OOC Note: As a reminder for the benefit of the reader, the agenda and attendance for the Naval Conference can be found in the first post of Chapter XXI and may be of some use to keep track of the various personalities involved as well as to be apprised of upcoming topics of discussion - about which speculation is as always encouraged!
N.B. - as it has been some time since the last update, this being calendar time rather than AAR time, the reader might be well-advised to review the previous parts of Chapter XXI to refresh their memory, although of course given the typical length of an update such a commitment is great and fearsome and I could fault no one for declining to engage in such a demanding endeavor.----
25 May 40090800: Session on Performance and Assessment of the Bellerophon Class, Duranium Legion Naval ConferenceThe morning of 25 May was somewhat unique among the mornings of the Naval Conference, in that every Lord Admiral walking into the Conference chamber was in agreement about something - a rare enough occurrence at any hours of the day, let alone those most disagreeable to humankind. The subject of such unprecedented assent was of course the much-maligned
Bellerophon class of frigates which had exhibited to say the least a controversial combat history. Indeed, while each flag officer in the chamber held his or her own opinions as to the details, all present agreed - privately, if not publicly - that the class was seriously flawed and had badly underperformed expectations, this being all the more damning for the fact that said expectations had not been terribly high in the first place.
Attempting to strike a neutral tone, Lord Admiral Criasus noted that in fairness to the class it had never been intended to carry much weight from a pure combat perspective. Therefore, he exhorted the assembly to place greater weight on the performance of the class in other roles, such as the contributions of the class to fleet missile defense operations, reconnaissance and intelligence collection missions, and other ancillary actions. At the same time, Lord Admiral Criasus also conceded quite readily that the oft-criticized survivability of the class certainly played a role in its ability to carry out these roles, and so should not be neglected any more than over-emphasized. The reader should, of course, be able to make an astute guess as to how closely these instructions would be followed by the members of the assembly.
At this, Lord Admiral Criasus doubled down on his optimism and opened the floor for discussion. Immediately, Lord Admiral Niobe Chryson sprang up from her seat and rushed to take the floor, clearly full of opinions and more importantly the vigor to express them at great length and high volume. Unfortunately - at least for the Lord Admiral herself - the meeting notes indicate that in her haste to reach the floor she collided with a member of the Imperial Guard who happened to be in her path. Usually this would have been a non-event, after all accidents do happen and despite their intimidating appearance the Imperial Guard soldiers knew this and would respond accordingly. However, such a knowledgeable response could not be assumed from a Lord Admiral, and the record shows that Lord Admiral Chryson made several admittedly puerile remarks to the face of the offending soldier at her characteristic high volume. A brief scuffle broke out shortly after this; the Guard soldier in question would later attest on the paperwork that a mild peacekeeping action had been necessary and this seems to have never been questioned. Ultimately, while the petulant Lord Admiral was not at this time removed from the Conference chamber, in taking time out of her busy schedule to instigate this fracas her desired status as first to the floor would ultimately pass to a colleague who had taken a rather more leisurely approach.
Thus, the morning session began with remarks from Lord Admiral Gaia Pandia, one of the few present who could give a relatively positive, that is to say lukewarm, assessment of the
Bellerophon class. With the bare minimum of ado, indeed scarcely five minutes of introductory remarks, the Lord Admiral quickly laid out her case for the utility of the
Bellerophon class as commerce raiders, not only in recent encounters with the Belaire but also with an eye towards a future redesign of the class. At this, several members of the assembly were prepared to raise quite loud objections, and indeed the reader could be excused for thinking along much the same lines, for out of the 2,650,000 or so tons of auxiliary and civilian shipping destroyed by the Legion Navy in commerce raids, only 22,500 tons of this could be attributed to the actions of a
Bellerophon-class vessel. Lord Admiral Pandia, however, had anticipated these objections and prepared a measured counter-response along three principal lines of reasoning:
- While her overall contribution to the Legion’s commerce raiding efforts had been minimal, the frigate Bad Omen certainly deserved some credit for demonstrating the feasibility and value of this tactic from her initial interception of a Belaire Burrows-class spaceliner.
