Rolands actually have plenty of room for Marines

Relax wrote: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.

I was about to question the slower, since the Viper is higher accel but shorter (powered) range so over it's range it'd get there sooner. But, after a second thought, I thought you might mean firing the warning at around the normal SDM range (7 million-ish km) so the Viper would have to coast a good long way; which seems like it'd let an SDM cover that range faster.
And for a warning shot it wouldn't mater much that your chance of a hit is basically zero because they can maneuver away - you're just letting them know you're serious and are willing to fire.

Then I quickly crunched some numbers and realized that over any range a Viper will get there quicker than an RMN SDM because the Viper has a terminal velocity of .32c while the SDM only has a terminal velocity of .27c. (75s @ 130,000g vs 180s @ 46,000g)*

You'd actually need most of the extra runtime of an ERM to match a Viper's terminal velocity; the slower ERM would finally match velocity 212 seconds into its 225 second run (but at that point it's still over 6 million km behind the ballistic Viper - it won't actually catch up for over 18 minutes; at which point they're both over 109 million km downrange. Sorry, got carried away with the number crunching)



But then I rethought and saw another possibility, that you'd meant it'd be a touch slower because the ship would spend extra time closing the range so it could fire it's warning shot from within the Viper's powered envelope. And that certainly would be a somewhat slower process.


---
* Now the SDM still has a longer effective engagement range, despite getting there slower, since it can still maneuver out to about 7.3 million km while the Viper goes ballistic after 3.5. And it's easy to dodge away from ballistic weapons. And that's extra true if comparing a Viper to an ERM

Actually, I thought at normal SDM ranges Viper would arrive slower as I did "math" in my head and thought the SDM was slightly faster. Guess I got that backwards and yes I was also thinking that if you wish to have maneuvering time you also have to get closer, and therefore "slower". But I was mainly thinking that in terms of boarding pirates or freighters, a single missile fired regardless if it has maneuver time or not should be MORE than enough to get the MOST recalcitrant captain to heave too.

Also regarding CO2 scrubbers on a ROLAND... it should in reality have greater CO2 scrubbing capability than the old CL Fearless with FAR higher total crew. Why?

Because of battle damage, open passages, and compartmentalization. Due to compartmentalization and battle damage you by necessity/doctrine must be able to have a holed ship and still survive. So total number of units of a bigger ship by necessity will be greater compared to a small ship via total number of compartments. You still need maintenance etc and if one section gets obliterated you must move remaining crew to a different section. Due to compartmentalization a ROLAND with its greater volume will have greater numbers of compartments and therefore more units will be required to scrub CO2 in said compartments and these are stand alone units as one does not have giant ducts running through your ship which have to be SEALED after taking damage.

Combine the above with fact that all small Cruiser class ships and probably their civilian counterparts will be using ~identical, STANDARIZED, off the shelf units that EVERYONE knows how to use and maintain. Size for CO2 scrubbers should be standard where only real difference is the NUMBER present for cost reduction and reliability as here redundancy and reliability is no different for a warship than for a civilian freighter other than TOTAL amount of redundancy.

Jonathan_S wrote:

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

Combat experience directly led to Manticore, Haven and even the Andies into reducing their compensator reserves. Haven mostly only did it because they had to just to stay within shouting distance of RMN units still using 80%, but the RMN also eventually did it because 20% reserve had been proven to be too conservative.

Experience also led to the increased automation, and smaller gun-crews. IIRC, during Honor's snotty cruise, wasn't the gun-crews of the grasers around 4 or 5 people? I seem to recall that from the scene where she was listening to a Chief, reached up to pet Nimitiz and Santino 'just happened' to show up and start chewing her out.

But the more modern post-1900 designs, at least of Manticoran ships, seem to have reduced their gun crews to just one or two. Not only due to increased automation in general, but there seemed to be an increase in the automation quality. This was seemingly shown in things like the first and second-generation Shrike LACs. They relied heavily on automation to start, but then they seemed to go even heavier and shifted from having an officer for communications to using a Central AI to place calls. Hexapuma's marines on Kornati also placed their intra-unit calls through a Central AI, rather than having a marine do it.


When you're a mostly peacetime, or commerce protection fleet, you won't need to build nearly as much redundancy into anything because you don't need it regularly. This is the same trap the Sollies fell into, nobody ever challenged their fleets so they became complacent and their designs were both very conservative in technology changes, and they were stayed extremely manpower heavy. When some (most?) of their Reserve Battle Fleet SD's still relied on projectile point-defense, so they likely needed huge crews just to keep the guns fed, similar to how WWII-era submarines needed crew to do things that nowadays is more automated. Even Frontier Fleet ships were larger crews with lower amounts of automation than other navies, and they regularly saw use that should have gotten them refits and upgrades, except for bureaucratic infighting.


