The Navy of God against Charis naval superiority

Dilandu wrote:

The compact steam engines existed since mid-XIX century, and by the 1880s they were of very advanced & effective type. Still, they weren't exactly suitable for motorboats, due to inherited low efficienty. Also, the hydrodynamic questions arise.
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forgive me if I'm wrong, not my forte
but wasn't one of the big problems with steam engines for ships the fact they needed condensers or a means to deal with the salt water issues, which all led to much greater weights and problems for OCEAN going vessels?
when talking about warships that is, as their needs and expenses are different than a slow, efficient merchant ship

a warship like a cruiser, or a cargo ship, due to better volume issues on larger hulls, has more capacity for condensers etc, than a small boat has (surface area/volume ratios etc)
so that's where problems would come from that would make ordinary steam engines a bad idea for a small high speed boat?

But Doble/Praigyr engines don't HAVE those issues, as they use a very closed circulation fresh water system that has little loss
it doesn't sound very scalable, it wouldn't be good for a large ship, but would for a small boat?

SilverbladeTE wrote:
"Ballistic gelatin"
do you mean the explosive, "gelignite"? (which is its 'more common British name)
think translation issues there

Yeah, my mistake. Thank you for correcting me.

ok, that sounds like a great mix of ships/systems!
well, a fun read, not so fun for Charis, lol
yeah I'm not in favour of the "big slugging matches" some folk like for big warships or tanks against each other
war is about survival, you do what it takes to win and thus be smart about it

Well, basically the only actual "big sluggish match" that actually led to something was Tsusima battle) And even it is not a clear example, because Japanese side have all possible advantages here. All other attempts - like Jutland - generally were inconclusive, and by 1930s the general decision was to abandon the concept of "battleline" at all, replacing it with "surface groups", centered around a single battleship division.

Jutland was especially good example how practice went contrary to theory. Both sides struggled, trying just to put their enormous, sluggish battlelines in the right position. And they basically was able to do it... for 15 minutes of action, after which they disengaged.

there are issues with poison gasses, but long topic and unpleasant, a primary point is they contaminate where they are made, stored and used which makes them bloody stupid things to use, really.

Disagree about mustard gas; it's quite effective as battlefield weapon. Its main advantage is that it is not of immediate effect (which means, that victim would not immediately realize that it is being affected), and could stay active for quite a long time, efficiently contaminating the terrain and equipment.

another is they are likely causes of epidemics to break out because they weaken the immune system of so many men, reasonable bet the Spanish 1918 Flu got so bad because of the poor healthof so many men in the trenches, mustard gas is very bad for victim's immune systems

Er, nah. It was generally because of food shortages in Europe and lessened quarantine measures during the war.

SilverbladeTE wrote:
But Doble/Praigyr engines don't HAVE those issues, as they use a very closed circulation fresh water system that has little loss
it doesn't sound very scalable, it wouldn't be good for a large ship, but would for a small boat?

Problem of the flash boilers, that they are not exactly reliable. They are prone to overheating, and quite unpleasant bursts. And one of the reason why they weren't exactly popular on naval ships - they are not durable. Under combat condition, they are prone to failures, and they are NOT easy to repair. If the enemy pierced a standard fire-tube boiler, it is not exactly hard to repair it. But flash boiler would fail completely and need to be rebuild.

Royal Navy tried to use flash boilers on steam gun boats (SGB) of World War II, due to shortage of gasoline engines; they weren't exactly successful ships.

By the way:
very good thread for info, thanks for all the input to read up on here!



oh and one more thought on "native Safehold" things being used for technology:
I would be looking for a native Safeholdian organism, or unusual mineral perhaps, that could be used as the basis for anti-fouling paint!

as we now know, alas, some of the anti-fouling pants used in recent years have had a truly catastrophic effect on marine life and should be damn well banned, sigh
So I doubt the Inner Circle would want the same kind of environmental damage to occur
and they have t have a reasonable method of such being "discovered"

however, ships, especially naval vessels absolutely rely on them, as the novels point out well how bad the effect of fouling on ship's bottoms truly is, and it gets worse the faster you go, as far as I am aware?

discovering a suitable material may happen in any of Safehold's realms.
definitely a bit of a game changer with metal hulled ships, until the tech is stolen or sold etc

The King Haarhald's had to have, of all things, a wooden hull added to them underwater to which copper could be added
because there is no way you could attach copper to iron without galvanic corrosion
and sacrificial anodes are limited in effect and costly, and absolutely NO electrical systems !

thus a safe, effective fouling paint is a major necessity for Safehold's iron warships

Kraken Kote (tm) !

