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JSB
Post subject: Re: Concept line drawingsPosted: February 27th, 2016, 7:31 am
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re your guns,
I would worry that the 30mm is to heavy to man handle and to light to be worth power operating not that this isn't a realistic mistake like the IJN 25mm.
The 60mm with VT is just to good IMO for WWII nobody got a VT below USN state of the art 3" (76mm) for a time and the 60-76mm difference is significant as the shells volume is are cubed.

Re ships I think you generally have to many 5" twins as you will find space for lighter guns difficult and they will use a huge crew.

Anyway keep designing 8-)


Last edited by JSB on February 28th, 2016, 7:43 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Western_1
Post subject: Re: Concept line drawingsPosted: February 27th, 2016, 10:56 pm
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Hmm, thats annoying. I was hoping that if I increased the size to 60mm I could get VT fuses for the gun.

Huge crew I don't mind, one of the ways the nation in question went on to win its war was through sheer manpower.

I am now working on a carrier, something post was similar to the USS Unite States. I am going to take the concept of battleships being supported by aircraft to the next level.


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Western_1
Post subject: Re: Concept line drawingsPosted: February 28th, 2016, 1:46 am
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Alright a new batch. This is a roughly 1960's version of my battleship with extensive reworks of some parts. It is now a command ship, meant to act as a dedicated control tower/floating bunker for a nearby totally flat-top carrier. I talked about this topic in another thread at one point, and while it wasn't very popular I still love it.

The carrier is rather enormous. The command ship has lost many of its secondaries and had a somewhat extensive helicopter facility installed. I imagine its ammunition storage has also been cut down by 50% for its primaries to free up more space/weight.

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Krakatoa
Post subject: Re: Concept line drawingsPosted: February 28th, 2016, 2:18 am
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This is a 2x3x16" 35,000 ton BB I did for one of my AU's. I would be happy for you to use it as a start point for the BB you are looking to produce. Remove the aft centreline 5.1/130mm DP guns and leave the broadside turrets. Give you plenty of space aft for your heli deck. It is a 30 knot ship on 140,000shp. The AA are twin and quad 40mm.

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Western_1
Post subject: Re: Concept line drawingsPosted: February 28th, 2016, 5:42 pm
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Awesome ship. All my line art concepts are pretty rough, so seeing a refined design serves as a great reference point. What made you come up with the idea for a 2x3x16" battleship like I did?


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Tobius
Post subject: Re: Concept line drawingsPosted: February 28th, 2016, 6:50 pm
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Quote:
Krases wrote:

The justification for this ship is this:

While a large USS Montana sized ship could be built, a Montana cannot be in two places at once. As such, it is considered better to have two lesser hulls instead of one great hull so as to have more naval presence in more areas. However, to augment the problems this creates, a number of adjustments are made to the doctrines used by the Navy.
First; this is not intended as a concept criticism at all; but a quick dirty historical overview of what was possible in the 1944 RTL era.
Quote:
The main doctrine change is extended use of land based air support. The skill, training and investment is not there at the time these ships are needed for a major investment to be made in carriers. The type of distances involved when it comes to this ships patrol range and its proximity to land based air support greatly negates enemy carriers, which at this stage of the war have taken major losses. Carriers are being developed, but the wars focus means that they are not being being focused upon strongly.
This identifies the user as either Russian or German. With the long coastline, my guess is Russian. Russian naval artillery ordnance tech is fair to good in that era. Their electronics and fire control systems are competitive. Where they are deficient is in shipboard ordnance handling and stowage. They are stuck in WW I with French methods, which while better than English methods are still 1944 obsolete.

USN experience (And British, German and Italian) indicates that shore based air support for naval units will lead to a Pearl Harbor, Repulse, Prince of Wales, Bismark, or Taranto disaster every time. Fleet air cover must be organic, locally present and shipborne or under positive naval control. Battleships without aircraft carriers are torpedo bait for enemy naval air forces and submarines.
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Armor has not been heavily sacrificed in this design, firepower has been. The ship still maintains good speed and its armor scheme is heavily concentrated around the two front turrets and engines. The ship cannot have its T crossed, as doing so allows the ship to angles its armor for maximum thickness while still maintain full firepower. The ship is well equipped to charge an enemy vessel head on, angling its armor as it moves. During a retreat phase, the ship relies on its great quantity of 5" guns, smoke from escorts and land based air support to cover itself. The ships also work very well in groups, as treating naval forces as a unit and not as single ships was another doctrine change brought about by developments in communication and training.


There is no such thing as immunity to raking fire, even in this age of cruise missiles and torpedoes. The example is the USS Stark. Vulnerability aft is present and in 1944 with the expected engagement ranges by aircraft (3000 to 1000 meters) and torpedo craft (destroyers, submarines, and PT boats (3000 - 1000 meters or about the same as torpedo bombers) unless there is a better coverage astern, it will be sunk, rather easily.
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The navy this ship belongs to had fairly modern cruisers at the start of the war. Light cruisers were about the only ship it had in decent quantity and with fairly modern designs. Heavy cruisers were available in smaller numbers and with less quality with capital ships being even fewer in number and even less advanced.


