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

Hi Don,

No, it was from Caparelli's report to Elisabeth and friends that they'd have that many by late February, almost all being Apollo, and largely confirmed by Albrecht when he thanked the MSN for at least getting all the missile production lines and the next generation SDP's.

Given that ~205 alliance non-Apollo's SDP's survived first Manticore, with many if not most that couldn't be converted, puts the number of new completed Apollo SDP
's at ~160, though some consider that to be a minimum.

L

n7axw wrote: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

Kammerling is basically a modern tech-base and design replacement for the Broadsword - which was essentially a Marine support cruiser - enlarged Marine complement and launch bay capability, and dedicated facilities to support and manage a Marine landing force and deployment in the face of opposition.
It's not the notional next-gen light cruiser.


The Janacek Admiralty cut R&D by a massive amount, and BuShips had to do end runs around to get any new ships out of design study stage, much less actually built.
The Saganami-B isn't that huge a deviation from the Saganami-A. The Sag-C, however, is a brand new design, that BuShips called the Sag-C, making it look like just an upgraded variant of the Sag-A/B, not the new ship it actually was, to get funding for it and get Sag-C's built.


The notional Sag-C/Roland generation light cruiser is probably 10-12 DDM tubes per broadside, heavy energy weapons (as per current Manticoran Alliance design standards), and so on, proportional to the size differences between the Roland and the Sag-C. Probably has a platoon or so of Marines.



If I were responsible for designing the "next generation" of ships, I'd probably say that the smallest ship I go with is roughly equivalent to the Sag-C/Roland gen light cruiser, heavy automation and all, and then add quarters and life support capacity for additional crew (probably an additional 50% of nominal) and up to a company of Marines, and probably some more small craft capacity as well. This additional crew and Marine capacity would not be employed when deploying in a warfighting fleet, but would mainly be used when the ships were being deployed on longer/anti-piracy independent cruises. When deployed as system defense pickets in places like the TQ, the extra crew and Marine capacity would be employed to support the training of local recruits, much like the system defense LACs will be.
This would let you have the reduced crew requirements to man more hulls when you need the hulls for warfighting (ie, 8th Fleet), and also to have the capacity to bring along the crew and Marines to handle prizes when doing commerce protection and anti-piracy or other independent deployment (ie, Silesia, the Talbot Quadrant, etc).

I don't believe it is true that they cut R&D. There was a high degree of arrogance that "those sollies can't possible match our tech", or something like that , but they continued all the R & D programs, which is why Apollo came out when it did.

Kytheros wrote:Kammerling is basically a modern tech-base and design replacement for the Broadsword - which was essentially a Marine support cruiser - enlarged Marine complement and launch bay capability, and dedicated facilities to support and manage a Marine landing force and deployment in the face of opposition.
It's not the notional next-gen light cruiser.


The Janacek Admiralty cut R&D by a massive amount, and BuShips had to do end runs around to get any new ships out of design study stage, much less actually built.
The Saganami-B isn't that huge a deviation from the Saganami-A. The Sag-C, however, is a brand new design, that BuShips called the Sag-C, making it look like just an upgraded variant of the Sag-A/B, not the new ship it actually was, to get funding for it and get Sag-C's built.


The notional Sag-C/Roland generation light cruiser is probably 10-12 DDM tubes per broadside, heavy energy weapons (as per current Manticoran Alliance design standards), and so on, proportional to the size differences between the Roland and the Sag-C. Probably has a platoon or so of Marines.

The problem with that is that we're told that the Sag-C has the minimum beam (74m) necessary to mount broadside tubes for Mk16s. That's about 50% wider than an Avalon (48m) or Roland (54m). [Oddly a Wolfhound is actually a bit wider (51m), if shallower and shorter, than an Avalon]

You're going to have to do something pretty unconventional to fit tubes that big/long into a next-gen CL hull which is likely to be no more than, say, 60m wide.



We've discussed options for that before though; the ones I recall offhand are:
a) Stick with Roland-style hammerhead missile clusters
b) angled tubes - mount the tubes so they angle aft enough to penetrate no more deeply than a ERM tube; so from above the tubes would look like a herringbone pattern).
c) interleaved or offset tubes - let the tubes stick back past the centerline of the ship, but mount them at different points long each broadside so they can extend past each other.
d) vertically offset tubes - put the port tubes one deck above the starboard tubes; so they extend over/under each other
e) asymmetric broadside - only mount tubes on one side

But all of those have drawbacks, and many of them seriously disrupt the other compartment, components, and passageways that live in the middle of a ship.

kzt wrote:I don't believe it is true that they cut R&D. There was a high degree of arrogance that "those sollies can't possible match our tech", or something like that , but they continued all the R & D programs, which is why Apollo came out when it did.

