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I think they're also proportionally a good bit too expensive.
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Nov 15, 2015 16:42
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Arglebargle III posted:Kure Design Bureau comes back with a proposal for a battleship with a hexagonal turret layout, based on French designs. I am not entirely pleased. (Main battery wing turrets are a way to achieve a heavy broadside, but they waste tonnage on turrets that are masked by superstructure. Dreadnought's designers believed that wing turrets would allow her to fire her forward and wing turrets at a target on her forward quarter, but in practice firing the wing turrets so far inboard caused blast damage to the superstructure and decks. A superfiring forward turret was contemplated but designers' believed the lower turret would be rendered uninhabitable by blast, and so went with wing turrets. It was not until the Americans built a superfiring design were British worries about superfiring turrets disproved.) There's worries about superfiring turrets, and there's also another factor in play forward. Superfiring turrets by definition have to be above the turrets in front of them, and forward centerline turrets' height is constrained by the bow (except for one US interwar design I've seen which is absolutely bonkers and didn't get made for very good reason). Two forward wing turrets on the Dreadnought does mean more turret weight, but a superfiring turret would be two decks higher, and lowering the turrets, not needing as tall a barbette, and not having to raise the superstructure high enough to see over it would do a great job of making up for or even beating the topweight of a design with forward superfiring turrets. This isn't necessarily a deciding factor for the Dreadnought class, but the Neptunes being the way they were with a forward single turret, staggered side turrets and a superfiring pair aft suggests very strongly that this was a pressing concern for the RN ship design bureau. Meanwhile the US had experience from the Virginias (which I think would have been the ones to convince the British superfiring was viable for the Neptune class since the South Carolinas were only in service by 1910). Also it is just crazy how different the designs just launching could be from what was starting construction.
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Nov 16, 2015 02:11
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Galaga Galaxian posted:The fact that I don't feel I should ask "is that true?!" says a lot about the relationship between the IJA and IJN... Oh that's not even the particularly bad stuff. Admiral Yamaguchi once placed his superior Nagumo in a headlock to persuade him to bring Yamaguchi's shorter ranged carriers to Pearl. Nagumo once threatened to stab a fellow officer (Shattered Sword page 77 should have details). Assassination and intimidation were commonplace in the 20s and 30s, Yamamoto got promoted to CinC Combined Fleet in large part because he would probably be safer posted outside Tokyo after having supported the Washington naval treaty and opposing Japan's membership in the Tripartite Pact. Arglebargle III posted:That's what I'm referring to in Danton; she was built as a pre-dreadnought but one of her alternate plans would have had her with that main battery turret layout. I was hoping to avoid launching that because it's so wasteful, and because I didn't have steam turbines or torpedo protection yet. Incidentally, money for battleships has only been available for the last four months or so anyway. We've completed a lot of cruisers and destroyers and submarines in the last 14 months. Umm, why not call it a Kawachi? Also, firing across your ship and covering the thing in soot is incredibly gauche.
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Nov 17, 2015 06:00
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Arglebargle III posted:To be honest I don't know much about the IJN. I guess I will next evening then (curse you gainful employment!). It's actually the only navy whose entire inventory of dreadnoughts (and semi-dreadnoughts depending on how you want to class the Kawachi class) I can list off the top of my head. The relevant bit here though is that the Kawachi was the Japanese attempt to make a design based on what they learned from Tsushima and the big gun theories of the day, and had six twin turrets in a hexagonal pattern just like the Nassau and Helgoland classes. Interestingly early design drafts had two pairs of superfiring turrets fore and aft and en echelon turrets amidships but they couldn't fit weight. Then they got pressure to use 50 caliber guns like the RN was using, but they could only afford a pair for the fore and aft turrets. Pretty normal for early big gun ships, all told. xthetenth fucked around with this message at 06:39 on Nov 17, 2015 |
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Nov 17, 2015 06:32
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if you want to say something about it!
