Commerce raiding

Sigs wrote:Well before commencement of hostilities the RHN should have concentrated, having 240 BB's in a few major bases means they have a chance to work as divisions, squadrons and task forces. The fact that they were spread around the republic meant that before an offensive they would have to be recalled and concentrated which gives the RMN a chance to get wind of BB's being withdrawn.

The RHN doesn't need to worry about a surprise attack from the SKM and they can press their own people with 60 BB's support by CL's and DD's. The 120 wallers they used in the opening phase of the war supported by 240 BB's and a decent screen would have absolutely crushed the alliance and forces the SKM to abandon the alliance and retreat to the home system.

I agree, they should have done that. But they didn't.

I can think of two likely reasons why they didn't and both may be true. First, they didn't think it was necessary. They thought the DNs and SDs would be sufficient and, given deployment needs, they'd be more suitable for the war effort than battleships, while DNs for rear-area defence would be overkill. We know the PN leadership massively underestimated the technological gap (and fumbled the operations anyway), so it stands to reason that a great deal of their their planning is questionable too.

Second, those BBs weren't available in such great numbers. As others have pointed out, even the rear-area BBs could get suddenly called into service for internal policing reasons. Withdrawing them from those systems in great quantities and for a great length of time would mean the PRH would quickly lose those systems as members of the Republic. That was clearly politically bad and might not have been acceptable to the Legislaturalists or the CPS, meaning the military decisions may have been made for political reasons. But it's also possible many of those systems were still the economically productive ones that the Republic needed to fund the war in the first place, so losing them would not be just politically disastrous.

After the initial phases of the war, the PN is was in complete disarray, so even if the ships had become available for some reason, they didn't have the strategists and planners to make this happen. It's also possible (I'm speculating here) that the crews of the BBs were even more Legislaturalists than the front-line units, because their admiralty would not have wanted to hand policing of restless, conquered systems to crews recruited from other restless, conquered systems. That would mean their crews were even more gutted by the purges than the front-line ones and would thus be even less combat-effective.

So they didn't have those ships available, therefore your ideas, whether workable or not, are irrelevant.

Relax wrote:Additional considerations:

IF the BB's were designed specifically to attack ONLY star systems close to the PRH in the early 1800's and used as such. For all we know they have VERY short legs. Lets not forget ~100 years ago Haven was a single system polity with near ~zero navy who at the time was ONLY interested in conquering their kitty corner neighbors at most.

That's not likely correct. It isn't stated anywhere how large the Republic was in the 1820s up to the 1840s, but my impression is that they were multiple systems already. We do know that they had founded daughter colonies (some of which were the first conquests or had voted to join the Republic) so it's entirely possible that many of those colonies were never independent. They were also the shiniest system in the neighbourhood for the 1600s and 1700s, so some systems may have requested annexation on fully above-board plebiscites.

They were also known to have big navies all the way back to the 1530s, when they hosted the Secour Conference and sold a cruiser to Casca. They had the best ships available this side of the SL and had full yards capable of building warships. The SLN and the IAN were the only navies known to have battleships at the time (and even the IAN ones were doubted); the RHN did have battlecruisers though, including the RHNS Saintonge.

The DuQuesne Plan was already in full swing in the 1820s, so the PN would have begun building up. The design of a battleship at this time and built in such large numbers speaks to that.

Why would their doctrine change? Bureaucrats do not change their spots nor leave. Now add Prolong and bureaucrats(admirals on down) now entrench for LONG lives.

Indeed. Why change what worked?

Relax wrote:It wasn't until the decapitation of the entire Legislaturists several years into the war that new ideas were surfacing(1910ish). The entrenched power structures were decapitated(literally) allowing new ideas to flourish and no ones "precious" iron rice bowl was "threatened"

Timeline correction. The war isn't generally considered to have started until the first wave of attacks on Hancock, Grayson, etc. in March 1905. The Pierre coup overthrows the Legislaturalists and begins the reign of terror in May -- so that wouldn't have been long after news of the initial failures made its way back to Haven.