So it's really hard to figure just how much redundancy was built into ships, especially when it's in glossed over areas. If you build greater redundancy into 2 or 3 areas (missile control links, compensator reliability, overall automation), you're likely but not guaranteed to also build more redundancy into other areas (life support, and emergency expediencies). Especially when the overall ship tonnage has been creeping up due to the very same weapons, you have lots of other space to utilize.


Double-checking the IEH scene though, things are getting even more complicated.

In Enemy Hands, Ch12 wrote: One of the cruiser's air scrubbers had failed, reducing her life-support capacity by ten percent, and although McKeon's ship had enough spares to rebuild the scrubber from scratch, if necessary, the job would take over a week without yard support.
-snip-
Prince Adrian carried sufficient spare parts to repair the scrubber, but the newer, bigger Alvarez turned out to have three complete backup scrubbers tucked away in her capacious Engineering spaces. Exactly where Alvarez's chief engineer had acquired the third one (which put her above establishment) was something of a mystery.
-snip-
Alvarez's higher-volume scrubbers weren't exact matches for Prince Adrian's, but they were close enough that one of them could be adapted to replace the failed unit.
-snip-
the scrubber was big enough (and awkwardly enough shaped) that he'd been forced to close off the after two-thirds of the pinnace's modular interior to free up the cargo space to accommodate it.

The Adrian was a Prince Consort 246 k-ton cruiser, while Alvarez was a Grayson variant of the Star Knights that officially replaced the Consorts, at 319 k-tons. It seems the official Engineering rule was was to have two scrubbers for backups. One scrubber being worth 10% would suggest they have 10 functioning at any given time, with parts or entire prebuilt backups for 2 of the 10.

But that seems like a lot of air scrubbers, when we saw that HMACS Wayfarer only had one scrubber after her final battle, and that gave them air for upto 400 crew. The entire complement of a Prince Consort is 856 crew, so 10 scrubbers should be good for 4000 crew, which would be almost a 300% reserve. That's an insane amount of life support reserve, when we were looking at even newer crew-heavy Havenite ships having trouble carrying 200% of nominal evacuees.

Looking from a purely size/tonnage perspective is even worse. Pinnaces being 30m long and probably 7-10m wide/high, gives us the volume of the Star Knight scrubbers as being somewhere around 980 cubic meters. Assume it's roughly rectangular and measuring 207x7m, and that if it were solid steel, it would weigh just shy of 8000 tons. Since it can't possibly be solid steel, and they have futuristic metals that are low-weight, let's quarter that. That now works out to ~2000 tons per air scrubber, and the Consorts might have as many as 10, which means they're could be using approximately 20 k-tons, out of their total 246 just for life support?

Almost 10% of their entire tonnage devoted just to life support, I'm torn between saying that's simultaneously both massive overkill and not nearly enough. They also need to fit in lots of missiles, their engineering parts for making repairs, plus foodstuffs, their Marines powered armor Morgue, a gunnery range, two hangar bays each with 2-3 pinnaces, and a significant Hydrogen bunker for fuel.

The math doesn't really feel like it's mathing here. Something just doesn't feel right about these numbers, either the weight is hilariously low for the size it occupies, or they are so insanely efficient you don't actually need many scrubbers if you have other systems available.

Somtaaw wrote:

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.

Culverins actually have a massive crew for a DD - 395 men, the largest crew in an RMN DD that we have crew sizes for (traditionally 292-395). The PRN DDs actually have larger crews; the 2 we have stats on are 417 (Bastogne) and 435 (Desforge). IAN and SCN DDs seem to have smaller crews, with the 2 we have specs on being around 315 men (IAN Dolch - 317, SNC Joachim Cheslav - 314).

Somtaaw wrote:Looking from a purely size/tonnage perspective is even worse. Pinnaces being 30m long and probably 7-10m wide/high, gives us the volume of the Star Knight scrubbers as being somewhere around 980 cubic meters. Assume it's roughly rectangular and measuring 207x7m, and that if it were solid steel, it would weigh just shy of 8000 tons. Since it can't possibly be solid steel, and they have futuristic metals that are low-weight, let's quarter that. That now works out to ~2000 tons per air scrubber, and the Consorts might have as many as 10, which means they're could be using approximately 20 k-tons, out of their total 246 just for life support?

Almost 10% of their entire tonnage devoted just to life support, I'm torn between saying that's simultaneously both massive overkill and not nearly enough. They also need to fit in lots of missiles, their engineering parts for making repairs, plus foodstuffs, their Marines powered armor Morgue, a gunnery range, two hangar bays each with 2-3 pinnaces, and a significant Hydrogen bunker for fuel.