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Galaga Galaxian posted:Kawachi class was all 12" guns for the heavy battery, so I'd consider it a Dreadnought. It is the Satsuma class with its mixed 12" and 10" heavy battery I'd call a "semi dreadnought". I'd tend to as well, but the mix of 12"/50 and 12"/45 as well as not having turbines means it misses out on a decent amount of the Dreadnought's advantages. Of course mixes like that also get into talking crap about amidships turrets because they tended to shoot farther because they generally were located between the boilers and machinery spaces so the steam pipes heated the magazines nicely, which increased how far the turrets shot at the same elevation by a little bit.
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Nov 17, 2015 06:43
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Galaga Galaxian posted:Eh, my criteria is "is it a monocaliber battleship"? That's fair enough, I'd have to do some looking to see whether they could really expect to drop all the shells in the salvo on the same place, regardless of how they did it, and again, amidships turrets could have similar issues.
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Nov 17, 2015 06:50
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You missed a pretty important checkbox there. I'd submit it makes the design a bit more accurate.
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Nov 17, 2015 19:23
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Tevery Best posted:So, can somebody tell me what's such an issue with cross-deck firing? I mean, isn't it just the matter of keeping enough space for the turret to turn around? What does ticking that checkbox represent? Pretty much that, and reassuring yourself that yes the superstructure can withstand the blast effects.
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Nov 17, 2015 21:47
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Alikchi posted:I think that half of Wikipedia editors are warship nerds because I've seen like two dozen Featured Articles be big-gun battleships. They're not wrong. Also the articles generally tend to be non-terrible and free of the worst excesses of revisionist history (generally).
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Nov 18, 2015 00:19
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Does the game have Japan make the terrible mistake of building their legacy ships with their own yards?
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Nov 18, 2015 01:22
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I'd say commerce raid and attempt to minimize battle unless you have superiority.
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Nov 18, 2015 15:46
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Arglebargle III posted:Survived, yes. There are other win conditions?
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Nov 20, 2015 00:02
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Arglebargle III posted:
Heat exchange devices to recover the residual heat from combustion products by preheating the process water for your boilers. So basically it pulls heat out of the exhaust to put into the water rather than throwing it away so you don't have to do that heating by burning fuel. I'd recommend the wiki article but it reads like the author had only a pamphlet for a particular brand of economizer and a severe concussion to work from. The name feedwater heater for a very similar device is quite a bit more descriptive and has a significantly less poo poo article on wiki for those interested. It has pictures. I'm pretty sure Oil-sprayed coal is mentioned as pretty much that, it's kind of a big deal and doesn't really have a nifty name. xthetenth fucked around with this message at 06:23 on Nov 20, 2015 |
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Nov 20, 2015 06:18
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TildeATH posted:Finally, an opponent we can defeat! You'd think that. And then we miss every shot.
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Nov 20, 2015 17:22
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Riso posted:I still don't get BC. Because scouting elements fight each other.
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Nov 20, 2015 19:58
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Pvt.Scott posted:Fleets themselves were and are obviously important, but the dreadnaughts seem to have had a psychological impact more than anything else, rather than any sort of pivotal battlefield moment. Germany wasn't kept lean by Britain having some new super-battleships, they were kept lean by Britain having a world spanning fleet with tons of fast little ships that could murder Germany's shipping. All the big boats did was provide an excuse for both sides to never actually have a battle! When fate decided it was tired of their poo poo and mashed the two fleets together at Jutland, those big ships performed sub-par at best. I've only been getting into this pre/post-wwi naval poo poo recently thanks to SA threads like this, but with hindsight, it sounds like the stupidest waste of men and materiel ever, and I love it. At least, as you point out, their giant guns will actually be ably to accurately pummel a target zone in 30 years! The British battle line was in no uncertain terms their control over the sea. Germany's unwillingness to engage them and the caution with which they made their few attempts are successes of the British battle line, and that gave the fast ships the ability to damage that shipping without getting murdered by German battleships and battlecruisers. A lot of why Jutland wasn't a bloodbath is the effort of the Germans to disengage and make following them risky. A battle line that takes breaking a crucial blockade off the table is no less successful than a nuclear deterrent that takes land war off the table even if neither fire a shot.
