Rolands actually have plenty of room for Marines

Theemile wrote:Perhaps we confusing the air shrubber with an air handler.

Commercial building systems are often built in factories and lifted into place with cranes and can mass hundreds to thousands of tons.

Relax wrote:

Theemile wrote:Perhaps we confusing the air shrubber with an air handler.

Commercial building systems are often built in factories and lifted into place with cranes and can mass hundreds to thousands of tons.

Yes, each compartment is going to have to have its own CO2 scrubber and separate air handler(seal) for battle damage reasons.

Erm: Missunderstanding. HVAC do not weigh hundreds or thousands of tons(building would collapse). They weigh maybe a ton or 2 if REALLY big, but they are RATED by how many TONS of refrigerant they move an hour, and therefore you can calculate how much HEAT is moved an hour based on Delta T. In this case, for a big building hundreds of tons whereas a home residence HVAC system will be rated at ~4t to maybe 10t for a REALLY BIG residence. The home residence HVAC will weigh ~100kg whereas the big boy will weigh 1t.

There is an exception: Often HVAC systems have giant ICE(literally ice) tanks where they chill water to ice at NIGHT to use during the day when power prices are CHEAPER. These separate tanks will be down in the basement and an insulated circulation loop run through them into the rest of the building. If solar panels get cheap enough, this might reverse. Buildings have chilled water run throughout the building to radiators and fans for individual rooms combined with a dehumidifier. AIR is not moved between rooms en mass by and large(are exceptions) for say a single floor, but not more due to FIRE chimney problems. Or special concrete structures to seal said HVAC duct is required. Or a combination of all of the above is often used. Especially in sealed buildings where CO2/O2 content has to be changed over. In this case often a central open structure is used with balconies etc.

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

Jonathan_S wrote:Though they did refocus on MDM warfighting at the expense of some of their other roles. They're still expected to carry those other roles as needed - but the designers accepted that they wouldn't be as good at manpower intensive roles as older designs.

For example a Roland simply couldn't do what the old CL Fearless did at Basilisk. She doesn't have the crew to leave some at the terminus for customs inspections, leave some more at the planet to assist the NPA and enforce traffic control regs in orbit, while still remaining combat effective. Where-as a modern (for 1900) DD like a Culverin-class could have. (Jayne's says the DD actually has a few more crew; but fewer of them are Marines)

So Roland's are better at raiding, fleet escort, commerce protection/convoy escort, and "Show the Flag" (at least those that don't require also having an impressive number of crew to show off) type roles than they are at prize taking, boarding actions, ground assault, customs inspection, emergency response.

All that pretty much comes down to small crew size (and its somewhat related lack of Marines)

OTOH even as something of a transitional design they currently punch way above their weight in combat; with more missile defense than a current SLN BC and are the smallest unit to carry MDMs. (Though despite the missile defenses they're still a lot more fragile than a heavy cruiser like a Sag-C; so any hits they take are going to hurt and are likely to knock out much more of their capability)

RFC also had this interesting tidbit in a 2011 post on their potential uses

runsforcelery wrote:Current Manticoran fleet exercises and tactical analysis suggest that even destroyer types as large and robust as the Roland-class may well largely disappear from battle fleet formations. They will continue to have utility as independently deployable hyper-capable units, but there are indications even there that the destroyer will be supplanted in that role by the cruiser and that the destroyer's screening functions will be taken over by LACs transported in company with heavier combatants aboard attached CLACs.

And there's some concern that once MDMs become widespread that even a Roland will be too small to be a survivable combatant and the minimum viable (hyper-capable) warship will be over 50% larger (around 300,000 tons)

That said, now that the RMN isn't involved in active combat ops I wouldn't be surprised to see them evolve a flight II or flight III Roland which isn't quite a ruthless with its crew reduction - it'd have the same combat abilities but now with the ability to assign larger crews when doing detached ops that might need the manpower. (That might be as simple as making a non-flagship variant; or it might be a slightly enlarged design with more crew and possibly more shuttles/pinnaces, etc.)

tlb wrote:For what it is worth, the Fan Wiki states that the Roland-class ships were the smallest that could carry the Mark 16 multiple drive missile and had magazine space to carry at least 200 of them. Has it been considered that the lack of marine space could have been designed in order to hold more of the larger missiles? Unlike the simple process of increasing magazine space to hold more and bigger missiles, adding more people has many additional impacts. Obviously they could have just made the ship bigger to solve the problem of adding marines, but there may have been wartime constraints that dictated the ship size.

tlb wrote:For what it is worth, the Fan Wiki states that the Roland-class ships were the smallest that could carry the Mark 16 multiple drive missile and had magazine space to carry at least 200 of them. Has it been considered that the lack of marine space could have been designed in order to hold more of the larger missiles? Unlike the simple process of increasing magazine space to hold more and bigger missiles, adding more people has many additional impacts. Obviously they could have just made the ship bigger to solve the problem of adding marines, but there may have been wartime constraints that dictated the ship size.

