The USS United States was a disaster. Fortunately somebody British invented the angled deck and the subsequent Forrestal was an improvement.
apart from the CVA-58 being cancelled because of politics, forrestal was originally designed to an design very similar to (but slightly smaller) then CVA-58. the angled deck was added when construction had already started, something which might also have happened to CVA-58. the primary missiong of CVA-58 would have been long range bomber aircraft and their escorts, but that does not mean she would not have been useful in other roles as well. in addition, in a different political climate, she might very well have been build (let alone in an alternate universe setting such as which we are speaking about now)
in short, I think you are too fast in commenting without research Tobius. without context, a ship like CVA-58 would make just as much sense as CVA-59 in this AU setting.
1. Something to which I alluded when I said that the British invented the angled flight deck. CVA-58 was an aberration and abomination that was not considered successful when first proposed in 1948. This beast would have required air traffic control from another "traditional carrier" or a bodyguard cruiser. Plainly the people who thought her up were not aviators. You did not mention that in your criticism.
2. CV-59. Never would have happened without "The Admirals Revolt". This is WHY the carrier was called FORRESTAL.
4. Hmm. History of the USN aviation ignored? The AJ Savage specifically---> A3D Skywarrior. Smaller and lighter than the Neptunes which operated off the USS Midway and USS Roosevelt.
While the infighting between the USN and USAF was going on and the Truman Administration was demonstrating a naval incompetence that rivaled the McKinley Administration, the British navy and the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough were playing around with something called a flex-deck, or pneumatic flight deck on which they hoped jet aircraft could belly flop and drag to a stop after a wheels up trap. This idiotic idea horrified the USN who had a lot of experience with wheels up crash landings on their carriers.
Meanwhile the British officers who tried that crackpot idea at sea on an experimental carrier (1950)rapidly concluded that the "geniuses" at Farnborough had not considered the other problem of aircraft carrier operations: how to spot planes on the flight deck. There was no clear space to de-foul the land-on (trap for Americans) and move the planes forward to the fly-off or bow if you installed the flex-deck. It also interfered with centerline lift operations. The Americans were already ahead of the British in that regard. They were determined to move the elevators to the edges of the flight deck and establish a clear run for jets. They just had not figured out how to work the axial solution yet.
The British meanwhile had called a conference in 1951, where a fleet air arm officer Dennis Cambell proposed a two axis land-on solution. Lewis Boddington gets the credit for the idea, but the credit should go to Cambell.
Actually no. The credit really belongs to the United States Navy;
Pride, “Oral History,” p. 197. On the “flightdeck cruiser” of the 1930s, see Alan D. Zimm,“The U.S.N.’s Flight Deck Cruiser,” Warship International 16, no. 3 (1979), pp. 216–45
.
He just remembered that the Americans had proposed something like it in 1936. The British committee meeting was held in August 1851. By SEPTEMBER 1951, the Americans were painting out an angled flight deck on USS Midway and preparing trials. Cambell in his memoirs said he merely mentioned the 2 axis solution in passing to some visiting American aviators in August just around the time of the RN meeting, and he swears that the Americans looked like a collective light bulb had gone off in their heads.
The Midway conducted a year of trials (1952) to proof the concept, but so promising were the results, that the USS Antietam was immediately scheduled for a refit (in the middle of a war no less). What the Americans learned and the British at the time did not know, was that the angle offset for the 2 axis land-on solution had to be greater than 6 degrees. The British would find it out the hard way as the Americans did but only after they ran botched trials of their own on HMS Triumph the carrier claimed as the first one which ever ran angled deck trials.
What the British tried was a 4 degree separation which was not successful.
What the British can claim as their own was the steam powered catapult. That was trialed on HMS Theseus. The Americans copied it. Both of those navies stole the mirror lights land-on aid from the WW II Japanese who invented it during the war to aid their own poorly trained pilots achieve a proper glide slope angle for a land-on without an LSO.
All of these innovations came together in 1952-1953. The USN had the Forrrestal (originally designed as an enlarged Midway) under construction since July 1951. She was halted for a few months while the new design elements were worked into her. then construction resumed. She was never intended to be a repeat of the CV-58 fiasco. For example, from the start, she would have had an island.
*snip*
I am going to try an counter some points you made as I feel like I am failing to explain my vision.
A few things to be said about the use of land based aircraft to support my cheap battleships. Firstly, all the examples you presented (Pearl Harbor, Repulse, Prince of Wales, Bismark, or Taranto) did not occur in my world as it is an AU and even if analogous events were to occur, the ship designers would not have some sort of pre-knowledge of those events happening. Secondly, Repulse and Wales were sunk by land based bombers. The very same aircraft I imagine in a supporting role for my battleships. Pearl Harbor was a battle under unique circumstances (in my AU, by the time these battleships are commissioned the war has been raging on land for years). A Taranto analogue could occur, but the ports these ships are stationed in are very spread out. Something like the attack on the Bismark could occur, but remember the circumstances would be different. My BB's are in friendly waters, likely not leaving air cover and enemy vessels would have to heavily rely on carrier based aircraft only. At that point, the heavy AAA is the last point of defense after those other factors.
