BC(C) (Spoiler Within)

Rincewind wrote:

kzt wrote:Ships in the honorverse are not going to fold up. Merchant vessels will run at 400g without a compensator for hours. Warships are much stronger. They are massively overbuilt. So they are essentially 747's where flying through skyscrapers without any damage was part of the design requirements.

I did NOT say fold up. I said RETRACT. And as we have already HAD one example of that in the Honorverse in On Basilisk Station where the PMSS Sirius's Nodes retracted into the hull because they were outsize it is not beyond the bounds of possibility.

Sure, but it could do that because on a modified merchant hull it had lots of internal void space to build the retraction mechanisms into.

A LAC is stuffed almost entirely full of things (to the point where much of the maintenance has to be done from the outside because there aren't maintenance passageways from the interior to many of the systems. The only way to create the voids for the impellers to retract into would be to remove systems from the LAC or to make it bigger in the first place. (And if it can do without some systems better simply to remove them and build a slightly more compact design rather than add the overhead of node retraction).


And of course retracting the nodes doesn't really help you cram more LACs into a given volume because those aren't the wide point of the ship. Impeller rings, we're told and can see on the HoS diagrams, are smaller than a ship (or LAC)'s maximum beam. So even if you retract the impeller nodes you're making a narrower part of the hull yet narrower by a few meters - but the widest part, which dictates how wide (and tall) the docking bays need to be, is unchanged.


(Now if this was the Kris Longknife universe and the LACs were made of smartmetal it'd be different. Then you could take the crew aboard the CLAC and eliminate all internal passageways, as reconfigure other major system positions for the most compact storage configuration)

There were some early comments about how CLACs are much wider than SD's because the LACS were parked nose to nose in the ship.

You can park nose to nose and not need so much width. All you have to do is park the LACs in a herringbone pattern.

My technical support job was moved to Serbia, so I now drive a semi for a living. I have a great deal of experience with perpendicular and herringbone parking spaces

Now, parking LACs in a herringbone pattern does mean you can't park as many LACs in the same length of ship, but you can do it without needing to make the ship extremely wide. The greater the angle, the fewer LACs but the less extra width is required.

Cheopis wrote:There were some early comments about how CLACs are much wider than SD's because the LACS were parked nose to nose in the ship.

You can park nose to nose and not need so much width. All you have to do is park the LACs in a herringbone pattern.

My technical support job was moved to Serbia, so I now drive a semi for a living. I have a great deal of experience with perpendicular and herringbone parking spaces

Now, parking LACs in a herringbone pattern does mean you can't park as many LACs in the same length of ship, but you can do it without needing to make the ship extremely wide. The greater the angle, the fewer LACs but the less extra width is required.

Herringbone pattern docking would be essentially triangular pattern yes? If looking from the bow or stern of the notional carrier, the LAC's would form a sharp angle upwards or downwards?


How are you really proposing to speed launch when, as far as we know, CLAC's don't drop their wedges when they launch their broods. So the powered cradle-rams that hold the LAC's while docked have to train out at a sufficient speed to help with crash launching the LAC's to help them get away from the carrier fast enough to bring their wedges up ASAP.


An angled launch would vastly increase the risk of those LAC's hitting the roof or floor of a wedge, see the Yawata Strike tug that tried to intercept debris heading for Sphinx using it's wedge (instant disintegration). The same problem applied to trying to mount vertical missile launches rather than broadside, they couldn't avoid hitting the wedge.

Somtaaw wrote:An angled launch would vastly increase the risk of those LAC's hitting the roof or floor of a wedge, see the Yawata Strike tug that tried to intercept debris heading for Sphinx using it's wedge (instant disintegration). The same problem applied to trying to mount vertical missile launches rather than broadside, they couldn't avoid hitting the wedge.

Why would the bays be angled up or down? I'm imagining them simply rotated aft so instead of shooting out perpendicular to the ship they shoot out (still in the same plane) angled somewhat towards the rear. There should be no more risk of wedge collision because they're still leaving on that same plane. (However they'd take a bit longer to clear the wedge as they're now crossing it at an angle.

The real problem is that LACs are a lot 'fatter' than semi-trucks and the width of the LAC bay seems to defeat much of the depth savings achievable from angling it.

A LAC is 72 meters long and 20 wide. Let's assume you need 2.5 meters of clearance, walls, equip, etc around it on each side, making the bay 77x25.
If we angle it back 20 degrees that 77 meter long wall only impinges 72.356 meters into the hull -- we've saved almost 5 meters of depth! And if we go to 45 degrees it's only 54.447 deep, and at a very extreme 60 degrees it's 38.5 meters deep.

