lyonheart wrote:Hello and thank you so very much for the data dump, RFC!
Thunderbolt is surprisingly slow for some reason (17.2 vs 28 knots etc), and I'm very surprised how thin the deck armor (1.5-2") still is given how vulnerable it was to the large anti-ship rockets as pointed out in AToT; a new ship class with new more powerful longer ranged guns might now out range those 15" rockets (that were remarkably accurate for early 19th century tech), but from the inner circle discussion during the battle, increasing the KH VII's deck armor was going to be a lesson learned priority in the following ships, let alone even newer classes.
So I'm very curious why that fix didn't happen.
I'm sure RFC has a reason, so I'll be looking for the reason, rational or required by the story, come January.
If you analyze what actually happened to
Eraystor and
Gairmyn, and was an armor penetration that did them in. They were severely
damaged (in fact, they would ultimately have been completely gutted) by
fire, which was set by the very limited number of rockets which actually hit them.
Eraystor was
destroyed when she steamed straight into a minefield and you never actually saw
Gairmyn go down at all. She was clearly sinking, according to the text, but she hadn't
sunk the last the reader saw of her. I couldn't put everything into a book even the size of
At the Sign of Triumph, but what really happened here was that — if you will recall — the ships were in relatively shallow water, and 300-plus rockets plunged into the water
all around them. The observer aboard another ship thought that four or five had actually hit
Eraystor , but he couldn't be sure. Even if it was six, that was only about a 4% hit rate, and it wasn't six. And was enough to set her heavily on fire, but nowhere near enough to sink her. In water that shallow, however, and exploding that close to a riveted hull, the underwater damage was pretty catastrophic. That's actually what happened (ultimately) to
Gairmyn. And remember that these are coal-fired ships, which means that really watertight collision or "torpedo" bulkheads are practically impossible to achieve (as the Royal Navy found out in World War One), because there have to be physical hatches for the coal to be passed through and any physical hatch is liable to spring open from shock damage given a sufficiently powerful (and close) explosion.
The reason I go into this at some length is that the ICN's analysis of what actually happened didn't indicate that the deck armor had been catastrophically thin. That was the
immediate assumption of quite a few people, but then there is the commonly held belief that the British battlecruisers at Jutland were lost because their armor was too thin, as well, whereas they were actually lost because of criminally negligent ammunition handling procedures.
I mentioned somewhere else that there were multiple reasons to go to a Dreadnought all big gun (or at least all the same caliber guns) armament, and one of them is to secure hits at extreme ranges by increasing the number of rounds in the pattern, while another is to smother an opponent with hits at much closer range. At the time that the original Terran
Dreadnought was being considered, the argument as to the practicality of gunnery engagements much beyond 6-10,000 yards was far from settled. And to be honest, the folks who thought that it
wasn't practical had some darned good points. For the purposes of this discussion, however, what matters is that until effective gunnery ranges reache one at which plunging fire will score hits on deck armor at fairly steep angles. If they come in at
shallow angles — which will be the case at shorter ranges — they will tend to skip across the deck armor rather than penetrate. And when that is true, armor thickness can be more profitably employed in belts and turret faces because there won't be many (in fact, may not be
any) plunging shells at practical engagement ranges without not just rangefinders, and not just computational systems capable of keeping track not only of current positions but accurately projecting
future positions
and transmitting that information to the guns in a way that gets it to them in time to do any good. At the present time, nobody on Safehold — including the Imperial Charisian Navy — can do that. Please note that I am not saying whether or not they (or someone else) will be capable of doing that at some time in the future. I am simply saying that right this minute, they can't. So in
Thunderbolt, the inner circle is still looking at a transition design which incorporates trade-offs that aren't directly related to its war-fighting capabilities, knowing that they (Charis) are in a position at this time to outbuild the rest of the world combined if a reason to introduce a Dreadnought style armament presents itself. In the meantime, they'd just as soon not up the ante because building a proper Dreadnought will be far more expensive — and thus far more daunting for a potential opponent — then building a peer competitor for
Thunderbolt.
