There are a lot of things you misunderstood about the Donnager, 1. It doesn't carry it's escort ship to hide it's numbers but to increase the endurance, since small ships have small endurance. 2. Those big circle in the front and not torpedoes tubes, they are tubes for ballistic missiles like the ones infront of morgan class but much larger 3.Every larger ships have holding cells for capture enemies to ship mates. 4. Fighting pirate it's peace time job but it's actually intended for planetary assault while Morgan class is to save as a flag ship.
@@wallecesembe2099 The thing is, we see Corvette Class and Morrigan Class ships doing long range trips at multiple occaisions with no issues, so the endurance thing doesn't really apply
G force is relative. Even under full burn, a ship is only pulling a couple Gs...or its crew is dead. A missile, even in earths atmosphere, can pull alot more. Some concept missiles have been tested up to 100G acceleration. In space, with no resistance, its gone.
I felt like the Donnager class was intended to serve as along term forward supply ship both as a carrier and battleship. Set up shop in a shipping lane and send out frigates and patrol craft. They actually hunt pirates while knowing they have a safe harbor in an engagement gets out of control. Pick up some prisoners, then head back to the donnager and offload them. You have the space to perform dry dock maintenance on the patrol craft and the ability to rotate crew as required. Rather than the whole fleet needing to head back to Mars for prisoner drops and resupply, the Donnager serves as your hub and and post up as a long range power projection around the system. It never felt like the Donnager was actually meant for a full scale war, but as a piece on the board for an extended cold war.
The Donnager feels like its built for long term Star Trek esque voyages. Carrying an escort inside it so it can spread out and handle multiple things potentially at once, plus being able to basically drydock smaller vessels without needing to haul around another dedicated ship. For missions like that you need a brig not only for captures but also for potential mutineers which could happen if you are on a super long term assignment. Like it feels like a ship basically sent to patrol the belt and stay there for years.
That's exactly how I see those. I can't recall whether it was in one of the core books or the short novels, but the Donnager class is at some point described as a "force projection platform". A mobile safe harbor where the real work horses can resupply, repair, rotate crew and offload. Want to retaliate against that couple of destroyers that slagged your ship/arrested your pirates/impounded your contraband? Good, now YOU go and chase those speedy boys TOWARDS a Donnager-class, see how far that gets you. Meanwhile, D-class ships can go back and forth from Mars to any Donnager-class with an escort of, say, two or three frigates. Oh, Mr. Pirate McPirateface wants to retrieve his people by hitting that D-class? Yeah, have fun mustering a flotilla that can confidently take on those just to rescue some pirate scum and maybe steal some cargo. The whole Donnager-Corvette-Morrigan part of MCRN's doctrine makes a lot of sense, especially once you add a bunch of cruisers to the mix.
I think the brig makes sense on the Donny. In the real world, a carrier might have a brig, but a destroyer or cruiser never does. It's just a sci fi trope to have a jail on every little ship. Only the biggest ships have enough room to justify it. A little corvette would stop a ship doing coast guard duty, arrest a smuggler and put him in handcuffs, then head back to the big capital ship with enough room to house and feed the prisoner until they made it home. FWIW, I also think no railgun on the corvette makes sense. Again, it's only meant to be used while sitting next to a Donny which has the space and power reserves to use the railgun optimally. It's easy to add every kind of gun to a sketch. But if you imagine it's a real ship in a real economy, you want to use your industrial capacity putting the railguns on ships that are intended to actually use them. Rocinante only finds the railgun useful because Holden doesn't have a Donny to run back to when a big enemy shows up. As-intended, a railgun on a corvette would just be deadweight on a corvette while it does PDC to defend the Battlecarrier. The mass of the railgun is going to mean at least exactly that much less mess of PDC ammo. Less PDC ammo means the corvette would be worse at defending the actual strategic asset.
Honestly, while I agree that the Morrigan-class is peak MCRN vibes, I still think that the Corvette and Donnager-class are some of my favourites. That extra detailing and slightly lumpy superstructure bits for PDC's or just because, really captured me on the MCRN aesthetic overall. That, and Bobbie. Just Bobbie.
I'm sad that the battles from the show didn't follow the events of Caliban's war better. Having them actually resupply with the MCRN and the mysterious "package" Alex picks up for bobbie was so fun.
In defense of the "do everything" nature of cruisers, I've always taken cruisers as being expected to operate independently and/or be able to take up flagship duties. They are suppose to do everything, if only a little bit.
Sail frigates which are replaced in role by cruisers which come about when steam powered ships are finally have the range to be able to operate independently so they can start being used for fly the flag missions in distant stations. It's a shame that Kennedy pushed the nonsense cruiser gap in the late 1960's to 70's since then all the USN cruisers from the Leahy class onwards would have been called Frigates.
Do everything ships are also becoming increasingly more popular in the real world as well, at least in concept. The US Navy is definitely trying to make more versatile ships, but these can’t operate as command ships because they lack the size to accommodate. The bigger a ship the more expensive it is to use and the more picky you need to be with how it’s used. Modern aircraft carriers and old school Landing docks are designed to be as versatile as possible. That’s because they’re so large, you can really stick anything on them. These are usually too expensive to take out of a command role though, so even though they can operate independently, most militaries would rarely consider it.
That was the entire point of cruisers and the frigates that they replaced. The European powers, particularly Britain, needed ships that could protect trade routes, defend colonies and generally sail all over the world, often alone. Smaller ships didn't have the endurance or combat capability for the job, while larger ships were too expensive, slower and reserved for critical fleet engagements. Since cruisers had to be capable of operating independently in large numbers, they needed a broad range of capabilities in a cost-efficient package. In most sci-fi settings, the same logic applies. Mid-sized warships with a broad range of capabilities are invaluable. Purpose-built cruisers (such the British Dido's and the American Atlanta's) tend to have a shorter lifespan, particularly in peacetime, as they can't operate independently and can quickly become obsolete.
That is actually the sole criteria linking all early modern cruisers, from battlecruisers to gunboats. These ships were all designed with independent operations in mind, whether hunting down large enemy cruisers or patrolling some colonies/sphere of influence/punching bags. Battleships operated as part of a battle fleet, while destroyers operated in groups (with various names). The bottom end of the cruiser group was broken off in the 1930 London Naval Treaty to become frigates/sloops/corvettes/avisos/kaibōkan/gunboats/etc., as that group wasn’t really named in the text. That of course died with the advent of the missile age. Today almost all surface combatants have evolved from destroyer design practice and are capable of operating independently. The term “cruiser” now is essentially synonymous with “big destroyer”.
@@Imbeachedwhale As a fanatic of Sir Fisher's Battlecruiser concept, I have been looking forward to the reappearance of such a large ship that capable of fully independently operating in far seas in now and future. Even the carriers, which might be consider as some sort of "transformation" of BCs in aviation era, are now not truly capable of fighting independently. A batteries of ASBM launcher will kicked the carrier's asses hard if no escort Destroyers to provide missile defense, but a large cruiser with its own AEGIS radar and SM-6 missiles will be a complety different story.
If a near-peer assumes you have a tucked away escort you're benefiting from deterant regardless of whether you have a full bay or not - many a waterbound ship battle has been strategically won as neither side wanted to find out on a tactical level.
One complication in space is that your acceleration vs your drive plume says how much mass you're carrying- if poorly managed, then everyone can tell exactly how toothy you are at any given moment.
@@absalomdraconis this could also be used as an advantage though, they could load heavy asteroids into their hangars to appear more dangerous or burn „dirtier“ to look like they’re going full speed when they’re not so making themselves look less dangerous
Resupply ships are something I wish we got more of in Sci-fi. It makes a fun premise for an episode, whether your characters are with the resupply ship or the warship and find the other mysteriously adrift in space.
They have so much potential and add a huge amount of authenticity to a setting, I love em but the D-class missed the mark a bit. - hoojiwana from Spacedock
Also imagine this. A warship just got out of a tough engagement, their supplies are low, their spare parts are all used up abd their ammo is at say, 10% capacity. There is a secondary enemy force on its way and the warship lacks the ammo to reliably deal with it or the parts to repair itself after the fact. There is a resupply ship on its way too, but now it's a race, who will get there first? The resupply ship who can well, resupply the warship to deal with the incoming enemy forces, or the enemy force who'll easily destroy the depleted and vulnerable warship? Bam. There's a gripping, tension filled episode right there.
One reason for the Pella-type cruisers might well be that the MCRN's repsonse to the Ring Gates was to move production away from "hey, UN, look at my MASSIVE SHIP" to building larger numbers of smaller ships with torpedo spam, because the effective area they had to operater in just got, like, 3 orders of magnitide larger.
Ok so about the Donnie having prison cells, it really does make sense, being the fact it was mainly used to fight pirates which is why it carries itself a small fleet so that it can extend the area it can in effect police. The ships it carries aren't really big enough to hold prisoners for long periods of time but as they may regularly group back up with the Donnager for Resuply they can then use the Donnagers prison facilities, and with space being as big as it is its possibly fairly rare that a Donnager ever gets chance to return to mars or meet up with other fleet assets to offload prisoners which could be the reason it carries such facilities. The ability to hold vessels internally could perhaps provide an advantage to repairing damaged ships rather than having them return to a dedicated ship yard or having to dock outside to be repaired which could be more dangerous to work on also is not as well protected as being inside the ship.
Yep. Also, a warship needs a place to hold potential mutineers. Proportional to its' crew size. But there is another very important use for prisoner cells during war - you can't take war prisoners without a place to hold them. And yep, in case of war you want to take prisoners - they can be exchanged for your own captured (which additionally makes an enemy nation more prone to take prisoners as well), so even if we forget that leaving somebody to die in vacuum of space, even an enemy, is barbaric: they are a leverage and a source of information - a resource worth collecting and maintaining.
Also, being the flagship of a flotilla, it's also where the Redcaps can keep your own defaulters for relatively petty shit, or keep then under lock and key while you arrange transport somewhere a court martial can be convened.
I agree, I think of Donnager's as a forward Martian base ship, as its a combination carrier/battleship making it more of a command ship (the Galactica type gig). A mobile bit of Mars territory, thus it kept prisoners gathered by other ships for longer periods, maybe even holding certain folks for extended stays outside of martian territory proper, their little Guantanamo. Just some thoughts. Good post.
@@NaqrSeranvis Plus say the ship has to perform a rescue operation for a neutral vessel (merchant or science ship). The survivors are going to need to be played somewhere to be monitored and you can't have them wandering the ship. So they'd likely be kept in the brig as well (accommodations seem okay for a transitory stay) until you offload them at a neutral port or to another vessel. The Donnager sets up shop then sends its vessels out to either recon hard targets or dispatch smaller vessels then return from refit and offloading anyone they rescued or capture.
Hiding numbers makes absolute sense for the Donny. The MCRN has a numerical disadvantage, so being able to play a strategic shell game is a big deal. You basically force the UNN to send enough ships to go toe-to-toe with a Donnager and a full escort group, while that escort group can be elsewhere doing other things, stretching the UNN thinner. It's not unlike the thinking that underpins the Fleet In Being concept. And the prison-bus thing was more because the Donnager happened to be nearby.
And since the mcrn can change engine signatures and transponders on all their ships and have stealth coatings gives even more credence to that theory imo
I mean, we all know the real reason these MCRN ships have robust prison barracks is because it's a TV show. We all hand-wave away everyone walking around like it's 1G and not 0.3G/grav-boot-assisted because we understand that it'd be impossibly difficult to film, so we should also give them a break when the show presents to us giant roomy prison cells with floor-to-ceiling glass doors.
@@Sky_Guy Most military ships have brigs today. Not just for prisoner transport, but for crew. I'd expect something more like a small regular quarters so it could be converted to carry more non-prisoners if the need arose. If they're going out on months-long missions someone is going to be caught breaking the law or going crazy. Some Americans can't even handle 3 minutes in an airplane without getting arrested. I expect we will see air brigs in our lifetime.
