Hull number discrepancy

Armed Neo-Bob wrote:The Havoc class entered RMN in 1860 iirc, and started with hull 001 so the RMN wouldn't have 4 digit hull numbers. Doesn't mean they had all those ships still in service.

HOS only gives data on ships in service at the start of the war (i.e., 1905); otherwise they are just left out of the narrative altogether. Other classes are more than likely. but unless a ship needed to be in a story, they are just omitted.


Members of BuNine who have more info are hobbled by non-disclosure agreements. The author doesn't comment so he can retain more flexibility if he needs it.

IOW, we aren't supposed to know.

A long long long many years ago, a (very frustrated!!!) MaxxQ mentioned during a discussion (ok, there was a very heated argument involving me, Lyonheart and several others) that the RMN had around 1200 frigates before King Roger's buildup; but since all of them--even the Lightnings, built with the Falcons and Apollos by Hauptmann in the 1850's--were retired years before the war, no details were ever given. And he was never, ever that specific again, afaik, but I am not very diligent about reading the posts anymore.

Frigates essentially give up weapons space for endurance--but the frigates were what the RMN used for presence ships and commerce protection, in prefence to the CL's. Another reason why the SLN didn't take them seriously, too, but the conversation pre-dated the expansion into Talbott.

The numbers of BC's were supposed to have been increased to a permanent level of @200 in service after the Battle of Carson, I think; the numbers are disproportionately high compared to other classes, and were used more for force projection than commerce protection.

Wasn't that why it took over a hundred years to build the AD Astra class? No one they needed to deal with had anything that heavy, except Silesia/Manpower. After spanking them with the BB's and forcing them to sign Cherwell, their 200 BCs kept any other fringe systems from bothering them. As for Sollies--all other navies combined were more or less invisible (or insignificant) to the SLN.

YMMV, of course.

Rob

Thanks for the information, Rob.

You're right that nothing above BB would have been necessary for Manticore in the 1700s and early 1800s, before the PRH became expansionist. It was a quiet corner of the Galaxy, with a friendly neighbour, and the only possible thread (SLN) wasn't worth fighting if they got their eyes on you.

I've seen past threads on frigates and how the heated arguments went. Honor server on one in her early career (HMS Osprey (FG-1069)), but I didn't include them in my calculations since there's little information. We don't know whether the Osprey was the very last FG still in service or if the RMN had hundreds of them left. Given the timeframe (1882), I'd guess the former.

I'm still not convinced of explanation for BCs. It's not that Manticore couldn't have built them if they had put their minds to it -- as evidenced by the fact that they could build DNs and SDs when they did want them. It's that it's inconsistent with the CL and CA force levels: 50 CLs, 30 CAs, and 150-200 BCs in 1844?

We know from Lt. Roger Winton that promotion in the RMN was slow. That's also inconsistent with that number of BCs available.

If CLs and CAs were considered useless for force projection and commerce protection, then why hundreds of DDs? And why send newly-minted ship captains to Silesia alone on them?

ThinksMarkedly wrote:If CLs and CAs were considered useless for force projection and commerce protection, then why hundreds of DDs? And why send newly-minted ship captains to Silesia alone on them?

I wouldn't consider the old (1800 PD) CLs and CAs worthless for force projection. They weren't capital units, and for a long while BCs were considered capital units.

So Manticore's BCs were both its home fleet and its heaviest power projection.

But way back when FFs, CLs, and DDs seemed to have an interesting relationship. Of the three DDs were powerful but short ranged, CLs were powerful and long ranged but expensive, while FFs were weak but long ranged. CLs had barely more armament than DDs; but had long cruising range. FFs had basically the same cruising range as CLs but far lighter weapons fits than DDs or CLs.

