Do we actually need SD(P)s?

Somtaaw wrote:Bolded the emphasis since it seemingly went over your head. LERM's are not even remotely a major weapon in the era of MDMs, nor are the SDM legacy missiles from legacy classes that Manticore is busy trying to mothball or scrap as fast as they can rebuild shipyards to build the modern ships to replace them with.

I didn't miss it, I ignored it as pedantic and stupid and illustrated how you were wrong.

The RMN currently has a minimum of 250 ships in service which use LERMS, and one class of those - Avalons - was still in full wartime production right up to Oyster Bay. While they're not being used thousands at a time, they are being build and deployed in significant numbers even if they aren't seeing the mass front line use the other missiles are.

Even LAC missiles are a minor system, because LAC's are officially classified as small craft, and even as large and modern as the GA builds them, are ultimately irrelevant compared to major platforms. For the missile-oriented Ferrets to have parity with a single Sag-C, you need 3 squadrons of them (24 total). A single Sag-C carries 1200 Mark 16s, which being DDMs are a minimum of double the range even without utilizing a ballistic phase; while 24 Ferrets each carry 56 shipkillers for a total of 1344 (shorter-ranged) missiles with smaller warheads.

Or if you look at the other extreme, it only takes TWO Ferrets to carry almost as many missiles as a Roland. Regardless of what comparison games you want to play, the fact remains that each carrier in service carries tens of thousands of LAC missiles.

Next up, I will actually concede to your point about Rolands, it is pretty far-fetched. Due to how difficult it was to even give Roland's the Mark 16 launcher packs, and the compromises on those launchers it is doubtful that they also cram cruiser weight grasers in as well.

Perhaps the most telling part is that the Wolfhounds carry broadside grazers despite having 3 meters less beam than a Roland, which only mounts lasers in the broadside. It's reasonable to assume both the Wolfhound and the Roland carry a variant of the grazer mounted on Shrikes, as that's the grazer we know to have been designed to fit in the smallest space possible. No textev on that but it seems likely.

Whether Sag-C's do or not hasn't been explicitly proven or disproven through actual textev, so we can at most talk around the point through unproven supposition without a pronouncement from a Bu9 member or Himself concerning the Sag-C weapon sizes.

Again, from HoS:

Its energy armament was reduced to only eight grazers, but each is significantly more powerful than those carried by the Saganami-B, with an output yield closer to the weapons some navies mount on smaller capital ships, and improved fire control modeling increases hit probability per mount significantly

Smaller capital ships are BCs and BBs, possibly old outdated DNs and SDs. Not current new-built SDs. Again, the equivalent is saying that the Alaska had battleship grade guns because both she and WW1 battleships both carried 12 inch guns. At the time Alaska was built, contemporary battleships were being built with 16 inch guns.

However, textev concerning the Courvosier IIs/Agamemnons, and by extension Nike's says:

War of Honor, Ch 28 wrote:"At any rate," Brigham went on, returning her attention to McKeon, "the new Courvoisier II-class battlecruisers are a pod design. The Office of Shipbuilding reduced their conventional missile broadsides by over eighty percent, which let them build in superdreadnought-sized energy weapons." McKeon's eyes widened and turned suddenly thoughtful, and the chief of staff shrugged. "I think there was some pressure to go to something more on the lines of the Invictuses and suppress the broadside tubes entirely, but Shipbuilding decided against it.

Courvosier IIs mount SD sized grasers hard fact. Agamemnon's are the Manticoran version of same so they also mount SD grasers. Nike's are not only 30% larger than a Courvosier II physically, they also mass three times as much, so it's not even remotely a question they have the space and tonnage to mount SD grasers.

See above, as well as munroburton's post. "Superdreadnought sized" does not automatically imply that they're using the same exact gun as a Medusa, Invictus, or even a Gryphon.

