Suspension of Disbelief.

Jonathan_S wrote:But even the London Treaty did not define a Frigate.
FFs might fit into one of the small ship exceptions, but if not it would likely count as a DD (but I suppose in theory you could have something called a FF that crept into a CL or heavier category)

'Frigate' has had about three lives, referring to:
Age of Sail - a one gun deck warship
Early steam - one gun deck (because guns were that big) early armored steam vessels
WWII - ASW ships smaller than destroyers

Since WWII, it's been a bit of a muddle (all ship classes have been).

'Corvette' got resurrected for early, small escort vessels in the WWII era too.

Suspension of disbelief?

I'd say the Battle of Manticore, taking out all of Home Fleet and leaving ZERO reserve, and then not firing a cascade of missiles early to stop Haven from deploying pods. At the very worst they would have disrupted the "donkey" based salvos. Once they knew Haven had MDM pods, the idea that with all of the RMN's tactical experience they wouldn't have already gamed something like that out at ATC to protect Manticore and home fleet seems unconscionable.

Furthers the plot yes, but realistically, no. Not with two of the three planets within easy missile strike range of the hyper limit for that type of long-range missile fire.

JeffEngel wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:But even the London Treaty did not define a Frigate.
FFs might fit into one of the small ship exceptions, but if not it would likely count as a DD (but I suppose in theory you could have something called a FF that crept into a CL or heavier category)

'Frigate' has had about three lives, referring to:
Age of Sail - a one gun deck warship
Early steam - one gun deck (because guns were that big) early armored steam vessels
WWII - ASW ships smaller than destroyers

Since WWII, it's been a bit of a muddle (all ship classes have been).

'Corvette' got resurrected for early, small escort vessels in the WWII era too.

I'm pretty sure there were two decker frigates during the age of sail, though they were often called great frigates. I think it was only mid to late eightteenth century that the single decker rule came into play

And Yeah I think Sloops, Corvettes and Frigates were all class terms revived in the WWII era. I believe the Sloops came first then the Corvettes and then the Frigates.

I just know that one of my great-uncles served on a River class FF in World War II and she once told me she remembered a letter their family got where he mentioned that the ship he was serving on was one of the first frigates in the RN since the early days of their Grandfather's time in the service.

SharkHunter wrote:Suspension of disbelief?

I'd say the Battle of Manticore, taking out all of Home Fleet and leaving ZERO reserve, and then not firing a cascade of missiles early to stop Haven from deploying pods. At the very worst they would have disrupted the "donkey" based salvos. Once they knew Haven had MDM pods, the idea that with all of the RMN's tactical experience they wouldn't have already gamed something like that out at ATC to protect Manticore and home fleet seems unconscionable.

Furthers the plot yes, but realistically, no. Not with two of the three planets within easy missile strike range of the hyper limit for that type of long-range missile fire.

Well, you know how it is, under the stress they also forgot to deploy their magical recon drones.

kzt wrote:

SharkHunter wrote:Suspension of disbelief?

I'd say the Battle of Manticore, taking out all of Home Fleet and leaving ZERO reserve, and then not firing a cascade of missiles early to stop Haven from deploying pods. At the very worst they would have disrupted the "donkey" based salvos. Once they knew Haven had MDM pods, the idea that with all of the RMN's tactical experience they wouldn't have already gamed something like that out at ATC to protect Manticore and home fleet seems unconscionable.

Furthers the plot yes, but realistically, no. Not with two of the three planets within easy missile strike range of the hyper limit for that type of long-range missile fire.

Well, you know how it is, under the stress they also forgot to deploy their magical recon drones.

What? You mean RD's can count individual pods when in orbit with only a single Destroyers worth of RD's when scouting, but with an entire fleets worth of RD's twittering, none of them can actually see the pods behind the Havenite fleet a couple months later... Don't worry, RD's magically could not count pods at Solon either during the battle. As if Honor would not set an RD to watch the near orbitals where the older ships resided... Nah. Wouldn't want to do that! Hell no. Gotta give em a fighting chance. After all her name is Honor is it not... Only "honorable" fighters give the other a fighting chance in stand up combat.

Oh wait..... That is not how you fight a war... Hrmmmm

--snipping--

Relax wrote: What? You mean RD's can count individual pods when in orbit with only a single Destroyers worth of RD's when scouting, but with an entire fleets worth of RD's twittering, none of them can actually see the pods behind the Havenite fleet a couple months later... Don't worry, RD's magically could not count pods at Solon either during the battle. As if Honor would not set an RD to watch the near orbitals where the older ships resided... Nah. Wouldn't want to do that! Hell no. Gotta give em a fighting chance. After all her name is Honor is it not... Only "honorable" fighters give the other a fighting chance in stand up combat.

Oh wait..... That is not how you fight a war... Hrmmmm

Those I don't have as much trouble with, as it takes a certain amount of time to get the RD's on station, no idea where but I think we're told their max accel is around 2K g's before they start becoming really easy to detect. Space being big, takes time, yada yada yada.