The major thing for that it only about endurance since small ships can't burn from Mars to Jupiter without refueling. It's the same thing as aircraft carriers do
I guess having a large brig is a contingency for mutiny or more likely, the capture of POWs. The ship has better things to do than act as a prison transport, but in the middle of a war, after capturing an enemy ship, that might be required nonetheless.
I actually like the tall PDC housings on the Tachi. It makes sense to have as much field of fire on each gun as possible, especially on a small ship that is meant to be an escort.
I got the feeling the technology to make railguns that were small enough for the Rocinate to use was relatively new, which is why it didn't originally have one. Even when it got one it had to be integrated with the haul to prevent it from ripping itself off when fired, meaning you can only aim it by pointing the whole ship at the target.
Interesting hypothesis. During the Donnager battle one of the 'gunners' says she's "never seen them (a railgin) on a ship that small", and those were state of the art stealth ships. The Roci is a bit smaller(?) than the stealth ships, and it's older so that might support your hypothesis.
@@TStark-vj2wo Thta, and I always assumed that once Mao went down, the UN would have possibly raided his company's files and figured out how they managed to get a railgun on those smaller stealth ships.
@@TStark-vj2wo I assume that the railgun aboard the Rocinante was derived from the Amun Ra-classes experimental railguns. One of the main problems seemed to be strength of the ship and energy supply to the railgun. While on battery power at Illus, Alex does explain that the railgun does have it's own battery-system to supply it.
"Why didn't the MCRN Corvettes have a railgun?" There is something called fleet doctrine, and I think the MCRN ships show it really well. The MCRN Light Cruiser (Pella) shows a ship that can be a ship of the line, capable of dishing out the hurt and avoid getting hit (which is exactly what a Light Cruiser would do), it's likely that a Cruiser would sail as part of a battle line (multiple cruisers) while still being cost effective and flexible enough to take on a whole gamut of missions. They would likely sail with Frigates and Destroyers as escorts if they were the only Cruiser there. Light Cruisers aren't designed to constantly brawl with an enemy but they are designed to pack a hefty punch and outflank an opponent. The Sirocco, an Assault Cruiser (likely a type of Heavy Cruiser) is likely to have far more capability than a Light Cruiser and a much heavier armament. The Heavy Frigate is very well designed as an independent ship capable of running a lot of missions (similar to real life frigates) it can run missions of low importance solo, or you can group a bunch of them together for a big fight, they remain one of the most flexible vessels in the Navy. Additionally I'm fairly sure the heavy frigates use their torpedoes for defense of a much larger fleet for when PDCs just aren't enough. The Corvette and Morrigans weren't really designed to operate on their own, but they provide a powerful PDC screen for the rest of the fleet. The Morrigan's "weak point" isn't really a weak point if you think about these ships flying in formation around a fleet. It's interesting to note that the Morrigan is constantly referred to as a destroyer throughout the TV series, and that's because it's role is functionally equivalent to the Torpedo Boat Destroyers in days of yore. Now onto the Donnager. The Donny is for when the MCRN is REALLY looking for a fight, it is there for one purpose and that is to make whatever happened to piss off the MCRN have a very, very, bad day. It's deployed as both a highly capable weapons platform and as a very effective deterrent. It's likely to be at the center of a fleet. Whatever it can't hit with missile spam it will hit with Railguns, the Donnager is a brawler it can take as much as it can dish out. The vast majority of combat in the Expanse takes place using torpedoes as the primary weapon, in order for torpedoes to hit however they need to pass through the PDC fire that defends most ships. Railguns provide an interesting paradigm in that they can very easily pass through PDC fire but won't cause catastrophic damage to larger ships (but can devastate smaller ones). I suspect the MCRN fleet doctrine centers around using smaller vessels as a PDC screen and using railguns to whittle away at an opponent's escorts, which likely have a lot of PDCs, opening a hole in the center to launch an overwhelming torpedo attack on the central formation. The MCRN fleet, while being much more capable, is also quite a bit more specialized and isn't nearly as general purpose as the UN Fleet or the Belter fleets. The reason the Pella, a Light Cruiser leads the Free Navy is simply because it's the best ship they have. I suspect the High-Low mix is also present in how the MCRN designs their ships and fleet combinations. Light Patrol Fleet: 1 Heavy frigate + 3 Morrigans + 2 Corvettes. The Heavy Frigate provides an ample magazine of Torpedoes and the Morrigans and Corvettes provide PDC cover. Patrol Fleet: 1 Light Cruiser + 2 Heavy Frigates + 6 Morrigans + 2 Corvettes. The Heavy Frigates provide an ample magazine of Torpedoes and the Morrigans and Corvettes provide PDC cover. The Light Cruiser has flag facilities and has the added benefit of better sensors and more torpedoes. Operations Fleet: 1 Assault Cruiser (or Donnager battleship), 2 Light cruisers or 4 Heavy Frigates, 8 Morrigans, 4 Corvettes. An assault cruiser adds additional capability and a light railgun, the Operations Fleet has the ability to undertake any operation the MCRN needs done save for all out battles or missions without extended resupply. Battlefleet: 2- 3 Donnager Class Battleships, 2-3 Assault Cruisers, 4 Light Cruisers, 6 Heavy Frigates, 32 Morrigans, 16 Corvettes. This is a fleet for fighting actual battles. Due to the Donnager's hangar bays the Battlefleet is capable of repair and refit of smaller craft.
Great analysis! Also worth noting the shock of the Donnager crew when seeing a ship as small as the Anubis-class mounting a railgun. As much as the MCRN is supposed to be newer and higher-tech than the UNN, most or all of the designs we see probably pre-date the pilot episode. So it might not have been considered financially prudent or practical to mount a railgun on smaller spaceframe... at least until Mao-Kwik collapsed and presumably a lot of salvaged or nationalized cutting edge R&D became more widely available. Also, speaking of fleet doctrine, the Donnager being so goddamn *big* also speaks to it's ability to fire railguns off-axis without massive disruption to the crew or other systems. Considering the Roci's main drive has to fire in sync with the railgun as a recoil compensator, an off-axis solution might not work on anything smaller - and MCRN fleet doctrine might not have liked the idea of a sizable % of a ships' firepower (and unit cost...) being only able to fire on one axis, also making it extremely predictable and unreliable outside of point-blank range engagements (which with MCRN's superior torpedo guidance and flight characteristics, they may have assumed was an unlikely engagement to ever *be* in in the first place. We see that explicitly in season 1 with Alex protesting, "who would be crazy enough to take on the Donnager in CQB?!"
The Donnanger is the perfect example of force projection, and I would guess that in times of crisis it would be the center of today's carrier groups. You nailed it! Also, I like the weirdness of the Donnie's design, because it reflects the politics and compromises of real-life warships.
Lore wise the Corvette class Roci can also only support a railgun after a set of upgrades to reactors and railguns derived from the protomolecules constructions.
Honestly, I would take two or three Morrigans, arrange them in a formation that has them cover each other's blind sides and you get a pretty cool little wolfpack
I was thinking in wings/squadrons, sort of. 1 corvette like the Roci paired with 2 Morrigans. Working in groups of 3 or 5 ships. You'd have both defensive screens and ranged firing in relatively flexible and fast formations for hunting pirates and supply line strikes. In larger engagements adding a cruiser as command ship with her railguns would make a mess of even capital ships since there's a large concentration of fire from multiple sources.
Maybe like a heavy frigate at the centre with 3 moreigans on each ends of a triangle with there 2 pdcs out wards would do the thing, maybe with added rail guns on top
It generally feels like the Roci is primarily designed to offer massive PDC support and this coincidentally makes it great at defense. It seems like few ships have as many and as wide coverage as the Roci.
I love the "OMG its a Donnager!" moment. The freaking Laconians have one, OK that was multiple refurbished previously mothballed Donnagers, but seriously, if your ship can scare the most high tech faction decades after being obsolte, you know you've done something right.
@@benhobson3084 Yeah there's a big difference between strategic obsolescence and tactical. Navies still found uses for their legacy battleships long after building more was seen as a bad idea. Big gun make big boom.
Battleships in space combat actually makes sense the donnager having to easily take multiple hits and a lot of punishment and being their in the rear of the battle supporting with its massive 80-90 meter long railguns, hundreds of torpedoes, and being used against a fleet while remaining behind the line supporting and using distance to its advantage and such as this ship would be a large headache platform to deal with and a hanger bay able to act both like a mobile base and a repair maintenance hug and something to drop off the capture pirates makes sense plus the flagship was in a secret operation to have its other ships and other martian ships of the fleet hunt down pilots and such while the donnager was in the dark during this operation.
For forward launching vs side launching torpedos, I remember from the books that torps have vastly more power/weight ratio than ships carrying squishy humans, and can easily out-accelerate their launcher. They'd have a weaker chemical rocket engine for the initial launch to get them away from the vessel, then they engage the main Epstein drive when they have enough distance so they don't toast the launching ship. Even the initial chemical engine has plenty fast enough. Another bit from the books is that in a chase scenario, the chaser has a disadvantage firing torps, as they're having to fight against an accelerating frame of reference between two ships that might be relatively static to each other distance wise.
There's Nebulous fleet command on steam which has the same feel of the combat (missiles, torpedoes, railguns, PDCs) You can download mods to have the Expanse's ships on there
Capital ships will have their own brigs as the size of them means that somewhere a sailor on board will do something dumb and need locking up for awhile...Bit of an oversight by our Spacedock here
He must've missed his coffee that day cause he was completely talking out of his ass with that one &a few others.. either that or he lost a bet where the forfeit was "trashtalk the Donny for no reason &if u don't have anything just make stuff up!" 💀
You didn’t listen to what he said He said it’s dumb that the ship is used to carry prisoners Not that having a brig is dumb Which it’s true, imagine the U.S. using a super carrier to transport prisoners from NY to Florida That would be moronic There is a difference between having the ability to do something and something being built specifically to do so A battleship being used, as he said, as a prison bus, is stupid
There is nothing wrong with having a small brig and offloading prisioners into homebound ships too. But no. We have to make space in this battleship for multiple levels of prison and then drag the whole ship, with the guns, sensors and presence back to Mars just to send off prisoners.
The sheer middle finger energy though… Donnager in sixth is upsetting as it is a gorgeous ship in any Sci fi setting. Plus when one turns up. It’s exciting!
@@Valokaari exactly and battleships in the expanse and in irl space combat make great sense they could stay behind the lines and use the long distance as their advantage to fire support and such while most of the fleet is near the front lines and attacking while the battleship provides the massive punch in a fight is very significant and can take a massive amount of punishment and could be a mobile repair, maintenance, ship/tender carrier and more.
@@Valokaari The Donnager doesn't just dominate the battlefield, it dominates the entire theatre. According to the first book, it could have dropped a few torpedoes on the Knight from halfway across the system.
@@rakisuzuki-burke4148 there only aperances are getting blown up, getting eaten by the things that killed the gate builders or being bait. Not once in the books do see a donager dominating anything
One headcanon I've seen several times that I'm a fan of is that the Pella is an example of the show version of the Raptor-class fast-attack cruiser from the books.
I used to think that too, but the lack of a railgun on the Pella means it doesn't really stand the comparison. I prefer to think of the Pella as an older design, too obsolete for the MCRN but still potent enough to be a threat to smaller ships. Tbh I think the show designs are way too stingy with railguns. In the book-verse destroyers all have one (IIRC one UN design even has two) aside from the Morrigan which is its own thing, and they're only one step above frigates. The show's heavy frigate should probably have one, especially since the heavier destroyers were omitted from the adaptation, and it should be a mandatory feature on any cruiser.
@@hoojiwana Probably. I totally understand it from a showrunning perspective, but it still bothers my nerd brain haha. There's a bunch of stuff like that which is justified by out of universe logic like wide spaces inside warships, the Corvette all but disappearing from the MCRN to avoid confusion with the Roci or the capital ships being weirdly lit up. I can't really hold that against the show too much, even if it's not how I would've done it.