DDs tended to stick close to fleets or bases, where their lack of cruising endurance wasn't an issue. FFs tended to wide patrol because they were sufficient to deal with normal pirates and you could afford enough of them to do so. CLs could basically do any of eithers jobs better - but at much higher expense so you couldn't afford enough to cover everything you needed to. (Though keep in mind that the CLs we're talking of were often around the size of a 1905 PD destroyer)

CAs of course were bigger and more expensive than even CLs. They probably traded off a little range for much more power and armor (and bigger missiles). BCs had endurance at least equal to any of them, while being much bigger, tougher, and better armed (but vastly more expensive).


Silesia was probably somewhat doable with an old DDs only because there were so many neutral ports willing and able to resupply them. Still, back 100+ years ago I'd bet Silesia saw many more RMN FFs or CLs tasked with anti-piracy work than DDs.


However as we get closer to the time of OBS the minimum size of a viable destroyer keeps creeping up and up. So you get to the point where you just don't have to compromise anywhere near as heavily on cruising endurance to squeeze in the weapons and magazines you want to achieve your firepower goals. As that's happening frigates make less and less sense. Their range advantage over DDs is lessening and that makes it harder to justify units, even cheap ones, that are far less useful in fleet combat.

Jonathan_S wrote:

ThinksMarkedly wrote:If CLs and CAs were considered useless for force projection and commerce protection, then why hundreds of DDs? And why send newly-minted ship captains to Silesia alone on them?

I wouldn't consider the old (1800 PD) CLs and CAs worthless for force projection. They weren't capital units, and for a long while BCs were considered capital units.

So Manticore's BCs were both its home fleet and its heaviest power projection.

Ok, so if I get your argument, the RMN in 1844 had multiple hundreds of DDs and FFs, a handful of CLs and CAs, plus a hundred or two BCs consisting the majority of the Home Fleet, backed by 11 BBs and 11 DNs. The DDs and FFs were sufficient for patrolling close to home and in Silesia, with enough firepower to hold their own against any reasonable threat, while the FFs were sent further afield, like into the Verge and Solarian League, chasing down slavers. CLs were too expensive for little real gain in the same tasks. CAs and BCs could be sent whenever there was a bigger problem, with the preference given to building BCs over CAs because they could serve as escorts to ships of the wall.

Is that it?

We may say there was also an aspect of institutional culture: because Sagamani died aboard a BC, the RMN personnel, including BuShips, preferred BCs over CAs.

Still, I think it's far more likely there was another BC class in the 1800s that didn't get mentioned in HoS.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:
Ok, so if I get your argument, the RMN in 1844 had multiple hundreds of DDs and FFs, a handful of CLs and CAs, plus a hundred or two BCs consisting the majority of the Home Fleet, backed by 11 BBs and 11 DNs. The DDs and FFs were sufficient for patrolling close to home and in Silesia, with enough firepower to hold their own against any reasonable threat, while the FFs were sent further afield, like into the Verge and Solarian League, chasing down slavers. CLs were too expensive for little real gain in the same tasks. CAs and BCs could be sent whenever there was a bigger problem, with the preference given to building BCs over CAs because they could serve as escorts to ships of the wall.

Is that it?

We may say there was also an aspect of institutional culture: because Sagamani died aboard a BC, the RMN personnel, including BuShips, preferred BCs over CAs.

Still, I think it's far more likely there was another BC class in the 1800s that didn't get mentioned in HoS.

One of our findings of HoS was that only warships active in the RMN between 1900 (the start of OBS) and 1921 are in the book. (So a theoretical BC class what retired 5 minutes prior to the start of OBS would not be mentioned in the book)

No support ships are mentioned in the ship lists.

Build counts only include ships accepted by the RMN; ships destroyed in the slips, ships which failed trials, and ships built for other navies are not included in the build #s.

Ships weapons stats, size and mass are given for the class's latest refit #s. Not every ship may have the same fit.

Ships accel is given as their original design spec #s.

The Book only gives accepted ships #s through May 1st, 1921pd.

HoS does not detail sales, losses or transfers of active or reserve ships from the RMN.