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Nov 22, 2015 08:40
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Arglebargle III posted:
For reference, this is an absolutely horrifying design and I honestly think they'd have been better off with anything else. To land on the Furious as configured, a pilot would have to fly up at low speed and sideslip onto the deck while flying through all the turbulence of a ship's superstructure moving at 20+ knots and all the turbulence caused by the nice hot exhaust gases.
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Nov 24, 2015 06:17
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SIGSEGV posted:A proper Japanese battleship must have mast at least a third as tall as the ship is long.  Pvt.Scott posted:Was that an artifact of constant refits or some sort of strange aesthetic choice? A ton of interwar refits where they stuck basically any shiny toy they could find onto the superstructure.
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Nov 26, 2015 21:22
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SIGSEGV posted:All battleships had that problem, you can't up-armor things that high because it'll destroy your stability because of the distance to where the center of gravity should be. http://www.combinedfleet.com/Fourth-Fleet-Incident.htm It turns out that skimping on hull strength to fit a bit more weapons onto treaty ships ends up with fun quotes like: MOGAMI again has distortion similar to what had happened in March - the forward part of the ship buckling from ruptured welds so the forward turrets became unuseable. The forward part of HOSHO's flight deck is wrecked, and the bridge located under the overhang there is smashed. HOSHO also loses steering for a time. The bridge of the newer and larger RYUJO, also at the head of the ship and under the flight deck, is stove in. The windows are warped at the corners at both the port and starboard sides. The pounding seas also breach seams in the shell plating, and RYUJO's hangar deck experiences flooding. Some of the fleet's FUBUKI-class report rolls up to 75 degrees. Though welding is thought to save as much as 15% of weight in a ship, the technique is suspended except for specified areas and subsequent warship building reverts to riveting for longitudinal beams and the bulk of amidships shell plating. For already exant ships, fore-and-aft integrity is increased by adding more steel plates atop existing plates through the hull's longitudinal axis. The TAKAO class is improved in this manner. To solve the related design issues that caused instability, a number of weight removal and stability enhancement measures are undertaken. Where possible topside hamper, weaponry, and volume of munitions carried are reduced to increase metacentric height. Loading ballast or fitting ballast keels in smaller vessels and attaching external bulges on large units is implemented. Adequate pumping means to increase ballast as called for is also mandated. The best example of radical changes of this nature other than the CHIDORI-class are the new MOGAMI-class cruisers. In 1936, the MOGAMI and MIKUMA ae put in reserve status and remodeled again. More superstructure is reshaped, the mainmast reduced in height and the recommended changes such as external bulges fitted, even though these increase displacement by a full 1,000 tons more. Literally every class other than the battleships was inadequate to stand up to a typhoon with big, choppy waves.
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Nov 26, 2015 21:50
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Pvt.Scott posted:Eh, good enough, ship it. We'll patch it after launch! :is responsible for the cold watery deaths of thousands: See? Strangely, very few ships made before WWI were fit to see combat in WWII in an unaltered form. They were nearly universally merchantmen. Arglebargle III posted:
That's kind of cute compared to the story of the Iowas. The Bureau of Ordnance took a look at the Iowas, saw they were set to be armed with 16"/50 guns and went "right, we've got the Mark 2s we designed for the South Dakotas" (not those South Dakotas, the 1920 design that didn't get made), and the Bureau of Construction and Repair designed turrets for modern compact 16"/50 guns because of the reasons here: Arglebargle III posted:
Needless to say, 20+ year old rifles were neither modern nor compact and somebody in BuOrd got a knock on the door and was informed that the ships had been designed around turrets that had certain dimensions and asked if they could please make a 50 caliber 16" rifle to fit in those dimensions. And then the same BuOrd that brought us the Mk14 torpedo of "works great except it goes under ships, blows up too soon and doesn't blow up when it hits and sometimes gets a bit homesick" fame designed one of the best battleship guns of all time.
