Jonathan_S wrote:For G-torps on Sharks it does seem like a 4 Mton ship should have room for oversize launch tubes for something even twice as big as a Mk23. Though I'm guessing that this meant twice the exterior dimensions; not just twice the volume.
Which would make that 8 times the volume.
But its possible that the g-torp wasn't finalized until after the test-bed Sharks were designed and laid down; or possibly not even until after they were built. And it must not have seemed a major priority to do massive overhauls to squeeze in oversize missile tubes and handling equipment into ships that weren't ever supposed to be used beyond testing and wargames.
That doesn't make sense either. The Sharks were designed to be a testbed for the Leonard Detweiler class, so presumably the goals of the LDs were already known at the time. Your paragraph is not impossible, but it would mean that the design and mission profiles of the LD changed very recently, which is its own kind of nightmare for the MAN. But more importantly, if launching torpedoes wasn't the original goal, then what was?
At this point, I have to simply suspend disbelief and accept as gospel what was written.
Now the Sharks do have pod bays for all the Cataphracts they carried; but I could easily see there being some critical dimension that prevented those from fitting pods that could hold a weapon that's significantly longer than the missiles the original pod dimensions were based around. (If all the pods have to travel at some point through an elevator, or curved track, then a longer pod wouldn't fit)
Cataphract-A and Bs, mind you. The Sharks couldn't have been designed to carry Cataphract-C (the one carrying the capital ship regular missile) because those were themselves too new an innovation. Sure, the Galton spies had been working on Haven-Manticore war details as early as Buttercup unveiled the MDMs, but I doubt the design had been updated for the larger C variant. Moreover, the Cs were too big for SLN ships of the wall, so presumably of a size similar to the torpedoes themselves.
But again my question of why not. If this is a testbed to launch torpedoes from and you're going to build a 4-million tonne monster anyway, why not do it properly? It doesn't seem right either that you needed a battleship-sized ship to test the spider itself.
I'd have expected the testbed to incorporate missile tubes but no magazines. Those are a known quantity to solve.
And that's assuming you need a tube at all. As the SBs have shown, you can launch them from a regular payload bay: push them out on a tractor and turn them on. You may not want something as weak as a cargo bay door, but instead an armoured chase pod bay door, like SD(P)s. If Manticore and Grayson could build BC-sized pod layers at the 1.25 million tonne range, the MAN should have been able to do the same at 3.2x that.
So 'almost twice the size of a Mk23' just seems too small compared to the difficulties they've talked about with them. Without that line I'd have guessed maybe 40-60% the size of a Shrike. (Which wouldn't have sounded insane; as they also carry a large, if not as large, energy mount plus a very volume intensive drive system, and a lot of volume of plasma capacitors - though don't need space for crew, missiles, or CMs)
That would make more sense. The volume of a Shark is similar to the volume of a CLAC. And CLACs are fragile enough with their LAC doors, so a Shark would not have been a good combatant at that size range.
Another datum that fails to fit is the size of the Silver Bullets, which are bigger than Ghost Riders and presumably bigger than the torpedoes. Ghost Riders aren't as big as LACs.