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SeanBeansShako posted:I don't recall any kind of Rooster Rubbing fad in the late 19th century.... HMS Smug Francophobe would be a fine name.
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Aug 22, 2019 18:43
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| # ¿ Apr 16, 2024 19:21 |
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The effects budget problem would be hard to overcome, but I think you could find some interesting lines to follow through specific engagements. Captain Buckmaster at Midway comes to mind. Commanding a carrier, taking to the flyers, taking orders from Admiral Fletcher, giving the orders under air attack... A good writer would have a lot to work with.
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Sep 3, 2019 04:53
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Acebuckeye13 posted:I've got some bad news. No such movie exists, nor will be allowed to exist, within the interior of my consciousness.
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Sep 3, 2019 05:38
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Also the old Saratoga, CV-3. I know she was in terrible shape by the end of the war, and her actual service record didn't feature any amazing exploits, but she was historic in design and length of service.
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Sep 26, 2019 20:24
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The Des Moines class and the mk16 8-inch gun was the correct answer to the 6 vs 8 quandary.
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Oct 17, 2019 04:40
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Hyrax Attack! posted:That’s a good question, I’m trying to think of examples from countries that were hit by blitzkrieg and didn’t lose the war. Soviets really didn’t prepare for it but had so much territory and men they were eventually able to turn it around. And South Korea needed massive UN intervention. If I remember right, Soviet doctrine for countering a combined-arms mechanized attack was pretty good, but the people charged with implementing it just weren't ready. To make to an example, doctrine might correctly call for using armor to counterattack as penetration at the shoulder, but if the armor that gets that order doesn't know how to cooperate with local infantry, has no logistical tail, and is so green that they attack before scouting the terrain, then that operational doctrine can't work. War is hard.
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Oct 28, 2019 02:43
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AlexanderCA posted:He also likely was a "luitenant ter zee tweede klasse oudste categorie" ltz2oc previously. I can only hear this in the Swedish Chef's voice.
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Nov 20, 2019 15:26
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bewbies posted:I dunno if we're still on this but Has anyone ever studied war crimes with the same mindset that we use for airliner crash investigations? I think the standard framework of war crime investigation hinges on this idea that there's a line between the acceptable and unacceptable, and when servicepeople cross the line, it's because they are bad. That in turn impedes the investigation, because often they aren't, and even if they are, we have to support our troops. From my armchair, it seems like it would be better to look at a whole causal chain, and look at who framed the rules of engagement, how they correspond to conditions on the front line, what sorts of drugs were made available to the troops, etc. Then you (hypothetically) find yourself saying, "these soldiers did indeed kill 16 civilians in an unprovoked shooting spree, but it was at the tail end of a battle in which they'd had 3 hours of sleep in 96 hours, stayed awake using various unapproved substances that were nonetheless made readily available to them, operating under rules of engagement that required them to accurately differentiate enemy combatants from civilians in a situation where both dressed identically and freely intermingled." In that example, the war criminals aren't the ones who did the shooting.
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Nov 21, 2019 16:47
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bewbies posted:I don't know about any formal academic studies, but alleged criminal actions in combat are typically investigated in exactly the same way as a plane crash. Thanks! It's good to know the framework is there, even if it doesn't always work as hoped.
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Nov 21, 2019 20:06
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:I guess the motors would give a better torque curve vs. direct drive? That's something...but why not give electric motors to the Clemson too? Cost and lack of crew to maintain a more complicated drive system? Turboelectric drive was bulky, and destroyers aren't. I need to dig up my Friedman bookls and see if I can find more detail on the respective powerplants, because this is interesting.
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Nov 29, 2019 06:09
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Phanatic posted:I think you need better data. Everything you're doing is predicated on "the Clemson-class destroyer and Colorado-class battleship produce very similar amounts of power, 20.6MW vs. 21.6MW." Friedman's U.S. Battleships and U.S. Destroyers books are frustratingly vague on the exact details of the powerplants of the designs. I guess that's fair, since he was more interested in design history and the various trade-offs involved than in the minutiae of design. He credits the Clemsons with 24,890shp and the Colorados with 31,268, and lists both as trials figures. Wikipedia doesn't provide a citation for their Clemson power figures. Since they're explicitly listed as shaft horsepower (trials), in books by the same author, I think they ought to be comparable figures. On the other hand, both ships get their power in totally different ways. Turboelectric drive was big and heavy but enabled better subdivision of the machinery spaces, with boiler rooms split outboard and deliberately made part of the ship's protection. Tests explicitly showed that even if all boilers on one side were lost, the other side could produce sufficient steam to power both shafts. The Clemsons used geared turbines, which were lighted overall, at the cost of some efficiency. By comparison, Friedman doesn't have trials figures for an Iowa, but estimates that even with the speed-oriented changes in their hull form, it took 212,000shp to drive something that size to 33 knots. There are a great many factors that you might or might not model, but surely weight of machinery has to be a major one. Direct drive turbines were very inefficient, so people were always looking for more efficient ways to turn steam power into torque at the shaft. Geared turbines were an obvious one. Turboelectric drive was another. People also looked at multiple turbine sets, optimized for different roles, and during the 30s, the Germans were very interested in mixing diesel for cruising and turbines for speed. The US got more power out of a given weight of machinery by running at higher steam pressure than any other nation. Oh, and on top of the basic question of weight vs power, there are also questions of efficiency. Turbines like to spin fast, and propellers don't, but do you want to build the whole system for max power, or for optimal fuel efficiency at cruising speed? That ends up being largely a question of design range, which in turn is going to be based on planned areas of operations, availabiity of bases, and logistical doctrine.
