Russian Space Forces patch
Russian Space Forces patch
While Russia has long ignored the development of warships believing absence of colonies obviated the need for them, this point of view was rapidly abandoned after a General Staff study of Russia's strategic military posture in 2288 in the aftermath of the Central Asian War. The greatest weakness it found was absence of adequate space-going warships able to protect Russia's space trade and interests in the face of any threat greater than occasional incident of piracy. It concluded that nearly any country possessing stutterwarp-capable warships, including a number of lesser powers, would be able in the event of hostilities to enforce a complete space blockade of Russia, unless Russia was able to call on powerful allies. This was not an assumption Russian General Staff was willing to make.
In addition, an effective space fleet was considered to be a valuable bargaining chip and would immeasurably enhance Russia's desirability as an ally. Not tied down to colonies, a Russian space fleet supported by suitably disguised replenishment vessels and a network of supply caches placed throughout interstellar space could wage guerre de corse on any potential adversary's trade lines and thus hold his colonial trade hostage. If needed, it could concentrate its strength more easily than a colonial power's navy forced to escort convoys and guard colonies, and strike at will with force sufficient to overwhelm any but the most powerful convoy escort or system defense force.
The General Staff study therefore laid out the following space doctrine requirements:
While laying out the doctrine was relatively easy, agreeing on means of implementation was something entirely different. There existed several schools of thought, ranging from proponents of a conventional balanced fleet built around heavy cruisers and even battleships to adherents of "moskitnyy flot" composed exclusively of fighters and small missile-armed corvettes. Eventually, it was decided that a fleet of small combatants would have to rely extensively on space-based replenishment facilities which would likely not survive first days of war against a superior space power. On the other hand, concentrating on building cruisers and other "prestige" ships would mean that Russia would not be able to afford more than a small number of such ships. Moreover, their movements would be easy to track and which would make them too vulnerable to a Port Arthur-style surprise attack. It quickly became clear that what Russia needed was a fairly large number of medium-sized ships capable of lengthy independent operations. This was seen as the only way of combining sufficient combat capability with dispersion. The ship that was to become the backbone of Russian Space Forces was the Novik-class Missile Destroyer (Proyekt 1356) armed with the KS-300 Shkval missile system. Construction of the prototype ship began immediately after commissioning of the last Tula-class frigates, conceived as a stop-gap design to replace losses suffered in the Central Asian War.
NOTES: The condition of Russia's space forces probably represents the greatest single discrepancy between what was published to date and Grand Game economic charts. While the "Invasion" module pegs the strength of Russia's space fleet at 5 frigates, the economic charts give a total space forces procurement budget of over 400 Mlv, of which 111 Mlv is to be spent on interstellar warships, enough to buy 6 Tula-class frigates every year. This naturally provokes a question how can Ukraine, with budget of less than 70 Mlv, afford a fairly respectable fleet of 3 Konstantins, 3 Kievs, 7 Aconits and 24 Riche fighters, if Russia's 111 Mlv can buy only 5 mediocre frigates? Since the ratio of fleet cost to procurement budget was about 10:1 for Ukraine, I assumed this must be the case for Russia as well (by the way, this ratio seems to hold true for many other countries in the 2300AD economic charts), which would entitle her to a fleet worth over 1000 Mlv. Another assumption I made was that Ukrainian and Russian technology level had to be roughly equivalent, due to the fact that both countries are close French allies. If anything, Russia is probably more advanced, given her higher R&D budget. Everything else we know about Russia (detonation laser missile production capability, series production of an indigenous Gauss rifle design, operation of modern LkPz-IX hovertanks, etc.) indicates that it is technologically roughly on par with other advanced Earth nations. Also, since it would have taken Ukrainians at least 8-9 years to build the 3 Konstantins and 3 Kievs on a Mlv 60+ annual budget, it's obvious that they would have had to acquire fusion technology sometime in the late ‘80's, or otherwise those ships would not have been available for the first battles against Kafers in 2298. On basis of that knowledge I decided that the relatively primitive Tulas must have represented a rushed wartime emergency design rather than the pinnacle of Russian technological achievement, and changed their commissioning dates to late 2280's. Once they were completed, Russians got to work on the Noviks, roughly when Ukrainians began constructing their fusion-powered ships.
This solves the question of where those 111 Mlv went every year. Question remains, what to do with the other 300+Mlv earmarked for in-system space forces each year? There are several options for accounting for all those livres:
Once the Kafer War erupts and Russian government decides to contribute
military forces to the conflict, procurement patterns will change dramatically.
Budgetary priorities will switch heavily towards interstellar warships
and procurement ratio will change correspondingly, with no more than 25%
being spent on in-system space forces.
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