Dilandu wrote:
Problem of the flash boilers, that they are not exactly reliable. They are prone to overheating, and quite unpleasant bursts. And one of the reason why they weren't exactly popular on naval ships - they are not durable. Under combat condition, they are prone to failures, and they are NOT easy to repair. If the enemy pierced a standard fire-tube boiler, it is not exactly hard to repair it. But flash boiler would fail completely and need to be rebuild.

Royal Navy tried to use flash boilers on steam gun boats (SGB) of World War II, due to shortage of gasoline engines; they weren't exactly successful ships.

Ah, that does make sense as to the issues

I would say though, that if the enemies of Charis don't come up with something better though may try and use such, even with those problems
they are kind of stuck and need a "game changer" and the Emperors don't care how many serfs get parboiled
though of course, treating their military badly may end up with something akin to the German High Seas Fleet Mutiny....

Dilandu wrote:

SilverbladeTE wrote:
"Ballistic gelatin"
do you mean the explosive, "gelignite"? (which is its 'more common British name)
think translation issues there

Yeah, my mistake. Thank you for correcting me.

No worries, mate!
I can barely write in my own language at times with screwing up, so I'm hardly going to complain about someone having to translate from their native language!

Mustard gas does have a severe, detrimental, long term affect on the actual immune systems of survivors
as do a few other more advanced poison gasses (i.e., organophosphates)
effects denied by governments to avoid paying out compensation, clean up efforts, or helping survivors

stuff I know about, meh.

UK's ratbags in government and bureaucracy dumped mustard gas all over and in the sea (Beaufort's Dyke) and there were lots of victims, plus unethical testing etc.
see what happened to the poor bloody Australians they tested it out on, ugh

other issue with mustard gas and similar poison gasses is they damage the skin and lungs, making infections far more likely to occur, because the skin and lung tissue cannot do one of it's primary functions: keep infections out.

this is why the proposed mass bombing of Germany with a mix of anthrax and and mustard gas in WW2 would have been an absolute apocalypse if the weather conditions were right

Normally the skin provides a pretty good barrier against such infections, but mustard gas blisters/lesions...and the amount of pathogens involved would have ensured millions of civilian deaths and making affected regions uninhabitable.
took the UK 50 years to come up with a way to decontaminate anthrax and even that's only applicable in some areas, NOT with a mix of mustard gas as well

and, after World War 1, many of the poor sods who got gassed, died after from being VERY susceptible to lung and other infections...hence, ideal breeding ground for a strain of Flu to take root, and, evolve. Which is exactly what happened.
this was one of the reasons so many of those many had mental problems, seeing their mates slowly die from infections, as well as all the other issues like severe PTSD, pain from injuries, etc
the cumulative horrors had a bad effect on people and society as a whole

it all adds "stress" to a population, which then results in more crime, mental problems etc
note for example the mental paralysis of the French high command in WW2, they'd been so traumatised by the ghastliness of WW1 and the aftermath, so they had mental problems
the knock on effects of chemical weapons is serious.


The British anthrax/mustard gas plans in Ww2 were one of the big dirty secrets of WW2, and some of the British military told Churchill if he tried to use it as he'd wanted after one of his little "rants" (possibly due to the strokes he kept having) they'd bloody well shoot him.
lots of things got "edited" out of, or altered, in "official accounts", even now

Normally, the amount of pathogens encountered by our bodies is small, maybe tens or hundreds of thousands of particles
but in a bombing raid where they planned on dropping literally hundred+ TONS of *bacteria*...immune systems might be over whelmed by a vast amount of pathogens
in fact, you might die from a form of anaphylactic shock, immune system overwhelmed


so, chemical weapons that reduce victim's immune systems are a very very bad idea!

please note that at Halabja, areas underground are still lethally contaminated with mustard gas even now.

SilverbladeTE wrote:
oh and one more thought on "native Safehold" things being used for technology:
I would be looking for a native Safeholdian organism, or unusual mineral perhaps, that could be used as the basis for anti-fouling paint!

as we now know, alas, some of the anti-fouling pants used in recent years have had a truly catastrophic effect on marine life and should be damn well banned, sigh
So I doubt the Inner Circle would want the same kind of environmental damage to occur
and they have t have a reasonable method of such being "discovered"

If the Inner Circle knows or believes they're into the endgame, they might be more willing to accept short-term pollution issues on the grounds that once they can openly deploy Federation tech they can fix those issues. They'd still have to be careful about human exposure, since they already know not everyone will be able to accept the true history of Safehold and those who can't accept it aren't likely to accept Federation medical care. But "this anti-fouling paint will cause problems for sea life in 50 years" is an acceptable risk IF you expect to start the cleanup in 25.

