The RMN's new construction fleet and what it means.

Hi all,

I was curious a couple weeks ago as to just how large the RMN's new construction was up to by the time of OB.

We have 2 interesting benchmarks; the old Fleet Strength Chart [FSC] of June 1920 just over 7 month's from the beginning Operation Thunderbolt, and the HoS "Jayne's" update of April 17, 1921 which split the remaining 20 month's before OB surprisingly evenly; the first ten month's from the June 1920 FSC, then the last perhaps most intriguing last ten month's.

I assume the 1920 FSC is familiar to most fans here, since it's been around since 2005 and is easily accessible at Joe Buckley's fifth imperium, and mention the HoS increases.

First, despite the several WroH and AAC references [NTM RFC posts] to 12 Invictuses in service and only 35 left under construction when Thunderbolt struck, especially at Grendlesbane, HoS claims 53 have been built despite the textev for only 47 until those laid down after the High Ridge government fell were completed in the month's after First Manticore [if built in only 90 weeks construction by accelerating and 'telescoping' all possible 'shortcuts', October 24th might have been roughly when the first commissioned if it was laid down on January 1st, 1920], so where the other 6 came from at least 27 weeks early is another one of those unexplained Bu9 mysteries.

In terms of size the next construction surprise were the 70+ more CLAC's, to the 42 in service as of the June 1920 FSC less the 9 losses with 3rd Fleet in First Manticore, which even with their unarmored construction is still quite impressive [isn't there a RFC post somewhere that CLAC's and BCL's take ~75-80 weeks for construction?]; despite the new missile screening doctrine does anyone think 112 CLAC's was enough by April 1921, before the new missile screening doctrine, so those building slips might have been then used to build more SDP's, or were even more slips built for more CLAC's?

After the Hydra CLAC's, there are the 11+ new Nike BCL's, and 79+ more Agamemnon BCP's for 90 new BC's in ten month's, which is also very impressive before considering the 165 million tons they mass.

Again, do people feel 80 odd BCP's [after Solon] is enough so all those yards would have been switched to Nike's, or are their potential capabilities as auxiliary Apollo pod carriers among other things, enough to keep them in production, and if so for how many more?

Granted what they could do to the SLN beggars description, since the SLN isn't a 'peer competitor', but how much of a consideration was that really in April 1921, especially when it appeared that Terekhov had removed that threat, NTM when Solon was the last action the Agamemnon's had seen?

The next category is heavy cruisers of course, and 146+ more Sag-C's at 70.5 MT, is awesome; how many think many more Sag-C's were completed before OB?

I'm betting the number built before OB easily exceeds the 175 of the Prince Consort Class, making it the largest heavy cruiser class in RMN history.

Avalon light cruisers are next and the 196+ mentioned poses a problem because they were first commissioned in 1919, possibly several month's before Thunderbolt.

So how many were built and commissioned before the June FSC?

I'm willing to consider 16-26, leaving 170-180 as new, for another 25+ MT, but how many of those yards were switched to Rolands, because of their greater missile capabilities?

Given the RMN had some 277 CL's as of the June FSC, isn't ~470 light cruisers [after losses], ie 60% more than the 295 the RMN had at the beginning of the First Haven war, enough?

It's possible due to their small size that the same slip could have built 2 in the 10 month interval, to give some idea of the number of Avalon class dedicated building slips.

Then we have the 48 Kamerling's at 276,250 tons for another 13 MT, which might be the basis for the near mythical light cruiser design although it appears RFC may favor something nearer the 336 KT mid point between the Sag-C and Roland.

Since no more are scheduled, were these yards used for Rolands or Sag-C's?

Then we have the 46+ Rolands, RFC told us years ago that the old 85,000 ton Chanson DD's [back when that was textev] took 15 weeks to build compared to a SD 100 times their mass taking 100 weeks, but that was the first war, so I suspect construction times have been significantly reduced or 'telescoped' and accelerated by integrating major sub assemblies and souped up nano's etc, such that a Roland might be built in as little as 20-21 weeks despite being more than twice the mass.

