Beating up Frontier Fleet, mercilessly

Weird Harold wrote:

Kizarvexis wrote:I think the larger problem will be where you put the grunts. Ten officers and ratings to a LAC and 40ish to a marine platoon? Not to mention the supplies for said grunts.

You're not counting the LAC support troops -- another 5-7 per LAC, or thereabouts. That is, however, why I said you could carry more assault shuttles than you had troops to fill.

The assault shuttles have support people too. Probably less than for a LAC, but you are planning on carrying more assault shuttles, so my SWAG was the support people stayed largely the same.

kzt wrote:Pretty much. I'm sure they could improvise a pressurized entry for one or two, but most would parked out on the deck. Given that marines normally fight in armored skin suits and the shuttles are normally stored and serviced in vacuum I'm not seeing any issues here. You could also transport outsized gear that won't fit in the ship elevators.

Not sure how many you could fit, the LAC bay is over 20m high, shuttles are much lower. Hence a lot of the capacity is unusable without a LOT of work

Yep. Especially since Assault Shuttles are normally grabbed by overhead docking clamps in boat bays, they don't dock nose in like LACs do in CLAC bays.

Though if you really wanted to you could probably build an ready made adapter that hooked into the normal LAC docking clamps, and the bay's floor/sides, and provided a few decks for the shuttles to land on (envision a short bookcase). Probably have to tether them down for safety after landing (in case the ship gets hit in combat - obviously in normal flight there would be no forces big enough to overcome grav-plates holding the shuttles down at 1g) Then run out (air-locked) flexible pressurized boarding tubes so the marines and pilots don't have to board in vacuum.

Not sure it's worth bothering with - but mechanically it should work. (And of course you'd have to have it handy when you wanted to offload a couple LACs to embark extra shuttles)

Jonathan_S wrote:Though if you really wanted to you could probably build an ready made adapter that hooked into the normal LAC docking clamps, and the bay's floor/sides, and provided a few decks for the shuttles to land on (envision a short bookcase). Probably have to tether them down for safety after landing (in case the ship gets hit in combat - obviously in normal flight there would be no forces big enough to overcome grav-plates holding the shuttles down at 1g) Then run out (air-locked) flexible pressurized boarding tubes so the marines and pilots don't have to board in vacuum.

Not sure it's worth bothering with - but mechanically it should work. (And of course you'd have to have it handy when you wanted to offload a couple LACs to embark extra shuttles)

The new-model ships - Minotaur specifically - are very good for having versatile machine ships aboard. You wouldn't be able to fab up something in them nearly as good as a specially designed plug-in assault shuttle bay for a LAC bay, but you could probably do something pretty good just with parts, shops, and personnel on hand.

Mind you, I suspect you could also do pretty well for troop transport and deployment directly from whatever mil-spec freighter brought these marines and assault shuttles out to Talbott in the first place and let the CLAC be a CLAC.

Kizarvexis wrote:

kzt wrote:Pretty much. I'm sure they could improvise a pressurized entry for one or two, but most would parked out on the deck. Given that marines normally fight in armored skin suits and the shuttles are normally stored and serviced in vacuum I'm not seeing any issues here. You could also transport outsized gear that won't fit in the ship elevators.

Not sure how many you could fit, the LAC bay is over 20m high, shuttles are much lower. Hence a lot of the capacity is unusable without a LOT of work

Well, you still want to have them locked down for maneuvers. I'm sure the 41st century still has duct tape.

I think the larger problem will be where you put the grunts. Ten officers and ratings to a LAC and 40ish to a marine platoon? Not to mention the supplies for said grunts.

I hate to tell you but duct tape does still exist it is mentioned in CoG.

saber964 wrote:I hate to tell you but duct tape does still exist it is mentioned in CoG.

But power cords do not.

PS. Upthread someone said there are support people for the LAC's(5-7). No. The LAC crews themselves ARE the support people as described in EoH when LAC's are introduced. They do the maintenance and rearming.

But they do embark, at least for the original unit ~300 more people for support.

Granted we are not shown them in action. But do we really want RFC to introduce another group of people doing nothing but maintaining the LACs.

Quote from EoH at the bottom.

Relax wrote:But power cords do not.

PS. Upthread someone said there are support people for the LAC's(5-7). No. The LAC crews themselves ARE the support people as described in EoH when LAC's are introduced. They do the maintenance and rearming.

EoH Chapter 3 wrote:“Minotaur’s core ship’s company is only six hundred and fifty,” Truman went on, and her new subordinates blinked, for that was barely seventy percent of the crew assigned to most heavy cruisers five percent her size. “We’ve managed this by building in a much higher degree of automation than BuShips was prepared to accept prewar, and, of course, by eliminating all broadside weapons. In addition, we carry only a single company of Marines instead of the battalion normally assigned to a DN or an SD. On the other hand, our current TO&E calls for us to embark approximately three hundred additional shipboard personnel to provide permanent engineering and tactical support to the LAC wing. That, Commander Stackowitz, is where you will come in.”

For what it is worth,
T2M

Relax wrote:

saber964 wrote:I hate to tell you but duct tape does still exist it is mentioned in CoG.

But power cords do not.

PS. Upthread someone said there are support people for the LAC's(5-7). No. The LAC crews themselves ARE the support people as described in EoH when LAC's are introduced. They do the maintenance and rearming.

Those power cords you seem to want may be a bit more difficult that you are thinking. How far is the item you wish to power from the source of power? What are you using to power it?

Would powering a Missile pod require the equivalent of 1 KM of 10CM fire hose rated for plasma? That might be a little difficult to store on a ship with plenty of other demands for cubage.

Castenea wrote:Would powering a Missile pod require the equivalent of 1 KM of 10CM fire hose rated for plasma? That might be a little difficult to store on a ship with plenty of other demands for cubage.

No, a single superconducting cable about the size of an outdoor 12 gauge power cable should do fine. All you are doing is running the tractors, and a cable that handle a couple of gigawatts should be fine for that.

kzt wrote:

Castenea wrote:Would powering a Missile pod require the equivalent of 1 KM of 10CM fire hose rated for plasma? That might be a little difficult to store on a ship with plenty of other demands for cubage.

No, a single superconducting cable about the size of an outdoor 12 gauge power cable should do fine. All you are doing is running the tractors, and a cable that handle a couple of gigawatts should be fine for that.

If all you are doing is hauling the missile pods externally, yes.

But if you want to be able to deploy and fire those missile pods, you need much, much more power. You need to be able to:

1) Supply sufficient power to operate the tractors holding the missile pod to the ship.


2) Supply even more power (over and above the amount in 1 above) to start-up the fusion plant on-board the missile pod that supplies power that enables the missile pod to:

a) Power the missile pods on-board electronics and communications equipment that control the pod and act as an interface with the on-board missiles and the controlling ship's fire control.
b) Power the tractors that will hold the missile pod in a towed position astern of the ship ready to fire.
c) Power up all of the missiles' fusion reactors that will power the missile in flight.
d) Power the missile pod's grav-drivers that launch the missiles into space and get the missiles far enough apart that wedge fratricide does not occur when the missiles activate their impeller wedges.

I suspect that the amount of power required for 2 above (the amount of power required for start-up of the on-board fusion reactor) is much more than a couple of gigawatts.

Considering that a non-pod layer has no ability to supply huge amounts of power to a pod without using a cable, how do you think they normally get powered up when you decide to hang some off the side of a random DD?

Consider home fleet at BoM. They loaded up something like 20,000 pods in something like 15 minutes. How did they power them up?