House of Steel: The Honorverse Companion (67 page)

Because of the nature of hyper travel, “rear areas” in the classic sense of a zone protected from attack by a “front line” did not truly exist, of course, since attacking forces could readily evade detection or interception on their way to their targets. Instead, “rear-area” targets were defined as those objectives far enough behind the volume of active operations as to take some time for strike forces to reach and sufficiently important for industrial, logistic, or economic reasons to be worth reaching and attacking in the first place. The far larger People’s Republic had many more such vulnerable points, and providing adequate security for its vital areas drew off a far greater proportion of its fleet strength. Not only that, but it was literally impossible for the People’s Navy to provide strong enough system defense forces everywhere to prevent the RMN from amassing crushing numerical superiority at points of its choice, resulting in a steady, grinding flow of Havenite losses.

Fleet Design

In the preceding steps, the environment has been described and the fleet’s general role in that environment has been defined. We’ve also fleshed out the missions of the fleet, including where it is based and where it expects to fight. To this point, though, we have only talked about fleets. Now we start to discuss the ships that make up the fleet.

FLEET CAPABILITIES, SIZE, AND MIX

The military (both uniformed and civilian analysts) often talk about both capability (what you can do) and capacity (how much you can do). So, Fleet Capabilities are the tasks that the fleet can do, as embodied in its platforms. Modern US Aegis ships, for instance, can provide area-wide air defense against air and missile threats. Most can embark helicopters and conduct operations against enemy submarines and other surface vessels as well. Fleet Size is the total number of ships in the fleet. Fleet Mix describes how many of each different type of ship. Between Fleet Capabilities, Fleet Size, and Fleet Mix, the capabilities and capacity of the overall fleet have been explained.

Prior to the end of the nineteenth century PD, the evolution of warship types and functions had been remarkably stable (see above), and had generally sorted itself into the following ship types, from largest to smallest.

The ship of the wall, usually a superdreadnought massing between seven and eight million tons, was essentially an energy weapons platform. It was designed and armored to bring its energy batteries into range of an opponent and stay there until that opponent was destroyed, and it had no other function. Maneuverability and acceleration capability were totally secondary; protection and brute firepower were the primary considerations.

The superdreadnought had supplanted the dreadnought for the same reasons the dreadnought had supplanted the battleship. As gradual improvements in inertial compensators allowed steadily larger hulls to be accelerated at acceleration rates in the “capital ship” zone (roughly 350 to 450 gravities), those larger hulls gained a decisive qualitative advantage. A designer could simply put more weapons—and more active and passive defenses—into the larger unit, which exerted a gradual, slow, but inexorable upward pressure on the mass of ships considered fit to “lie in the wall of battle.”

Dreadnoughts were simply superdreadnoughts writ small—lower displacement units, massing between four and seven million tons, with the same design function and philosophy as the superdreadnought. They continued to be built after the emergence of the superdreadnought by cost-conscious navies (like the RMN) that wished to expand the number of units in their wall but could not afford to standardize on the larger vessel. Individually, they remained superior to any lesser opponent than an SD and technological advantages could go far towards equalizing the playing field even against the larger ship, yet by the mid-nineteenth century, they had become a clear second-choice decision for major navies.

Battleships, massing between one and a half and four million tons, had once been the galactic standard for ships of the wall. By the end of the nineteenth century, however, they were thoroughly obsolete, simply because they were far too fragile to survive a “proper waller’s” fire long enough to make their own lighter, less numerous weapons effective. They were, however, used, especially by the People’s Republic for rear area security. The SKM itself built two squadrons of battleships as part of the initial force buildup to protect the home system after the discovery of and first transit through the Junction. By the time the RMN needed a proper wall of battle, however, dreadnoughts had already entered the picture, and all Manticoran battleships had been decommissioned by the time of the First Havenite War.