For raking fire, there is no such thing as immunity
period. My designs try to reduce the chance of getting hit and taking damage. For stern coverage, I don't see what you mean, it has plenty of rear 5" guns.
This ship is not comparable to an Alaska, Dunkirk or Deutschland due to its 16" gun armament.
As for AAA for the smaller ships I will work on the layout more. The super huge battleship is more of a thought exercise at this point and still needs a lot of refining.
Hmm. An AU has to be plausible. You invoked WW II tech and practice. I am acutely aware of why RTL decisions in WW II were made, who made them, what was successful, what worked and what didn't. You cannot dismiss the results. You cannot hindsight or wish away the results.
As an example, take your truncated HMS Nelson. Seems like a good idea? What happened to the Graf Spee? You do know that Graf Spee had SeeTakt radar and some of the British cruisers did not carry radar at all? The British split the German ship's gunfire and were able to saber dance her to death. I don't think a pair of Aganos could do it with torpedoes (see below), but if a couple of American cruisers could savage the Hei in a point blank gun duel, I don't think much of your ship's chances in a multi-cruiser gun duel against a fighting navy like Japan's.
For mathematical probability of hit ballistic reasons, you need a minimum of eight main guns distributed among at least three turrets distributed fore and aft for indirect naval gunfire to be effective---> especially if you are fighting multiple targets. Radar does not change this fact.
Take another example... torpedoes. The Japanese opted for oxygen boosted wetheater Brotherhood engine torpedoes that had enormous run times and seemed to promise a tactical edge for them in battle because of their greater range. The USN was aware of oxidizer assisted closed cycle engines. Their own designs interwar were hydrogen peroxide based turbine powered experiments, some of them quite successful. The USN chose not to pursue that line of development. Why?
The reason is simple. The USN and the Japanese both from exercises and experience knew that you have maximum range and effective range in a weapon. Before the advent of guidance, a torpedo would wander out of angle solution with an error of 1 degree over 100 seconds run. With a gyro controlled constant bearing lead 18 m/s torpedo swimming toward your moving ship that means a MISS at roughly 300 seconds or 4800 meters swimout.
What use is a 20,000 meter swim torpedo? 10,000 meter swim will do. The USN chose the correct solution they thought. As it turns out (Battle of Savo Island and Java Sea are the examples.) the American were right and the Japanese were wrong. Most Japanese Long Lance (American name) torpedo attacks that were successful were well within 4,000 meters swim-out or less. US torpedo ambushes were about the same. The difference for why Japanese torpedoes earned a fearsome early reputation? Exploders and fuses. The Japanese kept it simple Simon. Their exploders worked and the Americans didn't. The Americans tried to be fancy in guidance and in magnetic fusing. It cost them dearly.
In the end, the Americans fixed their exploders (also the depth control and nose wander problem) and introduced competitive torpedoes by 1944. In that year, it was not Japanese torpedoes that were feared, or German or British. It was American weapons. The decisions to make it simple, work for reliability and keep the weapon within what was possible was the final correct set of decisions for the Mark 13, (airborne) Mark 14 (submarine) and Mark 15 (surface ship) torpedoes. Too bad that the over thinking Americans did not do that before the war.
As for the Repulse and the Prince of Wales example, I think you missed the point. You said that defending land based air cover would protect your ships or cooperate with your ships. Well, the RAF historically tried to do that with the Royal Navy twice. The first time, the RN and the RAF screwed up the rendezvous in the Malay Gulf and the Japanese not only slaughtered the Repulse and the Prince of Wales, they also pasted the RAF.
There were no Japanese ships present in that case. It was land-based Japanese naval aviation alone which sank the British ships.
In the second case, it was a Japanese carrier raid into the Indian Ocean that reached as far as Sri Lanka. The British lost an aircraft carrier, a heavy cruiser and a dozen other ships in that one. The RAF was present again and it was savagely trounced as it was not able to coordinate nor cooperate with the RN in a coherent unified defense..
How about some American examples? The Americans raided the Carolines and the Marshalls about the time the British were being pasted in the Indian Ocean. Surface ships protected by carriers survived Japanese land based naval air.
At Midway, American land based air tried to coordinate with the USN and failed miserably. However the carriers had a field day. So successful was an inferior American fleet with aircraft carriers present, that the arguably best admiral Japan had, retired after he lost his carriers. He was not afraid of American land based air which he knew was of little consequence. He was frightened of a fleet that still had its organic ship-borne air cover intact under positive control and which had just demonstrated to him that no enemy surface fleet would long survive in its presence if that enemy surface fleet lacked its own continuous air protection.
You can argue that in your AU, no-one paid attention to these things I mention, but if you do, why do your ships bristle with essentially useless AAA (no directors or zonal fire control indicated)? That's a RTL Japanese solution to a RTL American problem they faced and it failed them.