Do we actually need SD(P)s?

munroburton wrote:This is why a lot of people find the Roland's lack of Marine capacity ridiculous. 82 crew, ~190,000t ship.

Indeed. The mass and volumes of starships would definitely allow for roomier accommodations.

But I took the lack of marines as "they weren't needed" rather than "there's no space for them". Marines were needed for boarding actions (clearly good against pirates and captured enemy ships), planetary insertion, and damage control. The Rolands were expected to do none of those.

cthia wrote:Oops.

5%?...4?...3? Heck, I give up.

I've seen naval accommodations; it's why I said sardine cans upstream. (Albeit aboard the oldstyle battleships, with no air conditioning and no women). Speaking of women, the Honorverse has so many women and I was thinking they would have separate quarters and separate facilities. Due to your incredulity, I do remember Helen's conversations with the crews, and they were not separate. I was also factoring in the space saved by the use of pods and other general automation. Again, lots of space must have been wasted to be able to gut a ship.

Whatever is responsible for the eggshell factor is the only thing left to account for the capital gains in available space for the design. (Which I do remember was explained, somewhere.) Anyway, even if the women were separate that wouldn't have significantly added to the footprint either.

I did think Honorverse accommodations would be a bit better. Again, until I remembered Helen. (Poor Grayson women...and their armsmen's apoplexy.) Well, more than a bit better as far as environmental systems. The only thing left to explain the sudden windfall of available space to fit pods has to be losing the battle steel and dampening - the thing that turns them into eggshells. Must have been a heckuva lot of battle steel, but bulkheads were only feet thick, as I recall, Not yards. Anyways, I give up the ghost, and the hunt for Red October.

The to biggest contributors to the void we call a pod bay are the missile magazines and the missile feed tubes. The Magazines were nothing but a large volume with racks of missiles, control wiring, plasma plumbing, and automated robotics fetching the appropriate missile to each feed tube. The Feed tubes were, well, tubes to each launcher, with armored cofferdam doors periodically to keep blasts from sneaking up the tunnel unopposed. SDs carried 15-30 thousand, 130 kton missiles, each the size of a large shipping container - remove those and you have (literally) tons of space to play with.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

munroburton wrote:This is why a lot of people find the Roland's lack of Marine capacity ridiculous. 82 crew, ~190,000t ship.

Indeed. The mass and volumes of starships would definitely allow for roomier accommodations.

But I took the lack of marines as "they weren't needed" rather than "there's no space for them". Marines were needed for boarding actions (clearly good against pirates and captured enemy ships), planetary insertion, and damage control. The Rolands were expected to do none of those.

"Surprise" - reality rears it's ugly head again!

munroburton wrote:Yeah. A Nimitz-class aircraft carrier has 6,000 crew. They fit them into a ship displacing 102,000t.

This is why a lot of people find the Roland's lack of Marine capacity ridiculous. 82 crew, ~190,000t ship.

One thing we have to accept is that the tonnage per person is vastly higher for Honorverse ships compared to current warships - and current warships are vastly ahead of past warships in the same way.

HMS Victory: 3500 tons, 850 crew, 4.12 tons per man
Nimitz class: 102 ktons, 6000 crew, 17 tons per man
Ohio class: 16.8 ktons, 155 crew, 108 tons per man

Katana class LAC: 1950 tons per man
Roland class DD: 2300 tons per man
Sag-C class CA: 1360 tons per man, 2247 tons per man discounting marines


An Invictus is well over 4000 tons per man (couldn't find definitive crew number, assumed 2000 including Marines)

kzt wrote:Huh? Have you ever seen a Navy berthing space? The crew doesn't get a private suite.

We have seen a bit of Honorverse enlisted quarters on Wayfarer. Crew in cabins of 6 each rather than the temp bunk room for dozens where Wanderman first meets Steilman.

Not that bunk space alone is what reducing the crew saves you. Stores spaces, life support machinery, galley space, even rec space, as well as also eliminating the crew members that served those functions.

The obvious example we have is Duke of Cromarty, where they ripped out 180 pods worth of magazine space to make room for passenger spaces. Even if we assume that space allowed one additional passenger per pod lost, that would give the yacht room for a whole lot of staff and guests to accompany the royal family.

