As you can see on the finished product (link below), those are hangar bays, yes. https://fractalsponge.net/?p=3737
The ship is 880m long and looks a lot less stealth corvette-y when finished.
For your second point I would like to refer you to the thread started by StormCommando, below.
I can’t remember where answers are for the first, but I do remember carrying capacity being discussed on one of the threads.
Hello there
5 years ago
It can’t be classified as a frigate according to the Anaxes war college system. By its length it is classified as a heavy cruiser
You may classify it however you like. I write game stats for a D6 forum, and if I end up really liking the finished product, I’ll likely end up classifying this ship as a Heavy Cruiser or Light Star Destroyer on that stat. That doesn’t require fractalsponge to alter his classification system to fit mine, and the fandom is more than big enough for both perspectives to exist with room to spare.
On top of that, the Anaxes System is crap. To quote a guy on the D6 forum (who is also a History Professor), the Anaxes System has little military value beyond impressing politicians and uninformed civilians. Form follows function, and size is a subset of form. A system that classifies vessels purely by size fails to take into account the far more important classification of mission.
You’re welcome. If I might make a suggestion, simply telling the man he’s wrong on his own website might not get you the response you’re hoping for. A better alternative would be:
Hey, fractalsponge, I’ve noticed that your ship classification system doesn’t adhere to the Anaxes system. Why is that, and can you explain the system you do use and the reasoning behind it?
Yeah I’m new here and too naive so thanks a lot for the suggestion.
StormCommando
5 years ago
Fantastic, have been looking forward to this since the first preview! It’s an instant favourite. The protruding hunchback bridge, the hull’s low angle, and broad sweeping wedge-shape gives it a real elegance. Going by the bridge I am guessing it’s between 750 and 850 metres long. Reactor draw… 2e24w?
Nice, thanks. If it’s missing the huge carrying capacity of the Acclamator, but uses roughly the same chassis, only enlarged, it must have room for more reactors where those big hangar bays are? Perhaps two ‘engine reactors’ which can also contribute to main power generation and channel that energy to weapons and shields if needed.
In my hypothetical design development, this design was first, and it actually has a lot more volume and a lot more power than an Acclamator. The Acclamator design took this as a starting point, swapped the reactor for something a lot lower powered but a lot cheaper and with a lot higher endurance, and started cutting away a lot of mass in terms of weapons, armor, and protected hull volume. That allowed them to drop a few main engines to maintain performance on a smaller and cheaper powerplant (and to further cut costs for numbers/expendability), and they used the internal space liberated by secondary reactors and such along with some of the old hangar volume to carry their troops and dropships.
Mr. legends is best canon
5 years ago
I wonder why capital ships and smaller craft don’t use droid brains or computers to fire their weapons than actual people since droids can react a lot quicker than organic and shooting things don’t require a lot of experience for a droid
In Star Wars, droids are often regarded as sub-sentient entities, with organics having better instincts and judgement than droids, even at the expense of faster reaction time. Although this can be build up with time, droids that don’t go through regular memory wipes will develop personalities away from the baseline (refer to Artoo’s attitude) and the last thing you need is a turret that feels like it doesn’t feel like shooting anymore or that the best solution to solve the conflict is to do friendly fire. And if you choose to endure less effective gunnery droids over that risk, periodic memory wipes of all droids onboard will add to the ship’s upkeep cost.
Mr. Legends is best canon
5 years ago
I know about the nebula class sd I meant design was
Mr. Legends is best canon
5 years ago
Totally unrelated to this ship, but what would happen if some engineering decided to combine the designs of a mon calamari ship and an imperial one? Like how effective would a ship with redunted mon calamari shields and have the firepower of an ssd with point defence be? (I know ssd don’t have point defence, I meant it as a part of the mon calamari ship)
EU has Mon Cal equipping their ships with three times as many shield generators as Imperial ships do. This mean more redundancy, more shield strength, and high shield recharge. Mon Cal ship could have one shield generator be active while the other two stand by. Then take the first offline to recharge and bring the second online. Repeat for third. This would be one way how they do it.
Seems like it makes sense. The key to making it all hold together is that there are tradeoffs in design, otherwise everyone would put the best of everything into the same hull.
Want more protection? Great, take away offensive power or acceleration or something else. There’s no free lunch. Going all in on durability means that you are explicitly trading off the ability to better kill other big ships. For a starfighter-centric force like the Rebellion that sorta makes sense – tank while the fighters go…do something. But it’s not going to work all the time, and there are just some things that they won’t be able to do well at all with a strategy like that. Balance is important. Sort of like how the High Seas Fleet was tough to kill but couldn’t actually win, and so was strategically not at all worth the money.
The rebel fleet served a pretty similar purpose to the High Seas Fleet by forcing the Empire into a reactive strategic position. The mechanics of hyperspace travel make this posture far more successful.
The Alliance would present the Imperials with a sufficient critical mass of fishtanks, which would then compel the Imperials into concentrating their own fleet assets to protect vital worlds, commerce lanes, and industrial sites instead of dispersing to every settlement. The Rebel fleet-in-being would then allow lighter Rebel assets to strike at the worlds left behind by Imperial concentration, and gain a massive propaganda victory by declaring that the Empire had abandoned them. Pretty nifty.
Eh. The Germans forced the British to maintain a distant blockade instead of a close one and forced the British to invest far more resources into superdreadnoughts to counter the High Seas Fleet. They also allowed German surface commerce raiders to do a lot more damage by not permitting the Grand Fleet to disperse to chase them down. Perhaps they even helped the Ottomans to hold Gallipoli by preventing the British from detaching squadrons of modern battleships to attack Istanbul. Plus, they beat up the Russian Baltic Fleet off the coast of Riga and supported land operations with reasonable effectiveness. Not the worst investment.
No, a miserable investment. The blockade was massively effective even though distant. The surface raiders were all hunted down without dispersing the Grand Fleet (which was ridiculous overkill to bag a handful of cruisers). Building, manning, and maintaining the HSF, expanding the ports and the Kiel Canal, cost the equivalent of lavish coast defenses that could have done largely the same thing at the fleet, and probably the equivalent of at least another army formation (in manpower alone), as well as upgraded artillery for the army. The Russian Baltic Fleet even pre-Tsushima did not warrant anything like a battleline explicitly conceived to rival the foremost naval power.
Without the HSF, maybe the army would’ve managed to reach Paris. Without the HSF, maybe the naval arms race would not have driven the British into the Entente. And definitely without the HSF, the mass of demoralized and starving sailors would not have been the spark for the revolution that brought down the Kaiser. That perhaps is the greatest reward for Wilhelm and Tirpitz’s hubris.
Well if we’re just going to throw hypotheticals out there, without the HSF, Jackie Fisher might have been able to put the Baltic Project into action and land a combined Anglo-Russian army only 100 miles from Berlin. Without the threat of the HSF, British monitors with 18-inch guns would have slowly reduced German shore batteries and allowed bombardments of Bremen, Kiel, Wilhelmshaven and Hamburg along with the U-Boat pens. Without the HSF, the British would have been able to reduce their own ludicrous naval expenses and put another field army into the B.E.F. Without the HSF, the army would have still violated Belgian neutrality and drawn the Brits in.
Even with another German field army on the books, the limit to the German advance at the Marne wasn’t total national manpower. It was the ability to reinforce, resupply, and coordinate the existing formations at the end of a long and non-motorized supply chain on torn-up and narrow roads. The westernmost German field army was operating 100 kilometers away from the nearest German railhead, requiring resupply by starving horses which were dying by the hour, while the French defenders were less than 10 miles from their own railhead.
Admittedly, the mutiny was pretty devastating, but by 1918 the war was lost and Germany was a tinderbox. The spark that brought social collapse would have come from somewhere else if not the fleet.
The Schlieffen plan working scenarios are very hypothetical true, but the arms race contributed in no small part to the alliance network that enabled a general European war.
Coast defenses don’t require giant battlefleets sitting in harbor doing nothing. You know the British anti-invasion plan? Huge masses of destroyers and submarines, not really the battleships. That’s why they had the largest submarine fleet in the world. Yeah you could do bullshit coast bombardments like Hipper’s east coast nonsense but that wasn’t really going to do anything strategic. Monitors managed to knockout not a single heavy coastal gun in Flanders in the entire war. A look at WW2 naval bombardments also suggest that bombardment alone would’ve have a hard time killing heavy artillery. How many submarines do you think could’ve been built on HSF money, even with fortifications thrown in? That was the one strategic naval contribution by the Kaisermarine that might have actually won the war.
