Roland Peacetime duties

Somtaaw wrote:Oh, and which Solarian system was it, where Terekhov's missiles were already in flight so even though the SLN unit surrendered, he literally COULD NOT stop the in-flight missiles in time to avoid totally vaporizing the ships in question? Wasn't this also a battle that involved Rolands, if so then it's a picture case that surrender doesn't mean said Rolands will need to board a full ship, simply covering escape pods and pinnace tubes.


The ranges ships engage at, and the light-speed telemetry of anything below Apollo, coupled with the range a Roland has, means surrenders of intact ships are not always possible. Escape pods, pinnaces, shuttles and the like are far more likely to be what a Roland would be "boarding", and even a squad is almost too many for that form of need for Marines.

Yes, people understand lightspeed lag. It's not illegal to be unable to stop launched missiles if an enemy strikes their wedge any more than it would be illegal to be unable to stop artillery rounds in flight if an enemy indicated their surrender.

But that doesn't change that sometimes they do managed surrender and then you have to be able to deal with that.

Sorry, can't take you aboard. I'll tow your lifpods to somewhere near a more or less inhabitable planet. I'll send someone back for you when we finish our cruise. Best of luck.

Jonathan_S wrote:

Keith_w wrote:That was precisely my suggestion. If a pirate attacks, destroy it. No issues with local governors releasing them because the pirates are actually working for them. As recall, for the most part, captures occurred when a warship came on a captured ship and the warship wished to recover it for the owners. If a Roland is sailing in escort duty, this is unlikely to happen. Any pirate stupid enough to attack when a merchant convoy is in company with a ship of war deserves to be removed from the pirate genetic pool. In any case, there shortly will be a shortage of pirates attacking convoys since any stupid enough to do so will be eliminated and any others will avoid such convoys and eventual destruction.

And my issue still stands - sometimes you're attacked by people covered by various interstellar treaties (privateers or naval warships) and refusing to accept surrenders from them is illegal. But to accept surrenders you then need the manpower (and secure space) to collect all the prisoners and feed and securely house them until you can turn them over to appropriate authorities. A Roland probably doesn't have the room, food, or life support capacity, to bring along the surrendered crew of a conventional DD or CL!

And even with pirates you often would prefer to accept an offer of surrender so you can take prisoners for interrogation and to look for intel on their ship about who is supporting them (fences, bases, financers, etc) so you can hope to choke off the problem a little higher up rather than just weedwhacking pirates as they appear.

Oh, and you might want to be able to board and take back a captured ship.


So I still say you need something with more crew and boarding party than a Roland to properly do convoy escort or anti-piracy duties. A squadron of Rolands would be crazy overkill from the firepower standpoint, but starts to have the collective crew and space necessary - but you're better off teaming them with a legacy design.

I mostly agree with that, except that even a squadron of Rolands doesn't really have the crew capacity for anti-piracy or convoy escort duties, sure, they'll have the collective crew for it, but each Roland can only afford to give up a handful of people - they can probably manage to find boarding and prize crews for one or two merchants or one small pirate. I'm not sure they'd be able to put even a skeleton prize crew on a proper conventional/legacy warship - and I doubt they'd have the space to keep, much less keep secure, a few hundred prisoners.


And those failings, contribute, in my mind, to the relegation of the Roland-class to swift retirement, no more to be built.
In addition those failures are why I don't really see the Roland as a proper generalist Destroyer that RFC and the RMN say Destroyers should be. It's too much a warfighting specialist, but it doesn't even really have the ammo capacity for that - if it max stacks salvos, based on the Sag-C max fire control being about triple the number of tubes, a Roland can fire 6 triple salvos of 36 and a double salvo of 24. At max fire rate, a Roland shoots itself dry in 6 minutes - a podlayer lasts longer than that.

Admittedly, with the Mod-G upgrades to the Mark 16 DDM, a Roland can probably put a serious hurt on an SLN SD and obliterate anything smaller in League inventory. Of course, to do that, it'll probably need to stack salvos and shoot itself dry in the process.

Lord Skimper wrote:Roland's not only don't have crew for prize operations, they don't have Brigs for the pirates the Marines, they don't have, capture.

Maybe they don't have a peacetime role?

When Skimper thinks an idea is unreasonable, perhaps it's time to walk away from it.

darrell wrote:Most DD's we have seen in the honorverse are actually light cruisers writ small, just like DD's are SD's writ small, and the SEM uses them as such.

The roland, however, is actually designed more like an infant DN, designed to take out other ships, and as such can probably go toe to to with most heavy cruisers.

RFC has said and I believe that destroyers won't go away and I believe him, but I don't believe that many more rolands will be built post war.

I have seen a lot of talk about replacing the flag deck with marine quarters, but I don't think it is practical. IMO it is likely that the training areas required by marines will take up more space on a man for man basis, but even if not, you won't be able to get more than a squad in the same space.

As far as the Kamerling-class system control cruiser, Mass: 276,250 tons puts it bigger than any light cruiser listed in HoS.