Naval accommodations being what they are, the same trade might be one additional pod for every 10 crew eliminated after accounting for life support reductions and such in the mass savings. So eliminating 3000 crew due to automation would mean potentially an additional 300 pods in the space saved. Not at all trivial. Feel free to quibble as to how accurate that 10 crew per pod volume speculation is. It could easily be 20 crew per pod - that's still 150 pods worth of additional ammunition.

cthia wrote:I've seen naval accommodations; it's why I said sardine cans upstream. (Albeit aboard the oldstyle battleships, with no air conditioning and no women). Speaking of women, the Honorverse has so many women and I was thinking they would have separate quarters and separate facilities. Due to your incredulity, I do remember Helen's conversations with the crews, and they were not separate.
[snip]
Anyway, even if the women were separate that wouldn't have significantly added to the footprint either.

I did think Honorverse accommodations would be a bit better. Again, until I remembered Helen. (Poor Grayson women...and their armsmen's apoplexy.)

Mancitoran, and apparently Haven, ship do now have have separate women only designated quarters. Modifing the captured


Based on what we saw in in Wayfarer normally enlisted crew seem to be able to more of less chose which enlisted berthing they'll claim (since it made the point that "It was, however, unusual for a single member of one sex to bunk with four members of the other sex, which was precisely what Elizabeth Showforth had done."
Showforth couldn't have chosen to bunk there if enlisted were simply assigned bunks.
But it does sound like given that freedom to select quarters that some bunk rooms might end up with all men, or all women, but mixed ones are far from unheard of (just usually the ratio would be a bit closer to even). But that's a bunk room by bunk room breakdown; as apparently determined by the enlisted themselves.

It was specifically brought up (though I'm not finding it at the moment) that the initial batch of Grayson women in their navy were assigned exclusively to capital ships because those ships were big enough for Grayson to easily modify them to create a segregated female berthing area (can't remember if they had separate mess areas too; but IIRC the idea was to keep the younger women under the eye and guidance of their older female NCOs and officers during off duty time)

But if Grayson had to make modifications to achieve that then it seems even the captures SDs from Haven didn't have gender segregated quarters (or at least not to the level Grayson found initially acceptable)

Galactic Sapper wrote:

munroburton wrote:Yeah. A Nimitz-class aircraft carrier has 6,000 crew. They fit them into a ship displacing 102,000t.

This is why a lot of people find the Roland's lack of Marine capacity ridiculous. 82 crew, ~190,000t ship.

One thing we have to accept is that the tonnage per person is vastly higher for Honorverse ships compared to current warships - and current warships are vastly ahead of past warships in the same way.

HMS Victory: 3500 tons, 850 crew, 4.12 tons per man
Nimitz class: 102 ktons, 6000 crew, 17 tons per man
Ohio class: 16.8 ktons, 155 crew, 108 tons per man

Katana class LAC: 1950 tons per man
Roland class DD: 2300 tons per man
Sag-C class CA: 1360 tons per man, 2247 tons per man discounting marines


An Invictus is well over 4000 tons per man (couldn't find definitive crew number, assumed 2000 including Marines)

That's true, but as the Ohio class demonstrates, you don't need a huge amount of tonnage to sustain a crew for several months with onboard sources of oxygen, water and food.

Don't forget to consider pre-automation crew ratios.
Star Knight CA: ~330 tons per crew

Well surface ships don't have to budget tonnage towards "air tanks" of compressed Oxygen, or Air Scrubber plants. Even subs don't have to make a huge dedication to air scrubbing, because they can always employ water electrolysis on seawater to get brand new oxygen almost as needed.


It's also the Fusion versus modern fission issue concerning power. We use fission, so X tonnage nuclear reactor mass stays at X tonnage it doesn't really change as you use the reactor. Honorverse ships are fusion powered, and they specifically use Hydrogen which being flammable = super dangerous.

