Honorverse ships and weapons ~ real life equivalents

What would be the real life equivalent of Honorverse ships in terms of firepower and role? Or any other similarities. I know of the existence of the HMS Super Dreadnought Battleship during WWI. Which is confusing trying to equate it unless perhaps I consider the bigass BBs Manticore began to build

Battleships, dreadnaughts, battlecruisers, destroyers seem to have an obvious counterpart.

What would be the matchup for Honorverse Superdreadnaughts in terms of firepower and role? Would it be the aircraft carrier?

CLAC?

Where do LACs fit in? The Cyclone Class patrol ship?

Where does that leave U.S. patrol boats? Coast Guard cutters, etc. I suppose, since the Honorverse Heavy Cruiser is the jack-of-all-trades that it will do just fine sitting in for many U.S. ships, in role.


As far as weapons. Tribarrels. Flechete. Etc.

What would be the equivalent of our spy ships? Like our U.S. Pueblo that was captured by the North Koreans in '68 and on display there. (The Pueblo Incident).

There are Russian spy ships. American spy ships. German spy ships. Every major power seems to have them and they seem to be allowed to come within an appalling distance of our coastline.

I suppose in the Honorverse you use freighters, probes and of course the MAN can just sit and eat popcorn while in your system.

Russian spy ships are in the news quite a bit recently.

cthia wrote:What would be the real life equivalent of Honorverse ships in terms of firepower and role? Or any other similarities. I know of the existence of the HMS Super Dreadnought Battleship during WWI. Which is confusing trying to equate it unless perhaps I consider the bigass BBs Manticore began to build

Battleships, dreadnaughts, battlecruisers, destroyers seem to have an obvious counterpart.

What would be the matchup for Honorverse Superdreadnaughts in terms of firepower and role? Would it be the aircraft carrier?

CLAC?

Where do LACs fit in? The Cyclone Class patrol ship?

Where does that leave U.S. patrol boats? Coast Guard cutters, etc. I suppose, since the Honorverse Heavy Cruiser is the jack-of-all-trades that it will do just fine sitting in for many U.S. ships, in role.


As far as weapons. Tribarrels. Flechete. Etc.

The concept of the Super Dreadnaught was mainly the presses invention. It came about shortly before WWI when battleships began making large leaps in speed and firepower. Take the RN's Queen Elizabeth class battleship they jumped in speed over previous classes by 2-3 knots and gun power by almost double.
12 inch gun shell weight 8-900 lbs
13.5 inch gun shell weight 11-1200 lbs
versus
15 inch gun shell weight 17-1800 lbs

The same thing happened to other navies at roughly the same time.

Germany
11 inch to 15 inch guns

U.S.Navy
12 inch to 14 inch and eventually 16 inch guns

(I see Sabre964 beat me to some of this - but it's too long to want to edit down now)
In our world the term Super-Dreadnaught was first applied to, IIRC, the Orion-class (~22 ktons, 10x13.5" guns) a significant jump over the original Dreadnought-class - Colossus-class (~20 ktons, 10x12" guns) in terms of displacement, weapons, and armor.

And of course this trend just continues with the Queen Elizabeth-class fast battleship (~27 ktons, 8x15" guns)

Like in the Honorverse SDs were simple DNs that got bigger and a bit more powerful. The difference is that, by and large, nobody built a significant number of weaker battleships once they'd escalated to more powerful ones. The cost savings weren't worth it.

And of course hydrodymamics meant BCs in the real world were at least as large (if tending to have finer lines) than contemporary BBs. The original Invicible-class BC (17.2 ktons) fell far closer to HMS Dreadnaught (18.1 ktons) than the final RN Armored Cruisers Minotaur-class (14.6 ktons). But if they'd been lighter and smaller their hydrodynamics would have prevented them from having their speed advantage over the DNs (at least with the amount of engine power they could cram in).

But there's never been as large a size / tonnage jump between 1st rate cruisers and 1st rate battleships/DNs/SDs on Earth as there is in the Honorverse. The Earth delta between heavy/armored/1st rate cruiser and battleships doesn't seem exceeded 5x, while a 1905 PD SD is easily 25x the tonnage of a CA.

A LAC is more like a British motor gun boat (MBT) (or the US PT boats in their barge busting mid-late Pacific war fit where they reduced or eliminated the torpedo armorment to carry more guns and depth charges for barge hunting (the Japanese inter island barges being too shallow draft to reliably target with torpedoes). A short ranged boat with heavy (for it's displacement) gun armament and little to no armor.

Then the closest thing I can think of to a CLAC is the French torpedo boat tender Fondre (later converted to a seaplane carrier). Unlike most tenders, which just service boats in harbor, she was designed with heavy deck spanning crane hoists capable of deploying or recovering torpedo boats from her upper deck to the sea -- allowing her to theoretically provide strategic mobility to the short ranged craft and drop them for tactical action.


