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Pearls of Weber

A collection of posts by David Weber containing background information for his stories, collected and generously made available Joe Buckley.

Escort CLACs

Sorry about the confuzzlement. What I meant (and bear in mind how late I wrote the orignal post and that I am usually fairly close to the point of collapse from cummulative fatigue when I finish a book) was specifically that Torch might be interested in a smallish CLAC, configured to carry no more than 16 LACs or so, with a high degree of automation to hold down crew requirements, a Manticoran-style compensator, to make it as lively as possible, a decent missile-defense/LAC-defense capability (although they would probably cut out all ship-to-ship capability) and the ability to carry old-style Manty numbers of Marines, plus landing craft. Think of this less as an escort-carrier than as a modern USN/MUSMC amphibious attack ship with limited (and localized) ability to command and dominate the space immediately around it with its LACs.

I still don't see anyone being interested in an escort CLAC for convoy protection or even for commerce raiding, simply because of the cost factors involoved and the issue (which other have raised, as well as I have) of the type's complete inability to engage targets inside a grav-wave. This is purely a means for a smallish star nation to project attack power against carefully chosen, relatively lightly-defended targets within a star system and (in Torch's case, especially) to conduct hostage rescue/slave liberation operations. It would be essentially useless against heavily defended targets because of its relatively small size, punch, and ability to sustain damage. For that sort of operation, you'd still want a CLAC which could haul in the maximum amount of LACs per ton of CLAC (and with the greatest economy of support crew and expense), and then get the hell out of the way while the actual operation goes in. Indeed, one of the motives for this particular sort of asymetrical warfare mentality on Torch's part would be the ability not only to conduct smallish (and/or pinpoint) attacks and raids which would both be useful in their own right and force the other side to beef up rear area defenses (thus expending huge amounts of resources in the equivalent of poured concrete and coast defense guns), while simultaneously allowing Torch to project fear of such attacks into every Manpower executive in the galaxy.