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Nov 27, 2015 00:44
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Japan's done a really good job of keeping to a naming scheme even after the US converted their carriers to the world's biggest thank you cards.
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Dec 1, 2015 01:28
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Ikasuhito posted:Watch as you hubris brings us right into conflict with the Royal Navy. Evacuate? In our moment of triumph?
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Dec 1, 2015 14:04
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Cythereal posted:This is a real practice, by the way. One of the biggest dangers flooding poses to ships is making them capsize through heavy listing - a hull breach on one side of the ship makes compartments along that side of the ship flood assuming compartments seal successfully. Better than letting the entire ship flood and sink, of course, but making one side of the ship heavier than the other makes the ship list and tilt to that side, creating the danger of capsizing as the ship falls over onto its side. Counterflooding is the practice of deliberately flooding compartments on the opposite side of the ship in such cases to even out the ship's list, which can be very dangerous and tricky to do, but has saved more than a few ships throughout the 20th century. Alternately do what the Americans do and don't have longitudinal bulkheads so the flooding doesn't cause as much list. I'm pretty sure the Japanese lost at least two ships in WWII to mishandling counterflooding. Listing is still a thing without them but it's not going to be so potentially extreme.
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Dec 3, 2015 04:53
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Arglebargle III posted:Usually because they lost electrical power to damage control stations and pumps. I'm aware of the practice, I was trying to get across the idea that I'm nearing retirement. Admiral Togo was 76 years old in 1924. Even Jackie Fisher resigned from being First Sea Lord at 72. (Well to be more accurate he deserted his post. Fisher's last year in office was a hell of a thing.) Yeah, I'm pretty sure that usually it was failure to counterflood leading to capsize, I'm pretty sure the Kirishima and possibly the Kongo got lost to it.
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Dec 3, 2015 06:05
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The Sandman posted:Just been reading Neptune's Inferno myself, and it definitely gives the impression that the USN had to learn how to fight the hard way. So does Japanese Destroyer Captain. quote:Also, that night battles are unlikely to go well for anyone involved, barring one and only one side making some catastrophic mistake. Until the US properly plays to all its strengths Overall though, while the US had equipment that could allow a ridiculously lopsided fight, Japan had training, doctrine and practice that meant that battles that started out roughly even often went their way, especially early on. You can buy a lot of success by being ready.
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Dec 9, 2015 05:59
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OpenlyEvilJello posted:The USN's budget is all the more impressive when you learn that shipbuilding costs were—at a conservative estimate—twice as high in American yards as in British. Pretty sure that depends on the time period. The US actually did try to economize to some degree before they turned their economy into the wal-mart of war for WWII.
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Dec 9, 2015 06:31
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Arglebargle III posted:
Clockwise from top left by class: Richelieu Kongo Iowa Guessing SoDak, not sure, the pic's blurry and I'm on a phone
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Dec 16, 2015 17:47
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Arglebargle III posted:That's all correct. I hope you weren't cheating! Richelieu: Has proper superstructure (especially aft) and secondaries, and there's two classes with a quad in the superfiring position, especially the French split one that's two pairs of guns, and the Dunkerques are real light on things other than hull and guns. Kongo: Two front twins makes it either that or a Nagato, and the Kongos are the ones with the rear pair separated like that, and with the top one right near the aft superstructure. Iowa: Forward superfiring triples & aft, US BB style secondaries staggered with five turrets a side and no mixed caliber, and that long as hell nose with the curve outwards as it goes back (rather than just a straight diagonal) and flat sides. SoDak: US rangefinder aft, gun tubs on the stern mean it's US, it's not long as hell, gently caress it. (Actually the dead giveaway is that it's only got one stack, and the NCs have two, but I forgot that) Heeeeelp.
