-SPOILER- Uncompromising Honor - Likes and Don't Likes

There is a huge degree of optimism in that quote. For example, they had NEVER run an actual evacuation drill in living memory. They didn't start to evacuate even when the entire second fleet was bearing down on Spinx having just blown Home fleet into little bitty pieces.

To claim the you could get 95% of 3-4 million people off in 15 minutes using a plan that had never been tested is just wishful thinking.

How many did Beowulf get off Alpha given 15 minutes warning? How long did it take for the systems that the SLN attacked? Or Earth?

So I tend to doubt you can really take anything stated there as actually factually accurate.

kzt wrote:There is a huge degree of optimism in that quote. For example, they had NEVER run an actual evacuation drill in living memory. They didn't start to evacuate even when the entire second fleet was bearing down on Spinx having just blown Home fleet into little bitty pieces.

To claim the you could get 95% of 3-4 million people off in 15 minutes using a plan that had never been tested is just wishful thinking.

How many did Beowulf get off Alpha given 15 minutes warning? How long did it take for the systems that the SLN attacked? Or Earth?

So I tend to doubt you can really take anything stated there as actually factually accurate.

And you totally missed the point. Given 15-20 minutes warning they would have had time to spin up the sidewalls and had wedges from the tugs interposed which means that they can get most of the people off the platforms safely - not necessarily in the first 15-20 minutes.

Joat42 wrote:And you totally missed the point. Given 15-20 minutes warning they would have had time to spin up the sidewalls and had wedges from the tugs interposed which means that they can get most of the people off the platforms safely - not necessarily in the first 15-20 minutes.

IIRC none of Manticore's space stations had sidewalls. The planned replacement stations will have.

Also When Haven attacked Bsilisk, the platforms were given hours to evacuate.

pappilon wrote:

Joat42 wrote:And you totally missed the point. Given 15-20 minutes warning they would have had time to spin up the sidewalls and had wedges from the tugs interposed which means that they can get most of the people off the platforms safely - not necessarily in the first 15-20 minutes.

IIRC none of Manticore's space stations had sidewalls. The planned replacement stations will have.

Also When Haven attacked Basilisk, the platforms were given hours to evacuate.

According to White Haven the stations have sidewalls

Mission of Honor, Chapter 30 wrote:"Yes, it was extraordinarily well planned and executed. From a professional perspective, I have to admire the ability, imagination, and skill behind it. But successful as it was, it was essentially a hit-and-run raid, albeit on a massive scale, and its success—as Tom has just pointed out—derived entirely from the fact that it achieved total strategic and tactical surprise. If any significant percentage of the weapons committed to it—either those graser platforms or the missile pods—had failed, or been detected on their way in, or even if we’d only suspected something was coming in time to alert the stations and activate their sidewalls and get the tugs deployed to interpose their wedges against potential attacks, the damage would have been much less severe. Give us fifteen or twenty minutes’ warning, and we’d’ve had a good ninety-five percent of our personnel off Hephasteus and Vulcan, for that matter, not to mention getting a lot of our ships out of the station docking slips!"

Weird Harold wrote:

Slneezy wrote:
How many countries currently feature Battleships -- dreadnought size or bigger, excluding aircraft carriers -- in their Navies?

The only Navies with Cruisers are the US and Russian. The first flight of CG-49s (non-VLS) are laid up waiting for the scrapper. Later flights have a retirement date, but there is no current effort (that I know of) to design the follow-on class.

Apologies if I miscounted my "quotes")

Fox2! wrote:

Weird Harold wrote:
How many countries currently feature Battleships -- dreadnought size or bigger, excluding aircraft carriers -- in their Navies?

The only Navies with Cruisers are the US and Russian. The first flight of CG-49s (non-VLS) are laid up waiting for the scrapper. Later flights have a retirement date, but there is no current effort (that I know of) to design the follow-on class.

Apologies if I miscounted my "quotes")

That's kind of my point (and yes you did miscount the quotes) Nobody is fielding anything bigger than cruisers (except aircraft carriers.) Honorverse Navies are going to go the same way -- smaller, yet more lethal dollar-for-dollar.

Weird Harold wrote:

Fox2!" [quote="Weird Harold wrote:
How many countries currently feature Battleships -- dreadnought size or bigger, excluding aircraft carriers -- in their Navies?

The only Navies with Cruisers are the US and Russian. The first flight of CG-49s (non-VLS) are laid up waiting for the scrapper. Later flights have a retirement date, but there is no current effort (that I know of) to design the follow-on class.

Apologies if I miscounted my "quotes")

That's kind of my point (and yes you did miscount the quotes) Nobody is fielding anything bigger than cruisers (except aircraft carriers.) Honorverse Navies are going to go the same way -- smaller, yet more lethal dollar-for-dollar.[/quote]



It depends the Zumwalt class is as big or bigger tonnage wise and maybe size too. As a WWII heavy and some classes of light cruisers. IIRC the Zumwalt's are 600 ft long and 12-14,000 tons. IIRC the Baltimore class was 610 ft and 14-16,000 tons and the Cleveland class was 600 ft and 12-14,000 tons. Also the U.S. Navy had a next generation CG in the works but with the problems in the Zumwalt's class it's been put on the back burner for the foreseeable future.

saber964 wrote:It depends the Zumwalt class is as big or bigger tonnage wise and maybe size too. As a WWII heavy and some classes of light cruisers. IIRC the Zumwalt's are 600 ft long and 12-14,000 tons. IIRC the Baltimore class was 610 ft and 14-16,000 tons and the Cleveland class was 600 ft and 12-14,000 tons. Also the U.S. Navy had a next generation CG in the works but with the problems in the Zumwalt's class it's been put on the back burner for the foreseeable future.

In the Honorverse, the Roland-class destroyers are as big as other Navies' light cruisers. I'm not seeing
how that relates to the point that nobody in today's world has any battleships or anything approaching that size of ship or guns.

Weird Harold wrote:

saber964 wrote:It depends the Zumwalt class is as big or bigger tonnage wise and maybe size too. As a WWII heavy and some classes of light cruisers. IIRC the Zumwalt's are 600 ft long and 12-14,000 tons. IIRC the Baltimore class was 610 ft and 14-16,000 tons and the Cleveland class was 600 ft and 12-14,000 tons. Also the U.S. Navy had a next generation CG in the works but with the problems in the Zumwalt's class it's been put on the back burner for the foreseeable future.

In the Honorverse, the Roland-class destroyers are as big as other Navies' light cruisers. I'm not seeing
how that relates to the point that nobody in today's world has any battleships or anything approaching that size of ship or guns.

The reason why nobody is building battleships is mostly money and manpower. During the late eighties and early nineties it was discussed about building new battleships but the expense was to much. IIRC it would have cost upwards of 100 billion dollars to recover the expertise that had been lost in things like manufacturing Class A and B armor plate in the thicknesses required. Which in some cases is 22 inches thick and the ability to weld metal the same thickness. This expense would've been incurred for only a few ships built, plus the cost of actually building the ships in question. The cost of building a new class of battleships would have exceeded 35-45 billion dollars per ship. All for a ship that would have a very limited utility. Even today if the U.S. Navy wanted to it could reactivate all of the Iowa class for about 5 billion dollars and crew them for another billion. As to manpower you could crew 5 or 6 cruisers or destroyers for the manning of one battleship.

Along with everything else that has been said, I would imagine that given today's offensive weapons, a battleship would be vulnerable and hard to protect.

Don

-