I can see the next destroyer design one of the following:

1: similar in size to the culverin: 100K tons, 6 broadside LERM missile tubes, 3 broadside grasers and several PDLC's. Chase 1 graser, 8-10 CM tubes and several PDLC's, with a platoon of marines.

2: Roland B, 10% larger (200K tons) to include space for a platoon of marines.

Nah, the next generations of hyper-capable warships built by the RMN are all going to be DDM capable, and likely bigger than Rolands, because of tonnage creep.
Any warship the RMN builds is going to have to be fully capable of the frontline combat duties its class's role has if so required. And that means DDMs, and the tonnage increases required for survivability in the mass swarm of MDM/MSM paradigm.
There might have been room for another generation of ERM-ships had Oyster Bay not happened and Cataphracts not been revealed.
Plus, it ultimately simplifies ammo requirements. Once the legacy ships are retired and the more modern ERM ships like Sag-Bs, you can stop making ERMs, and you're only making five types of missiles: DDM Mark 16, MDM Mark 23, MDM Mark 23-E(Apollo Controller), System Defense MDMs (whatever they're called), and System Defense MDM Apollo Controller.

kzt wrote:Sorry, can't take you aboard. I'll tow your lifpods to somewhere near a more or less inhabitable planet. I'll send someone back for you when we finish our cruise. Best of luck.

That assumes that both the lifepods have the necessary endurance to last however long that takes, and you have the tractor capability to haul them all. Oh, and your accel is then shot to hell because you don't want to paste the guys in the pods.
Still does nothing for supplying prize crews or boarding/inspection parties.

kzt wrote:Sorry, can't take you aboard. I'll tow your lifpods to somewhere near a more or less inhabitable planet. I'll send someone back for you when we finish our cruise. Best of luck.

And Honestly, this makes complete sense. 99% of pirate attacks will take place in an inhabited system - even if it is just a mining habitat. And, of course, the general rule is to let the local government try them, since they have jurisdiction, unless they are on "the list" - then you only need to worry about the pirates consuming 1 airlock's worth of air.

Jonathan_S wrote:

Somtaaw wrote:Oh, and which Solarian system was it, where Terekhov's missiles were already in flight so even though the SLN unit surrendered, he literally COULD NOT stop the in-flight missiles in time to avoid totally vaporizing the ships in question? Wasn't this also a battle that involved Rolands, if so then it's a picture case that surrender doesn't mean said Rolands will need to board a full ship, simply covering escape pods and pinnace tubes.


The ranges ships engage at, and the light-speed telemetry of anything below Apollo, coupled with the range a Roland has, means surrenders of intact ships are not always possible. Escape pods, pinnaces, shuttles and the like are far more likely to be what a Roland would be "boarding", and even a squad is almost too many for that form of need for Marines.

Yes, people understand lightspeed lag. It's not illegal to be unable to stop launched missiles if an enemy strikes their wedge any more than it would be illegal to be unable to stop artillery rounds in flight if an enemy indicated their surrender.

But that doesn't change that sometimes they do managed surrender and then you have to be able to deal with that.

Except I picked out the Terekhov battle specifically because he did that with just one salvo per ship. So that still doesn't change the fact, that Roland's are so incredibly overarmed, surrender is almost impossible. The only time a Roland is ever going to have an intact ship surrendering, is because they managed to troll a pirate into energy range, like Honor preferred doing.

But trolling a pirate that close, means you're knowingly going after pirates. And the Roland's not designed for that, so your CO would have to be even dumber than Santino or Pavel Young, to order a Roland into that form of long-term (solo) patrolling. A lone Roland might do that sort of thing once, very much like how Terekhov with Hexapuma on a courtesy call to Nuncio, and found out there were pirates there and then. But a Roland isn't going to be going out of its way looking to board pirates.

Zavala, not Terekhov.

Duckk wrote:Zavala, not Terekhov.

Ok, Zavala then. I should reread the later books more to remember the little details better

Somtaaw wrote:Except I picked out the Terekhov battle specifically because he did that with just one salvo per ship. So that still doesn't change the fact, that Roland's are so incredibly overarmed, surrender is almost impossible. The only time a Roland is ever going to have an intact ship surrendering, is because they managed to troll a pirate into energy range, like Honor preferred doing.

But trolling a pirate that close, means you're knowingly going after pirates. And the Roland's not designed for that, so your CO would have to be even dumber than Santino or Pavel Young, to order a Roland into that form of long-term (solo) patrolling. A lone Roland might do that sort of thing once, very much like how Terekhov with Hexapuma on a courtesy call to Nuncio, and found out there were pirates there and then. But a Roland isn't going to be going out of its way looking to board pirates.

If the Roland fires a full 12 tube salvo at a pirate, or light commerce raider, I agree that the raider is most likely blown to shreds.

But you can't fire a salvo at someone out of the blue. (OK, if there's an active war and you and ID the ship as belonging to your enemy then yes you can, but not during peacetime).