Germany lost in large part because of the blockade. This is the blockade that happened despite the HSF existing and managing to do nothing. The British AND the Germans ran into serious financial difficulty with their mutually-reinforcing naval programmes – but no agreement could be reached before the war. For the British it was RN or nothing – they were not going to massively expand their army just because the money was available because that was not their historical national strategy. For the Germans, the army was absolutely paramount, surrounded as they were by large land powers. They would have just built a defensive small craft navy and fortifications like Heligoland everywhere and still had a huge amount of manpower and money left over without the HSF. Most of that surplus would’ve definitely gone to army expenditures.
I think you discount the value of bombardments. Sure, the Scarborough raid was strategically meaningless, but it was conducted by a handful of battle-cruisers attacking a tertiary target for only a bit longer than an hour. Had three battle squadrons of the Grand Fleet been able to anchor off the coast of Wilhelmshaven and stay there for days, the devastation would be total.
In the closing days of WW2, small numbers of Allied battleships were able to bombard Japan with near impunity. In only a couple of attacks, several steel works, aluminum plants, railway yards, and aircraft factories were destroyed, resulting in months of lost production and a massive morale shock to the Japanese people. Perhaps not as decisive as the firebombing of Tokyo or the atomic bomb, but the bombardments were a notable contribution to Japanese surrender. They were similarly devastating off of Korea, Vietnam, and Beirut. There’s a reason why Congress wanted to retain the Iowas into the 21st century: land targets within range of battleship guns tend to stop existing.
The U-boats were more effective commerce raiders pound-for-pound, but their hypothetical success would be worthless if they were forced to stay in the North Sea and protect their bases, or if they departed and their bases and shipyards were shot up by the Grand Fleet’s battleships. Without battleships to contest the Heligoland Bight, British mine-layers could deny the very entrances to the Elbe and the Weser, preventing any submarines from even leaving the Reich.
The Russian lack of a modern battle line forced them to rely on submarines, torpedo boats, shore batteries and destroyers to hold their coast, and when faced with German combined arms anchored around a dozen dreadnoughts, the Russian coastal defenses collapsed. Battleships escorted by destroyers and sufficient minesweepers proved more than capable of reducing any coastal defense prior to air power, as long as they were handled competently.
From 2018 we can call the HSF stupid in hindsight, but with the information available at the day, it was not unreasonable. Tirpitz even got the endorsement of Bismarck himself to buy into the plan. How could they have possibly expected something like Room 40 to grant the ability for the British to read all their supposedly encrypted naval communication?
The Japan WW2 bombardments were conducted under total naval and aerial superiority against a beaten enemy. Fixed defenses alone are not the end all and be-all true, but it would be a comprehensive system with submarines and torpedo craft. Note that, say, the naval attack against Dakar failed (and don’t give me any BS about it being a half-complete Richelieu that stopped them – effectively she was a floating battery and not a working battleship). The level of superiority the Allies enjoyed over Japan in 1945 or on the beaches in Normandy in 1944 would just not have been the case in WWI unless Imperial Germany was already collapsing. The point is that for the cost of 30+ dreadnoughts and the infrastructure required to support them, Germany could have built hundreds of submarines and light craft backed by coastal defenses and a small battleline/cruiser force and still have come out ahead in resources. And we’re not talking stupid stuff like the Lindemann batterie or something – even the British stopped coast defense guns largely at the 9.2″ because it just wasn’t really worth it much above that. The intention was to use destroyers and submarines to support those lighter artillery and coastal fortifications.
As for the Iowas – using battleships for gun support in the 80s and as a prestige reaction to the Kirovs is a slightly different thing than thinking that battleship bombardments were EVER strategically decisive. As far as anchoring offshore for days – well yes if the fleet had comprehensively breached the coastal defense *system* that much, sure. But even if they did, a cursory analysis of bombardment efficacy at Normandy would show that it’s unlikely that it would’ve had the accuracy or effectiveness (let alone in WW1) to demolish major fixed defenses effectively. Air superiority was much more important for that and that sort of aerial power did not exist in WWI. Moon Sound also was not like storming the Bight, or for that matter bombarding Kronshtadt. At that point the Russian military was massively disorganized (this is after the tsarist government was deposed), and Moon Sound wasn’t actually a major fortress zone. But if we’re looking for contemporary examples, then sure, what was the naval force ratio at Gallipoli again? I recall many battleships sitting at anchor there offshore from their targets. And we all remember the glorious Allied conquest of Constantinople in 1915 don’t we?
Yeah, mines are great but only when in a defense network. Have you heard of the Orkney barrage? Hundred thousand mines that sank a half dozen boats over the war. We’re not talking unsweepable pressure mines in 1945 here. Old school horn-detonator minefields in isolation without artillery to defend them can be swept or bypassed to a certain extent. BUT if minelaying is used in concert with fixed defenses and surface forces guarding them they could be prohibitive against battlefleet attack without nearly the same cost as a comparable battlefleet. But if the money already went to dreadnoughts, then those defenses don’t get built, and those dreadnoughts get blockaded in harbor because they were too afraid to use them anyway.
Which goes back to what the HSF was really for: prestige. The military rationale of the fleet was stupid on its face: a continental land power with no meaningful overseas interests or serious naval tradition was going to try to outbuild the premier industrial and naval power of the world, one that had proved several times in living memory that it was not willing to countenance losing naval superiority at any cost (see Spencer and Northbrook programmes). And in no small part drove them into an alliance with the 3rd, 4th, and 5th major industrial and naval powers at the same time in order to counteract the move. Not surprisingly, they lost that building race quite badly (a lot lot lot worse if we look at anything but battleships), which might have been foreseen by just looking at the industrial costs.
None of this is to say that all battlefleets were useless or that coastal defenses are the way to win wars – they clearly aren’t because defense doesn’t alone win wars. The point is that the HSF was a diversion of resources from the only realistic way Germany was going to “win” WWI – on the ground. It didn’t and wasn’t going to breach the blockade and deterrence of naval attack can be done a lot cheaper, so what the hell was it for other than to show off?
Dakar as an example for the failure of naval firepower to breach coastal defenses is pretty meaningless when De Gaulle planned the whole operation expecting the Vichy side to surrender immediately, and then canceled futher amphibious landings because he didn’t want to shed the blood of Frenchmen fighting other French folks. The actual naval battle went generally in favor of the Allied Fleet despite the presence of the ludicrously well armored and armed shore battery Richelieu.
The Dardanelles campaign failed not because battleships couldn’t suppress the channel forts, but because they didn’t bring along enough military minesweepers with naval crews instead of civilian trawlers. Churchill, Keyes, and De Robeck wanted to press the attack, but Fisher and the Admiralty Board denied his request for lack of additional ships…. because they couldn’t be withdrawn from the North Sea due to the threat of the High Seas Fleet. Ambassador Morgenthau even reported that Ottoman and German command felt like they could only hold out for a few hours if the attack resumed on the 19th of March, and preparations were being made to abandon the city. Had a breach been made in the outer defenses, there would be nothing between the Entente fleet and Constantinople except for the Goeben, and we all know what the Queen Elizabeth would have done to her.
The Orkney barrage was ineffective, but it was mediocre because the density of mines per square kilometer was absurdly low. Mines laid right outside the U-Boat bases would be a different story had there been no German surface fleet to contest the minelaying operations. The U-boats were okay at commerce raiding, but they lead to disasters like the Lusitania that brought in the US. You said that the blockade was the thing that broke Germany’s ability to make war, and the HSF was the only thing that the Kaiser had with a chance to smash that blockade.
I’ll say it again: SIGINT at Room 40 allowed Britain to win the naval war. Had Alastair Denniston not decrypted every German naval command, including those for the Dogger Bank and Jutland sorties, (+the Zimmerman telegram), Von Pohl’s strategy of using qualitatively superior and concentrated German ships to pick off detached British fleet elements was a viable one. Sure, there was plenty of risk, but the potential for reward would be even greater.
