Shipbucket

The last battlecruisers.

Tiger and her sisters came in at the tail end of the war. When a fire broke out at the yard, construction of Tiger was seriously slowed down, and Lion was actually the only of four planned (Tiger, Lion, Leopard, Jaguar) ships to be launched before hostilities ended. Leopard and Jaguar were cancelled, and work on Tiger, still months from launch, was suspended.
Ultimately Tiger was completed to the same standard as Lion: Both were equipped with the same fire control and secondaries that HMS Vanguard recieved irl. In fact, because of the (apparent) need for fast heavy (battle) cruisers, HMS Vanguard never leaves the drawing board...

Unlike HMS Vanguard, Lion and Tiger actually operate in the Korean war, albeit in a shore bombardment role. Neither ever fires her guns at another ship. In 1957, Lion is placed in reserve, a year later followed by Tiger.
When the Royal Navy realizes how large NIGS is going to be (the Sea Slug replacement system) there is some talk of taking Tiger and Lion out of reserve, as they are the only available hulls large enough to take the new missile system. With the cancellation of NIGS, reactvation plans fall through, and in 1963, Tiger and Lion are sold off for scrap.

With her long range 9.2" cannons and a top speed of 34.5 knots they would have been a serious danger to the first generation of Deutschland types, and would have been able to outrun everything they couldn't outfight.

(I made the choise for the 9.2 for the reason that A: The designers didn't want to fall into the old battlecruiser trap: Give it battleship guns, and the commander might decide to fight battleships... And the 9.2 caliber was known to the RN, and with a 51 caliber barrel had some serious range. If a pressing need for larger cannons had arrived, the ship could have carried a lesss armored version of the double 14" turret from the KGV class, at the cost of 1.5 knots of speed.)



14" armed:



Numbers, loosely based on the 1940 Lillicrap design:

Displacement: 21,500 standard, 25,500 tons full load
Dimensions: 720 x 84 x 25 feet
Machinery: 4 shaft, Steam turbines 160,000shp
Speed: Max 34.5 knots (33 knots 14" version)
Endurance: 11,000 at 16 knots
Armour: 7" belt, 4" deck, 8" turrets
Armament:
9 x 9.2" (3x3) / 6 x 14" (3x2)
12 x 5.25" (6x2)
52 x 40mm (6x6 2x2 12x1)
Torpedoes: 8x21"
Aircraft: None
Crew: 1170

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Would you please not eat my gun...

That looks great, Mihoshik.

Big fast and powerful, just what cruisers were supposed to be.

Well done!

It would be interesting to see it in missile modes and maybe with the helicopter type as well.

I will reply.
1. Notwithstanding that it takes a full generation to learn how to operate aircraft carriers properly, something that is considerably longer than ten years, and which the Royal Navy could not do in ten years once it lost its naval aviation control and actually misused the expertise of men such as Admiral Lumley Lister, the brains behind the Taranto raid, and that the excuse that the FAA at the time did not understand or know how to formulate a request for tender for aircraft that operate from ships is an excuse that I've heard just once too often to be justified by blaming the RAF for it, I will address that argument again. If you want to place the blame properly for this situation of wrong type aircraft carriers and inadequate aircraft; then the culprit is Admiral Sir Reginald Henderson, Third Sea Lord, and the assorted incompetents who pencil pushed with him. He was the one who saddled the RN with wrong-builds such as Illustrious and Formidable, when he should have pushed for lessons-learned Ark Royals. Wrong bird farms resulted in wrong aircraft procurement as a consequence. Why buy the right planes when the planes you wanted wouldn't fit the ships you bought? Hmm, little things like takeoff runs, hanger capacity, and appropriate engines also seem to be a problem? The Americans with their big cavernous flattops with the huge open hangers can buy the big burly engined planes to go with them. (If the RN had bothered to look, they would see US flattops running around with planes parked on the flight deck and worked on there in the weather, a practice that the British and Japanese eschewed.) The RN did build the Ark Royal, which was a thoroughly modern 'Japanese' design at least as good as the Soryu, but they missed the whole do routine things on the flight deck hard stands and use the hanger as a repair garage concept.