In case you've been adding all the new ships up, combining the known 35 Invictuses makes it 631 new ships, depending on how many Avalon's you figure were built before the June 1920 FSC, or over a billion tons in ten month's!

No wonder the star empire wasn't about to give up despite how dark it may have looked to us poor readers in WroH and the early part of AAC!

It's been over 9 years since I joined the bar, and I remember one of the first strong RFC critiques if not rebuke was to one of my posts for suggesting rather high RMN building rates for the lesser classes, since I figured each class had some 28 of the smaller and older building slips between Vulcan and Hephaestus, which was that many given the sizes of the stations.

Given the building curve RFC had implied above, I suggested that if DD's took 15 T-weeks, then CL's probably took 20 T-weeks given their then relatively small size, while CA's needed 25, and BC's 50.

RFC didn't mention any errors for those assumptions, but if they were in any way close, perhaps current building rates up to OB might have been 20-21 weeks for DD's, 25 for CL's and 30 for CA's.

Given the unarmored nature of CLAC's, even if they're framed in battle steel, I wonder if they might be built closer to 60 T-weeks, while the Nike takes 75.

I believe it was in SFtS, that we first had textev that the MA would have some 365 SDP's by the third week of February 1922, most of them Apollo capable, which ignored most of the ~205 older alliance SDP's that survived First Manticore that can't accept Keyhole's let alone KH-2's.

Somehow according to HoS, Benjamin managed to up Grayson SDP production so instead of the 2-3 per month we knew of in WroH and AAC, that Grayson really couldn't afford, a total of 50 more were completed according to Jayne's in those ten month's, almost 439 million tons of SDP's, a truly incredible triumph; and possibly why the MA survived.

Compared to that engineering miracle the GSN's other new ship construction is relatively paltry, 12 CLAC's, 17 type Sag-C's, 37 Avalon types, and 17 Roland types or less than 92 more million tons spread across 83 new warships, but a combined 740+ new starships of over 1.5+ billion tons in ten month's is nothing to be ashamed of.

The FSC details only 127 modern types then in the RMN, compared to 179 in the GSN for 306 total.

I'll have to finish this later, but does anyone want to suggest how much more the SEM was still expanding its production base over the next ten month's?

Besides the 180-200 SDP's completed as the RMN's share of the expected N/C, if new shipyard construction ceased, how would you have allocated the the last ten month's production?

For example, would you have upped Nike production over CLAC's?

Please feel free to add your wisdom.

L

Handwavium plot power.

If the plot requires another 150 SAG-Cs built before OB, then 150 + additional losses inflicted in OB will be built. 1920 FSC will vanish in so much smoke along with the build times attributed for SDP/CLAC/BCL/BCP in the pearls to achieve the power of plot handwavium.

The real Q becomes, how many ships SHOULD have actually been built in the FAR LONGER 1st Havenite War?

Hi Lyonheart,

You did good work with a tough job... What I have been wondering is how big the group of new construction SDPs that escaped OB and was out working up at Trevor's Star when OB moved in?.. Also to clarify, is that 365 figure you mentioned post OB?

Don

lyonheart wrote:In terms of size the next construction surprise were the 70+ more CLAC's, to the 42 in service as of the June 1920 FSC less the 9 losses with 3rd Fleet in First Manticore, which even with their unarmored construction is still quite impressive [isn't there a RFC post somewhere that CLAC's and BCL's take ~75-80 weeks for construction?]; despite the new missile screening doctrine does anyone think 112 CLAC's was enough by April 1921, before the new missile screening doctrine, so those building slips might have been then used to build more SDP's, or were even more slips built for more CLAC's?