If the Germans got a couple of decent engagements, the blockade would have been broken wide open to massive German advantage. We only remember the naval theater as indecisive because one side was reading the other side’s notes through the fog of war, and had near perfect information to not engage without a massive advantage.
Saying that the Germans shouldn’t have built battleships because the other side had a few more is like saying that Guderian shouldn’t have pushed to build panzers because the British/French had more. A smaller, well-handled force with a good doctrine always has a chance to prevail… unless the enemy has an insurmountable intelligence advantage.
Building the HSF for an actual military purpose would be like the British in 1890 suddenly deciding to build a huge land army to stage it in Denmark to threaten Berlin, because the Germans won’t do anything to contest that. It was based on a fundamentally flawed geostrategic premise. The Germans did NOT achieve strategic naval parity, didn’t get close, and were not going to, and were never going to be a position to attain it once an actual ground war started. Having the chance to win is well and good, but the real question is whether that chance is big enough to be worth the opportunity cost. It wasn’t even built to have the kind of qualitative superiority that the Japanese (unsuccessfully) attempted in their fleet designs leading up to the Pacific war with the US.
The blockade was a major contributor, not least to the hunger that led to the idle and demoralized HSF rebelling against the Kaiser, but the really proximal cause of loss was the defeat of the German field armies in the West. But even a major fleet victory by the HSF would not have suddenly opened a flood of supplies to Germany, since the British would still have had an overwhelming superiority on the oceanic routes, and the HSF would not have been able to escort convoys in, if Germany could even find major suppliers of food, nitrates, etc.
Really, one might have argued from the beginning that the Germans were in all likelihood going to lose against the Entente, because they were challenging an alliance that encircled them and had more industrial, financial, and manpower resources than they did. Perhaps if they had not provoked the British into joining the Entente largely by the building of the HSF, the entire thing might have been averted, or at least been reduced to a more manageable size for Germany. Once the attempt at the knockout blow in the West failed, it was in all likelihood going to end badly for the Germans. The HSF was a boondoggle that helped set those initial strategic odds, and contributed little to offsetting them once the war started.
I’d agree with your first point if the British didn’t try to do that exact thing. Fisher had the Courageous class built specifically for the purpose of supporting an amphibious landing on Germany’s Baltic coast to open up a new front. The only thing that stopped that from happening was Britain’s inability to knock out the HSF.
Sure, the Germans eventually lost in the west, but they lost not because their armies were encircled and destroyed, but because they started facing an overwhelming manpower disparity once Americans started arriving in force. You can blame the submarine force and its inherent indiscretion for that.
The Germans never ended up with Dreadnought parity, but from a political standpoint, there was reason to believe that the Liberal party in Parliament would hold off on further construction. The British came damn close to canceling several classes of dreadnoughts for budgetary reasons stemming from ideological deadlock. Even David Lloyd George and Churchill opposed certain naval construction, with the controversy and horse-trading surrounding the People’s Budget of 1909. The Germans had a decent reason to believe that their less egalitarian political process would allow them to commit to a longer-term program of naval construction.
While the German Naval Laws certainly didn’t help Anglo-German relations, the damage was done mostly by unforced diplomatic errors committed by Wilhelm at Tangier, Algeciras, and Agadir. How could Tirpitz or Bismarck have predicted that kind of folly?
With the food resources and freed-up manpower they secured in the east after Brest-Litovsk, had the Germans not antagonized the US into joining the war, it seems eminently likely that they would have been able to turn the Western Front stalemate into a negotiated peace settlement without major concessions. The ability of the High Seas Fleet to neutralize the Grand Fleet was precisely what the Germans needed to kickstart such negotiations. To make that happen, perhaps the Germans should have continued to focus on building dreadnoughts up to 1914 instead of redirecting output to incredibly politically counterproductive U-Boats.
That’s just the wrong order. The Baltic strategy was an proposal to break the Western stalemate. It’s quite different from trying to use a diplomatically counterproductive and strategically vapid use of resources in peacetime as a way to deter an opponent. There was an entire genre of invasion literature in Britain in the steam era dating from (at least) when the Prince de Joinville was talking about “steam bridges” under Louis Phillipe. There was a long history of massive building programmes in response to even perceived foreign attempts at parity, and large scale agitation for the same in the papers (Lord Beresford for one, but also others). Assuming that your opponent is foolish is bad strategy. Even had the Germans achieved temporary dreadnought parity that’s quite different from saying they would be able to *win* with that parity had war broken out, or that the British would go against their entire naval tradition and become passive when outnumbered.
Naval laws were also far from unique to Germany, and not intrinsically a strategy to beat foreign construction – they were a way to avoid having to fight parliamentary battles over funding again and again. They could result in a more powerful fleet, but the intention to outbuild an enemy was not the impetus for multi-year programming. The will to do so had to be there to begin with. Regardless of that political will, the simple infrastructure necessary to build these fleets were completely lopsided in favor of the British, one reason why apart from dreadnoughts the HSF (at least less than 2x difference!) was ridiculously outmatched in every other category. The RN had “fallen behind” by some measures previously against French construction in the late 19th century, but was then predictably able to leapfrog foreign construction because of the strength and capacity of their maritime industries.
Speaking of the wrong order, talking about submarines being unproductive is silly, just like saying the Baltic strategy showed that the British were planning to directly challenge Germany against its greatest strengths. Submarines were the most effective way for the Kaisermarine to decisively influence the war *once it had started.* The decision to build the HSF helped to precipitate that war. The HSF contributed little to the war once it began – and it was always a war that in the basic outlines the Germans were favored to lose. The Germans were badly outnumbered in submarines in 1914 – even had they not built any prewar they would not have been able to materially alter the basic building rate of dreadnoughts using those resources. Indeed by 1913-1914 they had effectively conceded dreadnought parity. The British entered the war approaching double German numbers of dreadnoughts built, building, requisitioned, and planned, not even counting the existing and planned French and Russian construction. The Statut Naval if 1912 alone would have added 20 odd dreadnoughts to Entente figures, and the Russians had 8 built or projected for the Baltic.
In terms of what was critical to Wilhemine Germany, naval power was there to deter attacks on the coast. That did not require the resources spent on the HSF. I don’t mention stopping a blockade – Germany would have had to build much more than the HSF to keep oceanic sealanes open against the RN because the British alone had the bases required to sustain major naval forces abroad, and had a comically lopsided advantage in cruisers and such able to interdict and protect trade (this was a dominant Admiralty strategic concern since the wars against Napoleon). Distant blockade of the North Sea had removed the ability to attrit the RN using the limited light forces available and basically made prewar German plans unworkable. The best way to prevent that kind of blockade was to detach Britain from the Franco-Russians, and the HSF was directly counterproductive to this diplomatic goal. One might (legitimately) argue that Tangier/Agadir etc would also not have had the same resonance with the British had the HSF not indicated a potential threat to Britain itself.
No one is proposing that the HSF would enable an invasion of Britain itself, but it did serve two critical purposes: limiting the actions of the Grand Fleet, and bringing the Entente to the negotiating table if tactical victories could be scored. Sure, sufficient investment into coastal torpedo boats, defensive submarines, minefields, and shore batteries could maybe prevent the Grand Fleet from leveling Kiel, but static defenses couldn’t hold the Grand Fleet in the North Sea the way the HSF could, even from their harbors. If the British had the complete freedom of movement, they could have committed far more modern ships to the Dardanelles operation, which came perilously close to success and subsequent Ottoman collapse.
In terms of sustained investment, the German economy by PPP was larger than the British one by 1910 and through 1913. The majority of British colonies were fiscal liabilities in that they required more expense to maintain and secure than they generated in tax revenue. While the Germans did maintain a larger land army, they absolutely could stay within a competitive distance of Britain in regards to naval spending. The French ships spent the whole war staring down Austria in the Mediterranean, while the Russians were trapped in the Baltic, wholly unable to coordinate with their allies or contribute to any North Sea showdown. While the HSF didn’t help Anglo-German relations, Britain entering the war was guaranteed once pickelhaubes were sighting at Liège, regardless of how few or many dreadnoughts were built.
The submarines were decent commerce raiders once the war began, but when I said unproductive, I meant in a political sense by hardening the will of the British people and directly bringing the United States into the war through unrestricted slaughter of the American merchant marine.
