The cruiser future in the RMN - another go

Honestly there is a bit of an issue there because there really isn't much space to save costs if a Sagnammi and a Nike are similar price points.

Also Marines do a lot more than the big flashy missions. They're responsible in whole or in part for multiple functions on and off the ship. Really for operations in Silesia a full company is close to the minimum size that can be made to work, and that's allready pushing a quarter the crew complement of a Sangami, never mind something lighter and smaller.

Even without the problem though getting the crew size down much more whilst mostly a matter of cutting weapons, (on mount crews chew up a huge amount of crew requirements), is still going to be tough without completely gimping the ship's ability to fight anything, (again because it's weapons are the big drain so if you cut too much you cut too many weapons doing it).

The real question is the hull form. The obvious broadside answer is interleaved weapons so each weapon can stretch the full width of the ship but weather the missiles should be there or on the hammerheads Roland style is a genuine question.

I'd line the spes up as something like 8 Missile tubes in each broadside with a 20 salvo magazine arrangement backed by a pair of Grasers, with the Keyhole lite mounted between the Grasers on the "energy deck". With a pair of spinal Grasers at each hammerhead for the heavy spinal punch. Works out at 96 crew for the on mount crews. Which probably means a crew below 200.

One major NIT to the OP: Avalon class CL's have off bore launching and with G mod, have just as heavy a punch as anyone toting the MK-16. Every ship since the SAG-B for sure has off bore launching capability built in from the get go. Remember the Mk-16 and the MK-14SDM both had the exact same laser warhead section. Obviously the MK-16 has fusion power for better ECM, but the laser head itself was the same. Same laser head Rosak used blowing away State Sec rejects.

It should also be pointed out that the major need for an upgraded Avalon to DDM is only a slightly larger hull for the missiles themselves. Another large increase in tonnage is a large step up in sidewall strength to handle MK-16G warhead strengths.

Keyhole "lite" can be accomplished via the expedient use of hermes buoy's for at least the defensive side of things regarding missile control. With no modifications they should be able to handle that outside of software handshake. The offensive control links, at least a couple should be able to be done this way as well. If Honor can do it, why the ***BLEEppp*** can everyone else not do it as well? Honor had 50? 60? on a single hermes buoy. That is already a triple Avalon broadside or thereabouts. Seems more than enough to me for a CL anyways. Uh, why can a CA, not use multiple Hermes buoy's? Keyhole 1 without the ECM suite etc already exists. It is the Hermes buoy's. Lets not over think things here. Keeps the broadside clear of holes...

MISSION creeeEEEEPPPPP: What extra equipment will be required to hunt down Spider Ships? Would think this would just entail additional RD's myself. Might need modified RD's, but still RD's.

Crew #'s. I am not worried. When RFC already has 300 in a DD massing all of 80,000tons, why bother worrying about it on a ship massing 3-400,000? RFC claims Buships "saved" a lot of tonnage, by cutting crew, but honestly out of that 80,000 ton DD, the crew complement can only be about 10,000tons at best out of said tonnage because an unarmed DB is about 50,000 tons. Yes, by cutting the crew, technically, they "saved" tonnage. It is hardly worth mentioning though. It is hardly "a lot". Rather it is the cost of the crew. So, going forward, just build in extra crew compartments for different missions depending on where you go.

@Relax: We have no info on how honour transmitted the the Hermes Bouy though, if she did it via the keyhole platforms rather than her onboard grav com, (seems the most likely as the grav com probably only has so many channel's). Also she fired one complete pattern of pods. That's 6 pods with 6 apollo control missiles which is a massive way away from a triple broadside.

Also Herme's Bouy's aren't available in countless places and even if they are they may not be in the right place, (based on the lack of time lag for her talk with Tourville it was within his energy range) and we have no info on weather the Herme's relayed via grav link or STL coms, lastly even where they are available if you start using them for fire control on a regular basis the enemy is just going to target them.