THAT is what made the hundred plane American carriers possible and so tough to sink. (Armored hangers full of planes are a guaranteed loss of ship after one internal hit. HIJMS ships, Akagi, Hiryu, Soryu, Taiho, Shinano, HMS Hermes, Glorious, Eagle, Courageous and the Ark Royal, herself. It's remarkable that the British and the Japanese, and America's modern competitors never understand that about aircraft carriers. Topheavy=turn turtle and sink; not to mention the usual internal hull explosions, that force abandonment, as aircraft, fuel and bombs in the armored closed hanger light off.

The Americans usually simply patched the hole in the flight deck or the hull and they pushed the burning planes and bombs over the side and put out the fires. This is what kept the Saratoga and the Enterprise in business. Even when sunk, it was a tough thing for an enemy to accomplish as the USS Hornet (a loss) illustrates this aspect of the difference in how navies do things..

2. If you know anything about the USN's naval aviation and what it learned in the Pacific War, you will learn a curious detail about its combat experience. Once it discovered that its fighters could dive bomb. (Hellcats and Wildcats) those planes dive-bombed. Once it discovered that the Avenger torpedo bomber could also dive-bomb, the follow on plane, the Helldiver, intended to be the next purpose built dive bomber, which was a Curtiss built failure and a horribly badly designed aircraft intended to strictly dive-bomb and scout was sort of sidelined and its place entirely taken up by Avengers as scouts/attackers and Hellcats as dive bomber supplements and protection, who split the scout/attack and fighter duties between them. Bearcats and Skyraiders coming into service towards the end of that war were intended to scout, bomb and torpedo in a single package. So you might see that the RN FAA stumbled into the general purpose attack plane that war actually showed was the operational trend when the Skua/Roc combo showed up for them in 1938. Fortuitous accident? Probably, but in an AU vein, it was an opportunity they muffed with the Roc when they tried a navalized Boulton Defiant layout and screwed it all up. Bad theory conflicted with operational reality. You need to watch that when you think AU possibilities.

3. I also gently remind you, that it was the RAF, not the FAA, historically who figured out how to make Seafires and Sea Hurricanes. Those worked, not as well as a Hellcat, but they were RAF developed and unlike the Gloster F5/34, the planes could compete with the Zeke as well as the Wildcat did and in essence that is just good enough to get the work done provided the pilots and carrier air divisions know their business. If you have ever read the First Team by John Lundstrum he goes into exhaustive detail about everything I tell you here.
4. It is too small in the barrel to take a proper sized naval air cooled radial. In this case we are sort of case restricted to the Bristol Hercules (my proposed engine fix for the Roc which could accept that engine.) the American equivalent to the Hercules is the Pratt R-1830. It powered the Wildcat. That was a four ton (imperial measure) fighter. If you want the British made AU fighter to take a competitive engine and you insist the plane/engine combo match be remotely realistic in your stated time frame development then you will be stuffing Merlins into navalized Hurricanes equipped with a Wildcat type rolling foldback wing and either Oerlikon FFL cannon or an early version of the Hispano HS404 and that in pairs for the plane, not in fours. Otherwise it is the Browning 303 (6 max.). It's what you have available. Nothing else works. Nothing.

5. You must not hand-wave solutions when you AU. Otherwise it isn't even remotely possible to defend the choices made. You can suggest an evolved Skua/Roc combo which makes sense. You can suggest an early version of the 1942 emergency program Colossus class aircraft carrier as the base ship and you can justify as rationalized the air group of Roc-Skua-Gladiator as its main armament.