@@zqfmgb4335 My personal theory-to-head canon is that the Pella and its class had a keel-mounted railgun by design, but was disarmed to a degree for unknown purposes. Perhaps to avoid the Free Navy from effectively sniping Duarte's fleet in the case of betrayal.
i thought railguns were pretty much impossible to install on such a small vessel like the rocinance due to the power constraints, if this is true it makes sense as to why it was installed later on in the series when the technology from the previous "Unknown Small" ships in season 1 EP 1 were finally understood since they did have railguns .
The keel mounted railgun was definitely seen as something of note as soon as the Amun Ra's came about. Even Duarte took note with the Pulsar class having the same setup, though being substantially larger. On the other hand they could have just done that to make the Storm not outclass the Roci so much by having turreted railguns.
The power output of a fusion torch drive should be more than sufficient for a rail gun, considering that such things are real now and can be powered by gas turbine engine, cruiser sized, destroyer like the Zumwalt.
The brigs on the Donny and the Pella were probably intended not just for pirates but also for crew. I don't think we have a ton of detail on how the MCRN handles discipline, but they don't strike me as a very insubordination friendly organization.
Man, I couldn't disagree more strongly on the Corvette-class. I thought it was a fantastic design, and as a character is a perfect hero ship. Its strengths (PDCs) and weaknesses (low torpedo count) are prominent, make sense, and strongly affect the story. The simple grey paintjob was my favorite iteration.
"And a non-peer wouldn't care because OH MY GOD, IT'S A DONNAGER!" So true, and so funny. Yes, non-peer powers wouldn't really care about the exact complement of escort ships hidden inside the Donnager when the Donnager alone could wipe the floor with an entire fleet of Belter ships with ease. Ironically, the loss of the Donnager occurred because the Donnager DIDN'T make use of this feature of the ship. It had a full-blown Corvette-class escort ready for action, needing only a handful of people to crew it well-enough, and it would definitely have made all the difference in that fight. Fast, agile, and small enough to be a much harder target for torpedoes, plenty of point-defenses to help whittle down incoming torpedoes as well as make life difficult for any of the stealth frigates that got in close, and its own complement of torpedoes to give those frigates something to worry about. Not to mention the fact that the additional suite of sensors from a different ship would have made effective stealth harder. Also, the Donnager having a degree of prisoner facilities makes some sense. It doesn't need to be much (and isn't shown to be much; about 6-12 cells in one room and that's it), but it would be very useful when dealing with high-value prisoners, spies, crewmembers having a breakdown, or the psychological effect on the prisoner to know that they're being held in the heart of the most powerful warship in the system--no hope of escape or being broken out, being surrounded by an unparalleled display of might.
The prison cells might also be used just for unruly crew, we definitely see some conflicts/rivalries among the branches and drinking doesn’t not seem to be rare.
Even were the Roci not a Corvette class, the Corvette would still be my favorite just because of the sheer volume of PDC fire it can put out. It just makes it so that the Corvette has such a clear strength and obvious role. The Corvette looks so great with all of its PDCs out.
I LOVED the Expanse series, Sadly I became very ill and spent 3 weeks in ICU and 3 weeks in the Hospital and when I came home it was over a year to get back on my feet. That was a long time ago, can't believe I forgot about one of my favorite shows. I quit watching after season 3, and kind of forgot about it until I seen your video. I'm going to order the compete series now. I have a feeling I'm in for a real treat.
Regarding the Corvette-class and it's lack of a native railgun, my understanding from the books is that it just wasn't considered especially effective as a weapon on a ship of that size. At the long distances space combat takes place at, a ship can often see a railgun discharge a moment before it would impact and it's piloting-assistance computer could execute a brief but intense lateral thrust with it's RCS to cause the shot to go wide. By contrast, torpedoes fly more slowly but have a longer effective range since they can track with their targets and adjust course. A railgun can be effective either at closer ranges where a target has less time to react or if a target is more massive and can't evade as quickly, but a Corvette shouldn't be getting close enough to a much more massive target to use a railgun on it and even if it did, at that close range a fixed forward railgun would require the entire ship spin to track the target, which would limit its evasive capability. That having been said, the railguns make more sense on a warship large enough to be able to mount them on turrets because those ships are expected to close with the enemy and use their bulk to slug it out and can let them track targets without needing to reorient the entire ship. As for why the Roci got a railgun, that was more a matter of economics than stopping power. Since the Roci is an independent ship, it didn't exactly have good opportunities to replenish it's magazine of MCRN military-grade torpedoes. Since they accept a lot of escort and armed-patrol contracts, they needed weapons they could reliably keep supplied with munitions, and it was much cheaper and more accessible to replace comparatively simple railgun slugs than it was complex military-issued self-guided munitions. It might not have the range of torpedoes and might be awkward for such a small ship to use, but as something that they can fire on the regular it made economic sense for them to invest in one as an aftermarket upgrade.
In the S6 battle between the Pella and the Rocinante, we see the Pella changing course to avoid railgun fire from the Roci. That tactic succeeds, until Bobby Draper pre-emptively showers their anticipated future course with PDC rounds.
@@derekp2674 Yeah, that battle happens in the books too. When ships have PDC cannons continuously blazing away in broad sweeping patterns at each other like that, it's not necessarily that they're expecting to get hits and do damage with them, it's rather the ship's firing computers trying to bracket their target's position to either force them to maneuver and to constrain where they can evade without being perforated. That in turn can set their target up to be hit by other, higher-damaging, weapons. It's kind of like the ship-to-ship equivalent of suppressing fire. Oh, and the fact that the PDCs are computer controlled doesn't diminish Bobby's skill in this. Those firing programs are still complex systems that require operators to set and switch patterns and modes, trying to anticipate how the target will react and keep them guessing. Bobby's role as an MCRN Gunnery-Sergeant ("That's a rank with a very specific meaning," in her words) had her trained to be an expert in the effective use of such systems.
The Pella serves a distinct role in the Martian fleet by having an ENORMOUS complement of torpedoes. While it only has four launchers, it has at least 160 torpedoes total, potentially more, in addition to its PDCs. This is actually really significant, as torpedoes are generally the most versatile and threatening weapon in The Expanse. While PDCs are really good at their job and double as pretty devastating weapons in close-range fights, and railguns pack a big punch but are so short-ranged that it's almost not worth the drawbacks of having them over more PDCs or torpedoes, torpedoes are incredibly long-ranged, capable of maneuvering mid-flight, and mount a variety of warheads for different use cases. They also serve as point-defense by intercepting other torpedoes. This is what makes the Pella truly scary. Torpedoes are always a deadly threat; every salvo is a big deal that has to be defeated every single time. The Pella has torpedoes for days; it can spam those things to a frightening degree. It also has more than enough PDCs that it can defend itself against torpedoes quite well even without using its own torpedoes to help. Each time the Pella loses, it's because of a failure of the crew to respect its opponent and adapt or anticipate threats to it. Hell, even the time it got rammed was because Marco was too arrogant and high on the victory he'd won to take the threat of a suicidal ramming seriously. The Pella takes a bold step away from conventional thinking about the PDC-railgun-torpedo triad and I love it. Torpedoes are way more threatening than railguns when it comes to maneuvering ships (unless you've got alien tech to make them vastly more dangerous, and the unique terrain that protects them from being overwhelmed by a big-enough salvo of torpedoes).
Keep in Mind that the Pella was suppose to be from Mars latest and greatest Stealth Fleet, which they decommissioned and sold off after the ring gates opened. You might attribute it closer to something like the Red October, a stealth torpedo boat designed to get in close and then lay waste to opponents en masse from stealth.
Scirocco class is my favorite, it the space equivalent of a Burke Class destroyer, which pioneer the concept of general purpose naval surface combatant and really should have been first place. I remember in S3 it was reveal Scirocco class's torpedo even outclass/outrange that of UNN's Truman class battleship, just like when Burke class was first introduced it outclassed even previous cruisers.
The thing I love most about the design of ships in the expanse is that it's clearly a transitional phase for mankind, if you look the ships look more like rockets much like how early cars looked like horse buggies/carriages and eventually came to look like the cars we see today, the expanse takes place in an awkward phase of human expansion where we have ships that are more than just rockets but we don't have true starships yet.
The Morrigan really does have the traits of a small fighter craft in the Expanse universe. Anything smaller would not have any room for torpedoes and a larger vessel would have been too expensive and sacrifice maneuverability. Its small size, 2 PDC mounts and twin torpedo launcher with a crew of less than 6 tells you it was built like a destroyer escort of WW2 - cheap, disposable and to a cost, but man it is so damn cool doing so.
I’m truly love The Expanse series every day since I’ve watched its finale. The ending gives me joyful tears in context of the Expanse universe itself and real life that there’s no more episodes to continue watching. I really hope someday we’ll get the three final book in some form of series or movies.
I always assume the Donnager and the Corvette are older designs for the MCRN. Ass it relates to the Donnager and the Morigan, it’s possible that the morigans are so small, they conserve reaction mass by riding in the Donny till it reaches the area of operations then gets dropped off. That instead of being attached like a shuttle or fighter.
Something a little...tangentially related thing I'd love to see you rank would be your favorite depictions of futuristic or sci-fi setting food. I love your videos. Thank you for all you do!
This is an excellent analysis of MCRN ships. For myself, I respectfully disagree and put the Donnager as #1 for, oddly enough, the same reasons that you gave as a critique 🙂 When I first saw it on-screen, the ship immediately evinced me of Mars' projection of power and technological superiority. Coupled with an excellent color scheme, the battleship looks both intimidating and formidable. Great list^^ Oh, and Salamanda550 is completely correct about Bobbie 😄 Goliath power armor FTW^^
As a machine focused concept artist I love all of the designs in the exspanse, Personally I usually hate simplicity andlove complexity in a design especially when its needless, it gives a richness to the machines a apearance. So for me the Donager is my favourite and corvette second
I agree! I also love how the Expanse really leans into the idea that almost all of these things are going to spend their entire service life operating in vacuum, so there's no need to worry about aerodynamics...just pure, unadulterated function! Nothing bugs me more than so many of the Star Wars ship designs, which concede so much useful practicality in favor of an aerodynamic look, without actually being remotely aerodynamic...
its because the donnager battleship could also be used for as a mobile base, repair, maintenance, small ship dock yard, supply tender, and such whatever to hunt down the pirates because before the lost of it was apart of an anti pirate campaign that was apart of many ships that were hunting down pirates in the traffic lanes
plus a battleship in the expanse or irl in real space warfare would work and would be used far behind friendly lines and be used as firing support for a battle and can use the long distance to its advantage to fire its large 80-90 Meter long Foehammer railguns that can easily tare targets apart, firing torpedoes, and hitting its objective targets with its weaponry give it a massive headache because if an enemy ship trys to break through the line would be suicide because not only you be having the battleship then turn on you but the friendly fleet in the front lines and the battleships excort ships will be their to support it and everything to defend it would be a nightmare for the enemy and this kind of tactic would be pretty darn good and effective tool because if they did break through the friendly line than their basically gonna be in between two offensives in a nightmare two directional crossfire
@@Edhooey I do have a massive ammount of respect and love for the ships of star wars... but its a completely different type of love those ships and that design language are the result of creativly mixing so many so many different things into an incredible idea. But I respect and lovethe exspances ships more what their designs do and accomplish is so much harder really thinking about how physics and spcae affects everything and designing a ship around that while still creating a sleek beautiful design with personality. Things like that are what makes the exspance and its ships special
It's possible the Pella's class was actually a Donnager predecessor, since the Donnager class is brand new at the start of the series, and iirc the ships Inaros gets from Mars are all decommissioned or otherwise disused ships.
There's nothing like it! Its so good I watch it over and over again. To think Amazon spent a billion dollars on the new LOTR crap instead of spending a 10th of that on 3 more seasons of the Expanse to finish the book series is just downright criminal lol
If you haven’t done them yet, a top 5 best ships from video games and top 5 from movies would be awesome, especially if they’re ranked by both design and real world science.