I'm not sure, the idea of sticking a grav pulse comm unit into something disposable like an Apollo control missile just screams Hemphill to me, and so far as we know she wasn't at the Admiralty between her stint at WDB with Honor and White Haven's arrival as First Lord.

Alternatively, Janacek could have continued the R side of things, theoretical work which would be relatively cheap, might spin off a useful civilian application and would let the High Ridge government point to their continued commitment to the Navy's improvement without having to spend much actual money on it, while cutting back on the D which requires you to spend money on real hardware. In that case the theory behind Apollo could have been worked up during Janacek's tenure, then pushed through a crash development program when Sonja arrived at BuWeaps - and if there's anyone to drive a new tech-based idea through a crash development process, it's Horrible Hemphill.

Or, and I have to say I like this idea, it could be that the idea for Apollo has been around in BuWeaps since the first development of the MDM and its long-range fire control problems, but then had to wait until the grav pulse comm developed to the point where they could build a unit small enough to put in a control missile with enough bandwidth to do the job.

Side question - do we have any idea how much power the grav pulse comm uses? Could Apollo have been implemented using capacitor-powered missiles, or does it require the micro-fusion reactors?

kzt wrote:I don't believe it is true that they cut R&D. There was a high degree of arrogance that "those sollies can't possible match our tech", or something like that , but they continued all the R & D programs, which is why Apollo came out when it did.

I can't find the textev right now, but I think it was more or less to the effect that while the Janacek Admiralty did keep funding R&D, they cut its funding, because that was money the High Ridge government could spend elsewhere, and the Manticoran tech advantage meant that R&D didn't need to be pushed so hard and thus didn't need as much money.

Though, given all the other Janacek Admiralty cutbacks, it's quite possible that R&D had a proportionate increase in the amount of the RMN budget it was getting, despite a decrease in absolute terms.

Again, R&D was continuing unabated. What High Ridge and Janacek did was pause construction which was under way and cancel construction for which funds had already been allocated. Those funds were then freed up for pork barrel projects. Remember that the Star Kingdom technically still remained at war - with all the emergency appropriations, tariffs, and taxes that were implemented - even while Janacek was busy reducing the size of the fleet. That's a vast amount of money even without Janacek touching the R&D programs which he specifically did not touch.

Jonathan_S wrote:

Kytheros wrote:Kammerling is basically a modern tech-base and design replacement for the Broadsword - which was essentially a Marine support cruiser - enlarged Marine complement and launch bay capability, and dedicated facilities to support and manage a Marine landing force and deployment in the face of opposition.
It's not the notional next-gen light cruiser.


The Janacek Admiralty cut R&D by a massive amount, and BuShips had to do end runs around to get any new ships out of design study stage, much less actually built.
The Saganami-B isn't that huge a deviation from the Saganami-A. The Sag-C, however, is a brand new design, that BuShips called the Sag-C, making it look like just an upgraded variant of the Sag-A/B, not the new ship it actually was, to get funding for it and get Sag-C's built.


The notional Sag-C/Roland generation light cruiser is probably 10-12 DDM tubes per broadside, heavy energy weapons (as per current Manticoran Alliance design standards), and so on, proportional to the size differences between the Roland and the Sag-C. Probably has a platoon or so of Marines.

The problem with that is that we're told that the Sag-C has the minimum beam (74m) necessary to mount broadside tubes for Mk16s. That's about 50% wider than an Avalon (48m) or Roland (54m). [Oddly a Wolfhound is actually a bit wider (51m), if shallower and shorter, than an Avalon]

You're going to have to do something pretty unconventional to fit tubes that big/long into a next-gen CL hull which is likely to be no more than, say, 60m wide.



We've discussed options for that before though; the ones I recall offhand are:
a) Stick with Roland-style hammerhead missile clusters
b) angled tubes - mount the tubes so they angle aft enough to penetrate no more deeply than a ERM tube; so from above the tubes would look like a herringbone pattern).
c) interleaved or offset tubes - let the tubes stick back past the centerline of the ship, but mount them at different points long each broadside so they can extend past each other.
d) vertically offset tubes - put the port tubes one deck above the starboard tubes; so they extend over/under each other
e) asymmetric broadside - only mount tubes on one side

But all of those have drawbacks, and many of them seriously disrupt the other compartment, components, and passageways that live in the middle of a ship.

I kinda like (c) and (d) - they're just variations on one another in different dimensions - but yes, it would call for a serious redesign of internal configurations and ammo delivery.