The math doesn't really feel like it's mathing here. Something just doesn't feel right about these numbers, either the weight is hilariously low for the size it occupies, or they are so insanely efficient you don't actually need many scrubbers if you have other systems available.

Thinking on it, I forgot to account pinnaces may be 7-10m wide at the wings but not the core hull. And that in Flag in Exile, when Honor's pinnace was shot down, she was sitting near the front and didn't get killed when the first 10m was shorn off. So the cargo section of a pinnace isn't 20m.

So recalculating assuming a rectangular shape measuring 10x5x5 meters, gives us a 250 cubic meter scrubber. If it were solid steel, it would be 2000 tons. So a quarter of that, the air scrubber would be approximately 0.5 tons per scrubber or 500,000 kilograms each.

That works out to 5 tons if we still figure 10 scrubbers on the Adrian, which would be around less than 1% of her total mass is now spent on life support. So definitely a hilariously low tonnage devoted to such an important thing (no air = no more people).

But how many people are supported by each scrubber? Because 10 scrubbers could still be able to support 4000 crew, which is a 300% reserve of a Consort's normally assigned crew. And that's much higher than the considerably newer, and even more manpower heavy Havenite designs like the Mars-class cruisers and Warlord battlecruisers could support, despite them having even more tonnage to devote to the same 10 scrubbers.


And 5 tons for 10 scrubbers on a Roland just becomes ridiculous. With a reserve of possibly 4000 'passengers' when they only carry 62 normally? That's a huge reserve that is simply stupendous, so they can't possibly have 10 scrubbers, or they do have 10 scrubbers but they can't support 400 crew each.

Somtaaw wrote:The Adrian was a Prince Consort 246 k-ton cruiser, while Alvarez was a Grayson variant of the Star Knights that officially replaced the Consorts, at 319 k-tons. It seems the official Engineering rule was was to have two scrubbers for backups. One scrubber being worth 10% would suggest they have 10 functioning at any given time, with parts or entire prebuilt backups for 2 of the 10.

But that seems like a lot of air scrubbers, when we saw that HMACS Wayfarer only had one scrubber after her final battle, and that gave them air for upto 400 crew. The entire complement of a Prince Consort is 856 crew, so 10 scrubbers should be good for 4000 crew, which would be almost a 300% reserve. That's an insane amount of life support reserve, when we were looking at even newer crew-heavy Havenite ships having trouble carrying 200% of nominal evacuees.

Though it's not clear that Wayfarer's life support was completely rebuilt from civilian specs. From scratch military designs might prefer to split their life support into more numerous smaller plants scattered around the ship so no single unlucky hit can knock out a large percentage of your life support. Accepting that you'll be less efficient and also need watch standers in all those dispersed life support rooms instead of just one or two concentrated larger life support facilities.

Wayfarer, in her original merchant guise, would likely have optimized the other way concentrating all her life support into one (or maybe two) centralized spots for efficiency. Now for multiple reasons the RMN would have needed to supplement that when making her an armed merchant cruiser (if nothing else she carried much more crew now) but they may still have opted to r stick closer to merchant-style planes with fewer larger ones rather than ripping it all out and putting a full warship grade many small distributed plants in. So her single remaining scrubber might be far larger and higher-capacity than the scrubbers on those heavy cruisers. (So just because one of her scrubbers could support 400 crew doesn't mean one of Prince Adrian's could have -- so they might not have as much excess life support as calculated)

Somtaaw wrote:Looking from a purely size/tonnage perspective is even worse. Pinnaces being 30m long and probably 7-10m wide/high, gives us the volume of the Star Knight scrubbers as being somewhere around 980 cubic meters. Assume it's roughly rectangular and measuring 207x7m, and that if it were solid steel, it would weigh just shy of 8000 tons. Since it can't possibly be solid steel, and they have futuristic metals that are low-weight, let's quarter that. That now works out to ~2000 tons per air scrubber, and the Consorts might have as many as 10, which means they're could be using approximately 20 k-tons, out of their total 246 just for life support?

Almost 10% of their entire tonnage devoted just to life support, I'm torn between saying that's simultaneously both massive overkill and not nearly enough. They also need to fit in lots of missiles, their engineering parts for making repairs, plus foodstuffs, their Marines powered armor Morgue, a gunnery range, two hangar bays each with 2-3 pinnaces, and a significant Hydrogen bunker for fuel.

The math doesn't really feel like it's mathing here. Something just doesn't feel right about these numbers, either the weight is hilariously low for the size it occupies, or they are so insanely efficient you don't actually need many scrubbers if you have other systems available.

