Courvosier II-class pod battlecruiser : MLU

Captain Golding wrote:Yes Grayson may be getting unified new ships via the GA Pipeline.

Thing is there is a lot of other people queued up for those ships and I also read the Grayson's Independent streak as saying they will want to get back into shipbuilding asap.

Also I suspect the Unified GA BC will be more a Nike BC than a BC(P).

So where do they start with that ? Building minor vessels like DD's and refitting existing ships as they rebuilt the skills and infrastructure they lost in OB. They need a Fleet Base infrastructure to support their existing fleet even if they get new deliveries from the Havenite shipyards. Also those hulls will need fitting out.

Looking at HoS the GSN is very light on under the wall vessels compared to their count of SD's and CLAC's.

The GSN is light on under wall ships because they don't need them. They don't have a huge merchie fleet, so they don't need merchie protections, or anti piracy duties. LACs have taken the tactical scouting, screening and missile screen duties for waller formations, and Drones have taken the tactical recon duties.

The GSN just needs light ships for strategic recon/scouting, picket duties, and most importantly, wetting their commanders.

The GSN also has a different doctrine for their BCs than other navies - their BCs are used only in the light capital ship role; they are not wall screening units (Havenite practice) or independent heavy raiders (RMN practice). They are a heavy fist intended either to protect Grayson, or to smash Haven's opponents. With the advent of Apollo, their role has probably been reduced, but this has not been discussed.

Theemile wrote:

Captain Golding wrote:We know from House of Steel that the Courvosier II-class pod battlecruiser's have 6 tubes in their broadsides and 4 in their bow.

This is 1919+ so predating the Sag- C and Nike and also Keyhole II.


So What Missiles fit in those tubes ? Not Mk16 because they were not available at the time and even if they were in Development the High Ridge government had closed the information feed.

Assuming these were the previous generation of CA/BC tubes then I would assume ER-SDM's of some kind.

Of course Grayson being Grayson all up tubes for Mk23's might be possible.

Now Blackbird is wiped out (Oyster Bay) but the near orbit platforms are still available so Grayson has not lost all it's space industry.

So we can't build new but some form of mid life update is possible.

What would you do ? Remembering that your volume is fixed so something will have to come out for bulky things to go in.

We've actually never been told. The original Medusas, Minotaurs, and Harringtons were armed with Mk 41 Tubes (Big capacitor missiles), and we've never been told if these were also designed to launch Mk 23s as well - it's possible because the pods bays on those designs were designed to spin up Fusion pods as well as the original Capacitor pods. If the tubes cannot handle mk 23s, the refit to Mk 23 tubes is close to the cost of a new hull, which may be a driver to put these older designs in the reserves quickly.

Due to the timing, I would assume Courvosier IIs got Mk 23 tubes, like Harrington IIs, but interwar builds could have gotten the older Mk 41 capable tubes.

I have to take my words back - I found this in House of Steel in the text about the Hydra CLACS.

Starting in 1920 PD, the Flight II Hydras have had their launch tubes and magazines configured to fire the Mk23 fusion-powered MDM rather than the much larger Mk41; and the limination of all chase beam weaponry allowed them to increase the launch tubes to twelve, in addition to an increase in the defensive armament. This change reflects the operational realities of how little business carriers have in engaging in beam combat with ships of the wall, as well as providing them with a credible threat at extended range against anything below the wall.

So, anything built before 1920 presumably fires a Mk 41 out of it's tubes, while any of the 2nd war construction fires Mk 23s.

The Courvosier II start to launch in 1919, with a squadron being with the Protector's own at Sidemore. At least the original models most likely fire the Mk 41, but this is not stated anywhere.

They really can build ships themself.

They have still their old orbital infrastructure, I don´t know how useful that is for building new ships.

Also, Grayson has two big things in their favor:

1. Their shipyards are smaller and so faster to build.

2. The blueprints of their shipyards are brand new, no need for upgrades, because outdated tecnologie.

Manticore need some time to even made blueprints for their new orbital stations, so does Beowulf. They need months if not 1-2 years only to get the blueprints.

In the mean time, Manticore and Beowulf can send the mayority of their space station building equipment to Grayson, that would speed up the construction of new shipyards significantly.

