Return Of The Frigate

SWM wrote:I know that was your idea, but RFC has pretty definitively nixed the idea. He's been quite firm about it.

And for clarification since it´s a new poster, RFC is Runsforcelery, the forumname of David Weber.

In the turmoil of the SL breakup and then the post-breakup, there are three or four variations on what a system will need to keep itself independent if it does not already have s significant SDF

You would be facing:
) Normal pirates- usually single ships with converted merchant ships or some ancient warship.
) Former SLN warships on their own or in pairs/small groups having turned pirate or warlord and are raiding to support themselves or possibly to take over a system and set up as the rulers of it.
) Neighboring systems or aggressive systems from longer distances which are taking over systems for their position (such as with wormholes), populations, products/materials that make them valuable.
) Actual empires or multi-system Star Nations that have significant military force and are able to act as did the PRH and the IEA.

And then there is the hidden one- the members of the RF which are going to be offering alliances or “protection” through partnerships which will eventually result in the RF and impose the Detweiler Plan with stealth and shadow government control.

One is some variety of LAC variant that can actually engage raiding starships. That would mean Haven or RMN type LACs in some number and given the present situation of Manticore’s need to rebuild, the primary default would be Haven.
This would be useful against normal garden variety pirates raiding your system with converted merchant ships. It might even work against pirates that were intercepting ships outside the hyper-limit if you can station and patrol the LACs in the area relative to the star where most of you incoming and outgoing shipping would be using it on regular routing. Enough Haven Quadrant modern LACs can deal with small warships, you just have to have them where the problem is and have trained & experienced crews that can do the job.

Against rogue or former SLN warships or systems with hyper-capable warships, you are going to need something heavier than just LACs and that would be at least some SLN equivalent warships that can deal with other warships.

All of this is going to get really ugly really fast. Single pirates bad but potentially stoppable. Pirate/warlord squadrons or “SDF” groups from other systems are going to smash through almost anything less powerful and actually capture other systems or use the former PROH tactic of intimidating said systems and imposing control on them.

Remember that there will no longer be SLN to enforce peace (well, keep them from actual military combat as opposed to low level business and economic warfare) between systems. Not that the actions of OFS and friends were actually protecting anyone except their own avarice and being the enforcers for local dictators and Transtellars who would gut OFS in on a piece of the action or just continuing payments for “services”. Piracy, other than their own, and interstellar warfare between systems was bad for OFS business and was “managed”.

The GA is, for the moment, not interested in the role of peace keeper for the former SL or anywhere else. The major members – Haven and Manticore- want peace within their boarders, on the trade routes their shipping is going to use, and convincing others to not grow to the point where they will become a threat to the GA members (and treaty partners such as IAM, etc.)

A Frigate class (lighter than a DD of any modern type (SLN through Manticore) is going to be useless against anything more than much more that older light warships (in the DD range) or normal pirates even if you have several of them.

Brigade XO wrote:In the turmoil of the SL breakup and then the post-breakup, there are three or four variations on what a system will need to keep itself independent if it does not already have s significant SDF

You would be facing:
) Normal pirates- usually single ships with converted merchant ships or some ancient warship.
) Former SLN warships on their own or in pairs/small groups having turned pirate or warlord and are raiding to support themselves or possibly to take over a system and set up as the rulers of it.
) Neighboring systems or aggressive systems from longer distances which are taking over systems for their position (such as with wormholes), populations, products/materials that make them valuable.
) Actual empires or multi-system Star Nations that have significant military force and are able to act as did the PRH and the IEA.

And then there is the hidden one- the members of the RF which are going to be offering alliances or “protection” through partnerships which will eventually result in the RF and impose the Detweiler Plan with stealth and shadow government control.

One is some variety of LAC variant that can actually engage raiding starships. That would mean Haven or RMN type LACs in some number and given the present situation of Manticore’s need to rebuild, the primary default would be Haven.
This would be useful against normal garden variety pirates raiding your system with converted merchant ships. It might even work against pirates that were intercepting ships outside the hyper-limit if you can station and patrol the LACs in the area relative to the star where most of you incoming and outgoing shipping would be using it on regular routing. Enough Haven Quadrant modern LACs can deal with small warships, you just have to have them where the problem is and have trained & experienced crews that can do the job.

Against rogue or former SLN warships or systems with hyper-capable warships, you are going to need something heavier than just LACs and that would be at least some SLN equivalent warships that can deal with other warships.

