Insanity: Screening elements in the HV

Jonathan_S wrote:There's a reason the WWII Liberty and Victory ships carried only the most minimal of defenses (usually just one obsolete 4" gun and a handful of whatever AA guns there was a surplus of at the time; with no fire control except local iron-sights). You could have made ships that were much more likely to survive a torpedo or bomb hit -- but they'd cost so much more in time, money, and materials that you couldn't build nearly enough of them to meet logistics demands (even if none were lost to enemy action)

penny wrote:Yeah, The Washington Treaty. The Washington Treaty won't prevent the RMN from utilizing BCs for this tactic. It will pay for itself in one battle.

The fleet will fall in love with this ship faster than our ground troops fell in love with the sound of the Warthog … and more recently our very own Ghostrider. The AC-130J Ghostrider that is.

What? No, the Washington Treaty (which was a dead issue by WW2) did not limit defensive weapons on cargo ships. Jonathan_S gave you the economic reasons for the limited arms. From Wikipedia:

It limited the construction of battleships, battlecruisers and aircraft carriers by the signatories. The numbers of other categories of warships, including cruisers, destroyers, and submarines, were not limited by the treaty, but those ships were limited to 10,000 tons displacement each.

The Air Force is replacing the Warthog with an armed crop duster and the Ghostrider is great when the ground troops do not have air defense. But yes, the friendly troops do love both planes.

penny wrote:You better watch out Jonathan. You seem to be juggling the books in ways the IRS won't like. I can see why Honor rolls her eyes at the Admiralty’s notion of cost. If it works, this is a game changing tactic. It isn't concerned with logistics. Although logistically, it will free up a lot of those screening elements for duty elsewhere. So ixnay on the notion of any kind of return on the enemy's investment. I am thinking about two or three of these assets in a single fleet for redundancy. As far as cost, get a hold of your accountant and fire him! In the long run what you will save is the time that is usually spent by any of your combatants in yard hands. No time with repair ships and no waste of the limited spares stored aboard. You will also save on spacers who will no longer be killed. And you will save the battle! This tactic will pay for itself in a single salvo.

And who says if one of these ships are destroyed the CM protection suffers? It will be the same because LACs can only manage to spit on a raging fire compared to the utility of these in the first salvo. This tactic can weather two … two… two alpha launches, at least, back to back. Wiping out every single missile. And there can not be any price placed on the lives saved.

IINM, it will also save on control links if these ships come with their own Keyhole. That means the wall can save on control links wasted on its CMs.

Jonathan _S wrote:Wait, now I'm confused.
I thought you were advocating for two different concepts:
1) Adding the ability for ammo ships to fire off missiles in self-defense
2) Building dedicated CM ships

Are you saying you want to use the ammo ships as the CM ships? That'd seems even worse because they'll be even more likely to be involved in combat -- not just if a raiding force intercepted the fleet's supply chain -- and they'll be busy closely following the fleet instead of shuttle back to get more missiles.


Also one of the reasons for concentrating the firepower into dedicated escorts is that an escort that's able to maintain a screening position can protect a lot of ships -- so you need less manpower and fewer weapons overall than if you made your freighters self-escorting. (Plus a nimble little destroyer or CL; or in WWII terms an escorting frigate/DE/sloop is more maneuverable and a harder target than a freighter). You might have 5-10 escorts protecting 40-100 freighters. And once you escort the convoy to a safe harbor the escorts can almost immediately turn around to protect the next convoy; whereas the self-escorting freighters have all their weapons and weapons crew twiddling their thumbs in port waiting to get unloaded. Moving the convoy defense to dedicated escorts probably cut down on the cost and number of weapons needed by a factor of 10 or more (especially in WWII when it might take a couple weeks to turn a convoy around due to how slow break bulk cargo loading/unloading was).
So spending a lot of money and diverting a bunch of weapons onto freighters to free up escorts is almost certainly a false economy.