Also of note - the 1920 Shiplist is the ships active and reserve on ~ March 1st 1920pd (the date Honor accepted command of 8th fleet.). The new war construction, all the halted 1st war construction, and reserve refresh were not included in that list.

As for the 1850s shiplist, there more than a handful CLs and CAs- we know there were 62 Courageous CLs, and 123 Truncheon and Warrior CAs built prior to 1850. Totals were probably a couple hundred each of CLs and CAs, but far fewer than the 1200 FFs.

Also, you forgot the 3 Manticore SDs, built in the mid to late 1700s.

What no one has mentioned is this is just part of the fleet. Manticore also had a solid core of forts at the Junction and the planets in 1850. These were Manticore's true defenses, and kept the need for a larger mobile wall nonexistant. While we don't know their numbers at most periods, we can safely guess that there are >>20 at the Junction in 1850, each with the capability of 1/2 a squadron of SDs or so.

This greatly skews Manticore's combat power - for defense the 24 Wallers and ~200 BCs are icing on the cake - the hammer to the Fort's anvil. Plus, Manticore can afford to free up most of that mobile power for operations - the forts can protect the planets and junction - a peer competitor with the same size mobile force cannot do this without removing cover from their defenses, making their thrusts far less effective.

Even with 24 decrepit wallers, Manticore in 1850 was a force to be reckoned with. Fewer than 24 other navies (even in 1923 pd) could field 8 or more wallers. And with Wallers being designed to last 100 or more years, similar navies probably fielded similar ships, refitted repeatedly to stay current.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:If CLs and CAs were considered useless for force projection and commerce protection, then why hundreds of DDs? And why send newly-minted ship captains to Silesia alone on them?

Jonathan_S wrote:I wouldn't consider the old (1800 PD) CLs and CAs worthless for force projection. They weren't capital units, and for a long while BCs were considered capital units.

So Manticore's BCs were both its home fleet and its heaviest power projection.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:Ok, so if I get your argument, the RMN in 1844 had multiple hundreds of DDs and FFs, a handful of CLs and CAs, plus a hundred or two BCs consisting the majority of the Home Fleet, backed by 11 BBs and 11 DNs. The DDs and FFs were sufficient for patrolling close to home and in Silesia, with enough firepower to hold their own against any reasonable threat, while the FFs were sent further afield, like into the Verge and Solarian League, chasing down slavers. CLs were too expensive for little real gain in the same tasks. CAs and BCs could be sent whenever there was a bigger problem, with the preference given to building BCs over CAs because they could serve as escorts to ships of the wall.

Is that it?

We may say there was also an aspect of institutional culture: because Sagamani died aboard a BC, the RMN personnel, including BuShips, preferred BCs over CAs.

Still, I think it's far more likely there was another BC class in the 1800s that didn't get mentioned in HoS.

Ummm. Yes, and no. Yes, other classes had to have been built that weren't suitable for upgrading and got scrapped before the war. No, because you are all ignoring the politics involved. And RFC wrote a lot about the politics.

And Theemile did a nice job of citing the limitations in HOS.

The main reason the early RMN build numbers were skewed to Frigates and Cruisers, to Battlecruisers instead of Battleships or Dreadnoughts, was politics.

One point of view was represented by Janacek and his supporters; it was the attitude of a Navy which had had NO major conflicts between Axelrod's invasion and Queen Adrienne (and that was a couple hundred years ago); and while there are frequent clashes with pirates, privateers, and slavers, there haven't been any outright wars. Until Haven started actually expanding in the 1840's, the public was blissfully unaware of any threat. And refused to believe in that threat after it became obvious.

The other pov was held by Our Heroes. But even White Haven had to be kicked out of the mental rut he was in, regarding Change instead of Modification of What IS.

You might consider this in conjunction with a lot of the idiocy that people do throughout this series: an inability to accept that conditions have CHANGED.

This was the case for both Liberals and Conservatives on Manticore (pre-war, I mean); for the hardline traditionalists on Grayson; and just lately for the SLN. But it is something seemingly everywhere in the Honorverse.

