Roland Peacetime duties

SharkHunter wrote:Let's assume that when peace exists

So what are the Rolands doing? Henry Kissinger was famous for asking where the carriers were

After all, a pair of Rolands care pretty much represents any potential warlord's bad day.

Don't be absurd. A Roland is the equivalent of sending a RIB in today's world. You want to impress a warlord? You send Battlecruisers or SD's. A Roland scares no one in 20yrs.

kzt wrote:

Bill Woods wrote: If a Roland's bow and stern tubes can be closely packed, why can't broadside tubes?

Because the hammerhead systems extend 30-40 meters into the main body of the ship. Hard to do a 60-70 meter deep system in a 54 meter wide hull.

The depth broadside exists in the Roland. One can't be a square peg though. You would just have to angle the tubes as they would not be perpendicular to the broadside. The con for this arrangement obviously is that the initial velocity imparted by the missile tube itself is not 100% directed towards the enemy. But with a DDM, who cares honestly.

Duckk wrote:Even without an armored core, the core hull of DDs and CLs contains stuff, like fusion plants(s). Some of that stuff may not fit between your staggered weapons. Alternatively, staggering the weapons will displace those core components towards one side of the hull or the other, making them a bit more vulnerable. At the very least, zig-zagging the core components just to fit them into the remaining sliver of internal space would be a nightmare.

As for having multiple weapon decks, that's only doable if the ships is sufficiently tall enough. It took until the Star Knight (300 ktons) to reach that point.

The way warships are pictured as constructed, the broadside weapons decks are no where near the core hull.

At the front, you have the bow hammerhead.

next you have the bow impeller ring.

next you have the forward core hull. it probably contains the bridge, fusion reactor, hyper generator, may contain other things.

In the middle of the ship is the weapons deck.

next you have the aft core hull. it contains damage control, fusion reactor, flag bridge, crew quarters, may contain other things.

next is the aft impeller ring

finally is the aft hammerhead.

The armored core would be forward and aft of the weapons deck(s), not inside them.

According to HoS, the redoubtable class BC is 87M wide. half of 87 is 43M. 43M Graser on 87M hull
top view
|<--G--X--G-->|
|<--M--X--M-->|
The shrike B is 72 M long so 43M is 60% of the length. The pictures of the shrike in AoV show the shrike graser extending more than 80% the length of the shrike, which is at least 57M, so the weapons deck would look like this:
|<---G---<>CM>|
|<--M--X--M-->|
CM could be Counter missiles, PDLC's telemetry links or a host of other things.

with the roland at 188K tons, A DDM light cruiser should be about 250K tons. Prince Consort-class Mass: 246,500 tons Dimensions: 487 × 59 × 49 m

if the shrike graser is 43M
|<CMX--M-->|
|<--G--XCM>|
|<--M--XCM>|
|<CMX--G-->|

if the shrike graseer is 60M long
|<CMX--M-->|
|<---G----<|
|<--M--XCM>|
|>----G--->|

instead of putting the crew quarters in the core hull, put them above and below the weapons deck. That way there is extra room and you can fit out a light cruisers with 8 broadside DDM tubes and 4 energy weapons.

Bill Woods wrote: If a Roland's bow and stern tubes can be closely packed, why can't broadside tubes?

kzt wrote: Because the hammerhead systems extend 30-40 meters into the main body of the ship. Hard to do a 60-70 meter deep system in a 54 meter wide hull.

Relax wrote: The depth broadside exists in the Roland. One can't be a square peg though. You would just have to angle the tubes as they would not be perpendicular to the broadside. The con for this arrangement obviously is that the initial velocity imparted by the missile tube itself is not 100% directed towards the enemy. But with a DDM, who cares honestly.

And if a ship is firing both broadsides at once, on launching at least 50% are pointed nowhere near the target.

Bill Woods wrote:If a Roland's bow and stern tubes can be closely packed, why can't broadside tubes?

They're not THAT closely packed: http://maxxqbunine.deviantart.com/art/R ... -471275655

OTOH, there is still the potential - key word, that - to take out the entire missile launching capability of a hammerhead with a single hit. Not that a single hit WILL take out the weapons, but that it's possible. Much in the same way it's possible to get a Golden BB shot on a ship's reactor(s).

Also, a Roland's launch tubes are about twice the length of a standard broadside mount.

Next, there's textev dating way back to the early books in the series that have stated that tubes are separated to prevent a single hit from taking out multiple tubes. The Roland design takes a risk in clustering those tubes as they have, which is why it's an interim design, but it's there to give a DD the ability to use DDMs.