So the decapitation was months into the war, not years. But still, new ideas did take much longer that that to flourish; as in the chaos of the coup and the following purges mostly had the survivors keeping their heads down; rather than rethinking naval strategy.

Sigs wrote:Ok they were picketed by BC's... they still cannot stand up to BB's.

Actually, can't they?

How would an 1823-designed BB build in the 1830s and 1840s going to stand up to a Reliant-class BC from 1897? Depending on how recently they were updated or which Flight they were from, they may have very slow missile launchers. I wouldn't be surprised if they fired only once per minute, whereas a Reliant can probably sustain a 12 to 15-second cycle.

So even though the 700k-tonne BC has fewer missile tubes than a 4.5-million-tonne BB, the BC may be able to fire more missiles per minute than the BB. In the long run, the BB has deeper magazines so they can fire more, but they have to survive to do so.

Then let's consider the quality of the missiles. An RMN BC would be firing their best, state-of-the-art shipkiller. At this stage, BC missiles aren't designed to take on wallers, but they are very good at what they do. What kind of missiles do 80-year-old design BBs fire? In fact, were they even updated to have the same launchers as their bigger cousins, the DNs and SDs?

A passage above quoted from Jaynes says PN ships have stronger armour and comparatively weaker sidewalls to RMN units. A PN BB would have much stronger armour than any BC, but it might actually have sidewalls as strong as the RMN BC, so the missiles may be able to get through them.

Finally, consider the laserhead: those didn't exist in the 1820s yet. House of Steel describes how they'd begun researching it in the 1840s and 1850s. That means the battleship design was pre-laserhead, with defences aimed at stopping contact nukes, rather than a 50,000-km standoff warhead. Were those ships updated to deal with laserheads? And how good was that update, because we know the PRH educational system wasn't good and that everyone underestimated how good laserheads were prior to the outset of the war.

On top of all of that, the BCs picketing a system would be controlling missile pods. So I am not convinced a 1:1 BB vs BC is a favourable outcome - the BB probably still has greater odds of winning than losing, but it might be close enough that it's a risky proposition and could easily lead to mission-kill. A 1:1 with a BC firing an Alpha launch from pods is not in the BB's favour, despite the BC not having enough control links. Even if it survives, the BC has higher acceleration and can engage and disengage at its own will. That means at this time, raids using battleships would need to have numerical superiority, possibly even overwhelming numeric superiority, to make sense.

There were large concentrations of forces that ate up most of the RMN's and later GSN's wallers so there was likely not that much to go around and picket every secondary and tertiary system. Even if you are right and every tertiary system was infact picketed by a handful of DN/SD's that makes it even more criminal that they never bothered to launch a large offensive led by BB's. Hitting those isolate pickets with BB's would have deprived the RMN of their services. BB's may not be able to go 1 to 1 or 2 to 1 against DN's and SD's but they can easily go up 5 to 1 or 6 to 1 with DN's and SD's.

Indeed, but see my post above about those BBs not being available in the first place. And if I'm right about the disparity in technological edge, 6:1 against a modern Victory or Gryphon-class SD would not work either. The PN would need to scout the system to know what class of waller is present and whether pods are present (something they're unlikely to be able to detect with certainty) before launching such an attack. That would mean sending a full squadron of BBs for each Alliance waller and still lose half of them.

That in turn means there are only a limited number of times this could be done before the PN ran out of available battleships.

In cold calculations trading battleships for dreadnaughts and superdreadnaughts makes a lot of sense.

1:1, yes. 2:1, probably too.

But what if the exchange ratio is 5:1? I don't mean the superiority to win, I mean the loss/kill ratio. That's 22.5 million tonnes of battleship and 20,000 crew for 8 million tonnes of Alliance waller and 6,000 crew.