Jonathan_S wrote:There's a reason the WWII Liberty and Victory ships carried only the most minimal of defenses

penny wrote:Yeah, The Washington Treaty. The Washington Treaty won't prevent the RMN from utilizing BCs for this tactic. It will pay for itself in one battle.

Jonathan_S wrote:Nope, by the time those ships were build the treaty was long dead.

If the US had wanted to mass produce freighters in fall 1939 or later with torpedo defenses, a dozen 5" dual purpose guns and a hundred 40mm AA guns, and armored decks the only thing stopping them was how much time and money it'd cost and finding the crew to man them all. Admittedly, before the treaties broke down with the outbreak of war the treaty forbad (other than deck stiffening) preparing merchant ships for conversion to vessels of war -- and defensive weapons might count towards that.

But they didn't because even the US shipbuilding industry couldn't mass produced the needed number of freighters if they'd added all that to them (though it would have made each built far more survivable)

Heck, none of the treaties prohibited nations from building up as many slower convoy escorts as they please. The US and UK could have started the war with hundreds of ships like the Flower-class sloops, Black Swan-class corvette, or River-class Frigate to protect their convoys (ships of under 2000 tons, designed for 20 knots or less, with no gun exceeding 6.1", and no torpedoes). But they didn't. The treaties limited the buildup (and size) of the heavier ships; but had no impact on war build ships and little to no impact on pre-war escort procurement.

Forgive my lack of clarity. I am no longer advocating for item #1. That was in the past before the author gave us the David Taylor class. That class is better than nothing and it gives me something to tell Alanis Morrisette.

I probably should not have mentioned the idea of a freighter without going into detail. The idea of a freighter is simply mentioned in passing. My logic is that the RMN can build a freighter and give it military nodes and compensation. I do not know if the notion is viable, but I am thinking that a militarized freighter might be able to keep up with the fleet whose accel is also limited by the pods the fleet is towing; at the beginning of engagements. Probably not a good idea. It was more off the cuff.

But item #2 is what I am advocating. I will accept it if the author says no CM ships. Like I said, I would understand such a decree utilized as plot armor to negate the fact that the evolution of weapons and tactics has overcome the need for a screen in certain circumstances.

Perhaps I misunderstood the entire Washington Treaty. I will attempt to find it and redigest it. The material also mentioned the handicap of building bigger ships and getting them to the area of conflict having to pass through canals. Anyway, my apology about the Treaty.

penny wrote:Perhaps I misunderstood the entire Washington Treaty. I will attempt to find it and redigest it. The material also mentioned the handicap of building bigger ships and getting them to the area of conflict having to pass through canals. Anyway, my apology about the Treaty.

Just keep in mind that the Washington Naval Treaty (1922) was superseded by the London Naval Treaty (1930) which in turn was partially superseded [because Japan & Italy refused to join it] by the Second London Naval Treaty (1936) -- but all of them were abrogated by the start of WWII in the fall of 1939.

There might be indirect effects from the treaty on ships ordered or completed after that date (just because designs had been largely locked in, or plans approved, with treaty compliance in mind), but as of the start of war in Europe nobody was bound by those treaties anymore.


Washington focused almost entirely on battleships/battlecruisers and carriers. It was the London treaties that added restrictions on smaller ships (cruisers, destroyers, small escorts), auxiliary ships, submarines, and armed merchantmen.

penny wrote:I probably should not have mentioned the idea of a freighter without going into detail. The idea of a freighter is simply mentioned in passing. My logic is that the RMN can build a freighter and give it military nodes and compensation. I do not know if the notion is viable, but I am thinking that a militarized freighter might be able to keep up with the fleet whose accel is also limited by the pods the fleet is towing; at the beginning of engagements. Probably not a good idea. It was more off the cuff.

Those freighters already exist and they do not limit the speed of the fleet. However while they may have PDLCs, I doubt that any can fire missiles (I am not even sure about a PDLC). You can find mention of them in the books on every side in the wars.