At that point, it's still building on the basis of what the Janacek Admiralty set up. In particular, the JA was interested in system defenses, anti-piracy, commerce protection, and economy - not power projection. System defenses meant a whole lot of LAC's, and probably a lot of LAC-specific production facilities. So if you want to use what you have and move to a more aggressive fleet in a hurry, your capital ship construction may reasonably be skewed a bit toward CLAC's. Also, the JA supposed that the enemy had no effective answer to RMN LAC's yet, in which case there's no powerful reason to be set up to build more SD(P)'s at all, giving even more reason for the production systems inherited from the JA to lean that way.

Moving to the Alexander-Harrington Admiralty, while a solid wall of battle was very much needed, the GSN could help out with that aspect better than with the LAC/CLAC element anyway. They'd been building wallers particularly and sparing older pre-pod ones from the breakers. There weren't older CLAC's to spare that way at all.

After Thunderbolt, the RHN had made it very clear that the RMN would now have to deal with enemy LAC's, and their own LAC's and CLAC's for them would have been the preferred response - particularly with the GSN already showing off an anti-LAC LAC design.

Finally, it's not too speculative to suppose that BuWeaps and at least one Admiral Alexander-Harrington were already thinking at that point that LAC's would be important in a fleet missile defense role, so that more CLAC's really would be an important component of the wall of battle as the carriers of remote defensive platforms.

After the Hydra CLAC's, there are the 11+ new Nike BCL's, and 79+ more Agamemnon BCP's for 90 new BC's in ten month's, which is also very impressive before considering the 165 million tons they mass.

Again, do people feel 80 odd BCP's [after Solon] is enough so all those yards would have been switched to Nike's, or are their potential capabilities as auxiliary Apollo pod carriers among other things, enough to keep them in production, and if so for how many more?

I think there it was (1) a matter of competing BC visions, between sheer firepower on the one hand versus trying to preserve a traditional BC role somehow on the other, and (2) "OMG need pods need pods NEED PODS GIMME PODS!!!" BC(P)'s are the fastest way to satisfy (2), even if they are not satisfying that way. I think, with a little breathing room, the need since is less urgent, that their vulnerability in combat is just more than the RMN can accept, and that the BC(P) has since lost (1) in RMN service.

I wonder if the third option there - just downplay the battlecruiser as a class and expect to use far fewer of them than before - really has a chance in the RMN. The battlecruiser is too romantic.

Granted what they could do to the SLN beggars description, since the SLN isn't a 'peer competitor', but how much of a consideration was that really in April 1921, especially when it appeared that Terekhov had removed that threat, NTM when Solon was the last action the Agamemnon's had seen?

The next category is heavy cruisers of course, and 146+ more Sag-C's at 70.5 MT, is awesome; how many think many more Sag-C's were completed before OB?

I'm betting the number built before OB easily exceeds the 175 of the Prince Consort Class, making it the largest heavy cruiser class in RMN history.

Thank goodness - it's likelier to be useful far longer, far better, for more benefit per unit cost, than the Avalon, Wolfhound, Roland, Agamemnon, or Nike classes.

Avalon light cruisers are next and the 196+ mentioned poses a problem because they were first commissioned in 1919, possibly several month's before Thunderbolt.

So how many were built and commissioned before the June FSC?

I'm willing to consider 16-26, leaving 170-180 as new, for another 25+ MT, but how many of those yards were switched to Rolands, because of their greater missile capabilities?

Beats me. They're built for different jobs. The Avalon doesn't go far out in any experimental direction, but it does Silesian patrol and control nicely and extended range single drive missiles will still suffice against anything without multiple drive ones (and maybe Cataphracts even then). So they're fine for now, they're just going to expire sooner than anything suited to DDM's.

Given the RMN had some 277 CL's as of the June FSC, isn't ~470 light cruisers [after losses], ie 60% more than the 295 the RMN had at the beginning of the First Haven war, enough?

Probably not, no. Then, they did not have half of Silesia or Talbott, or a commitment to fight and patrol throughout the entire sphere of the Solarian League coming down history's pipeline now. It's not their CL's vs. Haven's - it's their CL's versus range of operations.

It's possible due to their small size that the same slip could have built 2 in the 10 month interval, to give some idea of the number of Avalon class dedicated building slips.