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Nov 30, 2019 03:28
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:Hey, thanks for this! It makes a lot of sense and also is something I can usefully translate into game terms. Instead of having just generic "drive screws" as a part, I can have drive trains as a part, so you can get a geared turbine drive system or a turboelectric drive system. And those will have differing mass/efficiency tradeoffs. I'll probably need to dig up more types of trains though. Seems like I can do: If you aren't going to worry about range and fuel efficiency, most of those choices end up being bad choices. With WWI or WWII technology, if range isn't the issue, you use geared turbines in warships. As you move forward in time, you open up gas turbines or nuclear propulsion. If you're having some sort of technology level tracking, you might go from direct drive at level 0 to a couple tiers of gearing and then go into high pressure systems, but there aren't really interesting trade-offs there. If you can run high pressure successfully, there's no reason not to do it, it's just a hard engineering challenge.
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Nov 30, 2019 22:41
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SerthVarnee posted:
This has me imagining what insane machinery you could contrive with modern technology to move coal around a ship quickly enough to allow high speeds on a warship. Belts that move bins of coal between flashlight doors! Forklift drones! More maimings than an Amazon warehouse!
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Dec 1, 2019 17:35
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Unless I've been following all the wrong sources, the battlecruisers exploded due to unsafe ammunition-handling practices. If they'd kept things buttoned up, they'd have been a lot less likely to sink, and certainly the body count would have been lower. None of that is to say that if I had to go into battle on a battlecruiser, I wouldn't have preferred to ride in a German model.
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Dec 1, 2019 21:24
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Lemony posted:I have a thought experiment I was wondering about the other day. If you were given access to modern shipbuilding knowledge/science/computer modeling, but needed to build a ship using only techniques, budgets and materials that might be available to a major naval power in the early 1800's, could you make a fighting ship that would be noticeably superior to leading examples of the time. I assume yes, even just on superior understanding of hydrodynamics and rigging, but I'm interested on hearing from people who have more knowledge than I do. Aside from the cheap shot answer where you scoop Humphreys on diagonal bracing, I wonder what sort of laminates you could produce using old technology? I know that some ultramodern laminates are stronger (in what way, I do not recall) and lighter than steel. I doubt you could do that with 19th century glue, but I have no idea how much of the strength of modern laminates comes from the glue vs the technique. If if you had to hand-make them on an artisanal basis, being able to make critical bits out of superior materials might be a huge advantage.
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Dec 1, 2019 21:45
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:can you provide examples of the first case? In the WWI British attack on the Dardanelles, if they'd managed to stick to their minesweeping operations instead of taking counsel of their fears, they had a chance to break through the strait and attack Constantinople. I'm not sure if it really counts, though, since it's not obvious to me that breaking through once and shelling a city would be sufficient to achieve any of their strategic objectives.
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Dec 10, 2019 20:16
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I just finished Sheehan's A Bright Shining Lie and while it's narrowly focused on one badly flawed man, it gave me more understanding of the ARVN's performance. Lots of other accounts of the war talk about ARVN units refusing to fight, but ABSL gives more perspective on why that happened, with special attention to pervasive corruption and the ARVN's increasing role as an anti-coup force rather than a field force. As usual, the more you learn about Vietnam, the more you can't believe how much the American leadership refused to learn about Vietnam. Edit: I forgot to mention John Vann's [Vann being the subject of the book] conviction that the only way to win the war was to colonize Vietnam, shove the venal (because we made them that way) South Vietnamese leadership aside, and impose his (actually plausible and kind of well-thought-out) policies. It reminded me of the story of McNamara meeting Giap long after the war, and being stunned to hear that Giap thought the Americans were trying to colonize South Vietnam. I wonder now if Giap thought that because he knew, as McNamara would never accept, that America could not hope to defend South Vietnam without colonizing it. I guess it's more likely that he put that spin on it since he knew the North Vietnamese leadership were never going to be pawns of the Russians and Chinese, so he couldn't see why America would bother to fight the war if they didn't have colonizing interests. Zorak of Michigan fucked around with this message at 17:04 on Jan 9, 2020 |
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Jan 9, 2020 16:59
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brugroffil posted:Who invented the term "warfighter" and where can we find them to make them pay Shameful admission: I liked it when I first heard it. The way the military was talked about when I was growing up (late 80s) tended to be a bit antiseptic, and as was with the Russians seemed less and less likely, people were correspondingly more likely to view the military as a disaster relief organization with college benefits. Putting more "war" in the vocabulary helped to remind everyone what the real point was. I mean, in the late 90s, someone did a reality show about US Army basic training, and there was one recruit tearfully confessing into the camera that they hadn't expected there to be so much emphasis on guns in the Army. She might have needed to hear someone say "warfighter" a few more times. Now it grates on me too, but just because of repetition. It doesn't grate on me the way "please action this ask" does.