Maybe it's not as bad as that for full losses, but if you include mission-kills, with the PN's inability to fix their ships without major yards while the Alliance could, it might mean even an indecisive engagement means an oh-for-4 loss for the PN.

There is a finite number of SD's and DN's, there is also a number of critical systems that MUST be held. The 25-35 systems the alliance had captured during the first phase of the war not to mention the at least Alliance members that the RMN was charged to defend.

I agree on the home systems of the Alliance members. That was well-explored in the books that they were tying down RMN wallers. They were also target of some PN raids, and some were even successful (Operation Icarus, for example).

But those 25-35 systems the Alliance liberated in the opening phases? They weren't worth picketing with wallers. They were barely worth picketing at all. They may as well not have captured them (wasn't there a thread about the value of captured territory and how they can be a drain on the conqueror?)

the simple volume of conquered territory leads me to believe that most had nothing heavier than a CA and those that did have SD's or DN's had very few which means that the RHN could have used those BB's crush the systems that were highly defended with a handful of BB's and crush the systems with wallers by sending overwhelming numbers of BB's .

But why should they waste BBs on those systems that were probably as equally worthless to them as to the Alliance? If you're going to risk your ships, you should do it for something strategic.

And as others have said, if a picket of half a CruRon sees a Battle Squadron translate from hyper, they bolt the other way and use their higher acceleration to avoid any contact. This means a Battle Squadron could "reconquer" half a dozen systems just by showing up. But if they don't stay to keep the system conquered, it will quickly change hands too because most systems don't want to be under Peep rule.

A force of 30-40 BB's backed by CA's and CL's and DD's can easily overwhelm that picket and lets be honest here, trading 5 BB's for every alliance DN/SD would still put Haven ahead.

Not sure. That would take only 75 wallers from the Alliance (which at this stage should include the Erewhonese ones and other members, not just the RMN's 307) and would deplete all of the PN's battleships. And as others and I have said, the PN may have needed those crews to man the new waller constructions, not throw them away, and they definitely did need those ships in other activities.

So taking out 75 Alliance wallers may be a short-term victory that dooms the war effort.

1) The RHN has the BB's to spare.

No, they don't. The number of units active does not mean they are available to action.

2) The RMN couldn't possibly have enough in a nodal force to respond immediately which means they would have to call on whatever offensive fleet the alliance has whether its 6th or 8th fleet. So the 25-35 systems that the RMN captured in the first few years of the war will have captured them again and again.

Yes.

Trading BB's for SD's and DN's seems like it's worth it, especially if done right and in overwhelming force. When the RMN comes back to capture the RHN retreats and observes what the RMN does with the pickets for those systems.

It seems so, but again I don't think it was practical or feasible in the first place. The number of times we heard of BBs being used in the war is very small, which means they were likely simply not available.

Using the BB's to their maximum advantage doesn't mean throwing them away in hopeless battles. The BB's and the DuQuesne class SD's seem to use the same capital missiles and based on a quick look 40 BB's have roughly 80% of the tubes of 40 SD's. The 40 BB's pack the offensive punch of 32 SD's but the CM's of 22 SD's so they can easily overwhelm the right enemy force.

Where did you find that they use the same missiles?

I'm not doubting, I'm just inquiring, because if they don't have the same missiles and can't launch as quickly, then the tube count alone is not enough for the comparison.

Its armour being weaker means it's definitely not just the proportion of CMs and PDLCs for survivability. I'd be more comfortable if you multiplied all three ratios together.

The biggest advantage those BB's provided to the RHN would have been early in the war but even later on they could still have provided an advantage just by packing the offensive forces with substantial BB's to bolster the offensive power and the defensive power of the fleet in question.

Assuming they still existed. At this time, the PN yards would have been churning out DuQuesne-class SDs like the RMN and GSN ones were producing Gryphon-class ones and had recently converted to Medusa-class. The PN would have decommissioned the BBs in favour of SDs.