As for your speed question, the reason for the two speed notations is that ships are designed with a maximum speed (in the case of
Thunderbolt, 28.7 Charisian knots and 25 Terran knots [Charisian sea miles and land miles are the same length; Terran land miles and sea miles were
not]) and a maximum
economical speed (in the case of
thunderbolt, 17.2 Charisian knots and 15 Terran knots. Economical speed means the speed at which they are wasting the least power overcoming wave resistance, and fuel expenditures climb steeply as speed is pushed upward and resistance increases. And without going to turbines, any speed much higher than
Thunderbolt's would tend to shake the ship apart from vibration.
lyonheart wrote:While its 5+ years after the war, we saw now sign of even stationary industrial steam engines, let alone naval ones mentioned in in use by the CoGA etc, and while the might have the principles spelled out, advancing to late 19th century triple compression engines is a huge leap.
You haven't seen very much at all of the mainland, now have you? I wouldn't go making any assumptions about the extent of technology transfers until you actually have some text evidence to go on. Just sayin'.
lyonheart wrote:Torpedo boats weren't really practical until after Turbinia demonstrated the advantages of steam turbines in 1897 at the naval review, so until we see some sign somebody has invented them, I don't expect the Johnny come latelies to come up with something far more advanced.
Given Charis 'invented' the Schooner for commerce raiding, scouting, NTM screening, etc; I don't think Charis really underestimated light units.
Rather, its more accurate to say that having the world's largest merchant marine meant she didn't have near enough when a major power made producing commerce raider type schooners it primary tool in the jihad.
So the ICN had to send out some of the well built ex-NoG galleons, now equipped with explosive shells etc, to help shepherd its numerous convoys, which apparently worked very well as there were no further mention of successful attacks on Charisian convoys.
Between them and the message the City class ironclads delivered, they combined to kick Desnair out of the war.
Thus, until replaced by a longer legged City type cruiser, the schooners will still have a role to play in the ICN.
All the very best wishes to all,
L
If anyone decides to go all jeune ecole and start playing around with torpedo boats, I assure you that the ICN's intelligence apparatus — you know, the guy named Merlin — will know all about it in time to adapt their designs. At the moment, no one is fooling around with anything much more advanced than spar torpedoes, and, frankly, the short-ranged "underwater gun" Dilandu is describing later on in the same thread isn't going to be a significant threat for a long time to come. And as he himself pointed out, the ships are substantially under gunned for their tonnage. One of the reasons for this is that there are footings for pedestal mounts for a
lot of smaller caliber quick-firers. They aren't mounted at the moment for a lot of reasons, including keeping down crew size in peacetime, but while these ships would be potent war fighters if they needed to be, their primary function is to serve as a benchmark — an obvious improvement in detail on the
Gwylym Manthyr but not
enough of an improvement for their potential adversaries to decide that they can't possibly catch up. The trick is to lead the charge, not leave the rest of the pack so far in your dust that they abandon the chase.
As for building torpedo boats with reciprocating engines, it could be done. Remember, they would be competing with other ships with reciprocating engines. They probably wouldn't have very much endurance at high speed — like endurance that means they could make one high-speed attack run before they needed complete overhaul of their machinery — but they could be built. The problem is that building them and providing them with an effective armament requires several things nobody in Safehold has right now. Turbines are only one of the things they need. Depth keeping and gyros compasses come to mind, as well, if they want to have enough range to pose a realistic threat to a cruiser which has mounted enough rapid firing light guns to deal with them.
runsforcelery wrote:Dilandu wrote:quote="PeterZ"
I think this is a battle cruiser. The corresponding all big gun battleship has yet to be seen. I think we will see it in the story, though./quote
Irrelevant of her classification, she seems to be underarmed quite a bit.
Indeed she is. Now why, I wonder, would the ICN have built a ship not quite as nasty as they could have?
Most of the improvements here are detail: better guns with better propellant and faster rate of fire, better arrangement of the armament, hydraulically powered hoists, improved machinery, better distribution of armor. etc. She's also carrying a lot of freeboard because of the weather conditions and sea states in which she's expected to operate, and the casemates are actually in the superstructure and stepped back from the side to reduce blast and spray interference and prevent them from being washed out at anything like normal speeds or "Atlantic" conditions.
Now, there are more reasons than one to go to a dreadnought-style armament. None of those reasons are really in play at this point, although the Inner Circle has already drawn up plans for how to approach the design when the time does come. This is essentially a transition design --- a tech demonstrator to get other navies thinking about proper turret mounts, powered turret machinery, and the other features of a workable design (including how much industrial capacity it will take to build the things).
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