Rolands actually have plenty of room for Marines

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

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

She captured some transport ships too.

The POV was of Honor aboard the cruiser, describing how cramped the cruiser(s) were.

Ashes of Victory, Ch1 wrote: She and Warner Caslet, Farnese's exec, had packed the battlecruiser, like all the other ships of the ESN, to the deckheads to get all of the escapees aboard. The massive redundancy designed into warship life-support systems had let them carry the overload (barely), but it had done nothing about the physical crowding, and the systems themselves were in serious need of maintenance after so long under such heavy demand. The personnel shuttles outside the boat bay were but the first wave of craft which would transport her people from the packed-sardine environment of their battlecruiser to the mountainous surface of San Martin. The planet's heavy gravity scarcely qualified it as a vacation resort, but at least it had plenty of room. And after twenty-four T-days crammed into Farnese's overcrowded berthing spaces, a little thing like weighing twice one's proper weight would be a minor price for the glorious luxury of room in which to stretch without putting a thumb into someone else's eye.

I can't find exactly how many people they actually fit aboard each battlecruiser, but we know how much the absolute minimums were to allow the ship to fight, and if we know how much they were normally rated to carry, we can guesstimate what the true maximum was around.

But a Warlord was nominally carrying a crew of 2200, including its marines, so if they were so packed they were [quote"Ashes of Victory, Ch1"] men and women packed into their ship like emergency rations in a tin[/quote] we can figure it was at least 3x normal crew, if not 4x.

From Echoes epilogue

Echoes of Honor, epilogue wrote: "Tracking made it five battlecruisers, four heavy cruisers, a light cruiser, and two of their Roughneck-class assault transports."
-snip-
"... I am accompanied by approximately one hundred and six thousand liberated inmates of the prison planet Hades."

Each transport had to hold easily multiple battalions worth normally, because that's what they were designed to do. That's easily 2-3000 just off they're normally designed requirements and holding say 3 battalions. But Honor packed in ONE HUNDRED thousand, so each Roughneck was probably holding 15 thousand, making it thirty thousand escapees between them, each Mars was probably holding closer to 10 thousand for another fifty thousand (now upto 80,000 escapees) and the remaining twenty-six thousand between the four heavy cruisers and light cruiser. Give or take those numbers hold up, means a Mars class which is normally rated for 1190-ish personnel can hold upto 5000 for a 3 week journey, as long as you know the ship can either go directly into a shipyard or you won't be using the ship further.

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.

Somtaaw wrote:The POV was of Honor aboard the cruiser, describing how cramped the cruiser(s) were.

The dispute is not over whether all the ships were crammed full of people, everyone will admit that. The dispute is where you only mention cruisers, when there were other types of ships, including seven transports.

tlb wrote:

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.

Somtaaw wrote:The POV was of Honor aboard the cruiser, describing how cramped the cruiser(s) were.

The dispute is not over whether all the ships were crammed full of people, everyone will admit that. The dispute is where you only mention cruisers, when there were other types of ships, including seven transports.

Because the POV was from a cruiser, and she described what people ON THAT CRUISER were living like. Quite literally doesn't matter that two transports were also there, or five heavy cruisers and a single light cruiser as well. Honor was directly describing what the personnel aboard her battlecruiser were living (and smelling) like.

By extrapolation we know the other ships were in similar conditions, but since it wasn't written we don't know for absolute fact, because Weber never explicitly broke down how many were aboard each ship. So we can only go off what is actually written, and what was written was living on the battlecruiser for 24 days, and that by the time they arrived the Life Support was damned near to failing and they really wanted to debark so they could stretch.


Transports always seem to operate under 'hacks' anyway. Each Roughneck was described as being for a couple battalions. Which as I calculated (using RMMC numbers) is approximately 600 and change per battalion. 3 battalions would be 1800 Marines, plus a very small navy crew to run the ship, so a Roughneck would be 1900 normally. And yet somehow, during the final evacuation, Honor was somehow cramming 50,000 evacuees aboard it. Which is nearly twenty-five times it's guesstimated rated loads which is absolutely ridiculous. Even if we know she actually took every surviving pinnace and cutter and docked them externally, because Peep ships have more docking spots, and used them as strap-on extra Life Support. Because that just doesn't make any sense to go from 1,900 to 50,000 people aboard the exact same ship.