Manticoran battlecruisers carry enough hydrogen for 6 MONTHS of usage, excluding any time spent in hyper with reactors turned off using their sails to produce power. 6 months supply for (at least) 3 reactors is a ridiculously huge amount of Hydrogen bunker storage required, and all of it needs to have space to be internally sealed which increases the overall dedicated space. Otherwise you get a "golden BB" that blows up that battlecruiser with 1 hit, because that laser dug deep and pricked a hole in the reactor mass bunker... and caused an electrical fire that causes that hydrogen to explode.


Those 2 sources alone probably account for a considerable amount of the "empty space" we think Honorverse ships have to spare, since zero modern ships whether surface or submarine have those needs.

Somtaaw wrote:It's also the Fusion versus modern fission issue concerning power. We use fission, so X tonnage nuclear reactor mass stays at X tonnage it doesn't really change as you use the reactor. Honorverse ships are fusion powered, and they specifically use Hydrogen which being flammable = super dangerous.

Ditto with fusion. Strictly speaking, both fusion and fission fuel mass slightly more than their products, as the difference is the energy release. With fusion, that's about 1% reduction in mass only. You only get major mass reduction with a matter/anti-matter reactor, for which one of the fuels is extremely more reactive. If you meant that the fuels for fusion are more massive than for fission, I agree (U-235 and U-238 are far more energy dense than H-1, D-2 or He-3).

But note that "flammable" implies combustion with oxygen. If there's no oxygen for the hydrogen to react to, it won't. But that brings the point that the ship need not carry water, since it can simply burn a bit of its hydrogen supply to make water for the crew.

There's also a question whether the fusion fuel needs to be hydrogen. It could be Helium-3, which as a noble gas will not react chemically to anything. Even if it needs to be hydrogen, the hydrogen could be carried in the form of water or heavy water. You just electrolyse it to separate into oxygen and hydrogen before feeding into the fusion chamber (you need less energy to electrolyse than you will gain in fusion, so it's still net positive). In fact, water is a good shield against cosmic rays if you don't have armour or particle shielding, so it is one of the most likely ways we'll power our first interstellar ships.

Manticoran battlecruisers carry enough hydrogen for 6 MONTHS of usage, excluding any time spent in hyper with reactors turned off using their sails to produce power. 6 months supply for (at least) 3 reactors is a ridiculously huge amount of Hydrogen bunker storage required, and all of it needs to have space to be internally sealed which increases the overall dedicated space. Otherwise you get a "golden BB" that blows up that battlecruiser with 1 hit, because that laser dug deep and pricked a hole in the reactor mass bunker... and caused an electrical fire that causes that hydrogen to explode.

I don't think a hydrogen explosion is likely, as explained above. However, if the bunkers do store a compressed gas, whether it's deuterium, helium, rupturing the bunker could cause explosive decompression, which would further rip open the hole created by the projectile. That's considerable damage. A water tank wouldn't nearly as much damage, as I don't think it would store water under high pressure. However, it would sublimate when exposed to vacuum.

They definitely use Hydrogen because it's even more available than Helium, and they use it because that one fuel source is also used in multiple locations. Specifically, it's the fusion reactor bunkerage for the starships themselves and their emergency thrusters, it's used in pinnaces & assault shuttles for thrusters and fuel for both fusion plants (hip pockets for the pinnaces, miniaturized ones for the assault shuttles).


It's also described during one of Honor's dinner parties with High Ridge as PM, by Henke that Honor's strategy at Hades during her final action (when she came out of the sun), that she used so much hydrogen for her "no wedge" burn for intercept, if she had to fight normally Honor's whole fleet might have run out of power mid-fight and thereby lost their wedges.

And when Honor's pinnace was shot down by the Armsmen working for Steadholder Burdette (Flag in Exile) there were 2 sets of hydrogen fuel tanks. One set were on ejectible fuel pods which caused big explosions upon impacting the surface (after the pinnace had already crashed), and the second set were deep inside the hull and they blew up due to fires. This heavily suggests they do in fact keep the hydrogen as uncompressed gas, since they had time before the fires & hydrogen gas mixed and blew the entire pinnace up. If it were compressed hydrogen, Honor would have been dead, still inside the crashed pinnace before she ever even realized she was on the surface.