Beating up Frontier Fleet, mercilessly

stewart wrote:

Somtaaw wrote:Good points Stewart, but you got the CLAC's flipped. GSN and RMN navies chose DN CLAC's, blending speed with carry capacity for offensive actions.

The RHN chose SD's because their LACs were crap, and they were more intended to stop Shrikes, and protect their own wallers.

We also don't truly have data on what the IAN chose, as far as we're aware they haven't (yet), but they were starting to play around with new and improved LACs, when they started rolling out podlayers.

http://honorverse.wikia.com/wiki/LAC_carrier

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Actually the first GSN CLACs were purchased Minataurs, their home-built Covington class is SD-sized and carries 125 LACs.

-- Stewart

Minotaurs are only just slightly over 6 M-tons themselves, and Convingtons weigh in at 6.5 M-tons, that's not a whole lot of difference. (wiki actually quotes the Convingtons at 6.25 M-tons, so even closer in weight to the dreadnought hull Minnies)

Meanwhile, Medusa/Harrington-class, first-generation podnoughts were 8.5 M-tons, and the second generation Invictus are just under 8.8 M-tons. Even the pre-podnought Sphinx-class started at 8 M-tons. We don't have numbers on the followup Gryphon's, we just know they were "larger and more powerful".

Unless the wiki's just out of date, we don't know how large Chimera-class and Hydra-class Manticoran CLAC's are, but they are likely to weigh in under 7 M-tons.

Generation 3 Manticoran CLAC's (and podnoughts), design in collaboration with Foraker getting to play with Manticoran miniturization tech are going to be scary however you want to look at it.

Here's an interesting question...

Can every RMN ship new enough to handle FTL drones (Star Knights and newer, etc.) handle Mark-16's even if they can't launch them? Given that a freighter is huge and has NO areas to worry about obscuring. So the whole sides of the things could be covered with pods at any point between the freight bays.

Wouldn't it be a nasty surprise to Frontier Fleet if they equipped a significant chunk of the recalled RMMC freighters with "power points" so that they could hold a bunch of Mark-16 pods for use by their escorts, any vintage?

Granted, merchies don't in the line of fire, but in a commerce raiding situation they're in the line of fire anyway... However, the Mark 16's "line of fire" is so far outside even ballistic range of the SLN missiles (especially if the cruiser captain uses a coast phase of the Mark 16) that a big freighter -- even fully loaded with it's normal freight load-- could likely dump all of it's "attached pod volleys" in the process of running, enough so that an older CA 's fire control would use those missiles to put a serious hurt on if not destroy a squadron of raiding FF ships giving chase?

Yes/no?

SharkHunter wrote:Can every RMN ship new enough to handle FTL drones (Star Knights and newer, etc.) handle Mark-16's even if they can't launch them?

Being able to handle FTL Drone communications has nothing to do with missile control. As far as I can tell, any RMN warship from LAC to SD(P) can handle any Mk of RMN missile except for FTL control of Apollo ACM.

SharkHunter wrote:Given that a freighter is huge and has NO areas to worry about obscuring. So the whole sides of the things could be covered with pods at any point between the freight bays.

Freighters have sensors, too. They might not be as sensitive as a warship's sensors, which would make blocking them even more problematic. Freighters probably do have more clean hull space than warships, but why store them outside? Freighters can dump pods through a cargo hatch with far fewer modifications than creating "power points" for external carriage.

SharkHunter wrote:Granted, merchies don't in the line of fire, ...

Merchies don't what in the line of battle?

Standard convoy tactics seem to be to have the convoy scatter while the escorts take on the commerce raiders. What happens to your escorts with no Mk 16's to control because they scattered with the Merchies carrying them?

Weird Harold wrote:

SharkHunter wrote:Can every RMN ship new enough to handle FTL drones (Star Knights and newer, etc.) handle Mark-16's even if they can't launch them?

Being able to handle FTL Drone communications has nothing to do with missile control. As far as I can tell, any RMN warship from LAC to SD(P) can handle any Mk of RMN missile except for FTL control of Apollo ACM.

SharkHunter wrote:Given that a freighter is huge and has NO areas to worry about obscuring. So the whole sides of the things could be covered with pods at any point between the freight bays.

Freighters have sensors, too. They might not be as sensitive as a warship's sensors, which would make blocking them even more problematic. Freighters probably do have more clean hull space than warships, but why store them outside? Freighters can dump pods through a cargo hatch with far fewer modifications than creating "power points" for external carriage.

SharkHunter wrote:Granted, merchies don't in the line of fire, ...

Merchies don't what in the line of battle?

Standard convoy tactics seem to be to have the convoy scatter while the escorts take on the commerce raiders. What happens to your escorts with no Mk 16's to control because they scattered with the Merchies carrying them?

I was thinking "hull space" because ejecting them from bays would still require more work than dropping them off the sides.