Then we have the 48 Kamerling's at 276,250 tons for another 13 MT, which might be the basis for the near mythical light cruiser design although it appears RFC may favor something nearer the 336 KT mid point between the Sag-C and Roland.

The Kamerling isn't that notional ship in any sense but approximate tonnage. It's a specialist transport first and a warship somewhere way behind. It's more a replacement for the Broadsword, with a bit more motivation behind it based on the reduced crew and Marine complements of all the current generation warships proper.

Somehow according to HoS, Benjamin managed to up Grayson SDP production so instead of the 2-3 per month we knew of in WroH and AAC, that Grayson really couldn't afford, a total of 50 more were completed according to Jayne's in those ten month's, almost 439 million tons of SDP's, a truly incredible triumph; and possibly why the MA survived.

For what it is worth, the cost issue for Grayson is likely worst in terms of upkeep (crew included) than construction. And for that, if they turn them over to some ally (or, you know, sell them!), those costs are no longer on them.

Compared to that engineering miracle the GSN's other new ship construction is relatively paltry, 12 CLAC's, 17 type Sag-C's, 37 Avalon types, and 17 Roland types or less than 92 more million tons spread across 83 new warships, but a combined 740+ new starships of over 1.5+ billion tons in ten month's is nothing to be ashamed of.

Remember, the GSN's got a different mission than the RMN. No Silesia, no Talbott, not even a few systems next door by way of the Junction. It's a system defense force on steroids. The units below the wall are essentially to support it and to handle local anti-piracy etc. duties. It's got growing regional influence and responsibility, but that's more or less optional, spatially limited vastly more than the SEM's sprawling extent, and no one in it is counting on them nearly so much as Manticoran Silesian or Talbott is counting on the RMN. All the GSN really needs to do is be a painful lump that makes taking Yeltsin's Star too darn unpleasant to carry off. You use a wall of battle for that.

The FSC details only 127 modern types then in the RMN, compared to 179 in the GSN for 306 total.

I'll have to finish this later, but does anyone want to suggest how much more the SEM was still expanding its production base over the next ten month's?

Besides the 180-200 SDP's completed as the RMN's share of the expected N/C, if new shipyard construction ceased, how would you have allocated the the last ten month's production?

For example, would you have upped Nike production over CLAC's?

I'd've cut BC(P) and BC(L) production back in favor of more Saganami-C's and SD(P)'s, to the extent that that trade-off would be possible based on building slips. But that's hindsight contributing, I'm sure.

The need for PODS PODS PODS! that motivated the BC(P)'s hasn't worked out with them. They don't fit into classic BC use; they don't fit into the wall of battle (given missile types, ammo limits, vulnerability); and if there's a third doctrine available for their use, nobody's developed it. (I do not want to rule out the possibility.)

BC(L)'s can certainly do better for some things than mere heavy cruisers, and still represent less commitment of human and material resources than a waller. I'm just skeptical that the costs are repaid in genuine utility beyond sheer coolness, which is not in fact a military benefit.

lyonheart wrote:Hi all,

Compared to that engineering miracle the GSN's other new ship construction is relatively paltry, 12 CLAC's, 17 type Sag-C's, 37 Avalon types, and 17 Roland types or less than 92 more million tons spread across 83 new warships, but a combined 740+ new starships of over 1.5+ billion tons in ten month's is nothing to be ashamed of.

L

The annual steel production today, worldwide is 1.5Billion tons and China makes the majority of it.

Building that much tonnage into ships is not exactly an "amazing" feat for 2000 years from now with essentially "free" asteroids, and "free" power in the form of fusion power. With these "free" resources, they should easily be producing 10X-100X as much as we do today in equivalent ship building materials.

Face it, economics and engineering are not RFC's strong points. Opera plot are his amazing strong points with enough realistic "science" to whet our appetite. We read for his great side plots. His great foreshadowing. His lack of wordiness. His fairly believable dialogue from a political perspective.

