Torch and captured war ships

Torch could work with even RMN or RHN light ships that would otherwise be retired because they could not be retrofitted with the MDM. That should be sufficient to handle much of what could be expected to try and make a pass at Torch for other than a second revenge hit by the Alignment.
Recall that most of the rest of the known galaxy is working with variations of the SLN weapons systems and ships. How much of a target -for anyone but the Alignment- is Torch? Against your garden variety pirate (not the big multi-ship fleet operations) a couple of DDs and or CLs combined with modern LACs make for an expensive place to hit. They also have Erwhonl and the Maya Autonomous Area which could have warships trading in and out doing "commerce protection" so somebody trying to invade Torch and take the systems would be playing a high stakes game.
Perhaps the Royal Torch Navy needs a couple of ships (armed) that can carry enough people to crew captured slavers etc and use the captured ships both to bring the liberated slaves back to Torch and then either convert the prizes for merchant shipping or sell them for funding other needs. At the moment they can -a frigate is armed so an unarmed freighter is not that big a problem unless they are willing to blow themselves up rather than surrender-so a frigate of two with a support ship hanging outside the hyper limit could be carrying prize crew. What they will need is enough experienced people to crew those ships going out in the first place.

Brigade XO wrote:In the timeline, Torch was not in any real position to try to field ships of the size handed over from the PNE. They just didn't have the numbers of trained officers and crews to do it. That's the primary reason they were using frigates.
By the time we get to TEIF they are still maintaining the former PNE ships but that's just preserving assets and using them for training while they expand their SDF/navy.

I don't recall anything in TEIF mentioning warships larger than frigates in active duty in the Torch navy. At this point, it stir might not even be practical for Torch to add something like one or two destroyers given the need to build up the numbers and experience of the navy. We also don't know what their needs are going to be. Raiding slaver locations probably is going to drop low since Manpower & Mesa are no longer in the genetic slave business though it is possible that there are/were satellite operation away from Mesa producing slaves.

I'm not sure that's true. In To End in Fire, They were starting to at least assigned commanding officers to some of those ships. I'm not sure they would have been doing that unless they thought they could manned them.

tlb wrote:Even with the Silver Bullet problem, Mycroft and the Apollo system defense pods were sufficient to destroy a good part of the raiding SLN fleet at Beowulf. Throw in a bunch of LACs and that should handle any defensive worries that Torch might have. I do not think that intercepting ships will ever be a big part of their plans, but raiding orphaned Manpower locations might be. So a LAC carrier based on Erewhon's Masquerade class might become one of their larger ships.

A more interesting opportunity to me for Torch is some sort of an arrangement with the new Mesa and the pacified Galton. Either would eliminate any problems caused by a small workforce and population.

Jonathan_S wrote:Ah, but is Manticore and the GA going to release their highly classified top of the line system defense tech to Torch? (FTL fire control, FTL contro relays, brilliant control missiles, microfusion power plants, multi-drive missiles)?
I tend to doubt it.

Even Haven giving them a deal on old Moriarty systems as those get swapped out seems dubious. The GA seems to be holding on to the secret of true multi-drive missiles pretty closely and even the lightspeed controlled Mycroft relied on those to get sufficient coverage.


That said, if all you need to do is cover the seemingly unusable wormhole terminus from a surprise transit you don't need fancy ships or long ranged missiles. A control station / fort, some service shuttles, and a pile of laserhead mines and energy weapons buoys will make any hostile transit unfeasibly expensive in terms of lost ships. And if you can back that up with some SDM laserhead pods then all the better.
You need some folks to man the shuttles that maintain the minefield -- but not so many folks.

That depends on how much the Grand Alliance expands. Torch is already heavily involved in the changes at Mesa and might get involved with Galton. We shall see.