But wait, what about that width. Assuming we have to keep the rectangular shape, the innermost corner also gets displaced inwards as we rotate.
At 20 degrees it's 8.551 m deeper; so instead of saving almost 5 meters we actually lost almost 4 meters! Oops.
At 45 degrees it's 17.678 m deeper; so we save only about 5 meters
At 60 degrees it's 21.651 m deeper; so we save ~17 meters.

Now you're going to lose some bays by angling them but it does seem possible to get some reduction in maximum beam if you're willing to angle the LAC bays sharply. (Of course if you were willing to turn them 90 degrees so the LACs docked broadside you'd get major depth savings; but also major reduction in number of LAC's carried)

Jonathan_S wrote:

Somtaaw wrote:An angled launch would vastly increase the risk of those LAC's hitting the roof or floor of a wedge, see the Yawata Strike tug that tried to intercept debris heading for Sphinx using it's wedge (instant disintegration). The same problem applied to trying to mount vertical missile launches rather than broadside, they couldn't avoid hitting the wedge.

Why would the bays be angled up or down? I'm imagining them simply rotated aft so instead of shooting out perpendicular to the ship they shoot out (still in the same plane) angled somewhat towards the rear. There should be no more risk of wedge collision because they're still leaving on that same plane. (However they'd take a bit longer to clear the wedge as they're now crossing it at an angle.

The real problem is that LACs are a lot 'fatter' than semi-trucks and the width of the LAC bay seems to defeat much of the depth savings achievable from angling it.

A LAC is 72 meters long and 20 wide. Let's assume you need 2.5 meters of clearance, walls, equip, etc around it on each side, making the bay 77x25.
If we angle it back 20 degrees that 77 meter long wall only impinges 72.356 meters into the hull -- we've saved almost 5 meters of depth! And if we go to 45 degrees it's only 54.447 deep, and at a very extreme 60 degrees it's 38.5 meters deep.

But wait, what about that width. Assuming we have to keep the rectangular shape, the innermost corner also gets displaced inwards as we rotate.
At 20 degrees it's 8.551 m deeper; so instead of saving almost 5 meters we actually lost almost 4 meters! Oops.
At 45 degrees it's 17.678 m deeper; so we save only about 5 meters
At 60 degrees it's 21.651 m deeper; so we save ~17 meters.

Now you're going to lose some bays by angling them but it does seem possible to get some reduction in maximum beam if you're willing to angle the LAC bays sharply. (Of course if you were willing to turn them 90 degrees so the LACs docked broadside you'd get major depth savings; but also major reduction in number of LAC's carried)

I agree with almost everything here, but I'll point out that LACs don't have hammerheads. They don't necessarily need the full 20 meters of width at their nose. Tapering the front of the compartment would significantly increase the number of LACs in a herringbone parking pattern in a CLAC.

What about having the LAC bays at different heights between port and starboard, that would allow an overlap and keep down the width of the CLAC. I don't know if such an arrangement would affect the height of the CLAC so much that it would pose the same problem as increasing the width though.

Could the mechanicals required for servicing, loading & etc. be run as one horizontal line with spurs going up or down as required at the appropriate positions along the line.

Access corridors for LAC crews could be one on top of the other to allow rapid ingress/egress.

Feel free to shoot me down in flames

George J. Smith wrote:What about having the LAC bays at different heights between port and starboard, that would allow an overlap and keep down the width of the CLAC. I don't know if such an arrangement would affect the height of the CLAC so much that it would pose the same problem as increasing the width though.

Could the mechanicals required for servicing, loading & etc. be run as one horizontal line with spurs going up or down as required at the appropriate positions along the line.

Access corridors for LAC crews could be one on top of the other to allow rapid ingress/egress.

Feel free to shoot me down in flames

1) you still disrupt the core hull, the armored area at the center of a warship where the reactors and other essential components are housed.

2) until you get well over BC Sized you don't get a hull with enough Draught (height) for 2 lac bays, and the essential ventral and dorsal equipment and structures. You also need to account for the tapers in the hull to give it the cigar shape, limiting the breadth of the hull further away from the ship's beam. A LAC has a Draught of ~23 meters, so you need to account for the width of the hull ~25 meters above and below the beam.

3) The loading equipment for current LACs is on the noses, so you need to have at least 1 missile length of so of space in front of the LAC bays just for the reloading system. The crew access and main servicing points are at the same place.

Cheopis wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:Why would the bays be angled up or down? I'm imagining them simply rotated aft so instead of shooting out perpendicular to the ship they shoot out (still in the same plane) angled somewhat towards the rear. There should be no more risk of wedge collision because they're still leaving on that same plane. (However they'd take a bit longer to clear the wedge as they're now crossing it at an angle.

The real problem is that LACs are a lot 'fatter' than semi-trucks and the width of the LAC bay seems to defeat much of the depth savings achievable from angling it.

