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Snippet #13

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Re: Snippet #13
Post by Kael Posavatz   » Tue Nov 13, 2018 4:09 pm

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Dilandu wrote:
Vinea wrote:I don't understand this comment when there are plenty of examples of these in RFC's books.


Examples, yes. But not much use. Of course it's only my IMHO - and I clearly not always right - but for me it seems that RFC tend to underestimate the value of light units less than sea-capable destroyer analogue. I.e. patrol crafts, escort ships, gunboats, ect. Both in Honorverse and in Safehold, warring fleets tended to pump out as much capital ship as possible, and basically do not build anything functionally smaller than light cruiser.

No offense.


In Honorverse, the RMN/PN started with ~500 and ~600 DD respectively. Was there a major shift from building smaller vessels to capital ships during war? Yes, but that was, in part, because large numbers of smaller ships had already been put in commission. The RMN revolutionized a gunboat-analog in the midst of a war. And the Janacek's admiralty during the High Ridge administration focused almost utterly on LAC/light ship construction (as I recall, the only ships heavier than a CA built during that time were 1 squadron of BC(P)s, and the Nike-class 'prototype'. I grant there is some argument about the Roland-class DD out-massing the light cruiser Avalons, but even there the RMN classifies ships by their intended mission/use rather than mass limitations.

There are also multiple examples of use of such ships. HoQ, SVW, HAE, iEH, and EoH all have examples of warships ranging from DD up to BC being used as merchant escorts. I'll grant that HoQ the freighters are barely mentioned, and in EoH it is the Peeps pulling escort duty, but it is still a fairly major plot element in HAE, and only somewhat less so (if briefer) in iEH.

Safehold also has examples of lighter ships. But whereas Honorverse tends to use naval-treaty terminology for ship classes/missions, Safehold has been built around a modified age-of-sail terminology with the number of guns often being the key to determining the relative size of a given vessel type. I think there are examples of Charisian schooners that range from 8-14 guns. Technically the RN considered any unrated combat vessel to be a sloop, but as a matter of practice they were classified by sailplan (brig, schooner), purpose (bomb ketch, fireship), or size (cutter).

In part because of the starting point of navies and the severely compressed development timeline, the terminology used has remained relatively unchanged. 'Galleon' was still used for capital line-of-battleships despite the sharp divergence in ship characteristics from the pre-Merlin merchant ship of origin from which they derived. Likewise, the term 'schooner' is a catchall term for sail-powered vessels that are not intended to fight in the line of battle.
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Re: Snippet #13
Post by Alistair   » Tue Nov 13, 2018 7:35 pm

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I know little of Naval tech but my guess is that the ship is not a strictly speaking a war ship but rather an "Imperial Yacht on steroids" for Emperor and Empress.

Note its fast cruising speed
Low armaments
The fact that key people in Dohlar were watching it come in would they take note if it was just a normal flag showing port visit?

The space is taken up with giving Flag quarters and guest quarters suitable for the Empire needs.

Just a guess...
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Re: Snippet #13
Post by runsforcelery   » Wed Nov 14, 2018 1:34 am

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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).
[/quote]


"Oh, bother!" said Pooh, as Piglet came back from the dead.
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Re: Snippet #13
Post by runsforcelery   » Wed Nov 14, 2018 1:42 am

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Dilandu wrote:
GregD wrote:
Um, you really think Thunderer is going to be traveling around by herself?

When the ICN decides they want to visit, and destroy, your port, what is your defense? If your land-based forts can't withstand her guns, and can't hurt her, you're toast


Why not? In previous war, Charisians threw battleships in actions without any escorts. (And I knew that RFC tend to disregard the need of escorts, coastal & convoy protection ships ;) )




Actually, I didn't. I spent quite a while talking about it, and the need to provide escorts was a critical limiting factor on the Charisians' deployable hulls. For that matter, it was a critical factor in the Temple's logistics between South Harchong and the battlefront. I didn't fight a lot of convoy actions, but there were certainly an awful lot of references to Desnairian commerce-raiders (among others) in the books.

And the nature of the engagements is a factor of the armament mix on both sides. The purpose of escorts for capital ships is to deal with the torpedo threat, basically, and absent a torpedo threat, you don't build a lot of short-legged coal-fired escorts. And when the only mobile underwater threat is from an oar-propelled spar torpedo platform, sticking 3" and 4" QF guns aboard is perfectly adequate, thank you.

There is absolutely no reason for these people to be building a duplicate of a 1890 1910 navy at this time, and unless somebody can invent practical torpedo — and not the short-ranged, chemical-propellant version you are talking about above — they aren't going to. At the moment, ships like Thunderbolt are the "capital ships" of the Imperial Charisian Navy. There is a lighter cruiser class (which you haven't seen yet) which is more of the scouting cruiser and also serves (inasmuch as it is needed) in the escort role.