Nike, however, does have textev that her grazers match contemporary SD grazers. HoS does not specifically state that it mounts the same guns as an Invictus but does say Nike's guns "rival the most modern capital ships" which can be assumed to be SDs being built concurrently with her.

Galactic Sapper wrote:All of this is supposition without textev to back it up and with good reason to doubt it.

You've failed to produce even one scrap of evidence to back your suppositions up though? By your own logic, that makes all of your points something to doubt with good reason. And I actually have been posting textev, so your strawman supposition counter has lost even more weight. I have been dropping textev backing my positions, or at least giving enough detail that jchild placed the specific passage I knew existed but couldn't remember where on my own.

I admit, I'm lazy and only have dead tree versions of books so finding and typing out textev is often a chore. But if someone wants to act the fool as thoroughly as you it sometimes becomes worth doing.

Galactic Sapper wrote:

ThinksMarkedly wrote:We don't know if a Wolfound carries Mark 16s to shoot at pirate and rogue destroyers.

We do, actually. Per HoS, they are confirmed to carry "the latest generation of single drive missiles in RMN service, far longer ranged and more powerful than anything in service at the start of the war."

That only says they are the latest tech, not that they are the same BC-killer Mark 16s. There could be a Mark 17 DDM CA-killer that is half the size of the Mark 16, which would allow an Avalon or Wolfhound to carry sufficiently more of them to be on patrol far longer between resupplies. This is especially important for a CL, which is expected to have long endurance.

That said, I suspect that even the storage of a Wolfhound, Mark 16s would be more than enough. We know from experience that 120 Mark 16s can completely overwhelm an SLN Nevada-class BC. Pirates and rogues using obsolete SCN CLs and DDs (or even FFs!) wouldn't require more than a handful of missiles.

IIRC the warhead and lasing rods even capacitor-based first gen MDMs were considerably larger and more powerful than the preceding SD sized missiles, but I don't have an efficient means of finding textev for that.

It pays to remember that laser head missiles were still relatively new weapons and most navies (including most of the RMN) were locked into the mindset that missiles were "softening up" weapons to batter your opponent's defenses rather than a serious attempt to kill something as heavy as an SD. That mindset is still visible in the behavior of various SLN officers all the way up to Raging Justice.

I'm not doubting that. Indeed the Mark 23s are definitely powerful than what SDs carried before the first war.

What I'm saying is that there hasn't been a need to scale them even further up. RMN & allied DDs, CLs and CAs carry BC-killing missiles and BCs carry SD-killing missiles. But SDs still carry only SD-killing missiles because there hasn't been anything bigger to threaten them. The Mark 23s are probably effective against MN-sized ships, but if monitors do indeed show up, you can expect the Foraker & Hemphill Dynamic Duo to quickly come up with something even better.

Oops - should have finished reading before posting. I see Munroburton and Galactic Sapper already touched on this.

Somtaaw wrote:Courvosier IIs mount SD sized grasers hard fact. Agamemnon's are the Manticoran version of same so they also mount SD grasers. Nike's are not only 30% larger than a Courvosier II physically, they also mass three times as much, so it's not even remotely a question they have the space and tonnage to mount SD grasers.

I would nitpick that "SD grasers" could be a bit of a moving target.

When the Invincible-class was launched in 1908 their 12-inch 45 caliber guns were battleship guns. But four years later the Orion-class BBs were commissioned bearing more powerful 13.5-inch 45 caliber guns. I think the I-class's guns could fairly still be described at battleship guns, even in 1918 as there were plenty of RN battleships still in service carrying those same 12-inch guns. But you'd hardly say that because Invincible, Orion, and Queen Elizabeth all carried battleship guns that they all carried the exact same size and power guns.

Similar things may have happened with "SD grasers". Even if the Courvosier II-class of 1919 mounted the exact same graser of the Steadholder Denevski-class of 1908, it's possible that's not necessarily the same exact size and power of graser that the Gryphon-class of 1900 or theInvictus-class of 1919 mount. Research could have been driving a slow increase in the size and power of SD grasers -- the books are silent on that point.