As for spy ships those would, presumably, be civilian designs with surreptitiously upgraded sensor suites. Ships that have a legitimate excuse for passing through neutrals' or potential enemies' space while hovering up anything their sensors can detect. Though if you're standing off beyond the 12 light-hour limit you could use something like a Talisman-class intelligence CL (designed to follow Havenite units in neutral space or to picket Havenite systems from beyond their territorial limit -- gathering intel for use in the coming war)

The flechete guns remind me of modern day shrapnel and fragmentation weapons.

cthia wrote:The flechete guns remind me of modern day shrapnel and fragmentation weapons.

Actually there are flechette guns so to speak. What the are is shotguns firing special rounds. The rounds are filled with 2 or 3 mm steel darts instead of buckshot.

Jonathan_S wrote:(I see Sabre964 beat me to some of this - but it's too long to want to edit down now)
In our world the term Super-Dreadnaught was first applied to, IIRC, the Orion-class (~22 ktons, 10x13.5" guns) a significant jump over the original Dreadnought-class - Colossus-class (~20 ktons, 10x12" guns) in terms of displacement, weapons, and armor.

And of course this trend just continues with the Queen Elizabeth-class fast battleship (~27 ktons, 8x15" guns)

Like in the Honorverse SDs were simple DNs that got bigger and a bit more powerful. The difference is that, by and large, nobody built a significant number of weaker battleships once they'd escalated to more powerful ones. The cost savings weren't worth it.

And of course hydrodymamics meant BCs in the real world were at least as large (if tending to have finer lines) than contemporary BBs. The original Invicible-class BC (17.2 ktons) fell far closer to HMS Dreadnaught (18.1 ktons) than the final RN Armored Cruisers Minotaur-class (14.6 ktons). But if they'd been lighter and smaller their hydrodynamics would have prevented them from having their speed advantage over the DNs (at least with the amount of engine power they could cram in).

But there's never been as large a size / tonnage jump between 1st rate cruisers and 1st rate battleships/DNs/SDs on Earth as there is in the Honorverse. The Earth delta between heavy/armored/1st rate cruiser and battleships doesn't seem exceeded 5x, while a 1905 PD SD is easily 25x the tonnage of a CA.

A LAC is more like a British motor gun boat (MBT) (or the US PT boats in their barge busting mid-late Pacific war fit where they reduced or eliminated the torpedo armorment to carry more guns and depth charges for barge hunting (the Japanese inter island barges being too shallow draft to reliably target with torpedoes). A short ranged boat with heavy (for it's displacement) gun armament and little to no armor.

Then the closest thing I can think of to a CLAC is the French torpedo boat tender Fondre (later converted to a seaplane carrier). Unlike most tenders, which just service boats in harbor, she was designed with heavy deck spanning crane hoists capable of deploying or recovering torpedo boats from her upper deck to the sea -- allowing her to theoretically provide strategic mobility to the short ranged craft and drop them for tactical action.


As for spy ships those would, presumably, be civilian designs with surreptitiously upgraded sensor suites. Ships that have a legitimate excuse for passing through neutrals' or potential enemies' space while hovering up anything their sensors can detect. Though if you're standing off beyond the 12 light-hour limit you could use something like a Talisman-class intelligence CL (designed to follow Havenite units in neutral space or to picket Havenite systems from beyond their territorial limit -- gathering intel for use in the coming war)

Jonathan a slight nit pick the QE class top speed was 24 knots not 27 knots

saber964 wrote:

cthia wrote:The flechete guns remind me of modern day shrapnel and fragmentation weapons.

Actually there are flechette guns so to speak. What the are is shotguns firing special rounds. The rounds are filled with 2 or 3 mm steel darts instead of buckshot.

Flechette guns firing individual flechettes have been tested by the Army. They didn't work as predicted and were not considered successful.

Cannon shells and rockets filled with a few thousand work pretty well and were used in Vietnam. The newest APERS round, the 120mm M1028, uses 1,100 of small tungsten balls instead, don't know why. But supposedly it works pretty well. https://www.orbitalatk.com/defense-syst ... _Sheet.pdf

saber964 wrote: Jonathan a slight nit pick the QE class top speed was 24 knots not 27 knots

Counter nitpick. I didn't mention their speed - I said they were "(27 ktons)", that is they displaced 27,000 tons. (Pointing out how much bigger they were than the earlier DNs and SDs)

Saber, Jonathan, thanks. It is sad that the battleship's need has come and gone. The Zumwalt class destroyer is sleighted to slot in its place.

****** *

The shoulder fired missile used to shoot Honor down on Grayson seemed, to me for some reason, to be lowtech for the Honorverse.