Had the Germans not suffered farcical levels of counterintelligence failure, the technical details suggest that if the British were operating under the same fog of war, the HSF would have come ahead in hypothetical engagements due to a fairly significant qualitative advantage stemming not from their own marginally superior armor belts, but rather awful British AP shells, inter-squadron communication, turret roof armor, and ammunition flash protection.
By 1918 most of these issues had been fixed, but sufficient German aggression in the early war combined with not giving away their naval codes could result in a series of engagements that would attrit down the British numerical advantage. Forcing the Grand Fleet into a defensive stance would then allow German battlecruisers to potentially escort small numbers of convoys carrying critical materials from the Western Hemisphere. That very panic you mentioned about invasion in Britain would conversely encourage diplomatic talks, especially given the non-ideological nature of the war.
After total victory on the Eastern Front, the Germans could then turn Western Front continental stalemate and naval parity into a negotiated peace to largely pre-war boundaries with some minor concessions like restored Belgian independence, and Qingdao changing hands. The annexed lands in Poland and the Baltics would make the war a net-positive for Germany, with the HSF as a key element in avoiding defeat and ensuring victory. Churchill aptly described Jellicoe as the only man in the world who could have lost the war in an afternoon, and that might have transpired if he wasn’t reading Scheer’s notes.
I find myself headscratching WRT the shield-redundancy approach’s effectiveness in pitched exchanges with a peer-or-heavier opponent. Seems like energy-weapon speed would have a nasty chance of exploiting that generator-swap window, and what happens if bleedthrough happens to cook one or more of your shield *projectors*? Might give MCs a bit more breathing room in long-range duels or forming up for lightspeed retreats, *or* keep big carrier craft alive long enough for the latter, but I dunno about extra generators constituting a decisive or disproportionate slugging-match advantage.
Perhaps less developed Calamari industry isn’t able to produce individual generators as robust as Kuati models, and they are forced to compensate by adding several smaller civilian-grade generators/projectors for every single Imperial generator. That would take up a lot more hull volume and be a maintenance nightmare, but increased redundancy against bleedthrough can’t hurt. Presumably instead of handing off shields at the same instant, there might be a microsecond or two where both sets of generators and projectors are active, which prevents exploitation by dumb luck.
Mon Cals probably spend a lot of time beating up unaware targets and then swiftly retreating when response-force destroyers show up, so redundancy isn’t the worst idea. They were never really designed to stand and fight against an Imperial battle line until stuff like the MC90 shows up Post-Endor.
Workable redundancy does seem well & good for raid-and-retreat ops, though cruiser-tonnage designs like Home One strike me as more battle-line oriented. I just have issues when it’s brainbugged to the point where peeps are claiming a Venator-sized MC (or one of the NR destroyer designs) can casually tank the attentions of something like Executor. Seems more prudent to retcon the size & hence power output of such Hero Ships(C) than claim ‘magic super-shields, yo’.
Well, it does look like an Acclamator plundered its bank account to buy beefed up armor and more weapons for itself, although the bridge looks more Venator-esque to me. What’s this baby gonna be called? Adiutor-class Star Frigate? Adiutor means literally “helper” or “Assistant” in latin and would be in line with the usual Republic name theme.
Acclamator for fleet combat? Sounds like an Acclamator II-class to me. Though given the armaments and thrusters I see, And I’d like to designate it a rapid response cruiser.
880m, mostly because of the fantail extension. The core hull largely follows Acclamator dimensions; the idea is that the Acclamator was a razee version of this design.
If this has similar dimensions to the Acclamatory, then I’d say the lengh is closer to 800 meters rather than 880.. But then again you’re the designer not me, so if its 880 meters long them so be it~ Its still beautiful~
Speaking of stripdowns, cornball vs-debate query: how many ‘Assault Frigate’ Dreadnaught conversions would you need to make this thing break a sweat? I’m guessing 4-5, but that might be yet another lowball.
Depends on whether you think Assault Frigates retain the power output of the Dreadnaught. From the lore it seems like the modification is primarily to reduce the number of crew required, but the art shows them taking on a more skeletal, CIS-like appearance with presumably a different reactor.
Dreadnaught power output is about 8e23, while the Acclamator transport sits at 2e23. Based on that, the Dreadnaught should be able to comfortably beat up an Acclamator, but presumably a combat variant with at least 720tt worth of flank HTL plus MTL could hold its own with a stripped down dread. It would probably come down to crew handling.
I have scaled the full-fat frigate power dramatically upward – it’s more like a third of a Venator/VSD in terms of power now. Which is what you’d expect from ISD power density on a hull this size. I think Acclamators basically have a different reactor altogether, built for endurance rather than output. Certainly I’ve replaced the Acclamator’s 2 primary and 2 secondary engines with 6 full primary engines, an indication of the expectation of increased mass and power requirements to make similar acceleration and the increased reactor yield.
I think this fits with the following logic – original ship was high power density warship, designers made a razee transport – in SW terms, they cut the reactor power and a lot of structure (and reactor and armor mass), but kept large hangar volumes. That allowed them to cut several main engines and maintain high speed, while simultaneously making the reactor smaller, more efficient, and cheaper to build as an assault ship, rather than basically an Old Republic Kuati ISD.
So given prior discussion WRT the number of Dreads you’d need to actually dent an Impstar, this frigate boasts enough juice to potentially slug it out with at least two, and may well have a hefty edge in the thrust department. Granted, we have three very different ‘assault frigate’ designs to consider, but none of ’em strike me as especially nimble (and only one seems to add much potential reactor space).
cScott
5 years ago
i normally prefer an even number of barrels on weapon systems but i just love that triple barrel TL battery design of yours
Seconded WRT those triples (70 teraton?), though Fractal’s snazzy ball turrets take the top spot for me. I take it said trips are the heaviest energy weapon this Acc-gunboat has the juice to efficiently wield?
They seem like they might be the same guns as the axial battery on the ISD. Triples just look great in general, whether they’re on the Rodney, Iowa, or Imperator.
In fulfilling its role as a frigate, would it be a pro or a con if you had placed the majority of those triple turrets along the dorsal axial? Just curious to know if it would be beneficial at all (e.g., greater concentrated fire or better firing angles) or would it just make those turrets to exposed to potential Rebel TL fire & starfighter attack
Well, better firing arcs seem to entail a great deal of ‘exposure’ as in ‘more open space that your turrets can traverse’. Seems to me you’d usually want to optimize offensive capability so targets jump out or get vaped before they can pound your ship to the point where losing main guns (or other crucial components) is on the table.
Soren
5 years ago
Hey fractal, what program do you use to make your models?
Shadowwolf
5 years ago
I think you are an awesome designer, and modeler, I would love to see your take on the TOR Thanatos Frigate aka updated Hammerhead….
I have been hoping you would work on this and glad to see it, love the shape of the acclamator and it really can pack some firepower in a small package.
Ah, a fresh mental picture of the Comarre Meridian. This fills a much needed spot in the ORBAT, with an interesting hangar configuration.
RhysT
5 years ago
Excellent. IT LIVES!!!! I’ve been hoping you’d get back to this one! Would it be possible to suggest a name for this things? Maybe it could be the Centax Heavy Frigate which is mentioned in the books but never depicted? Just a thought. Take it for what you will. I like the look of the thing already though!
Nice to see you brought back the heavy frigate Fractal but in the same detail as the Imperator redux that is just even better than I though.
gorkmalork
5 years ago
Sweet, the Acclamator’s pricklier sibling takes a couple steps closer to launch-and with a familiar hangar layout from some now-Legendized Dark Horse material.
Zellnotronus
5 years ago
It’s been a while since I’ve seen this hull. I can’t wait to see how it turns out.
What is the length on this ship? Are those four ventral cutouts hangar bays?
Also, it kinda looks like a stealth corvette.
As you can see on the finished product (link below), those are hangar bays, yes.
https://fractalsponge.net/?p=3737
The ship is 880m long and looks a lot less stealth corvette-y when finished.
oh, I was not aware this was a w.i.p. lol, sorry.
Are there any planes in it (when yes which and how much)
Looks a Bit like the acclamator class
For your second point I would like to refer you to the thread started by StormCommando, below.
I can’t remember where answers are for the first, but I do remember carrying capacity being discussed on one of the threads.
It can’t be classified as a frigate according to the Anaxes war college system. By its length it is classified as a heavy cruiser
You must be new here.