Maldorian wrote:Manticore need some time to even made blueprints for their new orbital stations, so does Beowulf. They need months if not 1-2 years only to get the blueprints.

In the mean time, Manticore and Beowulf can send the mayority of their space station building equipment to Grayson, that would speed up the construction of new shipyards significantly.

Manticore spent all of maybe 2-3 months designing new stations and were already hard at work building new ones. Oyster Bay hit somewhere in Feb 1922, Filareta tried and failed to attack in June, and according to UH, by August Hamish was touring the projects and they were projected to be online and functioning by no later than June 1923.

Uncompromising Honor, August 1922 wrote: Without her cybernetic eye’s telephoto feature, he couldn’t make out details from here, but he spent more than enough time actually in space touring the projects to know she was right. Current estimates were that the first shipyard modules would be ready to begin construction again in no more than another eight to ten T-months, far sooner than anyone had dared project immediately after the strike, and the new stations—two of them in orbit around each of the Manticore Binary System’s inhabited planets this time, not one—would boast ample active and passive defenses of their own.

Beowulf was even better off, because according to the flight where we saw Jacques and Hamish flying on Jacques private ship, the stations were SPECIFICALLY limited to only light industry.

So the Alignment blowing all three civilian stations up only killed a megaton of civilians, but did virtually nothing to Beowulf's heavy industrial output, which was much further away. So they're going to have new stations finished almost at the same time as Manticore who obviously started building much earlier.

Maldorian wrote:They really can build ships themself.

They have still their old orbital infrastructure, I don´t know how useful that is for building new ships.

Also, Grayson has two big things in their favor:

1. Their shipyards are smaller and so faster to build.

2. The blueprints of their shipyards are brand new, no need for upgrades, because outdated tecnologie.

Manticore need some time to even made blueprints for their new orbital stations, so does Beowulf. They need months if not 1-2 years only to get the blueprints.

In the mean time, Manticore and Beowulf can send the mayority of their space station building equipment to Grayson, that would speed up the construction of new shipyards significantly.

Grayson had moved most of their ship production out of Grayson orbit and out to Blackbird, which got smashed, so they don't have much construction capability left. Even worse, the infamous "Grayson" construction practice required tons of expert construction workers - which they had in spades prior to the Blackbird strike, but now don't - almost everyone at Blackbird was killed. Most likely there are still many trained space construction workers supporting other industries (resource extraction, or supporting the Grayson orbit Stations and industry) but a huge chunk of the trained workforce that made the Grayson miracle possible, is no more, and future Grayson construction will need more automation since it will not have the massive space workforce Grayson was originally able to repurpose and train to use the Manty technologies.

So while their Blackbird yard was new, it's replacement will probably be different with more automation (more like Manticore's "hard yards")so they can do more with fewer workers.

Theemile wrote:Grayson had moved most of their ship production out of Grayson orbit and out to Blackbird, which got smashed, so they don't have much construction capability left. Even worse, the infamous "Grayson" construction practice required tons of expert construction workers - which they had in spades prior to the Blackbird strike, but now don't - almost everyone at Blackbird was killed. Most likely there are still many trained space construction workers supporting other industries (resource extraction, or supporting the Grayson orbit Stations and industry) but a huge chunk of the trained workforce that made the Grayson miracle possible, is no more, and future Grayson construction will need more automation since it will not have the massive space workforce Grayson was originally able to repurpose and train to use the Manty technologies.

So while their Blackbird yard was new, it's replacement will probably be different with more automation (more like Manticore's "hard yards")so they can do more with fewer workers.

Plus at this point Grayson has at least as much fleet as they can really afford to maintain over the long haul. So priority isn't likely to be on getting the most construction slips back in the least time.

Instead it make sense, to me at least, to look at building infrastructure that focuses on lower total cost of ownership for maintaining, upgrading, and eventually replacing, the ships of the existing fleet. And with Grayson's rising standard of living over the life of the yard manpower is going to continue increasing in cost -- even if they wanted to take the time to train up another huge space construction workforce, by the time you'd be looking to retire these new yards you wouldn't want to pay all those workers.

So there's another reason to look at making new yards with more automation to try to control those long term costs. They can afford to take a little longer, and spend a little more up front, in order to make something that'll work long term and keep the fleet more affordable in the future.