Rolands actually have plenty of room for Marines

tlb wrote:From The Short Victorious War:

Chapter 6 wrote:As in most merchantmen, fusion rooms in destroyers and light cruisers—and some smaller heavy cruisers—were designed with blow-out bulkheads to permit them to jettison malfunctioning reactors as an emergency last resort. But larger warships couldn't do that, unless their designers deliberately made their power plants more vulnerable than they had to.

And we actually saw that used at Basilisk when Fearless's Fusion One went unstable after battle damage from Sirius, and almost took out the ship.

On Basilisk Station wrote:She couldn't hear the alarm in Fusion One's vacuum, but she could see the numbers flashing blood-red on the panel. The mag bottle was going, counting down with lightning speed, and there was no longer time to kill the plasma flow.
[...]
The emergency jettisoning charges hurled the entire side of Fusion One out into space a microsecond before the ejection charges blew the reactor after it. There had to be a delay, be it ever so tiny, lest a faltering mag bottle be smashed against an intact bulkhead and liberate its plasma inside the ship. But small as that delay was, it was almost too long.
Dominica Santos, Allen Manning, and Angela Earnhardt died instantly. The dying containment field failed completely just as the reactor housing blew through the opening, and the terrible fury of a star's heart erupted back into the compartment as well as out. Fusion One vanished, along with seven hundred square meters of Fearless's outer hull, Missile Two, Laser Three, Point Defense One, Rad Shield One, all of her forward fire control sensors, and her forward port sidewall generators, and forty-two of Fearless's surviving crewmen died with them. A streamer of pure energy gushed out of the dreadful wound, and the light cruiser heaved bodily up to starboard in maddened response.

Still, there could always be exceptions where for whatever reason a DD or CL design doesn't have their power rooms near the hull. That's just not a level of detail we get on a class-by-class basis.

Oh, but apparently Manticoran merchantmen don't fall under into that "most merchantmen" category [G]

Shadow of Saganami wrote:Manticoran civilian designers had a tendency to sacrifice some cargo-handling flexibility by moving things like fusion plants and hyper generators closer to the center of a ship, rather than leaving them exposed, but Solarian designers were less concerned, by and large, about such design features. A smaller percentage of the Solly merchant marine worked in high-risk environments like Silesia or deep into the Verge, and the Solarian philosophy was that any merchantship which found itself under fire should surrender and stop pretending it was a warship before it got hurt.

Megan Peterson. Protecting a solar system, by methodically taking out BCs?

Theemile wrote:

penny wrote:Will anyone mind giving me a recap of the battles the Roland's have been used in and exactly what their intended role entails?

If memory serves (which seems questionable these days), we've only seen Rolands in a primary combatant role in 2 interactions:

1) New Tuscany - destroyed at Anchor in Orbit.
2a) Saltash, 5 Rolands curbstomp 4 SLN Indefatigable BCs using internal launchers.
2b) Saltash boarding actions against Saltash Orbital base.

Rolands are intended for all destroyer roles - Convoy Escort, Strategic Scout, Fleet Escort, Anti-Pirate, "Showing the Flag" Presence missions, Commerce Raiding, etc.

ooooh....Good catch. I forgot about that because she wasn't alone... at first, but then she was.

so...

3) A Roland as a Stealth Sniper @ Hyperion.

Daryl wrote:Megan Peterson. Protecting a solar system, by methodically taking out BCs?

Theemile wrote:
If memory serves (which seems questionable these days), we've only seen Rolands in a primary combatant role in 2 interactions:

1) New Tuscany - destroyed at Anchor in Orbit.
2a) Saltash, 5 Rolands curbstomp 4 SLN Indefatigable BCs using internal launchers.
2b) Saltash boarding actions against Saltash Orbital base.

Rolands are intended for all destroyer roles - Convoy Escort, Strategic Scout, Fleet Escort, Anti-Pirate, "Showing the Flag" Presence missions, Commerce Raiding, etc.

Somtaaw wrote:So what we know about how poor the Roland's are for officers is pre-BoMa, they could barely function when BuPers actually had the most officers available.

I am arguing that they already didn't, even before BoMa.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

Somtaaw wrote:So what we know about how poor the Roland's are for officers is pre-BoMa, they could barely function when BuPers actually had the most officers available.

I am arguing that they already didn't, even before BoMa.

Trying to back up my previous point, I'm actually finding the crew levels arn't that crazy. We can assuming a ship would require an officer or sr enlisted for 3 watchkeeping shifts of at least 5 critical stations, plus 3+ other officers or sr. enlisted for other non-watch keeping roles.

Watches:
Command Seat
Engineering/Fusion
Tactical
Navigation
CIC

Non watch:
Logistics
Boatbay/Pilot
Medical

(non-watch positions probably hold 1-2 watches each over the week in addition to their normal focused workload.)

