xthetenth

NavWeaps is a really good site and has the best info on the subject I've seen:
 
http://navweaps.com/index_tech/tech-029.htm
 
For more:
 
http://navweaps.com/index_tech/index_tech.php#Ship_Design_and_Construction
 
I recommend the one on prismatic coefficient at the very least, it's about hull form.
 
Anyway, I was swinging by to post this.
 
Fun topics in ship design: The Superposed Turret

I'm not saying it's the cake for the wedding between the US and Mahan's ideas, but it's a pretty likely explanation.
The first US battleship was the Texas, authorized in 1886, and already obsolete when completed in 1895. The US built up to the second strongest naval power in terms of battle line strength in the twenty years after 1886. They did this in two major bursts between 1890 and 1896 and 1900 and 1902. These bursts followed each other so quickly that they couldn't incorporate experience with actually using the things. The only war experience they got was the Spanish-American war of 1898, which was in time for the latter group of ships. The result was a bunch of ships that got some things right, some things wrong, and some things so different that without them going to war we still don't know if they were actually a good idea or not. One which was definitely not in the first category was the superposed turret. In classic old timey racism manner with a dash of timeless hyperbole, William S. Sims claimed that (at least as far as the Kearsarges went), the setup was "The greatest crime ever perpetrated against the white race".
So what exactly are superposed turrets?
They're what happens when a daddy ship designer loves a mommy place to put a turret a bit too much. It's also what happens when a nation is backwards technologically and trying to match more sophisticated weapons with innovation. Describing what a design feature is is only part of what matters, the trade-off it means are vital to a ship as a whole, and the US had a problem with a different toolkit to solve it than other nations. The US had a problem in being unable to make proper 5-inch rapid fire guns (IE firing a shell from a metal cartridge that seals the breech), while foreign ships were armed with 6 inch guns of the type. The solution decided upon was to mount a slower firing secondary that could defeat protection against the 6 inch rapid fire guns. That meant an 8 inch gun, with the serious problems that meant. The guns were heavy and cumbersome, the 6 inch guns could devote much more of a similar amount of weight to ammunition, and blast interference would be severe, particularly on the relatively short and light US ships. The first class of US battleship with such guns, the Indiana was a mess. It took four twin turrets to get four 8 inch guns on a side, and the small ships were incredibly crowded with guns, which made for serious issues with blast interference.