- The long-range sensor capabilities of the Bellerophon class had proven essential to find and fix commercial targets, even if the frigates had not usually participated in the destruction of those targets. Strategically, these capabilities should be considered essential for identification of enemy shipping lanes in the general case.
- While much of the destroyed auxiliary and civilian tonnage was attributed to larger vessels, such missions should be considered frankly beneath the station of a Legion Navy battle fleet when one or several frigates would be more than adequate for the task, ideally as a detached duty.
Lord Admiral Pandia had been quite strategic in her presentation, as this last point in particular played well to the assembled Lords Admiral who quite appreciated the sentiment of detaching a few small, irrelevant ships to conduct such raids while their main fleets could continue to seek glory in battle. Thusly placated, the majority of Lords Admiral present were willing to concede the validity of the arguments presented, if not necessarily the thesis these arguments had been raised in support of, and under most circumstances the stage would have been set for a calm, rational discussion of commerce raiding doctrine and its place in Legion Naval theory.
Nevertheless, as was Legion Naval tradition at least one strident and likely irrational objection would have to be raised, and as Lord Admiral Chryson appeared to be still slightly concussed at this time
(Author’s Note: it remains unclear why this observation was entered into the official Conference minutes) it fell to Lord High Admiral Hilaera Antilochus to perform this sacred duty. The Lord High Admiral astutely noted that while it may perhaps be beneath the station of a full battle fleet to engage in such side actions, in the several cases of escorted auxiliary convoys the
Bellerophon class had clearly lacked the protection and firepower to engage the convoy escorts, which had after all been able to inflict minor damage even against the Combined Attack Fleet on 2 March. Thus, the commerce raiding role would require at least a squadron of light cruisers, which would have sufficient protection to minimize potential damage from convoy escorts while bringing sufficient firepower to bear that said escorts would be unable to exchange fire with the Legion cruisers. Thus, Lord High Admiral Antilochus concluded, the
Bellerophon class was entirely unnecessary to the success of the Legion Navy and had frankly been proven as such time and again.
This tirade, as blatantly one-sided and logically underdeveloped as it was, nevertheless marked a strong tactic on the part of the Lord High Admiral. While several obvious counter-arguments could be made, any Lord Admiral raising such an argument would in doing so mark themselves as a
Bellerophon proponent. While of course few among the Lords Admiral were vehemently opposed to the class, indeed most members of the assembly would readily concede some degree of viability and even necessary for the class, even fewer of them were willing to tie their own political capital to a project with such a mixed service record and uncertain future.
Nevertheless, “fewer” is not zero, and as some counter-arguments were simply too obvious to be ignored entirely it fell to Lord Admiral Pothos Aleus, commander of the Training Corps, to delicately lay out the strongest of these by inquiring how, in the absence of a
Bellerophon squadron, a commerce raiding force would deploy long-range sensors to find and fix vulnerable enemy traffic. The initial response to this inquiry was given by Lord Admiral Agamemnon of the Survey Corps, who was perhaps in hindsight attempting to forestall whatever assuredly hot-tempered rejoinder his superior officer had planned. The latter Lord Admiral pointed out that the long-range sensors necessary for these and other sorts of operations would be mounted on the planned command cruiser class, which though it would inevitably be of a compromise design would provide more than adequate capability to replace a
Bellerophon squadron. Lord Admiral Aleus, in turn, agreed that the new command cruisers would be more than adequate replacements in the course of most naval operations, but noted that perhaps detaching a valuable command cruiser from a battle fleet to seek out secondary targets would perhaps not be the best use of resources, thus returning to the previous question. Not one to be denied twice, Lord High Admiral Antilochus leapt at this second chance to address the question, perhaps too eagerly as her response could be classified as little else but a serious political blunder:
“We don’t
need the bloody sensors!”