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Dec 17, 2015 00:51
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V. Illych L. posted:the richelieu is such a pretty ship Yeah, even though I'm a huge USN fanboy, it's my favorite WWII era battleship, it's just the right mix of interesting, pretty and innovative, and not massively intrinsically flawed.
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Dec 17, 2015 01:14
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Makrond posted:I guessed Bismarck (specifically the Tirpitz) and a repurposed fishing trawler instead of Richelieu and South Dakota, but I totally got the Kongo and Iowa. You can tell the Kongo because it has an ugly-rear end superstructure but it doesn't look bent, tumorous or misshapen like other IJN BBs, and the Iowa is pretty uniquely shaped. Nagato's pagoda mast is actually very similar to the Kongo one, the aft mast is actually more distinctive. The bow, stacks, aft mast and aft turrets are probably the best places to look for a quick definite answer.  The Iowa's hull form is really distinctive, it's just hard to describe easily.
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Dec 17, 2015 01:45
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The Merry Marauder posted:/\ "Coke bottle" Neat. I'm more by the showboat. It's kind of a shame that she's the one that survived while her sister got scrapped. Although I must say her deck is absolutely lovely. USS North Carolina: Sailed up and down the Hudson river a bunch. Ate a torpedo. Shot her big guns (at some islands). Shot a lot of little guns at planes. USS Washington: Covered northern convoys. Shot her big guns (and gutted the Kirishima). Rammed the Indiana. Shot some islands and planes.
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Dec 17, 2015 02:08
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:I did not realize that silly 3 - 2 - 2 - 3 superfiring arrangement that the RtW AI loves so much was the reconstructed Cavour-class armament. Nevadas too.
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Dec 17, 2015 03:36
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Before some sort of central fire control, one of the early huge draws of a big gun armament, that it means all splashes around an enemy are from the same salvo and can be used to check guesses, wouldn't actually be true. That advantage is predicated on centralized firing control being able to link all guns of a caliber into a single salvo. So with that advantage down, what's left is a firepower debate. For a good while, even heavy secondary calibers tended to be well ahead on reload rate, so an equivalent weight of secondaries could very well have more aggregate firepower than main caliber guns by sheer virtue of reload rate at the cost of penetrative power, but have a huge advantage in ability to get enough shots out to protect against torpedo craft. Tsushima is an example of the havoc that a huge number of secondaries liberally dousing ships in HE could/were expected to provide. Finally there's the last factor, which is simply weight and ship size. Properly armored turrets for main caliber armament are heavy. Dreadnought is almost as close to Royal Sovereign getting fully enclosed turrets as WWI, and she's actually much closer in displacement to Royal Sov than the Queen Elizabeths built on the eve of war. Fitting ten 12" guns, battleship armor and real propulsion into a displacement that the US considered about right for a truly satisfactory 8" cruiser is no joke, and doing what the crazy American did and putting half of 8 12" guns a deck higher to shoot over each other may even have been worse because stability costs weight, and superfiring guns mean a bunch of topweight that costs stability. It's probably for the best that the US didn't really believe in superstructure back then. Also don't mock the lattice mast, they save weight. They also provide a smoother ride for the guys up top by not being totally rigid and fold down nicely in case of a storm (these are not good things).
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Dec 17, 2015 16:27
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Is there still a factory on earth that can make a BB belt?