Battlecruisers, massing between five hundred thousand and a million tons, were the fast, powerful screening and raiding units of choice. Designed to destroy anything they couldn’t outrun, they were envisioned as commerce-raiders
par excellence
and (especially by the People’s Navy) as antimissile screening units for the wall of battle. Unlike ships of the wall, their offensive weapon suites tended to allocate far more tonnage (proportionately) to missile tubes and magazines, in keeping with their role as “space-control” units.

At the outbreak of the Havenite Wars, cruisers and destroyers were also considered suitable for use as screening and light antimissile escorts for the wall of battle. Experience, and the increasing lethality of missiles (especially Manticoran missiles), demonstrated that this was no longer in fact true—that such light units were simply not survivable in fleet combat scenarios. They were, therefore, increasingly designated for convoy work, commerce raiding, patrol duties, sensor pickets, etc., and released from fleet combat duties.

In 1900 PD, the People’s Navy’s cumulative tonnage was approximately twice that of the Royal Manticoran Navy, but the RMN, which found it necessary to provide security for a far smaller total number of star systems, could concentrate a higher percentage of its total available tonnage in ships of the wall. At the start of the war, the RMN had 188 superdreadnoughts and 121 dreadnoughts in commission, while the PN had 412 superdreadnoughts and 48 dreadnoughts, backed up by 374 battleships for rear area security. As the Havenite Wars continued, the percentage of tonnage devoted to ships “below the wall” in both navies plummeted as the unsuitability of those lighter units for fleet combat became increasingly evident.

The introduction of missile pods near the beginning of the war fundamentally altered naval tactics. No longer would ships of the wall slug it out in protracted duels that might begin at long range but must culminate in the inevitable short-range pounding match. Instead, with the massive opening salvos made possible by the pods (themselves largely unarmored and hence vulnerable to destruction), the opening salvo of an engagement was often the only salvo. Initially, pods were towed on tractors behind existing ships, but beginning in about 1910 PD, the Manticoran introduction of the multidrive missile, married to the use of pods, completely transformed the nature of combat and hence of the platforms best optimized for it. With the arrival of the MDM, the energy-armed superdreadnought became hopelessly obsolete, and the resulting total redesign produced the “podnought,” or SD(P): a hollow-cored design intended to deploy pods of very large, very capable, very long ranged, and very lethal missiles in the largest possible numbers. The possession of that weapon and those ships gave the RMN an overwhelming advantage, which brought the first phase of the Havenite Wars to a disastrous conclusion for the People’s Republic in 1914–1915 PD.

FLEET LAYDOWN

The final element of Fleet Design is the Fleet Laydown. Where are the parts of the fleet located? How many bases exist, and how many/what type of ships per base are located at each base? Before World War I, for instance, the Royal Navy concentrated its battlefleet in bases in the northern United Kingdom, to better position itself to engage the German High Sea Fleet. This meant that the most powerful navy in the world was often underrepresented on some of its far-flung naval outposts.

As Manticore repositioned itself to confront the Havenite threat, its deployment patterns changed. Historically, the Manticoran wall of battle had always been kept concentrated in the home system in order to protect the Star Kingdom’s inhabited planets, its infrastructure, and the Manticoran Wormhole Junction. On the occasions—such as the dispatch of capital ships to Silesia after the Battle of Carson or the short “war” with San Martin—when capital ships had been employed outside the Manticore Binary System, they were dispatched directly from First Fleet for the specific operation but remained administratively attached to First Fleet and returned to it as promptly as possible.

A redistribution of forces was a fundamental part of Roger III’s planning, although that was not perhaps immediately apparent. First Fleet was officially redesignated Home Fleet as a clear indication of its function and also additional numbered fleets were soon to be organized. As the size of the Manticoran wall of battle increased and as the Manticoran Alliance acquired additional members, detachments of ships of the wall were permanently deployed to critical naval stations like Grendelsbane and Hancock or to the support of Allied star systems such as Alizon and the Caliphate of Zanzibar. Such detachments were normally accompanied by appropriate scouting and screening units, although in the case of the system like Alizon light local naval units might be assigned for that purpose.