While the Lord High Admiral could perhaps be commended for her rhetorical astuteness, having successfully composed a reply which failed to contain any logic fallacy - albeit by containing no logic whatsoever - such commendations must be tertiary at best compared to the egregious slight she had committed. The implications were immediately made explicit, as the Lady Imperator Ellen Scamander promptly rose from her rather prominent chair at the head of the honored guest section and exited the Conference chamber, followed by a column of decidedly uneasy-looking aides. As the head of the famous Scamander Corporation, sole provider of all active and passive electronic systems to the Legion Navy, the Lady Scamander while generally characterized by a rarified air of elegant indifference was quite opinionated on the subject of whether or not the Legion Navy did, in fact,
need the bloody sensors. As such, while the official Scamander public relations department would later claim that the Lady Imperator had been regrettably forced to step away from the Naval Conference on urgent Corporation business, in reality the implications of the act were clear, most especially those implications most relevant to Lord High Admiral Antilochus’ career aspirations.
As such, a motion was hastily prepared and a voice vote rapidly held, establishing to the tune of thirteen assents and one abstention that the Legion Navy did, indeed,
need the bloody sensors.
With the pivotal role of the
Bellerophon class, or one not too much unlike it, to Legion Naval doctrine thus clarified, the discussion throughout the remainder of the Conference session would proceed with a less adversarial tone, if only slightly so. This being said, pivotal or not the members of the assembly readily agreed that the
Bellerophon class had clearly underperformed in that role, with the remaining part of the problem being to determine which flaw(s) in the class had contributed to render it such a disappointment. Thus-satisfied with the morning’s accomplishments so far, the Naval Conference was briefly adjourned and light refreshments served.
----
As the morning session resumed following the well-deserved break, the attendees of the Naval Conference set about the challenging task of determining why the
Bellerophon class was so terrible. While many objections and more than a few pejoratives were raised about the class, for the sake of the historical record three principal lines of objection were brought most sharply into focus: misconstruction of the class’s doctrinal role, insufficient armor protection, and inadequate offensive capability.
The topic of the
Bellerophon class role was perhaps unexpectedly broached by Lord Admiral Criasus, “unexpected” here referring not as much to the topic in and of itself but rather to the surprising vitriol which the topic engendered among the assembly. The fault of the Lord Admiral in this matter was quite innocent, as in the interest of rational and fact-based discussion he had highlighted that of the eight
Bellerophons lost to enemy action, six of these had been lost in close-range beam engagements against Belaire fleets, which naturally could be taken to suggest that the class would perform much better in practice if simply withheld from such encounters, while remaining in battle fleet service for anti-missile defense work. On the surface this was an entirely sensible case, certainly not one made with any sense of partisanship on the part of the Speaker, and indeed similar points had been brought up in a more tangential manner in previous Conference sessions. By this stage, however, certain hostilities among the Lords Admiral towards doctrinal evolution had boiled over and it was Lord Admiral Criasus’s misfortune to remove the lid from this particular pot.
The chief opposition arose from the rather large portion of hardline conservative members of the assembly, in a perhaps confusing twist these were not the doctrinal conservatives of previous debates but rather the cultural conservatives of the Legion Navy who saw this seemingly innocent proposal as a threat to centuries of glorious Legion military tradition. Grand Admiral Thanatos Adrastus, as the ranking member of this considerable faction, laid out the crux of this reactionary position. In essence, he argued that enshrining in doctrine that a certain class of warship should explicitly
not engage the enemy in battle ran contrary to the core ethos of the Legion Navy, this being boldly sailing forth to engage the enemy head-on in glorious battle at point-blank range like
proper men and women. As controversial as the
Hellfire class had been, given its role as an attritional sniping specialist rather than a traditional frontal attack combatant, from a cultural perspective the
Hellfires were clearly designed and deployed with the sole purpose of engaging and destroying enemies of the Legion in open battle. To codify in official doctrine that the
Bellerophon class, or any like it, was explicitly to avoid battle would remove any illusion of traditional Legion military values associated with the class. How, then, could any self-respecting void sailor of the Legion Navy be asked, let alone expected, to follow such an - the Lord Grand Admiral emphasized that he did not choose his next word lightly -
emasculating doctrinal imperative?
