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Originally Posted by Mirificus
On one hand we have a sample size of one ship patrolling a backwater world.
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I'd argue that a lone ship patrol, far away from support, should be assigned to a ship with at least some armament to allow it to handle a wider range of missions without screaming for help. Obviously, you'd keep your battleships (if the TSAB has any) close to home, but you'd send your frigate, not an unarmed ship. Unless all you have on regular duty are unarmed ships.
But then, maybe we
could be optimistic and say that the TSAB Sailing Force Staff learned that ships need to be armed thanks to YnS.
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On the other hand, we have world that the TSAB has a vested interest in defending. Even if we presumed that Chrono has other ships in his fleet that are unarmed, it changes nothing as navies with non-trivial force projection capabilities usually have more auxiliary ships than warships.
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They are sortieing in this case for three
hours, not three months. I'm guessing they just grabbed everything that would steam on short notice.
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There is very little evidence upon which to make any conclusions with regards to the design intent of the class of ship Chrono used to destroy the Cradle, let alone its primary missions. It may very well be a transport but we weren't shown any evidence of that. In fact, they weren't shown to transport anything.
How would you reach the conclusion that the six ships are transports unless you had already assumed that their primary role is as a transport?
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He probably did it by averaging the pacifistic historical evidence. Personally, I suspect that the armament on the six ships were hastily grafted on by some combination of Lindy, Leti and Chrono (perhaps with the 3 Admirals helping out) over the previous week as a contingency measure.
They may not know that the Doc was prepping a ship, but the cannons will be useful against a large range of contingency measures. To support this, for all the supposed confusion at Sailing Force HQ, Chrono's fleet did sortie pretty fast - the Cradle sortied, and almost immediately Chrono's fleet sortied. Given the
usual readiness status of the TSAB (they take 3 hours just to prep 40 mages to the point when they could travel, and organizing a ship for combat is more complex than a platoon), for them to have moved so fast suggested they had already been on maximum alert and specially prepped, rather than random armed ships being suddenly called to action.
As for the mages, I'd strongly suspect every mage that could be crammed onto the ships were in fact there. In the event, there was nothing to do by the time the fleet arrived but to scuttle the
Cradle, but assuming a worst case scenario where RF6 was decimated (as nearly happened), the mages will be needed for a wide range of possible duties, from new teams to assault the Cradle from the inside (maybe Chrono will then get his sorry a*s off his chair), to assisting with the drones down below.
As it is, a large force of mages will be helpful for the post-battle cleanup.