The reason Honor beat the first load of escapees from Hades to safety, is that her group had the faster transports.

tlb wrote:

penny wrote:I probably should not have mentioned the idea of a freighter without going into detail. The idea of a freighter is simply mentioned in passing. My logic is that the RMN can build a freighter and give it military nodes and compensation. I do not know if the notion is viable, but I am thinking that a militarized freighter might be able to keep up with the fleet whose accel is also limited by the pods the fleet is towing; at the beginning of engagements. Probably not a good idea. It was more off the cuff.

Those freighters already exist and they do not limit the speed of the fleet. However while they may have PDLCs, I doubt that any can fire missiles (I am not even sure about a PDLC). You can find mention of them in the books on every side in the wars.

The reason Honor beat the first load of escapees from Hades to safety, is that her group had the faster transports.

Ah the JNMTC freighters

In Enemy Hands wrote:Smaller ships in the four- to five-million-ton range couldn't carry as much cargo or as many personnel, but smaller size translated into a larger total number of hulls for the same cumulative tonnage, and that equated to more destinations which could be served simultaneously. In peacetime, operating costs would have doomed the proposal (after all, a four million-ton ship required the same crew and very nearly the same fuel and maintenance costs as an eight million-ton vessel), but faced with the war against the Peeps, military, rather than financial, efficiency had become the overriding priority.
The Joint Navy Military Transport Command, composed of midsized ships and normally assigned to the delivery of high-priority, time-critical cargoes (or delivery to potential combat hot spots), was the result. And as part of the same move to speed and streamline the transportation process, the ships designated for JNMTC use had been taken in hand by navy shipyards—Manticoran or Grayson, as available slips permitted—for overhaul. Time was too tight for their civilian grade inertial compensators and impellers to be altered, but they'd received light sidewalls and missile defense systems, upgraded sensors and rudimentary electronic warfare systems, and military hyper generators to permit them to reach as high as the eta bands. Since most merchantmen were designed to cruise no higher than the delta bands, their up-rated generators virtually doubled the sustained apparent velocity JNMTC ships could attain.

Those have only slightly better acceleration than the big 8-9 mton freighters -- none of them are keeping up with a combat formation. And the Eta bands are still a solid 15% slower than the Theta bands that those combat formation are likely to use -- so the JNMTC freighters can't keep up strategically either.

And their primary purpose is logistical flexibility; but yes they do have very limited defenses tacked on as a wartime expedient; which does make them a bit more survivable against a raider. But note that they do NOT mention any offensive armament or offensive fire control. So they can't shoot back; just try to defense themselves from very small numbers of missiles.


Though I'd bet on them having PDLCs before CMs. PDLCs, while you have to run a power line, appear to require little to no hull penetration other than for power and data. CMs you'd need a launch tube (which is going to be a much larger installation and one that has to be within the hull) plus some kind of magazine. And if they did go with CMs I'd suspect that, to minimize the impact on cargo capacity and make for a quicker conversion, that they'd just have a small local magazine, with a handful of rounds, at each launcher. Maybe, at most, a slightly larger magazine, still right out by the hull, feeding a few closely clustered CM tubes.

Doing it that way means you don't need to make space for a central magazine, and more importantly don't need to find space for, and then install, missile transfer tubes all throughout the ship between the magazine and each launcher. The tradeoff thought would be the low number of CMs and the inability to transfer them between tubes (say if one set runs out while the tubes on the other side of the ship haven't been used yet)

In WW II the US did put out some AA cruisers, specifically optimized with dual 5" guns and at least 40mm quad mounts where they could be fitted not to interfere with the 5" batteries. I believe those were intended to thicken the AA defense of the carriers. There was the ability of those cruisers to be used for shore bombardment and they could be used for surface engagements in the range of what the contemporary US DDs and Des with 5' guns would be useful in.