Just look at this. I'm pretty sure some of those firing arcs would be grounds for an evacuation or failing that a court martial.
The ships were simultaneously badly cramped and undermanned (only nine line officers, with none for the torpedoes, main deck battery, secondary battery or replacements for those killed in action(!)), could only use 400 tons of coal if they wanted to have their design freeboard (or to have their belt line up with the waterline, at maximum draft the belt would be submerged). Naturally foreign observers were very impressed, since the US had clearly solved the problem of fitting a very heavy weight of ordnance into a very compact hull, and they neatly missed the statements made in Navy Department publications that they couldn't make an RF 6 inch. The next design down the line (Iowa) was a very similar design that traded in 13 inch main guns for very effective 12s and 6 inch BLR (breech loading rifled) for 4 inch RF in order to get a longer hull with a long forecastle and a greater coal load at normal displacement. This step from "coastline battleship" to "seagoing coastline battleship" was a major improvement. There were still problems though, that the following Kearsarge class sought to improve.
The high 8 inch turrets were troublesome, especially since BuOrd had finally figured out a 5-inch RF gun, and designs showed a long casemate for them, which pushed the 8 inch turrets out torward the ends. The turrets didn't have protection for their support structures all the way up, with only light armor (4" vs and 18" belt) covering half the way up to the turret itself, leaving the potential problem of being undermined by rapid firing guns.
The superposed turret was a replacement for all these problems. The 8 inch turret would be placed on top of the main caliber turret. The unprotected barbette and structure would be replaced by a thickly armored main caliber turret, the 8 inch turrets would be moved over away from the RF battery, and better yet, put them on the centerline so broadside firepower could be maintained with half the turrets. The ideas considered before this design were:
-two centerline turrets and two more on the waist
-two turrets on the beam forward and one superfiring aft
-two superfiring turrets on the centerline
-two turrets in the waist
BuOrd didn't like any of the designs, and an ensign who would later become its chief (Joseph Strauss) came up with the idea of a double-story turret. The immediate objection that the 8 inch guns and 12 inch guns might not want to shoot the same thing was "solved" by even a large ship being a pretty small target at battle range, while at shorter range, the 8 inch guns could take advantage of their 2 to 3 times faster reload to train back and forth. The turret would take "only" 30 seconds (at a point where the main battery fired once in five minutes and the 8 inch once in two) to train from one side to another so in theory fire could be maintained against a weaker target to one side while the main battery engaged a heavier target. Justifications aside, the blast interference situation was markedly improved, and that was a serious improvement over a lot of contemporaries. For example, the French Brennus' crew had worked out a system of bugle calls by which crews could leave their guns to get shelter from the blast of the heavy guns.
The two ships of the Kearsarge class weren't commissioned before 1900, so two more classes were laid down before any operational experience could be gained, but gunnery trials were successful, even though the 8 and 13 inch guns carried by the design were obsolete at that point. Amusingly the merits of the superposed design weren't the most notable features of the gunnery design of the ships. The 13 inch mount was flawed in a way that made the main battery guns be mounted too far back in the turret, which made for huge ports for the guns and potentially enemy fire (this failure, and a possibly contrived scenario by which a lit match (rather than a more likely ember) could be thrown straight through that gap into the magazine was the foundation of Sims' criticism of the design). The 5 inch battery wasn't subdivided by splinter bulkheads, which raised the possibility of a single hitting wiping out the entire battery of 7 guns on the side. Foreign observers didn't seem to hate the design, but nobody copied it, and it was considered to be a typical American overgunning of a ship.
The superposed turret was sidelined after the Kearsarge class, with the advent of a new rapid firing 6 inch gun. Since the 6 inch drastically outpaced the 8 inch in rate of fire and the 8 inch could penetrate enemy secondary protection but only with AP ammunition without HE, the 8 inch gun was rendered dubious in terms of value.
The Spanish-American war rolled around when the Texas, Indiana, and Iowa were the only battleship classes in service, and the 8 inch received favorable reviews for its decent rate of fire, flat trajectory, and actually scoring hits (13 of 319) at Santiago (unlike the 13s). Somehow nobody seems to have noticed that the weapons present for the battle were a generation old, and the rapid fire 6 inch (or even 5 inch) gun wasn't even present. The Virginia class was designed in a period where the 8 inch had a renewed cachet, and they were given two double turrets like the Kearsarge and two more 8 inch turrets in the waist for a broadside of four 12 inch and six 8 inch at the behest of seagoing officers in the Board on Construction (a design similar to the Indiana was favored until the objections of one of the officers meant a second board, which the chief of BuOrd still wasn't included in). It actually took two years to figure out what they wanted to build, and there were later claims that some of the votes in favor of the design built were to spoil a BuOrd proposal for replacing the wing 8" turrets with four additional 6-inch guns.
Unfortunately, while the Virginia class fixed the mounting, they weren't able to fix the passage of time. Heavy guns fired faster by that point in time, enough so that the concussion and smoke from the 12 inch guns alternating fire every 20 seconds, the 8 inch would only have 10 seconds to fire, and would likely interrupt the next 12 inch salvo. A variety of salvo techniques were tried, single barreled, double barreled, double barreled 8 inch combined with single 12 inch, and so on. Nothing really worked for that problem.
On the plus side, they had plenty of experience shooting guns over other turrets. That turned out to be nice to have as they entered the all big gun era. The South Carolina class was able to fit an equal broadside to the Dreadnought under better armor on about 3,000 tons less displacement (it's worth noting the US gave a damn about displacement and the UK didn't).

NavWeaps is a really good site and has the best info on the subject I've seen:
 
http://navweaps.com/index_tech/tech-029.htm
 
For more:
 
http://navweaps.com/index_tech/index_tech.php#Ship_Design_and_Construction
 
I recommend the one on prismatic coefficient at the very least, it's about hull form.
 
Anyway, I was swinging by to post this.
 