Definitely Russia.
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There are battlecruisers, standard battleships, pocket battleships and fast battleships. For my own AU, I am creating this class as a "Maneuver battleship", as it has qualities of a fast battleship and a pocket battleship.
Like the medium tank versus the light and heavy or cavalry and infantry tanks, navies of this era are going to discover that money poured into an Alaska, or Dunkirk, or Deutschland is wasted. Either a large fast well armed cruiser (Baltimore) or a genuine fast battleship will be economically viable. With the aircraft carrier becoming the general purpose platform of choice for first class navies even large cruisers become suspect if they do not contribute significantly to escort and bodyguard roles. That is for a blue ocean navy. For a coast defense fleet, the emphasis might be better to spend the money on attrition units, like torpedo boats and submarines---> hence the postwar Russian navy.
Quote:
I also have another design. Similar, with 22, 5" guns and one large quad 16" turret. This one leans even stronger towards being a pocket battleship.
About naval AAA.
krases wrote:
Hmm, thats annoying. I was hoping that if I increased the size to 60mm I could get VT fuses for the gun.

Huge crew I don't mind, one of the ways the nation in question went on to win its war was through sheer manpower.

I am now working on a carrier, something post was similar to the USS Unite States. I am going to take the concept of battleships being supported by aircraft to the next level.
The USS United States was a disaster. Fortunately somebody British invented the angled deck and the subsequent Forrestal was an improvement.

The problem with the 1940s AAA then as it is now, is that pesky shell time in flight problem. With small machine cannon you have to hit to kill. Without going into the complexities involved that means for a 1000 m/s velocity HTK shell the maximum engagement range is about 7000 meters slant. Beyond that and an aircraft can out-jerk the gun and shell hose and escape any realistic chance of a hit. The Russians knew this and developed a good class of 23 mm and 37 mm cannon based originally on Hotchkiss designs to work within those physical limits.

For fused based shells, you have a variety of nations that tried anything from 3.7-4 cm to 15.5 cm ordnance as AAA guns. The Germans, French, Italians and Americans settled in on guns (on land) that were uniformly around 8.8-9 cm meters bore and 45-55 caliber length to give a slant range of about 10,000 meters and a time in flight of no more than 30 seconds (average 800 m/s shell velocity). These shells were barrage shot at level bombers at between 7,000 and 13,000 meters altitude. PH ranged from 0.02% for the French to about 1%-4% for the Americans (with radar directed guns firing radio detector interrupted proximity fused shells.) The results once planes exceeded 150 m/s speeds were not good since the ballistic angle solutions for planes 30 seconds in the future at those speeds were impossible and still are. Hence we now use guided missiles.

Anyway, the Americans developed a naval DP 12.7 cm gun that was designed to knock down aircraft with VT shells within these parameters of 100 m/s and slant ranges of 1,000 ---> 10,000 meters. The guns worked four barrels per plane. That gives you an idea of the air attack saturation limits of an American ship armed with the 5/38s. For an Iowa that was about six planes per beam or three ahead or astern without counting the light AAA HTK guns. Counting those additional was a bit of a wasted exercise as the plane (1 chance in 3) or the ordnance would still hit the ship once those guns became active and effective.

The idea of mounting 40 such 5/38 barrels on a battleship begs the question of where are you going to cram the 10-15 directors you need to point those grouped guns? I won't mention over-blast, mutual interference of aim, or divergence of shells caused by wind passage of shells flying too close to each other. And you will still be swamped by a two flight echelon of eight aircraft. Five to seven planes per eight will survive to drop ordnance on you. The example is the Yamato and her escorts. The Americans came at her and her screen in waves of 10-16 aircraft from strikes that were stacked up many cases ten deep. Yamato, four destroyers and a cruiser went down after 280 aircraft made passes at them.


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JSB
Post subject: Re: Concept line drawingsPosted: February 28th, 2016, 7:49 pm
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krases wrote:
Huge crew I don't mind, one of the ways the nation in question went on to win its war was through sheer manpower.
It was more where are they going to sleep, even reduced habitability standards will be hard to attain with so many crew.


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acelanceloet
Post subject: Re: Concept line drawingsPosted: February 28th, 2016, 9:11 pm
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Tobius wrote:
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.

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Western_1
Post subject: Re: Concept line drawingsPosted: February 28th, 2016, 10:22 pm
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Tobius wrote:
*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.


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Tobius
Post subject: Re: Concept line drawingsPosted: February 29th, 2016, 1:32 am
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acelanceloet wrote:
Tobius wrote:
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;
Quote:
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.
krases wrote:
Tobius wrote:
*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.


Last edited by Tobius on February 29th, 2016, 2:03 am, edited 2 times in total.

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