Of course, if they had SDs at this point, then they should use the SDs.

By the time the SD(P)'s came around SD's were next to useless so BB's were just expensive coffins.

I don't they were around any more. Not that being aboard an SD was any more survivable.

there were 370 BB's at start of war. Remove 70 for refits that leaves you with 300 BB's. Take 60 for sector quick reaction forces and that leaves you with 240 BB's that have the same offensive capability as 190 SD's and point defence of 132 SD's.

Take another 200 that can't be deployed because they are required for showing force inside of the Republic, including and probably even more especially the systems near Trevor's Star which is where the Alliance's 3rd, 6th and 8th Fleets would be going after. If you remove those ships and the Alliance's scouts gets wind of it, they'd come and conquer the system with cruisers.

I also disagree on your comparative offensive and especially defensive capabilities. There's a reason no one built battleships as "cheap dreadnoughts:" they were not survivable in an era of dreadnoughts.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

Sigs wrote:Ok they were picketed by BC's... they still cannot stand up to BB's.

Actually, can't they?

How would an 1823-designed BB build in the 1830s and 1840s going to stand up to a Reliant-class BC from 1897? Depending on how recently they were updated or which Flight they were from, they may have very slow missile launchers. I wouldn't be surprised if they fired only once per minute, whereas a Reliant can probably sustain a 12 to 15-second cycle.

So even though the 700k-tonne BC has fewer missile tubes than a 4.5-million-tonne BB, the BC may be able to fire more missiles per minute than the BB. In the long run, the BB has deeper magazines so they can fire more, but they have to survive to do so.

Then let's consider the quality of the missiles. An RMN BC would be firing their best, state-of-the-art shipkiller. At this stage, BC missiles aren't designed to take on wallers, but they are very good at what they do. What kind of missiles do 80-year-old design BBs fire? In fact, were they even updated to have the same launchers as their bigger cousins, the DNs and SDs?

A passage above quoted from Jaynes says PN ships have stronger armour and comparatively weaker sidewalls to RMN units. A PN BB would have much stronger armour than any BC, but it might actually have sidewalls as strong as the RMN BC, so the missiles may be able to get through them.

Finally, consider the laserhead: those didn't exist in the 1820s yet. House of Steel describes how they'd begun researching it in the 1840s and 1850s. That means the battleship design was pre-laserhead, with defences aimed at stopping contact nukes, rather than a 50,000-km standoff warhead. Were those ships updated to deal with laserheads? And how good was that update, because we know the PRH educational system wasn't good and that everyone underestimated how good laserheads were prior to the outset of the war.

On top of all of that, the BCs picketing a system would be controlling missile pods. So I am not convinced a 1:1 BB vs BC is a favourable outcome - the BB probably still has greater odds of winning than losing, but it might be close enough that it's a risky proposition and could easily lead to mission-kill. A 1:1 with a BC firing an Alpha launch from pods is not in the BB's favour, despite the BC not having enough control links. Even if it survives, the BC has higher acceleration and can engage and disengage at its own will. That means at this time, raids using battleships would need to have numerical superiority, possibly even overwhelming numeric superiority, to make sense.


[snip]

Using the BB's to their maximum advantage doesn't mean throwing them away in hopeless battles. The BB's and the DuQuesne class SD's seem to use the same capital missiles and based on a quick look 40 BB's have roughly 80% of the tubes of 40 SD's. The 40 BB's pack the offensive punch of 32 SD's but the CM's of 22 SD's so they can easily overwhelm the right enemy force.

Where did you find that they use the same missiles?

I'm not doubting, I'm just inquiring, because if they don't have the same missiles and can't launch as quickly, then the tube count alone is not enough for the comparison.

Its armour being weaker means it's definitely not just the proportion of CMs and PDLCs for survivability. I'd be more comfortable if you multiplied all three ratios together.