Think about it--a plateau of technical and social progress that took a millenium to develop and needs to be set aside quite suddenly.

Rapid change for us, today, is normal. Change of any real sort, for them, is mind boggling and frightening.

Those who are advocating that all the Sollie systems will immediately set out to build SDF's with pod layers are ignoring the book by book re-iteration of just how hard it is for the people living in the Honorverse to set aside their assumptions. Even now, the Sollie survivors of BOM don't believe their own sensor techs. . . .

Feel free to disagree, of course.

Rob

ThinksMarkedly wrote:
If CLs and CAs were considered useless for force projection and commerce protection, then why hundreds of DDs? And why send newly-minted ship captains to Silesia alone on them?

Stop looking for logic with post-war hindsight.

Do you consider presence mission force projection? Or just useless?

Also, some of the build numbers went directly into the Reserve, but that is a different thread.

Destroyers had two major missions: fleet defense/scouting; and commerce protection. Engaging in the second allows a secondary function: show the flag. Unless you are sending them out to the deepest darkest parts of the Verge, they aren't going to be seen as "force projection" units by the system they are in.

Jonathan S addressed part of this from a technical viewpoint. He didn't consider the politics though. Manticore rarely engaged in force projection because their own public was highly anti-imperialist. Maybe because they were almost the victims of Sollie imperialism.

Manticore exerted their economic muscles first, not Naval ones, in dealing with foreign powers. Until Haven went rogue, there were only a couple of times they were ever challenged militarily; after the first expedition (to Pheonix), they got an expansion of the BC class; otherwise, it was business as usual for the Navy. The daily grind of tagging along with merchies.

In Silesia, they sent the BC's and found they were up against BC's with Silesian government complicity; so they sent the battleships in.

The first expedition can be called a success--people stopped raiding their commerce. They set up a local-supported anti-piracy force with Erewhon and local systems.

The second was an utter and total failure. Sure, they busted Pirate/Slaver/Sillie chops. But they got stuck policing an area 3/4's the size of the Solarian League, and had to combat pirates, slavers, privateers, secessionist/rebel governments and all the other assorted chaos; and it was straining their relationships with the Andermani, who are, according to the text, their most important trading partner.

They didn't even get a concession like having RMN bases within Silesia--something the Andies did have.

The initial build up in numbers of destroyers was because the frigates were running into trouble in Silesia; they were replacing the frigates in a region where stars are only a few days or a week apart, so you don't run out of food or air. So a DD's shorter range didn't factor in at all.

Then,immediately pre-war, it is all about scouting platforms and system pickets so you know where an enemy is--or where he was a few weeks ago, anyway. By this time, frigates are already scrap.

For myself, I always thought the number of smaller ships (escorts) was insanely low given the number of merchants.

Rob

Jonathan_S wrote:But way back when FFs, CLs, and DDs seemed to have an interesting relationship. Of the three DDs were powerful but short ranged, CLs were powerful and long ranged but expensive, while FFs were weak but long ranged. CLs had barely more armament than DDs; but had long cruising range. FFs had basically the same cruising range as CLs but far lighter weapons fits than DDs or CLs.

This is not something that I had noticed before and I find it disturbing. It would be far easier to design a destroyer class that had the same cruising range as a CL without increasing hull size, then to do that with a frigate, and it would still have a much better weapons package than the frigate. So what was the justification for this (the only one that I can see is money)? The extra space and larger crew of the destroyer would also make a long cruise less of a hardship, but again more expensive. But then that would make assigning prize crews easier, when necessary.

Theemile wrote:Also, you forgot the 3 Manticore SDs, built in the mid to late 1700s.

Oops, indeed. I think I had mentioned them up in the thread, but I'd forgot about them in this particular post. By the way, I had done the research on DNs and SDs too, but I hadn't needed for the argumentation so I didn't include it (in what was already a long post).