I think Havenite LAC's against SLN-standard warships would probably fare pretty well in combat. They'd likely have a harder time just managing to catch them in the right place, when hypercapability would let the bandit mess around the outer system without being too readily caught by a STL unit. Still though, you're not going to be seizing the inner system that way - the best you can do that way is hope to put the LAC's out of place enough trying to get you to let you nip around them and beat them to orbit. But for raids and piracy, the issue is going to be much more catching the bandits than beating them.

Assuming, say, reasonable but not immense amounts of cash and likely personnel, your small SDF may want to go with a combination of LAC's, system defense missile pods, and some hypercapable unit to keep the area right outside your hyperlimit yours, and to be able to threaten power projection on some scale into other systems. But given costs and capabilities, that smallest hypercapable unit is still likely to be a traditional destroyer than a traditional frigate - the frigates have simply been at a bad place on the resources to utility curve for decades for purposes of fighting things that are built to shoot back.

All of this is going to get really ugly really fast. Single pirates bad but potentially stoppable. Pirate/warlord squadrons or “SDF” groups from other systems are going to smash through almost anything less powerful and actually capture other systems or use the former PROH tactic of intimidating said systems and imposing control on them.

Remember that there will no longer be SLN to enforce peace (well, keep them from actual military combat as opposed to low level business and economic warfare) between systems. Not that the actions of OFS and friends were actually protecting anyone except their own avarice and being the enforcers for local dictators and Transtellars who would gut OFS in on a piece of the action or just continuing payments for “services”. Piracy, other than their own, and interstellar warfare between systems was bad for OFS business and was “managed”.

There's at least space for hoping that SLN ships and personnel will in some cases become the nuclei of smaller national fleets, and be at least as busy fighting warlords and pirates as being them. That's been the plan for the Maya Sector under Barregos, for instance, and while other OFS sorts are neither as prepared nor as decent as he is, some of them, or someone taking their place, may in some cases be no worse than, say, Gustav Anderman: creating a little pocket empire where the people inside it can live in safety.

The GA is, for the moment, not interested in the role of peace keeper for the former SL or anywhere else. The major members – Haven and Manticore- want peace within their boarders, on the trade routes their shipping is going to use, and convincing others to not grow to the point where they will become a threat to the GA members (and treaty partners such as IAM, etc.)

They're not in a position to maintain peace inside the Solarian League yet; the SLN is still around and the member worlds are still parts of the League. But if you don't want to wait for trouble to come over your borders, and if you want to be able to maintain trade peacefully in the 80% of the human civilization that has been under the League, you're going to end up taking as much of a peacekeeping role as you can. The entire Solarian League is about to be old Silesia. The RMN and IAN assumed a large portion of the peacekeeping role there just because chaos is bad for business and the Silesians couldn't do it themselves. The same will apply here on a far larger scale, and the GA is committed to keeping the former League from coming back as a single, aggressive state. Letting warlords be til one of them came out on top would be exactly the wrong move and they know it.

The trouble is what happens in between now and when you can start supporting smaller nation-building - particularly with the Alignment having their own agenda and some means to pursue it.

A Frigate class (lighter than a DD of any modern type (SLN through Manticore) is going to be useless against anything more than much more that older light warships (in the DD range) or normal pirates even if you have several of them.

Yep.

You know though... If the spider drive is cracked and detection of it doesn't become too easy even then, there may be more room for a small, unarmed or trivially armed spider-drive scout unit. How it fights would not be an issue if it's never intended to fight and can generally expect to be able to avoid fighting. I doubt an SDF would have a use for such a thing, but a wide-ranging navy may well have a use for some of them as specialized system scouting units. That'd also assume that recon drones become more detectable, so it's based on a string of conditions I wouldn't be optimistic about. Still, that could possibly happen.

JeffEngel wrote:You know though... If the spider drive is cracked and detection of it doesn't become too easy even then, there may be more room for a small, unarmed or trivially armed spider-drive scout unit. How it fights would not be an issue if it's never intended to fight and can generally expect to be able to avoid fighting. I doubt an SDF would have a use for such a thing, but a wide-ranging navy may well have a use for some of them as specialized system scouting units. That'd also assume that recon drones become more detectable, so it's based on a string of conditions I wouldn't be optimistic about. Still, that could possibly happen.

