Leaderboard

Here's to the B-21 Lemaycinerator.

So I got goaded into writing posts about the North Carolina class. For additional reading about warship design: http://navweaps.com/index_tech/tech-035.htm (I moved this up to the front because it's good and I'm angling for a general thing here). The weird and wonderful world of North Carolina sketches So the US found itself in the mid 1930s with a need for a new battleship with a treaty in place limiting it to 35k tons displacement and 14 inch guns. The first and most important thing about this design process is that they were in the middle of figuring out what a modern navy was and how it should work. They'd traditionally prioritized protection at the expense of speed and slightly less so firepower, giving them a battle line of slow football shaped things that could take a pounding and dish one out. Problem was those damnable carrier things. The first US carrier, the Langley, was a slow collier conversion, but the next two were conversions of the battlecruisers Lexington and Saratoga, (which were a lot like the mad, flammable fever dreams of Jackie Fisher in terms of protection, so it was probably a good thing in the end). The reason for this was the negotiations for the treaty. Unlike in RtW there was a lot of quid pro quo. The US had just finished the Colorado, Maryland and West Virginia, and the Japanese had just finished the Nagato and Mutsu. The British had the Courageous, Glorious, and Furious, which were in severe danger of starting to make sense. So the UK got to build the Nelsons so they could have nice modern battleships armed with and against 16" guns, and the US and Japan could get some carriers. So the US built the Lexingtons, which promptly showed the supremacy of the big fast carrier. Not only could they get places really quick to do important carrier things, they could also operate planes in larger numbers much more easily and in much worse weather. So the treaty carrier force was decided on being hulls as big as they could make them and 30+ knots. Suddenly that 21 knot battleship speed looks like a massive operational and strategic liability if they want to not have their carriers run in fright at sight of a battleship (This is still the time of the Lexington class carrying a heavy 8" armament to fight off cruisers, air power just couldn't be expected to head off heavy surface attack and conceding the sea wasn't necessarily a winner). The sum of all this was that they knew they were going to be making a major departure to what had gone before but they really weren't sure what that would be. To this end they tried a lot of ideas to see what they could get. These ideas are A, A1, B, B1, C, C1, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, J1, K, L, 1, 3, 4, I, II, II-A, III, IV, IV-A, IV-B, IX-C, IX-D, IX-E, X-A, X-B, XI-A, XI-B, IV-C, V, VI-A, VI-B, VII, VIII, IX-A, IX-B, XII, XIII, XIII-A, XIII-B, XIV, XV, XV-A, XV-B, XV-C, XV-E, XVI, XVI-A, XVI-B, XVI-C, XVI-D (Word says that list has 55 commas so that's 56 sets of specs considered). For obvious reasons I'm going to talk more about the fun designs. Scheme A had 3 triple 14" turrets forward and 30 knots speed with a thin 11.5" belt. A1 added to the belt with 13.5" and the same 9x14". B and C tried for more protection and a more conventional layout. BuOrd introduced a super-heavy 14" shell that made their targets for immune zone unattainable, (that's where A1 comes from). The CNO asked for ideas for a minimum displacement ship emphasizing defensive features. They didn't get dignified with an actual name on that list (Preliminary design called the worst, with 8x12" and 23 knots a deathtrap). D and E were armed with the shiny new 16" rifle to see what a ship armed with and armored against it would look like. However after a thorough search of their couch cushions, they couldn't turn up the 5,000 tons to make them fit the treaty limits. F makes me cry. 8 guns in two rear mounted quads. Wait, rear? They needed to free up the front for the three aircraft catapults. FDR apparently liked this demented battleship version of what the Tone class did better. G and H were slow 23 knot designs. They were nice, reasonable, balanced battleships and the spiritual successors of the standards. They also didn't fit the fleet's needs. So that left them looking at a 30 knot ship or a slower, better armed ship. Yes, this is the USN that previously considered a battleship to be a football made of armor. J tried to go with four turrets. It turns out that getting an idea and hammering the belt armor down to 8" to make it work is frowned upon. K made the belt narrower over A1 to make it thicker, but was considered too tight to the treaty limit. L is where we get to the good stuff and bring back the noble quadruple turret, which would have been 12 guns forward and crazy fun to play in WoWS. After that we get the thirty five (that we know of) sketch designs elaborating on those ideas. I through V show the development of the brilliant feature of fitting the ship for but not with 100 rounds more than the 100 per gun to save weight by careful manipulation of paper. I and II moved a turret aft to see if they could save weight there. Anyway, this is dragging on, I'll just post this and add a part 2 so we can get further adventures of people trying desperately trying to fit 40k+ tons of battleship that people can't even decide on the shape of into 35k tons.

