RFC's take on what the Royal Torch Navy might need...

SharkHunter wrote:This ship's job would purely be ONLY as a force-carrier and a small amount of long range tactical support at ranges of maybe 25-35MM km from the LAC and assault ship targets and presumably stealthed and in a direction where they're not likely to be in the line of fire or ambush range under any normal circumstances.

Then again it's only a hypothetical and whether the RTN would want that set of capabilities or a shipyard would agree to build it in the time available is another breed of cat altogether.

Essentially that doesn't require an armored hull. You could do this with a freighter conversion. This has obvious drawbacks, but also a lot of advantages. Like not requiring a real naval design team (one you don't have) to spend two years designing your ship and then requiring someone else's military construction yard that will build it for you.

kzt wrote:

SharkHunter wrote:This ship's job would purely be ONLY as a force-carrier and a small amount of long range tactical support at ranges of maybe 25-35MM km from the LAC and assault ship targets and presumably stealthed and in a direction where they're not likely to be in the line of fire or ambush range under any normal circumstances.

Then again it's only a hypothetical and whether the RTN would want that set of capabilities or a shipyard would agree to build it in the time available is another breed of cat altogether.

Essentially that doesn't require an armored hull. You could do this with a freighter conversion. This has obvious drawbacks, but also a lot of advantages. Like not requiring a real naval design team (one you don't have) to spend two years designing your ship and then requiring someone else's military construction yard that will build it for you.

And since it is a freighter, it may well be able to drop into a Manpower system, drop its LACs and then procced leisurely in at around 150gs, while the stealthed LACs move in at about 400. By the time the freighter arrives at the station/orbit, the situation is well in hand.

--snipping--

fallsfromtrees wrote:

kzt wrote:Essentially that doesn't require an armored hull. You could do this with a freighter conversion. This has obvious drawbacks, but also a lot of advantages. Like not requiring a real naval design team (one you don't have) to spend two years designing your ship and then requiring someone else's military construction yard that will build it for you.

And since it is a freighter, it may well be able to drop into a Manpower system, drop its LACs and then proceed leisurely in at around 150gs, while the stealthed LACs move in at about 400. By the time the freighter arrives at the station/orbit, the situation is well in hand.

Total agreement on all points, but there's two thoughts that negated the HMAMC approach to me altogether, besides survivability 1) H-Space speeds require a mil-spec compensator to get those RTN forces where they need to be quickly, and 2) The cost of a freighter conversion into the right size range including all of the support requires a civilian/military combined shipyard, and the added time and expense to retool to do the conversion are more than a fully military hull would be.

Once whichever mil-spec ship gets close, they can drop down to freighter speeds and play mouse just like Hexapuma, Gauntlet, Wayfarer, etc. have been doing for the whole series, using pirate swatting style fakery anyway.

Something like sending in a "we wanna trade" legation now that the big bad Manties are hogging the wormholes", if y'all will sign right here we can have our first 2mm ton freighters here a T-month from Tuesday... because said legation got the on-the-ground intel they needed to attack a slaver installation on the planet or whatever.

Shortly after arrival of course, the captain of the revealed military ship in their midst also reveals "oh, and by the way... your planet is now under new management, not the OFS lackeys who actively tolerated and abetted that slaver operation. Those fellers stopped breathing an hour ago for various gruesome reasons that we may have to lather rinse and repeat until you agree".

You don't need a yard to peel off hull plates and install internal bracing and power feeds You need someone to create a plan and people who can follow them, but essentially you are mounting elements of a prebuilt modular LAC base on a ship. Having the resources of a fleet repair ship would be really nice, but I'm not sure that is required.

Now if you really want the ship to have military grade screen and drives that will require a yard. It also requires a lot more money and design work. It is likely to require a new ship built from scratch, and last I heard even a standard freighter was a whole lot of money, much less one that has the drive system of an SD in it. SD scale drives require military scale crews, so now you need an engineering section of hundreds of, not a dozen, and who exactly is paying for this monstrosity?

...actually (new thread direction?)

Two thoughts. One is that Hauptan has to be pissed like nobody's business at the MAlign, and has backed the ASL better than anyone else. I'm not arguing that it would come to small change but...

Suppose Hauptman orders up an Atlas liner conversion to RTN specs. It's already mil spec in terms of speed, has missile tubes (no idea how many missiles though...) mounts a decent tactical suite, and could easily handle LACs, as it took the rest of Wayfarer's as personnel transfer vehicles.

I'd imagine they use good size passenger shuttles/lifeboat bays that might be able to be resized up to act and multipurposed (say a pair of shuttles per lac per bay?), and after that pretty much the only thing left to give it comparable firepower to say a Roland DD would be limpeted DDM pod control.