Jayne's says the Triumphants have LM-7(d) Capital Ship Missile Tubes - firing L13(a) Capital Ship Missiles. If I scroll up to the Nouveau Paris class DN and DuQuesne class SD I see it list them with exact same L13(a) missiles, but fired out of LM-8(b) and LM-8 tubes respectively. (Jayne's loves to assign numbers to everything; and the DN/SD tubes are presumably newer -- don't know if that also means faster or more reliable. But it is certainly saying all the Peep wallers, including the BBs, use the same missiles -- and quite different numbering than the F17 missiles their Sultan class BC carried)

ThinksMarkedly wrote:I also disagree on your comparative offensive and especially defensive capabilities. There's a reason no one built battleships as "cheap dreadnoughts:" they were not survivable in an era of dreadnoughts.

For what it's worth here's a statement in the Triumphant entry in Jaynes, under doctrinal notes, saying Triumphants "rely far more heavily on their active defenses than they do on their armor or sidewalls for survivability".

So they probably have far lighter armor per ton than the average Peep designs. (Thought that's kind of a scary statement when looked in in conjunction with the earlier statement that "The downside of the Triumphant's broadside is its anemic energy weapon suite, and its sub-par active defenses") Put those together and apparently it depends more on its (sub-par) active defenses than its sidewalls or armor.


Still, light armor for its tonnage is probably still at least double the armor of the BC. (Though you've a good point that they'd have been designed with armor optimized against contact or "burn mode" nukes; not laserheads; and armor is hard to upgrade during a refit so likely it still has its original armor design. If so, in a modern missile fight its armor is likely noticeably less effective, ton per ton or cubic meter for cubic meter, than the armor on a new BC) Still, I suspect that they'd carry enough that they've still got the noticeable edge in total armor effectiveness.

And, FWIW, Theisman at Fourth Yeltsin thought it was as suicidal for RMN/GSN BCs to go up against BBs as it was for BBs to go up against SDs. And at that point he had some experience commanding BBs and fighting RMN BCs, so that should be a pretty informed opinion.

Certainly I don't see a 1905 - 1910 BC formation surviving going up against and equal number of BBs -- not unless they had a lot of towed pods and really evened out the playing field with their alpha strike. On the other hand an equal tonnage of Reliants vs Triumphants (so about 6.5:! numerical advantage) would probably go quite badly for the BBs, even without the BC towed pods.

Relax wrote:Additional considerations:

IF the BB's were designed specifically to attack ONLY star systems close to the PRH in the early 1800's and used as such. For all we know they have VERY short legs. Lets not forget ~100 years ago Haven was a single system polity with near ~zero navy who at the time was ONLY interested in conquering their kitty corner neighbors at most. By ~1850 time period their merchant marine was all but sequestered into only Havenite controlled space. Therefore outside ~Haven immediate space really did not matter. They were building forward operating bases and hopping to the next system for the last century at a near continuous rate(we are told they have ~150 star systems from 1 in ~100 years)

Why would their doctrine change? Bureaucrats do not change their spots nor leave. Now add Prolong and bureaucrats(admirals on down) now entrench for LONG lives.

--> We forget this aspect. Prolong is a massive societal upheaval during this period of time.

It wasn't until the decapitation of the entire Legislaturists several years into the war that new ideas were surfacing(1910ish). The entrenched power structures were decapitated(literally) allowing new ideas to flourish and no ones "precious" iron rice bowl was "threatened"

Actually, Haven had a dozen or so of daughter colonies even in Travis Long's day - but you are essentially correct, their expansionist period didn't start until slightly before 1800 with the stratification of the Legistlaturist/Dolist system.

And the PRN BB's arn't really like the classic BBs the RMN fielded - they were system control ships intended for pacification and policing, not intended for heavy combat and deep raids. More like light, mobile forts (in concept) than warships. Can they be used as such - of course, but that's not their primary intention, and they are optimized for different jobs.