I don't recall if they were equipped with torpedo tubes (those would be in sets of tubes- 2 or 4 per mount etc mounted on port and starboard. That's pure anti-ship weapon.

At the point we are at now with the SEM and TEIF, it's the modern LACS optimized for CM defense that will providing the extra volume of fire for anti-missile work. Combination of maneuverability, amount of CMs they can carry and they are a difficult target for your opponent to target at long range and "usually" are not going to draw a ship-killer out of it's volley when the LAC is close enough to the incoming weapons targeted at the hyper capable starships.

The RMN does have "militarized freighters",other than the David Taylors They have military grade particle shields, compensators, nodes and other equipment with redundancies like warships in power plants etc.. What they don't have is a bunch of weapons. They are designed to keep up with the warships and be able to provide logistic support to either warships or to bases etc.

What you are talking about the the liberty ships was mass produced- and relatively slow, in the 11 knot range- freighters using essentially civilian pre-war commercial designed engines. Designed for volume of cargo crossing oceans. A lot of the ships the navy used for cargo -pre war- were in the 8 knot range, economical on a par with commercial shipping.

penny wrote:I probably should not have mentioned the idea of a freighter without going into detail. The idea of a freighter is simply mentioned in passing. My logic is that the RMN can build a freighter and give it military nodes and compensation. I do not know if the notion is viable, but I am thinking that a militarized freighter might be able to keep up with the fleet whose accel is also limited by the pods the fleet is towing; at the beginning of engagements. Probably not a good idea. It was more off the cuff.

tlb wrote:Those freighters already exist and they do not limit the speed of the fleet. However while they may have PDLCs, I doubt that any can fire missiles (I am not even sure about a PDLC). You can find mention of them in the books on every side in the wars.

The reason Honor beat the first load of escapees from Hades to safety, is that her group had the faster transports.

Jonathan_S wrote:Ah the JNMTC freighters

In Enemy Hands wrote:Smaller ships in the four- to five-million-ton range couldn't carry as much cargo or as many personnel, but smaller size translated into a larger total number of hulls for the same cumulative tonnage, and that equated to more destinations which could be served simultaneously. In peacetime, operating costs would have doomed the proposal (after all, a four million-ton ship required the same crew and very nearly the same fuel and maintenance costs as an eight million-ton vessel), but faced with the war against the Peeps, military, rather than financial, efficiency had become the overriding priority.
The Joint Navy Military Transport Command, composed of midsized ships and normally assigned to the delivery of high-priority, time-critical cargoes (or delivery to potential combat hot spots), was the result. And as part of the same move to speed and streamline the transportation process, the ships designated for JNMTC use had been taken in hand by navy shipyards—Manticoran or Grayson, as available slips permitted—for overhaul. Time was too tight for their civilian grade inertial compensators and impellers to be altered, but they'd received light sidewalls and missile defense systems, upgraded sensors and rudimentary electronic warfare systems, and military hyper generators to permit them to reach as high as the eta bands. Since most merchantmen were designed to cruise no higher than the delta bands, their up-rated generators virtually doubled the sustained apparent velocity JNMTC ships could attain.

Those have only slightly better acceleration than the big 8-9 mton freighters -- none of them are keeping up with a combat formation. And the Eta bands are still a solid 15% slower than the Theta bands that those combat formation are likely to use -- so the JNMTC freighters can't keep up strategically either.

And their primary purpose is logistical flexibility; but yes they do have very limited defenses tacked on as a wartime expedient; which does make them a bit more survivable against a raider. But note that they do NOT mention any offensive armament or offensive fire control. So they can't shoot back; just try to defense themselves from very small numbers of missiles.


Though I'd bet on them having PDLCs before CMs. PDLCs, while you have to run a power line, appear to require little to no hull penetration other than for power and data. CMs you'd need a launch tube (which is going to be a much larger installation and one that has to be within the hull) plus some kind of magazine. And if they did go with CMs I'd suspect that, to minimize the impact on cargo capacity and make for a quicker conversion, that they'd just have a small local magazine, with a handful of rounds, at each launcher. Maybe, at most, a slightly larger magazine, still right out by the hull, feeding a few closely clustered CM tubes.