Even though StateSec actually run even heavier on personnel, I think it was mentioned their squads are a third larger, so each StateSec (and possibly Gendarme) intervention battalions are probably 750 men each, so 3 battalions would actually be 2250 troops instead of the Manticoran Marines being 1800. But even that's twenty-times the rated life support, which again is absolutely ridiculous.

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

Somtaaw wrote:Because the POV was from a cruiser, and she described what people ON THAT CRUISER were living like. Quite literally doesn't matter that two transports were also there, or five heavy cruisers and a single light cruiser as well. Honor was directly describing what the personnel aboard her battlecruiser were living (and smelling) like.

Your original comment was NOT about one particular cruiser, as you now seem to be saying. It was about ALL, and ONLY, the cruisers.

Fine, all of the ships were packed to the maximum, including the seven transports.

tlb wrote:

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

Somtaaw wrote:Because the POV was from a cruiser, and she described what people ON THAT CRUISER were living like. Quite literally doesn't matter that two transports were also there, or five heavy cruisers and a single light cruiser as well. Honor was directly describing what the personnel aboard her battlecruiser were living (and smelling) like.

Your original comment was NOT about one particular cruiser, as you now seem to be saying. It was about ALL, and ONLY, the cruisers.

Fine, all of the ships were packed to the maximum, including the seven transports.

When the question/topic is "what is life like aboard a ship packed too full?", why would we include mention of things that don't contribute to the answer? Not even a tiny bit.

The only ships worth mentioning were the ones that had written details. Battlecruisers are cruisers, so what I said was not even remotely close to being inaccurate, or incomplete. Yes the transport were present, and yes they were necessary to help haul out the total remaining 106 thousand evacuees. But zero details were made, whether how many they each actually carried or what the conditions of life were. Since they don't contribute to either the question nor answer, they don't deserve to get mentioned because it's going to be entirely fanfiction.

Pedantically insisting their involvement be mentioned is just...absurd. You think the transports deserve to be mentioned, now you have to prove why. Post verifiable quotes of life aboard those transports, that isn't just copy-pasting what I've already put down of life aboard the cruisers.

Somtaaw wrote:Pedantically insisting their involvement be mentioned is just...absurd. You think the transports deserve to be mentioned, now you have to prove why. Post verifiable quotes of life aboard those transports, that isn't just copy-pasting what I've already put down of life aboard the cruisers.

We're not disagreeing that they were packed to the gills. I was merely pointing out that there were more ships when you seemed to imply Honor managed to lift a quarter million people off Hades in just a few cruisers. You may not have meant to imply that, it's just how I read it and possibly others.

Anyway, back to the topic, the issue is also that you're making extrapolations that don't necessarily hold. The fact that Warlords had exceptional redundancy and that Honor managed to cram a lot of people for a voyage of a couple of weeks does not necessarily mean Rolands have the same extra margin and could have that many people. For example, we know that Peep technology of the time was lacking, so it stands to reason they needed larger safety margins to be confident of no-failure, but the same need not apply to Manticore ships.

Mind you, I agree that the ships should have the volume for more crew. The ships should have enough life support capacity because that's not a limiting factor in warships. But that's not how RFC told the story. And even if they did have the volume, the RMN chose not to embark those Marines on those ships for those tasks during the war with the SLN.

Somtaaw wrote:

Because the POV was from a cruiser, and she described what people ON THAT CRUISER were living like. Quite literally doesn't matter that two transports were also there, or five heavy cruisers and a single light cruiser as well. Honor was directly describing what the personnel aboard her battlecruiser were living (and smelling) like.

By extrapolation we know the other ships were in similar conditions, but since it wasn't written we don't know for absolute fact, because Weber never explicitly broke down how many were aboard each ship. So we can only go off what is actually written, and what was written was living on the battlecruiser for 24 days, and that by the time they arrived the Life Support was damned near to failing and they really wanted to debark so they could stretch.


