Yet another (crazy) idea.

Belial666 wrote:

SharkHunter wrote:I don't remember them being that big? anyone got a link on that?

War of Honor, attack on "Tequila" system. 3 Aviary-class CLACs unleash 778 Cimeterres. Since the original Cimeterres were fusion-powered rather than fission-powered, they had to be larger than manty LACs.

War of Honor chapter 20 wrote:Clapp's solution undoubtedly owed a great deal to how much time he'd spent thinking about and modeling the short-range, cluttered, high-threat environment in which pinnaces and assault shuttles routinely operated. Very few tactical officers thought in terms of that sort of combat where "proper" spacecraft were concerned, even when the spacecraft in question were mere LACs. Pinnaces and assault shuttles, after all, were expendable. Everyone knew a certain percentage of them were going to be lost, whatever tactical doctrine they followed. Fortunately, they were cheap enough and had small enough crews compared to starships that even a relatively high degree of attrition was acceptable as long as it allowed them to accomplish their missions.
But that, Clapp had pointed out, was also the primary tactical advantage of the LAC. It was just that because it weighed in at thirty or forty thousand tons, people didn't really think of it that way. Even those who'd grasped the tactical reality intellectually hadn't done the same thing on a deep, emotional level. And so they'd continued to think in terms of standoff engagement ranges, sophisticated shipboard systems, and all the other elements which made a LAC a miniaturized version of larger, vastly more capable hyper-capable ships.
Mitchell Clapp had begun his own design process by going back to a blank piece of paper. Rather than designing a starship in miniature, he'd seen it as an opportunity to design a pinnace on the macro scale. He'd ruthlessly stripped out everything that wasn't absolutely essential to the combat role as he visualized it, and along the way he'd discovered it was possible to save a truly amazing amount of tonnage.
He'd started out by accepting a life support endurance of only ninety-six hours rather than the weeks and months which most LAC designers insisted upon. Next, he'd eliminated all energy armament, aside from an extremely austere outfit of point defense laser clusters. It was pretty clear to NavInt that the Manties had adopted radical innovations to provide the energy supply their new LACs required. Those EW systems had to be energy hogs, and the humongous graser they'd wrapped at least one of their LAC classes around was even worse. NavInt's best current guess was that they'd gone to some sort of advanced fission plant with enormously improved and/or enlarged superconductor capacitor rings to manage their energy budget. They'd also done something distinctly unnatural with their beta nodes to produce impeller wedges of such power without completely unacceptable tonnage demands. Again, all of those were things Haven would be unable to match for years to come, but by ruthlessly suppressing the energy armament and accepting such a vast decrease in life support—and by eliminating over half of the triple-redundancy damage control and repair systems routinely designed into "real" warships—Clapp had managed to produce a LAC hull which came amazingly close to matching the performance of the Manties' designs. Its less efficient inertial compensator meant its maximum acceleration rate was more sluggish, but it was actually a bit more nimble and maneuverable than the observational data suggested the Manty LACs were.
Of course, it had also been effectively unarmed compared to the Manticoran designs, but that was the point at which Clapp had recruited others to his project. In the absence of energy weapons, the Cimeterre carried a pure missile armament, and the R&D teams had made enormous advances in marrying reverse-engineered Solarian technology with their own indigenous design concepts. The missiles they'd come up with, like the LACs which would carry them, weren't up to Manticoran standards, but they were much, much better than anything any previous Havenite LAC had ever boasted. Unless NavInt was entirely wrong about the performance parameters of the Manticoran weapons, the Cimeterre's birds could approximately match their range and acceleration in a package which was only a very little larger. Once again, sacrifices had had to be made to cram that performance into something the Republic could produce, and in this instance that something had been the sophisticated seeking systems and penetration aids built into the Manticoran missiles. But when Clapp and his colleagues were done, they'd produced a ship which was faster on the helm, had almost as good an acceleration rate, and was armed with weapons which were almost as long-ranged as anything the Manticorans had yet demonstrated.