Theemile wrote:Worse - 240 Mk 16s, not to mention the fusion containment compartments in the missile feed tubes, and >1000 Mk32 counter missiles (Traditional DDs had 200-500). Yeah, the Roland is a dense ship with very little "extra" space.

My money is still on the Flag compartment, putting 8-12 marines there should be an easy lift (given the size of a Flag staff) and produce no more logistical burden on a ship than the flag would have.

Chapter 14 wrote:The Prince Consort-class ships like Prince Adrian were the product of a design philosophy which had been abandoned with the emergence of the later Star Knights. The Prince Consorts' original design was over sixty T-years old, dating back to the very first installment of the naval build-up Roger III had begun to counter the PRH's expansionism, and they hadn't been intended to function as flagships. Instead, in an effort to get as much firepower into space as quickly—and for as low a cost—as possible, BuShips' architects had chosen to omit a proper flag deck and all its support systems and used the freed mass to tuck an extra graser and an extra pair of missile launchers into each broadside. In fact, even their regular command decks had been built to unusually austere standards to help compensate for the increased armament and more magazine space. Instead of the extra, unused bridge volume BuShips normally allocated to new designs to provide room for the proliferation of control systems which always occurred, the Prince Consorts had been given just enough room for their original requirements. Which meant their bridges had become increasingly cramped as inevitable refits jammed in supplementary consoles and displays and panels anywhere a few cubic centimeters could be found for them.

The problem had been recognized at the time, but accepted as an unavoidable consequence of producing ships with maximum firepower for their cost and tonnage, and BuShips had projected a program which would have built the Prince Consorts in groups of seven and paired each group with a Crusader-class ship which did have a flag deck to make a full eight-ship squadron. Unfortunately, what had seemed like a good idea at the time had begun to look very different since the outbreak of the Navy's first serious shooting war in a hundred and twenty T-years.

The original Crusader building program had failed to allow for the unavoidable cycle of overhauls any warship required, with the result that at least twenty-five percent too few flagships had been allowed from the beginning, and Sir Edward Janacek's decision to cut funding for the Crusaders by over seventy percent during his first tenure as First Lord of the Admiralty had only made bad worse. But Janacek had viewed the Navy's proper role as anti-piracy patrols and defense of the Manticore Binary System itself. Anything more "aggressive" than that had clashed with his Conservative Party prejudice against "imperialist adventures" which were likely to "provoke" the People's Republic, and he'd regarded the deployment of cruiser squadrons to distant stations as the precursor to the gunboat diplomacy he rejected.

One way to hamstring such deployments was to cut down on the number of available flagships, which was precisely what he'd done, although he'd been careful to make the Crusaders' higher cost per unit his official reason. During his tenure, more than half the Navy's total cruisers had been tasked for solo operations chasing pirates on distant stations (for which no command ships were required), and most of the remainder had been concentrated in one spot and attached to Home Fleet, where only a limited number of flagships were needed. As a result, the implications of the shortage of Crusaders had gone largely unobserved at the time.

That, unfortunately, was no longer true. Janacek had been out of office for eleven T-years now, but the pernicious effects of his funding decisions lingered on. Numerically, the Crown Princes were the largest single class of heavy cruisers in the RMN's inventory, yet their lack of squadron command facilities severely limited their utility. The fact that the bigger, less numerous Star Knights' flag accommodations forced the Admiralty to keep tapping them for the detached command roles the Crown Princes couldn't fulfill properly also meant that the newer ships had suffered higher proportional losses. Prince Adrian and her sisters tended to stay tethered to task force and fleet formations, where someone else could provide the space for a commodore or admiral and her staff. That meant they were normally found in company with ships of the wall, whereas the Star Knights, exposed on frontier and convoy deployments without capital ship support, were much more likely to find themselves engaged with fast battlecruiser/cruiser-level raiding forces. And, of course, every Star Knight lost to enemy action or sent to the yard by battle damage reduced the supply of command ships by yet another unit.