I think the donnager has such a large docking bay so that it can serve as a possible dock for repairing Corvettes. Also the main function of the donnager was to patrol the belt and capture and kill pirates so they figured if this ship is going to be out there for months on end capturing Pirates they may as well store them there and not waste time sending a useful ship back-and-forth every time they capture a pirate
its because the donnager battleship could also be used for as a mobile base, repair, maintenance, small ship dock yard, supply tender, and such whatever to hunt down the pirates because before the lost of it was apart of an anti pirate campaign that was apart of many ships that were hunting down pirates in the traffic lanes
plus a battleship in the expanse or irl in real space warfare would work and would be used far behind friendly lines and be used as firing support for a battle and can use the long distance to its advantage to fire its large 80-90 Meter long Foehammer railguns that can easily tare targets apart, firing torpedoes, and hitting its objective targets with its weaponry give it a massive headache because if an enemy ship trys to break through the line would be suicide because not only you be having the battleship then turn on you but the friendly fleet in the front lines and the battleships excort ships will be their to support it and everything to defend it would be a nightmare for the enemy and this kind of tactic would be pretty darn good and effective tool because if they did break through the friendly line than their basically gonna be in between two offensives in a nightmare two directional crossfire
Missiles and torpedoes are often cold launched in the Expanse, this probably means some sort of propulsion is in the launcher itself. It could be pneumatic or gas pressure based, like a cold gas version of the RCS thrusters. Given there is never any sign of that, no puffs of gas and the proliferation of Electromagnetic propulsion/launch systems there is probably a system that uses Electromagnetic forces to kick the missile/torpedo from the tubes.
the rewatchability of these videos is enhanced by the little chuckles that can be found. 1:33 has a "no, no, back away from the tangent" feel that hit the funny bone.
I totally forgot that when inside the donnager, half of the little Patrol ships would be upside down. How DO the crews embark onto them when the battleship is under thrust?
I LOVE the Heavy Frigate design. But also think the Heavy Frigate concept you showed in the top-left at 8:16 is just as good and I wish they found a way to actually use it. It looks super unique as well because it’s triangular rear is very unique
My assumption with regards to the Roci not having railguns from the jump is because before the stealth ships from the first season, rail guns were never able to be mounted on ships of that size; after Mau's company got assimilated however, i imagine the tech that allowed the railguns on the small ship trickled its way down to the various Navies
Love the little Morrigan, and I would wonder if the MCRN would make rail guns on their corvette class ships standard issue. Having two support ships with the same armament seems redundant when it's possible to have one as a missile boat, and the other as a mobile rail turret.
OMG I always thought of the Pella as about the same size as the Rocinante! Thanks for clarifying that! Never knew it was a cruiser, and knowing that now makes the battle between the two even more impressive.
Dude you nailed it. The Morri is a right little stunner. Quite like the Roci and the Pella too. Like the Roci's curves but love those angular blocky shapes the Pella and Morrigan have.
Fun fact about the PELLA is that in the books it is a new and improved version of the TACHI, not a different class of ship. So it is very appropriate that she was based in an unused concept for the ROCI
9:26 in the battle between the stealth ships and the Donager the Donager crew where suprised that ships that small was equiped with a rail guns so im guessing Fred had Drumer remove the stealth ship's rail gun before dumping it into the shipping lanes and gave it to Holden.
On the whole Donnager-Corvette-Morrigan trinity: These three hulls should be viewed as members of a core group within MCRN doctrine. IIRC, Donnagers can carry up to six destroyers, with frigates taking up twice the hangar space. A Donnager might have to hold prisoners or impounded cargo retrieved by frigates or destroyers. Donnager-class ships would have way lower top acceleration than that of smaller hulls not because of the engines' output limit, but because of it's sheer mass threatening to collapse the whole frame. This would make the whole "boarding an upside-down destroyers under thrust" issue somewhat trivial. This lower speed would also enable a fairly neat tactic of having a Donnager tend to three or four times the destroyers and frigates it can carry, making it basically a force proyection platform. Send a single Donnager with six frigates and twelve destroyers from point A to point B? Cool, now all the shipping lanes and stations along the way are covered by these fast platforms that can be fully tended to by a sort of mothership that nobody wants to mess with. Just arrange resupply runs with D-class ships for that Donnager and you can maintain constant presence in a good chunk of space. Morrigan-class destroyers are meant to be deployed in groups and flown in loose formation in order to cover each other with their PDCs.
I thought it was this channel with the force recon videos that came up with the idea of storing morgans upside down. Also named the amun-ra stealth frigate I believe 🙂
the book mentions that instead of one corvet class frigat two morrigans can be stored, this implies to me that for every upside down morrigan one upside up morrigan is carried on the reverse part of the hangar
I wish we had gotten to see the innards of more MCRN ships! The Roci, Don, and the Pella all had super cool insides that (from what we saw) were unique to each class.
I love the Donnager, it is such a unique ship. Distinct in its shape, and a battleship as well as a carrier of destroyers. A functional and sensible battle carrier, in a hard sci fi setting of all things. That it is at all possible is an example of Martian technological superiority.
I love the Donny. It's a beast. I imagine that it acts as a forward patrol base for the Morrigans and Corvettes and also their backup when out in the belt. If they find a pirate station or base they can in a reasonable amount of time have a very potent squadron on hand. The threat of getting perforated by a capitol ship should be enough to encourage a surrender, and there is enough ordinance on board to enforce one. Alternatively the ship has a large enough marine contingent to be able to deploy them in defence of an outpost or station should Mar's interests in the system be threatened. The Donny is capable of carry and store enough supplies to keep the patrols out in the outer belt for extended periods and also has the fuel capacity to sprint back to Mars without resupply in case things get hot with Earth, and then still function as a very effective battlecruiser.
good to hear some sins of a solar empire while i watch a video about the expanse, criminally underrated game and criminally underrated book series/TV show.
I think a lot of ship classes in the MCRN lacked railguns because mounting a railgun on smaller ships was impossible up until recent advancements with the proto-molecule, as we saw with the stealth ships in the first episode where they said something along the lines of "How does such a small ship have railguns?" The Donager's railgun turrets and later on when we finally see the UN class heavy hitters, are the older style railguns that were pre-protomolecule. It stands to reason that the MCRN had less capability with railguns given the company that built the stealth ships was Earth based. The railgun that ended up on the Rocinante was one of a kind prototype, which is why it had almost a guarantee to punch way above its weight and deevelop a fearsome reputation, since basically nobody else had small ship with a railgun. The latter seasons began throwing in a lot of new technologies derrived from proto-molecule, including the armor plating that was basically a in-universe explanation for plot armor. The MCRN in general from my understanding was developing ways to make more use of less ships, since the UN had more ships, bigger ships and the ability to build more ships faster. They had to have a much different doctrine within their navy, which is why they have corvette class light frigates, and why the Donager had so many additional roles besides being a heavy hitter. I would bet pretty much every MCRN ship class is multi-role, and in the few cases where a ship was not multi-role it was a change made during outfitting and not on the assembly line. The Pella cruiser is an excellent exmaple, outfitted as a torpedo ship.
Manual chapters with the ships full title identical to the video overlay: 0:11 Intro 0:32 Exclusions 0:48 D-Class Supply Ship 1:59 Donnager-Class Battleship, Donnager 4:02 Corvette-Class Light Frigate, Rosinante 5:29 Whatever Class Light Cruiser, Pella 6:52 Heavy Frigate 9:03 Honorable Mention of The Rosinante 9:44 Scirocco-Class Assault Cruiser 11:05 Morrigan-Class Patrol Destroyer 13:09 Outro
Definitely choose the right first place. The Morrigan is just so un-like anything else out there without being weird. Like the class itself, the design is simple, yet effective.
I assumed the Donnager had a brig because it is acting as a tender for it's hanger-based smaller craft. If you view it as a power-projection platform into the belt, I can see the value. The ships it carries can't be expected to hold and prisoners they capture (customs inspections, anti-piracy in the belt, etc). So they are held (temporarily) on the Donny at the center of it's patrol group, until a tender or transport ship brings them somewhere. As for the Morrigan (looks great!) I don't really see a scenario where it would be safe to launch it under thrust. So packing it into the docking bay in whatever way lets the Donny fit the most stuff seems fine.
its because the donnager battleship could also be used for as a mobile base, repair, maintenance, small ship dock yard, supply tender, and such whatever to hunt down the pirates because before the lost of it was apart of an anti pirate campaign that was apart of many ships that were hunting down pirates in the traffic lanes
plus a battleship in the expanse or irl in real space warfare would work and would be used far behind friendly lines and be used as firing support for a battle and can use the long distance to its advantage to fire its large 80-90 Meter long Foehammer railguns that can easily tare targets apart, firing torpedoes, and hitting its objective targets with its weaponry give it a massive headache because if an enemy ship trys to break through the line would be suicide because not only you be having the battleship then turn on you but the friendly fleet in the front lines and the battleships excort ships will be their to support it and everything to defend it would be a nightmare for the enemy and this kind of tactic would be pretty darn good and effective tool because if they did break through the friendly line than their basically gonna be in between two offensives in a nightmare two directional crossfire
I'd say the pella was designed to house and protect it's captain. It also matches the Free Navy style of fighting as a railgun projects a more "stand and present arms" style of fighting where two armies face off (like battleships). Torpedoes, on the other hand are "fire and forget" letting the crew unload its full compliment quickly before turning tail to run (like submarines).
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There are a lot of things you misunderstood about the Donnager,
1. It doesn't carry it's escort ship to hide it's numbers but to increase the endurance, since small ships have small endurance.
2. Those big circle in the front and not torpedoes tubes, they are tubes for ballistic missiles like the ones infront of morgan class but much larger
3.Every larger ships have holding cells for capture enemies to ship mates.
4. Fighting pirate it's peace time job but it's actually intended for planetary assault while Morgan class is to save as a flag ship.
Can you please do a Halo Banished ship I can’t seem to find any videos on one and I don’t have any books with banished ships
@@wallecesembe2099 The thing is, we see Corvette Class and Morrigan Class ships doing long range trips at multiple occaisions with no issues, so the endurance thing doesn't really apply
G force is relative. Even under full burn, a ship is only pulling a couple Gs...or its crew is dead. A missile, even in earths atmosphere, can pull alot more. Some concept missiles have been tested up to 100G acceleration. In space, with no resistance, its gone.
I felt like the Donnager class was intended to serve as along term forward supply ship both as a carrier and battleship. Set up shop in a shipping lane and send out frigates and patrol craft. They actually hunt pirates while knowing they have a safe harbor in an engagement gets out of control. Pick up some prisoners, then head back to the donnager and offload them. You have the space to perform dry dock maintenance on the patrol craft and the ability to rotate crew as required. Rather than the whole fleet needing to head back to Mars for prisoner drops and resupply, the Donnager serves as your hub and and post up as a long range power projection around the system. It never felt like the Donnager was actually meant for a full scale war, but as a piece on the board for an extended cold war.
That honestly sounds like a very accurate assessment! Nice one 👌
The Donnager feels like its built for long term Star Trek esque voyages. Carrying an escort inside it so it can spread out and handle multiple things potentially at once, plus being able to basically drydock smaller vessels without needing to haul around another dedicated ship. For missions like that you need a brig not only for captures but also for potential mutineers which could happen if you are on a super long term assignment. Like it feels like a ship basically sent to patrol the belt and stay there for years.
That's exactly how I see those. I can't recall whether it was in one of the core books or the short novels, but the Donnager class is at some point described as a "force projection platform". A mobile safe harbor where the real work horses can resupply, repair, rotate crew and offload. Want to retaliate against that couple of destroyers that slagged your ship/arrested your pirates/impounded your contraband? Good, now YOU go and chase those speedy boys TOWARDS a Donnager-class, see how far that gets you. Meanwhile, D-class ships can go back and forth from Mars to any Donnager-class with an escort of, say, two or three frigates. Oh, Mr. Pirate McPirateface wants to retrieve his people by hitting that D-class? Yeah, have fun mustering a flotilla that can confidently take on those just to rescue some pirate scum and maybe steal some cargo. The whole Donnager-Corvette-Morrigan part of MCRN's doctrine makes a lot of sense, especially once you add a bunch of cruisers to the mix.
This sounds like a great idea to use it's very accurate!