The reviews of Hillary's new "book" are incredible: Don't forget to read the 5 star reviews, too!

Hey, look, T-14 in the field Look at that gun depression, lol.

The weird and wonderful world of North Carolina sketches Part 3: There's no business like show(boat) business So last time we checked in, they'd just finished the North Carolina and gotten her up to speed when the rear end of the ship started shaking like it was a crime against ship design and wanted to die. The Navy was rightly pretty worried. After all, the stern of the North Carolina looked something like this: And that kind of stern was a feature of all their new battleships, with the next class looking like this: If the new and unconventional stern they'd made was actually a crime against hydrodynamics and incompatible with actually moving at high speed, then the USN was screwed because that would be their entire lineup of modern battleships (and also their entire lineup of battleships that could do more than 23 or so knots) unable to actually do their job. The vibration was some sort of resonance in the incredibly complex (and at high speed, very energetic, just ask the Prince of Wales) system of shafts, propellers, machinery and hull, and the proposed fixes off the bat were new propellers, stiffer foundations for the machinery and restraining blocks for the shafts. Interestingly the Atlanta class had a similar problem, having a similar hull structure. The first fix tried was using propellers with one more blade on the inner shafts than on the outer, eventually moving from three blade propellers on the outboard shafts and four bladed inboard to four and five respectively by December 41, which provided a noticeable improvement, although the after range-finder vibrated excessively, and it got external braces, as well as braces on the turbine and gear casings. By 1943 the ships were using reduced diameter three bladed propellers inboard with four bladed propellers outboard and a scheduled change of the inboard propellers to five bladed ones in a continual effort to reduce the vibration. The eventual solution was a set of four bladed propellers outboard and five bladed inboard. They didn't actually fix the problem but moved it so that the vibration between 17 and 20 knots was unacceptable, which was likely between cruising and flank speed and thus less of an issue (I'm guessing here, because it says elsewhere that the class was most efficient between 18 and 25 knots). The vibration saga was only part of the history of the class though, and much of that is far happier. The huge compliment of secondary optics was slowly replaced by radar and by AA guns. Navigational rangefinders were replaced by 20mm cannon, and the auxiliary main battery rangefinder was replaced by a microwave radar in 44 after being supplemented by a third Mark 3 fire control radar in 42. This sort of pattern continued, with huge numbers of radars being added, with a CXAM air search unit, two Mark 3 main battery sets and three Mark 4 secondary battery sets (not four to match the compliment of directors because of interference concerns). Upgrading and adding radars on an ongoing basis was just a fact of life for WWII US battleships. The other huge configuration change was four quadruple 1.1" guns (Actually a pretty nifty gun with the abilty to rotate, elevate and also yaw to track dive bombers at high angle, but overcomplicated and too small to really warrant the more complex mounts) giving way to four quadruple 40mm Bofors (a superlative gun with good fire rate and range, a good amount of firepower for a director controlled mount, and a design that could be kept topped up without needing a break in firing). The number of quadruple 40mm mounts just spiralled upward through the war. By June 1943 the NC was carrying fifteen 40mm mounts, and Washington followed in August. Similarly, the planned twelve .50 caliber machine guns became forty 20mm cannon and twenty-eight .50 caliber by June 1942, and NC got forty-six 20mm cannon after her major refit. By August 1945, the Washington was carrying 63x1, 8x2 and 1x4 20mm guns (the NC was only carrying 36 20mm guns total at that point) By 1945, the North Carolina class, which they had fought so hard to fit inside 35,000 tons, was now displacing 46,800 tons and assigned a maximum desirable displacement of 48,000 tons. The main combat record of the class was two major events. First was the night battle of Guadalcanal, where Kirishima started opening up on the South Dakota as the latter was crippled by teething flaws and accumulating damage to the superstructure. The Washington took the opportunity to get in perfect firing position on the Kirishima using radar, and once the Kirishima lit her searchlights to get a firing solution on the South Dakota, Washington promptly showed her what a difference twenty-five years makes in ship design. The other was the North Carolina being an unlucky participant in the most successful torpedo spread in history. While patrolling in south of the Solomons on September 15 1942, I-19 fired off six torpedoes at the Wasp. For those who don't know US carriers, a brief aside. I mentioned the Langley, Lexington, and Saratoga. After that the US built the Ranger, after which they realized that large carriers were really the way of the future. They decommissioned the Langley and had enough space in the treaty tonnage limit for three and significant change carriers at the maximum tonnage allowed for a carrier. Once they realized they could either have four mediocre carriers or three good ones and one compromised one, they built three Yorktowns and the Wasp, a smaller Yorktown that saved weight by skipping out on having a sufficient torpedo defense system. Anyways, back to the Wasp on September 15, sitting downrange of a torpedo spread it doesn't have real protection against. Whoooops. Three torpedoes hit the Wasp and knocked out her power, so she couldn't fight the fires. Bye, Wasp. The remaining three kept going. One hit the destroyer O'Brien, which sank on the way home. Finally one more hit the North Carolina, which wound up needing repairs that took her out of the fight for two months. The armor above the hole cracked, the second and third decks buckled, 970 tons of water was let in, and although the ship was able to get back up to 24 knots within a few minutes but had to slow back down to 18 because of strain to the shoring. Worryingly, the damage below the first turret basically took it out of action, and the shock disabled the main search radar. The General Board wanted a redesign on the last two Iowas for more protection, but BuShips said the system performed as designed, made no change and the US wound up not making the ships anyway. In contrast to the following South Dakotas, which managed to kind of properly protect against 16" fire (same scheme as the Iowas, which at 10,000 tons heavier than the South Dakota class shows just how expensive going from 27 to 33+ knots is), the North Carolinas weren't incredibly cramped for their crew, which gave them a bit of a career postwar, but nothing too major.