As there could only be two real resolutions to this problem, it fell to Lord Admiral Chryson, by now apparently recovered from her concussive symptoms, to exposit the first. In a set of surprisingly brief (once edited for content) remarks, she asserted that Lord Grand Admiral Adrastus was completely correct in his interpretation of Legion Naval doctrine and tradition, namely that a Legion Naval warship must be a capable combatant to be worth fielding at all. Equally certain, she stated, was the fact that the
Bellerophon class was in no way a capable combatant nor was it likely to be rendered such by any sort of iterative design changes. Thus, she concluded, as a sensor-bearing class of ships was still necessary, for reasons previously established, the only acceptable solution would be to design an entirely new class of sensor-bearing ships which could also function as capable front-line combatants. While left unsaid at this time, it was clear that Lord Admiral Chryson was implying that a larger class, with at least a destroyer if not cruiser-sized hull, would be necessary to meet this criterion - certainly, her own preference for larger warships was not unknown to the members of the assembly.
Lord Grand Admiral Adrastus, ever one to advise against rash judgments, immediately moved to counter this argument, urging caution while advancing the second possible resolution to the problem he himself had raised. Specifically, he argued that while it was unconscionable for Legion Naval doctrine to instruct any ship class to flee from battle, it was entirely wise and practical to provide for certain ship classes not to encounter a battle which they would be unsuited to win. To wit, turning to a projector-and-screen setup which had heretofore gone unnoticed by the members of the assembly, the Lord Grand Admiral asked his colleagues to recall the agreed-upon revised doctrine from an earlier session:
The nominally agreed-upon organization for the future Legion Navy battle fleet, based on doctrinal agreements and other discussions up until the Conference sessions of 25 May. Lord Grand Admiral Adrastus was quick to emphasize that this was not a finalized organization, and would still be subject to the final vote at the conclusion of the Conference, but would here serve as a suitable illustrative aid. Notably, while the assignment of the command cruiser as the jump cruiser for the heavy squadron was established in a prior session, at this time neither the fighter loadout of the Judgment Day-class cruiser nor the final composition of the Beam Squadron had been settled, albeit neither matter was anticipated to lead to any undue quarreling.Given the visual aid, the Lord Grand Admiral considered his solution quite obvious; as an optional attachment, the
Bellerophons or any successor class would simply not be assigned to any fleet which could expect to do battle on terms unfavorable to the class. This improvement in class utilization would be enabled only by the presence of the new command cruiser class, which would ensure that every battle fleet had organic long-range sensor capabilities even without a
Bellerophon attachment.
At this, the reader will be unsurprised to learn, two closely related objections were raised. The first, raised by several Lords Admiral familiar with the combat record of the class including Lord Admiral Criasus himself, was that in the past, the
Bellerophons had frequently found themselves engaged in battles they were ill-suited for regardless of any preceding hope or intention. Lord Grand Admiral Adrastus readily conceded this point; however, he noted, the
Bellerophons had always heretofore been considered an essential component of a battle fleet, rather than an optional mission specialist unit. Prior doctrine, he correctly assessed, had not properly allowed for the detachment of a frigate squadron when not called for - in large part, he added, because the frigate squadron was always called for by any fleet otherwise lacking long-range sensor coverage.