I think the brig makes sense on the Donny. In the real world, a carrier might have a brig, but a destroyer or cruiser never does. It's just a sci fi trope to have a jail on every little ship. Only the biggest ships have enough room to justify it.
A little corvette would stop a ship doing coast guard duty, arrest a smuggler and put him in handcuffs, then head back to the big capital ship with enough room to house and feed the prisoner until they made it home.
FWIW, I also think no railgun on the corvette makes sense. Again, it's only meant to be used while sitting next to a Donny which has the space and power reserves to use the railgun optimally. It's easy to add every kind of gun to a sketch. But if you imagine it's a real ship in a real economy, you want to use your industrial capacity putting the railguns on ships that are intended to actually use them. Rocinante only finds the railgun useful because Holden doesn't have a Donny to run back to when a big enemy shows up. As-intended, a railgun on a corvette would just be deadweight on a corvette while it does PDC to defend the Battlecarrier. The mass of the railgun is going to mean at least exactly that much less mess of PDC ammo. Less PDC ammo means the corvette would be worse at defending the actual strategic asset.
Honestly, while I agree that the Morrigan-class is peak MCRN vibes, I still think that the Corvette and Donnager-class are some of my favourites. That extra detailing and slightly lumpy superstructure bits for PDC's or just because, really captured me on the MCRN aesthetic overall.
That, and Bobbie. Just Bobbie.
Bobbie hot...
I stan Bobbie Draper
Bobby has always been absolutely amazing and hilarious. Both in book and the Show.
I'm sad that the battles from the show didn't follow the events of Caliban's war better. Having them actually resupply with the MCRN and the mysterious "package" Alex picks up for bobbie was so fun.
In defense of the "do everything" nature of cruisers, I've always taken cruisers as being expected to operate independently and/or be able to take up flagship duties. They are suppose to do everything, if only a little bit.
Sail frigates which are replaced in role by cruisers which come about when steam powered ships are finally have the range to be able to operate independently so they can start being used for fly the flag missions in distant stations.
It's a shame that Kennedy pushed the nonsense cruiser gap in the late 1960's to 70's since then all the USN cruisers from the Leahy class onwards would have been called Frigates.
Do everything ships are also becoming increasingly more popular in the real world as well, at least in concept. The US Navy is definitely trying to make more versatile ships, but these can’t operate as command ships because they lack the size to accommodate. The bigger a ship the more expensive it is to use and the more picky you need to be with how it’s used. Modern aircraft carriers and old school Landing docks are designed to be as versatile as possible. That’s because they’re so large, you can really stick anything on them. These are usually too expensive to take out of a command role though, so even though they can operate independently, most militaries would rarely consider it.
That was the entire point of cruisers and the frigates that they replaced. The European powers, particularly Britain, needed ships that could protect trade routes, defend colonies and generally sail all over the world, often alone. Smaller ships didn't have the endurance or combat capability for the job, while larger ships were too expensive, slower and reserved for critical fleet engagements. Since cruisers had to be capable of operating independently in large numbers, they needed a broad range of capabilities in a cost-efficient package.
In most sci-fi settings, the same logic applies. Mid-sized warships with a broad range of capabilities are invaluable. Purpose-built cruisers (such the British Dido's and the American Atlanta's) tend to have a shorter lifespan, particularly in peacetime, as they can't operate independently and can quickly become obsolete.
That is actually the sole criteria linking all early modern cruisers, from battlecruisers to gunboats. These ships were all designed with independent operations in mind, whether hunting down large enemy cruisers or patrolling some colonies/sphere of influence/punching bags. Battleships operated as part of a battle fleet, while destroyers operated in groups (with various names). The bottom end of the cruiser group was broken off in the 1930 London Naval Treaty to become frigates/sloops/corvettes/avisos/kaibōkan/gunboats/etc., as that group wasn’t really named in the text.
That of course died with the advent of the missile age. Today almost all surface combatants have evolved from destroyer design practice and are capable of operating independently. The term “cruiser” now is essentially synonymous with “big destroyer”.
@@Imbeachedwhale
As a fanatic of Sir Fisher's Battlecruiser concept, I have been looking forward to the reappearance of such a large ship that capable of fully independently operating in far seas in now and future.
Even the carriers, which might be consider as some sort of "transformation" of BCs in aviation era, are now not truly capable of fighting independently. A batteries of ASBM launcher will kicked the carrier's asses hard if no escort Destroyers to provide missile defense, but a large cruiser with its own AEGIS radar and SM-6 missiles will be a complety different story.
If a near-peer assumes you have a tucked away escort you're benefiting from deterant regardless of whether you have a full bay or not - many a waterbound ship battle has been strategically won as neither side wanted to find out on a tactical level.
Ahh the naval strategy of "fuck around and find out"
@@hyperx72 It's worked every time a Carrier Battle Group makes a visit, and here's hoping it continues to work and know one has to find out.
One complication in space is that your acceleration vs your drive plume says how much mass you're carrying- if poorly managed, then everyone can tell exactly how toothy you are at any given moment.
@@absalomdraconis this could also be used as an advantage though, they could load heavy asteroids into their hangars to appear more dangerous or burn „dirtier“ to look like they’re going full speed when they’re not so making themselves look less dangerous
@@absalomdraconis it would require some form of ai/vi to run those math equations quick and accurate enough to notice though.
Resupply ships are something I wish we got more of in Sci-fi. It makes a fun premise for an episode, whether your characters are with the resupply ship or the warship and find the other mysteriously adrift in space.
They have so much potential and add a huge amount of authenticity to a setting, I love em but the D-class missed the mark a bit.
- hoojiwana from Spacedock
The BSG reboot gave us a literal shit boat.
Also imagine this.
A warship just got out of a tough engagement, their supplies are low, their spare parts are all used up abd their ammo is at say, 10% capacity. There is a secondary enemy force on its way and the warship lacks the ammo to reliably deal with it or the parts to repair itself after the fact.
There is a resupply ship on its way too, but now it's a race, who will get there first? The resupply ship who can well, resupply the warship to deal with the incoming enemy forces, or the enemy force who'll easily destroy the depleted and vulnerable warship?
Bam. There's a gripping, tension filled episode right there.
@@rainmanslim4611 Hey, I am stealing that if you don't mind. 😉
Mulchcow submarines were a thing, it makes a lot of sense
One reason for the Pella-type cruisers might well be that the MCRN's repsonse to the Ring Gates was to move production away from "hey, UN, look at my MASSIVE SHIP" to building larger numbers of smaller ships with torpedo spam, because the effective area they had to operater in just got, like, 3 orders of magnitide larger.
That and when a nuke can just as easily kill a large ship, with the only advantage being more defense systems, the best tactic is numbers.
Ok so about the Donnie having prison cells, it really does make sense, being the fact it was mainly used to fight pirates which is why it carries itself a small fleet so that it can extend the area it can in effect police. The ships it carries aren't really big enough to hold prisoners for long periods of time but as they may regularly group back up with the Donnager for Resuply they can then use the Donnagers prison facilities, and with space being as big as it is its possibly fairly rare that a Donnager ever gets chance to return to mars or meet up with other fleet assets to offload prisoners which could be the reason it carries such facilities.
The ability to hold vessels internally could perhaps provide an advantage to repairing damaged ships rather than having them return to a dedicated ship yard or having to dock outside to be repaired which could be more dangerous to work on also is not as well protected as being inside the ship.
Yep. Also, a warship needs a place to hold potential mutineers. Proportional to its' crew size. But there is another very important use for prisoner cells during war - you can't take war prisoners without a place to hold them. And yep, in case of war you want to take prisoners - they can be exchanged for your own captured (which additionally makes an enemy nation more prone to take prisoners as well), so even if we forget that leaving somebody to die in vacuum of space, even an enemy, is barbaric: they are a leverage and a source of information - a resource worth collecting and maintaining.
Also, being the flagship of a flotilla, it's also where the Redcaps can keep your own defaulters for relatively petty shit, or keep then under lock and key while you arrange transport somewhere a court martial can be convened.
You really do need a brig. Even small Coast Guard patrol boats have one.
I agree, I think of Donnager's as a forward Martian base ship, as its a combination carrier/battleship making it more of a command ship (the Galactica type gig). A mobile bit of Mars territory, thus it kept prisoners gathered by other ships for longer periods, maybe even holding certain folks for extended stays outside of martian territory proper, their little Guantanamo. Just some thoughts. Good post.
@@NaqrSeranvis Plus say the ship has to perform a rescue operation for a neutral vessel (merchant or science ship). The survivors are going to need to be played somewhere to be monitored and you can't have them wandering the ship. So they'd likely be kept in the brig as well (accommodations seem okay for a transitory stay) until you offload them at a neutral port or to another vessel. The Donnager sets up shop then sends its vessels out to either recon hard targets or dispatch smaller vessels then return from refit and offloading anyone they rescued or capture.
Hiding numbers makes absolute sense for the Donny. The MCRN has a numerical disadvantage, so being able to play a strategic shell game is a big deal.
You basically force the UNN to send enough ships to go toe-to-toe with a Donnager and a full escort group, while that escort group can be elsewhere doing other things, stretching the UNN thinner. It's not unlike the thinking that underpins the Fleet In Being concept.
And the prison-bus thing was more because the Donnager happened to be nearby.
And since the mcrn can change engine signatures and transponders on all their ships and have stealth coatings gives even more credence to that theory imo
I mean, we all know the real reason these MCRN ships have robust prison barracks is because it's a TV show. We all hand-wave away everyone walking around like it's 1G and not 0.3G/grav-boot-assisted because we understand that it'd be impossibly difficult to film, so we should also give them a break when the show presents to us giant roomy prison cells with floor-to-ceiling glass doors.
@@Sky_Guy Most military ships have brigs today. Not just for prisoner transport, but for crew. I'd expect something more like a small regular quarters so it could be converted to carry more non-prisoners if the need arose. If they're going out on months-long missions someone is going to be caught breaking the law or going crazy. Some Americans can't even handle 3 minutes in an airplane without getting arrested. I expect we will see air brigs in our lifetime.
The major thing for that it only about endurance since small ships can't burn from Mars to Jupiter without refueling. It's the same thing as aircraft carriers do
I guess having a large brig is a contingency for mutiny or more likely, the capture of POWs. The ship has better things to do than act as a prison transport, but in the middle of a war, after capturing an enemy ship, that might be required nonetheless.
I actually like the tall PDC housings on the Tachi. It makes sense to have as much field of fire on each gun as possible, especially on a small ship that is meant to be an escort.
I got the feeling the technology to make railguns that were small enough for the Rocinate to use was relatively new, which is why it didn't originally have one. Even when it got one it had to be integrated with the haul to prevent it from ripping itself off when fired, meaning you can only aim it by pointing the whole ship at the target.
Interesting hypothesis. During the Donnager battle one of the 'gunners' says she's "never seen them (a railgin) on a ship that small", and those were state of the art stealth ships. The Roci is a bit smaller(?) than the stealth ships, and it's older so that might support your hypothesis.
@@TStark-vj2wo Thta, and I always assumed that once Mao went down, the UN would have possibly raided his company's files and figured out how they managed to get a railgun on those smaller stealth ships.
@@TStark-vj2wo I assume that the railgun aboard the Rocinante was derived from the Amun Ra-classes experimental railguns. One of the main problems seemed to be strength of the ship and energy supply to the railgun. While on battery power at Illus, Alex does explain that the railgun does have it's own battery-system to supply it.
"Why didn't the MCRN Corvettes have a railgun?"
There is something called fleet doctrine, and I think the MCRN ships show it really well.
The MCRN Light Cruiser (Pella) shows a ship that can be a ship of the line, capable of dishing out the hurt and avoid getting hit (which is exactly what a Light Cruiser would do), it's likely that a Cruiser would sail as part of a battle line (multiple cruisers) while still being cost effective and flexible enough to take on a whole gamut of missions. They would likely sail with Frigates and Destroyers as escorts if they were the only Cruiser there. Light Cruisers aren't designed to constantly brawl with an enemy but they are designed to pack a hefty punch and outflank an opponent. The Sirocco, an Assault Cruiser (likely a type of Heavy Cruiser) is likely to have far more capability than a Light Cruiser and a much heavier armament.