That's a minimum of 18 Officers or Sr. Enlisted out of a crew of 63, or roughly 1:4. A Traditional RMN DD/CL had a 1:12 (or worse) ratio of officers to total crew. If you assume 2 SR enlisted for every officer, that's a 3:12 or 1:4 ratio of Officer & Sr. Enlisted to Jr Enlisted - or right on the traditional ratios.

Everyone is just worked to the bone....

The purpose of the Marines is to be deployable - the Rolands crew size is so limited that I think you would find that you could not deploy the 13~26 Marines and then still be able to fight the ship.

IIRC the Rolands seem to be limited on Life Support? Something came up regarding an evacuation. 2 Marines covering a single ship job is probably a good working ratio - I am not sure of the experience of the RN back when the Royals did shipboard duty, Still Flottila craft did not normally carry Marines, Cruisers and above mostly did (But Gunboats like the Insect class did).

Just how much space is the Flag Bridge and what Berthing goes with it ? Converting 1 or 2 per flottila to carry a Marine unit in place of the Flag Staff. Perhaps the Marine Co HQ and HW Squads and then placing 1 squad per Roland. Still a Senior Officer's Quarters would be a lot of space but 1 person, converting that to a multi berth Marine Quarters would probably hold 6~8 but the Life Support loading would be different. Of Course said SO would also have a staff - How big ? Including personal Stewards, Cook, Logistics and signals teams.
A lot of bodies but with a much higher rank average than your Marine squads.

I do wonder if the lack of Marines on the Rolands is a war time expedient rather than long time policy. Also we don't know what Grayson is doing on theirs - and we know Grayson is well able to go their own way.


Yes the Wartime Manning Levels of the Rowlands seems rather small and I agree with the thought that the berths they do have need to meet the day to day maintenance of the ship. Yes Marines can cover some GQ posts if trained but do they train to do ship maintenance. On the larger ships there is more room to have specialists and Marines as Generalists.

The RMN seems to benifit from a generally higher level of base competence than many of the other Navies we see. Replacing a Havenite enlisted with a marine probably would not take much.

Captain Golding wrote:I do wonder if the lack of Marines on the Rolands is a war time expedient rather than long time policy. Also we don't know what Grayson is doing on theirs - and we know Grayson is well able to go their own way.

House of Steel does have an entry on the GSN Rolands, the Paul of Tarsis-class (or just Paul-class) destroyers. But it says calls the differences between them and the Roland subtle, saying "The most notable internal difference is the split berthing that the GSN has built into all of their new construction to accommodate mixed-gender crews."

But it is silent on whether they're doing anything different with manning numbers or routinely embarking Marines.

Jonathan_S wrote:Oh, but apparently Manticoran merchantmen don't fall under into that "most merchantmen" category [G]

Shadow of Saganami wrote:Manticoran civilian designers had a tendency to sacrifice some cargo-handling flexibility by moving things like fusion plants and hyper generators closer to the center of a ship, rather than leaving them exposed, but Solarian designers were less concerned, by and large, about such design features. A smaller percentage of the Solly merchant marine worked in high-risk environments like Silesia or deep into the Verge, and the Solarian philosophy was that any merchantship which found itself under fire should surrender and stop pretending it was a warship before it got hurt.

Probably because only Manticoran (and Andermani?) merchants that seemed to care about their crews and ships, despite regularly sending them into dangerous space. Everybody else seemed to follow the Solarian merchant ship methodology, which can be summed up as "there's always someone else who'll work"

Was in one of the later Shadows books, or maybe it was Mission of Honor or somewhere thereabouts. It takes your quote even farther, straight out saying the Sollies just plain don't care about the crews aboard their ships. It's all about maximum profit, and that apparently it's cheaper to the Sollies to replace entire ships and crews aboard them, than to even start trying to protect hyper generators or crews.

Conversely, we saw how even such a capitalist as Klaus Hauptman actually trying to protect his ships. Sending sealed letters that basically tell any pirates "look, dont kill my crew and I'll pay you to get both crew and ship back." Based on the later conversations in HAE, we can figure the Dempsey cartel has similar things because Erika Dempsey was equally displeased at the sudden spike in ships lost in Silesia of ~1907-1908. These large Manticoran cartels were not only willing to try protecting their ships by assuming 'somebody' would take a shot so they bury the fusion cores and engine rooms in spinal mounts, they'd put letters of randsom into the ship to also try protecting their crews where possible.

Captain Golding wrote:IIRC the Rolands seem to be limited on Life Support? Something came up regarding an evacuation. 2 Marines covering a single ship job is probably a good working ratio - I am not sure of the experience of the RN back when the Royals did shipboard duty, Still Flottila craft did not normally carry Marines, Cruisers and above mostly did (But Gunboats like the Insect class did).

Just how much space is the Flag Bridge and what Berthing goes with it ? Converting 1 or 2 per flottila to carry a Marine unit in place of the Flag Staff. Perhaps the Marine Co HQ and HW Squads and then placing 1 squad per Roland. Still a Senior Officer's Quarters would be a lot of space but 1 person, converting that to a multi berth Marine Quarters would probably hold 6~8 but the Life Support loading would be different. Of Course said SO would also have a staff - How big ? Including personal Stewards, Cook, Logistics and signals teams.
A lot of bodies but with a much higher rank average than your Marine squads.