That leads to the PRN's pre-war operational concept - "Win on the the first salvo." On every previous takeover, the small, single star polities were destabilized through clandestine political operations, subterfuge, societal disinformation campaigns, special operations, and (finally) overwhelming force. Before Manticore, the PRN had never faced a true peer adversary, and never had any long term operations, beyond insurgency oppression, and shaping operations.

The PRN was simply not built or trained for heavy deep raiding operations, and every time BBs tangled with true capital ships - they lost. Simply because their role isn't that of a front line warship, but a system control ship to exert control over previously pacified systems.

All good pts from multiple posters: Here is a BIG addition which hit me in face that no one has brought up.

We are told: Haven was deep in the red and SHORT of funds. THIS IS ENTIRE PREMISE of series. 1st 2 books are prelude to Short uh hem, SHORT Victorious War. What do politicians do when short funds? They cut budgets which do not buy votes. Right? Right? Chop chop.

Navy budget will be pinched. So, Vote buying is "jobs" --> Building new ships. But what gets cut? Training, Live fire exercises, Bonus pay, Maintenance, and ship upgrades. Right?

So, if you are deferring upgrades and maintenance what ships are MOST likely to have deffered maintenance and upgrades? An 100 year old design class that cannot stand in line of battle is what.

Now sir Politician wants a SHORT "victorious" war.
Your older ships have been SHORT sighted with few/no upgrades,
Bonus pay for active operations is in SHORT supply.
Training has been SHORT changed for decades.
Maintenance has been SHORTed

So are 50% of the BB's even available to start the war? Do they even have crews? No really? Do they? 300BB's sounds like a lot, and it is a LOT of a LOT, but we never see them until ~1910, 5 years later after war starts. Relegated to rear areas, and just worn out un upgraded junk with heaps of deferred maintenance.

REMEMBER: OBS, Honor in a CL, from a nation which has $$$ for its navy, Unlike the RHN, DID NOT, uh hem, DID NOT have a full load out of laser head missiles. So what does this say about a class of ships which is an OLD design from the RHN?

Yes, upthread many have pointed out that SOME of the BB's were upgraded to fire newer missiles etc. How many on a naval budget which is SHORT? I mean common, if a CL in the RMN who has $$$ is still rocking 1/3 Contact nukes in its missile load out to start the war what is the RHN doing? Their laser head was behind that of the RMN.

We get laser focused in on the NEW and SHINY, but often forget that navies fight with the OLD, CLUNKY, RUSTY, and OVER the Hill yesterdays "shiny" and bashed junk.

Relax wrote:All good pts from multiple posters: Here is a BIG addition which hit me in face that no one has brought up.

We are told: Haven was deep in the red and SHORT of funds. THIS IS ENTIRE PREMISE of series. 1st 2 books are prelude to Short uh hem, SHORT Victorious War. What do politicians do when short funds? They cut budgets which do not buy votes. Right? Right? Chop chop.

Navy budget will be pinched. So, Vote buying is "jobs" --> Building new ships. But what gets cut? Training, Live fire exercises, Bonus pay, Maintenance, and ship upgrades. Right?

So, if you are deferring upgrades and maintenance what ships are MOST likely to have deffered maintenance and upgrades? An 100 year old design class that cannot stand in line of battle is what.

Now sir Politician wants a SHORT "victorious" war.
Your older ships have been SHORT sighted with few/no upgrades,
Bonus pay for active operations is in SHORT supply.
Training has been SHORT changed for decades.
Maintenance has been SHORTed

So are 50% of the BB's even available to start the war? Do they even have crews? No really? Do they? 300BB's sounds like a lot, and it is a LOT of a LOT, but we never see them until ~1910, 5 years later after war starts. Relegated to rear areas, and just worn out un upgraded junk with heaps of deferred maintenance.