Julia Minor wrote:
If the Inner Circle knows or believes they're into the endgame, they might be more willing to accept short-term pollution issues on the grounds that once they can openly deploy Federation tech they can fix those issues. They'd still have to be careful about human exposure, since they already know not everyone will be able to accept the true history of Safehold and those who can't accept it aren't likely to accept Federation medical care. But "this anti-fouling paint will cause problems for sea life in 50 years" is an acceptable risk IF you expect to start the cleanup in 25.

Fair point
but the IC are trying to avoid moral slippery slopes or setting of chains of events that can have severe problems
and Safehold's native life maybe more, or less susceptible to toxic fouling paints

there is another alternative to toxicity though
some folk are working on "mechanical" systems where micro-bristles or coatings of a slowly dissolving but harmless and frequently reapplied slime (added through pores in the hull), make it physically difficult for organisms to bond to the ship's hull

so the IC may know of a technology that may require tech they currently have, to produce an anti-fouling system that's relatively harmless
a "win-win"

Evidence supporting my point on mustard gas being very bad for immune system and other issues, too

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK236055/

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16961503

not only from what *older relatives and acquaintances told me* about seeing their comrades die off after the war and the psychological aspects of that
but the weapons leave a very large number of men with long term compromised immune systems

as we've seen with the awful mix of HIV, syphilis and Tuberculosis in some poor souls, having a lot of folk with weakened immune systems is a very bad problem for us all.
you may win the war...and lose far more from a pandemic afterwards.
War sucks.

Chemical weapons proved not very efficient, compared to plain old HE and shrapnel in terms of casualties etc, but the psychological effects were veyr bad.
and post WW2, a lot of effort went into developing systems/training that meant that Weapons of mass Destruction were much less effective against suitable trained/equipped troops
however, one of the biggest secrets of the Cold War era wasn't the actual weapons per se, it was their delivery systems and methods to make them more effective which actually took a lot more money and effort than basic weapon design

Some US military officers after realising how deadly biological weapons had gotten thanks to these "innovations" (see weapon tests in the Pacific late 1960s), had had enough, and put pressure on the wahoos, and thus Nixon banned bio-chem research (though alas, some of the covert agencies still dabbled in that madness and likely continue to do so)

anyway
I'd expect to see Charis' enemies possibly try to develop such
they aren't exactly moral or sane, are they? Sigh
Chemical weapons are not much use as a naval vs naval weapon
but a "dynamite gun" would be a perfect weapon for hurling containers of poison or pathogens at ports
quiet, very large volume, projectile suffers little shock/heat, large calibre
Safehold will surely provide a few potential plant/animal based chemicals of use
and, the Proscriptions themselves, by saying "what does what", may give ideas, and the clergy aren't exactly above waiving exceptions....

"heroic warfare" didn't work too well against Charis, so their enemies will likely resort to terrorism, again
it's a problem that when you defeat an enemy's conventional military, but cannot come to a reasonable peace afterwards, that events and hotheads will push things to irregular and increasingly ugly violence

Britain vs Germany WW1
and Union vs South in US Civil War
both sides in those conflicts came to reasonable but troubled peace and many tried to avoid atrocities during the fighting
but thankfully the problems in decade afterwards weren't as bad as say, Iraq
as Teddy Roosevelt believed, allowing enemies to save face in defeat prevents resentments that flare up into more violence years later

i.e., French Revanchism post WW1 set the stage for WW2
and alas, Lincoln got murdered before he could implement his far more benign "olive branch" policy for the South which would have avoided a lot of the lingering bitterness that did occur in the face of punitive, greedy and dumb behaviour under Grant's Administration

Alas, Safehold has two bitter Emperors and an increasingly malign junta who don't want a reasonable peace.

During the 1920s, Germany engaged in a highly covert chemical weapons project, using pesticides/herbicides as a cover and such developed chemicals to help provide funding
that resulted in ZyklonB and Sarin
and those involved after WW2 got put to work by the British and developed V and VX nerve gas.
So I'd expect covert projects set up most like by Desnair to develop chemical weapons

The Law of Unintended Consequence....
just building bigger and better warships or aircraft etc sometimes had rather odd knock ons in real life