Paris imposed upon commerce raiders. Fisher, on the other hand, saw from a very early point that a submarine would make a deadly commerce destroyer and that, by the nature of her armament and vulnerabilities, she would have no choice (as a raider) but to sink without warning and without seeing to the safety of her victims’ crews. In the absence of a Safeholdian Karl Doenitz, however, the difficulties people like Julian Corbett were seeing in 1911 will, indeed, apply to commerce raiders on Safehold.
