Future Naval sizes

LACs are a very divided term. You have two basic types...Those who are Royal Manticore Navy and allied plus the Republic of Haven's own modern LAC variants and......

Everybody else that uses the "standard" SLN type designed which don't have the better compensators, the fission powerplants and all that great RMN or RHN tech.

Not exactly sure where Beowulf was falling into that as they were not going to be using RMN stuff explicitly prior the the break with the SL

So non-GL LACs are and have been mostly Customs Boats, some defense agains your garden variety pirate with an armed civilian conversion, local Search & Rescue operations and variations on shuttles. And- at the point of surrender of the SL to Harrington and the GL plus the TEIF story line, nobody had CLACs besides the GL.

A CLAC with the latest version SLN LAC is not worth much because the old SL LAC designs don't have the speed, firepower, endurance, tactical suite or much else. A CLAC built --right now- for the SLN would still be hobbled by having little more than SLN tech, weapons, decoys etc.

This will change but who is going to get the initial production runs of even modernized -such as they will be- variation of "SLN" types of ships and LACs? Mostly the SL but only if they are going to probably have to pay up front. Independent systems or small allied system groups or leagues might be better able to get initial production by being able to fund them. That would be probably up to CA level ships.

kzt wrote:

drothgery wrote:Also while the military drawing disproportionately from the most productive part of society was certainly true in WWII, Manticore is not mid-20th century AD earth and I really don't get why that would be true there.

Basically everyone has prolog (excepting immigrants who were too old to get prolong), and basically no one with prolog (even 1st-gen) is old enough to be more than physically middle-aged. So there's really no problem with signing up 40-year-olds, or even 80-year-olds.

There's basically no sexism. You can sign up all the women you want, for any role they can do, and they will have been educated as well as the men.

You've got 20th century PD medicine, so there are very, very few people with disqualifying injuries or medical conditions.

It doesn’t matter. That is David’s position. Despite the fact that less than a million people produced the entire RMN and all it’s weapons…

And this includes the army and marines, so if you put three companies of marines on a ship that is one less battle cruiser or 5 DDs you can man. They all come out of the same limited pool of people.

To add - remember this is the universe where 300 million people live in space in the Manticore B system and virtually none of them are in the manufacturing, construction, or shipbuilding/maintaining fields. A handful are in the resource extraction field or it's immediate support roles, the rest are poets, painters and cafeteria workers.

Brigade XO wrote:LACs are a very divided term. You have two basic types...Those who are Royal Manticore Navy and allied plus the Republic of Haven's own modern LAC variants and......

Everybody else that uses the "standard" SLN type designed which don't have the better compensators, the fission powerplants and all that great RMN or RHN tech.

Not exactly sure where Beowulf was falling into that as they were not going to be using RMN stuff explicitly prior the the break with the SL

So non-GL LACs are and have been mostly Customs Boats, some defense agains your garden variety pirate with an armed civilian conversion, local Search & Rescue operations and variations on shuttles. And- at the point of surrender of the SL to Harrington and the GL plus the TEIF story line, nobody had CLACs besides the GL.

A CLAC with the latest version SLN LAC is not worth much because the old SL LAC designs don't have the speed, firepower, endurance, tactical suite or much else. A CLAC built --right now- for the SLN would still be hobbled by having little more than SLN tech, weapons, decoys etc.

This will change but who is going to get the initial production runs of even modernized -such as they will be- variation of "SLN" types of ships and LACs? Mostly the SL but only if they are going to probably have to pay up front. Independent systems or small allied system groups or leagues might be better able to get initial production by being able to fund them. That would be probably up to CA level ships.

Part of that is also a mindset - traditional LACs are built like miniature warships. Everyone knows that warships have 4 weapons arcs, are built to run for months without support, have 24/7 crewing, and are built for internal maintenance.

Now, take your 10Kton ship and expand it to 20-25 Ktons. Focus all your weapons on the forward firing arc, with moderate defenses else where. Design the LAC with only several days of endurance, with the crew spaces kept to a bare minimum (hot-bunking), and most maintenance done externally, and a crew parsed down to support flight and combat operations only.

Also design a couple different, but similiar designs with different purposes - Strike, Patrol, Anti-shipping Missile, Anti-LAC, ECM, Scout, Drone support, & Missile defense. Over iterations stream down the variants into a handful of designs that work with each other to form a LAC group.

In reality, LACs with Box launchers were the motorized Pods at the beginning of the story line. That aspect, and the "do it all" nature of considering them a full warship, is part of the problem that they needed to over come. They need to transition to something akin to the US Coast Guard's 120' boats, an austare solution dedicated to the mission at hand, while being designed to be as multirole as possible within those parameters. The big Medium and Heavy Cutters can have the frills, and have the agility to support crews for weeks - the smaller boats need to be able to go out in any condition, spend a couple days patrolling, then return home.

I'm not saying that that change in mindset will instantly change the SLN to have LACs that can take RMN LACs on a 1:1 basis - but just making that start will make a vastly superior LAC to what is currently fielded.

Theemile wrote:To add - remember this is the universe where 300 million people live in space in the Manticore B system and virtually none of them are in the manufacturing, construction, or shipbuilding/maintaining fields. A handful are in the resource extraction field or it's immediate support roles, the rest are poets, painters and cafeteria workers.

The economics of the Honorverse are not the strongest point of the series.

Relax wrote:NIT: RoH has 150 systems by itself. I forget which book it is mentioned, one of the early books. Manticore Empire now has 50 by itself and are we counting the Manticore alliance systems as well? That gives another ~20 systems.