What you describe already exists, as the Ghost-class Spider Frigate.

No offensive weapons, limited missile defense, highly capable sensors and very stealthy.

munroburton wrote:

JeffEngel wrote:You know though... If the spider drive is cracked and detection of it doesn't become too easy even then, there may be more room for a small, unarmed or trivially armed spider-drive scout unit. How it fights would not be an issue if it's never intended to fight and can generally expect to be able to avoid fighting. I doubt an SDF would have a use for such a thing, but a wide-ranging navy may well have a use for some of them as specialized system scouting units. That'd also assume that recon drones become more detectable, so it's based on a string of conditions I wouldn't be optimistic about. Still, that could possibly happen.

What you describe already exists, as the Ghost-class Spider Frigate.

No offensive weapons, limited missile defense, highly capable sensors and very stealthy.

Indeed. And it did well for the MAN. Even if someone isn't planning another Oyster Bay, something like that would still be handy for covert system surveillance for any other sort of operation. The speculation is more along the lines of what it'd take for something like it to have a part in more conventional navies for broader purposes than OB.

That said - if someone were building a navy with the combined toolkits of the Alignment and Manticore, it's entirely possible that they'd replace the Ghost FF with a larger platform supporting spider-drive recon drones, each itself stealthier than a Ghost and the ship very little less so for its size.

JeffEngel wrote:

JeffEngel wrote:You know though... If the spider drive is cracked and detection of it doesn't become too easy even then, there may be more room for a small, unarmed or trivially armed spider-drive scout unit. How it fights would not be an issue if it's never intended to fight and can generally expect to be able to avoid fighting. I doubt an SDF would have a use for such a thing, but a wide-ranging navy may well have a use for some of them as specialized system scouting units. That'd also assume that recon drones become more detectable, so it's based on a string of conditions I wouldn't be optimistic about. Still, that could possibly happen.

munroburton wrote:
What you describe already exists, as the Ghost-class Spider Frigate.

No offensive weapons, limited missile defense, highly capable sensors and very stealthy.

Indeed. And it did well for the MAN. Even if someone isn't planning another Oyster Bay, something like that would still be handy for covert system surveillance for any other sort of operation. The speculation is more along the lines of what it'd take for something like it to have a part in more conventional navies for broader purposes than OB.

That said - if someone were building a navy with the combined toolkits of the Alignment and Manticore, it's entirely possible that they'd replace the Ghost FF with a larger platform supporting spider-drive recon drones, each itself stealthier than a Ghost and the ship very little less so for its size.

Of course that depends on the spider drive being less detectable once you know how to detect it. For all we know at this time, it could be giving off a form of radiation for which there is currently no detector, but which is a blinding flare once you do have a detector for it, rather like attempting to detect microwaves with a photo electric cell.

Building a frigate with a spider drive does not make sense, the currently known (to the reader) disadvantage of the spider drive is its low speed. If somehow it is detected and tracked it would have no chance of getting away from its pursuers. The same applies to any spider drive equipped vessel, if detected and tracked it just can't shake off its pursuers.

George J. Smith wrote:Building a frigate with a spider drive does not make sense, the currently known (to the reader) disadvantage of the spider drive is its low speed. If somehow it is detected and tracked it would have no chance of getting away from its pursuers. The same applies to any spider drive equipped vessel, if detected and tracked it just can't shake off its pursuers.

Not true outside the hyper limit.

kzt wrote:Not true outside the hyper limit.

Only if the pursuer can't follow into hyper.

George J. Smith wrote:Building a frigate with a spider drive does not make sense, the currently known (to the reader) disadvantage of the spider drive is its low speed. If somehow it is detected and tracked it would have no chance of getting away from its pursuers. The same applies to any spider drive equipped vessel, if detected and tracked it just can't shake off its pursuers.

The idea there is definitely not something to do any fighting. (So yeah, it's definitely not the same sort of frigate idea floating around otherwise.) It's to have a stealthy platform for observation only. Being smaller is one way of helping yourself to a bit more stealthiness, and if you're not aiming at fighting anyway, you're a lot more able to afford it.

So the concept does rely on the expectation that you simply will not be detected and tracked, not unless you're perfectly content to give the enemy a sniff you're sure they won't be able to turn into an interception. Me, I don't think that's an expectation a navy ought to be confident of moving forward, but it's at least plausible enough to be the basis of some serious consideration.