Yet another (crazy) idea.

Belial666 wrote:And that's one possible reason you aren't going to do it, if you want to maintain operational security.

How many 10's of thousands of LAC's does Haven have? A few thousand is somehow going to be a tip off?

Off hand the odd ~350 Podnaughts going into maintenance before the major op would have been the tip off... Assuming new SD'P even need any for several years after being built. They were new build so... I'll go with no. Ditto on the LAC's. They were all brand spanking new from qualification out of the factory.

Wierd Harold is also mistaking routine maintenance ebb and flow with a major operation. If the discussion was day-to-day routine wear and tear he could be right assuming readiness rates equivalent to modern fighters. Of course this is space so mass becomes negligent criteria for cutting corners regarding more reliable machinery. All one has to do is look at commercial airline readiness rates in comparison to fighters to see the difference when extra mass is available especially in the sensors, flight actuators, power systems, and wiring. Let alone allowing for 2000 years of fatigue/MTBF design proficiency.

Weird Harold, while nowhere near your expertise in maintenance (and I tip my hat to you, sir, for your service), I have seen a Hanger Queen or three in my time and I know what you are talking about.

But for an effort like this, the Havenites might well have left 1-2 CLAC's behind and literaly 'strip-mined" them for parts and, if necessary, swapped out LAC's to give the remaining ships all the Hanger Queens, leaving the ships going to battle at 100% and the poor sods back at base explaining a readiness rate of 40%.....

Same for the SD's, BC's and other ships. Make those staying home the "Hanger Queens" while making sure you go into the decisive battle with everything you can bring.

Since RFC is suggesting that there is going to be some lighter or differently configured CLAC for support operations why build a bigger CLAC. Amoung the challanges you face is putting yet more eggs in larger baskets and if you have a CLAC destroyed you potentialy loose all of its LAC and often all of its crew including those people who support and maintain those LACs. Building smaller CLACs takes more people on the CLAC crew and LAC wing support and maintenance but both lets you deploy ships to more places at the same time and buffers your LAC (and LAC crew) losses.

Why would you also build a RHN (with primarily Haven tech) and then outfit it with RMN versions of LACs which require the parts and tech and trained people for RMN equipment? You could fill or partially fill an Avery class CLAC with RMN LACs but you are probably only going to get to use them once because, while you can recover (the survivors of the launch) them, you are probably not going to be able to repair them very well and rearm them quickly if at all.

Sorry, design you ship for the mission and don't mix you hardware.

Since RFC is suggesting that there is going to be some lighter or differently configured CLAC for support operations why build a bigger CLAC. Amoung the challanges you face is putting yet more eggs in larger baskets and if you have a CLAC destroyed you potentialy loose all of its LAC and often all of its crew including those people who support and maintain those LACs. Building smaller CLACs takes more people on the CLAC crew and LAC wing support and maintenance but both lets you deploy ships to more places at the same time and buffers your LAC (and LAC crew) losses.

What? David said the complete opposite. He said no to escort CLACs, and yes to large bulk CLACs similar to Haven's (as well as an armored CLAC for close fleet support).

Duckk wrote:

Since RFC is suggesting that there is going to be some lighter or differently configured CLAC for support operations why build a bigger CLAC. Amoung the challanges you face is putting yet more eggs in larger baskets and if you have a CLAC destroyed you potentialy loose all of its LAC and often all of its crew including those people who support and maintain those LACs. Building smaller CLACs takes more people on the CLAC crew and LAC wing support and maintenance but both lets you deploy ships to more places at the same time and buffers your LAC (and LAC crew) losses.

What? David said the complete opposite. He said no to escort CLACs, and yes to large bulk CLACs similar to Haven's (as well as an armored CLAC for close fleet support).

Right - it looks more as though the Havenite/Grayson LAC and CLAC paradigms have won out over the initial RMN one. CLAC's are to be SD-range in size, for either sheer bulk carriers without waller defenses, or the CLAC-of-the-wall design, and LAC's are primarily tasked with anti-LAC and wall missile defense missions, with anti-shipping being a tertiary mission (outside system defense roles in secondary systems).

