Roland Peacetime duties

Jeroswen wrote:I got to thinking of the new designs and wondered. With the new compensater designs the speed difference between GA ships has narrowed a lot. I am re-reading the books and not far enough along to get a firm grasp of current ship speeds by class. So here is a what if for those good at the number crunching.

What if Manticore decided to build a destroyer with enough mass to top out at 600g acceleration. I would drop the light cruiser and just built a cruiser class with a top speed of 550g acceleration. Then a battle cruiser of 500g acceleration and a SD of 450g acceleration. What would the size and weights of the ships look like? If you have to redesign then redesign.

Each class would be faster than its current non-GA equivalent and be much bigger and tougher to boot. I can see the argument at the Admiralty. One side wanting to bring the speed down to First War levels with increased mass for armor, weapons, and active defense. The other side wanting to keep ship sizes the same and push the speed envelope to its limit. Its the old speed vs armor argument writ large.

So a Roland is what 650g or so acceleration at 95k tons? How much bigger would its replacement be if it topped out at 600g?

Keep in mind that even the accel numbers from House of Steel reflect the 'as designed' ship specs; later refits that include compensator upgrades can increase that performance further.

The best compensator performance I've noticed so far was an Invictus-class SD(P) in SftS with appeared to be capable of a max accel of 610g; which is 153.93% better than what a pre-war compensator could do on that tonnage. And also incidentally quicker than the ship you wanted the new destroyer to be

Applying that same ratio to a Roland shows that their then current top should be up to 790g! (Though "only 711-ish at 90%; the new 'safe' accel)

The problem with trying to calculate the ships with the displacements you requested is that they're all way out past the last datapoint I have to plot the accel curves with. The destroyer you want would mass more than an Invictus SD(P)!!.
I know the compensator "cliff" must still be out there, somewhere, past the last data points I have on the curve; but I'm not sure the tonnage it kicks in, or how sharp the accel drop is now once you pass that tonnage. And the calculations would be entirely dependent on that unknown information.
Sorry I couldn't provide the numbers you wanted.

Jonathan_S wrote:

Jeroswen wrote:I got to thinking of the new designs and wondered. With the new compensater designs the speed difference between GA ships has narrowed a lot. I am re-reading the books and not far enough along to get a firm grasp of current ship speeds by class. So here is a what if for those good at the number crunching.

What if Manticore decided to build a destroyer with enough mass to top out at 600g acceleration. I would drop the light cruiser and just built a cruiser class with a top speed of 550g acceleration. Then a battle cruiser of 500g acceleration and a SD of 450g acceleration. What would the size and weights of the ships look like? If you have to redesign then redesign.

Each class would be faster than its current non-GA equivalent and be much bigger and tougher to boot. I can see the argument at the Admiralty. One side wanting to bring the speed down to First War levels with increased mass for armor, weapons, and active defense. The other side wanting to keep ship sizes the same and push the speed envelope to its limit. Its the old speed vs armor argument writ large.

So a Roland is what 650g or so acceleration at 95k tons? How much bigger would its replacement be if it topped out at 600g?

Keep in mind that even the accel numbers from House of Steel reflect the 'as designed' ship specs; later refits that include compensator upgrades can increase that performance further.

The best compensator performance I've noticed so far was an Invictus-class SD(P) in SftS with appeared to be capable of a max accel of 610g; which is 153.93% better than what a pre-war compensator could do on that tonnage. And also incidentally quicker than the ship you wanted the new destroyer to be

Applying that same ratio to a Roland shows that their then current top should be up to 790g! (Though "only 711-ish at 90%; the new 'safe' accel)

The problem with trying to calculate the ships with the displacements you requested is that they're all way out past the last datapoint I have to plot the accel curves with. The destroyer you want would mass more than an Invictus SD(P)!!.
I know the compensator "cliff" must still be out there, somewhere, past the last data points I have on the curve; but I'm not sure the tonnage it kicks in, or how sharp the accel drop is now once you pass that tonnage. And the calculations would be entirely dependent on that unknown information.
Sorry I couldn't provide the numbers you wanted.