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Dec 18, 2015 21:17
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Asehujiko posted:What work goes into armour belts that makes it different from regular hull plates, aside from being a lot thicker? A lot of metallurgy. For reference, you're taking 410mm (or one and a third feet) of steel alloy in a chunk that's huge in both other dimensions and controlling its heating and cooling through its thickness very carefully. In fairness, Japan couldn't do it then and they were still building battleships with the industry and personnel there. Last I checked it's been about seventy years since anyone's felt the need for giant plates over a foot thick of very carefully face hardened steel alloy. Generally it takes some combination of chilling, quenching, annealing, cementing, decremental hardening, tempering and refrigerating, with hammering, forging and rolling being used as well. I bet you'd have a fun time finding a press big enough to forge a battleship belt.
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Dec 19, 2015 03:27
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Arglebargle III posted:That is basically how you produce Krupp armor. As you can see, it is substantially different from normal structural plating. Xthtenth's link goes into more detail with the metallurgy but its so ugly. Hey it's better than his armor penetration calculator. He includes directions on how to use DOSBox to run it for those running Win 7. I wonder if I could get my hands on his formulae.
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Dec 19, 2015 05:18
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That sounds incredibly stupid enough to be Pierre Sprey, you might want to see if using his name helps you find it.
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Dec 31, 2015 04:08
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Corbeau posted:The only thing I know about CVEs is that they were the only carriers slow enough to experience the ignominious honor of being caught and sunk by battleships. HMS Glorious begs to differ. But overall yes, CVEs are a great way to get less airpower per ton and have it be bad planes.
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Dec 31, 2015 05:10
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The biggest advantage the US had in that fight was that they had nothing bigger than a destroyer and escort carriers so the Japanese had nothing actually big to use for scale and could be more easily convinced they were outmatched.
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Dec 31, 2015 06:35
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Centurium posted:Keep in mind that a ton of battlecruiser from a naval shipyard is not the same as a ton of tanker from a civilian shipyard. The great advantage of CVE's is that you can build a LOT of them using yards that aren't really otherwise going to contribute fighting ships without significant retooling. For the purposes of WWII it's right about naval shipyard vs. civilian shipyard, but that was with a mind to the idea of using CVEs postwar. Considering the Essexes were small carriers postwar and they were using some of their A4Ds as fighters in case they desperately needed a fighter, that's a good idea of the capability loss a small deck brings. The problem with 25 CVEs is that CVEs cannot launch a mass strike. They can beat attacks that can be stopped by FM-2s for a while, but without room for a proper deck load and with a requirement for catapults for every takeoff, getting big mass isn't great. You're also having to deal with tankers which means the fleet can't do any more speed than they can which kind of defeats the point of a fast carrier task force. As far as defending against land based planes, the big blue blanket was Hellcats and Corsairs primarily, not the FM-2s the CVEs were limited to. The CVEs were more for ASW support since what you really want is the cheapest way to have a plane or two in the air continually. Centurium posted:To me, the joke in that is that CV's are Combustible, Vulnerable. The US did crash build CVLs out of cruisers. That's what the Independence class was. They also needed some cruisers as well, and the Independence class weren't very good carriers. Princeton was lost because they weren't great carriers and a lot of pilots crashed because they weren't great carriers. There also wasn't much room for growth, the Independences and Saipans didn't have nearly the career of the Essexes or Midways. Arglebargle III posted:The lesson of Midway argued strongly for more CVEs, because the big Japanese carriers were tied up doing CAP launch and recovery operations all morning instead of launching their reserve strike force. The big flight decks are your offensive throw weight in a carrier battle, and they were unable to throw for a good five hours at Midway because they were doing CAP instead. Offload CAP duties to a few CVEs and you improve sortie generation enormously. That's the Japanese experience, the US had a very different experience because they had radar and were already in the practice of voiding lines and clearing munitions to prepare for an incoming strike. There's also the lesson that it's very important to have coordination because it doesn't matter if you have more planes in the air if they all swarm off into the same target and leave the way open for another attack. They're useful but that use is as a secondary capability. If it weren't for the Arashi and Nautilus, the fast carriers' speed would've been a very effective defense.
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Dec 31, 2015 21:49
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