Trade Protection and Use of Captured Units

As a 'protection of maritime trade guy' (that's my PhD subject-area and my professional expertise area), I have been interested in Weber's trade protection narrative thread in the series. It's obviously only as deep as the plot needs and is also obviously based on a working knowledge of 18th to early 19th century RN experience, what is so unusual is that it exists at all and so broadly as a theme throughout the series.

I lurk a little here and have been following the discussion re these captured units with some interest. What is notable is that the discussion has been rather one-dimensional.

As the author notes, the ships are tactically obsolete as capital ships. That does most certainly not mean they are useless, especially considering the requirements of the 'Talbott Sector'.

Note that any interim enemy strategy must be a commerce raiding strategy.

First, let me deal with the auxiliaries.
3 Repair ships - a repair ship is a repair ship. Buy in to service and base at Spindle.
2 ammunition ships - same. Store the ammunition, free modern ammo even if obsolete = training ammunition.
24 stores ships - same, but bundle them with 'Fleet Units' (see below)

Light warships (16 BC, 12 CA, 23 CL, 18 DD)
All are valuable as trade protection and anti-piracy units if manned by local forces. These may be the most valuable vessels in the short term as they can relieve a much more modern first-class unit for these secondary and tertiary functions. Note carefully that they are modern units of obsolete tactical type due to being built to an obsolete tactical doctrine.

Note that a standard use of tactically outdated capital ships which are still capable of operational use lies in trade protection. Now, all older ships are manpower intensive, and in the case of a force so winnowed as in this series, there is not the slightest chance of manning these ships.

That also does not matter.

That there is a large uniform class of 48 technologically modern capital ships also matters. This obviates the argument of 'use obsolescent Manticoran/Havenite SD's'. These will have very different wear and mod states, and won't be available in such large class numbers of standardised, unworn ships.

The obvious use for all these ships lies in the secondary uses of trade protection and training. This is extremely useful in the very poor 'Talbott Sector' as they can't afford to buy modern ships. These ships are all modern in the sense of their technology and equipment, but they were built to a now-obsolete tactical doctrine. Therefore they are quite worthless to any first class navy, so they will not be bought in. But there is nothing wrong with their systems, engines, weapons etc, these are modern units in that respect, not century-old, worn-out cast-offs. They have not seen any hard war service either (war service ages a ship a 2-3 times the normal rate).

That means they can be transferred for negligible cost to the system defence forces as training vessels also capable of convoy escort.

This means that minor system defence forces can be sold these vessels at a dollar each for use as the essential training ships needed to bootstrap their people. They have immense life support (say about 10,000 people each) and can be partially stripped while retaining ample weaponry for convoy escort purposes. Partial stripping liberates power and volume for limited upgrade, and that can be done locally as well. Their low accel is no issue when escorting freighters or doing in-system training deployments, their obsolete 'training missiles' are no issue when doing convoy escort in a grav wave as no missiles can be used there anyway.

That said, they do need some upgrade. Their own EW is well made, it can be retained and given a software upgrade.
An additional modern EW pack is required.
Their short-ranged missile systems are OK for training and against pirates, but for convoy protection they need a modern cruiser-style capability. One based on the latest Havenite battlecruiser system or Nike-type Mk16 MDM equivalents should suffice for, say, 28 tubes. Leave 4 original tubes for obsolete short-range training missiles.
Energy weapons. They have ample, delete the 24 lasers, leave the grasers.

This leaves 24 stations stripped, add the 16 counter-missile and 32 point defence stations (72 stations) which must be upgraded and you have a major manpower saving and ample power and volume to do a standard upgrade pack using Nike-standard systems. Getting 50 countermissile tubes and 60 point defence clusters (per Nike) should be no issue there on a 6.8MT hull.

Manpower requirements should drop by at about half and you want to be careful not to drop them too far. You need a large crew (a third of them advanced trainees) plus accommodation for at least 2,000 additional basic trainees. Note that I am proposing a crew of 5,000 here, composed of ~2,000 + 1,000 advanced trainees, with a separate group of say 200 instructors and 2,000 basic trainees.

The 'fleet unit' proposed below is specifically intended to offer as many training pathways as quickly as possible, right across the training spectrum. Adding two extra SD in maintained reserve is specifically intended to add technician training depth as well as future growth capabilty. That the ships have some basic maintenance shortfalls (like manual hatch opeing systems!) is turned to training advantage by this model.

A raiding BC or CA force will not be able to engage a convoy with such a heavy escort for precisely the same reason KM Scharnhorst and KM Gneisnau refused to engage HX106 on 8 February 1941 the instant they saw the obsolete BB HMS Ramillies escorting it. They are raiders and cannot risk being damaged far from home.