Belial666 wrote:It's nearly Christmas again so it's time for me to post another one of my ideas;

1) The latest pre-grand-alliance Havenite LACs were nearly 40 kilotons, right?
2) Manticoran LACs of the same period were around 20 kilotons, right?
3) The largest pre-grand-alliance Havenite CLACs could carry 250+ of their larger LACs, right?

This means that with the current tech merging one could design a decent CLAC-type ship with 200 LAC bays and several Keyhole-analogs (one KH2 masses as much as 3 Havenite LACs). And then have each one of said 200 LACs it carries basically be a mantie-tech LAC with an additional 18 kilotons of capital missile box launchers, whether built-in, limpeted or otherwise.



1) LAC's pre-launch, load up on launchers.

2) Fight begins. Maximum controllable salvos launched at minimum possible intervals for control shifts. Say, 1000 missiles each at 20 second intervals.

3) 200 LACs can bring to bear defensively 1600 CM tubes and 1200 PDLCs. That's 8 times more than an Invictus-class podnought.

4) Fight over, LACs and unused box launchers are packed up again.

Belial666 wrote:War of Honor, attack on "Tequila" system. 3 Aviary-class CLACs unleash 778 Cimeterres. Since the original Cimeterres were fusion-powered rather than fission-powered, they had to be larger than manty LACs.

Relax wrote:

Belial666 wrote:War of Honor, attack on "Tequila" system. 3 Aviary-class CLACs unleash 778 Cimeterres. Since the original Cimeterres were fusion-powered rather than fission-powered, they had to be larger than manty LACs.

PROLOGUE AAC, 1st paragraph

3 Aviary class CLAC's dropped off "nearly" 600 LAC's...

~200.

AAC, BoMA, Home Fleet engagement 16 CLAC = just over three thousand RHN LAC's. If it were 225 x 16 it would be 3600 RHN LAC's. Hardly "just over" 3000. He seems to have retconned that 778/3 CLAC's. *Note* I did not look up the Tequila system battle in WoH.

...

What certainly is true at least by the time of AAC, RHN CLAC's carry sub 200 LAC's that should mass around 30,000tons.

Weird Harold wrote:All we can really say is that RHN CLAC have around an average 200 LACs ready to launch. We can't say whether that is a readiness rate of 100% or only 80%.

Given what we know of RHN maintenance, I kind of doubt that they run anything like 100% readiness.

Relax wrote:Even incompetents at maintenance are going to be at 100% readiness for the biggest mother of all battles.

Belial666 wrote:It's nearly Christmas again so it's time for me to post another one of my ideas;

1) The latest pre-grand-alliance Havenite LACs were nearly 40 kilotons, right?
2) Manticoran LACs of the same period were around 20 kilotons, right?
3) The largest pre-grand-alliance Havenite CLACs could carry 250+ of their larger LACs, right?

This means that with the current tech merging one could design a decent CLAC-type ship with 200 LAC bays and several Keyhole-analogs (one KH2 masses as much as 3 Havenite LACs). And then have each one of said 200 LACs it carries basically be a mantie-tech LAC with an additional 18 kilotons of capital missile box launchers, whether built-in, limpeted or otherwise.



1) LAC's pre-launch, load up on launchers.

2) Fight begins. Maximum controllable salvos launched at minimum possible intervals for control shifts. Say, 1000 missiles each at 20 second intervals.

3) 200 LACs can bring to bear defensively 1600 CM tubes and 1200 PDLCs. That's 8 times more than an Invictus-class podnought.

4) Fight over, LACs and unused box launchers are packed up again.

Weird Harold wrote:

Relax wrote:Even incompetents at maintenance are going to be at 100% readiness for the biggest mother of all battles.

Not if they can't get the parts. If your LAC is going to turn into a ball of plasma if you try to fake it and light the fusion reactor without fixing it, you're not going to get any brownie points for being at 100% readiness.

Relax wrote:Don't be absurd