All Rolands have the flag bridge, and what we directly saw from Chatterjee's perspective on his trip to New Tuscany, or the single Roland that traveled to Meyers with the aborted message because they saw Crandall's SDs, plus what we know of other flags.

Commodore plus his own steward, the Flag Lieutenant, a Chief of Staff, and then an officer for Staff Intelligence, Operations, Navigation and Communications respectively. That's 8 crew right there alone, plus they seem to try for an assistant to most of the roles (Henke wasn't able to get them before she deployed, but she was free to poach once arriving in Talbott), so we can add another 4 assistants, that's 12 crew aboard the Roland that are 100% purely for squadron/staff work. The personally assigned Steward handles some/most/all of the cooking for the flag officer, but we simply don't know much else about how many 'staff' like stewards a flag officer brings aboard a ship other than the big ones.


All ships are designed to take damage and still have a reserve, while assuming nobody's killed. So a Roland which is designed for 62 regular crew (and at least 12 staffers) for a total of ~74. Based on the conversations between Honor and Warner Caslet when they were trying to figure out how many prisoners they could cram aboard each ship, we can figure Rolands had at minimum between double and 2.5 times their rated life support in reserve.

That works out to a Roland can carry, in a pinch, somewhere between 148 to 185 personnel just relying on what their life support was actually maximum rated for. And they could probably carry 200-225 in a true emergency and if they were willing to stress their systems. Think when Honor won at Hades and then pulled everyone out on all the cruisers. Everybody stank because they couldn't even use the showers anymore, and even moving your arms above your head could hit someone else was the description. They physically fit and the Life Support wasn't going to last too much longer, and few if anybody was actually comfortable, but it worked long enough to hyper from Hades to Trevor's Star and that's all that mattered.

Somtaaw wrote:Commodore plus his own steward, the Flag Lieutenant, a Chief of Staff, and then an officer for Staff Intelligence, Operations, Navigation and Communications respectively. That's 8 crew right there alone, plus they seem to try for an assistant to most of the roles (Henke wasn't able to get them before she deployed, but she was free to poach once arriving in Talbott), so we can add another 4 assistants, that's 12 crew aboard the Roland that are 100% purely for squadron/staff work. The personally assigned Steward handles some/most/all of the cooking for the flag officer, but we simply don't know much else about how many 'staff' like stewards a flag officer brings aboard a ship other than the big ones.

Henke was CO of Tenth Fleet, not a DesRon or even CruRon. She first flew her flag aboard Agammenon-class BC(P)s, which are already massive, before transferring to the SD(P)s when they arrived. When she and Lester Tourville conquered Mesa, she was aboard one of those.

She was also a full Admiral. The flag bridge of a destroyer is going to be occupied by a Commodore or senior-grade Captain (like Zavala was). DesRons don't usually work in squadron formation without being part of a larger fleet grouping, so the flag officer can usually rely on their superior's staff for the heavy lifting. DesRon 301 and the whole Talbott deployment of Tenth Fleet was very unusual in that it was a fleet but was dispersed in small groupings.

PS: the books refer to Zavala as Commodore while the squadron contains multiple ships, but he's only "Captain" when a single ship is present... which would make sense if he were that ship's skipper, but the wiki says he wasn't.

All ships are designed to take damage and still have a reserve, while assuming nobody's killed. So a Roland which is designed for 62 regular crew (and at least 12 staffers) for a total of ~74. Based on the conversations between Honor and Warner Caslet when they were trying to figure out how many prisoners they could cram aboard each ship, we can figure Rolands had at minimum between double and 2.5 times their rated life support in reserve.

That's true for most ships, but we don't know if the Rolands were designed with such a spare. If they were not intended to carry Marines in the first place, the planners may not have considered they would need to take that much excess passengers and crew.

Think when Honor won at Hades and then pulled everyone out on all the cruisers.

She captured some transport ships too.

Somtaaw wrote:Think when Honor won at Hades and then pulled everyone out on all the cruisers.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:She captured some transport ships too.

From Echoes of Honor:

Chapter 44 wrote:She nodded at the data on the five Longstops-class transports the warships would be escorting. "They're providing enough lift for a full seventy thousand slave laborers, assuming Tresca could find that many in so short a time, plus another forty-one thousand technicians and supervisory personnel and twenty-four thousand SS ground troops— and that doesn't even count the additional eight thousand SS support personnel attached to the intervention battalions. That's over a hundred and forty thousand total, and according to the readouts, these ships are actually designed to provide life support for forty thousand people each, exclusive of their own crews, so StateSec is planning on running them light."

Epilogue wrote:"Tracking made it five battlecruisers, four heavy cruisers, a light cruiser, and two of their Roughneck-class assault transports."

The five left first, but were beaten to Trevor's Star by the fast assault transports.