(SPOILERS) From David re: a certain ship's fate

Easternmystic wrote:

Dilandu wrote:
Well, on Earth, Britain, France and other major naval power held inquiry pretty often, if something went screwed. In this case, they clearly have the situation with shipbuilding program.

That's one benefit of not having politicions in charge. Decisions can actually can made on merit. There's also the lack of politico's looking for scapegoats to throw under the bus.

Huh. So - politicians can be counted on to make decisions on anything but merit, and to look for scapegoats, and these habits cannot be found in any human beings but politicians?

Jonathan_S wrote:I agree that the ICN will almost certainly go through the process of an inquiry; if for no other reason than to distribute a lessons learned.
One correction though; neither of the two lost ironclads were steamships - not even auxiliary screws. Making then even closer to obsolescent.

The main question would be "why there weren't any modern steamships - even not armored - in all Dohlar Bay squadron?"

Dilandu wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:I agree that the ICN will almost certainly go through the process of an inquiry; if for no other reason than to distribute a lessons learned.
One correction though; neither of the two lost ironclads were steamships - not even auxiliary screws. Making then even closer to obsolescent.

The main question would be "why there weren't any modern steamships - even not armored - in all Dohlar Bay squadron?"

Fuel, they are building up coal stockpiles to allow steamship operation, but they aren't there yet.

Poker

pokermind wrote:Fuel, they are building up coal stockpiles to allow steamship operation, but they aren't there yet.

This problem could be easily solved by building sail&steam frigates and sloops, that could use sailpower to save the coal when winds are favorable.

Dilandu wrote:

pokermind wrote:Fuel, they are building up coal stockpiles to allow steamship operation, but they aren't there yet.

This problem could be easily solved by building sail&steam frigates and sloops, that could use sailpower to save the coal when winds are favorable.

You can. Of course there are compromises to that. The steam engine and coal chew up a lot of internal volume that you used to use for stores, magazines, powder rooms, or berthing. So a hybrid has less endurance, even under sail than a pure sailing frigate of the same size.
Also unless you do complicated things the screw will cause drag while not in use; so it'll be slower under pure sail than it would be without the screw. Though I'd guess even under steam it wouldn't be fast enough for the drag from masts, rigging, and furled sails to be a significant factor.

And of course it costs more than a pure sail or pure steam design.

But even with all those compromises they can still be effective in a number of situations. I'm just not sure Charis wants to divert much of the steam propulsion construction into somewhat more effective frigates rather than using that engine in a vastly more locally effective ironclad.
You save the iron/steel armor. But reducing armor plate production doesn't necessarily allow increased steam propulsion production; that would depend on where the bottlenecks are.

Jonathan_S wrote:You can. Of course there are compromises to that. The steam engine and coal chew up a lot of internal volume that you used to use for stores, magazines, powder rooms, or berthing. So a hybrid has less endurance, even under sail than a pure sailing frigate of the same size.
Also unless you do complicated things the screw will cause drag while not in use; so it'll be slower under pure sail than it would be without the screw. Though I'd guess even under steam it wouldn't be fast enough for the drag from masts, rigging, and furled sails to be a significant factor.

And of course it costs more than a pure sail or pure steam design.

But even with all those compromises they can still be effective in a number of situations. I'm just not sure Charis wants to divert much of the steam propulsion construction into somewhat more effective frigates rather than using that engine in a vastly more locally effective ironclad.
You save the iron/steel armor. But reducing armor plate production doesn't necessarily allow increased steam propulsion production; that would depend on where the bottlenecks are.

Yes, they would be less capable than iron lads. But they would be avaliable much sooner and in much great numbers. And they would be much more effective than sail galleon - and require less crew, also.

Even a few steamers in Dohlar Bay would prevent the current disaster simply due to their independence of wind. A couple of screw sloops - like US civil war era - would be perfectly capable of destroying all screw galleys force, and could also place the enemy galleons in dangerous position.

And, also - as all Earth naval warfare clearly indicate, you need SMALLER ships for coastal operations. Gunboats, not battleships.

Weird Harold wrote:

Easternmystic wrote:
That's one benefit of not having politicians in charge. Decisions can actually can made on merit. There's also the lack of politico's looking for scapegoats to throw under the bus.

A military "Board of Inquiry" isn't a political process, it is more akin to an "accident investigation" intended to discor what happened and how it can be prevented from happening again.

There will almost certainly be an inquiry, probably a formal Board of Inquiry, into the loss of two steamships, including the capture of one.

I was obviously being overly glib. What you have stated is the ideal of what a board of inquiry should be and the truth is that most military services on earth come admirably close to that ideal. However, as with any human ideal political factors are never entirely absent.


for example, does anyone seriously think that the command staff of Abu Ghraib were ignorant of the abuses going on under their command. Even if they were they would be culpable of incompetence and if they did know they would be culpable for condoning the abuse of prisoners. Yet not one person of command rank received as much as a reprimand.