As you rightly point out, due to build times, HoS ship numbers should not be possible according to his dropped "pearls" and AAC times for slapping together Grayson style building slips. RFC needed more ships for his wormhole "negotiations" with the league in upcoming novels. Snap! POOF! They exist.

PS. Difference between 1920 FSC and HoS FSC minus destroyed should indicate about another thousand ships should be built after HoS and before OB hits. After all production is geometric progression and not linear.

Hi all,

Thanks to all who have responded so far, I hope to return the courtesy in sequence, if that's all right.

In the words of Mr. Spock, it's "fascinating" to see such different reactions to the same post by various posters, and see a little of why they focused on what they chose to respond to.

Relax, it's a given that plot requirements drive the supporting numbers far more than the other way around is I think understood by most if not all fans here, though the numbers can and do affect the story in very significant ways as RFC has emphatically demonstrated on many occasions, and one of many reasons why his work is so popular among his fans.

If we had the numbers for the next ten month's we'd probably see at least another 200 Sag-C's, before getting into how many more dispersed or 'soft' yards were still being constructed, whether or not they had any ships that were completed before OB.

Regarding first war build rates, I pointed out years ago at the bar that commissioning a SD every couple weeks [twice the rate leading up to the war] or so for ten years adds up before the SDP led production surge added another 50-60+ even faster meant the RMN should have had well over 600 wallers of all types before Janacek whittled them down.

For example, the stated 74 Star Knight heavy cruisers are far too few, given their evident loss rate, NTM the notion of no new CA's being built for almost ten years to replace war losses let alone the sheer obsolescence of all the rest [up to 259 or almost 78%] until the Edward Saganami commissioned @ 1913 PD boggles the mind when none of the rest of the RMN's CA's were designed with laserheads in mind, which doesn't fit the early textev, but that's another thread.

My suggested production figures at the bar were an attempt to understand or explain where all those several million extra RMN sailors and marines in HAE were serving since the stated ship figures didn't, but the MWW didn't want to go there for some reason.

One of the fascinating things about the billion tons of new warships is that the total crewmen required is only around 370,000 which could easily be met by ~61 SD crews, barely a quarter of the 230 that survived First Manticore, so where are all those marines no longer aboard so many warships?

L

Relax wrote:Handwavium plot power.

If the plot requires another 150 SAG-Cs built before OB, then 150 + additional losses inflicted in OB will be built. 1920 FSC will vanish in so much smoke along with the build times attributed for SDP/CLAC/BCL/BCP in the pearls to achieve the power of plot handwavium.

The real Q becomes, how many ships SHOULD have actually been built in the FAR LONGER 1st Havenite War?

lyonheart wrote:For example, the stated 74 Star Knight heavy cruisers are far too few, given their evident loss rate, NTM the notion of no new CA's being built for almost ten years to replace war losses let alone the sheer obsolescence of all the rest [up to 259 or almost 78%] until the Edward Saganami commissioned @ 1913 PD boggles the mind when none of the rest of the RMN's CA's were designed with laserheads in mind, which doesn't fit the early textev, but that's another thread.

During the First Havenite War, need for cruisers didn't expand the way that keeping up and expanding the wall did. Oh, commerce protection was a bit more important, there was more scouting to do, but they didn't have much more territory to cover. Once Trevor's Star was taken, the logistics runs to the front required no protection at all, and the IAN helped with Silesian patrolling.

And in the run up to the war, Conservatives could be counted upon to support cruiser construction and to grumble about wallers, so I'd strongly suspect the force mix initially was heavier on the cruisers and lighter on the wall than the admiralty would have preferred.

Additionally, the heavy cruisers seemed to get more refitting than wallers. They were in a sweet spot, with more space than the DD's and CL's to squeeze more stuff in, but without the absolute demand for sheer combat capability and the design around the toughest armor possible for the DN's and SD's. So the effective service life of those CA's was a lot longer. And the core of a cruiser's design varied less with the advance of technology than the wallers did. Cruisers just need endurance, reasonable toughness, and reasonable weaponry. Wallers need to be crowding the edge of the big badass envelope, a moving target.