REMEMBER: OBS, Honor in a CL, from a nation which has $$$ for its navy, Unlike the RHN, DID NOT, uh hem, DID NOT have a full load out of laser head missiles. So what does this say about a class of ships which is an OLD design from the RHN?

Yes, upthread many have pointed out that SOME of the BB's were upgraded to fire newer missiles etc. How many on a naval budget which is SHORT? I mean common, if a CL in the RMN who has $$$ is still rocking 1/3 Contact nukes in its missile load out to start the war what is the RHN doing? Their laser head was behind that of the RMN.

We get laser focused in on the NEW and SHINY, but often forget that navies fight with the OLD, CLUNKY, RUSTY, and OVER the Hill yesterdays "shiny" and bashed junk.

Well, the Mk 50 warhead wasn't big enough to pack a meaningful contact nuke and still carry laserheads, to they developed a new missile that could (the Mk 34) and the old Courageous class had to make due until they retired.

But your point is sound - pre-war there were complaints about the cost of filling a new DN with missiles. If a wealthy nation cannot afford it, how would a funds deprived one on flimsy economic standing do it?

Relax wrote:All good pts from multiple posters: Here is a BIG addition which hit me in face that no one has brought up.

We are told: Haven was deep in the red and SHORT of funds. THIS IS ENTIRE PREMISE of series. 1st 2 books are prelude to Short uh hem, SHORT Victorious War. What do politicians do when short funds? They cut budgets which do not buy votes. Right? Right? Chop chop.

Navy budget will be pinched. So, Vote buying is "jobs" --> Building new ships. But what gets cut? Training, Live fire exercises, Bonus pay, Maintenance, and ship upgrades. Right?

So, if you are deferring upgrades and maintenance what ships are MOST likely to have deffered maintenance and upgrades? An 100 year old design class that cannot stand in line of battle is what.

Now sir Politician wants a SHORT "victorious" war.
Your older ships have been SHORT sighted with few/no upgrades,
Bonus pay for active operations is in SHORT supply.
Training has been SHORT changed for decades.
Maintenance has been SHORTed

So are 50% of the BB's even available to start the war? Do they even have crews? No really? Do they? 300BB's sounds like a lot, and it is a LOT of a LOT, but we never see them until ~1910, 5 years later after war starts. Relegated to rear areas, and just worn out un upgraded junk with heaps of deferred maintenance.

REMEMBER: OBS, Honor in a CL, from a nation which has $$$ for its navy, Unlike the RHN, DID NOT, uh hem, DID NOT have a full load out of laser head missiles. So what does this say about a class of ships which is an OLD design from the RHN?

Yes, upthread many have pointed out that SOME of the BB's were upgraded to fire newer missiles etc. How many on a naval budget which is SHORT? I mean common, if a CL in the RMN who has $$$ is still rocking 1/3 Contact nukes in its missile load out to start the war what is the RHN doing? Their laser head was behind that of the RMN.

We get laser focused in on the NEW and SHINY, but often forget that navies fight with the OLD, CLUNKY, RUSTY, and OVER the Hill yesterdays "shiny" and bashed junk.

To be fair in OBS Honor's CL expected to primarily be performing anti-piracy and commerce protection / regulation. Nukes are the preferred warhead for warning shots and so it makes sense that for a peacetime deployment she'd be carrying a fair number of the warheads she'd be most likely to use -- since she'd be more likely to make a bunch of one-off warning shots than to get into sustained combat.

