Can a Roland carry Marines?

kzt wrote:The ship is enormous, and the description of the ship is the books talked about how one of the main things that made it that way was the added flag bridge. Hence we are not talking about a small space. We are talking about a space designed to handle the full battle staff for a squadron or task force in a sustained combat operation.

kzt wrote:The flag accommodations are designed, per the text, to make up for the lack of flag accommodations in modern CAs and CLs. So it not to ran a DD section, it’s to run a task force. Last I remember a DD squadron in the RMN was 6 ships anyway.

The RMN had been caught short of suitable flagships for cruiser and destroyer service during the First Havenite War, and the Rolands were one attempt to address that shortage. Every member of the class was fitted with extensive command and control capability and, in essence, each can operate as the flagship of a destroyer squadron.

Additional advances in automation reduced the personnel and space required to build the same command and control capability into follow-on ships. With the Star Knight and Saganami classes and their variants being built in large numbers, the need for a class of lightly armed dedicated flagships was dwindling. Almost the entire class had been relegated to the Reserve by the time of Operation Buttercup, and [the Crusader] was finally scrapped during the Janacek build-down.

munroburton wrote:The RMN retained Janacek's 6-ship squadrons for the most part, but the forces sent to Talbott appear to be restored to the 8-ship squadron arrangements.

As for the flag decks - I'm not sure they'd be quite up to task force capability. Task groups, possibly. What does HoS say?

Jonathan_S wrote:For some reason I thought it was just the wallers that we’re 8 (and now 6) ship squadrons; that as you got lighter there were progressively more ships per squadron...

Squadrons in the RMN are permanent administrative units, not necessarily tactical units, although there is a distinct tendency for squadrons of cruisers and larger warships to be kept together as much as possible. Thus a Destroyer Squadron might consist of sixteen destroyers operating in four separate divisions of four ships each, deployed light-years apart on an as-needed basis. The fact that light units routinely need to be detached as escorts, scouts, couriers, etc., helps to explain why their unit organization is so much more flexible than that for larger units, which are not so likely to be detached.

Cruisers fall into a special category as the medium combatant jack-of-all-trades. Cruisers very seldom operate as complete squadrons unless assigned to a task force or fleet organization, and, even there, the task force or fleet commanding officer has a distinct incentive to detach individual heavy cruisers or divisions of light cruisers for all sorts of tasks.

Prior to 1902 PD, both heavy cruisers and battlecruisers were organized more according to their mission than their type. The two most common squadron sizes are eight-ship squadrons integrated into the screen and twelve-ship squadrons tasked for independent operations, though recent years have seen frequent changes in these sizes, often to match the smaller battle squadrons.

Ships of the wall have historically been organized into eight-ship battle squadrons, a practice which was phased out in favor of a six-ship squadron during the Janacek Admiralty as a largely political maneuver, though (unlike most Janacek “reforms”) the practice has been maintained due to the increased tactical flexibility the smaller squadrons offer.

Jonathan_S wrote:For some reason I thought it was just the wallers that we’re 8 (and now 6) ship squadrons; that as you got lighter there were progressively more ships per squadron...

munroburton wrote:True, you somehow reminded me of this pearl: http://infodump.thefifthimperium.com/en ... ngton/59/1

I would highlight the note at the bottom, which explains that the RMN doesn't necessarily have an overlap between tactical and administrative units.

The Pearl is reconfirmed in HoS:

Squadrons in the RMN are permanent administrative units, not necessarily tactical units, although there is a distinct tendency for squadrons of cruisers and larger warships to be kept together as much as possible. Thus a Destroyer Squadron might consist of sixteen destroyers operating in four separate divisions of four ships each, deployed light-years apart on an as-needed basis. The fact that light units routinely need to be detached as escorts, scouts, couriers, etc., helps to explain why their unit organization is so much more flexible than that for larger units, which are not so likely to be detached.

Cruisers fall into a special category as the medium combatant jack-of-all-trades. Cruisers very seldom operate as complete squadrons unless assigned to a task force or fleet organization, and, even there, the task force or fleet commanding officer has a distinct incentive to detach individual heavy cruisers or divisions of light cruisers for all sorts of tasks.

Prior to 1902 PD, both heavy cruisers and battlecruisers were organized more according to their mission than their type. The two most common squadron sizes are eight-ship squadrons integrated into the screen and twelve-ship squadrons tasked for independent operations, though recent years have seen frequent changes in these sizes, often to match the smaller battle squadrons.

Ships of the wall have historically been organized into eight-ship battle squadrons, a practice which was phased out in favor of a six-ship squadron during the Janacek Admiralty as a largely political maneuver, though (unlike most Janacek “reforms”) the practice has been maintained due to the increased tactical flexibility the smaller squadrons offer.

So a Roland's flag capabilities are designed for a destroyer squadron containing up to sixteen ships.

JohnRoth wrote:As well as to serve as a flagship for cruiser squadrons; most cruiser types don't have their own flag decks. That may be administratively messy since the commodore or rear admiral might not really want to have cis flag on a destroyer.