Changes in ship classification

Jonathan_S wrote:

kzt wrote:Like he said, the ship class is what the owner says it is.

Generally this role based, but sometimes it's because of things like the program budget document says that it's a destroyer.

*cough* Fisher's large light cruisers?

The "Outrageous" class cruisers (Glorious, Courageous, Furious") 15 or 18 inch guns on less than 20 tons displacement. Only Jackie Fisher could come up with such a design, and the means to get around war time restrictions on starting new capital ships. Fortunately, they were all converted to aircraft carriers.

Brigade XO wrote:Are some of you proposing that some sort of below the present war-fighter DD in the RMN be built and called a Frigate as perhaps the nominal equivalent of a DE for things like light convoy or commerce protection. Kind of like sending the DD Hawkwing to Silesia? Just with present generations of weapons?

I know I wasn't. I did mention frigates in the 1924 build discussion to demonstrate the difference between frigate, destroyer and light cruiser, at least as per the RMN definitions of them (or so we understand). And that's also why we won't see them: frigates may have legs to go far, but they can't survive any determined enemy. They have too few defensive or offensive mounts and their throw weight is minimal. If you increase their fighting capabilities, you've got yourself a light cruiser.

The RTN can make use of frigates only because they were going against slavers, not a navy. Even if Jessyk started sending armoured escorts, they'd be more like a security vehicle than a warship, so a frigate would still work. But if any military had decided to side with the slavers, then the mission of those ships would have ended and they'd remain only school ships in the Congo system.

Well, like always, we drift away from the topic.

Currently on Earth, navy ships are mostly classified by role, not by weight. We are talking about Honorverse, and here is the weight mostly the classification standard.

Like I wrote at the start: Manticorian ships are drifting more into the weight range of the next higher class.

If we follow my suggestion and shift the classification "boxes" one step up, would mean, if Manticore decide to build a new screening ship, a Destroyer at the beginning of the war, would be now a frigate. The Frigates Torch owns would be seen as corvettes under my new system.

Maldorian wrote:Currently on Earth, navy ships are mostly classified by role, not by weight. We are talking about Honorverse, and here is the weight mostly the classification standard.

Like I wrote at the start: Manticorian ships are drifting more into the weight range of the next higher class.

Again, Manticore doesn't categorize ships by weight. (Well, except for the split between dreadnoughts and superdreadnoughts; the only real difference there is that SDs are bigger dreadnoughts)

They define a role, and then work out how big a ship they need for that role.

That why their ships are getting bigger. The role then envision for destroyer, cruiser, and battlecruiser remain largely the same; but as the technological and threat environment changes the systems needed to perform that role, and the size of the ship required to carry them, changes.

They don't build bigger ships just for the heck of it. All else being equal smaller ships are less expensive, so you can afford more of them. So there's a constant tension between having enough ships to do everything needed and having ships capable enough to fulfill their roles. That tends to keep ships designed for roles close to what the navy perceives as the minimum viable size to perform that role during the ship's projected service life.


Even if we look at the pre-war era we saw size go up as laserheads and other things started changing the threat environment.
RMN destroyers grew from:
68,200 tons in 1819 to
78,000 tons by 1867 to
104,000 tons by 1899

RMN light cruisers grew from:
88,250 tons in 1820 to
126,000 tons in 1856 to
154,750 tons in 1902

RMN heavy cruisers grew from:
223,000 tons in 1809 to
246,500 tons in 1851 to
305,250 tons in 1893

and RMN battlecruisers grew from:
784,750 tons in 1786 to
834,000 tons in 1863 to
877,500 tons in 1896

But they were still considered DDs, CLs, CAs, and BCs because the newer larger ships were the new minimum required to continue filling the roles the RMN held for those ship classes.

The multi-drive missile and pod based combat caused another massive growth. But the current designs at:
188,750 or 123,500 tons for a destroyer
146,750 tons for a light cruiser
483,000 tons for a heavy cruiser and
1,750,750 or 2,519,750 tons for a battlecruiser
Because those were seen as the new minimum viable sizes to continue performing their respective roles going forward -- at least as of the time their designs were finalized. Those numbers may, and likely will, end up getting pushed higher as the thread environment evolves and/or the RMN gets more experience operating in the current threat environment.

But that doesn't make obsolete cruisers into destroyers. Sure they're now about the same tonnage -- but they lack the systems that pushed destroyers up into that tonnage range. So they're obsolete, 2nd or 3rd line, cruisers -- not front line destroyers. Redesignating them to destroyers just confuses things.

sofioluwato wrote:Generally this role based, but sometimes it's because of things like the program budget document says that it's a destroyer.

Again, why are you plagiarizing KZT words? What is you point? At least you have not hidden URL's in this post.

Maldorian wrote:Well, like always, we drift away from the topic.

Currently on Earth, navy ships are mostly classified by role, not by weight. We are talking about Honorverse, and here is the weight mostly the classification standard.

Like I wrote at the start: Manticorian ships are drifting more into the weight range of the next higher class.

If we follow my suggestion and shift the classification "boxes" one step up, would mean, if Manticore decide to build a new screening ship, a Destroyer at the beginning of the war, would be now a frigate. The Frigates Torch owns would be seen as corvettes under my new system.

In one of the early books, RFC explicitly states that the RMN types ships by mission, not "displacement" (hard to displace vacuum). So that a ship designed for destroyer duties is a destroyer, regardless of her mass. Same for light and heavy cruisers, battle cruisers, Superdreadnaughts. The Andermanni, in the Manticore Ascendent series, have ships with most of the capability and displacement of a cruiser, but typed as "frigates". That's why Roland/Pauls are destroyers, not light cruisers, and the latest Nike class are battle cruisers, not battleships or Dreadnoughts. Mission, not size, is what matters. Size is determined by what is required to carry out the assigned missions, in terms of weapons, armor, crew size, bunkerage, magazines, consumables, and repair parts/facilities. Manticore, and most other navies, has decided that frigates, corvettes, battleships, and even dreadnaughts, do not have a viable mission in the current threat and operational environments.

It's unusual to change the "type" of a ship class, although it does happen (e.g., the great cruiser conversion when most of the USN's frigates (type symbol "DL" for destroyer leader) were retyped as cruisers. Several types of smaller ships (DE, OE, etc.) were redesignated as frigates. These were more in line with what other Navies called frigates, not the ~10-25,000 ton nuclear powered behemoths of the Bainbridge, Truxtun, Virginia and related classes, and the nearly contemporary conventional fueled DLs. And now, the LCS' are reported to be in the process of being designated as frigates, at least those that aren't retired before their time.