For the record, here are the numbers. They also are consistent with sequential numbering:

Dreadnoughts

• 1632: Ad Astra class, 11 in service in 1844
• 1846: HMS Royal Winton (DN-12), Royal Winton class, 21 built
• 1866: Gladiator class, 34 built
• 1896: Majestic class, 40 built
• 1900: Bellerophon class, 38 built

Total; 124, strength in 1905: 121

Superdreadnought

• 1742: HMS Manticore (SD-01), Manticore class, 3 built
• 1848: HMS Samothrace (supposedly SD-04), Samothrace class, 7 built
• 1877: King William class, 25 built
• 1889: Anduril class, 14 built
• 1892: Victory class, 36 built
• 1895: Sphinx class, 67 built
• 1895: HMS Basilisk (SD-105)
• 1900: Gryphon class, 163 built

Total: 315, strength in 1905: 188

The numbers seem reasonable for the wall too. The only noticeable part is that only 3 of all DNs ever built were not in service in 1905. Either they had been retired for some reason or those last 3 were still in construction at the time the war started, but no new DN was built since.

Given that, we can probably assume that all SDs were in service, except for SD-02 and SD-03 that we know were decommissioned. To reach 188 by the start of the war, we need 105 Gryphons and Sphinxes out of the 230. That seems totally reasonable that 115 more (which could be all Gryphons) were built until the Medusas entered service in 1914.

Armed Neo-Bob wrote:Ummm. Yes, and no. Yes, other classes had to have been built that weren't suitable for upgrading and got scrapped before the war. No, because you are all ignoring the politics involved. And RFC wrote a lot about the politics.

And Theemile did a nice job of citing the limitations in HOS.

The main reason the early RMN build numbers were skewed to Frigates and Cruisers, to Battlecruisers instead of Battleships or Dreadnoughts, was politics.

Thanks Bob and Theemile. This makes a lot of sense now.

The answer to the BC hull number discrepanc could bey, it seems, "all of the above": there was likely one class of BCs from the 1800s missing from HoS but that had been completely retired out of service by the start of the war, even though older Redoubtables were still active, and the RMN and politics skewed heavier construction towards BCs.

There are any number of good reasons why a class between Redoubtable and Homer could have been designed, built and retired. Like you said, upgrading could have been more difficult than on Redoubtables. Or it could be because of some short-sighted decision (in hind-sight) that made them less suitable for war conditions.

The "BC-413" hull number can be achieved by, say, some 120-150 BCs built in the 1600 and 1700s, most of which still in active service when the build up started, and another 30-40 of a "failed" class from any point in the 1800s. With the Redoubtables and Homers, that would make HMS Reliant's hull number anywhere from BC-354 to BC-394, commissioned 8 years before HMS Nike.

tlb wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:But way back when FFs, CLs, and DDs seemed to have an interesting relationship. Of the three DDs were powerful but short ranged, CLs were powerful and long ranged but expensive, while FFs were weak but long ranged. CLs had barely more armament than DDs; but had long cruising range. FFs had basically the same cruising range as CLs but far lighter weapons fits than DDs or CLs.

This is not something that I had noticed before and I find it disturbing. It would be far easier to design a destroyer class that had the same cruising range as a CL without increasing hull size, then to do that with a frigate, and it would still have a much better weapons package than the frigate. So what was the justification for this (the only one that I can see is money)? The extra space and larger crew of the destroyer would also make a long cruise less of a hardship, but again more expensive. But then that would make assigning prize crews easier, when necessary.

Wouldn't a DD with the same cruising range as a CL be, by definition, a CL?

From what I understood from Jonathan's post, for the same price you could build an FF or a DD, and they might have about the same crew size, even though a DD cost more to arm than an FF. Each of a FF or a DD matches one aspect of the CL but not the other: armour / firepower or range.

So having little need for a ship that had both armour and firepower, the RMN of the 1500s, 1600s, 1700s and early 1800s found it more convenient and more flexible to build those two instead of CLs and CAs.