The weird and wonderful world of North Carolina sketches: Part 2 Honestly the roman numerals are just a whole bunch of small things to save weight to try and jam the ship into the displacement limit. Not weighing it with all the ammo, sloping the belt (the bottom is the narrower part because plunging fire is a concern, this isn't a tank), making the barbettes conical even, making the hull longer (which meant that the ship needed less power to make the same speed and the armored area could be shortened). That last one saved 47 tons by shortening the armor belt 8 feet, on a ship they were trying to fit in 35,000 tons that had just grown to 725 feet. Ship design is a thing. They then started trying to fit 16 inch guns in, trying eight in both two triples front and a twin aft as well as two quads forward, but they decided against the sacrifices that meant. Scheme IV seemed to be pretty good if a bit tight, which meant that of course they immediately demanded a bunch more stuff be slapped on. Twelve 5 inch guns became twenty, and a frankly quaint setup of two quadruple 1.1" AA guns and at least eight .50 caliber machine guns. Next the board tried a few four turret designs which followed the example of earlier four turret designs and didn't work. The main line of development kept finding weight for desired features in such things as the ability to take two torpedoes to the same part of the torpedo defense system and the ability to take more than one torpedo on a side before the deck went below the waterline. Even then they just couldn't make the numbers. Next up was IXA, B and C, where they tried out two quadruple turrets up front. At that point they were at 30 knots and they realized that just had to give. XA was 27 knots and had a quad up front as well as the triple and an aft triple for ten guns, XIA traded belt for length and thus speed (length makes a ship faster by reducing drag). They also tried a small cut in speed to 26.6 knots for more armor (XII), they tried nine guns and a bit more power, and so on. Next they tried adding length to XII for some more speed to see if that would be cheaper than more power, they finally gave up on the requirement that the frontmost turret be able to fire at 0 degrees forwards so they could drop the front turrets and conning tower (a big savings). They removed a second conning tower that had caused much heartache all the way back in scheme I to see what they could get for it. After a whole bunch of rearrangements new requirements were issued, asking for a ship that could do 28.5 knots with eleven 14 inch guns and sixteen 5 inch guns. Both firepower and speed were on the relatively high end of what they'd been considering, and the proposal noted that weight savings could be made by trimming a gun or if refinements freed up weight another gun could be added (BuOrd still wanted the 16" gun, but treaty conditions were still in effect). At that point they realized the waves the ship made would reveal the lower edge of the belt right over the magazine, that they probably couldn't taper the transverse bulkhead like the belt (because going through the bow wouldn't slow a shell like going through water), and underwater hits were a major menace in the longer range brackets. The next alternatives considered were all moves towards a fast and well protected ship with relatively light armament, and was again considered as a carrier escort. This proposal was being seriously considered when Admiral Reeves on the General Board poked in and said the design was still too slow to work with the carriers and wasn't worth the high cost. He recommended thinning the belt to strengthen it and provide underwater protection over the magazines, and the board also recommended provision for replacing quadruple 14" with triple 16" if the escalator clause was invoked. This was just about what got made. Next up was a request to add four more secondaries, a bit more belt armor to get a uniform inner edge on the immunity zone, and to raise the second turret so it could fire over the first a bit more easily and move forward a bit for a bit more machinery room. Surely that would be minor tweaks. Right? And now we understand Old George in that link I posted earlier and his plight. Those changes would lower the speed to 24 knots by gutting the weight budget for machinery, and even then cost too much stability. The turret change just wasn't going to happen, the secondaries could get stuffed in unprotected twin turrets that would replace the singles in the design, and the belt could get thickened mainly by angling it more sharply. 8 quadruple 1.1" guns were requested (apparently to fend off small torpedo boats at close range as well which is a bit odd). With a bit more work the North Carolina emerged. One big fight was the adoption of high pressure, high temperature steam plants, which were more efficient. What they were not, however, was well proven, but engineering won, and adopted 565 psi at 850 F compared to 400/648 in recently completed carriers. Naturally they won late enough that the turbines were designed for lower pressure and lost some of the efficiency. Two skegs outboard were adopted to keep the stern wide for better torpedo protection of the aft magazine, and calculations were done to reassure the designers that the form wouldn't cause transverse vibration. It didn't, instead the ships had bad longitudinal vibration. Finally after the first ship was laid down the escalator clause was invoked and the US was saved from the shame of quadruple turrets and the North Carolina as we know it was finalized (until they put AA guns on every flat surface they could find). It was reasonably balanced against 14" fire, but the 16" guns especially firing the superheavy shell were just beyond its armor, and they still needed to make weight. The result was another flat 2 percent cut to the armor. However, a special advisory board was able to shave weight from paper so they didn't have to shave it from the steel, including a 10 ton reduction to the 30 tons of stores carried for sale to the sailors as well as more pedestrian water and stores reductions. Those got cashed right back into armor, which actually got a bit thicker. Finally, the ships were made to the plans for which so much had been sacrificed at the altar of meeting the 35k ton treaty limit. According to the BuShips standard figures from 1941, they displaced 36,600 tons (ssh). And then they started to move and tried to shake themselves apart. Tune in next time for a very special episode, My battleship is full of bees!