A closely following objection was raised by the eminently predictable Lord Admiral Chryson, who complained that while “doctrine” was all well and good, battlefield reality was such that a
Bellerophon squadron would inevitably find itself hurled into an unexpected and unfavorable combat situation. Any class which could not handle such a twist of fate simply did not deserve to be listed on any Legion Navy roster, save perhaps that of the local scrapping yard. Once again, Lord Grand Admiral Adrastus did concede the point raised - the
Bellerophon class as it currently stood was a nightmare of poor survivability and some revision was undoubtedly called for. Whether this necessitated a mere revision of the class or a completely new type was a matter for the afternoon session; the Lord Grand Admiral despite his advocacy to this point would certainly not be sticking his neck out for the class any more than any one of his colleagues would. His essential point, then, was simply that a “combat-capable” class was not strictly necessary to fulfill the sensor-bearing role, rather a less demanding designation of “combat-survivable” should be sufficient in the worst cases given the proper doctrinal approach already agreed upon in the previous sessions.
As this was followed by a comparative dearth of further objections and counter-objections, it quickly became apparent that the assembly by and large could accept or at least tolerate this line of reasoning. If nothing else, the logic laid down by Lord Grand Admiral Adrastus served the self-interests of the Lords Admiral, these being that on one hand the major problems with the
Bellerophon class could be resolved with work already done previously on the subject of doctrine, thus no further work on such an egregious and tiresome subject would be necessary, and on the other hand that some improvements to the class remained clearly necessary and thus with a modicum of further discussion the Conference attendees would be able to point to some superficial changes and claim that they had made progress to solve the Navy’s problems. With this attitude, the Lords Admiral eagerly turned their attention towards the simpler, more concrete, and surely less acrimonious topic of the actual specifications of the
Bellerophon class, seeking to establish in as few words as possible, for a loose definition of “few”, which changes might be necessary to correct the by now rather minimized failings of the actual design.
Following from the newly-defined requirement of “combat-survivable”, the discussion naturally turned first to the armor protection of the
Bellerophons. Each frigate was protected by 381 mm of composite armor plating, this being three-quarters as thick as the armor of the Legion’s destroyer classes or half as thick as the armor on a Legion Navy light cruiser. In the original design documents prior to the year 4000, this armor thickness had been stated as a requirement as it would provide protection against nuclear missile warheads up to 15,000 kilotons in strength, a value considered well beyond any reasonable enemy capability. In practice, damage from stray missiles had been a rare consideration, with the notable exception of the understrength Cruiser Squadron 5 during the pursuit of fleeing Belaire fleet elements after the jump point assault of 19 January, and under usual circumstances the answer to stray missiles had been not to allow any by laying down an impenetrable wall of point defense fire. While Lord Admiral Chryson was quick to point out the obvious example of the Battle of Gliese 1, when this doctrine had failed rather spectacularly, others among the assembly were quick to point out that the doctrinal failure had led to more than a few stray missiles, and in any case the problem had been resolved through the sacking of those responsible.
Thus, administrative miscalculations aside, the greatest threat to the survival of the
Bellerophon class had been the powerful laser weapons of the Belaire
Sovremenny-class cruisers. This was for once acknowledged by all present without debate, however the solution to the problem was far less clear. Much of this unclear nature was due to a lack of facts in evidence: while the Belaire light lasers were known to (barely) lack capability to penetrate even the armor of a
Bellerophon at point-blank range, the medium lasers suffered from no such problem and for these the limiting case had been the 508 mm armor plating of the
Charybdis-class destroyers. Naively, this would suggest that a simple up-armoring of Legion frigate classes to match the destroyer armor scheme should solve the problem neatly. However, the maximum penetration capacity of the Belaire heavy lasers remained unclear, although it was clearly sufficient to deal internal damage to a Legion destroyer on the first volley of fire. As such, even a one-third increase in the armor thickness of the frigates would not guarantee survival against point-blank heavy laser fire, thus the merit of adding extra armor remained open to question. Ultimately, the question would come down to whether sufficient sensor capabilities would be retained in the face of an up-armoring program, as it would make little sense to design a “combat-survivable” class which was not useful enough to ever risk being near combat in any case. In the grand tradition of Legion Navy ship design, the Lords Admiral settled on the most familiar and conventional solution available, this being to punt the question to the afternoon session.
