Jonathan_S wrote:Though, until she finally ended things with a lucky hit in, the Hellbarde had to have been pretty surprised by Jessica Epps' capabilities as well.
Despite starting the fight by a surprise opening salvo from beyond what the RMN thought IAN missile range was, the text is clear that the 37 minute fight between the two heavy cruisers was not going well for Hellbarde.
War of Honor wrote:"For what it matters, Chantilly's sensor data clearly indicate that Jessica Epps was winning the engagement handily when a hit from one of Hellbarde's last laser heads apparently caused one of her fusion plants to lose containment."
Ton for ton the IAN ships at that point weren't yet a match for reasonably modern RMN units. (Or at least that was true of Hellbarde and the trio of CLs that tangled with Ephraim Tudor -- but I guess, in fairness, we don't know if those were the most modern IAN designs either)
I think we can safely conclude that they were. We know from later that the Adlers, which were the IAN's best effort at SD(P), were not yet in the same league as the Invictus or even the Medusa, and probably not as the RHN's Sovereign of Space. The IAN had advantage of not being at war to design the ships, but it had also the disadvantage of not being at war. That is, on one hand, they had the time and space to design them the best they could, without having to come up with something to keep their Empire from being conquered. They had the advantage of seeing what the combatants were using and thus copying their designs. But not being at war meant that they didn't have that extra pressure that "the prospect of hanging at dawn focuses one's mind." They also didn't have any direct samples from the RMN to work with, except what they may have been able to steal or acquire through second hand (probably bribing some ex-PN officer).
I also believe the faction that was pushing for war would have wanted to know just how good the RMN actually was. So throwing their best ships at it would have been the right way to do it. They
knew beyond doubt that the RMN had trounced the old PRN during Operation Buttercup. So sending an old-style cruiser with SDMs to fight a Saganami would not have yielded sufficient data.
That said, the RMN CAs involved in those two encounters, Jessica Epps and Ephraim Tudor, weren't the most modern CA's the RMN had either. After all, Sag-C's like Hexapuma, with Mark 16 DDMs, were already in service by that point -- while these two were apparently (based on the engagement ranges) using the older, smaller, Mark 14 ERMs. Epps, which the text calls "an Edward Saganami-class cruiser" [WoH] pretty clearly being a Sag-A (though probably a flight II); and Tudor (based on name and missile used) being either another Sag-A, or possibly a Sag-B.
They were Sag-A, so indeed they weren't the most recent, as the Bs already existed. Though the difference between those two isn't that great. Neither ship would is able to fire the Mk16 DDM (which didn't exist at the time), so the Epps was a good sample of what the IAN would face if it tried to push for conquest of Silesia.
It's too early for Saganami-C though. As far as we know, the first one to commission was the
Hexapuma (so we should start a petition to rename them to Hexapuma-class).
Anyway, my point was that Hellbarde's capabilities were a surprise. It's not relevant that they were still outmatched by the Saganamis. It's that the RMN didn't know the IAN had anything that could come that close. In turn, that means the RMN had not been able to acquire intel on the IAN construction for about 5 years.