The Heavy Frigate is very well designed as an independent ship capable of running a lot of missions (similar to real life frigates) it can run missions of low importance solo, or you can group a bunch of them together for a big fight, they remain one of the most flexible vessels in the Navy. Additionally I'm fairly sure the heavy frigates use their torpedoes for defense of a much larger fleet for when PDCs just aren't enough.
The Corvette and Morrigans weren't really designed to operate on their own, but they provide a powerful PDC screen for the rest of the fleet. The Morrigan's "weak point" isn't really a weak point if you think about these ships flying in formation around a fleet. It's interesting to note that the Morrigan is constantly referred to as a destroyer throughout the TV series, and that's because it's role is functionally equivalent to the Torpedo Boat Destroyers in days of yore.
Now onto the Donnager. The Donny is for when the MCRN is REALLY looking for a fight, it is there for one purpose and that is to make whatever happened to piss off the MCRN have a very, very, bad day. It's deployed as both a highly capable weapons platform and as a very effective deterrent. It's likely to be at the center of a fleet. Whatever it can't hit with missile spam it will hit with Railguns, the Donnager is a brawler it can take as much as it can dish out.
The vast majority of combat in the Expanse takes place using torpedoes as the primary weapon, in order for torpedoes to hit however they need to pass through the PDC fire that defends most ships. Railguns provide an interesting paradigm in that they can very easily pass through PDC fire but won't cause catastrophic damage to larger ships (but can devastate smaller ones). I suspect the MCRN fleet doctrine centers around using smaller vessels as a PDC screen and using railguns to whittle away at an opponent's escorts, which likely have a lot of PDCs, opening a hole in the center to launch an overwhelming torpedo attack on the central formation. The MCRN fleet, while being much more capable, is also quite a bit more specialized and isn't nearly as general purpose as the UN Fleet or the Belter fleets.
The reason the Pella, a Light Cruiser leads the Free Navy is simply because it's the best ship they have.
I suspect the High-Low mix is also present in how the MCRN designs their ships and fleet combinations.
Light Patrol Fleet: 1 Heavy frigate + 3 Morrigans + 2 Corvettes. The Heavy Frigate provides an ample magazine of Torpedoes and the Morrigans and Corvettes provide PDC cover.
Patrol Fleet: 1 Light Cruiser + 2 Heavy Frigates + 6 Morrigans + 2 Corvettes. The Heavy Frigates provide an ample magazine of Torpedoes and the Morrigans and Corvettes provide PDC cover. The Light Cruiser has flag facilities and has the added benefit of better sensors and more torpedoes.
Operations Fleet: 1 Assault Cruiser (or Donnager battleship), 2 Light cruisers or 4 Heavy Frigates, 8 Morrigans, 4 Corvettes. An assault cruiser adds additional capability and a light railgun, the Operations Fleet has the ability to undertake any operation the MCRN needs done save for all out battles or missions without extended resupply.
Battlefleet: 2- 3 Donnager Class Battleships, 2-3 Assault Cruisers, 4 Light Cruisers, 6 Heavy Frigates, 32 Morrigans, 16 Corvettes. This is a fleet for fighting actual battles. Due to the Donnager's hangar bays the Battlefleet is capable of repair and refit of smaller craft.
Great analysis!
Also worth noting the shock of the Donnager crew when seeing a ship as small as the Anubis-class mounting a railgun. As much as the MCRN is supposed to be newer and higher-tech than the UNN, most or all of the designs we see probably pre-date the pilot episode. So it might not have been considered financially prudent or practical to mount a railgun on smaller spaceframe... at least until Mao-Kwik collapsed and presumably a lot of salvaged or nationalized cutting edge R&D became more widely available.
Also, speaking of fleet doctrine, the Donnager being so goddamn *big* also speaks to it's ability to fire railguns off-axis without massive disruption to the crew or other systems. Considering the Roci's main drive has to fire in sync with the railgun as a recoil compensator, an off-axis solution might not work on anything smaller - and MCRN fleet doctrine might not have liked the idea of a sizable % of a ships' firepower (and unit cost...) being only able to fire on one axis, also making it extremely predictable and unreliable outside of point-blank range engagements (which with MCRN's superior torpedo guidance and flight characteristics, they may have assumed was an unlikely engagement to ever *be* in in the first place. We see that explicitly in season 1 with Alex protesting, "who would be crazy enough to take on the Donnager in CQB?!"
The Donnanger is the perfect example of force projection, and I would guess that in times of crisis it would be the center of today's carrier groups. You nailed it! Also, I like the weirdness of the Donnie's design, because it reflects the politics and compromises of real-life warships.
@@maggieo true
Lore wise the Corvette class Roci can also only support a railgun after a set of upgrades to reactors and railguns derived from the protomolecules constructions.
Honestly, I would take two or three Morrigans, arrange them in a formation that has them cover each other's blind sides and you get a pretty cool little wolfpack
I was thinking in wings/squadrons, sort of. 1 corvette like the Roci paired with 2 Morrigans. Working in groups of 3 or 5 ships. You'd have both defensive screens and ranged firing in relatively flexible and fast formations for hunting pirates and supply line strikes. In larger engagements adding a cruiser as command ship with her railguns would make a mess of even capital ships since there's a large concentration of fire from multiple sources.
Maybe like a heavy frigate at the centre with 3 moreigans on each ends of a triangle with there 2 pdcs out wards would do the thing, maybe with added rail guns on top
Take two Morrigans led by a Corvette and you have an even better wolfpack.
As much as I love the plot armor concept, in The Expanse the important ships are actually protected by "hero PDCs"
It generally feels like the Roci is primarily designed to offer massive PDC support and this coincidentally makes it great at defense. It seems like few ships have as many and as wide coverage as the Roci.
I love the "OMG its a Donnager!" moment. The freaking Laconians have one, OK that was multiple refurbished previously mothballed Donnagers, but seriously, if your ship can scare the most high tech faction decades after being obsolte, you know you've done something right.
I can't image any modern destroyer would want to be caught under an Iowa's guns; no matter how objectively obsolete the ship is.
@@benhobson3084 Yeah there's a big difference between strategic obsolescence and tactical. Navies still found uses for their legacy battleships long after building more was seen as a bad idea. Big gun make big boom.
Such a cool chapter
@@mella4376 the last three books are absolutely fantastic, the battle scenes are amazing.
Battleships in space combat actually makes sense the donnager having to easily take multiple hits and a lot of punishment and being their in the rear of the battle supporting with its massive 80-90 meter long railguns, hundreds of torpedoes, and being used against a fleet while remaining behind the line supporting and using distance to its advantage and such as this ship would be a large headache platform to deal with and a hanger bay able to act both like a mobile base and a repair maintenance hug and something to drop off the capture pirates makes sense plus the flagship was in a secret operation to have its other ships and other martian ships of the fleet hunt down pilots and such while the donnager was in the dark during this operation.
For forward launching vs side launching torpedos, I remember from the books that torps have vastly more power/weight ratio than ships carrying squishy humans, and can easily out-accelerate their launcher. They'd have a weaker chemical rocket engine for the initial launch to get them away from the vessel, then they engage the main Epstein drive when they have enough distance so they don't toast the launching ship. Even the initial chemical engine has plenty fast enough. Another bit from the books is that in a chase scenario, the chaser has a disadvantage firing torps, as they're having to fight against an accelerating frame of reference between two ships that might be relatively static to each other distance wise.
Yeah when you don't have a human passenger, you really don't have to worry about the Gs they experience when acceleration
I would love to see an asymmetric 3D RTS in the Expanse universe. MCRN, UN, and Belter/Free Navy as playable factions
I was just thinking this when I saw your comment :-D
Try nebulus fleet command
There's Nebulous fleet command on steam which has the same feel of the combat (missiles, torpedoes, railguns, PDCs) You can download mods to have the Expanse's ships on there
There's nothing wrong with having a brig on a battleship man
Capital ships will have their own brigs as the size of them means that somewhere a sailor on board will do something dumb and need locking up for awhile...Bit of an oversight by our Spacedock here
He must've missed his coffee that day cause he was completely talking out of his ass with that one &a few others.. either that or he lost a bet where the forfeit was "trashtalk the Donny for no reason &if u don't have anything just make stuff up!" 💀
You didn’t listen to what he said
He said it’s dumb that the ship is used to carry prisoners
Not that having a brig is dumb
Which it’s true, imagine the U.S. using a super carrier to transport prisoners from NY to Florida
That would be moronic
There is a difference between having the ability to do something and something being built specifically to do so
A battleship being used, as he said, as a prison bus, is stupid
@@bornonthebattlefront4883but it wasn’t used as a prison bus. The brig was for people the ship captured, just like actual warships IRL.
There is nothing wrong with having a small brig and offloading prisioners into homebound ships too. But no. We have to make space in this battleship for multiple levels of prison and then drag the whole ship, with the guns, sensors and presence back to Mars just to send off prisoners.
The sheer middle finger energy though…
Donnager in sixth is upsetting as it is a gorgeous ship in any Sci fi setting. Plus when one turns up. It’s exciting!
@@Valokaari exactly and battleships in the expanse and in irl space combat make great sense they could stay behind the lines and use the long distance as their advantage to fire support and such while most of the fleet is near the front lines and attacking while the battleship provides the massive punch in a fight is very significant and can take a massive amount of punishment and could be a mobile repair, maintenance, ship/tender carrier and more.
@@Valokaari The Donnager doesn't just dominate the battlefield, it dominates the entire theatre. According to the first book, it could have dropped a few torpedoes on the Knight from halfway across the system.
@@rakisuzuki-burke4148 there only aperances are getting blown up, getting eaten by the things that killed the gate builders or being bait. Not once in the books do see a donager dominating anything
One headcanon I've seen several times that I'm a fan of is that the Pella is an example of the show version of the Raptor-class fast-attack cruiser from the books.
I used to think that too, but the lack of a railgun on the Pella means it doesn't really stand the comparison. I prefer to think of the Pella as an older design, too obsolete for the MCRN but still potent enough to be a threat to smaller ships.
Tbh I think the show designs are way too stingy with railguns. In the book-verse destroyers all have one (IIRC one UN design even has two) aside from the Morrigan which is its own thing, and they're only one step above frigates. The show's heavy frigate should probably have one, especially since the heavier destroyers were omitted from the adaptation, and it should be a mandatory feature on any cruiser.
@@zqfmgb4335 I think they wanted railguns to be a much more special thing in the show, especially after the Roci got one.
- hoojiwana from Spacedock
@@hoojiwana Probably. I totally understand it from a showrunning perspective, but it still bothers my nerd brain haha.
There's a bunch of stuff like that which is justified by out of universe logic like wide spaces inside warships, the Corvette all but disappearing from the MCRN to avoid confusion with the Roci or the capital ships being weirdly lit up. I can't really hold that against the show too much, even if it's not how I would've done it.
@@zqfmgb4335 My personal theory-to-head canon is that the Pella and its class had a keel-mounted railgun by design, but was disarmed to a degree for unknown purposes.
Perhaps to avoid the Free Navy from effectively sniping Duarte's fleet in the case of betrayal.
i thought railguns were pretty much impossible to install on such a small vessel like the rocinance due to the power constraints, if this is true it makes sense as to why it was installed later on in the series when the technology from the previous "Unknown Small" ships in season 1 EP 1 were finally understood since they did have railguns .
The keel mounted railgun was definitely seen as something of note as soon as the Amun Ra's came about. Even Duarte took note with the Pulsar class having the same setup, though being substantially larger. On the other hand they could have just done that to make the Storm not outclass the Roci so much by having turreted railguns.
The power output of a fusion torch drive should be more than sufficient for a rail gun, considering that such things are real now and can be powered by gas turbine engine, cruiser sized, destroyer like the Zumwalt.
The brigs on the Donny and the Pella were probably intended not just for pirates but also for crew. I don't think we have a ton of detail on how the MCRN handles discipline, but they don't strike me as a very insubordination friendly organization.