Lastly, all the tubes for the Roland are fed from a common magazine. Standard broadside tubes, in most cases, have their own, independent magazines.

Regarding the core hull discussion a few posts back, the core hull on all ships that have it, goes the entire length of the center section of a ship. There are no breaks in it.

Bill Woods wrote: If a Roland's bow and stern tubes can be closely packed, why can't broadside tubes?

In addition to what kzt said I seem to recall that Rolands managed to squeeze in 6 tubes that tightly by clustering some of the missile support equipment; sharing it among the tubes instead of the normal practice of dedicating equipment to each tube.

There's probably a pretty low limit of how far you could extend their fairly dense packing of tubes before you'd have to provide a non-trivial buffer zone so the protruding shared support equipment of adjacent clusters could fit in. Basically to get 6 tubes into that tiny space they cut corners and played tetris with the equipment to fit it through the bottlenecks and let it swell out where room could be freed up. Much deeper and "lumpier" than a normal missile tube.


So even if you're willing to guarantee multiple tubes are lost to every hit you still can't squeeze in anywhere near as many to a broadside as a naive comparison of the square footage might indicate.

(Though Maxxq, having figured out how to make everything fit for his ship renders is obviously more authoritative about it that me)

Jonathan_S wrote:

Bill Woods wrote: If a Roland's bow and stern tubes can be closely packed, why can't broadside tubes?

In addition to what kzt said I seem to recall that Rolands managed to squeeze in 6 tubes that tightly by clustering some of the missile support equipment; sharing it among the tubes instead of the normal practice of dedicating equipment to each tube.

There's probably a pretty low limit of how far you could extend their fairly dense packing of tubes before you'd have to provide a non-trivial buffer zone so the protruding shared support equipment of adjacent clusters could fit in. Basically to get 6 tubes into that tiny space they cut corners and played tetris with the equipment to fit it through the bottlenecks and let it swell out where room could be freed up. Much deeper and "lumpier" than a normal missile tube.


So even if you're willing to guarantee multiple tubes are lost to every hit you still can't squeeze in anywhere near as many to a broadside as a naive comparison of the square footage might indicate.

(Though Maxxq, having figured out how to make everything fit for his ship renders is obviously more authoritative about it that me)

Not to mention, about seven meters of armor, making internal volume far less than surface calculations could allow. Even then, there's some slight thinning of the armor on the sides of the hammerhead to allow for clearance of the tubes and associated equipment.

Also, there are a pair of grasers packed in there as well, complete with all the armoring and equipment THEY require.

MaxxQ wrote:Not to mention, about seven meters of armor, making internal volume far less than surface calculations could allow. Even then, there's some slight thinning of the armor on the sides of the hammerhead to allow for clearance of the tubes and associated equipment.

Also, there are a pair of grasers packed in there as well, complete with all the armoring and equipment THEY require.

Where in the hell do you get 7 meters of armor on a rolands hammerhead???????????????????

Quote "Short Victorious War": Nike was no wall of battle ship, but leaving her top and bottom unarmored let her flanks carry twelve centimeters of side armor over more critical areas and as much as a meter over her vitals—like her fusion rooms.

Where does it say that a destroyer has 7 times the armor thickness of a reliant class BC 4 1/2 times larger???

A little untalked about part of the books is that the armor completely changed from early books to late books via Handwavium. IN FIRE FORGED talks about why armor is as it is. Changed to essentially "aero gel" as optimum laser armor. SD's had literally 10's of meters of armor in the mid books. Or was that the pearls? I think DW stated that little tid bit in his pearls around the time of the great resizing.

Anyways... FYI

darrell wrote:

MaxxQ wrote:Not to mention, about seven meters of armor, making internal volume far less than surface calculations could allow. Even then, there's some slight thinning of the armor on the sides of the hammerhead to allow for clearance of the tubes and associated equipment.

Also, there are a pair of grasers packed in there as well, complete with all the armoring and equipment THEY require.

Where in the hell do you get 7 meters of armor on a rolands hammerhead???????????????????

Quote "Short Victorious War": Nike was no wall of battle ship, but leaving her top and bottom unarmored let her flanks carry twelve centimeters of side armor over more critical areas and as much as a meter over her vitals—like her fusion rooms.

Where does it say that a destroyer has 7 times the armor thickness of a reliant class BC 4 1/2 times larger???

Hammerheads have always been the toughest part of warships. The Nike description only refers to its broadside armour - obviously, they weren't going to cut the broken fusion plant out through the front of the ship!

Even after bow and stern-walls were added, it's still a good idea to armour up the hammerheads... lest you take a direct hit from directly ahead running parallel to your ship. Without the armour, that kind of a shot is a total killer.