You may classify it however you like. I write game stats for a D6 forum, and if I end up really liking the finished product, I’ll likely end up classifying this ship as a Heavy Cruiser or Light Star Destroyer on that stat. That doesn’t require fractalsponge to alter his classification system to fit mine, and the fandom is more than big enough for both perspectives to exist with room to spare.
On top of that, the Anaxes System is crap. To quote a guy on the D6 forum (who is also a History Professor), the Anaxes System has little military value beyond impressing politicians and uninformed civilians. Form follows function, and size is a subset of form. A system that classifies vessels purely by size fails to take into account the far more important classification of mission.
Thanks for the statement
You’re welcome. If I might make a suggestion, simply telling the man he’s wrong on his own website might not get you the response you’re hoping for. A better alternative would be:
Hey, fractalsponge, I’ve noticed that your ship classification system doesn’t adhere to the Anaxes system. Why is that, and can you explain the system you do use and the reasoning behind it?
Yeah I’m new here and too naive so thanks a lot for the suggestion.
Fantastic, have been looking forward to this since the first preview! It’s an instant favourite. The protruding hunchback bridge, the hull’s low angle, and broad sweeping wedge-shape gives it a real elegance. Going by the bridge I am guessing it’s between 750 and 850 metres long. Reactor draw… 2e24w?
You probably missed it in the giant HSF tangent – the ship is ~880m right now. Not entirely final, but ~1.5e24W is a fair estimate.
Nice, thanks. If it’s missing the huge carrying capacity of the Acclamator, but uses roughly the same chassis, only enlarged, it must have room for more reactors where those big hangar bays are? Perhaps two ‘engine reactors’ which can also contribute to main power generation and channel that energy to weapons and shields if needed.
In my hypothetical design development, this design was first, and it actually has a lot more volume and a lot more power than an Acclamator. The Acclamator design took this as a starting point, swapped the reactor for something a lot lower powered but a lot cheaper and with a lot higher endurance, and started cutting away a lot of mass in terms of weapons, armor, and protected hull volume. That allowed them to drop a few main engines to maintain performance on a smaller and cheaper powerplant (and to further cut costs for numbers/expendability), and they used the internal space liberated by secondary reactors and such along with some of the old hangar volume to carry their troops and dropships.
I wonder why capital ships and smaller craft don’t use droid brains or computers to fire their weapons than actual people since droids can react a lot quicker than organic and shooting things don’t require a lot of experience for a droid
One the droids has less probability of improves and two it takes a lot less space and maintenance for person compared to Droid
In Star Wars, droids are often regarded as sub-sentient entities, with organics having better instincts and judgement than droids, even at the expense of faster reaction time. Although this can be build up with time, droids that don’t go through regular memory wipes will develop personalities away from the baseline (refer to Artoo’s attitude) and the last thing you need is a turret that feels like it doesn’t feel like shooting anymore or that the best solution to solve the conflict is to do friendly fire. And if you choose to endure less effective gunnery droids over that risk, periodic memory wipes of all droids onboard will add to the ship’s upkeep cost.
I know about the nebula class sd I meant design was
Totally unrelated to this ship, but what would happen if some engineering decided to combine the designs of a mon calamari ship and an imperial one? Like how effective would a ship with redunted mon calamari shields and have the firepower of an ssd with point defence be? (I know ssd don’t have point defence, I meant it as a part of the mon calamari ship)
EU has Mon Cal equipping their ships with three times as many shield generators as Imperial ships do. This mean more redundancy, more shield strength, and high shield recharge. Mon Cal ship could have one shield generator be active while the other two stand by. Then take the first offline to recharge and bring the second online. Repeat for third. This would be one way how they do it.
Seems like it makes sense. The key to making it all hold together is that there are tradeoffs in design, otherwise everyone would put the best of everything into the same hull.
Want more protection? Great, take away offensive power or acceleration or something else. There’s no free lunch. Going all in on durability means that you are explicitly trading off the ability to better kill other big ships. For a starfighter-centric force like the Rebellion that sorta makes sense – tank while the fighters go…do something. But it’s not going to work all the time, and there are just some things that they won’t be able to do well at all with a strategy like that. Balance is important. Sort of like how the High Seas Fleet was tough to kill but couldn’t actually win, and so was strategically not at all worth the money.
The rebel fleet served a pretty similar purpose to the High Seas Fleet by forcing the Empire into a reactive strategic position. The mechanics of hyperspace travel make this posture far more successful.
The Alliance would present the Imperials with a sufficient critical mass of fishtanks, which would then compel the Imperials into concentrating their own fleet assets to protect vital worlds, commerce lanes, and industrial sites instead of dispersing to every settlement. The Rebel fleet-in-being would then allow lighter Rebel assets to strike at the worlds left behind by Imperial concentration, and gain a massive propaganda victory by declaring that the Empire had abandoned them. Pretty nifty.
The High Seas Fleet was a braindead notion, full stop.
Eh. The Germans forced the British to maintain a distant blockade instead of a close one and forced the British to invest far more resources into superdreadnoughts to counter the High Seas Fleet. They also allowed German surface commerce raiders to do a lot more damage by not permitting the Grand Fleet to disperse to chase them down. Perhaps they even helped the Ottomans to hold Gallipoli by preventing the British from detaching squadrons of modern battleships to attack Istanbul. Plus, they beat up the Russian Baltic Fleet off the coast of Riga and supported land operations with reasonable effectiveness. Not the worst investment.
No, a miserable investment. The blockade was massively effective even though distant. The surface raiders were all hunted down without dispersing the Grand Fleet (which was ridiculous overkill to bag a handful of cruisers). Building, manning, and maintaining the HSF, expanding the ports and the Kiel Canal, cost the equivalent of lavish coast defenses that could have done largely the same thing at the fleet, and probably the equivalent of at least another army formation (in manpower alone), as well as upgraded artillery for the army. The Russian Baltic Fleet even pre-Tsushima did not warrant anything like a battleline explicitly conceived to rival the foremost naval power.
Without the HSF, maybe the army would’ve managed to reach Paris. Without the HSF, maybe the naval arms race would not have driven the British into the Entente. And definitely without the HSF, the mass of demoralized and starving sailors would not have been the spark for the revolution that brought down the Kaiser. That perhaps is the greatest reward for Wilhelm and Tirpitz’s hubris.
Well if we’re just going to throw hypotheticals out there, without the HSF, Jackie Fisher might have been able to put the Baltic Project into action and land a combined Anglo-Russian army only 100 miles from Berlin. Without the threat of the HSF, British monitors with 18-inch guns would have slowly reduced German shore batteries and allowed bombardments of Bremen, Kiel, Wilhelmshaven and Hamburg along with the U-Boat pens. Without the HSF, the British would have been able to reduce their own ludicrous naval expenses and put another field army into the B.E.F. Without the HSF, the army would have still violated Belgian neutrality and drawn the Brits in.
Even with another German field army on the books, the limit to the German advance at the Marne wasn’t total national manpower. It was the ability to reinforce, resupply, and coordinate the existing formations at the end of a long and non-motorized supply chain on torn-up and narrow roads. The westernmost German field army was operating 100 kilometers away from the nearest German railhead, requiring resupply by starving horses which were dying by the hour, while the French defenders were less than 10 miles from their own railhead.
Admittedly, the mutiny was pretty devastating, but by 1918 the war was lost and Germany was a tinderbox. The spark that brought social collapse would have come from somewhere else if not the fleet.
The Schlieffen plan working scenarios are very hypothetical true, but the arms race contributed in no small part to the alliance network that enabled a general European war.
Coast defenses don’t require giant battlefleets sitting in harbor doing nothing. You know the British anti-invasion plan? Huge masses of destroyers and submarines, not really the battleships. That’s why they had the largest submarine fleet in the world. Yeah you could do bullshit coast bombardments like Hipper’s east coast nonsense but that wasn’t really going to do anything strategic. Monitors managed to knockout not a single heavy coastal gun in Flanders in the entire war. A look at WW2 naval bombardments also suggest that bombardment alone would’ve have a hard time killing heavy artillery. How many submarines do you think could’ve been built on HSF money, even with fortifications thrown in? That was the one strategic naval contribution by the Kaisermarine that might have actually won the war.