I'm a simple man.
Spacedock puts out an Expanse video, I watch the Expanse video.
Man, I couldn't disagree more strongly on the Corvette-class. I thought it was a fantastic design, and as a character is a perfect hero ship. Its strengths (PDCs) and weaknesses (low torpedo count) are prominent, make sense, and strongly affect the story. The simple grey paintjob was my favorite iteration.
"And a non-peer wouldn't care because OH MY GOD, IT'S A DONNAGER!" So true, and so funny. Yes, non-peer powers wouldn't really care about the exact complement of escort ships hidden inside the Donnager when the Donnager alone could wipe the floor with an entire fleet of Belter ships with ease.
Ironically, the loss of the Donnager occurred because the Donnager DIDN'T make use of this feature of the ship. It had a full-blown Corvette-class escort ready for action, needing only a handful of people to crew it well-enough, and it would definitely have made all the difference in that fight. Fast, agile, and small enough to be a much harder target for torpedoes, plenty of point-defenses to help whittle down incoming torpedoes as well as make life difficult for any of the stealth frigates that got in close, and its own complement of torpedoes to give those frigates something to worry about. Not to mention the fact that the additional suite of sensors from a different ship would have made effective stealth harder.
Also, the Donnager having a degree of prisoner facilities makes some sense. It doesn't need to be much (and isn't shown to be much; about 6-12 cells in one room and that's it), but it would be very useful when dealing with high-value prisoners, spies, crewmembers having a breakdown, or the psychological effect on the prisoner to know that they're being held in the heart of the most powerful warship in the system--no hope of escape or being broken out, being surrounded by an unparalleled display of might.
The prison cells might also be used just for unruly crew, we definitely see some conflicts/rivalries among the branches and drinking doesn’t not seem to be rare.
even in the all so peaceful Federation of Planets almost every ship has a brig or two
Even were the Roci not a Corvette class, the Corvette would still be my favorite just because of the sheer volume of PDC fire it can put out. It just makes it so that the Corvette has such a clear strength and obvious role. The Corvette looks so great with all of its PDCs out.
I LOVED the Expanse series, Sadly I became very ill and spent 3 weeks in ICU and 3 weeks in the Hospital and when I came home it was over a year to get back on my feet. That was a long time ago, can't believe I forgot about one of my favorite shows. I quit watching after season 3, and kind of forgot about it until I seen your video. I'm going to order the compete series now. I have a feeling I'm in for a real treat.
Regarding the Corvette-class and it's lack of a native railgun, my understanding from the books is that it just wasn't considered especially effective as a weapon on a ship of that size. At the long distances space combat takes place at, a ship can often see a railgun discharge a moment before it would impact and it's piloting-assistance computer could execute a brief but intense lateral thrust with it's RCS to cause the shot to go wide. By contrast, torpedoes fly more slowly but have a longer effective range since they can track with their targets and adjust course. A railgun can be effective either at closer ranges where a target has less time to react or if a target is more massive and can't evade as quickly, but a Corvette shouldn't be getting close enough to a much more massive target to use a railgun on it and even if it did, at that close range a fixed forward railgun would require the entire ship spin to track the target, which would limit its evasive capability. That having been said, the railguns make more sense on a warship large enough to be able to mount them on turrets because those ships are expected to close with the enemy and use their bulk to slug it out and can let them track targets without needing to reorient the entire ship.
As for why the Roci got a railgun, that was more a matter of economics than stopping power. Since the Roci is an independent ship, it didn't exactly have good opportunities to replenish it's magazine of MCRN military-grade torpedoes. Since they accept a lot of escort and armed-patrol contracts, they needed weapons they could reliably keep supplied with munitions, and it was much cheaper and more accessible to replace comparatively simple railgun slugs than it was complex military-issued self-guided munitions. It might not have the range of torpedoes and might be awkward for such a small ship to use, but as something that they can fire on the regular it made economic sense for them to invest in one as an aftermarket upgrade.
In the S6 battle between the Pella and the Rocinante, we see the Pella changing course to avoid railgun fire from the Roci. That tactic succeeds, until Bobby Draper pre-emptively showers their anticipated future course with PDC rounds.
@@derekp2674 Yeah, that battle happens in the books too. When ships have PDC cannons continuously blazing away in broad sweeping patterns at each other like that, it's not necessarily that they're expecting to get hits and do damage with them, it's rather the ship's firing computers trying to bracket their target's position to either force them to maneuver and to constrain where they can evade without being perforated. That in turn can set their target up to be hit by other, higher-damaging, weapons. It's kind of like the ship-to-ship equivalent of suppressing fire.
Oh, and the fact that the PDCs are computer controlled doesn't diminish Bobby's skill in this. Those firing programs are still complex systems that require operators to set and switch patterns and modes, trying to anticipate how the target will react and keep them guessing. Bobby's role as an MCRN Gunnery-Sergeant ("That's a rank with a very specific meaning," in her words) had her trained to be an expert in the effective use of such systems.
@@FearlessSon Thanks, it's been a while since I read the books.
The Pella serves a distinct role in the Martian fleet by having an ENORMOUS complement of torpedoes. While it only has four launchers, it has at least 160 torpedoes total, potentially more, in addition to its PDCs. This is actually really significant, as torpedoes are generally the most versatile and threatening weapon in The Expanse. While PDCs are really good at their job and double as pretty devastating weapons in close-range fights, and railguns pack a big punch but are so short-ranged that it's almost not worth the drawbacks of having them over more PDCs or torpedoes, torpedoes are incredibly long-ranged, capable of maneuvering mid-flight, and mount a variety of warheads for different use cases. They also serve as point-defense by intercepting other torpedoes.
This is what makes the Pella truly scary. Torpedoes are always a deadly threat; every salvo is a big deal that has to be defeated every single time. The Pella has torpedoes for days; it can spam those things to a frightening degree. It also has more than enough PDCs that it can defend itself against torpedoes quite well even without using its own torpedoes to help. Each time the Pella loses, it's because of a failure of the crew to respect its opponent and adapt or anticipate threats to it. Hell, even the time it got rammed was because Marco was too arrogant and high on the victory he'd won to take the threat of a suicidal ramming seriously.
The Pella takes a bold step away from conventional thinking about the PDC-railgun-torpedo triad and I love it. Torpedoes are way more threatening than railguns when it comes to maneuvering ships (unless you've got alien tech to make them vastly more dangerous, and the unique terrain that protects them from being overwhelmed by a big-enough salvo of torpedoes).
Keep in Mind that the Pella was suppose to be from Mars latest and greatest Stealth Fleet, which they decommissioned and sold off after the ring gates opened. You might attribute it closer to something like the Red October, a stealth torpedo boat designed to get in close and then lay waste to opponents en masse from stealth.
Red October wasn't a torpedo boat, but a strategic nuclear submarine.
Scirocco class is my favorite, it the space equivalent of a Burke Class destroyer, which pioneer the concept of general purpose naval surface combatant and really should have been first place.
I remember in S3 it was reveal Scirocco class's torpedo even outclass/outrange that of UNN's Truman class battleship, just like when Burke class was first introduced it outclassed even previous cruisers.
The thing I love most about the design of ships in the expanse is that it's clearly a transitional phase for mankind, if you look the ships look more like rockets much like how early cars looked like horse buggies/carriages and eventually came to look like the cars we see today, the expanse takes place in an awkward phase of human expansion where we have ships that are more than just rockets but we don't have true starships yet.
The Morrigan really does have the traits of a small fighter craft in the Expanse universe. Anything smaller would not have any room for torpedoes and a larger vessel would have been too expensive and sacrifice maneuverability.
Its small size, 2 PDC mounts and twin torpedo launcher with a crew of less than 6 tells you it was built like a destroyer escort of WW2 - cheap, disposable and to a cost, but man it is so damn cool doing so.
I would have loved if it went for sideways torpedo launch bays. It would have sold the idea of a small torpedo load better I think.
I’m truly love The Expanse series every day since I’ve watched its finale.
The ending gives me joyful tears in context of the Expanse universe itself and real life that there’s no more episodes to continue watching.
I really hope someday we’ll get the three final book in some form of series or movies.
I always assume the Donnager and the Corvette are older designs for the MCRN.
Ass it relates to the Donnager and the Morigan, it’s possible that the morigans are so small, they conserve reaction mass by riding in the Donny till it reaches the area of operations then gets dropped off. That instead of being attached like a shuttle or fighter.
Love the Sins of a solar empire music in the back hahah. Was wondering what that was at first because it was so familiar, and then it clicked ;)
Something a little...tangentially related thing I'd love to see you rank would be your favorite depictions of futuristic or sci-fi setting food. I love your videos. Thank you for all you do!
This is an excellent analysis of MCRN ships. For myself, I respectfully disagree and put the Donnager as #1 for, oddly enough, the same reasons that you gave as a critique 🙂 When I first saw it on-screen, the ship immediately evinced me of Mars' projection of power and technological superiority. Coupled with an excellent color scheme, the battleship looks both intimidating and formidable.
Great list^^
Oh, and Salamanda550 is completely correct about Bobbie 😄 Goliath power armor FTW^^
Thanks for keeping love for The Expanse going beratna.
You can't do enough videos on the Expanse. Thanks for another awesome one!
As a machine focused concept artist I love all of the designs in the exspanse, Personally I usually hate simplicity andlove complexity in a design especially when its needless, it gives a richness to the machines a apearance. So for me the Donager is my favourite and corvette second
I agree! I also love how the Expanse really leans into the idea that almost all of these things are going to spend their entire service life operating in vacuum, so there's no need to worry about aerodynamics...just pure, unadulterated function!
Nothing bugs me more than so many of the Star Wars ship designs, which concede so much useful practicality in favor of an aerodynamic look, without actually being remotely aerodynamic...
its because the donnager battleship could also be used for as a mobile base, repair, maintenance, small ship dock yard, supply tender, and such whatever to hunt down the pirates because before the lost of it was apart of an anti pirate campaign that was apart of many ships that were hunting down pirates in the traffic lanes
plus a battleship in the expanse or irl in real space warfare would work and would be used far behind friendly lines and be used as firing support for a battle and can use the long distance to its advantage to fire its large 80-90 Meter long Foehammer railguns that can easily tare targets apart, firing torpedoes, and hitting its objective targets with its weaponry give it a massive headache because if an enemy ship trys to break through the line would be suicide because not only you be having the battleship then turn on you but the friendly fleet in the front lines and the battleships excort ships will be their to support it and everything to defend it would be a nightmare for the enemy and this kind of tactic would be pretty darn good and effective tool because if they did break through the friendly line than their basically gonna be in between two offensives in a nightmare two directional crossfire
@@Edhooey I do have a massive ammount of respect and love for the ships of star wars... but its a completely different type of love those ships and that design language are the result of creativly mixing so many so many different things into an incredible idea. But I respect and lovethe exspances ships more what their designs do and accomplish is so much harder really thinking about how physics and spcae affects everything and designing a ship around that while still creating a sleek beautiful design with personality.
Things like that are what makes the exspance and its ships special
All good points
It's possible the Pella's class was actually a Donnager predecessor, since the Donnager class is brand new at the start of the series, and iirc the ships Inaros gets from Mars are all decommissioned or otherwise disused ships.
I miss this show so damn much. I hope more Expanse is on the horizon.
There's nothing like it! Its so good I watch it over and over again. To think Amazon spent a billion dollars on the new LOTR crap instead of spending a 10th of that on 3 more seasons of the Expanse to finish the book series is just downright criminal lol
“I don’t dislike any of them”
*Relentlessly hates on Donnie*
I've never clicked a video faster. This is my jam. This is what I'm on this platform for.
That heavy frigate concept art is sweet and I want it.
I've always really liked the heavy frigate concept, and thought that it could have been a more stealth oriented ship
The video I didn’t know I needed
If you haven’t done them yet, a top 5 best ships from video games and top 5 from movies would be awesome, especially if they’re ranked by both design and real world science.