"Oh, bother!" said Pooh, as Piglet came back from the dead.
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Re: Snippet #13
Post by phillies   » Wed Nov 14, 2018 6:20 am

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The author undoubtedly has other fiendish schemes in mind to annoy the Charisians. If the author wants more speed for small ships, the crackpot project of hybridizing a fast boat and a dirigible comes to mind. After enough false starts that the research project is ignored, the inventors at a remote base come up with a World War One invention, the hovercraft, except with skirts, the main range increaser.

World War One? Yes, in the Imperial and Royal Navy. Without skirts, the vehicle was less effective.
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Re: Snippet #13
Post by isaac_newton   » Wed Nov 14, 2018 7:37 am

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phillies wrote:The author undoubtedly has other fiendish schemes in mind to annoy the Charisians. If the author wants more speed for small ships, the crackpot project of hybridizing a fast boat and a dirigible comes to mind. After enough false starts that the research project is ignored, the inventors at a remote base come up with a World War One invention, the hovercraft, except with skirts, the main range increaser.

World War One? Yes, in the Imperial and Royal Navy. Without skirts, the vehicle was less effective.



interesting - a few tracer shells might make that very 'interesting' for the occupants :-)
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Re: Snippet #13
Post by isaac_newton   » Wed Nov 14, 2018 7:40 am

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runsforcelery wrote: SNIP... And when the only mobile underwater threat is from an oar-propelled spar torpedo platform, sticking 3" and 4" QF guns aboard is perfectly adequate, thank you.

There is absolutely no reason for these people to be building a duplicate of a 1890 1910 navy at this time, and unless somebody can invent practical torpedo — and not the short-ranged, chemical-propellant version you are talking about above — they aren't going to. At the moment, ships like Thunderbolt are the "capital ships" of the Imperial Charisian Navy. There is a lighter cruiser class (which you haven't seen yet) which is more of the scouting cruiser and also serves (inasmuch as it is needed) in the escort role.



Nice to see you back 'en forum'!
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Re: Snippet #13
Post by Dilandu   » Wed Nov 14, 2018 9:18 am

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runsforcelery wrote:
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.



This is just counter-productive. The goal is to encourage the innovative mindset, after all. "They must adopt Charisian innovation to have a chance against new Charisian military" for which KH's and "Thunderbolt" are supposed to be a demonstrators. Right?

Well, problem is, that innovative mindset MUST be rewarded. If the situation would continiously went "despite everything we tried, Charisians just outteched us again", sooner or later everybody else would just give up. What the reason to innovate, if it never pays off? The "only Charisian could make sucsessful innovation" could hardly be the desired example. And if such situation would linger for some time, then Charisian would probably start to measure skulls quite fast.

Not to mention that AFTER the Reveal, all other nations would just realize, that they were essentially duped twice - that Charisian "innovative mindset" was in fact only a charade, illusion. The consequences might be... extremely unpleasant.
------------------------------

Oh well, if shortening the front is what the Germans crave,
Let's shorten it to very end - the length of Fuhrer's grave.

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Re: Snippet #13
Post by Isilith   » Wed Nov 14, 2018 9:49 am

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runsforcelery wrote: 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


Thanks for confirming my thought, that there would be slots for quite a few Hotchkiss revolving cannons along sides. Make fast small ships go boom.
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Re: Snippet #13
Post by isaac_newton   » Wed Nov 14, 2018 10:06 am

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Dilandu wrote:
runsforcelery wrote:
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.



This is just counter-productive. The goal is to encourage the innovative mindset, after all. "They must adopt Charisian innovation to have a chance against new Charisian military" for which KH's and "Thunderbolt" are supposed to be a demonstrators. Right?

Well, problem is, that innovative mindset MUST be rewarded. If the situation would continiously went "despite everything we tried, Charisians just outteched us again", sooner or later everybody else would just give up. What the reason to innovate, if it never pays off? The "only Charisian could make sucsessful innovation" could hardly be the desired example. And if such situation would linger for some time, then Charisian would probably start to measure skulls quite fast.

Not to mention that AFTER the Reveal, all other nations would just realize, that they were essentially duped twice - that Charisian "innovative mindset" was in fact only a charade, illusion. The consequences might be... extremely unpleasant.


well - there is also the motivation that they really, really wont want to be left behind by the nations!

It's one thing not being able to catch up completely with Charis, it's quite another being left in the dust by, say, Siddermark or Desnair or [name favourite enemy]
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