6. But if you do that in the mid 30s to late 30s onward, you have to deal with the British limitations existent. You won't get a proper American style naval air force, you won't have their radial engine tech and logistics base, you won't have their superior naval air defense doctrine, you won't have their aircraft carrier operations experience, or their other tools. What you do have is British.

a. You should be using liquid cooled engines. Superior performers in many ways to the American radials and there is no American liquid cooled engine as good as the Merlin. None.
b. Your planes overall will be a generation behind in build technique. You will have superior supercharger and baseline engine tech, but in such other things as carburetors and in overall airframe design, you are a decade behind Grumman, Douglass, and Lockheed. And forget about propellers and guns. Hamilton Standard and John Browning were made in the USA. Catchup is quick historically, (Hispano Suisa is just across the channel as is Farman in France.)
c. British naval AAA is no good and will always be no good until you import from Sweden. You don't have the fire control two axis predict leads of the US Navy, either, so you won't get the most out of Oelikon and Bofors when you do import. Forget about the heavy AAA for high angle fire. British medium guns (4'->5.25') are H/A or L/A and not designed at all to be D/P like the US 5/38. Not even the British 4/50 is any good. This is as much a function of shell characteristic as it is of the original hand feed nature of these British guns. US guns (3' and 5') were semi-automatics with better time fusing and lighter in weight AA shells. Intended for AAA right from the start, anti-ship was an add-on and those shells were considered and designed to fit an AA gun. Not the other way around.
d. British doctrine should drive what AU possibilities for them that could be exploited. I've already mentioned early Sea Hurricane, for the fighter (if you insist) but it occurs to me, here, that for a navy that should be terrified of U-boats, not much attention in this thread has been paid to THAT aspect of RN aircraft carrier warfare or of the way the Germans intended the Lutzows and the U-boats to complement each other in a commerce raider war. Perhaps you now perceive why I insist so much on the scouting/bombing aircraft mix in a pre-radar equipped RN aircraft carrier force and why 'fighters' don't bother me so much? This force does not expect to fight the battle of Midway, or it shouldn't. It has to expect another Battle of the Atlantic. It's job is to hunt GERMAN subs and surface raiders and attack the same by bombing. Anything BRITISH RN AU should be based on that understanding.

Tobias, many of your points are things that didn't crop up until the war was well underway. For example, the British insistence on armored flight decks made sense for their operational doctrine. It wasn't until actual war damage was taken that the downside to their design became know. And it appears that the call for a smaller airgroup actually preceded carrier design, and much of Britains carrier design was driven by treaty obligations anyway.
Simply putting it as "The Americans were crazy awesome at carrier design" is simplifying things to a crazy extent.
I refer here to an excellent double article by Stuart Slade and Richard Worth

Your point about combat experience and naval aviation is another one. It's combat expereince. At the start of WWII, nobody had it!

The USN 5" mounts were NOT semi-automatic! They were hand-loaded, but could retain a high rate of fire due to a combination of ideal shell/cartridge weight, and power ramming, which meant that the mount could be loaded at nearly any elevation. British mounts also tended to be cramped, with undesirable ergonomics.

Finally. First and foremost, this is a board which values art. In this part of the board, justifications are just that. Justifications. We're in a topic discussing a resurgance of battlecruisers!
In line with "We value art above all else", are you planning on contributing any, or are you just going to go around contributing commentary?

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Would you please not eat my gun...

Nice work on the Tiger MihoshiK, I'd love to see the never-were NIGS version!

I feel moved to offer a response to Tobious' points, I don't want to derail this thread so I'll try and be brief.

1. The FAA did order some good aircraft, Hawker Osprey, Fairey IIIF etc. and some bad during the 1920s, so did the RAF. Notably not much new equipment was forthcoming during the early 30s due to budgets. Remember the carrier fleet was small, hangar capacity as you admit was low and therefore there was little justification to persuade the Treasury to refund continual development and fielding of new aircraft when the force was quite small.

American carriers were not always big, Ranger was small and so was Wasp, intentionally designed as a smaller Yorktown due to Treaty restrictions. Although Lexington and Saratoga were big, they were battlecruiser conversions and not designed from scratch. Had the US been forced to design from the keel up I doubt the result would have been the same.
It is true the hangar used in the strictest sense of the word did affect RN capacity and encouraged the creation of HMS Unicorn, a dedicated aircraft repair and resupply ship to free hangar space on the carriers and to offer a means to offset the high accident damage and attrition rates of the era. It was an expensive luxury, but the logic was sound.

