Brigade XO wrote:Mostly we just have to wait until we get shown what the 1st, 2nd and 3rd rounds of ship out of the NEW Manticorian and Grayson yards are going to be. Will they include any of the existing generations of the ship designs that were in-hand at the time of Oyster Bay or not?
I don't think that Manticore would really want to devote all of any new capacity- as it comes on-line with the subsystem and general manufacturing capabilty to support it- to truly new designs. One or two for lead-in-class but not the bulk of the new yard slips.
For the existing designes I would includet anything of previously built designs includingthings that were to be added as modifcations/variations from lessons learned. So they could be Wolfhounds etc including Rollands.
Ships like the Rolland have been given to us as "transitional" designes. They are bridging the fleet designes to the newest implemneted weapons systems.
I figure they will be designs based on what has worked well for those transitional designs.
DDM's with the -G terror-laserhead are definitely good, welcome, and necessary. They're the gold standard of the developing subwaller weapon system. Two drives mean you can have a ballistic component in between as needed for stupendous range. For flexibility and that simple range, the second drive is a much bigger step up from one than the third is from two. No GA hypercapable combatant is likely to be laid down anymore without being built to fire DDM's, and they will be built under the assumption that, before the class reaches the end of its service life, it will have to confront a comparable opponent.
The Roland's hammerhead-based firepower and offbore fire commitment has worked well enough defensively and offensively for a unit its size, but I do think the ammunition limits will make it something they will hesitate to keep for the cruising duty it is likely to keep drawing. That's one big reason I suspect the future DD or CL is going to look more like a Saganami-C than anything else: it's got to be large enough for healthy magazines feeding DDM launching tubes. Even if they adopt some other magazine feed scheme and fire them out the hammerheads - something I think the Roland establishes really is an option in itself now - it's likely to put a lot of tonnage on a Roland model and balloon it up anyway.
I suspect that the "Big Roland" or "Saganami-D" is going to be pretty beefy, but it's going to merit being called a light cruiser (or 'frigate', if
that class name were freed from the tonnage association like the others have been) and not a CA or BC because it really will be designed for long-range cruising, anti-piracy, police duty, system scouting, etc., as the minimum size fully effective warship of its generation. Hopefully they will be able to economize on the crew/capability ratio so that the crew required isn't much larger than a Roland's. I'm optimistic about that, though I hope they can either include a small Marine complement or better prepare the ship to carry out the missions that would benefit from one.
Manticore (and we presume Grayson) are still involved a major war. Haven is with them and it is a war against AT LEAST against the present SL and, of course, the Alignment. They need to keep building designes based on warfighting needs with the current generations of weapons systems. Would it make sense -if it could be done- to upgrade some existing designes to produce new variations with the weapons systems? Like DD' and CL's with Mk 16's and the systems that have to be there to support them? Sure. IF it can be done and if the ships so changed in design and equipment can fulfill the roles required of them.
What EXACTLY does the GA need in the way of ships - in the next 5 to 15 years?
1) defend against the SLN and various SDFs with the hope and presumption that it can both deflect any SLN moves against the GA (and friends) plus maintain controling presence in GA space.
2) Hunt down the Alignment, detect, sucessfully engage & destroy its ships.
3) Keep the future fragments of the SL and other things (they don't know about the RF as an Alignment plan but the GA could reasonably anticipate "fragments of the SL" forming as sucessor states- especialy multi-system ones- to be able to cause significant problems for neighbors and the GA once SLN is elimiated as a pacifying and intimidating force which has been mitigating against predatory systems by brute force.
2 there is mighty demanding, when they have no gravitic signatures to spot and will run into serious difficulty seeing those hulls otherwise. Being able to put out sheer numbers of the ships may help, but their best bet in the near-term for managing that eventually may be making sure that the ships have space for refitting them with different/better sensors when they can be designed for that job, and/or have boat bays large enough to accommodate next generation recon drones with those sensors.
But lots of recon drones would be something for the design anyway. For one, in a way, in a war, these units are there to put recon drones out there on a self-defending hyper-capable platform. For another, the stupendous range of DDM's mean that FTL recon drone observation down-range is tactically critical, so they'd better have plenty.
Fleet screen duties/missions have shifted to CLACs with LACs for the time being. From a practical standpoint, the GA is going to need MORE ships with the ability to "cruse" and "scout". Whatever is developed to meet those needs is going to be likely smaller than what is developing as the current BC. More ships-smaller than BCs- to find out what is happening, provide commerce protection, etc. There WILL be renewed commerce in the area formerly controlled under the SL by the SLN, it depends on what Manticore, Haven, and friends how much of those roles they need to pick up to remain safe.
One thing that makes me feel all right about "light cruisers" nearly the size of current heavy cruisers, themselves nearly the size of old battlecruisers, is that there still is definitely a niche for at least two classes below-the-wall. The new CL/DD/whatever is there to be the minimal effective hypercapable warship; the BC is there to be the thing that stomps whatever below-the-wall and evades anything of it.
Whether there remains space for four such classes - DD, CL, CA, BC - I doubt. But then, the class roles tended to blend into one another anyway. If you get fewer with a starker contrast, fine.