A LAC is 72 meters long and 20 wide. Let's assume you need 2.5 meters of clearance, walls, equip, etc around it on each side, making the bay 77x25.
If we angle it back 20 degrees that 77 meter long wall only impinges 72.356 meters into the hull -- we've saved almost 5 meters of depth! And if we go to 45 degrees it's only 54.447 deep, and at a very extreme 60 degrees it's 38.5 meters deep.

But wait, what about that width. Assuming we have to keep the rectangular shape, the innermost corner also gets displaced inwards as we rotate.
At 20 degrees it's 8.551 m deeper; so instead of saving almost 5 meters we actually lost almost 4 meters! Oops.
At 45 degrees it's 17.678 m deeper; so we save only about 5 meters
At 60 degrees it's 21.651 m deeper; so we save ~17 meters.

Now you're going to lose some bays by angling them but it does seem possible to get some reduction in maximum beam if you're willing to angle the LAC bays sharply. (Of course if you were willing to turn them 90 degrees so the LACs docked broadside you'd get major depth savings; but also major reduction in number of LAC's carried)

I agree with almost everything here, but I'll point out that LACs don't have hammerheads. They don't necessarily need the full 20 meters of width at their nose. Tapering the front of the compartment would significantly increase the number of LACs in a herringbone parking pattern in a CLAC.

On a proper CLAC, that volume is probably taken up by the equipment used to reload the LAC's forward magazines.

If unable to stretch a hull to fit two broadsides with bays, I would rather design a pocket carrier which had all the LAC bays on one broadside and most of the missile and countermissile launchers on the opposite broadside. There are drawbacks to this scheme, of course, but the biggest one is vastly mitigated by the RMN's off-bore technology(and carriers aren't meant to get into direct combat anyway).

Such a carrier designed using the Agamemnon BC(P)'s dimensions as a starting point would be able to contain 32 LACs, in two rows of sixteen, with a generous allowance for armouring, weapons and other hardware. Really cramming the LACs in, with paper-thin walls, gives up to 64(unrealistically, as even the Hydra only has 56 per broadside).

So, slightly less than a third of the Hydra's mass with slightly less than a third of its LAC group.

munroburton wrote:If unable to stretch a hull to fit two broadsides with bays, I would rather design a pocket carrier which had all the LAC bays on one broadside and most of the missile and countermissile launchers on the opposite broadside. There are drawbacks to this scheme, of course, but the biggest one is vastly mitigated by the RMN's off-bore technology(and carriers aren't meant to get into direct combat anyway).

That asymmetric CLAC layout is my personal preferred layout if somebody decides they need to build a CVL/CVE equivalent.

You could potentially even restrict any offensive missiles to the hammerheads, Roland-like, but you'd still have issues packing as many point defense installations on the LAC-bay side as you'd like. But as you said, carriers aren't supposed to get themselves in combat, and little ones even less so. So that weakness might be accepted as a necessary trade-off.


Though I still remain somewhat skeptical of the need for such a beast. It's going to be more expensive on a per-LAC basis than a full sized CLAC, and it has barely better strategic speed. If you really wanted to send LACs along with a BC raid (for example) you it's add less than 3 days to the roundtrip to send a DN/SD sized CLAC along. And since a single CLAC has no business crossing the hyper limit it's lower tactical acceleration seems basically irrelevant. The one advantage is that for a given number of dollars smaller platforms can cover more simultaneous spots - but you're still getting less LACs per dollar; so it's only worth it if you need dispersed deployments at the expense of total numbers.

Theemile wrote:1) you still disrupt the core hull, the armored area at the center of a warship where the reactors and other essential components are housed.

I don't think BCs necessarily have the sort of core that a SD has. Which is why it was much easier to pull Nike's reactor through the bottom of the hull.

"Honor nodded in agreement. The R&D types' latest armor—a complex ceramic and metal alloy unbelievably light for its volume and toughness—was formed in place as part of the basic hull matrix, not added on later. That gave it vastly improved integrity against damage but meant there were no convenient sections to pull in the event of repairs. On the other hand, armor, however light, still used mass. No warship had that to waste, and since a warship's impeller wedge protected it against fire from above or below, BuShips' designers armored the inner areas of its top and bottom lightly or not at all in order to maximize protection elsewhere.

"Nike was no wall of battle ship, but leaving her top and bottom unarmored let her flanks carry twelve centimeters of side armor over more critical areas and as much as a meter over her vitals—like her fusion rooms. That much battle steel could stand up to a near-miss from a megaton-range nuke . . . and sneered at the best efforts of a standard laser cutter. Indeed, getting through it was a nightmare job even with chem-catalyst gear."