Your lists of armoured carrier losses "after one internal hit" is simply not credible. Taiho and Shinano were sunk by multiple torpedo hits and poor damage control, HMS Glorious was sunk by battlecruiser gunfire, HMS Eagle, Courageous and Ark Royal also by torpedoes. True, Ark Royal's design flaws sank the ship but I think DK Brown did a pretty good analysis of that. US carriers never gunnery attack from warships and they did not experience the same kinds of underwater damage the RN did. The articles by Stuart Slade and Richard Worth are good but overlooks that Kamikazes were topside impact weapons. They could hit the sides and decks of the ship and causes fires and shrapnel damage but they could not hole below the waterline - that is how you sink ships, by letting water in unless you can touch off enough ammo and fuel to do the job from the inside. No armoured carrier ever blew up or sank from bomb hits or Kamikazes.

The main problem is land-based air power. The USN never really went up against thousands of land-based planes in massed attacks with mixed dive-bomber and torpedo bomber formations and covered by world-leading fighters. It faced IJN carrier attacks of a few hundred aircraft in a few waves in the early years or hundreds of one-way Kamikazes using obsolete aircraft. Britain faced that kind of threat in the North Sea and in the Med, in aeronautical terms its bases were practically next door and no air superiority could be guaranteed but the FAA also knew it had RAF support to defend its bases and project its power beyond coastal waters (the first RAF raids of the war were against German harbours). Build more fighters and put them in more Ark Royals you say, the choice is allocating rearmament resources for aircraft production for home-defence fighters or for the navy. Option A is always going to win that political argument.

2 & 3 & 4. The Skua had potential and showed it at times. It could dive-bomb well and intercept bombers. However faced against land-based Bf-109s the Skua was no fighter and with only one 500lb bomb (British AP bombs were rubbish in the early war) it lacked real striking power against bigger ships. The Roc was a disaster but 'it seemed a good idea at the time'.
I don't think the Skua/Roc could easily take a Hercules, its wider and longer and heavier so you would need to restore the c.g. etc. and you'd end up with something much bigger and heavier. Krakatoa's Gloster is entirely AU so its impossible to say its too narrow if it was designed to take a Hercules from the start.

5. AU is hand-waving to a certain extent, its exploring other avenues and producing cool but realistic ship designs.

6a. I tend to agree although the Hercules was a good engine and perhaps the RR Exe could have been useful too.
6b. In certain elements I'd agree in regards to construction but Grumman was still building biplane fighters in the late 1930s (the Wildcat still had manual pump undercarriage retraction!) and Douglas and Boeing were making far more money in making airliners than military stuff. Notably not many of the late 1930s USN aircraft had lives beyond 1942 and the few sent to Britain were often rejected as unsuited to European conditions. America was good at carrying heavy payloads over long distances economically and reliably because that was its home market and why radials made more sense. "And forget about propellers and guns", really? Never heard of Rotol, Fairey-Reed and de Havilland Propellers? Britain brought Brownings (.303in was too small but in the late 30s it looked enough to do the job) and Hispano cannon too (also Brownings were built by FN in Liege too.)
6c. Meh, how many navies had decent AA fire control in 1939? I've heard too many arguments about medium calibre AA guns to care. I'm not sure it really made that much difference.
6d. It's 1939 and everyone in the Admiralty things ASDIC will easily sort out the U-boats. Also Germany hasn't got hundreds of the in 1937 or 1939, even 1940. The fact many ASW escort types were produced in this AU onwards suggests otherwise really.

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Hood's Worklist
English Electric Canberra FD
Interwar RN Capital Ships
Super-Darings
Never-Were British Aircraft

I'll give it a go one of these days. Going to have to read the NIGS thread on Secret Projects carefully though. From what I read, it's a slightly early design contemporary of Sea Dart, so I might be able to use some guidance parts.

BTW, did you guys ever finish that alternative Type 43 design for the Alt RN thread? I know Bill isn't around much any more, but damnit, that thread was ace. I wanted to see what you'd come up with opposed to the D.K. Brown Type 43.

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Would you please not eat my gun...

Yeah, I thought about drawing one of the possible land-based guidance radars, the Type 87 Scorpion for it on the RN parts sheet but never did. The NIGS thread on secret projects is about all we know about the radars really.

No, I still have the T43 WIP I saved but I don't think it was ever finished. Pity, both Al and Bill seem to have departed us so its unlikely it'll ever get up any steam again.