Home Fleet’s responsibilities were somewhat simplified by increasing the number of fortresses deployed to protect the Junction. Although the total manpower cost of the Junction forts was high in absolute terms, it was substantially lower in terms of manpower per unit of fire, given the forts’ powerful armaments and defenses. The forts served two functions: first, to protect against a conventional attack through hyper-space; second, to prevent a surprise attack through the Junction itself. In many ways, the latter threat was a graver concern for Manticoran analysts than the threat of a conventional attack, particularly before the introduction of the laser head. Wartime experience and steady improvement in both missile and mine laser head technology were to demonstrate that the fear of an attack through the Junction had been grossly overinflated, but no one in the Admiralty was aware of that in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Once Manticore had captured Trevor’s Star, the vast majority of the Junction forts were speedily decommissioned, leaving only a sufficient number to serve as command platforms for the heavy numbers of system defense missile pods deployed to protect it against conventional attack. This liberated large quantities of trained personnel for duty aboard the ships of the steadily expanding Manticoran wall of battle.

Additional fleet stations—such Hancock Station—were established to provide fleet concentration points and advanced repair and maintenance nodes in accordance with the traditional strategic doctrine which required defensive depth against the steady, incremental advance contemplated by most fleet planners. Several years of active wartime operations and the gradual evolution on Manticore’s part of the doctrine of the deep strike would eventually suggest that Manticore had actually established too many of those advanced bases. While the provision of logistics nodes closer to the scene of active operations was convenient, the same support was available from the Fleet Train of fast freighters and repair ships which could operate with fleet units far from home. Moreover, each of those isolated fleet stations became a defensive liability in its own right, tying down and dispersing combat power which might otherwise have been concentrated into offensive striking forces. By the end of the First Havenite War, Admiralty thinking had hardened toward the abandonment of all but the largest and most important of the fleet stations. In theory, the disestablishment of the more peripheral fleet stations would permit the forces normally tied to them to be redistributed to better protect the truly critical ones. The redeployment had only begun at the time of the ceasefire, however, and the Janacek Admiralty predictably failed to complete its implementation before Operation Thunderbolt.

One consequence of the Navy’s redeployment, coupled with procurement plans which of necessity concentrated on the construction of capital ships, was a steady drawdown in the numbers of lighter units previously available for commerce protection in the Silesian Confederacy. Destroyers and cruisers were required to scout for and screen the battle squadrons, and they were being built in smaller numbers. Accordingly, the policy of maintaining light units semi-permanently on station “visiting” Silesian star systems had to be discontinued in favor of rotating patrols and convoy escort. The new policy allowed the Navy to economize on platforms but provided a lower level of security and protection for merchant traffic in Silesia.

The long, arduous, and eventually successful campaign to capture Trevor’s Star had major strategic consequences. The Royal Manticoran Navy’s prewar operational planning had emphasized the need to secure Trevor’s Star in order to neutralize the threat of any attack through the Junction. By the time Admiral White Haven’s Sixth Fleet actually captured Trevor’s Star, the realistic threat of an attack through its terminus of the Junction had been effectively nullified (if it had ever actually existed at all), but the Navy’s strategists had not yet realized that was the case. In the event, Trevor’s Star’s greatest value to the Star Kingdom lay in the advanced, secure base it provided. Two hundred and ten light-years from Manticore, deep into what had been the Havenite sphere, Trevor’s Star was only a single transit from the Manticore Binary System itself, and transit through the Junction provided not only a huge savings in time but also complete security against Havenite commerce-raiders. It shortened the operational loop for offensive Manticoran operations and freed up large numbers of light units which would otherwise have been required to escort the shipping supporting it. The formation of Third Fleet to protect it did not dilute the Navy’s striking power as one might have anticipated. Indeed, in many ways, Third Fleet became a ready reserve for Home Fleet (and vice versa), freeing the newly formed Eighth Fleet for what ultimately proved decisive offensive operations against the core star systems of the People’s Republic of Haven.