There wasn't actually all that much to choose between the individual offensive power of the two classes, which—given the difference in their tonnages—only went to prove that even the Star Knights' design was less than perfect. Powerful as the Star Knights were, too little of their volume was allocated to offensive systems, in Honor's opinion, and too much was used on defense, probably as a reaction against the perceived shortcomings of their predecessors.

The newer class's more powerful sidewall generators, heavier armor, better electronic warfare capabilities, and more numerous point defense systems made them at least thirty percent tougher than the older Prince Consorts, and BuShips fully recognized the need for a better balance between offense and defense. Unfortunately, the need for cruiser flagships meant the yards were churning out Star Knights as quickly as they could—given the limited amounts of space which could be diverted from capital ship construction for any sort of cruiser—and that had significantly delayed introduction of the new Edward Saganami-class ships. The Saganamis, ten percent larger than the Star Knights and designed to take full advantage of the Navy's current battle experience and to incorporate the best balance of Grayson and Manticoran concepts, should have entered the construction pipeline over three T-years ago, but BuShips had decided it couldn't afford to divert building capacity to a new class (which, undoubtedly, would have its own share of production-oriented bugs to overcome) when the need for volume production was so acute. And so the Star Knights continued to be built to a basic design which was now eighteen years old. To be sure, their design had been on the cutting edge when it was finalized, and—like the Prince Consorts—they had been materially upgraded since, but even with as heavy a refit schedule as deployment pressures would permit, the class was losing its superiority over the Peeps.

tlb wrote:

tlb wrote:For what it is worth, the Fan Wiki states that the Roland-class ships were the smallest that could carry the Mark 16 multiple drive missile and had magazine space to carry at least 200 of them. Has it been considered that the lack of marine space could have been designed in order to hold more of the larger missiles? Unlike the simple process of increasing magazine space to hold more and bigger missiles, adding more people has many additional impacts. Obviously they could have just made the ship bigger to solve the problem of adding marines, but there may have been wartime constraints that dictated the ship size.

Theemile wrote:Worse - 240 Mk 16s, not to mention the fusion containment compartments in the missile feed tubes, and >1000 Mk32 counter missiles (Traditional DDs had 200-500). Yeah, the Roland is a dense ship with very little "extra" space.

My money is still on the Flag compartment, putting 8-12 marines there should be an easy lift (given the size of a Flag staff) and produce no more logistical burden on a ship than the flag would have.

The tension between having a flag command deck and not having one was discussed in the book In Enemy Hands:

Chapter 14 wrote:The Prince Consort-class ships like Prince Adrian were the product of a design philosophy which had been abandoned with the emergence of the later Star Knights. The Prince Consorts' original design was over sixty T-years old, dating back to the very first installment of the naval build-up Roger III had begun to counter the PRH's expansionism, and they hadn't been intended to function as flagships. Instead, in an effort to get as much firepower into space as quickly—and for as low a cost—as possible, BuShips' architects had chosen to omit a proper flag deck and all its support systems and used the freed mass to tuck an extra graser and an extra pair of missile launchers into each broadside. In fact, even their regular command decks had been built to unusually austere standards to help compensate for the increased armament and more magazine space. Instead of the extra, unused bridge volume BuShips normally allocated to new designs to provide room for the proliferation of control systems which always occurred, the Prince Consorts had been given just enough room for their original requirements. Which meant their bridges had become increasingly cramped as inevitable refits jammed in supplementary consoles and displays and panels anywhere a few cubic centimeters could be found for them.

The problem had been recognized at the time, but accepted as an unavoidable consequence of producing ships with maximum firepower for their cost and tonnage, and BuShips had projected a program which would have built the Prince Consorts in groups of seven and paired each group with a Crusader-class ship which did have a flag deck to make a full eight-ship squadron. Unfortunately, what had seemed like a good idea at the time had begun to look very different since the outbreak of the Navy's first serious shooting war in a hundred and twenty T-years.

The original Crusader building program had failed to allow for the unavoidable cycle of overhauls any warship required, with the result that at least twenty-five percent too few flagships had been allowed from the beginning, and Sir Edward Janacek's decision to cut funding for the Crusaders by over seventy percent during his first tenure as First Lord of the Admiralty had only made bad worse. But Janacek had viewed the Navy's proper role as anti-piracy patrols and defense of the Manticore Binary System itself. Anything more "aggressive" than that had clashed with his Conservative Party prejudice against "imperialist adventures" which were likely to "provoke" the People's Republic, and he'd regarded the deployment of cruiser squadrons to distant stations as the precursor to the gunboat diplomacy he rejected.

