This might seem silly to say, but 250 vessels is the total number of ships produced. Given H:RW's hard numbers, the final stat is the number of active vessels in the new SLN. Common sense would dictate that an entire class of 250 ships wasn't present...as in produced by that time, or that a class being noted as going through deactivation would actually be, well...mothballed. We're often provided with ship introduction dates, but rarely little else - including production timelines or averages. Every shipyard is individually different from another, as is every ship class. While one ship class could be produced in huge numbers in an extremely short period of time at a specific shipyard, the same can't be said for any other ship class or yard.
Sure, but as with, say, the
Quicksilver Mongoose, we have plenty of examples of ships staying in active service for 400-500 years. And as a
Du Shi Wang, the
Quicksilver Mongoose is only ~30 years younger than the
Quixote.
I know that's not helpful in locking down semi-generic class sizes or design numbers, but it's the game universe and the fiction provided. (Personally, one of the things I most enjoy, since scenario building isn't locked into narrowly defined numbers. If you want to run a H:RW AT2 scenario using a couple of ships that may have been present - go for it. There's nothing to state they weren't or couldn't have been present.)
And as a player & storyteller, I love the vagueness of numbers produced and timelines of service. The story of the
Quicksilver Mongoose, for example, I find fascinating, and H:RW finally provides an indirect explanation of how it came to be in SLN service, if it was one of the obsolete designs transferred from the Capellan Confederation to the new SLDF. But if it was obsolete even by Great House standards, why was it still in service to be taken on the Exodus? I could craft several reasons, but the ship's history doesn't provide anything to help, leaving it to the fans to explain away.
And before anyone gets up in arms about the early Star League mothballing ships on the eve of war, keep in mind that the Star League was expecting a short, six month war. They expected the Periphery to simply fall over and that the Star League's technology, coupled with their righteous cause (the propaganda they fed their citizens and themselves) would equate to an easy victory.
There's no reason to think that pre-war plans to remove older WarShips would not have occurred. Not until the Star League Navy starts to hit serious opposition would the Admiralty reconsider their earlier decisions in response to the actual reality of the Reunification War (specifically - battles with the Taurians.)
Sure, there's a long history of nations dismembering parts of their military right before a war (Stalin provides the most glaring example of what can happen when you do that, however). But otherwise, the case of the
Quixote, in particular, causes problems. I would avoid them by saying the SLN took title to a bunch of House warships, but didn't commission all of them, as such provides more maneuvering space for the production numbers listed in
BattleSpace and the various TROs, but based on production figures and length of service, we could easily give the HAF Navy 550 warships of its own, before looking at those transferred from the member nations.
Case Amber would have done absolutely squat to improve most of the SLN's opinion of the Taurians. After all, the Taurians were only fighting Davions, not Terrans. In a "real" fight, the Terrans would squash the rabble like bugs...or so the prevailing attitude would hold.
Agree completely. Such arrogance would also be a reason for the HAF to try not to actually commission the warships acquired from the Great Houses; those warships, after all, were "Not Invented Here". The
Davion destroyers present an interesting case, however, since the fluff of the Davion I talks about how unsuccessful the basic design was, but the SLDF went so far as to purchase them
after the RW. I guess they were better when rebuilt with SLDF technology (even though, per the TechManual & other sourcebooks, naval technology essentially stopped developing ~2500).
For the
Quixote specifically, we could come up with a number of reasons why its 250 examples weren't in service at the time of the RW.
1) The fluff for the design says that ordering 250 was a mistake. Ships can be cancelled after the initial order. This could reduce the overall numbers by 90% if we're particularly prompt. Otherwise, choose when it happened to suit personal preference, but this idea has potential problems with the
Volga's history.
2) The fluff is wrong, and the
Quixotes were replaced by the
Riga rather than the
Congress, giving the
Quixote only about a hundred years of service rather than 200.
3) The fluff is merely misunderstood;
most of the
Quixotes were replaced by the
Riga and it's only a handful of examples which were still in service to be finally replaced by the
Congress, much like the last
Essex-class carrier was retired in the late 1980s, despite having been designed in the late '30s and built in 1943 (yes, it was an early-model
Essex that was last in service, surprisingly, not a late-war or post-war design!).
4) The
Quixotes were rushed into retirement to free up bodies to crew the ships acquired from the Great Houses (but this assumes that, unlike the ground forces transferred to the SLDF, the ships did not have crews).
5) The
Quixotes were rushed into retirement out of budgetary concerns over all the new infrastructure the SLDF required.
6) The
Quixotes were as lightly-built, and had as short a design life, as contemporary DropShip designs like the DroST II, and were rapidly cycled through. The longevity of the
Du Shi Wang,
Dreadnought,
Monsoon and other ships suggests against this, but we could argue that since most of those are battleships they were more ruggedly built. But then we run into the
Aegis and even the
Volga, since that ship seems to have been built based on the
Quixote, 150 years after they were mothballed. But perhaps we could argue that only the original
Volga was a rebuilt
Quixote, an the remainder were completely new-built, from the
Quixote's original design.
And that's just off the top of my head. I would
like more internal consistency, but if I had it, I wouldn't have as much fun trying to figure things out.