But not firing a cascade of missiles early that can come in at 20x that 1st two stages and 40x that third stage? time on target would have forced the issue. Not assuming any hits on Havenite SD's etc but (let's assume 1 pod per home fleet ship, including pen-aids home fleet ship, all attempting to get past the 250 SD's to take out pods or keep the RHN from deploying more. Granted, Haven would have had to start doing the same thing to Home Fleet, but within a short period of time I think the RMN's individual superiority in pod-launchers, pen-aids, etc. plus the system defense pods would have made Lester's day rather more difficult.

Thoughts?

kzt wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote: Those towers are ridiculously strong.

David seems to think that everyone is trying to design a hardened fortress with everything he's done. The ships being two to three+ orders of magnitude stronger than they need to be, the towers able to stand up to midrange nuclear contact bursts.

Extra material costs money, reduces usable volume and increases build time. There is a reason why people don't design aircraft to survive being flown through skyscrapers or bridges to handle someone parking an aircraft carrier on it.

As i´ve read it, it seems to be a matter of structural supports requiring a certain amount of material to be functional, but once you hit that level of functional you also get a bonus of a lot of extra structural integrity.

You know what architects and structural engineers do with ridiculously strong materials? They make things much thinner and more open.

Not if the material NEEDS a certain "thickness" to achieve that ridiculous strength.

And they usually minimalise for the primary reason of building bigger/higher, as doing that today requires total and upper parts weight to not be too great.
Ceramacrete obviously doesn´t play by regular rules as it´s lighter and much stronger.

And it´s not like there are no such materials already in existence. For example there´s one such material that today is used by dentistry for certain demanding fillings, it´s very complex, much stronger than concrete, much lighter, and right now too expensive to use for anything largescale, not to mention noone knows a way to work with it in large scale either.

But if those two problems were fixed some day, then there you have your "ceramacrete" already.


As mentioned, ceramacrete is often used in about a foot thick builds, it may simply be that once you reduce that thickness by more than a little, the material gets insufficient internal support and becomes much weaker, so you build it to last, nothing wrong about that.

Have you ever met an architect?

Personally, my 2nd best friend´s father is one.

More pointedly i might mention how the WTC were "wonders of lightweight construction", and how that design style was effectively banned just years after they were finished.

And how nowadays, there´s just no highrise built without just a single structural support, anywhere. It´s not even 2 independent separate supports, but rather 3, 4 or even 5, often designed in such a spread out way that something that causes severe damage to one support simply cannot reach at least some other structural supports without whatever caused the damage is so extreme that it takes down a building right away.

So you detect a cloud of recon drones heading towards you. This tells you what? They turnover and start slowing down, then, at a light minute range from you they all vanish. Your response is what?

SharkHunter wrote:But not firing a cascade of missiles early that can come in at 20x that 1st two stages and 40x that third stage? time on target would have forced the issue. Not assuming any hits on Havenite SD's etc but (let's assume 1 pod per home fleet ship, including pen-aids home fleet ship, all attempting to get past the 250 SD's to take out pods or keep the RHN from deploying more. Granted, Haven would have had to start doing the same thing to Home Fleet, but within a short period of time I think the RMN's individual superiority in pod-launchers, pen-aids, etc. plus the system defense pods would have made Lester's day rather more difficult.

Thoughts?

At some point the voodoo of control links kicks in. The limit on the number of missiles you can effectively time-on-target is limited by your control links. And we're told (however much it bothers certain members) that even out at 65+ million km lightspeed control links are still critical and missiles without them are effectively useless.

Homefleet was very light on pod-based designs, and hull for hull mounted less fire control that Haven's attacking fleets. Also much of Home Fleet didn't have MDM capable tubes (relatively few tube based SDs were so built or refit), so if they burned through their towed pods they'd be out of the fight until they managed to close a lot of range while still taking rolled pod fire.


That said since they died with many pods unfired they obviously should have started firing earlier. Even if they didn't get many hits it would force Haven to use-or-lose the pods they'd started stacking up with donkeys. That should result in less dense, and longer ranged (less accurate) missile launches.
Home Fleet is still screwed if 3rd or 8th doesn't come quickly to the rescue. But hopefully they last a bit longer and do a bit more damage before being chewed up by podnaughts.

Home and 3rd were screwed no matter what, the correlation of forces was too far against them. However they chose obviously suboptimal approaches and essentially ended up fighting the battle having given up all their advantages of greater range, massively more ammo and much better accuracy at long range. The few Apollo armed ships in 3rd could have killed somewhere around 30 RHN SDs if someone had allowed to them to either deploy pods or start firing as soon as they reached effective range on 2nd (like right after exiting hyper).

And when you fight the battle the enemy wants, outnumbered and outgunned having given up all your advantages, you will tend to lose pretty badly pretty much every time.