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.
Erm, Mycroft is the central station of the FTL-capable successor to the Moriarty system-defense missile control platform, which was already the size of a cruiser. Manty miniaturization tech might shrink that, but not by enough that a *light cruiser* would be able to carry it as a parasite system even ignoring the added bulk of FTL comms. It takes a full-on *battlecruiser* to even carry a much smaller Keyhole-I platform, and it takes a battlecruiser the size of a
Nike to carry it without putting an unacceptable strain on armor thickness and broadside space. And why would you *want* to put a Mycroft on an
Avalon-successor CL, anyway? The point of Mycroft is to control system defense missile pods; it's just a giant mass of fire control and FTL comms. You're not fitting the equivalent of a Keyhole on a CL no matter what you do, so if you want more fire control just build it into your regular tactical section electronics and don't bother with some kind of weird parasite platform.
Racked pods are an... odd idea, design-wise. They have advantages and tradeoffs, but overall I'm thinking it'd probably just be better to go for internal tubes. (If, at least, by 'racked pods' you mean pods that fit into some kind of recess in the hull with an ejection mechanism, which is the first thing that comes to my mind when you say that. If you just mean 'designed with flat space on the outside of the hull to limpet pods, possibly with physical mooring hardpoints', then sure, no reason not to, but you're not going to have enough otherwise-empty hull surface to limpet very many of them.) Even if you face their narrow side dimension outwards each pod is still going to take up a fair chunk of hull surface, and their recesses are going to provide all sorts of interesting challenges for your armoring scheme. And ultimately, volume-wise, magazines are still more space efficient for missile stowage than pods, simply because you save on the bulk of the pod itself and its individual mass drivers. You do have to provision for the volume of the launcher to fire those magazine missiles, but by the time you're actually stowing a useful number of missiles the magazine + hard launcher is still going to win. The advantage of pods is more that you can do shenanigans with enormous salvoes and higher sustained fire rates, but honestly for such a light combatant I think the situations where those sorts of things would actually help are going to be infrequent enough that the efficiency advantage of traditional magazine + launcher arrangements to win over any type of pod-deploying design.
Theemile wrote:If we presuppose that any ship designed in the current generations has to have one of 4 missiles - Mk 16, Mk 23, LAC, or Viper - we can assume that the Sag-C CL consort would have mk 16s, just like the Roland. But we know the Sag-C hullform is the smallest which can hold broadside tubes.
so 2 options,
1) a modified Roland, with ~8 missiles clustered in each hammerhead.
or
2) a unconditional "stubby" design, with the beam of Sag-C, slightly shallower in Draught, and inordinately shorter, but no faster than a Sag-C, probably with 10-12 tubes in each broadside.
I think it can be assumed that any design will have a Marine section and a larger crew than a Roland, but smaller than an Avalon. It will also have significantly larger magazines than a Roland.
thoughts?
Dammit, stop stealing my ideas while I'm still spending an enjoyable evening fleshing them out!
I swear all of the following text was written before I saw Theemile's post, honest!
If I were designing some sort of
Avalon-B type class, meant to be to the
Avalon what the
Roland is to the
Wolfhound or the
Saganami-C is to the
Saganami (namely, larger and Mk16 capable), I'd probably go with something like this:
Avalon-B CL(L)
Mass: 300,000 tons
Dimensions: 521 x 63 x 53 m
Acceleration: 759.6 G (607.7 G at 80%)
Broadside: 6G, 18 CM, 18 PD
Chase: 8M, 2G, 8 PD
Total Crew: 220 (~90 marines - two platoons)
Shipkiller Missiles: ~560 Mk16 DDM
Fire Control: 64 Mk16, 90 CM
Hull space and hardpoints to limpet ~25 mk16 pods
Standard alliance two-phase bow and stern walls, EW, and full off-bore targeting
This is basically an attempt to adapt the
Roland design to the traditional CL 'generalist' role, as opposed to the
Roland's extremely specialized 'minimum Mk16 platform' role. It was stated in Shadow of Saganami that "Nothing smaller (or older) than a
Saganami-C-class ship would ever be able to handle" mk16 DDMs. The
Roland got around that by going to the chase clustered tube design, but I think we can still assume that nothing smaller than a
Saganami-C will be able to mount Mk16s *as broadside armament*, so this
Avalon-B sticks with the
Roland-style clustered Mk16-capable chase tubes. It also, despite being 60% larger, only increases the total missile armament by 33%, because
Rolands really are overgunned for their size. In an absolute sense the
Roland is just the smallest platform that can carry a useful Mk16 armament, but to do that they have to sacrifice practically everything else - crew, broadside weapons, and especially *magazine space* (carrying only 20 rounds per tube). An
Avalon-B still has notably more firepower, but by not going quite so all-out on Mk16 tubes it ought to be able to *also* flesh out all the rest of its capabilities in a much more well-rounded manner. This notional design carries 35 rounds per tube, has more spare fire control, actually has mass to carry larger (e.g. oversized as usual for the Alliance) grasers rather than old-style-DD-scaled lasers, much more point defense both in absolute (compared to
Roland) and relative to missile tube count and hull size (compared to
Roland *and*
Sag-C!) terms, more hull space for hardpoints to park pods (note
Rolands have enough space to limpet 15 without blocking sensors/etc,
Sag-Cs can limpet 40, and
Nikes 80, ref.
Storm from the Shadows), tougher sidewalls and some actual armor (though still not that thick, it *is* a CL), more endurance, and an actual marine complement and enough crew to not be so ridiculously limited in ability to perform ancillary tasks. In other words, it can do everything a
Roland can (and somewhat better), in addition to actually being capable of all the other 'generalist' tasks that CLs and CAs are supposed to be able to do.
Overall the capabilities I gave to this ship represent my guess as to what it might be possible to cram into a 300 kt Mk16-armed CL design. It's my best attempt to extrapolate between the capabilities of the
Avalon,
Roland, and
Saganami-C, but it *is* still just a guess. Nevertheless, I think it's at least a reasonable one. The idea of the 'notional 300 kt light cruiser' has been bandied about several times before, including by Weber himself if I recall correctly, as probably representing the lightest practical general-purpose hyper-capable warship in the era of the MDM. This is, essentially, my take on the concept.
(Also, man it's tricky to reconcile how much stuff you can jam into ships of 188, 300, and 483 kt. A
Sag-C is 2.5 times the tonnage of a
Roland, but carries about 4 times as many tubes and 5 times as many missiles, though only about twice as much point defense. There's all sorts of internal components whose volumes we know little about, and economies of scale we don't have information on. Scaling a
Roland up to 300kt doesn't give the same numbers as scaling a
Sag-C *down* to 300kt (and *man*
Sag-Cs have a lot of missiles!), and the varying proportions of offensive and defensive mounts further confuse things. I like to think I made reasonably appropriate guesses, but it's tricky.)