Germany lost in large part because of the blockade. This is the blockade that happened despite the HSF existing and managing to do nothing. The British AND the Germans ran into serious financial difficulty with their mutually-reinforcing naval programmes – but no agreement could be reached before the war. For the British it was RN or nothing – they were not going to massively expand their army just because the money was available because that was not their historical national strategy. For the Germans, the army was absolutely paramount, surrounded as they were by large land powers. They would have just built a defensive small craft navy and fortifications like Heligoland everywhere and still had a huge amount of manpower and money left over without the HSF. Most of that surplus would’ve definitely gone to army expenditures.
I think you discount the value of bombardments. Sure, the Scarborough raid was strategically meaningless, but it was conducted by a handful of battle-cruisers attacking a tertiary target for only a bit longer than an hour. Had three battle squadrons of the Grand Fleet been able to anchor off the coast of Wilhelmshaven and stay there for days, the devastation would be total.
In the closing days of WW2, small numbers of Allied battleships were able to bombard Japan with near impunity. In only a couple of attacks, several steel works, aluminum plants, railway yards, and aircraft factories were destroyed, resulting in months of lost production and a massive morale shock to the Japanese people. Perhaps not as decisive as the firebombing of Tokyo or the atomic bomb, but the bombardments were a notable contribution to Japanese surrender. They were similarly devastating off of Korea, Vietnam, and Beirut. There’s a reason why Congress wanted to retain the Iowas into the 21st century: land targets within range of battleship guns tend to stop existing.
The U-boats were more effective commerce raiders pound-for-pound, but their hypothetical success would be worthless if they were forced to stay in the North Sea and protect their bases, or if they departed and their bases and shipyards were shot up by the Grand Fleet’s battleships. Without battleships to contest the Heligoland Bight, British mine-layers could deny the very entrances to the Elbe and the Weser, preventing any submarines from even leaving the Reich.
The Russian lack of a modern battle line forced them to rely on submarines, torpedo boats, shore batteries and destroyers to hold their coast, and when faced with German combined arms anchored around a dozen dreadnoughts, the Russian coastal defenses collapsed. Battleships escorted by destroyers and sufficient minesweepers proved more than capable of reducing any coastal defense prior to air power, as long as they were handled competently.
From 2018 we can call the HSF stupid in hindsight, but with the information available at the day, it was not unreasonable. Tirpitz even got the endorsement of Bismarck himself to buy into the plan. How could they have possibly expected something like Room 40 to grant the ability for the British to read all their supposedly encrypted naval communication?
The Japan WW2 bombardments were conducted under total naval and aerial superiority against a beaten enemy. Fixed defenses alone are not the end all and be-all true, but it would be a comprehensive system with submarines and torpedo craft. Note that, say, the naval attack against Dakar failed (and don’t give me any BS about it being a half-complete Richelieu that stopped them – effectively she was a floating battery and not a working battleship). The level of superiority the Allies enjoyed over Japan in 1945 or on the beaches in Normandy in 1944 would just not have been the case in WWI unless Imperial Germany was already collapsing. The point is that for the cost of 30+ dreadnoughts and the infrastructure required to support them, Germany could have built hundreds of submarines and light craft backed by coastal defenses and a small battleline/cruiser force and still have come out ahead in resources. And we’re not talking stupid stuff like the Lindemann batterie or something – even the British stopped coast defense guns largely at the 9.2″ because it just wasn’t really worth it much above that. The intention was to use destroyers and submarines to support those lighter artillery and coastal fortifications.
As for the Iowas – using battleships for gun support in the 80s and as a prestige reaction to the Kirovs is a slightly different thing than thinking that battleship bombardments were EVER strategically decisive. As far as anchoring offshore for days – well yes if the fleet had comprehensively breached the coastal defense *system* that much, sure. But even if they did, a cursory analysis of bombardment efficacy at Normandy would show that it’s unlikely that it would’ve had the accuracy or effectiveness (let alone in WW1) to demolish major fixed defenses effectively. Air superiority was much more important for that and that sort of aerial power did not exist in WWI. Moon Sound also was not like storming the Bight, or for that matter bombarding Kronshtadt. At that point the Russian military was massively disorganized (this is after the tsarist government was deposed), and Moon Sound wasn’t actually a major fortress zone. But if we’re looking for contemporary examples, then sure, what was the naval force ratio at Gallipoli again? I recall many battleships sitting at anchor there offshore from their targets. And we all remember the glorious Allied conquest of Constantinople in 1915 don’t we?
Yeah, mines are great but only when in a defense network. Have you heard of the Orkney barrage? Hundred thousand mines that sank a half dozen boats over the war. We’re not talking unsweepable pressure mines in 1945 here. Old school horn-detonator minefields in isolation without artillery to defend them can be swept or bypassed to a certain extent. BUT if minelaying is used in concert with fixed defenses and surface forces guarding them they could be prohibitive against battlefleet attack without nearly the same cost as a comparable battlefleet. But if the money already went to dreadnoughts, then those defenses don’t get built, and those dreadnoughts get blockaded in harbor because they were too afraid to use them anyway.
Which goes back to what the HSF was really for: prestige. The military rationale of the fleet was stupid on its face: a continental land power with no meaningful overseas interests or serious naval tradition was going to try to outbuild the premier industrial and naval power of the world, one that had proved several times in living memory that it was not willing to countenance losing naval superiority at any cost (see Spencer and Northbrook programmes). And in no small part drove them into an alliance with the 3rd, 4th, and 5th major industrial and naval powers at the same time in order to counteract the move. Not surprisingly, they lost that building race quite badly (a lot lot lot worse if we look at anything but battleships), which might have been foreseen by just looking at the industrial costs.
None of this is to say that all battlefleets were useless or that coastal defenses are the way to win wars – they clearly aren’t because defense doesn’t alone win wars. The point is that the HSF was a diversion of resources from the only realistic way Germany was going to “win” WWI – on the ground. It didn’t and wasn’t going to breach the blockade and deterrence of naval attack can be done a lot cheaper, so what the hell was it for other than to show off?
Dakar as an example for the failure of naval firepower to breach coastal defenses is pretty meaningless when De Gaulle planned the whole operation expecting the Vichy side to surrender immediately, and then canceled futher amphibious landings because he didn’t want to shed the blood of Frenchmen fighting other French folks. The actual naval battle went generally in favor of the Allied Fleet despite the presence of the ludicrously well armored and armed shore battery Richelieu.
The Dardanelles campaign failed not because battleships couldn’t suppress the channel forts, but because they didn’t bring along enough military minesweepers with naval crews instead of civilian trawlers. Churchill, Keyes, and De Robeck wanted to press the attack, but Fisher and the Admiralty Board denied his request for lack of additional ships…. because they couldn’t be withdrawn from the North Sea due to the threat of the High Seas Fleet. Ambassador Morgenthau even reported that Ottoman and German command felt like they could only hold out for a few hours if the attack resumed on the 19th of March, and preparations were being made to abandon the city. Had a breach been made in the outer defenses, there would be nothing between the Entente fleet and Constantinople except for the Goeben, and we all know what the Queen Elizabeth would have done to her.
The Orkney barrage was ineffective, but it was mediocre because the density of mines per square kilometer was absurdly low. Mines laid right outside the U-Boat bases would be a different story had there been no German surface fleet to contest the minelaying operations. The U-boats were okay at commerce raiding, but they lead to disasters like the Lusitania that brought in the US. You said that the blockade was the thing that broke Germany’s ability to make war, and the HSF was the only thing that the Kaiser had with a chance to smash that blockade.
I’ll say it again: SIGINT at Room 40 allowed Britain to win the naval war. Had Alastair Denniston not decrypted every German naval command, including those for the Dogger Bank and Jutland sorties, (+the Zimmerman telegram), Von Pohl’s strategy of using qualitatively superior and concentrated German ships to pick off detached British fleet elements was a viable one. Sure, there was plenty of risk, but the potential for reward would be even greater.
If the Germans got a couple of decent engagements, the blockade would have been broken wide open to massive German advantage. We only remember the naval theater as indecisive because one side was reading the other side’s notes through the fog of war, and had near perfect information to not engage without a massive advantage.
Saying that the Germans shouldn’t have built battleships because the other side had a few more is like saying that Guderian shouldn’t have pushed to build panzers because the British/French had more. A smaller, well-handled force with a good doctrine always has a chance to prevail… unless the enemy has an insurmountable intelligence advantage.