Certainly by the time the Edward Saganami's (A, B, and C) started coming out (1908 for the A, by the way, after a proposal from 1903), the RMN CA force was longer in the tooth and smaller in the numbers than they would have liked. But given their needs and resources, I can't regard it as scandalous.

JeffEngel wrote:

lyonheart wrote:Avalon light cruisers are next and the 196+ mentioned poses a problem because they were first commissioned in 1919, possibly several month's before Thunderbolt.

So how many were built and commissioned before the June FSC?

I'm willing to consider 16-26, leaving 170-180 as new, for another 25+ MT, but how many of those yards were switched to Rolands, because of their greater missile capabilities?

Beats me. They're built for different jobs. The Avalon doesn't go far out in any experimental direction, but it does Silesian patrol and control nicely and extended range single drive missiles will still suffice against anything without multiple drive ones (and maybe Cataphracts even then). So they're fine for now, they're just going to expire sooner than anything suited to DDM's.

Given the RMN had some 277 CL's as of the June FSC, isn't ~470 light cruisers [after losses], ie 60% more than the 295 the RMN had at the beginning of the First Haven war, enough?

Probably not, no. Then, they did not have half of Silesia or Talbott, or a commitment to fight and patrol throughout the entire sphere of the Solarian League coming down history's pipeline now. It's not their CL's vs. Haven's - it's their CL's versus range of operations.

I have to disagree. The Annexation of Silesia removes most of the long term Silesian commerce protection mission from the Royal Manticoran Navy. The RMN needed long range, high endurance low cost cruisers for the traditional Silesian mission as they did not have local basing rights to support multiple flotillas of destroyers or frigates AND they had no long term in-system policing capacity.

In the sectors that Manticore directly annexed, by early the summer of 1920, the RMN had local security forces in the form of LAC wings and a small pod load plus an embedded sensor net. They also had one pre-built local fleet base at Sidemore and probably were building/modifying at least one sector base on the scale/intent of SVW Hancock Station to support the light flotillas.

Yes, in the pre-Monica timeline when the building plans were being formulated, Sarnow needed light combatants to chase down remnants and create the Manticoran security blanket, but over a three to five year horizon, Manticoran Silesia should be a happy, peaceful backwater as the two major regional powers (SEM and AE) have peacefully split the festering sore and are applying heavy local security forces to dry up the pirate/privateer supply and intelligence chain.

Now if the RMN was projecting its RMM to go even further into the wild, then more light cruisers could make sense, but honestly, the light cruiser role as a strategic scout is still present in strength, but the light cruiser roles as fleet screen and long range commerce protection cruiser are disappearing from traditional RMN usage.

fester wrote:

lyonheart wrote:Given the RMN had some 277 CL's as of the June FSC, isn't ~470 light cruisers [after losses], ie 60% more than the 295 the RMN had at the beginning of the First Haven war, enough?

JeffEngel wrote:Probably not, no. Then, they did not have half of Silesia or Talbott, or a commitment to fight and patrol throughout the entire sphere of the Solarian League coming down history's pipeline now. It's not their CL's vs. Haven's - it's their CL's versus range of operations.

I have to disagree. The Annexation of Silesia removes most of the long term Silesian commerce protection mission from the Royal Manticoran Navy. The RMN needed long range, high endurance low cost cruisers for the traditional Silesian mission as they did not have local basing rights to support multiple flotillas of destroyers or frigates AND they had no long term in-system policing capacity.

In the sectors that Manticore directly annexed, by early the summer of 1920, the RMN had local security forces in the form of LAC wings and a small pod load plus an embedded sensor net. They also had one pre-built local fleet base at Sidemore and probably were building/modifying at least one sector base on the scale/intent of SVW Hancock Station to support the light flotillas.

