Chapter 4 - When is a Frigate not a Corvette?If the Dreadnoughts are the avatars of the ideals of Empire, then frigates are the embodiment of the practical gritty realities. The frigates emerged as a response to the ever growing requirements for patrol squadrons and planetary guard ships to protect the new colonies of the expanding Empire. In theory the Army and their formidable surface-to-orbit gun batteries were supposed to cover such colonial defence duties, but the continued delays in large calibre railgun production precluded this. It should be admitted that this was in no small part due to the Admiralty refusing to share it's large calibre gun pits with the Army, prioritising production for it's own warships over deliveries to the Imperial Artillery. In fairness it should also be said that this was not just motivated by the typical lack of inter-service co-operation, but because the Admiralty believed it's existing railgun manufacturing capacity was woefully insufficient, a point illustrated by the armament of the new frigates.
The
Leander class frigates were somewhat smaller than a standard
Tribal class destroyer (8kT aether vs 10kT aether) and marginally slower, they also had thinner armour and were generally less robust with fewer redundant backup systems. What they did have was a considerably greater endurance, longer range and a wildly different weapons fit out, the design being cheaper both to procure and then to operate being taken as a given. Due to the bottlenecks in production of the standard Vickers 8" railguns the frigates instead mounted four twin 4.5" Molins light rail guns which provided both point defence and a coup de grace weapon against crippled foes. Controversially the main armament being fifty Hawker 5" 'light torpedo' tubes externally mounted around the hull. Very heavily influenced by the similarly sized weapons captured after the Sourmagh campaign, the 5" Brimstone light torpedo was the latest attempt to fix the increasingly blatant failure of the heavyweight 15" Tigerfish/Spearfish family of torpedoes and great things were expected of it. Though in fairness some of that was an expectation of another failure and great scandal.
As one would expect from such a deeply controversial concept there were many unbuilt alternatives. Leaving aside the numerous variants on the
Leander theme that tweaked the ratio of railgun to torpedo tube or other minor adjustments, the most interesting of these alternatives was the
Castle class. The design was another attempt to answer the same question but one which resulted in a quite wildly different outcome.
Castle Mk.I class Corvette 6,400 tons 196 Crew 1,263.6 BP TCS 128 TH 640 EM 0
5000 km/s Armour 4-30 Shields 0-0 HTK 42 Sensors 0/0/0/0 DCR 4 PPV 40.32
Maint Life 2.74 Years MSP 493 AFR 82% IFR 1.1% 1YR 95 5YR 1,419 Max Repair 320 MSP
Commander Control Rating 2 BRG AUX
Intended Deployment Time: 24 months Morale Check Required
Rolls Royce Osprey Mk.II MPD-640 (1) Power 640 Fuel Use 48.83% Signature 640 Explosion 12%
Fuel Capacity 561,000 Gallons Range 32.3 billion km (74 days at full power)
Molins 4.5" Mk.I Railgun V50/C4 (8x4) Range 50,000km TS: 5,000 km/s Power 3-3 RM 50,000 km ROF 5
Sterling Mk.I Twin Coil Turret (16k) (1x6) Range 30,000km TS: 16000 km/s Power 0-0 RM 30,000 km ROF 5
Plessey Type 900 TFC 192-16000 (SW) (1) Max Range: 192,000 km TS: 16,000 km/s 95 90 84 79 74 69 64 58 53 48
Racal Type 503XE BFC 240-5000 (1) Max Range: 240,000 km TS: 5,000 km/s 96 92 88 83 79 75 71 67 62 58
Brown Curtis Gorgon Mk.I SFR-B 25MW (1) Total Power Output 25 kBTU/s Exp 10%
Racal Type 250EMWS 700k/R1 (1) GPS 21 Range 8.6m km MCR 771.7k km Resolution 1
Ferranti Type 600SR 46m/R20 (1) GPS 1680 Range 46.6m km Resolution 20
This design is classed as a Military Vessel for maintenance purposes
This design is classed as a c for auto-assignment purposes
The
Castle class took the frigate principles and followed them further, not perhaps to the extreme but certainly further than was wise. It was even smaller, even slower and so even cheaper to build. Being a single engined design it lacked any redundancy in the propulsion system while even the standard TRE 'Asprin' ECM magnetic flux jammer had been removed to save weight and cost. Interestingly it was these cost saving choices and not the lack of torpedo armament that prompted the first great fight over the concept, the frigate lobby wishing to disassociate themselves from such a compromised design while the more economically minded sections of the Admiralty insisted it was perfectly reasonable submission. There were many productive meetings and discussions about what classification to give these new ships, not productive in the sense there was any useful output but in the sense that it kept the people involved safely distracted and unable to ruin anything else. In the end the Admiralty Board quite sensibly ignored all those discussions and just threw the problem at the Ship Naming Committee, who were genuinely delighted to develop a new classification naming scheme. They decreed that the
Castle design was indeed not a frigate but was actually a corvette, going so far as to produce the first classification system for the aether age;
- Single Engined Warship, second rate - Corvette
- Single Engined Warship, fleet service - Sloop
- Twin Engined Warship, second rate - Frigate
- Twin Engined Warship, fleet service - Destroyer
The system was somewhat arbitrarily capped at 15kT, any warship larger being a cruiser or one of the capital ship classes. It is tempting to call the exercise something of a waste of time as the
Castle class corvette was never built, but the system did endure and eventually corvettes would be built. The Admiralty of the time was spared any discussion on classification because a 'time honoured and traditional' system was in place, so it did eventually prove worthwhile.
As to the
Castle itself, it proved to be the peak (or perhaps low point) of the economical warship movement. Despite a whole host of compromises on capability and suitability the design was projected as barely 5% cheaper to build than a
Leander while having a very fractionally larger crew. For these fairly minimal savings the result was a ship that the Tactical Office feared would be too slow and too weak for many of the projected missions. A flotilla of the design could probably have handled a jump point picket with reasonable confidence and as a planetary guard ship it would have been impressive enough to reassure most civilians. But there had been a good reason the Admiralty Board had raised the standard fleet speed and the
Castles were just too slow, particularly for a warship with such short ranged beam weaponry. While much of the Admiralty had no problem with fobbing off the planetary guard ship mission onto cheap ships, they were adverse to building ineffective ones. It was correctly believed that at some point the army would get enough STO batteries in place that the guard ship mission would disappear, at that point the fleet would have to make use of the ships that were released. It was this that finally tipped the balance in favour of the frigates and marked the retreat of the economical warship faction, while price, strategic minerals and industrial capacity would remain important limits the faction had proved that certain savings were not worth the cost.
Considering the what-ifs is a challenge here, because the frigates that were built very rarely fired a shot in anger themselves. In the guard ship role or distant picket mission the design would doubtless have performed well, because such missions were about presence more than capability. Some have raised events such as the Vistonida Incursion into The Raj through a hidden jump point as an example of the sort of scenario a
Castle would struggle with and certainly they would not have performed well in that case. Being far slower than the standard Vistonida destroyer they never could have caught them and would have been reduced to trying to withstand a missile barrage while defending the key points, hoping to outlast an enemy they could not harm. The issue is of course that The Raj never rated a frigate squadron as it was only ever a listening out post, at least until the discovery of the hidden jump point, so the
Castles would not have faced that situation. If one uses hindsight then it is likely that the
Castles would have been an acceptable choice, but without that benefit it is hard to find fault with an Admiralty that preferred a very slight increase in expenditure to get a considerably more capable design.