I believe even newer ships, which could use missiles with multi-modal warheads capable of acting as laserhead or an effective contact nuke (or a sidewall burner), still carried some of the cheaper nuke only warheads when assigned to places like Silesia where the need for warning shots was anticipated. (What I don't know is whether they also carried enough spare multi-modal warheads to let them swap out all those contact nukes if needed. The CL Fearless clearly did not)


Still you've an interesting point that the BBs might be getting shortchanged. I'd mentioned that the Harris Administration might have been refusing to fund a proper fleet train, but I'd failed to consider whether they'd be properly funding their BBs. (You're right that we don't know whether they all got upgraded to flight IV status; nor we do know whether flight IV actually up to date for 1905 PD. Maybe it was, or maybe that was an decades old update package; Jayne's doesn't say)

One minor timeline correction though. Fourth Yeltsin, where the BBs lost to Honor's SDs, was in 1907 -- so while I don't recall seeing BBs before that we did see them prior to 1910. (And of course their existence was mentioned as far back as the appendix of SVW)

Jonathan_S wrote:Jayne's says the Triumphants have LM-7(d) Capital Ship Missile Tubes - firing L13(a) Capital Ship Missiles. If I scroll up to the Nouveau Paris class DN and DuQuesne class SD I see it list them with exact same L13(a) missiles, but fired out of LM-8(b) and LM-8 tubes respectively. (Jayne's loves to assign numbers to everything; and the DN/SD tubes are presumably newer -- don't know if that also means faster or more reliable. But it is certainly saying all the Peep wallers, including the BBs, use the same missiles -- and quite different numbering than the F17 missiles their Sultan class BC carried)

Thanks. So they have a single design of capital-grade shipkiller missiles, which makes complete logistical sense.

How good those missiles are is a different story. We didn't getmuch information on their effectiveness because we barely got any battle fleet action, as Honor was too junior for us to see that until much later. Hancock when she was flag captain, Fourth Yieltsin, and the passages more recently in ToH with White Haven in command are the only three times I can think of. We can't even use the later SLN baseline for comparison because the SLN barely fired its Trebuchet missiles for us to get information on.

Put those together and apparently it depends more on its (sub-par) active defenses than its sidewalls or armor.

That's a pretty steep indictment of the design. Probably shows its age.

And, FWIW, Theisman at Fourth Yeltsin thought it was as suicidal for RMN/GSN BCs to go up against BBs as it was for BBs to go up against SDs. And at that point he had some experience commanding BBs and fighting RMN BCs, so that should be a pretty informed opinion.

As much as I respect him and I know he's intelligent, he's only able to base his conclusions in information he's got. So garbage in garbage out applies. The same goes for the beginning of OBS when Honor is musing about a wormhole transit push: the fact we know it can't work doesn't mean she did.

He thought it was suicidal for the BCs to go against BBs before the battle. The battle showed two things: first, that the Alliance fire discipline was much better than the BB defences were. Second, that a defender that has home territory advantage and can set up prepared defences can have pretty nasty surprises, like SDs pretending to be BCs. This tactic may have been borne out of desperation by newly-minted Admiral Harrington of the GSN First Fleet, but once she showed it could be done, it would be disseminated and dissected by the Alliance to all its picket commanders. A DN division seeded here and there would ruin a PN BB squadron's day.

Certainly I don't see a 1905 - 1910 BC formation surviving going up against and equal number of BBs -- not unless they had a lot of towed pods and really evened out the playing field with their alpha strike.

Which they probably would have, if they are the defenders, in Relax's scenario of using the BBs to raid. Add to the fact that the Alliance's integrated defence with its below-the-wall escorts would be better than the PN's.

The exchange rate is also not favourable: a 1:1 loss of battleship per battlecruiser is in the Alliance's favour. The number of mission kills because the battleships can't be repaired in the field would make it worse.

The only way this would work is if they did come with overwhelming advantage, such as 4 BB squadrons (32 ships) to avoid taking any damage and being able to adapt to surprises the Alliance could throw at them. They probably did have 4 squadrons available that could be deployed (that's as many ships as arrived in the Yieltsin system before Fourth Yieltsin), but 8 squadrons is doubtful.

In any case, while the PN had 374 battleships, they had 412 SDs before war. Where were they? All tied up defending Haven and Trevor's Star?