We also don;t know how big a Hermes Buoy is but given their pre-placed their probably a lot bigger than an RD. Their'd be littile point to pre-placing them if they where that small.

claims Buships "saved" a lot of tonnage, by cutting crew, but honestly out of that 80,000 ton DD, the crew complement can only be about 10,000tons at best out of said tonnage because an unarmed DB is about 50,000 tons

Your forgetting that at the size of a Dispatch Boat a significant percentage of the mass is Hyper-Generator so it's mass is somewhat inflated. In the same vein a dispatch boat is very, very bare bones. Even DD's have a lot more on board crew amenities for various reasons and the cubage they eat will be the real hog on mass because it pushes up overall size. Again especially true on smaller ships with low crews as many amenities don't grow linearly with crew size.


Really though tonnage wasn't the main point under discussion, cost, namely operating costs and build costs was. And that's an entirely different kettle of fish.

Carl wrote:Honestly there is a bit of an issue there because there really isn't much space to save costs if a Sagnammi and a Nike are similar price points.

Also Marines do a lot more than the big flashy missions. They're responsible in whole or in part for multiple functions on and off the ship. Really for operations in Silesia a full company is close to the minimum size that can be made to work, and that's allready pushing a quarter the crew complement of a Sangami, never mind something lighter and smaller.

That's one reason not to expect the future cruiser to be much if any smaller than the Saganami-C, along with the smaller Keyhole and the DDM broadside launchers.

I take it that going without a Keyhole system (specifically, a nearby parasite used to direct counter-missiles while the ship itself has the wedge in that direction) isn't going to be an option for even the smallest serious warship of the future. I also figure that, while a missile arrangement other than conventional broadsides is possible, it'd be an engineering feat that they would want to avoid if practical.

A Roland-style hammerhead arrangement has issues with how deep the effective magazines can get, which is a serious issue for a unit meant to be able to stay out fighting a long while.

So with at least those three reasons to go large-ish, I figure they won't try to fight it and will work to conserve costs - operating especially - any which other way they can. Technological force multipliers for the Marines would be another - it's just ranging outside the scope I had in mind.

Even without the problem though getting the crew size down much more whilst mostly a matter of cutting weapons, (on mount crews chew up a huge amount of crew requirements), is still going to be tough without completely gimping the ship's ability to fight anything, (again because it's weapons are the big drain so if you cut too much you cut too many weapons doing it).

Certainly fewer weapons will mean less ability to fight, and removing on-mount crews will mean less ability to keep fighting under damage. But a cruiser mission doesn't call for all the fighting capability of a larger, more powerful mission. It needs to be able to eat pirates for breakfast; stay out and on patrol for long periods; have an excellent sensor suite, recon drones, and deployed immobile platforms for recon and system picket work; a Marine complement (or, in a pinch, a substitute for one) for all those light Marine jobs that come up; to be able to stand up to counterpart naval units; and maybe to be able, in sufficient numbers, to threaten battlecruisers, or, more often, to be able to get away from them.

It certainly doesn't need 80% of the missile firepower of a BC for those jobs. 40% is already probably more generous than necessary. It will definitely need the DDM range, else too many threats will be able to kill it before it can respond, and too many pirates would have a fighting chance against it.

Being able to keep firing the missile launchers despite enough damage that central fire control is out is a would-be-nice capability for that mission, not a darned-well-NEED-it one. And when the RMN will need so many of these ships, losing a would-be-nice feature that drives up operating costs considerably is nearly a forced move. That's even more the case if they can use some of that freed up tonnage/volume for making those weapons less likely to suffer the damage that causes them to lose central fire control.

The real question is the hull form. The obvious broadside answer is interleaved weapons so each weapon can stretch the full width of the ship but weather the missiles should be there or on the hammerheads Roland style is a genuine question.

I'd line the spes up as something like 8 Missile tubes in each broadside with a 20 salvo magazine arrangement backed by a pair of Grasers, with the Keyhole lite mounted between the Grasers on the "energy deck". With a pair of spinal Grasers at each hammerhead for the heavy spinal punch. Works out at 96 crew for the on mount crews. Which probably means a crew below 200.