This left only one remaining question, at least as far as those present would admit, which was the question of the class’ armament. While offensive weaponry would almost surely have crossed the line of “combat-survivable”, the contribution of the frigate classes to fleet point defense was a crucial element of Legion Naval defensive doctrine and thus merited at least a cursory treatment. The treatment was indeed cursory; Lord Admiral Pothos Aleus was the latest member of the assembly to continue the disturbing trend of coming prepared for the discussion, and presented a numerical analysis performed by experts at the Duratus Naval Academy. To summarize, the experts concluded that had the pair of
Bellerophons present at the Battle of Gliese 1 been armed with twice as many railgun batteries (i.e., four apiece rather than two), only one or perhaps two more Mongolican missiles would have been shot down per volley on average. This would have made virtually no contribution to the outcome of the battle, and thus the natural conclusion was that additional armament for the frigate class would be entirely superfluous and make no contribution to either the primary mission nor the doctrinal requirement of combat survivability.
In something of a last-ditch attempt to salvage some gains from the morning session, Lord Admiral Chryson pointed out that while additional weapons would not contribute to the existing primary mission of the
Bellerophon class, there was no reason that the mission profile could not be extended as part of a class redesign or (ideally, in her view) replacement. For example, a light raider role could be a natural fit for a class which already excelled at finding and fixing vulnerable targets, and would make the class just slightly less useless on balance. While this suggestion was naturally met with skepticism from the rest of the Lords Admiral, sufficient merit could be seen in Lord Admiral Chryson’s arguments that she could not be dismissed out of hand. For this reason, as well as a general feeling of peckishness which was starting to overtake the members of the assembly, the grand tradition of punting was once again invoked, this time by Lord Admiral Criasus himself who stated that the discussion of new roles for the class or its replacement properly fell under the purview of the afternoon session, which was after all denoted on the Conference agenda as the “Session on Future Directions for the Fleet Scouting Role”. As there could be no argument against this unimpeachable logic, or more precisely there was no one present who cared to raise such an argument, the matter was officially marked as punted.
After this the Naval Conference was adjourned for a light luncheon.
----
It could here be noted, candidly, that there is a strong tendency among students of history to seek assignment of “winners” and “losers” arising from a particularly vigorous debate in the historical record. In the vast majority of cases, such tendencies are, to use a diplomatic phrase, misguided oversimplifications, the historical reality being nearly always far too complex to be reduced to “one-nil”. Nevertheless, as this particular morning session of the Naval Conference concluded, a rare case of an unambiguous winner was found in the person of Lord Admiral Gaia Pandia. Herself being frankly indifferent to the eventual fate of the
Bellerophon class, her session-opening remarks ostensibly in defense of the class had been in fact a clever and highly successful misdirection ploy. By immediately driving the members of the assembly to debate the efficacy of the
Bellerophon class for commerce raiding, Lord Admiral Pandia had caused her colleagues, consciously or (far more likely) not, to accept the validity of commerce raiding as a viable and central element of Legion Naval doctrine, which had of course been her own key interest all along. While this would of course have an immediate impact for the afternoon session of the Conference, the full ramifications of this seemingly subtle doctrinal shift on Legion Naval history would require far longer to work out.
----
OOC Notes: Suffice to say, rumors of this AAR's death have been greatly exaggerated. 
While I have worked hard to keep to the traditional nature of this AAR by producing an intimidating wall of text to frighten away those faint of heart, I have at least been merciful and provided a picture in the middle to brighten the collective day of the readership. Or darken it, as the prevailing opinion might be.
That being said, I will admit that aside from the general business of life this update has been much-delayed in part due to the great difficulty in constructing it, with some parts undergoing as many as four drafts before I found something that could 'stick' and not be terrible. At least this is my opinion, but if anyone else finds this terrible anyways I am afraid that I cannot take responsibility for that.
Up next we turn once more to the chief attraction of this work, I speak of course of ship design discussions ad nauseum. This should prove considerably more straightforward of an update to write, though I make no promises as to the hour of its arrival.
