JenBurdoo2 wrote:Just finished Cauldron of Ghosts and am a little confused about the frigates. I have the impression there are two different types -- one that's basically an upgraded LAC and one that's a smaller destroyer. The smaller destroyer is the one I'm interested in. I'm interested in its size and capabilities -- this goes for the older types like those that were used before they became obsolete, too. What were their crew sizes and tonnages? How did they compare to destroyers? What were the ones that founded the Manticoran Navy like? The ones from CoG seem to be large enough to hold shuttles that can hold up to 30 marines, so they sound more "conventional" than the LAC style.
Is a frigate intermediate in size, crew and firepower between a hyper-courier boat and a destroyer?
Is there a description of HMS Osprey, one of Honor's early assignments, anywhere?
For Osprey, look in HoS at the Noblesse and drop about 8 or 10 thousand tons; fewer weapons, but about the same crew (300 for Troubadour in HotQ), for reasons of endurance.
Conventional frigates like the
John Brown class are smaller, conventional warships; they are designed with a hammerhead for mounting weapons; beam and missile armaments are mostly broadside; with sidewalls and point defenses. Although they might be the size of a pre-war destroyer, a frigate is supposed to have the long range cruise endurance of a cruiser, so you need a larger crew, and there is a lot less space inside for expendables like missiles.
The
Nat Turner had spinal mount grasers; they also used some sort of magazine similar to the rotary magazine for the Shrike; but they are also the downgraded "export" version of Manticoran systems, and there is no textev that they have off-bore tech. They do have ftl comms equivalent to what Erewhon was using.
Rob
Text: Cauldron of Ghost, chapter 11.
Cauldron of Ghosts wrote:Frigates were simply too small and fragile to have any significant role in modern naval combat. The roles the frigate had once filled were now filled by destroyers in any navy which aspired to be anything more than a system-defense force, and even destroyers were experiencing a steady upward creep in size and tonnage. There was still a role for small warships—indeed, a larger one than they had played in the better part of a century—but that role was played by LACs, not frigates, thanks to the revolution in warship technology which had come out of the Havenite Wars, especially where LACs were concerned.
<snip
Up until very recently, Torch’s tiny navy consisted entirely of the fifteen frigates built for it by the Hauptman Cartel: seven of the John Brown class and eight of the newer Nat Turner class. The John Brown class were modernized conventional frigates while the Nat Turner class were the more fancy hyper-capable Shrike equivalents.
That situation had changed radically when Luiz Rozsak handed Torch the heavy cruiser Spartacus and all the other captured warships which had surrendered to him after the Battle of Torch, but that gift—magnificent though it had been—was something of a problem in its own right. The primary reasons the Royal Torch Navy had consisted solely of frigates prior to the battle were fairly straight-forward. First, they were the cheapest hyper-capable ships Torch could afford, and even that had been possible only because of the Hauptman Cartel’s generosity. Second, (and even more importantly), they made ideal training platforms.