Building the HSF for an actual military purpose would be like the British in 1890 suddenly deciding to build a huge land army to stage it in Denmark to threaten Berlin, because the Germans won’t do anything to contest that. It was based on a fundamentally flawed geostrategic premise. The Germans did NOT achieve strategic naval parity, didn’t get close, and were not going to, and were never going to be a position to attain it once an actual ground war started. Having the chance to win is well and good, but the real question is whether that chance is big enough to be worth the opportunity cost. It wasn’t even built to have the kind of qualitative superiority that the Japanese (unsuccessfully) attempted in their fleet designs leading up to the Pacific war with the US.
The blockade was a major contributor, not least to the hunger that led to the idle and demoralized HSF rebelling against the Kaiser, but the really proximal cause of loss was the defeat of the German field armies in the West. But even a major fleet victory by the HSF would not have suddenly opened a flood of supplies to Germany, since the British would still have had an overwhelming superiority on the oceanic routes, and the HSF would not have been able to escort convoys in, if Germany could even find major suppliers of food, nitrates, etc.
Really, one might have argued from the beginning that the Germans were in all likelihood going to lose against the Entente, because they were challenging an alliance that encircled them and had more industrial, financial, and manpower resources than they did. Perhaps if they had not provoked the British into joining the Entente largely by the building of the HSF, the entire thing might have been averted, or at least been reduced to a more manageable size for Germany. Once the attempt at the knockout blow in the West failed, it was in all likelihood going to end badly for the Germans. The HSF was a boondoggle that helped set those initial strategic odds, and contributed little to offsetting them once the war started.
I’d agree with your first point if the British didn’t try to do that exact thing. Fisher had the Courageous class built specifically for the purpose of supporting an amphibious landing on Germany’s Baltic coast to open up a new front. The only thing that stopped that from happening was Britain’s inability to knock out the HSF.
Sure, the Germans eventually lost in the west, but they lost not because their armies were encircled and destroyed, but because they started facing an overwhelming manpower disparity once Americans started arriving in force. You can blame the submarine force and its inherent indiscretion for that.
The Germans never ended up with Dreadnought parity, but from a political standpoint, there was reason to believe that the Liberal party in Parliament would hold off on further construction. The British came damn close to canceling several classes of dreadnoughts for budgetary reasons stemming from ideological deadlock. Even David Lloyd George and Churchill opposed certain naval construction, with the controversy and horse-trading surrounding the People’s Budget of 1909. The Germans had a decent reason to believe that their less egalitarian political process would allow them to commit to a longer-term program of naval construction.
While the German Naval Laws certainly didn’t help Anglo-German relations, the damage was done mostly by unforced diplomatic errors committed by Wilhelm at Tangier, Algeciras, and Agadir. How could Tirpitz or Bismarck have predicted that kind of folly?
With the food resources and freed-up manpower they secured in the east after Brest-Litovsk, had the Germans not antagonized the US into joining the war, it seems eminently likely that they would have been able to turn the Western Front stalemate into a negotiated peace settlement without major concessions. The ability of the High Seas Fleet to neutralize the Grand Fleet was precisely what the Germans needed to kickstart such negotiations. To make that happen, perhaps the Germans should have continued to focus on building dreadnoughts up to 1914 instead of redirecting output to incredibly politically counterproductive U-Boats.
That’s just the wrong order. The Baltic strategy was an proposal to break the Western stalemate. It’s quite different from trying to use a diplomatically counterproductive and strategically vapid use of resources in peacetime as a way to deter an opponent. There was an entire genre of invasion literature in Britain in the steam era dating from (at least) when the Prince de Joinville was talking about “steam bridges” under Louis Phillipe. There was a long history of massive building programmes in response to even perceived foreign attempts at parity, and large scale agitation for the same in the papers (Lord Beresford for one, but also others). Assuming that your opponent is foolish is bad strategy. Even had the Germans achieved temporary dreadnought parity that’s quite different from saying they would be able to *win* with that parity had war broken out, or that the British would go against their entire naval tradition and become passive when outnumbered.
Naval laws were also far from unique to Germany, and not intrinsically a strategy to beat foreign construction – they were a way to avoid having to fight parliamentary battles over funding again and again. They could result in a more powerful fleet, but the intention to outbuild an enemy was not the impetus for multi-year programming. The will to do so had to be there to begin with. Regardless of that political will, the simple infrastructure necessary to build these fleets were completely lopsided in favor of the British, one reason why apart from dreadnoughts the HSF (at least less than 2x difference!) was ridiculously outmatched in every other category. The RN had “fallen behind” by some measures previously against French construction in the late 19th century, but was then predictably able to leapfrog foreign construction because of the strength and capacity of their maritime industries.
Speaking of the wrong order, talking about submarines being unproductive is silly, just like saying the Baltic strategy showed that the British were planning to directly challenge Germany against its greatest strengths. Submarines were the most effective way for the Kaisermarine to decisively influence the war *once it had started.* The decision to build the HSF helped to precipitate that war. The HSF contributed little to the war once it began – and it was always a war that in the basic outlines the Germans were favored to lose. The Germans were badly outnumbered in submarines in 1914 – even had they not built any prewar they would not have been able to materially alter the basic building rate of dreadnoughts using those resources. Indeed by 1913-1914 they had effectively conceded dreadnought parity. The British entered the war approaching double German numbers of dreadnoughts built, building, requisitioned, and planned, not even counting the existing and planned French and Russian construction. The Statut Naval if 1912 alone would have added 20 odd dreadnoughts to Entente figures, and the Russians had 8 built or projected for the Baltic.
In terms of what was critical to Wilhemine Germany, naval power was there to deter attacks on the coast. That did not require the resources spent on the HSF. I don’t mention stopping a blockade – Germany would have had to build much more than the HSF to keep oceanic sealanes open against the RN because the British alone had the bases required to sustain major naval forces abroad, and had a comically lopsided advantage in cruisers and such able to interdict and protect trade (this was a dominant Admiralty strategic concern since the wars against Napoleon). Distant blockade of the North Sea had removed the ability to attrit the RN using the limited light forces available and basically made prewar German plans unworkable. The best way to prevent that kind of blockade was to detach Britain from the Franco-Russians, and the HSF was directly counterproductive to this diplomatic goal. One might (legitimately) argue that Tangier/Agadir etc would also not have had the same resonance with the British had the HSF not indicated a potential threat to Britain itself.
No one is proposing that the HSF would enable an invasion of Britain itself, but it did serve two critical purposes: limiting the actions of the Grand Fleet, and bringing the Entente to the negotiating table if tactical victories could be scored. Sure, sufficient investment into coastal torpedo boats, defensive submarines, minefields, and shore batteries could maybe prevent the Grand Fleet from leveling Kiel, but static defenses couldn’t hold the Grand Fleet in the North Sea the way the HSF could, even from their harbors. If the British had the complete freedom of movement, they could have committed far more modern ships to the Dardanelles operation, which came perilously close to success and subsequent Ottoman collapse.
In terms of sustained investment, the German economy by PPP was larger than the British one by 1910 and through 1913. The majority of British colonies were fiscal liabilities in that they required more expense to maintain and secure than they generated in tax revenue. While the Germans did maintain a larger land army, they absolutely could stay within a competitive distance of Britain in regards to naval spending. The French ships spent the whole war staring down Austria in the Mediterranean, while the Russians were trapped in the Baltic, wholly unable to coordinate with their allies or contribute to any North Sea showdown. While the HSF didn’t help Anglo-German relations, Britain entering the war was guaranteed once pickelhaubes were sighting at Liège, regardless of how few or many dreadnoughts were built.
The submarines were decent commerce raiders once the war began, but when I said unproductive, I meant in a political sense by hardening the will of the British people and directly bringing the United States into the war through unrestricted slaughter of the American merchant marine.
Had the Germans not suffered farcical levels of counterintelligence failure, the technical details suggest that if the British were operating under the same fog of war, the HSF would have come ahead in hypothetical engagements due to a fairly significant qualitative advantage stemming not from their own marginally superior armor belts, but rather awful British AP shells, inter-squadron communication, turret roof armor, and ammunition flash protection.