Transports always seem to operate under 'hacks' anyway. Each Roughneck was described as being for a couple battalions. Which as I calculated (using RMMC numbers) is approximately 600 and change per battalion. 3 battalions would be 1800 Marines, plus a very small navy crew to run the ship, so a Roughneck would be 1900 normally. And yet somehow, during the final evacuation, Honor was somehow cramming 50,000 evacuees aboard it. Which is nearly twenty-five times it's guesstimated rated loads which is absolutely ridiculous. Even if we know she actually took every surviving pinnace and cutter and docked them externally, because Peep ships have more docking spots, and used them as strap-on extra Life Support. Because that just doesn't make any sense to go from 1,900 to 50,000 people aboard the exact same ship.


Even though StateSec actually run even heavier on personnel, I think it was mentioned their squads are a third larger, so each StateSec (and possibly Gendarme) intervention battalions are probably 750 men each, so 3 battalions would actually be 2250 troops instead of the Manticoran Marines being 1800. But even that's twenty-times the rated life support, which again is absolutely ridiculous.

The Jayne's PRN stats have the Roughneck fast transports with a crew of 1000, and 20,000 troops. Longstops don't have the crew listed in text or otherwise, but are said to have a lift of 40,000 troops/passengers.

Theemile wrote:The Jayne's PRN stats have the Roughneck fast transports with a crew of 1000, and 20,000 troops. Longstops don't have the crew listed in text or otherwise, but are said to have a lift of 40,000 troops/passengers.

Good find's. I couldn't find many details for the Roughnecks, and I probably skimmed too quickly for the Longstops because I never saw those numbers at all. So with the Roughnecks rated for 1000 & 20,000 troops, they only crammed roughly twice as many aboard. Since the math of 106k evacuees in the 'second wave', across 5 BCs, 4 CAs and a CL plus the 2 Roughnecks, that works out to roughly about 50,000 ex-prisoners or maybe 60,000 per transport.

For how much of that is intended, first we have to look at the influence the Solarian League has had on ship designs. Things like the compensator max power settings of 80% with 20% reserve to 'avoid compensator failure' was still very influencing on both Havenite and Manticoran designs. Also weapons mixtures were still influencing, as this still predates the podnought, or those crazy Grayson's slapping SD size grasers on cruisers, that was lunacy at the start.

Comparing equal-era, pre-podnought designs, both Haven and Manticore seemed to go for the same relative ratio. The Reliant vs Warlord comparison, Reliant's had 2100 crew while Warlord's had 2200 despite being physically larger, but looking closer, the Reliant has almost 600 marines, and the Warlord's only typically carried 300 (according to the wiki at least, maybe its wrong). Similar size ships, but the Peep ship has 300 extra sailors on it, to make up for differences in crew training. Both are going to have similar crew life support reserves. And as we saw, the Warlord's were carrying somewhere between 6000 to 10,000 evacuees, albeit at a ruinous overload. Haven, Manticore and Solarian League all still shared design mantra's at this point in time, so we can safely assume the Reliant was similarly capable of pulling off such an evacuation. Although due to the Reliants being smaller than Warlords, it'd be tougher finding enough free space to physically fit people onboard.


Rolands are considerably newer than the Warlord and Reliant classes, but it was also specifically a war design. They were flat out expecting it to take battle damage. That's why the equally new Saganami-C cruisers, had a SIXTY-PERCENT reserve on missile control links, in addition to it's nominally rated double off-bore broadside. It was only intended to fire salvos of upto 80 missiles at a time, but it was designed to handle upto 128 missiles so when it took hits, the Sag-C could still handle salvos of 80 for longer periods of time, thereby increasing probabilities of it surviving and winning.

Equally important, you're not gonna try and minimize your life-support, because if you're expecting to take damage then you generally want to ensure sure your survivors can still breathe air after the fight is over. Those skinsuits still need to be topped off, and as we saw from the final action of HMACS Wayfarer, after the battle, Honor almost sighed from relief when they realized they could get an air scrubber back online at all.