Fleet Units

My Navy was formed 'instantly' by our acquisition of a Fleet Unit, a balanced fleet in miniature, in 1913. Our Fleet unit was a second class capital ship (HMAS Australia), 5 trade protection cruisers (2 were on loan), four destroyers and two subs.

Here I'd say they'd build a number of 'Fleet Units' and offer them to the respective governments as a 'peppercorn cost kickstarter force'. I suspect the whole cost to them will be less than that of a CL for the whole package, trhe prestige is there, and they have a very valid local military function - protecting their trade.

4 Scientist class (1 as a stationary orbital basic training facility, 1 already upgraded as a TS/heavy escort, 2 in maintained reserve for later local conversion to TS/heavy escort for 3 total)

1 BC & 1 CA - both for local conversion into convoy escorts (this allows a 2-ship squadron of a SD and a BC/CA)

2 CL & 1-2 DD - for immediate use as local anti-piracy craft without significant modification

Local LAC SQN (Manticoran manned) work with the CL/DD to improve local training capability.

The more Solarian ships captured, the more 'standardised' heavy training/trade protection escorts are available, and the faster the manpower training pipelines can be expanded.

Sure, you can spend more money and get a better heavy escort from these hulls, and doubtless some systems will, but they can be quite cheap and austere and still get a highly efficient heavy escort/TS. people won't waste the resources on excessively upgrading these vessels if they have the money to buy a first-class modern cruiser. That will quickly become the next 'local politics prestige point'

Anyway, that's the take of an experienced maritime trade protection guy.


Cheers: Mark

Your idea trips up where countless others trip up: refitting requires yards, hardware, and personnel that Manticore does not have available. It is all well and good to talk about refitting Solarian SDs to some kind of Manticoran standard, but a SD refit is a massive effort akin to refitting the USS Missouri to fire cruise missiles. The investment needed to do such a widescale refit would be much better used rebuilding Manticore's yards and building new construction warships.

refitting the SDs is out. now and forever. about the only use if for training ships and even then you could get much the same level of training on a smaller ship which would have vastly smaller personnel and maintenance requirements.

use the screen for convoy protection is almost sound. but again has issues. personnel being the biggest. a pre roland/wolfhound destoryers has about 300 crew as i recall and each one of those that is mothballed frees up crew for 3 rolands/wolfhounds.

Solly designs are even more manpower intensive, and while the plan is to use talbot cluster locals, if they have learned enough to be able to help operate a solly DD/CL/HC/BC then they know enough to help man a manty DD/CL/HC/BC. if they mange to train a couple of hundred they can put 1 solly destroyer back in service or 3 rolands/wolfhounds, probably even more given the likely bigger crew the solly design used.

3 or more ships can be in more places and guard more convoys then 1.

marklbailey wrote:That there is a large uniform class of 48 technologically modern capital ships also matters.

There is textev that SLN maintenance isn't up to RMN standards; by implication the SLN (especially Battle Fleet) is far more concerned with appearance than functionality.

The smaller ships may well be as useful as you project, and those drawn from Frontier Fleet might even be in relatively decent condition. The majority of captured SLN ships are of a design that is several centuries old and in a state of questionable repair. Manticore has far more pressing problems than trying to bring them up to serviceable condition and manning them.

And let's not forget that for "coast guard" duties (which constitutes the majority of anti-piracy work in the honorverse), LACs and missile pods are perfectly adequate solutions.

Then there's the problem that there aren't anywhere near enough people in the Talbott systems trained as spacers. Systems like Rembrandt or Spindle may be able to scrape together a couple crews for a DD or CL, but other systems count themselves lucky if they're able to field a few LACs.

Actually, the box launchers for cruise missiles were pretty easy. What would be comparable is replacing the 16" turrets with 18" turrets.

kzt wrote:Actually, the box launchers for cruise missiles were pretty easy. What would be comparable is replacing the 16" turrets with 18" turrets.

While the box launchers were easy, the often revised plan of the replacement of a 16" turret with an internal missile launcher (Regulus, Tartar, Standard, or VLS) was repeatedly nixed due to the cost (roughly 1/2 the cost of a new build per turret modified.), and would probably be more difficult than a properly designed 18" turret.

Honestly, they probably should have modified the Hawaii or the New Jersey (both ~80% complete iirc) into missile ships.

marklbailey wrote:As a 'protection of maritime trade guy' (that's my PhD subject-area and my professional expertise area), I have been interested in Weber's trade protection narrative thread in the series. It's obviously only as deep as the plot needs and is also obviously based on a working knowledge of 18th to early 19th century RN experience, what is so unusual is that it exists at all and so broadly as a theme throughout the series.

I lurk a little here and have been following the discussion re these captured units with some interest. What is notable is that the discussion has been rather one-dimensional.

As the author notes, the ships are tactically obsolete as capital ships. That does most certainly not mean they are useless, especially considering the requirements of the 'Talbott Sector'.