If they can make interleaved missile tubes work out well enough, more power to them. But I'm skeptical that they would manage it without making the internal engineering too complicated or prone to unusual failures, and I think they're committed by the (future, smaller) Keyhole system to a large-ish volume anyway. The interleaved tubes would let them have a smaller width than they are going to be able to get anyway given the Keyhole, in which case, there's not a compelling reason to bother.

Relax wrote:One major NIT to the OP: Avalon class CL's have off bore launching and with G mod, have just as heavy a punch as anyone toting the MK-16. Every ship since the SAG-B for sure has off bore launching capability built in from the get go. Remember the Mk-16 and the MK-14SDM both had the exact same laser warhead section. Obviously the MK-16 has fusion power for better ECM, but the laser head itself was the same. Same laser head Rosak used blowing away State Sec rejects.

I sit corrected, thanks. HoS has the Avalon and Wolfhound using a Mark 36 extended range missile rather than the Mk 14, but I doubt that makes a difference to your points.

I can't confirm that it's got the G mod warhead, but even if it's speculation, it's not one I'd particularly doubt. Still, I don't think the Avalon's adequacy depended on the G mod warheads, so a 20 missile double-broadside should be satisfactory on a future light cruiser if the 16 missile double-broadside of the current Avalon is good enough.

For that matter, there's no compelling reason a larger light cruiser couldn't have Saganami-C-style broadside launchers (in reduced numbers) combined with Roland-style hammerhead launchers, if they really needed more firepower. The off-bore fire would mean the whole enchilada could be fired together. The hammerheads likely wouldn't be suited to firing for so long, but more missiles early is an important thing for combat anyway (something BC(P) partisans would hasten to remind us of) and it would make for smoother degradation of capability under damage and tactical options.

It should also be pointed out that the major need for an upgraded Avalon to DDM is only a slightly larger hull for the missiles themselves. Another large increase in tonnage is a large step up in sidewall strength to handle MK-16G warhead strengths.

If the Saganami-C is about as small as you can get for a conventional broadside arrangement for Mk 16's, then it's not going to be a slightly larger hull than the Avalon, unless you're managing a different launcher arrangement. The Saganami-C is triple the Avalon's tonnage.

MISSION creeeEEEEPPPPP: What extra equipment will be required to hunt down Spider Ships? Would think this would just entail additional RD's myself. Might need modified RD's, but still RD's.

Modified RD's, more RD's; modified ship-board sensors, maybe more ship-board sensors. We don't know yet. But between that, trying to do more recon/scouting work with fewer hulls/people, and the use of recon drones for monitoring targets in combat and getting FTL data back to the ship, I do think that future cruiser is going to need a Saganami-C's recon drone establishment, at least. Hopefully that won't jack up or keep up operating costs too much, but it certainly will prevent that future cruiser from having much less volume than the Saganami-C.

Crew #'s. I am not worried. When RFC already has 300 in a DD massing all of 80,000tons, why bother worrying about it on a ship massing 3-400,000? RFC claims Buships "saved" a lot of tonnage, by cutting crew, but honestly out of that 80,000 ton DD, the crew complement can only be about 10,000tons at best out of said tonnage because an unarmed DB is about 50,000 tons. Yes, by cutting the crew, technically, they "saved" tonnage. It is hardly worth mentioning though. It is hardly "a lot". Rather it is the cost of the crew. So, going forward, just build in extra crew compartments for different missions depending on where you go.

It's a decent amount of volume. Much of a warship consists of spaces for people to work, to live, to keep stores. Cut down the people and they don't need that space. It won't change too much in terms of mass, but I can certainly see it in terms of internal volume required. But in any case, yeah, the important savings there are in operating costs and personnel demand, and mass or volume savings are a pleasant bonus.