Yes, in the pre-Monica timeline when the building plans were being formulated, Sarnow needed light combatants to chase down remnants and create the Manticoran security blanket, but over a three to five year horizon, Manticoran Silesia should be a happy, peaceful backwater as the two major regional powers (SEM and AE) have peacefully split the festering sore and are applying heavy local security forces to dry up the pirate/privateer supply and intelligence chain.

Now if the RMN was projecting its RMM to go even further into the wild, then more light cruisers could make sense, but honestly, the light cruiser role as a strategic scout is still present in strength, but the light cruiser roles as fleet screen and long range commerce protection cruiser are disappearing from traditional RMN usage.

Certainly there's a big shift going on for local security, from stationed or visiting destroyers and cruisers to LAC groups and system defense pods. And the cruiser lump was more apt for the period without those defenses and cleaning up Silesia, as opposed to keeping the new, civilized Silesia secure and with good defenses in each system. The cruiser demands per area there are dropping off both because systems are otherwise covered and the threats are reduced.

They're still going to have a lot of use elsewhere though. Decent defenses in each system are a lot more reasonable, and Silesia particularly is so dense that response forces can get where needed easily to supplement them. Talbott's another thing, and so much of Solarian space is going to take mobile response because permanent on-site protection will be politically sticky and prohibitively expensive for some time. In effect, the Solarian sphere is and will be that wild for the RMM and anyone else, and an RMN light cruiser will be the 20th century PD's Texas Ranger out there. For that matter, as things settle - or as people want to get far from the shooting - colonization out through Matapan or Basilisk is going to demand those rangers too, albeit on a small scale.

So the LAC's are going to fill in a lot of DD's and CL's roles, particularly in Silesia, but the remaining ones elsewhere are getting more demanding.

fester wrote: I have to disagree. The Annexation of Silesia removes most of the long term Silesian commerce protection mission from the Royal Manticoran Navy. The RMN needed long range, high endurance low cost cruisers for the traditional Silesian mission as they did not have local basing rights to support multiple flotillas of destroyers or frigates AND they had no long term in-system policing capacity.

In the sectors that Manticore directly annexed, by early the summer of 1920, the RMN had local security forces in the form of LAC wings and a small pod load plus an embedded sensor net. They also had one pre-built local fleet base at Sidemore and probably were building/modifying at least one sector base on the scale/intent of SVW Hancock Station to support the light flotillas.

Yes, in the pre-Monica timeline when the building plans were being formulated, Sarnow needed light combatants to chase down remnants and create the Manticoran security blanket, but over a three to five year horizon, Manticoran Silesia should be a happy, peaceful backwater as the two major regional powers (SEM and AE) have peacefully split the festering sore and are applying heavy local security forces to dry up the pirate/privateer supply and intelligence chain.

Now if the RMN was projecting its RMM to go even further into the wild, then more light cruisers could make sense, but honestly, the light cruiser role as a strategic scout is still present in strength, but the light cruiser roles as fleet screen and long range commerce protection cruiser are disappearing from traditional RMN usage.

Italics mine. Yep, just like Iraq or Afghanistan, or the Balkans (..always some damn-fool thing in the Balkans). Thing is, 3-5 years may be enough to deal with most of the pirate issues, but providing good (non-corrupt, more-or-less democratic) government? Well, maybe be 1922 PD, they'll have learned something from all the mistakes we've made in the past centuries.

Wouldn't bet a lot on it, however.

Now, regarding the OP, it seems (IMHO of course) to be much ado about little (I'm in Relax's corner here, albeit it is a prickly place to be... ). It all depends if you accept that the Official Order of Battle at the Buckleys' site and the Jaynes' information in HoS are contiguious.

To me, the numbers RFC offered on the spreadsheet were more for his own balance of forces projections and the HoS numbers are actual textev that has been vetted and discussed by Himself and his Bu9 folks, so I tend to give them greater (like 100%) credence. And work the building schedules based on those numbers and ignore the older numbers on the early spreadsheet.

YMMV. But that's the way I look at it.