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Jan 23, 2020 16:02
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xthetenth posted:24 barrels versus 9 means a superstructure based knockout of the Yamato is definitely possible, but I'm not comfortable at all with a Colorado, let alone an R class, being able to avoid nasty hits. Unless someone gets lucky against the lighter Japanese ships during the daylight engagement, the Allies will never get their cripples away. The Japanese can shadow until dark and then go on a spree.
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Jan 29, 2020 01:29
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FMguru posted:
Dang, man, I never gave any thought to deep the breech on one of those must be. Yoink.
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Feb 3, 2020 22:19
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Benagain posted:So where do we find the next royal, are we going to create a new dynasty from a plutocrat or go with one of the existing minor branches. Go all Jurassic Park on Richard III's body.
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Feb 5, 2020 15:10
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Nebakenezzer posted:My gut instinct is that even in a worst-case scenerio, the radiation release would be limited because that ship is going to sink very soon. Sticking with current designs, since there are only two classes of ship (setting aside the Kirovs) that have nuclear power - submarines and aircraft carriers - I'd say that if a Nimitz class had its reactor spaces opened up by a cruise missile, the rest of the fleet has other stuff to worry about. I also know that instead of one big reactor, the Nimitz and Ford classes use 8 small reactors, which I think would limit the scope of a reactor accident. Enterprise had eight reactors, which was a major reason her cost was excessively high and the US reverted to conventional power for the next couple carriers. The subsequent CVN classes have just two.
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Feb 8, 2020 17:27
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Nebakenezzer posted:Were these also repurposed sub reactors? I was told the USN did something extremely smart when they just used existing reactors to power carriers rather than design a new one. I'm too lazy to go fetch a book, but Wikipedia says the Nimitz and Ford classes use reactors designed specifically for carriers.
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Feb 8, 2020 19:11
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It's also the same reason that WWI battleships had an anti-torpedo boat battery even though they were always screened by their own escorts. There's always the risk that someone will get through, and you want to feel like your capital ships can take care of themselves in that situation.
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Feb 17, 2020 10:13
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Nebakenezzer posted:Were Japanese air-dropped torpedoes as deadly as the long lances? No. They worked well from the beginning, which makes them a lot better than US torpedoes, but they didn't have the range or warhead of the Long Lance. More to the point, they required a predictable approach, just like US torpedoes did. After the Guadalcanal campaign, it would have been very difficult for the Japanese to put enough bombers in one raid to threaten a battleship. Maybe if we had been fun enough to sail an old BB unescorted into their range it could have been done, but we knew better.
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Feb 17, 2020 15:35
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Cythereal posted:Late war, USN battleships were explicitly counted on in USN planning as a major part of a task force's air defense. The big gun battleship thing had largely gone out of style except for shore bombardment, but battleships are huge platforms for mounting an absolute shitload of AA guns on, and that's exactly what the USN did. It's interesting to look at the response to the kamikaze threat and the later transition to worrying about cruise missiles. By 1945, US integrated air defenses could basically knock down inbound aircraft as quickly as their positions could be plotted and communicated. Even suicide attacks could only work by spreading the thread out so widely that they overwhelmed the controllers, or by infiltration of small groups of aircraft at wavetop height. There were even better weapons on the drawing board, like the 3"/50 mount and, IIRC, efforts to integrate the radar and director into the 5" mount so that every 5" turret could engage threats independently. The Japanese would have countered with an even more intense tempo of kamikaze attacks. It would have been insane.
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Feb 17, 2020 20:22
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Fangz posted:What about surrendering Counter-proposal: what about more people killing themselves in order to demonstrate their commitment to the national essence?