Doing it that way means you don't need to make space for a central magazine, and more importantly don't need to find space for, and then install, missile transfer tubes all throughout the ship between the magazine and each launcher. The tradeoff thought would be the low number of CMs and the inability to transfer them between tubes (say if one set runs out while the tubes on the other side of the ship haven't been used yet)

Oops, I expected with all those changes they would have the military compensators and impellers.

But what about the ammunition ships (which was what I was thinking about) and so on that all navies have, are they stuck with civilian impellers and compensators also? Because that really would slow a fleet down.

PS: I could not find what the fast transports that Honor took out of Hades had in this regard.

Brigade XO wrote:In WW II the US did put out some AA cruisers, specifically optimized with dual 5" guns and at least 40mm quad mounts where they could be fitted not to interfere with the 5" batteries. I believe those were intended to thicken the AA defense of the carriers. There was the ability of those cruisers to be used for shore bombardment and they could be used for surface engagements in the range of what the contemporary US DDs and Des with 5' guns would be useful in.

As WW2 went on, almost every ship had their AA capacity increased.

Brigade XO wrote:In WW II the US did put out some AA cruisers, specifically optimized with dual 5" guns and at least 40mm quad mounts where they could be fitted not to interfere with the 5" batteries. I believe those were intended to thicken the AA defense of the carriers. There was the ability of those cruisers to be used for shore bombardment and they could be used for surface engagements in the range of what the contemporary US DDs and Des with 5' guns would be useful in.

I don't recall if they were equipped with torpedo tubes (those would be in sets of tubes- 2 or 4 per mount etc mounted on port and starboard. That's pure anti-ship weapon.

The Atlanta class.

Though while often used as AA escorts for carriers they were originally designed to act as flotilla leaders for USN destroyers. A small light cruiser having space for the flag officer and staff of a destroyer squadron. As such they were equipped with the same 5" dual purpose guns as the destroyers (just more of them, befitting their larger size) and, unlike every other USN cruiser, did carry torpedoes -- as they were expected to lead destroyers into torpedo attacks.

(If they'd been designed primarily as AA ships they'd have probably carried more 5" fire directors so they could split their 16 5" guns across more than just 2 targets - even giving up a turret or two for an extra fire director or two would probably have improved their heavy AA effectiveness - and ditched the torpedoes. But they were designed to do all the roles that a multi-purpose destroyer could do including torpedo attack, surface gunnery, anti-air, and anti-submarine work with their sonar and depth charges; while being large enough to serve as a flagship for the destroyer squadron)

USN doctrine from the interwar period had settled on using heavy cruisers and even their full size light cruisers as pure gun fighters; and had removed any existing torpedo launchers to reduce the risk that the weapons posed to the ship that carried them. The USN decided that only destroyers were quick (and expendable) enough to mount those weapons. (Though during the war PT boats and some destroyer escorts' also carried torpedoes)

Ironically, for ships that did end up used primarily as AA escorts, the only two Atlanta-class that were lost were lost from a surface action; one of the night battles off Guadalcanal.

Uh guys, did you not read to End in Fire?

DW essentially said(mea culpa), everything he wrote about CM missile pods(the brain dead obvious counter to alpha pod strike especially after self tractored pods were available), No CM only drone LAC's, 2 stage CM drives, etc was bunk.

In other words, since the series is effectively ~over(maybe 1 or 2 more books), all the arbitrary tech restrictions for plot reasons he has talked about for 20 years, have been removed.

PS: Destroyers in WWII made VERY poor AA platforms. Mark 1 eyeball AA directors tied to hands trying to spin wheels or push powered peddles to rotate etc--> Stink. They shot a lot of ammo, did not achieve much other than asking the Japanese pilots if they feared death.