Charis went with the Rottweiler Class pure sail Ironclads, skipping the Sail/Steam ships planning to go to the King Harold BBs. As the King Harolds should be finished before any new construction could be built, and the coaling stations to support their operation be in place, thus why field outmoded steam/sail frigates when you'll have battleships?

As to the earlier Steam ironclads they are not good sea boats, but designed for river/canal operation.

Poker

pokermind wrote:Charis went with the Rottweiler Class pure sail Ironclads, skipping the Sail/Steam ships planning to go to the King Harold BBs. As the King Harolds should be finished before any new construction could be built, and the coaling stations to support their operation be in place, thus why field outmoded steam/sail frigates when you'll have battleships?

As to the earlier Steam ironclads they are not good sea boats, but designed for river/canal operation.

Poker

Because you can't fulfil all the roles with only a few battleships that would be ready somewhere in future. Charis need sloops for convoy protection and sea patrol. They need steam gunboat with small draft for the coastal operations - because large ships are, simply, unable to operate near coastlines. Basically, they red a lot of ships for everyday duty, not just a few large battleships.

Dilandu wrote:

Easternmystic wrote:
So all those wunderwaffe that Charis has been building have been a huge mistake. The galleons, new cannon, breachloaders, ship armor, cased ammunition etc... have been a gigantic waste of time and effort on the part of Charis. Just imagine where they could be today if they hadn't wasted their time building any of this stuff.

Yes, you completely missed my point.

Please, learn the difference between the "superior weapon" and "superweapon" There is difference, and pretty sharp, actually.

To make things easier, let's look at the World War II and the USN shipbuilding.

The superior weapon way (real): the USN started to build a large number of not individually perfect, but quickly available fleet carriers of "Essex" and "Independence" classes, and armed them with the F4F and latrer F6F fighters. None of this weapons were perfect, but they were superior to the cotemporary japanese, and they could be build quickly and in large numbers. And they won the Pacific War.

The superweapon way (charisian): if the USN decided to play Charisian, they would not build any fleet carriers in 1942-1944. Istead they would wait until the "Midway"-class supercarrier would be avaliable in 1945-1946; in hope that japanese would be so scared of this giant ships, that the IJN would surrender without actual combat. Also, the USA wouldn't build "Wildcat's" or "Hellcat's", but they would wait until the "Corsair" would be perfected.

Also, in the "superweapon" model the USA did not build any destroyers, escort ships, submarines or landing crafts in 1942-1944. Only a handful of cruisers as scouts and counter-raiders.

See the difference?

What I see is that you have never discovered the meaning of the word irony.

I thought that by pointing out that your arguments could be applied to every other technology that Charis has introduced would be sufficient to alert everyone that I was using irony when I did precisely that later in the post.

I realize now that I severely overestimated some people's critical thinking skills. Then of course the irony of you misunderstanding my post and assuming I was the one that had misunderstood is simple priceless.

Now onto your latest arguments. Perhaps you should do a little light reading regarding the current state of U.S. military procurement programs.

The F-35 program is a good place to start. It is the ultimate do everything jet fighter and has been plagued with serious problems for years.

The basic difference between the U.S. military building strategy during WW2 and now, is that during WW2 the U.S. had opponents with fewer raw resources and smaller populations. The U.S. simple had to produce more equipment of comparable quality to ensure that they would be victorious. That is they simply needed a quantitative advantage over their opponents.

Currently the U.S.'s potential opponents have more raw resources and larger populations. If they end up in a war against these opponents they will need to achieve a qualitative advantage over their potential opponents. That is they need better technology and training.

Now, lookong at the situation facing Charis, they have a smaller population than the COGA and fewer raw resources. They are immensely more productive than the COGA on a per capita basis but sheer population numbers means that they are still being outproduced. Therefore Charis needs to maintain a qualitative advantage with their military equipment. training and doctrine to survive.

Lets look at the particulars of how they have done that. Consider the King Haaralds that have your panties in such a bunch. Frankly your assertion that they have delayed production of other ships to make the King Haaralds is only true within your own mind. They have done nothing of the sort.

Charis needed to make experimental equipment to learn how to make ship armor for any of their ships, not just the King Haaralds, any ship that they wanted to armor. They then proceeded to use the material used during this phase to build the 'Delthaks".

After that they used the experience gained in making the "Delthaks" to build the first "Cities". During this time they used the experience gained in operating the "Delthaks" to make modifications to the 'Cities" and to redesign the "King Haaralds".

When the first "Cities" were launched they started building the first 3 'King Haaralds". They did not stop building the "Cities" They are still building the same number of them even. At the most it will take slightly longer to complete the full building program for all of the "Cities".

This look a lot like a strategy of building up your future capabilities while still building equipment for current needs to me.