Theemile wrote:Jonathan_S wrote:What makes you say the Nike is offensively minded? They put a vast amount of its extra tonnage into its survivability.
On 2.1 million extra tons compared to the Sag-C the Nikes mounted just 5 additional Mk16 tubes and 4 grasers per broadside.
ThinksMarkedly wrote:
Survivability because she's designed to go fight wallers. She's that big because she's literally carrying a million of tonne of missiles inside.
I call that offensively-minded.
A peace-time BC might be leaner and faster.
No, she's designed to SURVIVE against modern wallers. She is designed to be able to do what Honor's squadron did in 1905 against modern wallers. An Invictus would be able to shrug off a Nike's fire with no problem, while a Nike could intercept all but the most concentrated Invictus salvos. A Nike is seen as the "Minimum survivable combatant" in a pod launched MDM environment.
https://infodump.thefifthimperium.com/entry/Harrington/83/1/
Though I'd say her ability to survive against wallers is more a side effect of the BuShip's real goal. To come up with a design of BC able to perform all classic RMN BC roles - including deep raiding against secondary or tertiary systems. House of Steel even explicitly says "The Nike is designed to lead and survive independent long-duration deep-raiding missions in an era dominated by multi-drive missiles."
The size and defenses needed to do that in the face of pod based MDM system defense is, shall we say, significant.
Take look at the post WWII British battleship design studies sometime. Their designers were told to build something survivable against all current threats; which included little things like Tall Boy supersonic armor piercing bombs (potentially now matched to Fritz-X style guidance) and nuclear weapons. The designs were so large, and carried such thick armor, that there was no place they could be built, or for that matter docked, in the UK. IIRC they made Yamato look a bit puny. Of course they were ultimately judged not worth the cost, and never built. But if battleships had still been
the decisive offensive weapon you'd have seen a massive size jump from Vanguard to the next BB design; because that's what the designers determined was required to fill the same roles in the new threat environment.