That would be one helluva Torch Marine expeditionary transport.
I'd bet Captain Fuchien wouldn't mind getting a bit of her own back, although instead of the Peeps, it's the Manpower's operations or sponsor's they'd be hitting.

A big shuttle is 500 tons. A small LAC is 20,000 tons. It's like up-sizing an F-150 with a 1000 pound capacity bed to an F-150 with a 40,000 pound bed capacity. Those tend to have 18 wheels and won't fit in your garage even if you give it both spaces.

Does Erehwon (or Haven or Maya) have older, but serviceable, missile colliers similar to Bachfisch's Pirate's Bane or Ambuscade ?

Pirate's Bane did not have a huge crew and the armaments were well hidden.

Only question is could assault shuttles hide in one of the boatbays ?

-- Stewart

kzt wrote:A big shuttle is 500 tons. A small LAC is 20,000 tons. It's like up-sizing an F-150 with a 1000 pound capacity bed to an F-150 with a 40,000 pound bed capacity. Those tend to have 18 wheels and won't fit in your garage even if you give it both spaces.

While I agree in principle, over at the wikia it has an RMN Kamerling system control cruiser (a CL) able to hold 3 companies of Marines in around 250K Ktons; an Atlas is listed as being around 1MM K-Tons. As has been said, peeling plating and doing conversion work is alot easier on a civilian ship than a military hull, and with three and a half times more tonnage to play with, it seems like an Atlas would be a usable "shell" for conversion given that it already has most of the mil=spec abilities already in play.

stewart wrote:Does Erehwon (or Haven or Maya) have older, but serviceable, missile colliers similar to Bachfisch's Pirate's Bane or Ambuscade ?

Pirate's Bane did not have a huge crew and the armaments were well hidden.

Only question is could assault shuttles hide in one of the boatbays ?

-- Stewart

Maya - no They had no navy to speak of until now.

Haven - Yes, they use fleet trains heavily, but they are using their existing ships.

Erewhon - probably, but maybe not. Erewhon isn't the expedition type. Even though they assisted the RMN in the 1st war, and sent 12 DNs to join White Haven's 8th fleet, it was a RMN fleet, most likely with RMN fleet train. Erewhon usually likes to encourage others to do it's dirty work for it, so may not have an expedition support structure. I would suspect that the fleet train they do have is a small one compared proportionally to the RMN or RHN.

We've seen Heavy cargo shuttles over 1000 tons, so a 600 ton assault shuttle should fit easily.

SharkHunter wrote:

kzt wrote:A big shuttle is 500 tons. A small LAC is 20,000 tons. It's like up-sizing an F-150 with a 1000 pound capacity bed to an F-150 with a 40,000 pound bed capacity. Those tend to have 18 wheels and won't fit in your garage even if you give it both spaces.

While I agree in principle, over at the wikia it has an RMN Kamerling system control cruiser (a CL) able to hold 3 companies of Marines in around 250K Ktons; an Atlas is listed as being around 1MM K-Tons. As has been said, peeling plating and doing conversion work is alot easier on a civilian ship than a military hull, and with three and a half times more tonnage to play with, it seems like an Atlas would be a usable "shell" for conversion given that it already has most of the mil=spec abilities already in play.

To get that kind of internal volume, you'd be ripping up all the very hard armor and rearranging everything inside.* Freighters get to be internal LAC carriers because they're mostly just empty space inside. CLAC's get to be internal LAC carriers because they're designed from the beginning that way. And in both cases, it's because they're a lot larger than 1m tons.

Artemis could support LAC's kind-of externally - she could run shuttles to and from them, and bring them in close to hyper them up or down. It's much the same emergency support any large ship can offer LAC's. It's not nothing, mind you, but it's awkward as all get out for regular operations. It's not a basis for supposing that you can get a proper CLAC with a 1m ton warship and a few weeks and bucks in a yard - or even a few months and a whole lot of bucks.

Even that smaller CLAC brought up originally is likely to be much larger than 1m, and it's likely to be vastly less efficient for LAC carriage or far weaker defensively - or both - than the DN-scale CLAC's. The LAC bays may extend out of the hull, for instance, leaving it with trivial armor. For the RTN, that may well be acceptable - they may feel they can count on keeping their CLAC that far from danger, given what they are targeting. It'd make me cringe, but for their operations specifically, maybe it'd be acceptable.

* I assume the Atlas liners have armor similar to older BC's too. If not, then that doesn't apply so much. On the other hand, they're specifically designed for luxury passage, so converting them to CLAC's (or much of anything else) would mean wasting a lot of money spend on chandeliers and platinum-lined toilets. Starting from scratch, or a freighter hull, gets to be more appealing.