One way to hamstring such deployments was to cut down on the number of available flagships, which was precisely what he'd done, although he'd been careful to make the Crusaders' higher cost per unit his official reason. During his tenure, more than half the Navy's total cruisers had been tasked for solo operations chasing pirates on distant stations (for which no command ships were required), and most of the remainder had been concentrated in one spot and attached to Home Fleet, where only a limited number of flagships were needed. As a result, the implications of the shortage of Crusaders had gone largely unobserved at the time.

That, unfortunately, was no longer true. Janacek had been out of office for eleven T-years now, but the pernicious effects of his funding decisions lingered on. Numerically, the Crown Princes were the largest single class of heavy cruisers in the RMN's inventory, yet their lack of squadron command facilities severely limited their utility. The fact that the bigger, less numerous Star Knights' flag accommodations forced the Admiralty to keep tapping them for the detached command roles the Crown Princes couldn't fulfill properly also meant that the newer ships had suffered higher proportional losses. Prince Adrian and her sisters tended to stay tethered to task force and fleet formations, where someone else could provide the space for a commodore or admiral and her staff. That meant they were normally found in company with ships of the wall, whereas the Star Knights, exposed on frontier and convoy deployments without capital ship support, were much more likely to find themselves engaged with fast battlecruiser/cruiser-level raiding forces. And, of course, every Star Knight lost to enemy action or sent to the yard by battle damage reduced the supply of command ships by yet another unit.

There wasn't actually all that much to choose between the individual offensive power of the two classes, which—given the difference in their tonnages—only went to prove that even the Star Knights' design was less than perfect. Powerful as the Star Knights were, too little of their volume was allocated to offensive systems, in Honor's opinion, and too much was used on defense, probably as a reaction against the perceived shortcomings of their predecessors.

The newer class's more powerful sidewall generators, heavier armor, better electronic warfare capabilities, and more numerous point defense systems made them at least thirty percent tougher than the older Prince Consorts, and BuShips fully recognized the need for a better balance between offense and defense. Unfortunately, the need for cruiser flagships meant the yards were churning out Star Knights as quickly as they could—given the limited amounts of space which could be diverted from capital ship construction for any sort of cruiser—and that had significantly delayed introduction of the new Edward Saganami-class ships. The Saganamis, ten percent larger than the Star Knights and designed to take full advantage of the Navy's current battle experience and to incorporate the best balance of Grayson and Manticoran concepts, should have entered the construction pipeline over three T-years ago, but BuShips had decided it couldn't afford to divert building capacity to a new class (which, undoubtedly, would have its own share of production-oriented bugs to overcome) when the need for volume production was so acute. And so the Star Knights continued to be built to a basic design which was now eighteen years old. To be sure, their design had been on the cutting edge when it was finalized, and—like the Prince Consorts—they had been materially upgraded since, but even with as heavy a refit schedule as deployment pressures would permit, the class was losing its superiority over the Peeps.

So was the Roland designed as a replacement for the Star Knight?

tlb wrote:So was the Roland designed as a replacement for the Star Knight?

Theemile wrote:Personally, While I know a Roland can beat up a Star Knight and take it's lunch money before school every day of the week, I'd say no. In a Peer environment, It's designed to be the minimum survivable combatant. Unfortunately, the Star Knight represents the Tip of the Spear 3 technological levels back (early laser head combatant). Against a Peer, or gen removed Heavy Cruiser(Sag-B or -C analog), it would quickly run out of munitions for little to no damage to it's adversary, and would be unable to perform the heavier jobs a CA excels at due to it's smaller crew.

tlb wrote:

tlb wrote:So was the Roland designed as a replacement for the Star Knight?

Theemile wrote:Personally, While I know a Roland can beat up a Star Knight and take it's lunch money before school every day of the week, I'd say no. In a Peer environment, It's designed to be the minimum survivable combatant. Unfortunately, the Star Knight represents the Tip of the Spear 3 technological levels back (early laser head combatant). Against a Peer, or gen removed Heavy Cruiser(Sag-B or -C analog), it would quickly run out of munitions for little to no damage to it's adversary, and would be unable to perform the heavier jobs a CA excels at due to it's smaller crew.

I was thinking more as the minimum modern ship with a flag command deck.