We do know the Shrike-class LACs "carry a graser-not a laser-approximately as powerful as that mounted in our Homer-class battlecruisers". That's a BC-design that's about 50 years old at that point - having been superseded by the Reliant-class and then again by the heavily revised flight III-IV Reliant, even ignoring the original 1904 PD Courvosier-class; the first to carry the SD grade grasers. So it seems that at least BC grade grasers crept up in size over the years; or else the Shrike's graser would have been compared to the newer Reliant class not the older Homer-class. The same presumably happens within SDs as well. The smaller BCs might not be using the latest, largest, and most powerful graser Manticore or Grayson can build for their SDs.


Edit - Found in War of Honor, describing the Grayon's new Courvoisier II BC(P)s -

War of Honor wrote:"Not only that, and not only are the Courvoisiers a hell of a lot more dangerous in energy-range, but the designers used the new automation systems even more heavily than they did in the design of the Harrington class
[snip] "That kind of reduction in life support requirements, coupled with the hollow core design, explains how they were able to pack an enormously powerful graser broadside into the new design. They only have about two-thirds as many mounts as their predecessors did, but the ones they have are just as powerful as those the Harrington-class mount."

Onfortunately Honor doesn't clarify whether she's comparing to the original 1913 Harrington SD(P) design or the updated 1919 Harrington II SD(P)s.
But the "predecessors" of the 1919 Courvosier II are presumably the original 1904 Courvoisiers - already described as carrying SD grasers. So if the IIs are "enormously powerful" (presumably compared to the Is) and make a special point that they carry the exact same grasers as Graysons SD(P)s then that, to me, implies that the Harringtons and Courvoisier IIs carry significantly more powerful grasers than older SDs.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:We don't know if a Wolfound carries Mark 16s to shoot at pirate and rogue destroyers.

Galactic Sapper wrote:We do, actually. Per HoS, they are confirmed to carry "the latest generation of single drive missiles in RMN service, far longer ranged and more powerful than anything in service at the start of the war."

ThinksMarkedly wrote:That only says they are the latest tech, not that they are the same BC-killer Mark 16s. There could be a Mark 17 DDM CA-killer that is half the size of the Mark 16, which would allow an Avalon or Wolfhound to carry sufficiently more of them to be on patrol far longer between resupplies. This is especially important for a CL, which is expected to have long endurance.

That said, I suspect that even the storage of a Wolfhound, Mark 16s would be more than enough. We know from experience that 120 Mark 16s can completely overwhelm an SLN Nevada-class BC. Pirates and rogues using obsolete SCN CLs and DDs (or even FFs!) wouldn't require more than a handful of missiles.

I think you missed the key point. Mark 16s are DDMs, dual drive missiles. If the Wolfhound carries "single drive missiles" then they're are definitely NOT Mark 16s.

But if we go the the Avalon-class CL entry in HoS it definitively address this for both ship classes; because it contains this - "it carries the same Mk36 Lightweight Extended Range Missile (LERM) as the Wolfhound. The Mk36 single-stage drive package is capable of significantly longer runtime and range than prewar missiles but remains considerably shorter ranged than the Mk16."
(And while not stated, the Mk36 LERM is almost assuredly capacitor powered, like the larger Mk14 ERM carried by Sag-Bs; meaning it's got less power to devote to ECM)

We really do need a new edition of Jayne's, don't we? And in dead-tree format, please.

Jonathan_S wrote:Oops - should have finished reading before posting. I see Munroburton and Galactic Sapper already touched on this.
[I would nitpick that "SD grasers" could be a bit of a moving target.

When the Invincible-class was launched in 1908 their 12-inch 45 caliber guns were battleship guns. But four years later the Orion-class BBs were commissioned bearing more powerful 13.5-inch 45 caliber guns. I think the I-class's guns could fairly still be described at battleship guns, even in 1918 as there were plenty of RN battleships still in service carrying those same 12-inch guns. But you'd hardly say that because Invincible, Orion, and Queen Elizabeth all carried battleship guns that they all carried the exact same size and power guns.

