new light cruiser needed

Weird Harold wrote:

Kytheros wrote:A single broadside arrangement has no real benefit, and has several real downsides.

With the "off-bore" capability newer RMN missiles have, a single broadside arrangement is feasible. The Roland already makes routine use of the capability to fire twelve missile salvos instead of crossing its own "T" to fire its chase-only missile arrangement.

SharkHunter wrote:Even though RFC/MWW (who of course has the final word) has talked about the "next" CL class, if I were the Admiral SoAndSo in charge of BuShips, I'd say why? Instead I'd propose a modified Sag-C (which for brevity sake I am going to call the -CM) that's a -C with a smaller missile & modified drone loadout] where the -CM is highly optimized for the types of operations that require Marines.

Kytheros wrote:Off-bore isn't "shoot 180 degrees behind you". It is, IIRC, about a 270 degree total arc - or about 135 degrees to one side.

SWM wrote:

Kytheros wrote:Off-bore isn't "shoot 180 degrees behind you". It is, IIRC, about a 270 degree total arc - or about 135 degrees to one side.

Actually, the text says that current Manticoran ships can shoot 180 degrees off-bore. The 135 degrees is an older restriction that is no longer true.

JeffEngel wrote:

Theemile wrote:
Even if it is possible, you end up with a CL that is no faster than the Sag-C. While not a problem now, when you are opposing someone with the same compensator tech, you are left with a small ship which cannot run away from ships twice it's size - which is not a good thing.

If you've got the same compensator tech and the same efficiency using it, the ship half the size of the other will have some acceleration advantage. If it's the same size as a Saganami-C, and assuming identical compensator effectiveness, it will have the same acceleration. If it's smaller and doesn't suffer some compensator inefficiency by comparison - if you can shrink from the Saganami-C along a combination of the other two dimensions without suffering that - then smaller will still mean better acceleration. If you can't manage that, then it's not a workable notion - agreed, and never disputed.

A ship that's not optimized strictly for combat unable to outrun one of the same size that is is an inevitable consequence of building anything not optimized strictly for combat or speed. Fleets have lived with that and will continue to.

Theemile wrote:Even if it is possible, you end up with a CL that is no faster than the Sag-C. While not a problem now, when you are opposing someone with the same compensator tech, you are left with a small ship which cannot run away from ships twice it's size - which is not a good thing.

JeffEngel wrote:If you've got the same compensator tech and the same efficiency using it, the ship half the size of the other will have some acceleration advantage. If it's the same size as a Saganami-C, and assuming identical compensator effectiveness, it will have the same acceleration. If it's smaller and doesn't suffer some compensator inefficiency by comparison - if you can shrink from the Saganami-C along a combination of the other two dimensions without suffering that - then smaller will still mean better acceleration. If you can't manage that, then it's not a workable notion - agreed, and never disputed.

A ship that's not optimized strictly for combat unable to outrun one of the same size that is is an inevitable consequence of building anything not optimized strictly for combat or speed. Fleets have lived with that and will continue to.

Theemile wrote:Acceleration is by volume compensated, not actual mass. That is why an SD with empty magazines is no faster than a ship with full magazines (or and empty Merchie/full merchie comparison). The 3 dimensions are fairly locked - usually a ship has a few meters around it that is compensated (a little give for the various antennas and sensors - not to mention people working on them and now missile pods.)

Since we're talking about a ship having the beam and draught the same as a Sag-C, the compensated field would be the length of the Sag-C, regardless if that volume were actually used by the ship. So a stubby, fat ship would have the same accel as the Sag-C - as would a long thin ship - neither would be taking full advantage of the compensated field, but to get the field those dimensions you need the full sized field.

As seen in the Travis Long novels, you can change the shape of the field, but you lose efficiency when you do so, so you would actually have a ship SLOWER than the Sag-C if you tweak the compensator dimensions to match the stubby ship.

And Jeff, as you said, as long as your military is willing to accept this, that 's the way it is and just a consequence of getting what you want in the desired package, but it's still a major downside to the design.

Kytheros wrote:Off-bore isn't "shoot 180 degrees behind you". It is, IIRC, about a 270 degree total arc - or about 135 degrees to one side.

SWM wrote:Actually, the text says that current Manticoran ships can shoot 180 degrees off-bore. The 135 degrees is an older restriction that is no longer true.

Kytheros wrote:Really? Where?

