Brilliant quote about the Bellerophon (for the reader who asked, that's in the book called "A Short Victorious War, the 3rd book). Another might be how the battleship class was in action all the way through the 1990's, because it could maintain a higher rate of deadly fire close-in to shore based targets.Weird Harold wrote:Cataphract wrote:Wouldn't the space be better used for more missile tubes or the like? With the RMN advantage in missiles and targeting systems how would anything ever get into energy/beam range?
This is basically the same argument that resulted in early models of the F-4 Phantom not having a gun -- "The dogfight is dead, long live BVR missiles."
Note that the lesson was learned and even the newest fighters have internal cannons for close-in dog-fighting.
The same principle applies to starship design, and the Bellerophon's encounter with a task group of PRN Battle cruisers in SVW is an example of why ships need energy mounts.
Nobody's going to build "new, old style SD's". They are going to build better smaller ships. But the big boys still have a role in a universe with thousands of settled planets: preventing warlordism, should they make that their one and only goal. Trouble is, the OFS is the big bully warlord support system throughout most of the Verge.
Consider that in the Honorverse a graser's range is two to three times the distance from the Earth to the moon. It's the one thing that says to me that even a Solarian SD or Khumalo's ship in the Talbot sectors are still effective but only in a close-in planetary defense role. One well managed SD in planetary orbit, plus limpeted pods likely would have kept Warnecke from taking Marsh intact in HoE, for example. Caveat Emptor: pods were new and and DDMs/MDMs were still a future development at that point in the storyline. But you get the gist, right?