Even a quarter the weight of solid steel seems crazy high for something that's got to have lots of volume for moving air through it. Though who knows what actually in them if (as the book says) it'd take a week to rebuild one from spare parts -- that's way more than just some algae tanks to consume CO2). Still, I'd bet on them being more bulky than heavy.

Also, Jaynes has a scale rendering of a Mk28 pinnace on a 2x2 meter grid and it shows that the main hull is about a 6 meter diameter tube -- so a bit below your low end estimate. (Annoyingly while it says it has a "cargo deck holding eight standard equipment pallets", it neglects to tell us the size of those pallets. Though they must be pretty big as it mentions in casualty evacuation configuration 6 pallets of stretcher bays normally holds 54 stretchers while the remaining space is a "a two-pallet emergency field hospital". But it'd be more convenient to just know the cargo dimensions rather than having to guess how much of the interior is consume by bulkhead thickness and equipment. Though I assumed, despite having a ventral hatch under part of the cargo bay, that there's a fair bit of underfloor and overhead equipment so you don't get the full height usable)

Somtaaw wrote:Thinking on it, I forgot to account pinnaces may be 7-10m wide at the wings but not the core hull. And that in Flag in Exile, when Honor's pinnace was shot down, she was sitting near the front and didn't get killed when the first 10m was shorn off. So the cargo section of a pinnace isn't 20m.

Now you've undershot the wing width (not that it matters for this)
Again looking at the to scale rendering of the Mk28 Condor pinnace, they're about 12 meters wide at the engines (which is also approximately the pivot point of their variable geometry wings) and the specs list:
Wingspan (full extension): 36.3 m
Wingspan (folded): 21.25 m

Jonathan_S wrote:

Somtaaw wrote:Thinking on it, I forgot to account pinnaces may be 7-10m wide at the wings but not the core hull. And that in Flag in Exile, when Honor's pinnace was shot down, she was sitting near the front and didn't get killed when the first 10m was shorn off. So the cargo section of a pinnace isn't 20m.

Now you've undershot the wing width (not that it matters for this)
Again looking at the to scale rendering of the Mk28 Condor pinnace, they're about 12 meters wide at the engines (which is also approximately the pivot point of their variable geometry wings) and the specs list:
Wingspan (full extension): 36.3 m
Wingspan (folded): 21.25 m

Just a note to anyone interested, DrivethruRPG.com has both Jayne's Intelligence books and the SITS shipbooks and settings books Jonathan and I have been getting our #s from. If you want to get .pdfs of those books, they are still available there.

Jonathan_S wrote:

Somtaaw wrote:Thinking on it, I forgot to account pinnaces may be 7-10m wide at the wings but not the core hull. And that in Flag in Exile, when Honor's pinnace was shot down, she was sitting near the front and didn't get killed when the first 10m was shorn off. So the cargo section of a pinnace isn't 20m.

Now you've undershot the wing width (not that it matters for this)
Again looking at the to scale rendering of the Mk28 Condor pinnace, they're about 12 meters wide at the engines (which is also approximately the pivot point of their variable geometry wings) and the specs list:
Wingspan (full extension): 36.3 m
Wingspan (folded): 21.25 m

I had to try and roughly judge off the only resource I knew about and had to hand, the former wiki (now fandom). Took the known length of 30m and change, looked at the Condor and tried to ballpark what sounded logical based on length vs width. And wing width mattered little when I wanted the core cylindrical hull.

So somewhere around 6m width of the actual hull, sounds like the Star Knight style scrubbers were somewhere between the two sizes I calculated for as I used lowest end estimate for both.

I would normally agree an air scrubber should have more open space, and not be 1/4 of the weight of solid metal. But since they also rely so heavily on solid-state molecular circuitry, it's possible they found better ways of making an air filter that's more solid and dense, some form of self-cleaning perhaps? The RMN in particular isn't a big fan of pull out and plug-in replacements in their electronics. If they'd rather just repair circuitry in place, instead of pulling a bad unit and plugging a replacement in, they may also be more interested in scrubbers that clean filters without replacement.

Sounds logical, but that's the problem with logic, is sometimes it's just making wrong conclusions with style.

It’s possible there might be another thread that goes i to details, like how a squadron CO would have a large cabin with a dining room. It seems possible that you might be able to fit a few beds in there.

You might also find something to do with the room that has the flag bridge.

Recently I stumbled across the squadron command staff for a prepositioned squadron in the modern US navy. The embarked commodore has a staff of an 04, two 03s, an LT and about 12 enlisted. All of whom need to sleep somewhere.

Etc.

It’s a silly plot device.