Maybe one would work out perfectly well. The Roland's approach is even more radical and has worked out pretty well - the main problems with it are the inevitable vulnerability and limited ammunition availability. The design didn't have any unforeseen problems that an unconventional design could easily have. But it's certainly cause for concern that it may not work out well off the bat - you'd want to test thoroughly a testbed design in actual, diverse practice before committing to it. That may help explain why the latest generation RMN CL's are so conservative and the cutting edge designs are the Roland and Saganami-C: they didn't need the cutting edge yet for the CL workhorse duties, and they were exploring it with a radical design (the Roland) and a fairly large one (the Sag-C).

The other possibility is that the notional future light combatant is going to be much more like the Saganami-C than anything else: big enough to fire DDM's from conventionally arranged broadside tubes. So it's not going to have much less beam than the Saganami-C and reaching a lower tonnage will require loss of draught and/or length - if indeed they bother.

One implementation of that notional light combatant is simple: take the Saganami-C, tweak it according to needs (fewer small craft, more recon drones, for instance), and declare that your new light cruiser. You've already got assembly lines for it, it's already tested, so there's a lot of investment spared. The trouble is that the operating cost for it is a lot higher than you really want for a "minimum" hyper-capable warship - not much less than for a Nike, we're told. So if you can tweak it any way that reduces personnel required even more consistent with a cruiser's mission - or reduces operating costs any other way - it would be a compelling modification to make.

JeffEngel wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:The problem with that is that we're told that the Sag-C has the minimum beam (74m) necessary to mount broadside tubes for Mk16s. That's about 50% wider than an Avalon (48m) or Roland (54m). [Oddly a Wolfhound is actually a bit wider (51m), if shallower and shorter, than an Avalon]

You're going to have to do something pretty unconventional to fit tubes that big/long into a next-gen CL hull which is likely to be no more than, say, 60m wide.



We've discussed options for that before though; the ones I recall offhand are:
a) Stick with Roland-style hammerhead missile clusters
b) angled tubes - mount the tubes so they angle aft enough to penetrate no more deeply than a ERM tube; so from above the tubes would look like a herringbone pattern).
c) interleaved or offset tubes - let the tubes stick back past the centerline of the ship, but mount them at different points long each broadside so they can extend past each other.
d) vertically offset tubes - put the port tubes one deck above the starboard tubes; so they extend over/under each other
e) asymmetric broadside - only mount tubes on one side

But all of those have drawbacks, and many of them seriously disrupt the other compartment, components, and passageways that live in the middle of a ship.

I kinda like (c) and (d) - they're just variations on one another in different dimensions - but yes, it would call for a serious redesign of internal configurations and ammo delivery.

Maybe one would work out perfectly well. The Roland's approach is even more radical and has worked out pretty well - the main problems with it are the inevitable vulnerability and limited ammunition availability. The design didn't have any unforeseen problems that an unconventional design could easily have. But it's certainly cause for concern that it may not work out well off the bat - you'd want to test thoroughly a testbed design in actual, diverse practice before committing to it. That may help explain why the latest generation RMN CL's are so conservative and the cutting edge designs are the Roland and Saganami-C: they didn't need the cutting edge yet for the CL workhorse duties, and they were exploring it with a radical design (the Roland) and a fairly large one (the Sag-C).

The other possibility is that the notional future light combatant is going to be much more like the Saganami-C than anything else: big enough to fire DDM's from conventionally arranged broadside tubes. So it's not going to have much less beam than the Saganami-C and reaching a lower tonnage will require loss of draught and/or length - if indeed they bother.

One implementation of that notional light combatant is simple: take the Saganami-C, tweak it according to needs (fewer small craft, more recon drones, for instance), and declare that your new light cruiser. You've already got assembly lines for it, it's already tested, so there's a lot of investment spared. The trouble is that the operating cost for it is a lot higher than you really want for a "minimum" hyper-capable warship - not much less than for a Nike, we're told. So if you can tweak it any way that reduces personnel required even more consistent with a cruiser's mission - or reduces operating costs any other way - it would be a compelling modification to make.

Sure you could do the latter - basically rebrand the Sag-C a light cruiser. (Possibly shed a few tubes / energy mounts to free up space/tonnage for marines, or even a keyhole-lite)

But your earlier suggestion of a squat or stumpy hull has some issues. Going too far outside the 'normal' l*w*b ratio impacts your acceleration. Making a wide short ship will give you less displacement tonnage; but you'll still accelerate almost as if you were the higher tonnage 'full figure' hull of the same beam. In the short to medium term, the RMN has enough of a compensator accel advantage that they can probably live with that -- but it's not a great idea to tie yourself down to a sub-optimal hull shape on the assumption that you can maintain a compensator advantage throughout the ship's lifetime. (Or assume that it doesn't matter if your CL can't run from future CAs, or run down future CLs)