Honor Among Enemies, Ch42 wrote: "It looks like we can get at least some backup Environmental on-line. It'll be canned life support, but one of our main scrubber plants is still intact, and we've got one operable fusion plant. If we can duct to the scrubber, we'll have enough life support for four hundred or so.
-snip-
 "We've got the backups on-line down in Environmental, Ma'am," an exhausted Ginger Lewis reported from DCC three hours later. "Commander Wicklow's been a big help, and I think he's found a way to beat the temperature loss when we put in the ducting to the scrubber."

We know from In Enemy Hands that one scrubber is approximately half to 3/4 of a pinnace capacity, and IF all air scrubbers are the same size/quality as what Wayfarer had, we know that one scrubber is good for 400 people. So on a Culverin-class destroyer which, correct me if I'm wrong, has a crew of approximately 200 (?), would have 2 air scrubbers, one for daily general use and one for backup, and can therefore support approximately 800 people, which works out to three times reserve.

A Roland on the other hand, with only a crew of 62, also needs two air scrubbers, for the same reasons as a Culverin. So identical space used on both a Roland and a Culverin, but the Roland is also physically larger and can more easily carry the two scrubbers. 62 crew into 800 is over a ten times reserve, making a Roland seem more like an ant. It shouldn't be able to support so many extra personnel, but if they will physically fit, a Roland can more than easily carry lots of people in a pinch, making them excel in Search-and-Rescue missions. Except for that lack of any marines at all, which makes SAR problematic if the people they're 'rescuing' might want to remain hostile.

Roland ~190k tons ~75 personnel
CL Fearless 120k tons ~300 personnel
Roughly Roland has ~2X CM missile(larger and more of them)
2X PDLC, Much Larger, more numerous PDLC so ~4X the load
2X volume required for MK16 missiles compared to old 70ton missile due to handling equipment, though combined books claim for some savings so ~?
RD's are now ~250 tons and mission requirements for them have increased, not decreased which should indicate ~2X tonnage allocation.
Bow/Sternwall + MUCH stronger more power intensive sidewall generators
+50% compensator margin as well

Lost ~200 personnel and gained ~50% in mass(compensator volume). Basic requirements of CO2 scrubbers are going to be based on a "basic" model probably used in All DD/CL/CA, not a special one just for the Roland, so it would not surprise me at all if you can cram same complement of personnel and its margins for damage, albeit uncomfortable(hot bunking) on a Roland as on the old Fearless in OBS. I see no reason why this would change as the limiting factor here is BACKUP redundancy and base model weight common to all DD/CL/CA. Just increase number of said units by tonnage as Redundancy is more important for life support than shaving half a ton but increasing unit cost 2X

Honestly: a mere 50% increase in mass seems a bit of a stretch if you asked me. ~200 People do not require much volume compared to all base system bloating required for base operations. Savings yes, that much? Not really.

The real question: Having invested 190ktons in a ship, why not invest a mere ~10t or so more making a universal hull design able to perform ALL missions? Baffling if you asked me. Its not like they are standing in wall of battle at this point so they KNEW they are going to be tasked with extended independent missions. The answer: ~200 essentially brand new Avalon class CL's which at the time of initial Roland design, dominate any other light Cruiser/DD/CA with their new missiles.

PPS: Someone(?) John? brought up warning shots vrs pirates etc. Viper Missiles out of CM tubes solves this. A touch slower, but it still works just fine.

Somtaaw wrote:Rolands are considerably newer than the Warlord and Reliant classes, but it was also specifically a war design. They were flat out expecting it to take battle damage. That's why the equally new Saganami-C cruisers, had a SIXTY-PERCENT reserve on missile control links, in addition to it's nominally rated double off-bore broadside. It was only intended to fire salvos of upto 80 missiles at a time, but it was designed to handle upto 128 missiles so when it took hits, the Sag-C could still handle salvos of 80 for longer periods of time, thereby increasing probabilities of it surviving and winning.

Though this might not be a totally fair point of reference when reasoning out how overbuilt the life-support might be on modern designs.

That's because a reserve on missile control links also boosts the warship's ability to handle large launches from towed pods (or stack more broadsides for an alpha strike) before resorting to rotating your control links. (Which is nice because rotating control links aren't as effective). So there's a direct combat advantage in overbuilding there.

Though it does seem plausible that combat experience would also encourage further increasing life support margins as well