Fun topics in ship design: The Superposed Turret

I'm not saying it's the cake for the wedding between the US and Mahan's ideas, but it's a pretty likely explanation.
The first US battleship was the Texas, authorized in 1886, and already obsolete when completed in 1895. The US built up to the second strongest naval power in terms of battle line strength in the twenty years after 1886. They did this in two major bursts between 1890 and 1896 and 1900 and 1902. These bursts followed each other so quickly that they couldn't incorporate experience with actually using the things. The only war experience they got was the Spanish-American war of 1898, which was in time for the latter group of ships. The result was a bunch of ships that got some things right, some things wrong, and some things so different that without them going to war we still don't know if they were actually a good idea or not. One which was definitely not in the first category was the superposed turret. In classic old timey racism manner with a dash of timeless hyperbole, William S. Sims claimed that (at least as far as the Kearsarges went), the setup was "The greatest crime ever perpetrated against the white race".
So what exactly are superposed turrets?
They're what happens when a daddy ship designer loves a mommy place to put a turret a bit too much. It's also what happens when a nation is backwards technologically and trying to match more sophisticated weapons with innovation. Describing what a design feature is is only part of what matters, the trade-off it means are vital to a ship as a whole, and the US had a problem with a different toolkit to solve it than other nations. The US had a problem in being unable to make proper 5-inch rapid fire guns (IE firing a shell from a metal cartridge that seals the breech), while foreign ships were armed with 6 inch guns of the type. The solution decided upon was to mount a slower firing secondary that could defeat protection against the 6 inch rapid fire guns. That meant an 8 inch gun, with the serious problems that meant. The guns were heavy and cumbersome, the 6 inch guns could devote much more of a similar amount of weight to ammunition, and blast interference would be severe, particularly on the relatively short and light US ships. The first class of US battleship with such guns, the Indiana was a mess. It took four twin turrets to get four 8 inch guns on a side, and the small ships were incredibly crowded with guns, which made for serious issues with blast interference.