Agreed that there is not enough information, but what I can find is that the newest compensators appear to have an acceleration about 45% faster than old style compensators. That would give a SD with the newest compensators more acceleration than a DD with old style compensators.

As far as the maximum tonnage cutoff, there is lots of formulas that it can be based on.

The one that I like is that since the compensator field is figured on a volume, we are looking at the cube root of the increase in compensator efficiency. In other words a field that is 45% more effecient would be able to fit a ship that is 13% bigger before it hits the cutoff cliff. Where the old cliff was 8.5M tons, the new cliff would be 9.6M tons, and the invictus at 8.77 M tons is well within that peramiter.

At the opposite end, a field that is 45% more efficient might allow a ship to be 45% bigger, but that would be 12.3M tons, which would be the size of the newest manty forts.

Jeroswen wrote:Each class would be faster than its current non-GA equivalent and be much bigger and tougher to boot. I can see the argument at the Admiralty. One side wanting to bring the speed down to First War levels with increased mass for armor, weapons, and active defense. The other side wanting to keep ship sizes the same and push the speed envelope to its limit. Its the old speed vs armor argument writ large.

It seems they're building bigger and faster. The Invictus is half a million tons bigger and had 150+ extra Gs over the Gryphon. Both the Nike and the Agamemnon at least doubled the mass of the Reliant and gained a good 10% in speed, even over the improved Reliant III/IVs which also added mass (slightly) and increased speed (substantially). The RMN's heavy cruisers from the Star Knight to the Sag-C shows three clear and distinct compensator generations.

At design, anyway. Whenever those older ships have been recently refitted, they will be leaving their newer, larger replacements in the dust.

darrell wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:Keep in mind that even the accel numbers from House of Steel reflect the 'as designed' ship specs; later refits that include compensator upgrades can increase that performance further.

The best compensator performance I've noticed so far was an Invictus-class SD(P) in SftS with appeared to be capable of a max accel of 610g; which is 153.93% better than what a pre-war compensator could do on that tonnage. And also incidentally quicker than the ship you wanted the new destroyer to be

Applying that same ratio to a Roland shows that their then current top should be up to 790g! (Though "only 711-ish at 90%; the new 'safe' accel)

The problem with trying to calculate the ships with the displacements you requested is that they're all way out past the last datapoint I have to plot the accel curves with. The destroyer you want would mass more than an Invictus SD(P)!!.
I know the compensator "cliff" must still be out there, somewhere, past the last data points I have on the curve; but I'm not sure the tonnage it kicks in, or how sharp the accel drop is now once you pass that tonnage. And the calculations would be entirely dependent on that unknown information.
Sorry I couldn't provide the numbers you wanted.

Agreed that there is not enough information, but what I can find is that the newest compensators appear to have an acceleration about 45% faster than old style compensators. That would give a SD with the newest compensators more acceleration than a DD with old style compensators.

As far as the maximum tonnage cutoff, there is lots of formulas thatit can be based on.

The one that I like is that since the compensator field is figured on a volume, we are looking at the cube root of the increase in compensator efficiency. In other words a field that is 45% more effecient would be able to fit a ship that is 13% bigger before it hits the cutoff cliff. Where the old cliff was 8.5M tons, the new cliff would be 9.6M tons, and the invictus at 8.77 M tons is well within that peramiter.

At the opposite end, a field that is 45% more efficient might allow a ship to be 45% bigger, but that would be 12.3M tons, which would be the size of the newest manty forts.

Your volume based approach is an interstitial thought and one that seems to make sense.

I certainly feel that the cliff point can't have been going up at the same straight percentage improvement that the accels all seem to have been going with. As you say, that leads to the idea that Manticore and Haven both independently decided to leave over 25% of their max displacement unused. Manticore might decide their tech edge justified keeping SD(P) sizes well below max practical. But it seem far less likely the Haven would have followed suite. Especially on thing like their already larger CLACs were more volume increases the number of birds they can carry to support their swarm tactics.
So yeah I feel something must be limiting the compensator cliff; and your thought to basically apply the cube law to it seems an elegant reason for it to have done so.