Courvosier II broadside tubes

I wanted to reread I WILL BUILD MY HOUSE OF STEEL which led to another perusal of the ship specifications. The Grayson BC(P) design differs from the RMN Agememnon BC(P) design by retaining 6 missile launchers in each broadside and 4 missile lauchers as forward chase mounts. These tubes have off bore firing capability do they can supplement the missiles launched from missile pods.

My question is what missiles are fired from the broadside and forward tubes?

The Courvosier II and Agememnon designs apparently predated introduction of the Mk-16 DDM by a few years. When the Mk-16 became available the RMN chose to load out the Aggies with pods firing 14 Mk-16s rather than 10 of the larger, capital ship MDMs. It is not stated if the GSN emulated the RMN by reloading the Courvosair II BCs with Mk-16s when that missile became available.

Given the stated doctrine of the GSN for their BC(P), I suspect that the broadside and bow tubes are designed to fire full up, 3 stage MDMs.

If the above is true, then the GSN probably did NOT reload with Mk-16s to maintain a homogeneous armament. The extra 16 missiles from broadside tubes would allow them to fire the same number of all up MDMs as the the number of Mk-16s that can be fired from an Agememnon or even a Harrington / Invictus.

The Courvorsair II might not have the same defensive armament, sidewalls, armor and robustness as a Nike BC, but I'd still would not want to piss it off.

Darn!
RunsForCelery has visited to comment on Cleopatra Schwartz but has not seen fit to enlighten us on this question.

This doesn't really go into the DDM/MDM issue but...

The one real advantage I can see broadside tubes having over pods is that with a pod you are stuck with whatever you loaded into it, but with a tube you can mix/match anything you have in your magazines be it laser-heads, old fashioned contact nukes, various electronic warfare birds, etc. There's been some mention of being able to move pods around, but it's been universally about mitigating battle-damage rather than shuffling ammunition types.

We know the GSN was worried about mission kills on the pod-cores, and I recall something being said once about thickening EW assets, but I can see the sheer versatility being attractive as well.

TFLYTSNBN wrote:I wanted to reread I WILL BUILD MY HOUSE OF STEEL which led to another perusal of the ship specifications. The Grayson BC(P) design differs from the RMN Agememnon BC(P) design by retaining 6 missile launchers in each broadside and 4 missile lauchers as forward chase mounts. These tubes have off bore firing capability do they can supplement the missiles launched from missile pods.

My question is what missiles are fired from the broadside and forward tubes?

The Courvosier II and Agememnon designs apparently predated introduction of the Mk-16 DDM by a few years. When the Mk-16 became available the RMN chose to load out the Aggies with pods firing 14 Mk-16s rather than 10 of the larger, capital ship MDMs. It is not stated if the GSN emulated the RMN by reloading the Courvosair II BCs with Mk-16s when that missile became available.

Not sure when their design was locked down, but the Courvosair II entered service in 1919 and the Sag-C and Roland both entered service in 1920. Now HoS doesn't give in service months, so in theory at much as 22 months could separate the commissionings of the first Courvosair II and Saganami-C - but more likely closer to 12.

So I'm not sure it's a given than the BC(P)'s final design predated development of the Mk16. (The early sketches probably did - but who knows how many variations it went through before being finalized)

Kael Posavatz wrote:This doesn't really go into the DDM/MDM issue but...

The one real advantage I can see broadside tubes having over pods is that with a pod you are stuck with whatever you loaded into it, but with a tube you can mix/match anything you have in your magazines be it laser-heads, old fashioned contact nukes, various electronic warfare birds, etc. There's been some mention of being able to move pods around, but it's been universally about mitigating battle-damage rather than shuffling ammunition types.

We know the GSN was worried about mission kills on the pod-cores, and I recall something being said once about thickening EW assets, but I can see the sheer versatility being attractive as well.

Internal tubes are always going to be more flexible and convenient though, right? And they aren't prone to proximity kills. If your internal tubes are killed, you are too.

cthia wrote:Internal tubes are always going to be more flexible and convenient though, right? And they aren't prone to proximity kills. If your internal tubes are killed, you are too.