Just look at this. I'm pretty sure some of those firing arcs would be grounds for an evacuation or failing that a court martial.
The ships were simultaneously badly cramped and undermanned (only nine line officers, with none for the torpedoes, main deck battery, secondary battery or replacements for those killed in action(!)), could only use 400 tons of coal if they wanted to have their design freeboard (or to have their belt line up with the waterline, at maximum draft the belt would be submerged). Naturally foreign observers were very impressed, since the US had clearly solved the problem of fitting a very heavy weight of ordnance into a very compact hull, and they neatly missed the statements made in Navy Department publications that they couldn't make an RF 6 inch. The next design down the line (Iowa) was a very similar design that traded in 13 inch main guns for very effective 12s and 6 inch BLR (breech loading rifled) for 4 inch RF in order to get a longer hull with a long forecastle and a greater coal load at normal displacement. This step from "coastline battleship" to "seagoing coastline battleship" was a major improvement. There were still problems though, that the following Kearsarge class sought to improve.
The high 8 inch turrets were troublesome, especially since BuOrd had finally figured out a 5-inch RF gun, and designs showed a long casemate for them, which pushed the 8 inch turrets out torward the ends. The turrets didn't have protection for their support structures all the way up, with only light armor (4" vs and 18" belt) covering half the way up to the turret itself, leaving the potential problem of being undermined by rapid firing guns.
The superposed turret was a replacement for all these problems. The 8 inch turret would be placed on top of the main caliber turret. The unprotected barbette and structure would be replaced by a thickly armored main caliber turret, the 8 inch turrets would be moved over away from the RF battery, and better yet, put them on the centerline so broadside firepower could be maintained with half the turrets. The ideas considered before this design were:
-two centerline turrets and two more on the waist
-two turrets on the beam forward and one superfiring aft
-two superfiring turrets on the centerline
-two turrets in the waist
BuOrd didn't like any of the designs, and an ensign who would later become its chief (Joseph Strauss) came up with the idea of a double-story turret. The immediate objection that the 8 inch guns and 12 inch guns might not want to shoot the same thing was "solved" by even a large ship being a pretty small target at battle range, while at shorter range, the 8 inch guns could take advantage of their 2 to 3 times faster reload to train back and forth. The turret would take "only" 30 seconds (at a point where the main battery fired once in five minutes and the 8 inch once in two) to train from one side to another so in theory fire could be maintained against a weaker target to one side while the main battery engaged a heavier target. Justifications aside, the blast interference situation was markedly improved, and that was a serious improvement over a lot of contemporaries. For example, the French Brennus' crew had worked out a system of bugle calls by which crews could leave their guns to get shelter from the blast of the heavy guns.
The two ships of the Kearsarge class weren't commissioned before 1900, so two more classes were laid down before any operational experience could be gained, but gunnery trials were successful, even though the 8 and 13 inch guns carried by the design were obsolete at that point. Amusingly the merits of the superposed design weren't the most notable features of the gunnery design of the ships. The 13 inch mount was flawed in a way that made the main battery guns be mounted too far back in the turret, which made for huge ports for the guns and potentially enemy fire (this failure, and a possibly contrived scenario by which a lit match (rather than a more likely ember) could be thrown straight through that gap into the magazine was the foundation of Sims' criticism of the design). The 5 inch battery wasn't subdivided by splinter bulkheads, which raised the possibility of a single hitting wiping out the entire battery of 7 guns on the side. Foreign observers didn't seem to hate the design, but nobody copied it, and it was considered to be a typical American overgunning of a ship.
The superposed turret was sidelined after the Kearsarge class, with the advent of a new rapid firing 6 inch gun. Since the 6 inch drastically outpaced the 8 inch in rate of fire and the 8 inch could penetrate enemy secondary protection but only with AP ammunition without HE, the 8 inch gun was rendered dubious in terms of value.
The Spanish-American war rolled around when the Texas, Indiana, and Iowa were the only battleship classes in service, and the 8 inch received favorable reviews for its decent rate of fire, flat trajectory, and actually scoring hits (13 of 319) at Santiago (unlike the 13s). Somehow nobody seems to have noticed that the weapons present for the battle were a generation old, and the rapid fire 6 inch (or even 5 inch) gun wasn't even present. The Virginia class was designed in a period where the 8 inch had a renewed cachet, and they were given two double turrets like the Kearsarge and two more 8 inch turrets in the waist for a broadside of four 12 inch and six 8 inch at the behest of seagoing officers in the Board on Construction (a design similar to the Indiana was favored until the objections of one of the officers meant a second board, which the chief of BuOrd still wasn't included in). It actually took two years to figure out what they wanted to build, and there were later claims that some of the votes in favor of the design built were to spoil a BuOrd proposal for replacing the wing 8" turrets with four additional 6-inch guns.
Unfortunately, while the Virginia class fixed the mounting, they weren't able to fix the passage of time. Heavy guns fired faster by that point in time, enough so that the concussion and smoke from the 12 inch guns alternating fire every 20 seconds, the 8 inch would only have 10 seconds to fire, and would likely interrupt the next 12 inch salvo. A variety of salvo techniques were tried, single barreled, double barreled, double barreled 8 inch combined with single 12 inch, and so on. Nothing really worked for that problem.
On the plus side, they had plenty of experience shooting guns over other turrets. That turned out to be nice to have as they entered the all big gun era. The South Carolina class was able to fit an equal broadside to the Dreadnought under better armor on about 3,000 tons less displacement (it's worth noting the US gave a damn about displacement and the UK didn't).

NavWeaps is a really good site and has the best info on the subject I've seen:
 
http://navweaps.com/index_tech/tech-029.htm
 
For more:
 
http://navweaps.com/index_tech/index_tech.php#Ship_Design_and_Construction
 
I recommend the one on prismatic coefficient at the very least, it's about hull form.
 
Anyway, I was swinging by to post this.
 