The Shadow of Saganami, Chapter 24 wrote:"Aye, aye, Sir," Kaplan said crisply. "Execute Abattoir in three-zero seconds." She pressed a stud on her console, and her voice sounded over every earbug aboard Hexapuma. "All hands, this is the Tac Officer. Stand by to execute Abattoir on my command."
Helen found her eyes suddenly glued to the time display, watching the seconds slide away.
"Abattoir," she thought. An ugly name, but fitting, if the Captain's plan works out. . . .
Stress did strange things to her time sense, she discovered. On the one hand, she was focused, intense, feeling each second flash past and go speeding off into eternity like a pulser dart. On the other, the time display's numerals seemed to drag unbearably. It was as if each of them glowed slowly to life, then flowed into the next so gradually she could actually see the change. Her pulse rate seemed to have tripled, yet each breath was its own distinct inhalation and exhalation. And then, suddenly, the hyper-intensive cocoon which had enveloped her burst, expelling her into a world of frantic activity, as Naomi Kaplan pressed a red button at the center of her number one keypad.
Only a single command sped outward from the button, but that command was the first pebble in a landslide. It activated a cascade of carefully organized secondary commands, and each of those commands, in turn, activated its own cascade, and things began to happen.
HMS Hexapuma's impeller wedge snapped abruptly to full power. Senior Chief Clary's joystick went hard over, and the heavy cruiser snarled around to starboard in a six-hundred-gravity, hundred-and-eighty-degree turn. Her sidewalls snapped into existence; tethered EW drones popped out to port and starboard; her energy weapons ran out, locking their gravity lenses to the edges of the sidewalls' "gun ports"; and radar and lidar lashed the two Havenite ships like savage whips.
It was the worst nightmare of any pirate—a fat, defenseless merchie, transformed with brutal suddenness from terrified prey into one of the most dangerous warships in space at a range where evasion was impossible . . . and survival almost equally unlikely.
It took Hexapuma fourteen seconds to go from standby to full combat readiness. The EW drones' systems were still coming on-line, but Kaplan's fire control computers had been running continuously updated tracks on both targets for hours. The missiles in her tubes' firing queues had been programmed for three broadsides in advance, and the firing solutions had been updated every fifteen seconds from the instant Bogey One and Bogey Two entered her maximum missile range. Now, even as she turned, a double broadside roared from her tubes, oriented itself, and drove headlong for Bogey Two.
At such a short range, they were maximum-power shots, and current-generation Manticoran missile drives at that power setting produced an acceleration of over 900 KPS2. Worse, from the enemy's viewpoint, the bogeys were rushing to meet them at over two thousand KPS. Flight time was under thirty-four seconds, and it took the bogeys' tactical crews precious seconds to realize what had happened. Bogey Two's anti-missile crews got off a single counter-missile. Just one . . . that missed. The Haven-built destroyer's laser clusters managed to intercept three of the incoming laser heads. The others—all the others—ripped through the desperate, inner-boundary defenses and detonated in a single, cataclysmic instant that trapped the doomed vessel at the heart of a hell-born spider's lightning web.
The destroyer's sidewalls didn't even flicker. She simply vanished in the flash of a fusion plant which had taken at least a dozen direct hits.
But Kaplan wasn't even watching the destroyer. She'd known what was going to happen to it, and she'd assigned a single one of her petty officer assistants to the tin can. If, by some miracle, the destroyer somehow managed to survive, the noncom was authorized to continue the missile engagement on his own. Kaplan could do that, because she hadn't assigned a single one of her missile tubes to Bogey One . . . also known as Anhur.
Helen knew she was witnessing a brilliantly planned, ruthlessly executed assassination, not a battle. But she was a tactical specialist herself, however junior a practitioner she might still be. She recognized a work of art when she saw one, even if its sheer, brutal efficiency did send an icy chill of horror straight through her.
Aivars Terekhov felt no horror. He felt only exultation and vengeful satisfaction. The Desforge-class destroyer had been no more than an irritant. A distraction. A foe which was too unimportant to worry about taking intact. The cruiser was the target he wanted—the flagship, where the senior officers and relevant data the cold-blooded professional in him needed to capture would be found. And he was glad it was so, for it was also the cruiser—the Mars-class cruiser—the avenger within him needed to crush. There must be nothing to distract him from Anhur, and so he and Kaplan had planned the destroyer's total destruction to clear the path to her.
Hexapuma settled on her new heading, her bow directly towards Anhur. Not so many years ago it would have been a suicidal position, exposing the wide-open throat of her wedge to any weapon her enemy might fire. But Hexapuma possessed a bow wall even tougher than the conventional sidewalls covering her flanks, and Anhur didn't.
There were ports in Hexapuma's bow wall for the two massive grasers and three lasers she mounted as chase weapons. Like her broadside energy mounts, they were heavier than most battlecruisers had carried at the beginning of the Havenite Wars. In fact, they'd been scaled up even more than her broadside weapons, because they were no longer required to share space with missile tubes now that the RMN's broadside tubes had acquired the ability to fire radically off-bore, and the Manticoran cruiser's fire control had Anhur in a lock of iron. It took Hexapuma another twenty-seven seconds to reverse her heading—twenty-seven seconds in which the missiles which doomed Bogey Two were sent hurtling through space and the bogeys' overtake velocity closed the range between them by 54,362 kilometers.

JeffEngel wrote:

fester wrote:
There are several bits of canon that state the compensator fields are constrained by dimensional proportions. It may be that making the CL too squat/stocky would mess up the compensators...

It may be that they could make it somewhat shorter and somewhat flatter - give in the other two dimensions, without singling out either of them for too much reduction - without suffering compensator inefficiencies. Then again, the Saganami-C may be pushing that already; I've not compared it to older designs of similar tonnage to see if it's unusually wider relative to the other two dimensions.

Jonathan_S wrote:But if we assume that the hull form doesn't significantly affect accel then we could shorten a Sag-C hull form from 610m to 524m; which might save around 65k tons; with a corresponding increase in accel. (Given the same generation compensator that let the Sag-C pull 726.2g when introduced I think this shortened hull might be good for as much as 730.7g)

JeffEngel wrote:I think we're getting around to a consensus that there's nothing much to gain from making something lighter weight than a Saganami-C with a similar beam. We may still disagree or have different confidence levels about how much you may stand to lose going with a lower mass and a smaller combination of length and draught, but it's a difference that's not likely to make a difference in the end.

I also submit that, if the DN-scale CLAC's shape makes it slower than it would otherwise be for the hull size, it's yet another reason to abandon that size for them and build them all larger. There's no reason to suppose that they got the ideal size right immediately and no shame in moving to a larger standard.