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Feb 17, 2020 22:42
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taqueso posted:WW2 must have been great for learning about that kind of stuff both the hard way and the math way. Or learning that what was known and ignored on smaller boats couldn't be ignored any longer maybe? Treaties had a huge role in the design of the KGV class and led to most the fuckery in the design. It was a question of saving weight every which way they could, and then finding out that they'd cut a little too far and saved weight where they couldn't. They were good people and not stupid, but the long holiday between the design of the Nelsons and the KGVs meant nobody had done this lately, they needed the new battleships ASAP, and that sort of time pressure makes for bad design. KGV herself wasn't commissioned until Dec 1940 (according to Wikipedia), which means that if someone took an extra 6 months to check this stuff out, the ship wouldn't even have been in commission when Bismarck sailed.
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Feb 26, 2020 23:22
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You know why planned like they were always going to win WWII? The Japanese.
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Mar 2, 2020 23:28
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:I'm reading Nelson to Vanguard: Warship Design and Development, 1923-1945, and as it's quite a thorough book, it makes sure to mention the gunnery armament that the UK carriers had, as well as their armor and protections against torpedoes. Now, I can definitely see how AA guns and anti-aircraft armor would be valuable, but how often did carriers actually use their anti-ship measures in practice? The book made mention of a carrier with 8" artillery which just seems like overkill -- more armor against bombs, or more fuel/ammo for your own planes, would seem more valuable. Off the top of my head, HMS Glorious and the jeep carriers at the Battle Off Samar are the only times a carrier force was attacked by surface forces. In both cases, the carriers' self-defense weaponry was pretty much irrelevant. In the Pacific, subs sank the first Yorktown and the first Wasp, and I believe sub attacks were one of the reasons Saratoga spent so much time in dry dock. US subs got several Japanese carriers later in the war.
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Mar 18, 2020 16:05
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:Flight Deck Cruisers bitches All US carriers are flight deck cruisers, that's what the C in CV stands for!
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Mar 18, 2020 18:54
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I think you mean aviation cruisers. Only the B-36 and Maxim Gorky were flying cruisers.
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Mar 18, 2020 19:17
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Keep the Marines but go back a century and focus on their role as the State Department's Army.
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Mar 29, 2020 16:35
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Tias posted:FWIW, I'm mostly talking about the folks I've seen join Naked and Afraid, which currently counts: 1 SEAL, 2 GBs, one unidentified (but army) and a bunch of chair force grunts who did SERE and all did terribly. I just read a book about Special Forces and, when it was written at least, they had both tests and a lot of emphasis on peer grading. Candidates had to be good teammates and good trainers. That doesn't mean you actually have to be a good guy, though. There's a reason that "you can trust me with your life, but not your money or your wife" is a mantra for some people.
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Mar 29, 2020 22:51
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Megadreadnaught gonna have some stability problems with the height of C turret, even if it's only a two-gun mount. Which reminds me that the people who have to pay for the turret designs are looking at the mix of two-gun, three-gun, and four-gun turrets and thinking that in this case, their pencils might not be best used for drafting. How would you even create those turret shapes?
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Apr 7, 2020 19:46
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:You know how the Germans made their helmets? Just scale that up a bit. Did anyone make a press anywhere near that size for doing BB-thickness armor? I thought most late-era BBs had their relatively flat rolled plates which were then welded together because that was the sanest way to make armor on that scale.
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Apr 8, 2020 04:46
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Cyrano4747 posted:I’m pretty sure that was a joke. There’s no way you’re pressing armor anywhere near that thick. Curved tank armor tends to be cast for this reason. Thanks, that's what I thought. There's a certain charm to the dynamics of heavy armor and big guns. It often seems to work out such that vaguely comparable dimensions turn out to be the right answer (armor belt thickness usually seemed to be within a couple inches of main gun bore) but then the underlying technology was vastly more complex. Missiles ruined the fun. Now it's just "build a 28" thick armor monocoque hull if you want, we'll just apply existing techniques to make a missile that weighs 4 tons and hits at Mach 3.5, and your battleship will crack like an egg." Boring.
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Apr 8, 2020 16:06
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The Lone Badger posted:Has anyone ever built a kinetic-kill antishipping missile? I don't think anyone ever needed one. I mentioned it just because that was always how the "bring back the battleship" conversation ended over in sci.military.naval. There's no size armor plate that can't be defeated by a missile, and it's probably quicker and easier to develop the missile than it is to build the ship, so why even try? Certainly the missile would be in service within a small fraction of the ship's service lifetime.
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Apr 8, 2020 17:59
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Vincent Van Goatse posted:But at that point you might as well theorycraft that it's happening on the melted Martian polar ice caps. It's completely divorced from any reality. Clearly you haven't read the drafts of my new novel, in which bad guys hijack USS Constitution, and for ingenious plot reasons, can only be opposed by the patriots who steal PT-796 from Battleship Cove.
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Apr 14, 2020 18:24
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I think Cyrano meant Spruances, since the Fetchers were WWII ships.
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May 12, 2020 01:53
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