If you're lucky the pirate/privateer/warship announces themselves and their hostile intentions before entering their own missile range. At that point, yeah, you can simply throw a salvo at the pirate and make them go boom.

But usually they wait until they're close enough for a warning shot. That means you have to deliberately give up most of the Roland's range advantage before the other guy reveals their true colors and you can blow them out of space. That seems suboptimal.

But the alternative is to wait until they're deep enough in the Roland's range basket that you're confident that they can't successfully run and then order then to identify themselves and standby for inspection. At that point the pirate might just surrender (unlikely). But if they try to run without talking or bluster you'd usually toss a single warning shot at them. Once they see your DDM's performance they again might surrender. If they don't you could throw 12 missiles at them and blow them out of space - but you might want to get intel or conserve ammo, and you might fire only a few DDMs; enough to be likely to cripple them but unlikely to vaporize them.


Also, as an aside, captured pirates you could dump on the system authorities if the piracy attempt happened within their territory. But privateers and naval raiders fall under PoW rules and I think you legally need to hold onto them not hand them over to 3rd parties. So you still might need to drag them back to Manticoran PoW camps - which means you need food, life support, and secure berthing for them all until you get home.

Jonathan_S wrote:

Somtaaw wrote:Except I picked out the Terekhov battle specifically because he did that with just one salvo per ship. So that still doesn't change the fact, that Roland's are so incredibly overarmed, surrender is almost impossible. The only time a Roland is ever going to have an intact ship surrendering, is because they managed to troll a pirate into energy range, like Honor preferred doing.

But trolling a pirate that close, means you're knowingly going after pirates. And the Roland's not designed for that, so your CO would have to be even dumber than Santino or Pavel Young, to order a Roland into that form of long-term (solo) patrolling. A lone Roland might do that sort of thing once, very much like how Terekhov with Hexapuma on a courtesy call to Nuncio, and found out there were pirates there and then. But a Roland isn't going to be going out of its way looking to board pirates.

If the Roland fires a full 12 tube salvo at a pirate, or light commerce raider, I agree that the raider is most likely blown to shreds.

But you can't fire a salvo at someone out of the blue. (OK, if there's an active war and you and ID the ship as belonging to your enemy then yes you can, but not during peacetime).

If you're lucky the pirate/privateer/warship announces themselves and their hostile intentions before entering their own missile range. At that point, yeah, you can simply throw a salvo at the pirate and make them go boom.

But usually they wait until they're close enough for a warning shot. That means you have to deliberately give up most of the Roland's range advantage before the other guy reveals their true colors and you can blow them out of space. That seems suboptimal.

But the alternative is to wait until they're deep enough in the Roland's range basket that you're confident that they can't successfully run and then order then to identify themselves and standby for inspection. At that point the pirate might just surrender (unlikely). But if they try to run without talking or bluster you'd usually toss a single warning shot at them. Once they see your DDM's performance they again might surrender. If they don't you could throw 12 missiles at them and blow them out of space - but you might want to get intel or conserve ammo, and you might fire only a few DDMs; enough to be likely to cripple them but unlikely to vaporize them.


Also, as an aside, captured pirates you could dump on the system authorities if the piracy attempt happened within their territory. But privateers and naval raiders fall under PoW rules and I think you legally need to hold onto them not hand them over to 3rd parties. So you still might need to drag them back to Manticoran PoW camps - which means you need food, life support, and secure berthing for them all until you get home.

You're right that a Roland has to let them get close enough to prevent their escape. But a Roland is too 'small' and lightly crewed to want to risk letting any form of pirate too close. Whether it's a dinky frigate with delusions of grandeur or a full up Frontier Fleet battlecruiser pretending to be a run of the mill pirate, an energy weapon duel can still go badly for the Roland.

But I think it's very unlikely that outside of freak circumstances, similar to the Hexapuma in Nuncio, a Roland will be doing non-piracy patrols. As this thread has gone round and round, a Roland is plain and simple a warship killer, it's too specialized to be pigeonholed into the generalist roles of pre-war ships.

If a Roland is actually having to operate (solo) in an anti-pirate role, I'm figuring it'll be in Manticoran space, where the RoE change. In Silesia, they can't pre-emptively open fire on a pirate, until they've committed and done warning shots and repeated orders for the freighter to heave-to and accept boarders. But in Manticoran space, no warships seem to casually approach freighters without calling well ahead of weapons range.

With parts of Silesia now being Manticoran space, and pirates not really having had too much time to realize just how the rules have changed, a Roland might operate there. So any warship approaching a Roland pretending to be a merchy can be assumed 'hostile'. Which means, like you said, waiting until they're deep enough in the Roland's missile basket to prevent escape, but hopefully too far out to return fire and definitely too far to use energy weapons. But for the Silesia anti-piracy, they won't really care about capturing the pirates and then turning them loose with warnings "dont let us catch you again", they're attacking shipping in Manticoran space which is game-set-dead

There is a huge difference between 30 million KM missile range and the roughly million km range where energy weapons become marginally dangerous to a ship with a sidewall up. It's not A or B.