By 1918 most of these issues had been fixed, but sufficient German aggression in the early war combined with not giving away their naval codes could result in a series of engagements that would attrit down the British numerical advantage. Forcing the Grand Fleet into a defensive stance would then allow German battlecruisers to potentially escort small numbers of convoys carrying critical materials from the Western Hemisphere. That very panic you mentioned about invasion in Britain would conversely encourage diplomatic talks, especially given the non-ideological nature of the war.
After total victory on the Eastern Front, the Germans could then turn Western Front continental stalemate and naval parity into a negotiated peace to largely pre-war boundaries with some minor concessions like restored Belgian independence, and Qingdao changing hands. The annexed lands in Poland and the Baltics would make the war a net-positive for Germany, with the HSF as a key element in avoiding defeat and ensuring victory. Churchill aptly described Jellicoe as the only man in the world who could have lost the war in an afternoon, and that might have transpired if he wasn’t reading Scheer’s notes.
And now I have officially reached the limit of effort I’m willing to expend on responding to this. Nice exchange but I am calling time.
Y’all are NERDS.
This is a comment section for a fan interpretation of a hypothetical reconfiguration of a fictional spaceship. What the hell do you expect?
I find myself headscratching WRT the shield-redundancy approach’s effectiveness in pitched exchanges with a peer-or-heavier opponent. Seems like energy-weapon speed would have a nasty chance of exploiting that generator-swap window, and what happens if bleedthrough happens to cook one or more of your shield *projectors*? Might give MCs a bit more breathing room in long-range duels or forming up for lightspeed retreats, *or* keep big carrier craft alive long enough for the latter, but I dunno about extra generators constituting a decisive or disproportionate slugging-match advantage.
Perhaps less developed Calamari industry isn’t able to produce individual generators as robust as Kuati models, and they are forced to compensate by adding several smaller civilian-grade generators/projectors for every single Imperial generator. That would take up a lot more hull volume and be a maintenance nightmare, but increased redundancy against bleedthrough can’t hurt. Presumably instead of handing off shields at the same instant, there might be a microsecond or two where both sets of generators and projectors are active, which prevents exploitation by dumb luck.
Mon Cals probably spend a lot of time beating up unaware targets and then swiftly retreating when response-force destroyers show up, so redundancy isn’t the worst idea. They were never really designed to stand and fight against an Imperial battle line until stuff like the MC90 shows up Post-Endor.
This High Seas Fleet debate is interesting.
Workable redundancy does seem well & good for raid-and-retreat ops, though cruiser-tonnage designs like Home One strike me as more battle-line oriented. I just have issues when it’s brainbugged to the point where peeps are claiming a Venator-sized MC (or one of the NR destroyer designs) can casually tank the attentions of something like Executor. Seems more prudent to retcon the size & hence power output of such Hero Ships(C) than claim ‘magic super-shields, yo’.
Interesting, an Acclamator base!
Now that’s cool.
Acclimator III?
It’s supposed to be it’s predecessor
Nope Fractal said this ship is a fleet variant as in a warship while the Acclamator was a assault ship which mostly carried ground vehicles.
Well, it does look like an Acclamator plundered its bank account to buy beefed up armor and more weapons for itself, although the bridge looks more Venator-esque to me. What’s this baby gonna be called? Adiutor-class Star Frigate? Adiutor means literally “helper” or “Assistant” in latin and would be in line with the usual Republic name theme.
Acclamator for fleet combat? Sounds like an Acclamator II-class to me. Though given the armaments and thrusters I see, And I’d like to designate it a rapid response cruiser.
Is it still around 700m long ?
Well last time I check the Acclamator is 752 meters in length so this might be the same length.
Yeah, but we all know the Empire has a strong tendancy to do everything bigger.
880m, mostly because of the fantail extension. The core hull largely follows Acclamator dimensions; the idea is that the Acclamator was a razee version of this design.
If we take the absurd hyperdrive speed numbers at face value for the Acclamator, a razee refit would explain its speed pretty convincingly.
If this has similar dimensions to the Acclamatory, then I’d say the lengh is closer to 800 meters rather than 880.. But then again you’re the designer not me, so if its 880 meters long them so be it~ Its still beautiful~
I have an Acclamator model right next to it, and I work in direct scale, so it is 880m right now.
Can we see your Acclamator model?
I’m going to guess that he may put it on at WIP future
Speaking of stripdowns, cornball vs-debate query: how many ‘Assault Frigate’ Dreadnaught conversions would you need to make this thing break a sweat? I’m guessing 4-5, but that might be yet another lowball.
Depends on whether you think Assault Frigates retain the power output of the Dreadnaught. From the lore it seems like the modification is primarily to reduce the number of crew required, but the art shows them taking on a more skeletal, CIS-like appearance with presumably a different reactor.
Dreadnaught power output is about 8e23, while the Acclamator transport sits at 2e23. Based on that, the Dreadnaught should be able to comfortably beat up an Acclamator, but presumably a combat variant with at least 720tt worth of flank HTL plus MTL could hold its own with a stripped down dread. It would probably come down to crew handling.
I have scaled the full-fat frigate power dramatically upward – it’s more like a third of a Venator/VSD in terms of power now. Which is what you’d expect from ISD power density on a hull this size. I think Acclamators basically have a different reactor altogether, built for endurance rather than output. Certainly I’ve replaced the Acclamator’s 2 primary and 2 secondary engines with 6 full primary engines, an indication of the expectation of increased mass and power requirements to make similar acceleration and the increased reactor yield.
I think this fits with the following logic – original ship was high power density warship, designers made a razee transport – in SW terms, they cut the reactor power and a lot of structure (and reactor and armor mass), but kept large hangar volumes. That allowed them to cut several main engines and maintain high speed, while simultaneously making the reactor smaller, more efficient, and cheaper to build as an assault ship, rather than basically an Old Republic Kuati ISD.
So given prior discussion WRT the number of Dreads you’d need to actually dent an Impstar, this frigate boasts enough juice to potentially slug it out with at least two, and may well have a hefty edge in the thrust department. Granted, we have three very different ‘assault frigate’ designs to consider, but none of ’em strike me as especially nimble (and only one seems to add much potential reactor space).
i normally prefer an even number of barrels on weapon systems but i just love that triple barrel TL battery design of yours
Seconded WRT those triples (70 teraton?), though Fractal’s snazzy ball turrets take the top spot for me. I take it said trips are the heaviest energy weapon this Acc-gunboat has the juice to efficiently wield?
They seem like they might be the same guns as the axial battery on the ISD. Triples just look great in general, whether they’re on the Rodney, Iowa, or Imperator.
Or Kaitlyn Leeb.
Current version is the same as the axial triple turrets on ISD, so 32-40 teraton range.
In fulfilling its role as a frigate, would it be a pro or a con if you had placed the majority of those triple turrets along the dorsal axial? Just curious to know if it would be beneficial at all (e.g., greater concentrated fire or better firing angles) or would it just make those turrets to exposed to potential Rebel TL fire & starfighter attack
Well, better firing arcs seem to entail a great deal of ‘exposure’ as in ‘more open space that your turrets can traverse’. Seems to me you’d usually want to optimize offensive capability so targets jump out or get vaped before they can pound your ship to the point where losing main guns (or other crucial components) is on the table.
Hey fractal, what program do you use to make your models?
I think you are an awesome designer, and modeler, I would love to see your take on the TOR Thanatos Frigate aka updated Hammerhead….
Great Job
I have been hoping you would work on this and glad to see it, love the shape of the acclamator and it really can pack some firepower in a small package.
What are the big cutouts?
hangers is my guess, like the Imperial frigate
Ah, a fresh mental picture of the Comarre Meridian. This fills a much needed spot in the ORBAT, with an interesting hangar configuration.
Excellent. IT LIVES!!!! I’ve been hoping you’d get back to this one! Would it be possible to suggest a name for this things? Maybe it could be the Centax Heavy Frigate which is mentioned in the books but never depicted? Just a thought. Take it for what you will. I like the look of the thing already though!
Nice to see you brought back the heavy frigate Fractal but in the same detail as the Imperator redux that is just even better than I though.
Sweet, the Acclamator’s pricklier sibling takes a couple steps closer to launch-and with a familiar hangar layout from some now-Legendized Dark Horse material.
It’s been a while since I’ve seen this hull. I can’t wait to see how it turns out.