Similar things may have happened with "SD grasers". Even if the Courvosier II-class of 1919 mounted the exact same graser of the Steadholder Denevski-class of 1908, it's possible that's not necessarily the same exact size and power of graser that the Gryphon-class of 1900 or theInvictus-class of 1919 mount. Research could have been driving a slow increase in the size and power of SD grasers -- the books are silent on that point.

Based on how grasers seem to work, the destructive power is primarily modified in three ways: the power of the gravity lens, the size of the main aperture, and possibly the plants powering the weapon.

Uncompromising Honor, Chapter August 1922 wrote:For example, none of them were aware that in addition to the Shrike-B ’s internal rotary missile launcher, it carried a single spinal-mounted graser as heavy as many a superdreadnought’s broadside armament.

In operation Buttercup, Shrike-B's had 1.5m apertures, and were being compared to Homer-class battlecruisers. Between Buttercup and UH, those Shrikes haven't changed aperture sizes or fission piles, but in UH Shrike grasers were equivalent to superdreadnoughts in power clearly due to grav-lens advancements. The same advances in gravity lenses for UH Shrike's 1.5m graser applied to SD grasers and suddenly the Shrike revert back to being compared against battlecruisers and not superdreadnoughts.


We can see the same logic being applied to missiles. Mark 16 mod-G's aren't called "capital ship missiles" even though with the 40t warheads they're even more powerful than the capital ship SDM missile Mark 16's from pre-Buttercup. We call those DDM Mark 16's cruiser weight, meaning we aren't classifying missiles purely off their destructive power, and we aren't using range as the benchmark. This leaves only physical size as the basis for missile classification, much like I am assuming grasers are measured by.


This theory holds true when looking at PDLC classifications vs performance. Over the years of pressurized Manty research fighting Haven, Manty PDLC clusters on cruisers have more emitters per cluster than Solarian SDs do. Yet not only are they still classed as cruiser clusters but are equally outperformed by Manty superdreadnought clusters which are even denser. This means PD clusters aren't classed by emitter quantity or reload cycles, leaving only size or power requirements of the clusters.


Weapon sizes, and ship tonnages will obviously slowly creep up over the decades as technology changes, proven by how MDM's suddenly added almost 30% length to missiles. However, a Manticoran BC from 1890 is going to have pretty similar sizes to a BC built in 1920. Similar enough you could see the distinct gradual growth of the weapon sizes in tandem with the overall ship tonnage slowly creeping up.

Galactic Sapper wrote:We really do need a new edition of Jayne's, don't we? And in dead-tree format, please.

That'd be great.

House of Steel was nice, but it was definitely less detailed than Jayne's. Each warship class entry in Jayne's was probably about 4-6 times the size of the corresponding entry in House of Steel.

And of course we're still waiting for House of Lies (Haven) and whatever then Andermandi one is called.


Heck, I'm greedy. I'd love for an expanded Jayne's that not only covered the details of every warship class we've ever heard of but went several steps further and covered how their fit and performance changed over times with later flights or major mid-life refits.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:We don't know if a Wolfound carries Mark 16s to shoot at pirate and rogue destroyers.

Galactic Sapper wrote:We do, actually. Per HoS, they are confirmed to carry "the latest generation of single drive missiles in RMN service, far longer ranged and more powerful than anything in service at the start of the war."

ThinksMarkedly wrote:That only says they are the latest tech, not that they are the same BC-killer Mark 16s. There could be a Mark 17 DDM CA-killer that is half the size of the Mark 16, which would allow an Avalon or Wolfhound to carry sufficiently more of them to be on patrol far longer between resupplies. This is especially important for a CL, which is expected to have long endurance.