<snip>

Cheers: Mark

Hi Mark, good to hear your input on the subject - especially coming from an expert in the field.

As for the one-dimensional comment - do remember discussions on "what to do with the captured ships" has been going on since ~2007 when At All Costs came out and this forum was just a dream (We used Baen's forum at the time, and that forum has had updated it's software (deleting old discussions) several times since.) Passing out the light units to the Talbott SDFs has been discussed several times, in addition to why we havn't seen a greater presence of said navies in scuffles with the SLN. Many ideas have been bandied back and forth, and most of what has been seen in the last year or 2 have involved "new and innovative ideas" for the SDs

New Tuscany, who didn't join the Talbott Quadrant government has a fairly large navy - the one Lt Cruiser shown was "one of the newest, most powerful light cruisers" in the NT inventory, suggesting at least 2 dozen destroyers and CLs in their navy.

We could imagine Rembrandt and the other former members of the Rembrandt league had similar sized navies (a Rembrandt DD was mentioned), but nothing larger than a CL was mentioned in any of the SDFs (though Monica had 3 CAs, iirc), so CAs are either non-existant or rare in the TQ. So giving one of those navies anything larger than a CL will eat up enormous % of the existing manpower of any SDF. Few will have the manpower to man 1 SD even if they strip their entire navy.

I, for one, was an early advocate for upgrading the SDFs to a "uniform standard" using the SLN ships - however over the course of many discourses we proved it probably would not happen. To begin with, David has several times mentioned that the SLN ships are not uniformly updated - once, looking at a DD flotilla, a pov speaker was unable to get a type count due to the many types of radars SLN ships may mount, even though the SLN only has 2 official DD classes in use. When the sorry state of the maintenance of Crandall's SDs was mentioned, it showed (along with a history of only 5 deployments in 250 years) that the SLN BF focused on depot maintenance over shipborn maintenance.

All this, (and other details) showed that there was no "standard" ship to hand out, and everything would require maintenance - extensive maintenance - before use. Some of the SDs could be 250 years old - and outdated in every form, in a hodgepodge state of update, the basic design was built in at least 6 shipyards, and was updated multiple times, so some could have parts last built a century ago - and it's neighbor was built last week and bares only has a cursory resemblance to the other.

Also, it is very important to pay attention to the time line. The end of the last book is ~September 1922. The beginning of Shadows of Saganami (where the Hexapuma went to the Talbott Sector) was in May of 1920. The Hexapuma returned to Manticore just 2 weeks prior to the Battle Of Manticore in July 1921. The Battle of Spindle occurred pretty much simultaneously.

At this time, the RMN was punching out modern ships on an assembly line. over 650 DDM and Enhanced drive missile hyper combatants were produced in just 21 months lading up to May 1, 1921. We estimate the RMN could have produced another 500 ships in addition to the ~200 SD(p)s under construction in the 10 months between May 1921 and March 1922, when the RMN yards were destroyed. So the thinking in the RMN up to that point was that all Legasy RMN forces AND TQ forces could be replaced with first line RMN hardware before the end of 1923.

During this time, before Oyster Bay, Every RMN construction asset was aimed at building modern units or keeping the current navy functional. After March 1922, the remaining assets were focused on reconstruction or maintaining the navy.

Nothing is available for repairing or maintaining SLN hardware.

In addition David said the RMN doesn't want to create a caste system with the navy - where TQ SDFs get TQ levels of training and TQ levels of ships - the RMN wants 1 tier of navy and will train to it. Giving the SLN ships to the TQ SDFs, while a massive jump in capabilities, definitely gives them inferior hardware to the rest of the RMN.... Which is something to avoid.

I hope all this makes sense, I'm distilling 10 years of discussions into 1 post and missing tons of points and counter points in the process.

I was an advocate of trying to find a good use and I reluctantly came to the position that SEM has no internal use for them at all. The only viable use is to give them to other people who they want to support but for some reason won't/can't formally sign up with them.

TQ got an outrageous number of LACS deployed and they are capable of providing effective system defense against anything other than a SD squadron. The light RMN units can provide some sort of protection against hypercapable pirates and the remaining RMN heavy units can deal with any reasonable threat from anyone's SDs.

If you want to give them SDs, there were at least a hundred RMN SDs in mothballs that are a far better fit. I'd assume there are also old DDs and CLs in mothballs too. Activating them might be huge bear.

marklbailey wrote:As the author notes, the ships are tactically obsolete as capital ships. That does most certainly not mean they are useless, especially considering the requirements of the 'Talbott Sector'.

Eh, another thing that the author has noted (and I've been something of a broken record on) is that using a capital ship as anything other than a capital ship is extremely inefficient in the Honroverse. If a capital ship is useless as a capital ship, it's useless, period.