Valiant vs Avalon

Dauntless wrote:having just been looking at the wedge strength topic i noticed an oddity in these two CL desings.

now the general trend for units for pretty much the entirety of the 2 haven wars was that units got bigger, tougher and nastier.

so why is the Avalon which is newer then the Valiant smaller?

ok yes the difference is only 10K tons but it seems odd, that a nearly 20 year trend is ignored.

Jonathan_S wrote:

Dauntless wrote:having just been looking at the wedge strength topic i noticed an oddity in these two CL desings.

now the general trend for units for pretty much the entirety of the 2 haven wars was that units got bigger, tougher and nastier.

so why is the Avalon which is newer then the Valiant smaller?

ok yes the difference is only 10K tons but it seems odd, that a nearly 20 year trend is ignored.

Interesting question. House of Steel does describe the old Valiant class as being a "departure in typical RMN light cruiser design" and that it's considered cramped and short ranged (for a CL) despite their larger size.

OTOH the slightly smaller Avalon (presumably due to automationand minaturization) managed to cram in a heavier missile broadside 10 LERMs vs 8 (smaller) SDMs, and more point defense (though fewer energy batteries) on it's slightly smaller length.

At a guess BuShips defined what capabilities and firepower they wanted and then built the ship to that and it happened to come out a bit lighter. The other way to design is to pick your target size then see what fits; bit it seems unlikely they took that approach since it would be, as you said, odd to deliberately pick a slightly smaller size.

darrell wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:Interesting question. House of Steel does describe the old Valiant class as being a "departure in typical RMN light cruiser design" and that it's considered cramped and short ranged (for a CL) despite their larger size.

OTOH the slightly smaller Avalon (presumably due to automationand minaturization) managed to cram in a heavier missile broadside 10 LERMs vs 8 (smaller) SDMs, and more point defense (though fewer energy batteries) on it's slightly smaller length.

At a guess BuShips defined what capabilities and firepower they wanted and then built the ship to that and it happened to come out a bit lighter. The other way to design is to pick your target size then see what fits; bit it seems unlikely they took that approach since it would be, as you said, odd to deliberately pick a slightly smaller size.

I notice that HoS rarely gives missile storage, so possibly the avalon has smaller missile magazines.

Though it was billed as a block upgrade to the Flight II Saganami, the Saganami-B class is a radical departure from the original design. Originally on the books as Flight III Saganami, the difference in armament led to its re-designation upon commissioning of the first unit.

Less than 10% larger than a Saganami, the Saganami-B has a modified hullform to accommodate a broadside over 50% larger than that of the older ship. Its broadside of nineteen missile launchers and ten grasers more than double the armament of some older heavy cruisers still in service and, with active defenses equally upgraded, the Saganami-B is more than a match for most contemporary battlecruisers. On the passive side, electronics have been upgraded yet again, and the bow wall is joined by an equally powerful stern wall. The second generation missile launchers are capable of limited off-bore fire into adjacent arcs, though the chase telemetry arrays limit them to realtime control of less than half the total salvo they could launch.

Dauntless wrote:so why is the Avalon which is newer then the Valiant smaller?

Weird Harold wrote:

Dauntless wrote:so why is the Avalon which is newer then the Valiant smaller?

Acceleration might have something to do with the size, along with off-bore missiles, miniaturization, automation reducing life-support tonnage etc.

House of Steel lists the Valiant at "80% Accel: 413.2 G (4.052 kps²)" and the Avalon at "80% Accel: 599.9 G (5.883 kps²)." The difference has to be largely new-style compensators but smaller size means more possible acceleration

Jonathan_S wrote:A long winded way of saying that I doubt they shaved those tons just for that minuscule improvement - seems far more likely it's side effect of designing Avalon for a given capability and letting the size fall where it will.

SharkHunter wrote:Doesn't that make it fun to think what an an "Avalon, next" design might do for some hurt, aka a CL between the Roland and Sag-C size, designed to fill in the gap where a Roland is not quite enough and a Sag-C is -- well, needed elsewhere.

I'm thinking of course - racked pods plus a couple racked Mycrofts (why not, right?). Somewhere in the middle for tube based missiles, and enough Marines to let it operate solo as needed.