That Marine complement can be taken as a standard, rather than a constant. For some cruiser missions - extended system recon, for instance, or being a forward scout for a fleet travelling in hyper - a reduced or eliminated Marine complement would be fine, and the living, working, and storage spaces can be put to other uses. They may even go with a modular approach so that that space can be reconfigured: spend a little time in a dock or with a tender, and it's got instead flag facilities, more stores, more missile storage, or more recon platforms - perhaps even a niche to hold a small clutch of missile pods. RMN shipbuilding seems to have greatly reduced costs for a given class once you're set up to build it, so a pricier unit that you can then tweak for specific roles is going to be more economical than lots of specialist designs, each built in limited numbers. Our 20th and 21st century experience has often gone the other way, but different times, different rules.

Carl wrote:

claims Buships "saved" a lot of tonnage, by cutting crew, but honestly out of that 80,000 ton DD, the crew complement can only be about 10,000tons at best out of said tonnage because an unarmed DB is about 50,000 tons

Your forgetting that at the size of a Dispatch Boat a significant percentage of the mass is Hyper-Generator so it's mass is somewhat inflated. In the same vein a dispatch boat is very, very bare bones. Even DD's have a lot more on board crew amenities for various reasons and the cubage they eat will be the real hog on mass because it pushes up overall size. Again especially true on smaller ships with low crews as many amenities don't grow linearly with crew size.


Really though tonnage wasn't the main point under discussion, cost, namely operating costs and build costs was. And that's an entirely different kettle of fish.

Actually, I believe that was specifically his point. a 40Kton dispatch boat has a crew of about 20. A DD on <40 Ktons more includes weapons systems, defenses, miltech sensors, larger (due to the larger mass) Comp and Drive systems, and (most importantly) >275 more crew. So we know berthing, Lifesupport, and consumables for 2 months for 275 people has to mass somewhere within those 40 Ktons (along with the rest of the systems mentioned above.)

So doubling the crew on a Sag-C only has to mass 10-20 K-Tons more - heck we can even double it again to give more cubage per person (than what would be found in the DD) and extend the cruise radius in consumables available (over the DD again).

JeffEngel wrote:

Relax wrote:One major NIT to the OP: Avalon class CL's have off bore launching and with G mod, have just as heavy a punch as anyone toting the MK-16. Every ship since the SAG-B for sure has off bore launching capability built in from the get go. Remember the Mk-16 and the MK-14SDM both had the exact same laser warhead section. Obviously the MK-16 has fusion power for better ECM, but the laser head itself was the same. Same laser head Rosak used blowing away State Sec rejects.

I sit corrected, thanks. HoS has the Avalon and Wolfhound using a Mark 36 extended range missile rather than the Mk 14, but I doubt that makes a difference to your points.

I can't confirm that it's got the G mod warhead, but even if it's speculation, it's not one I'd particularly doubt. Still, I don't think the Avalon's adequacy depended on the G mod warheads, so a 20 missile double-broadside should be satisfactory on a future light cruiser if the 16 missile double-broadside of the current Avalon is good enough.

I can't imagine the RMN not applying the same technology to it's modern lighter units that it applied to it's cruiser weight missiles. To begin with, that 15 kton warhead goes back to the Mk 13 missile used in the Prince Consorts, Crusaders, Broadswords, StarKnights, and Edward Saganamis, so I can see their warhead getting at least the -e mod, if not the G - So EVERY RMN cruiser should be punching extremely hard right now.

That same technology should be applied to the LERM and the old Mk 34 used by the rest of the legacy DD/CLs - while they shouldn't be able to go toe to toe with Wallers, they should be able to rip into CAs and BCs without issue, making them a respectable threat for any sub-waller they will encounter for the next few years.

