Situation at the Front (SPOILERS FOR RTH)

StealthSeeker wrote:For readability, I'm going to shorten and clean up a few things. Forgive me if I clip something you consider important.

< snip >

Now I know I'm nit-picking here, but I just have to say it. Cuba is North West of the bulge of Brazil, way north west.

SS: But if the portal is in Cuba, why isn't the flight path for dragons from Cuba > Puerto Rico > St. Lucia > Guyana and points forward along Brazil's coast? It would seem to save a lot of time.

HTM: Excellent point, SS! The Leeward/Windward Islands route is indeed much shorter. Let's see ... dragons are carnivores, who need big animals to eat. Maybe the hunting on those relatively small islands isn't good enough for so many dragons, more than two hundred of them. Maybe Weber & Evans decided that it wouldn't be, when they set the Central American Route for the dragons, way back in Book One. But a single Courier Dragon might go that way.

What? 200 dragons? Uummmm.... it seemed that they were lucky to have a couple of dragons flying to Hells Gate. So I don't think it would be a question of food for the dragon. Besides, the dragons go days with out feeding. Surely they could last the few island hops till they reached South America again.

SS: As for a boat, I figure the Sharonan's would only need something with a 4" gun up front and a pair of borfors guns aft. That's not too big... They can ship it forward in parts, some assembly required, kind of thing.

HTM: I am not a Naval Architect, but I know better than to make Thomas Jefferson's mistake, that a single big gun can be successfully used on a small gunboat. The big gun will have a Big Recoil, which will damage or destroy a small boat. That is why 4" guns are put on Navy destroyers, which mass about a thousand (1000) tons. For a 5" gun, the warship mass will be at least 1,500 tons.

A 4" gun isn't that massive, the British easily mounted 4" guns on corvette class ships. Those aren't that big of a ship. Something that I think could easily be brought forward in parts and assembled

Mil-tech bard wrote:You all need to see this link --


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_m ... Royal_Navy

...and in particular look up the WW1 Royal Navy M15-class and M29-class monitors.

The former had a single 9.2 inch (23CM) and the latter a pair of 6-inch (152mm) guns on a displacement of 540 tons.

The size/displacement/capability of these vessels lends itself to disassembly and transport by rail.

Howard T. Map-addict wrote:This is of interest, Mill-tech bard,
but we do not know that monitor-type ships were ever built
on Sharona. They were only made OTL as part of a scramble,
when ironclad warships were suddenly needed *quickly." We
don't know that any Sharonan ever imagined a thing like that.

OTL monitors have been used for three things:
coastal attack, coastal defense, and river fighting.
They won't do for the open sea.

Also, I note that most of those British monitors were twelve
or fifteen times the size of those two references.

Using such small monitors is possible but not likely, I ween.

HTM

Mil-tech bard wrote:You all need to see this link --


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_m ... Royal_Navy

...and in particular look up the WW1 Royal Navy M15-class and M29-class monitors.

The former had a single 9.2 inch (23CM) and the latter a pair of 6-inch (152mm) guns on a displacement of 540 tons.

The size/displacement/capability of these vessels lends itself to disassembly and transport by rail.

Mil-tech bard wrote:Sharonan cruisers have turrets.

A "cheese box on a raft" with a turret from a decommissioned warship comes under the heading of "No-brainer."

And inshore armored river warship with one of more turrets has arisen in every major power fighting on a large river or lake system world wide since the 1860's.


See:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monitor_(warship)

Howard T. Map-addict wrote:This is of interest, Mill-tech bard,
but we do not know that monitor-type ships were ever built
on Sharona. They were only made OTL as part of a scramble,
when ironclad warships were suddenly needed *quickly.* We
don't know that any Sharonan ever imagined a thing like that.

OTL monitors have been used for three things:
coastal attack, coastal defense, and river fighting.
They won't do for the open sea.

Also, I note that most of those British monitors were twelve
or fifteen times the size of those two references.

Using such small monitors is possible but not likely, I ween.

HTM

Had any Sharonan major power done any fighting on a large river or lake system in the past 60 years?

Europe[edit]

Polish river monitors
On the Danube, river monitors were employed during World War I by Austria-Hungary. After the war, Hungary, Romania and Yugoslavia operated monitors of approximately 500 tons displacement. Due to having numerous well-armed monitors, the Romanian Danube Flotilla was the most powerful riverine fleet in the world during the Interwar period.[7] Czechoslovakia had one monitor, the President Masaryk, of about 200 tons displacement. Smaller monitors (70-100 ton displacement) were used by Poland in 1939 on the Pripyat River and by the Soviet Union in 1941 on the Pripyat and Dnepr rivers. The Soviet Union also had five Zheleznyakov class monitors of 263 tons, which served with the Dnieper Flotilla in World War II.

Hungary used smaller monitors PM-1 class and lightly armored fast patrol crafts Őrnaszád class during World War II (1941: Balkans, 1944: Hungary) as scout, fire support, fast minelaying PAM-21 class and anti-aircraft ships.

Mil-tech bard wrote:

Had any Sharonan major power done any fighting on a large river or lake system in the past 60 years?

The Uromathian (sp?) Emperor Chava certainly has.

Some tech background for reference --


The Early Torpedo Boats - 1873-1920
http://www.warboats.org/EarlyPatrolBoats.htm

and

Dnieper Flotilla
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dnieper_Flotilla

See the photos of the BK armored gunboat.


and finally


River monitor
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/River_monitor


Particularly this passage WRT the displacement of the average Austria-Hungary river monitor --

Europe[edit]

Polish river monitors
On the Danube, river monitors were employed during World War I by Austria-Hungary. After the war, Hungary, Romania and Yugoslavia operated monitors of approximately 500 tons displacement. Due to having numerous well-armed monitors, the Romanian Danube Flotilla was the most powerful riverine fleet in the world during the Interwar period.[7] Czechoslovakia had one monitor, the President Masaryk, of about 200 tons displacement. Smaller monitors (70-100 ton displacement) were used by Poland in 1939 on the Pripyat River and by the Soviet Union in 1941 on the Pripyat and Dnepr rivers. The Soviet Union also had five Zheleznyakov class monitors of 263 tons, which served with the Dnieper Flotilla in World War II.

Hungary used smaller monitors PM-1 class and lightly armored fast patrol crafts Őrnaszád class during World War II (1941: Balkans, 1944: Hungary) as scout, fire support, fast minelaying PAM-21 class and anti-aircraft ships.

DW & JP seem to be preparing for the Big Fight between sea-drakes and orcas.