Plus the Andermani, which probably add another 30-40 by themselves now.

Then we have serious problems: SL has 1800 core worlds + Shell + protectorates, yet we are told vast majority have nothing more than Forts/LAC's in orbit.

Now via my crude calculation in previous post, SLN had roughly 30,000-->40,000 active ships. We also have Madras sector out by Talbott Quadrant with nearly NO ships at all. Where the Hell was the SLN? What Rabbit hole swallowed up 30,000 ships??? 20,000 ships? Where? I mean, even if we assume EVERY planet had 2 permanently stationed 2 DD/CL[1 active and 2nd down for repair/crew rotation], that is still more than 10,000 planets, yet we are told most had nothing except a DD passing through occasionally. This must require number of protectorates to be several multiples greater than 10,000.

The Madras Sector is not a good sample, even though we did see several battlecruisers assigned there. The problem is that this is also where Crandall and Byng passed through, so they'd have picked up any lighter warships to accompany them. From their point of view, it made total sense: the biggest threat axis is where they were going, so there wasn't much of a need to leave much behind.

Also, the protectorates are not part of the League. If we give the FF the benefit of the doubt that they were not ALL in the piracy and warlordism business, the majority of them should be in Shell, which is part of the League, patrolling their citizens and where the population is likely going to be bigger anyway. Madras wasn't part League and either was Maya (and Maya was even more atypical).

The only shell sector of the League we've heard of is McIntosh, but we have very little detail on what the McIntosh Sector Detachment was comprised of.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

Relax wrote:NIT: RoH has 150 systems by itself. I forget which book it is mentioned, one of the early books. Manticore Empire now has 50 by itself and are we counting the Manticore alliance systems as well? That gives another ~20 systems.

Plus the Andermani, which probably add another 30-40 by themselves now.

FYI...
Andermani now has >50 planets

In 1904 they had 21 planets (Via SITS Setting Book 3) and they got 32 planets from Silesia (SITS Setting book 3 has Silesia having 67 planets in 65 systems, Manticore would later acquire 35 of said planets in 33 systems.

So post acquisition, the Anderman Empire should have at least 53 systems.

Manticore is actually larger now:

Old SKM - 6 (Manticore, Sphinx, Gryphon, Basilisk, San Martin, Lynx)
Silesia - 35
Talbott - 16
-------------
57

Plus any of the ~20 former PRH worlds that decide to join Manticore post 1924.

Theemile wrote:Plus any of the ~20 former PRH worlds that decide to join Manticore post 1924.

Or any other Alliance members who weren't in the PRH. Or those by the Henessy terminus of the Junction. And those are only those that are within 2 weeks' travel of the MBS, because I'd expect that the majority of the Madras sector would want to request admission too but Manticore may want them to put that off for a decade or so while they recover from the ravages of the OFS and get a taste of what it is like to be really independent.

See Expansion of the Empire: where to?

I agree. Previously I've said that I don't get the message of a sovereign entity fighting for its existence. It all seems to be business as usual.

kzt wrote:

drothgery wrote:Also while the military drawing disproportionately from the most productive part of society was certainly true in WWII, Manticore is not mid-20th century AD earth and I really don't get why that would be true there.

Basically everyone has prolog (excepting immigrants who were too old to get prolong), and basically no one with prolog (even 1st-gen) is old enough to be more than physically middle-aged. So there's really no problem with signing up 40-year-olds, or even 80-year-olds.

There's basically no sexism. You can sign up all the women you want, for any role they can do, and they will have been educated as well as the men.

You've got 20th century PD medicine, so there are very, very few people with disqualifying injuries or medical conditions.

It doesn’t matter. That is David’s position. Despite the fact that less than a million people produced the entire RMN and all it’s weapons…

And this includes the army and marines, so if you put three companies of marines on a ship that is one less battle cruiser or 5 DDs you can man. They all come out of the same limited pool of people.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

What Rabbit hole swallowed up 30,000 ships??? 20,000 ships? Where? I mean, even if we assume EVERY planet had 2 permanently stationed 2 DD/CL[1 active and 2nd down for repair/crew rotation], that is still more than 10,000 planets, yet we are told most had nothing except a DD passing through occasionally. This must require number of protectorates to be several multiples greater than 10,000.

The Madras Sector is not a good sample, even though we did see several battlecruisers assigned there. The problem is that this is also where Crandall and Byng passed through,

Byng was stated as specifically NOT pulling ships from the sector. Arrogance etc. Crandall, did take an FF officer... I do not believe we were ever told if she grabbed ships. I have not read that portion of the books in a long time so it easily could be you are correct and she did grab the sectors ships as well.

Maybe in A Rising Thunder we are told number of ships was decreased? I do not know, do you? But, you could be right. Still we have an entire sector(for whatever the term sector is worth) with only a handful of ships for ~20+++ planets and told they never see BC's let alone SD's even though the SLN has 4800 BC's in active service or working up...

Hmm maybe I will go read those books again. It has been years.

Daryl wrote:I agree. Previously I've said that I don't get the message of a sovereign entity fighting for its existence. It all seems to be business as usual.

... even though in fact Manticore (pre-expansion) had a far larger percentage of its population under arms than anyone but Grayson. I always thought it was weird that people got that impression Haven was digging deeper than Manticore; Manticore had a way, way larger percentage of its population and of its GDP committed to the military than Haven did. And the League spent peanuts per capita on the SLN (which despite being huge in absolute terms, was tiny per capita even compared to the RHN).