My point is that quite a lot of the weight increase is probably in the extra mass from cubage used. Weaponry aside from magazines for missiles doesn't use a lot of volume for each weapon on smaller combatants, it's the magazine space, (which light combatants have less of in general), that can make them really massive. Which in turn means the crew scalar probably accounts for most of the

Also as i noted Dispatch Boats are nearly all hyper generator for a reason. Dispatch boats routinely ride the highest bands at the very limits of hyper generator tech. I'd be shocked if in light of the risks they run they don;t have additions and modifications to their generator's, Alpha node's, and particle and rad shields to make such transit as much safer as they can. Warships are equipped to ride it but as we saw with Apollo they usually stay just below the real upper limit even when running at the highest band and we have a pearl that they don;t do even that all the time. I'd fully expect the Hyper Generator and associated systems to mass more on a dispatch boat TBH.


@JeffEngal: No one's suggesting on mount weapon crews be dropped, given just how common having weapons connections to central cut by battle damage was in the books where we've got to see that kind of detail it would represent an unacceptable loss of combat power in any kind of actual fight. Even Pirates with much more pressing reasons to drop crew don;t drop that which should tell you something about how important they are. What may be possible is that they've managed via automation to reduce the number of on mount crew.

Also the Rolands don;t have small magazines because the missiles are hammerhead mounted, we've seen with earlier designs that all magazine's are normally interlinked. the Rolands have small magazines, (with no interlinks), because really they're a bit on the small side to carry all up DDM's and some massive compromises have had to be made to shoehorn them in. they're the equivalent of putting Tomahawk missiles on a 100 ton patrol boat. Doable but seriously seriously wonky compromises have to be made to do it.

As far as Keyhole goes it's actually just as important if not more so for offensive fire control. Saganami B's and C's can fire rolled on their die but they still have to roll at pre-arranged intervals so they can direct fire control link's to their outbound missiles.

One of the reasons i considered the hammerhead missile arrangement and/or the small broadside energy armaments was the need to free up broadside space for Keyhole Lite. It's not really depth so much as surface area that will be the limit.

Theemile wrote:

JeffEngel wrote:I can't confirm that it's got the G mod warhead, but even if it's speculation, it's not one I'd particularly doubt. Still, I don't think the Avalon's adequacy depended on the G mod warheads, so a 20 missile double-broadside should be satisfactory on a future light cruiser if the 16 missile double-broadside of the current Avalon is good enough.

I can't imagine the RMN not applying the same technology to it's modern lighter units that it applied to it's cruiser weight missiles. To begin with, that 15 kton warhead goes back to the Mk 13 missile used in the Prince Consorts, Crusaders, Broadswords, StarKnights, and Edward Saganamis, so I can see their warhead getting at least the -e mod, if not the G - So EVERY RMN cruiser should be punching extremely hard right now.

That same technology should be applied to the LERM and the old Mk 34 used by the rest of the legacy DD/CLs - while they shouldn't be able to go toe to toe with Wallers, they should be able to rip into CAs and BCs without issue, making them a respectable threat for any sub-waller they will encounter for the next few years.

If the Mod-G requires the power systems that are built into a DDM but not built into any single drive missile, that'd be a reason that it may not be on the smaller ones. I doubt that; I'm just not prepared to rule it out without knowing more. And even then, it's possible that they've lagged behind working out or producing a Mod-G for the single-drive missiles, but if there isn't a technical barrier, I doubt they'd be waiting long - although not having much missile production currently may delay that process. Still, it's not here or there when it comes to future designs.

And as to future designs, I suppose it's worth considering the outside possibility that they may develop some sort of "DDM-Lite" like the Cataphract to allow the older, smaller launchers to fire, or to be refitted to fire, some sort of less functional but smaller than the Mk 16 DDM. If that's the case, then it's back to the drawing board.

Still though, the Mod G warheads do mean more defenses are needed, and they've got to plan on those monsters being in other people's hands too. The Nike is an instance of how you have to build to be able to plan on handling hits from one of those. I don't think they're going to be able to swallow even mere procurement costs that high for a cruiser, so adjusting expectations downward may be the thing to do there too. I'd figure on just not expecting these cruisers to survive many hits from a Mk 16-G and to have more and better decoys and ECM than a current Avalon does, maybe more than a current Saganami-C does, and work to avoid getting the hits as a defense instead of being prepared to suck them up like a Nike.