Well, if all of them are you're probably dead too. But ships lose internal tubes all the time in combat. There's just enough armor cofferdaming around them that a hit rarely kills more than a couple of tubes. Where as a hit that reaches into the pod bay is likely to wreck the majority of the pods in there.

Even the Invictus, 2nd gen SD(P)s, that have extra armor around the pod bay don't have anything within the bay to compartmentalize damage from spreading pod to pod. The extra armor is just to keep a hit from going from the pod back into the core vitals of the ship.

cthia wrote:
Internal tubes are always going to be more flexible and convenient though, right? And they aren't prone to proximity kills. If your internal tubes are killed, you are too.

I don't know about 'always.' I think the ability to put huge numbers of missiles into space in one go can be pretty darn convenient too.

I just think there are also enough examples of customized missile flights (Thunder of God's jamming package being used as a homing beacon for contact nukes in HoQ, also one of the missile flights used in OBS used an asynchronous launch with a decoy leading to hide the gap) that Grayson would see it as attractive. The HoQ example in particular would be a fairly strong motivation for leaving that kind of flexibility available.

agreed. always though the Invictus should have kept some broadside tubes. maybe not the 26 of the medusa but 12 or so would still be useful. particularly once off bore firing was perfected.

The GSN built their BC(P)s at a time when the Janacek admiralty was hostile to them and excluding Grayson's fro. Research. They probably were aware of the Mk-16 program but did not have enough information to risk bulding a bunch of battle cruisers around it.

Jonathan_S wrote:

TFLYTSNBN wrote:I wanted to reread I WILL BUILD MY HOUSE OF STEEL which led to another perusal of the ship specifications. The Grayson BC(P) design differs from the RMN Agememnon BC(P) design by retaining 6 missile launchers in each broadside and 4 missile lauchers as forward chase mounts. These tubes have off bore firing capability do they can supplement the missiles launched from missile pods.

My question is what missiles are fired from the broadside and forward tubes?

The Courvosier II and Agememnon designs apparently predated introduction of the Mk-16 DDM by a few years. When the Mk-16 became available the RMN chose to load out the Aggies with pods firing 14 Mk-16s rather than 10 of the larger, capital ship MDMs. It is not stated if the GSN emulated the RMN by reloading the Courvosair II BCs with Mk-16s when that missile became available.

Not sure when their design was locked down, but the Courvosair II entered service in 1919 and the Sag-C and Roland both entered service in 1920. Now HoS doesn't give in service months, so in theory at much as 22 months could separate the commissionings of the first Courvosair II and Saganami-C - but more likely closer to 12.

So I'm not sure it's a given than the BC(P)'s final design predated development of the Mk16. (The early sketches probably did - but who knows how many variations it went through before being finalized)

TFLYTSNBN wrote:The GSN built their BC(P)s at a time when the Janacek admiralty was hostile to them and excluding Grayson's fro. Research. They probably were aware of the Mk-16 program but did not have enough information to risk bulding a bunch of battle cruisers around it.

Could be. But it doesn't seem like going from a 3-drive fusion powered Mk23 to a 2-drive fusion powered Mk16 is that big a leap. I'm not sure Janacek could have cut them off early enough that they weren't aware the effort was underway and have sufficient details to roll their own Mk16s.

But I could certainly be wrong about that.

Unfortunately HoS, unlike the earlier Jaynes books, doesn't give part numbers for various hardware so we can't compare the missile launcher mod on the BC(P) and the Harrington I/II and see if they appear to be a capital MDM launcher or not.

So unless RFC, Tom Pope, or another BuNine member who worked on that area happen to chime in I guess all we can do is continue to speculate.


But I to thank you for bringing up the topic - I'd never thought to consider the timeline on the Grayson BC(P) design relative to the availability of DDMs. It's certainly an intriguing thought that they might have full Mk23 capable MDM launchers in their broadsides.