That said, I suspect that even the storage of a Wolfhound, Mark 16s would be more than enough. We know from experience that 120 Mark 16s can completely overwhelm an SLN Nevada-class BC. Pirates and rogues using obsolete SCN CLs and DDs (or even FFs!) wouldn't require more than a handful of missiles.{/quote]

Galactic Sapper wrote:IIRC the warhead and lasing rods even capacitor-based first gen MDMs were considerably larger and more powerful than the preceding SD sized missiles, but I don't have an efficient means of finding textev for that.

It pays to remember that laser head missiles were still relatively new weapons and most navies (including most of the RMN) were locked into the mindset that missiles were "softening up" weapons to batter your opponent's defenses rather than a serious attempt to kill something as heavy as an SD. That mindset is still visible in the behavior of various SLN officers all the way up to Raging Justice.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:I'm not doubting that. Indeed the Mark 23s are definitely powerful than what SDs carried before the first war.

What I'm saying is that there hasn't been a need to scale them even further up. RMN & allied DDs, CLs and CAs carry BC-killing missiles and BCs carry SD-killing missiles. But SDs still carry only SD-killing missiles because there hasn't been anything bigger to threaten them. The Mark 23s are probably effective against MN-sized ships, but if monitors do indeed show up, you can expect the Foraker & Hemphill Dynamic Duo to quickly come up with something even better.

We need some Known RMN missile masses

LAC missile - 70 tons (EoH)
Mk 50 - 80 tons (CL Fearless - OBS) old DD/CL missile
Mk 13 - 84 tons (Standard CA/BC missile - IFF)
Mk 16 - 94 tons (Cruiser DDM - SoS)
Mk 19 - 130 Tons (old Capital weight Missile- HAE)
Mk-27/28 - 120 Tons (LateWar Capital weight missile - HAE)

We don't know the masses of the Viper anti-LAC missile, Mk 34 (single drive DD/CL missile), the Mk 36 LERM, the Mk 14/15 ERM, the mk 41, the Mk 23D, the Mk 23E, or any of the Mk 25s. However we can assume that the the Mk 34 is similiar to, but larger than than the outdated outdated mk 50, which a tri mode Laserhead/boom/burn could not be engineered into it's size. The LERM is similiarly between a Mk 34 and a cruiser Mk 13, the Mk 14/15 is between the Mk 13 and mk 16 DDM, and the mk 23D is larger than the Mk 27/28, but smaller than the Mk 41.

David told us the Wolfhound did not have the Mk 16 - it was the cheaper DD option (to the Roland design) that Janacheck designed in the interwar years and 39 were under construction when the 2nd war started - the surviving 20 were built, then construction switched to the Roland - the expensive DDM warfighter.

LAC missile are still considered warship missiles - their warhead is considered a DD/CL class warhead with 3, 3m laserheads. Small ship weapons mass in the single tons, and used conventional explosions or their wedges to do damage, not a nuke/laserhead)

Erewhon's Cruiser weight Mk 17 ERM is in the region of the Mk 14/15 ERM - or somewhere between 84 and 94 tons, and not used by the RMN.

Other than the outdated Mk 50 and 19, all these missiles are currently in use, either in the legacy fleet (Mk 34, Mk 13, mk 27/28), the late/interwar ERM fleet (LAC, Mk 36 LERM, Mk 14/15 ERM, Mk 41 Capacitor MDM), or modern Fleet (Viper, Mk 16 DDM, Mk 23D MDM, Mk 23E ACM, Mk 25 system control missiles).

Also, the Mk 23s were upgraded at the same time as Mk 16s. The Mk 23D is a much more serious missile than the original Mk 23 introduced only ~5 years ago. It received the same grav lensing and warhead upgrade as the Mk 16 (but kept it's 10, 10m laserheads that the upgraded Mk 16g received 6 of). So the RMN is happy to continue to upgrade the lethality of it's missiles, and has not stopped finding new ways to ruin it's opponent's day that much faster.