Granularity that you'd get out of smaller CLAC's just isn't critical. If it's a mission that demands much less than one SD-range CLAC, you can likely do it with some destroyers or cruisers, or a (military-grade) freighter with LAC's out of the cargo bays. A military like Torch's, with missions against far weaker targets and built on a vastly smaller budget of money and trained personnel, may have a use for smaller CLAC's, but that's not the GA situation at all.

Brigade XO wrote:Since RFC is suggesting that there is going to be some lighter or differently configured CLAC for support operations why build a bigger CLAC. Amoung the challanges you face is putting yet more eggs in larger baskets and if you have a CLAC destroyed you potentialy loose all of its LAC and often all of its crew including those people who support and maintain those LACs. Building smaller CLACs takes more people on the CLAC crew and LAC wing support and maintenance but both lets you deploy ships to more places at the same time and buffers your LAC (and LAC crew) losses.

Setting aside the fact that RFC said Manticore has no interest in escort CLACs, actually building one is a interesting design trade-off.

If you go more than a fraction smaller than the DN sized Minotaur-class you suffer a drastic reduction in LAC numbers - something like 50 - 70% reduction.
If you look at the CLAC designs, the LACs park nose first, but when you look at the sizes the port and starboard LAC bays have to almost meet in the middle of the ship. A

nd CLACs are already a little wider than the normal beam to drought radio of a DN or SD. I assume it would do bad thing to your compensator field efficiency if you shrunk the tonnage but kept them the same width. But if you make them narrower then you can't fit two broadsides worth of nose-in LAC bays. So you need to go to a asymmetrical broadside, with bays on only one side (50% reduction) or switch to parking them parallel to the ship, but given they're 20m wide but ~70m long you can now fit only about 30% as many bays in a broadside.

And if you went any smaller than BC sized you could fit any LAC bays in nose first, you'd have to go to parallel parking - though at a quick estimate you'd be hard pressed to fit in bays for more than about 20-24 into a Reliant sized hull. (And they'd basically fill the entire center hull section, so I'm not sure you could cram all the other functionality into the tapers and hammerheads; those have a lot less volume than the similar areas in a Minotaur-class)

Not impossible, but like I said, trade-offs.

Relax wrote:Wierd Harold is also mistaking routine maintenance ebb and flow with a major operation.

You think I managed 21 years service without encountering at least one "major operation"?

Hutch wrote:But for an effort like this, the Havenites might well have left 1-2 CLAC's behind and literaly 'strip-mined" them for parts and, if necessary, swapped out LAC's to give the remaining ships all the Hanger Queens, leaving the ships going to battle at 100% and the poor sods back at base explaining a readiness rate of 40%.....

This side issue started because I disparaged Havenite readiness rates because of textev regarding their deficient maintenance skills. They can cannibalize and re-assign prior to deployment all they want but when it comes time to launch a max effort, there are going to be "red-ball maintenance" calls and mission aborts due to maintenance casualties.

I suspect that the wording "three aviary class CLACs launched nearly six-hundred LACs" is recognition of the fact that there were six-hundred LACs assigned, but something less than 100% were ready and able to launch.

you'd be hard pressed to fit in bays for more than about 20-24 into a Reliant sized hull

Probably true, but you don't have to use standard bays.


A shrike is 72 meters long, 20 meters wide. The Reliant is 713 meters long, 91 meters wide. Assume a central compartment that holds all the LACs being 4 LACs long, 3 LACs wide and 4 LACs tall. Essentially you could fit 48 Shrikes on about 30% of the Reliant's volume.

Belial666 wrote:Probably true, but you don't have to use standard bays.


A shrike is 72 meters long, 20 meters wide. The Reliant is 713 meters long, 91 meters wide. Assume a central compartment that holds all the LACs being 4 LACs long, 3 LACs wide and 4 LACs tall. Essentially you could fit 48 Shrikes on about 30% of the Reliant's volume.

That's fine if you're going to stack the LACs up like cargo containers, but if you do it's going to be a nightmare conducting maintenance and reloading the missile magazines. Then there's the question of how you launch LAC X when LAC Y is between it and the bay doors. Not to mention the fact that you've created a single huge void in the middle of the ship, on a far greater relative scale than the pod bay of an SD(P) which we know significantly reduces hull strength.