It needs to be armed with .50 cal defensive armament since a .50 cal bullet will tear a MiG's wing off even if it misses.

Shocking. A guy that has been in the public spotlight for four decades acts like a personable and gregarious human being when on an interview format. Are liberals somehow expecting Trump to foam at the mouth and rant about exterminating Jews, Muslims, blacks and gays? Did they expect Jimmy Fallon to be the one to goad Trump into a tantrum? Have they ever WATCHED Fallon? That's not exactly his forte.

Speaking of people whining: http://dailycaller.com/2016/09/16/media-outraged-after-trump-tricks-them-to-cover-endorsements-from-military-heroes/

the strv 103 is faster to lay against a stationary target from the short halt than the M60A1 AOS eat shit, stabilization havers

In our less exciting world, it was a battle and a half getting North Carolina going and another delicate matter invoking the elevator clause to get her the 16"s.

I immediately imagined a Hoover and then a Roosevelt looking over these, and saying "Fuck this noise, Build me a proper Navy".. And then, December 7, 1941 ending verry differently.... The very absurd and evil bit sees F7F's and L133's rising to meet early A6M's, etsc... The really dark bit sees a long range patrol of Lockheed L-133"s intercepting the Japanese fleet with 1000 pound bombs, and scaring them back to Yokohama. From there, shit gets very pear shaped.

The 4-2-4 layout makes sense, the B turret is the most expensive in terms of stability and you need a quad turret to hit 10 guns with only three turrets (good for weight, barbettes are heavy). The way you can tell it's not French is that the French turrets were internally subdivided so rather than four evenly spaced barrels they had two pairs. I think that's part of the reason they were unreasonably inaccurate until fitted with delay coils (I know it was postwar for the Richelieus). Shells are very fast and to get them to land close you need to get them to fly basically the same path, so if you have to fire them around the same time (and not doing so for guns off the centerline isn't in the cards until quads because they move the turret off line). So you've got shells flying very fast, very close, and their flight is to very precise tolerances. Part of that is just that the KGVs were quite heavily armored. A comparison of the North Carolina class and the KGVs shows that you can armor for or arm with a reasonable number of 16" guns. Pick one. Speaking of the North Carolinas and to a lesser degree quad turrets...

Joint China-Russian training.