Ok, the sins of a solar empire music in the background just makes me want to play it again. I wonder if they have an expanse mod...
I think the donnager has such a large docking bay so that it can serve as a possible dock for repairing Corvettes. Also the main function of the donnager was to patrol the belt and capture and kill pirates so they figured if this ship is going to be out there for months on end capturing Pirates they may as well store them there and not waste time sending a useful ship back-and-forth every time they capture a pirate
its because the donnager battleship could also be used for as a mobile base, repair, maintenance, small ship dock yard, supply tender, and such whatever to hunt down the pirates because before the lost of it was apart of an anti pirate campaign that was apart of many ships that were hunting down pirates in the traffic lanes
plus a battleship in the expanse or irl in real space warfare would work and would be used far behind friendly lines and be used as firing support for a battle and can use the long distance to its advantage to fire its large 80-90 Meter long Foehammer railguns that can easily tare targets apart, firing torpedoes, and hitting its objective targets with its weaponry give it a massive headache because if an enemy ship trys to break through the line would be suicide because not only you be having the battleship then turn on you but the friendly fleet in the front lines and the battleships excort ships will be their to support it and everything to defend it would be a nightmare for the enemy and this kind of tactic would be pretty darn good and effective tool because if they did break through the friendly line than their basically gonna be in between two offensives in a nightmare two directional crossfire
Missiles and torpedoes are often cold launched in the Expanse, this probably means some sort of propulsion is in the launcher itself. It could be pneumatic or gas pressure based, like a cold gas version of the RCS thrusters. Given there is never any sign of that, no puffs of gas and the proliferation of Electromagnetic propulsion/launch systems there is probably a system that uses Electromagnetic forces to kick the missile/torpedo from the tubes.
the rewatchability of these videos is enhanced by the little chuckles that can be found. 1:33 has a "no, no, back away from the tangent" feel that hit the funny bone.
I totally forgot that when inside the donnager, half of the little Patrol ships would be upside down. How DO the crews embark onto them when the battleship is under thrust?
Magnetic boots.
I dont know if someone noticed but in the backround there is music from Sins of a Solar Empire
Liking the use of Sins of a Solar Empire music.
I LOVE the Heavy Frigate design. But also think the Heavy Frigate concept you showed in the top-left at 8:16 is just as good and I wish they found a way to actually use it. It looks super unique as well because it’s triangular rear is very unique
My assumption with regards to the Roci not having railguns from the jump is because before the stealth ships from the first season, rail guns were never able to be mounted on ships of that size; after Mau's company got assimilated however, i imagine the tech that allowed the railguns on the small ship trickled its way down to the various Navies
The Martian Heavy Frigate is my favourite of the fleet. It just looks right.
The Scirocco is perfect - size, armament & ability to deploy assault commandos. And it looks great
Love the little Morrigan, and I would wonder if the MCRN would make rail guns on their corvette class ships standard issue. Having two support ships with the same armament seems redundant when it's possible to have one as a missile boat, and the other as a mobile rail turret.
0:00 Your intro strongly invokes Ace Combat mission briefing music. I love it.
I hear that Sins of a Solar Empire soundtrack in the background. Bet we wouldn't notice, huh?
OMG I always thought of the Pella as about the same size as the Rocinante! Thanks for clarifying that! Never knew it was a cruiser, and knowing that now makes the battle between the two even more impressive.
Dude you nailed it. The Morri is a right little stunner. Quite like the Roci and the Pella too. Like the Roci's curves but love those angular blocky shapes the Pella and Morrigan have.
The shape of the Morrigan, as well as the Pella's are the most aesthethically pleasing to me
"The Heavy Frigate concept is _vastly_ better than the Corvette design we got."
- GAB, renowned _The Expanse_ disliker
Why are you watching eggpants videos GAB
Fun fact about the PELLA is that in the books it is a new and improved version of the TACHI, not a different class of ship.
So it is very appropriate that she was based in an unused concept for the ROCI
Yep, an evil Rocinante for the anti-Holden.
A list of the best space exploration vessels would be great.
9:26 in the battle between the stealth ships and the Donager the Donager crew where suprised that ships that small was equiped with a rail guns so im guessing Fred had Drumer remove the stealth ship's rail gun before dumping it into the shipping lanes and gave it to Holden.
2:56 in defense of the donni, a hangar ease the process of maintenance and repair on said ships.
On the whole Donnager-Corvette-Morrigan trinity:
These three hulls should be viewed as members of a core group within MCRN doctrine.
IIRC, Donnagers can carry up to six destroyers, with frigates taking up twice the hangar space. A Donnager might have to hold prisoners or impounded cargo retrieved by frigates or destroyers.
Donnager-class ships would have way lower top acceleration than that of smaller hulls not because of the engines' output limit, but because of it's sheer mass threatening to collapse the whole frame. This would make the whole "boarding an upside-down destroyers under thrust" issue somewhat trivial.
This lower speed would also enable a fairly neat tactic of having a Donnager tend to three or four times the destroyers and frigates it can carry, making it basically a force proyection platform. Send a single Donnager with six frigates and twelve destroyers from point A to point B? Cool, now all the shipping lanes and stations along the way are covered by these fast platforms that can be fully tended to by a sort of mothership that nobody wants to mess with. Just arrange resupply runs with D-class ships for that Donnager and you can maintain constant presence in a good chunk of space.
Morrigan-class destroyers are meant to be deployed in groups and flown in loose formation in order to cover each other with their PDCs.
Heavy Frigate V1B definitely gives me vibes of the book-verse Free Navy. Upgraded next gen versions of the Tachi/Roci.
Something about the Pallas class i absolutely love. It's good looking in Inaros colours and a good sized ship for most engagements.
Nice to see you getting back to Expanse content. Are you going to cover the battles from the final episode?
*approves of Sins of a Solar Empire music in the background* perhaps a top 10 ships of Sins video?
That Sins of a Solar Empire music
The game Infinite Lagrange has some amazing ship designs, it would be really cool if you could cover some of those.
I thought it was this channel with the force recon videos that came up with the idea of storing morgans upside down. Also named the amun-ra stealth frigate I believe 🙂
the book mentions that instead of one corvet class frigat two morrigans can be stored, this implies to me that for every upside down morrigan one upside up morrigan is carried on the reverse part of the hangar
The Morrigan is exclusively a TV ship. But I think we can all agree the standard of design of all the ships is amazing 🙂
Didn't expect to see footage of my former ship (replenishment vessel at the start of the video).
I wish we had gotten to see the innards of more MCRN ships! The Roci, Don, and the Pella all had super cool insides that (from what we saw) were unique to each class.
I love the Donnager, it is such a unique ship. Distinct in its shape, and a battleship as well as a carrier of destroyers. A functional and sensible battle carrier, in a hard sci fi setting of all things. That it is at all possible is an example of Martian technological superiority.
I want a ranking of scifi cutlery 🤔😉
Edit: judging by my idle googlings the most famous cutlery in scifi are the ones from 2001 🤔
I love this edit.
- hoojiwana from Spacedock
I love the Donny. It's a beast. I imagine that it acts as a forward patrol base for the Morrigans and Corvettes and also their backup when out in the belt. If they find a pirate station or base they can in a reasonable amount of time have a very potent squadron on hand. The threat of getting perforated by a capitol ship should be enough to encourage a surrender, and there is enough ordinance on board to enforce one. Alternatively the ship has a large enough marine contingent to be able to deploy them in defence of an outpost or station should Mar's interests in the system be threatened. The Donny is capable of carry and store enough supplies to keep the patrols out in the outer belt for extended periods and also has the fuel capacity to sprint back to Mars without resupply in case things get hot with Earth, and then still function as a very effective battlecruiser.
The heavy frigate is my favourite, just beautiful!
good to hear some sins of a solar empire while i watch a video about the expanse, criminally underrated game and criminally underrated book series/TV show.
Amazing ships good work
I think a lot of ship classes in the MCRN lacked railguns because mounting a railgun on smaller ships was impossible up until recent advancements with the proto-molecule, as we saw with the stealth ships in the first episode where they said something along the lines of "How does such a small ship have railguns?" The Donager's railgun turrets and later on when we finally see the UN class heavy hitters, are the older style railguns that were pre-protomolecule.
It stands to reason that the MCRN had less capability with railguns given the company that built the stealth ships was Earth based. The railgun that ended up on the Rocinante was one of a kind prototype, which is why it had almost a guarantee to punch way above its weight and deevelop a fearsome reputation, since basically nobody else had small ship with a railgun. The latter seasons began throwing in a lot of new technologies derrived from proto-molecule, including the armor plating that was basically a in-universe explanation for plot armor.
The MCRN in general from my understanding was developing ways to make more use of less ships, since the UN had more ships, bigger ships and the ability to build more ships faster. They had to have a much different doctrine within their navy, which is why they have corvette class light frigates, and why the Donager had so many additional roles besides being a heavy hitter. I would bet pretty much every MCRN ship class is multi-role, and in the few cases where a ship was not multi-role it was a change made during outfitting and not on the assembly line. The Pella cruiser is an excellent exmaple, outfitted as a torpedo ship.
The Knight has strong "Apollo 11" vibes.
Like: "Oh my... They are in space inside of that? They're f****d."
I actually like the details on the corvettes. Makes me think of a design that's pushing the limits of its profile.
3:17 would those be tubes for the planet-killer type first strike missiles, instead of ship-to-ship ones?
Manual chapters with the ships full title identical to the video overlay:
0:11 Intro
0:32 Exclusions
0:48 D-Class Supply Ship
1:59 Donnager-Class Battleship, Donnager
4:02 Corvette-Class Light Frigate, Rosinante
5:29 Whatever Class Light Cruiser, Pella
6:52 Heavy Frigate
9:03 Honorable Mention of The Rosinante
9:44 Scirocco-Class Assault Cruiser
11:05 Morrigan-Class Patrol Destroyer
13:09 Outro
Top 5 ranking of the top ships from all the ranking videos.
I 100% agree. The Morrigan is my favorite also. I would give up crew space and mount torpedoes externally for another PDC.
Definitely choose the right first place. The Morrigan is just so un-like anything else out there without being weird. Like the class itself, the design is simple, yet effective.
I assumed the Donnager had a brig because it is acting as a tender for it's hanger-based smaller craft. If you view it as a power-projection platform into the belt, I can see the value. The ships it carries can't be expected to hold and prisoners they capture (customs inspections, anti-piracy in the belt, etc). So they are held (temporarily) on the Donny at the center of it's patrol group, until a tender or transport ship brings them somewhere.
As for the Morrigan (looks great!) I don't really see a scenario where it would be safe to launch it under thrust. So packing it into the docking bay in whatever way lets the Donny fit the most stuff seems fine.
its because the donnager battleship could also be used for as a mobile base, repair, maintenance, small ship dock yard, supply tender, and such whatever to hunt down the pirates because before the lost of it was apart of an anti pirate campaign that was apart of many ships that were hunting down pirates in the traffic lanes
plus a battleship in the expanse or irl in real space warfare would work and would be used far behind friendly lines and be used as firing support for a battle and can use the long distance to its advantage to fire its large 80-90 Meter long Foehammer railguns that can easily tare targets apart, firing torpedoes, and hitting its objective targets with its weaponry give it a massive headache because if an enemy ship trys to break through the line would be suicide because not only you be having the battleship then turn on you but the friendly fleet in the front lines and the battleships excort ships will be their to support it and everything to defend it would be a nightmare for the enemy and this kind of tactic would be pretty darn good and effective tool because if they did break through the friendly line than their basically gonna be in between two offensives in a nightmare two directional crossfire
I would love to see a ranking video of your favorite space combat Weapons platforms
Is it wrong to say I like the video, but disliked how it was essentially just complaint after complaint?
Not really , you can like the video while disliking some stuff about it
I'd say the pella was designed to house and protect it's captain. It also matches the Free Navy style of fighting as a railgun projects a more "stand and present arms" style of fighting where two armies face off (like battleships). Torpedoes, on the other hand are "fire and forget" letting the crew unload its full compliment quickly before turning tail to run (like submarines).