The cruiser future in the RMN - another go

kzt wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:Going back to the AAC scenario, at 150 million km the ballistic phase for a full up MDM is at least 520 seconds (more if the target maneuvers clear of the straight line path). But in that time even a current Havenite SD can likely displace less than a million km. That's apparently enough to get clear of the targeting basket for the missile's terminal seeker; but only because the control loop is too laggy at that range to properly cue the missile. At ranges you'd actually used non-Apollo MDMs, less than 1/2 that range, that's much less of an issue.


I don't accept that any (non-Apollo) ballistic shot has to have crap accuracy just because one insanely long-ranged one would.

You have to realize that Mk-23s can run with a ballistic component too. Which allows you to plot a ballistic segment that won't allow the target to exit the seeker FoV, but is kind of close. This inherently means that a DDM MUST have a ballistic segment that allows the target to exit the seeker FoV.

So the Mk-23 ship just obliterates that Mk-16 ship without taking effective return fire.

JeffEngel wrote:I think that RFC may have stated the rationale for the BC(L) over the BC(P) poorly. The battlecruiser is meant to be able to survive distant encounters with wallers; avoid serious encounters with them; hunt down cruisers and blow them away with ease and without being threatened seriously by them; and to mop up system defenders that aren't waller-equivalent.

To do that, having far more firepower than it takes to blow away cruisers starts to become more than the mission requires, and if you buy that at the cost of being able to laugh off what cruisers can do to you, you're not suiting the BC role anymore, at least, not that RMN conception of it. That's the issue with a BC(P): a Saganami-C could put a hurt on it; distant encounters with a waller can easily toast a BC(P); and the need to recover pods to carry on raiding means that the BC(P) cannot just run off as need be. Duration of fire really hasn't got much to do with it - mostly it is about the relevant necessary toughness and dangerousness. Any podlayer is going to be more dangerous than a BC needs to be, and any BC-size-range podlayer is going to be less tough and able to move right along freely and carry on raiding, as a BC is meant to.

Relax wrote:And no, a BCP will not lose its entire offensive capability if Buships simply uses a different dispenser method which has been covered multiple times on this site. I personally never understood why Buships would only have ONE hammerhead with pod doors. Forcing a ship to flip to fire its weapons when they have tractors able to move pods around seems ridiculous to me.

kzt wrote:

Relax wrote:And no, a BCP will not lose its entire offensive capability if Buships simply uses a different dispenser method which has been covered multiple times on this site. I personally never understood why Buships would only have ONE hammerhead with pod doors. Forcing a ship to flip to fire its weapons when they have tractors able to move pods around seems ridiculous to me.

Unless you are being commanded by a admiral smoking plot, you will have already deployed most if not all of the pods you will use prior to you shooting any missiles. Then you will fire them in a series of dense salvos designed to all arrive at the same time, plus or minus about 5 seconds. And you will do this timing it so that any return fire will require a sufficient ballistic window during which you can maneuver out of the seeker FoV.

As you can assure minimal effective return fire you also can have another full salvo or three already deployed in case ~800 Mk-23s arriving in a wave over 10 seconds isn't sufficient. Which it certainly should be.

Jonathan_S wrote:Compared to a BC(P) a BC(L)'s toughness and distributed weapons give it a better chance of surviving, and then completing the raiding mission (or at least fighting its way back out if a mobile component of the ambush shows up).
In contrast the BC(P) is too likely to lose its entire offensive power, and possibly just be destroyed, from a couple unlucky hits.

SharkHunter wrote:I think a better question might use HotQ as a yardstick. What would it take for a current generation CA with a top notch commander to take out a 2x ship one generation ago with a top notch commander? That's effectively what Honor had at Yeltsin, except that PNS/Saladin/Thunder of God wasn't being captained by Alfreo Yu; it was led incompetently by a Masadan command crew. Otherwise, barring a golden BB she would have lost.

That argues for Mark-16G class DDMs, with as many racked pods on the outside of the ship as possible and many control links. It also argues for heavy CM and PDLC deployment -- and not much energy weapons fire. That prevents the bigger ship from closing without sustaining heavy damage, and keeps the cruiser in the game longer. Hence my estimation that the CL of the future is Star Knight size, and the CA is Sag-C or slightly larger.

Either of those two ships along with 2 Roland(s) (equivalent to CA- Fearless, Troubadour and Apollo) would be a fierce set of combatants for any likely raiding-class force mix, whether offensively or defensively.

Relax wrote:Should note:

MDM: 70Mkm 540s
DDM: 70Mkm 840s
Delta ~5 minutes