Yes, they scatter, but the cruiser would stick with the freighter that has the pods. If the FF ships scatter to chase the other ships that just makes them more butt naked to getting wiped by the -16G warheads because they lose the integrated defense net of multiple ships. I'm picturing FF trying to close and pod salvos continuing to drop off the freighter as the CA uses them to pick off ships over a range of what, 45MM to 20MM kilometers before it even gets interesting?

Picture any SLN surviving ships arriving back at base with the report 'we never even got close...'

You know what would be worth more then an entire 8mt freighter loaded with electronics to a SLN raider?

A single intact MDM or DDM pod.

Weird Harold wrote:

SharkHunter wrote:Can every RMN ship new enough to handle FTL drones (Star Knights and newer, etc.) handle Mark-16's even if they can't launch them?

Being able to handle FTL Drone communications has nothing to do with missile control. As far as I can tell, any RMN warship from LAC to SD(P) can handle any Mk of RMN missile except for FTL control of Apollo ACM.

I suspect SharkHunter may have had in mind, without filling in the details, that the FTL-capable recon drones make for a very useful downrange observer to get data on the targets and their defensive response back to the launching and controlling ships at 64 times the speed that information would come back from the missiles. (And starting from a point near the targets, too, rather than on the way there.) That becomes very useful for the very long range any multiple drive missile can have, especially if it gets a ballistic component in the middle.

The Battle of Monica provides probably the first classic example of this use, and is at least one thing known as "Apollo Lite". The Apollo ACM essentially gets the FTL communications working two ways instead of one. (And you could usually combine it with a recon drone sitting near the target too for even more information and updates, including more detailed target condition in between salvo arrivals.)

kzt wrote:You know what would be worth more then an entire 8mt freighter loaded with electronics to a SLN raider?

A single intact MDM or DDM pod.

I was thinking about this quite a bit, and I came up with an interesting "fail-safe", namely "unless the super sophisticated, uber-difficult set of do everything right" command sequence plus tool usage is completed, "bring up the missile wedge"...

That's the second reason I wouldn't put them inside the bays. Easier to capture without that fail safe enabled.

Somtaaw wrote:[
Minotaurs are only just slightly over 6 M-tons themselves, and Convingtons weigh in at 6.5 M-tons, that's not a whole lot of difference. (wiki actually quotes the Convingtons at 6.25 M-tons, so even closer in weight to the dreadnought hull Minnies)

Meanwhile, Medusa/Harrington-class, first-generation podnoughts were 8.5 M-tons, and the second generation Invictus are just under 8.8 M-tons. Even the pre-podnought Sphinx-class started at 8 M-tons. We don't have numbers on the followup Gryphon's, we just know they were "larger and more powerful".

Unless the wiki's just out of date, we don't know how large Chimera-class and Hydra-class Manticoran CLAC's are, but they are likely to weigh in under 7 M-tons.

Generation 3 Manticoran CLAC's (and podnoughts), design in collaboration with Foraker getting to play with Manticoran miniturization tech are going to be scary however you want to look at it.

Wiki must be out of date. House of Steel has numbers on those.
Sphinx-class: 8,207,000 tons
Gryphon-class: 8,339,000 tons
Hydra-class CLAC: 6,145,750 tons (as HoS says, they're a little smaller than the Minotaur-class; but carry more LACs)

(Well, not on a 'Chimera-class', as there isn't text-ev of any such thing; wiki to the contrary. Scotty's ship, HMAC Chimera, is a Hydra-class CLAC if IIRC)

Jonathan_S wrote:(Well, not on a 'Chimera-class', as there isn't text-ev of any such thing; wiki to the contrary. Scotty's ship, HMAC Chimera, is a Hydra-class CLAC if IIRC)

The Hydra class did get a major change in 1920, with a change to more launch tubes for smaller MDM's (Mk 23's instead of Mk 41's) and more defensive armament. It's possible that that version of the Hydra class could be known by another class name in some references, with the first ship of that class/sub-class/group giving that class name.

In theory, the Hydra class is "just" Minotaur-B's, so these class names seem a bit messy in-universe too.

JeffEngel wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:(Well, not on a 'Chimera-class', as there isn't text-ev of any such thing; wiki to the contrary. Scotty's ship, HMAC Chimera, is a Hydra-class CLAC if IIRC)

The Hydra class did get a major change in 1920, with a change to more launch tubes for smaller MDM's (Mk 23's instead of Mk 41's) and more defensive armament. It's possible that that version of the Hydra class could be known by another class name in some references, with the first ship of that class/sub-class/group giving that class name.

In theory, the Hydra class is "just" Minotaur-B's, so these class names seem a bit messy in-universe too.

Before HoS came out, myself and some others called the "finalized" Manty CLAC design the Chimera class, because it was the earliest, named ship with the finialized design mentioned. IIRC, there is no actual mention of the class name prior to HoS.

Supposedly the first dozen or two CLACs were constant tweaks on the original Minotaur design, addressing operational suggestions and incorporating design optimizations, with no 2 ships being identical. The questions is what was the importance of the Hydra? - was it the first ship with 108 LAC bays, the place were the design stabilized, or some other point that clearly demarked it from the Minotaurs?