_________________
Hood's Worklist
English Electric Canberra FD
Interwar RN Capital Ships
Super-Darings
Never-Were British Aircraft

Hood, you did do a type82 with what looks like the NIGS systems on it?



Are those the controllers and radar on that ship for NIGS? Or is that Sea Dart?

Going a bit off-topic here, but what if there was some new fuel put in? we have some artists which have been mentioned as 'another new member for the Old Grey Funnel Line Faction!' how about bringing it back to life?

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Drawings are credited with J.Scholtens
I ask of you to prove me wrong. Not say I am wrong, but prove it, because then I will have learned something new.
Shipbucket Wiki admin

1. The British worried that dive bombing (Germans) would be a danger. That was the excuse for their armored flight deck, you usually see in these discussions. But you know that was post-hoc theory? The original British carriers were just guesses made out of converted battle-cruisers like the American Lexingtons. They all started with closed hangers and plate ups to the flight deck. I suppose I should explain it this way. Operational experience (Langley and Lexington) was teaching the Americans an entirely different lesson from the British builds. Closed hangers were a very bad idea. The Americans had punch their throughs and landing accidents and could compare results between two different type aircraft carrier build styles. The Lexingtons had closed hangers. The Langley had a flight deck mounted as an open superstructure. The Americans weren't smarter than anyone else nor were they 'brilliant' in any fashion. A couple of bad fires on the different ships taught them that damage control was easier if you had room to fight the fires and if the crew survived to fight them.

2. I suppose the British thought smaller airgroups (a consequence of deck operations tempo and their non-use of the mobile crash barrier to fence off the take off run from the arrestor or trap tail on the flight deck makes sense. With all those planes cluttering up the sides and mid-elevator access, you would expect an argument that the smaller air-group per hull made sense. Plus, you learned quickly that large numbered strike sorties took forever to lift off and organize. An American carrier could take up to an hour to put up a three squadron strike unit. Two smaller air group equipped British carriers could do that in about thirty minutes. with the corresponding advantage that they didn't burn up thirty minutes of fuel circling and waiting for the rest of the strike to form up. Note that this is all pre-war and before the Americans unlearned all the wrong things they thought they knew. (More on this in a bit when we discuss what who knew about carrier warfare.)
3. I see that pair of articles covers what I previously wrote, and why not? The key points I made actually are summed up from those articles.
4, The Japanese certainly did in their China war as they trained their carrier naval aviation in support of their land army campaigns along the China coast. They did not learn deferred departure or train 1500 naval aviators in how to bomb and strafe swanning about the sea of Japan. Those aviators had practice against a real enemy.

5. As for the Americans, well here is what they learned from fleet problems 1-21. I'll summarize the aircraft carrier part of the lessons learned.
a. Massed air strikes are the only way to ensure air attack results.
b. Parking all your carriers together in one spot is a bad idea.
c. Pearl Harbor was going to be attacked.
d. Torpedo planes are dangerous, but since a fighter screen can murder those slow vulnerable planes easy, it is best to send the dive bombers in first to cripple flight decks.
e. It takes forever to mount an air attack.
f. A CAP can see them coming far enough away for you to launch reinforcements to intercept an attack.
g. See first, strike first, survive. If the enemy gets the bounce on you, then you are dead meat.
Power ramming IS sermi-automatic.

As you will see here.
This board values "naval" art, land warfare art and air art of "potential and plausible" machines as well as actual historic examples. Then the rules of that 'art' sort of limits what you can draw. I would expect that art design criticism that declares that gun barbettes and or turrets (gun houses) are invalid because the hull form shown is too narrow in beam for the illustrated artillery should allow an art criticism of illustrated aircraft carriers based on what is wrong in aircraft selected and illustrated, flight deck layout possible for the time period, the errors in air operations control placement and such aircraft carrier type things, the reasons for why those illustrations are wrong and some discussion as to why I can reach those conclusions?

If you are going to resurge the battle-cruiser, then the aircraft carrier illustrated that hunts it is also fair game to such 'art' criticism.
In that respect, sir, we will see.