Fun topics in ship design: The Superposed Turret

I'm not saying it's the cake for the wedding between the US and Mahan's ideas, but it's a pretty likely explanation.
The first US battleship was the Texas, authorized in 1886, and already obsolete when completed in 1895. The US built up to the second strongest naval power in terms of battle line strength in the twenty years after 1886. They did this in two major bursts between 1890 and 1896 and 1900 and 1902. These bursts followed each other so quickly that they couldn't incorporate experience with actually using the things. The only war experience they got was the Spanish-American war of 1898, which was in time for the latter group of ships. The result was a bunch of ships that got some things right, some things wrong, and some things so different that without them going to war we still don't know if they were actually a good idea or not. One which was definitely not in the first category was the superposed turret. In classic old timey racism manner with a dash of timeless hyperbole, William S. Sims claimed that (at least as far as the Kearsarges went), the setup was "The greatest crime ever perpetrated against the white race".
So what exactly are superposed turrets?
They're what happens when a daddy ship designer loves a mommy place to put a turret a bit too much. It's also what happens when a nation is backwards technologically and trying to match more sophisticated weapons with innovation. Describing what a design feature is is only part of what matters, the trade-off it means are vital to a ship as a whole, and the US had a problem with a different toolkit to solve it than other nations. The US had a problem in being unable to make proper 5-inch rapid fire guns (IE firing a shell from a metal cartridge that seals the breech), while foreign ships were armed with 6 inch guns of the type. The solution decided upon was to mount a slower firing secondary that could defeat protection against the 6 inch rapid fire guns. That meant an 8 inch gun, with the serious problems that meant. The guns were heavy and cumbersome, the 6 inch guns could devote much more of a similar amount of weight to ammunition, and blast interference would be severe, particularly on the relatively short and light US ships. The first class of US battleship with such guns, the Indiana was a mess. It took four twin turrets to get four 8 inch guns on a side, and the small ships were incredibly crowded with guns, which made for serious issues with blast interference.

Just look at this. I'm pretty sure some of those firing arcs would be grounds for an evacuation or failing that a court martial.
The ships were simultaneously badly cramped and undermanned (only nine line officers, with none for the torpedoes, main deck battery, secondary battery or replacements for those killed in action(!)), could only use 400 tons of coal if they wanted to have their design freeboard (or to have their belt line up with the waterline, at maximum draft the belt would be submerged). Naturally foreign observers were very impressed, since the US had clearly solved the problem of fitting a very heavy weight of ordnance into a very compact hull, and they neatly missed the statements made in Navy Department publications that they couldn't make an RF 6 inch. The next design down the line (Iowa) was a very similar design that traded in 13 inch main guns for very effective 12s and 6 inch BLR (breech loading rifled) for 4 inch RF in order to get a longer hull with a long forecastle and a greater coal load at normal displacement. This step from "coastline battleship" to "seagoing coastline battleship" was a major improvement. There were still problems though, that the following Kearsarge class sought to improve.
The high 8 inch turrets were troublesome, especially since BuOrd had finally figured out a 5-inch RF gun, and designs showed a long casemate for them, which pushed the 8 inch turrets out torward the ends. The turrets didn't have protection for their support structures all the way up, with only light armor (4" vs and 18" belt) covering half the way up to the turret itself, leaving the potential problem of being undermined by rapid firing guns.
The superposed turret was a replacement for all these problems. The 8 inch turret would be placed on top of the main caliber turret. The unprotected barbette and structure would be replaced by a thickly armored main caliber turret, the 8 inch turrets would be moved over away from the RF battery, and better yet, put them on the centerline so broadside firepower could be maintained with half the turrets. The ideas considered before this design were:
-two centerline turrets and two more on the waist
-two turrets on the beam forward and one superfiring aft
-two superfiring turrets on the centerline
-two turrets in the waist
BuOrd didn't like any of the designs, and an ensign who would later become its chief (Joseph Strauss) came up with the idea of a double-story turret. The immediate objection that the 8 inch guns and 12 inch guns might not want to shoot the same thing was "solved" by even a large ship being a pretty small target at battle range, while at shorter range, the 8 inch guns could take advantage of their 2 to 3 times faster reload to train back and forth. The turret would take "only" 30 seconds (at a point where the main battery fired once in five minutes and the 8 inch once in two) to train from one side to another so in theory fire could be maintained against a weaker target to one side while the main battery engaged a heavier target. Justifications aside, the blast interference situation was markedly improved, and that was a serious improvement over a lot of contemporaries. For example, the French Brennus' crew had worked out a system of bugle calls by which crews could leave their guns to get shelter from the blast of the heavy guns.
The two ships of the Kearsarge class weren't commissioned before 1900, so two more classes were laid down before any operational experience could be gained, but gunnery trials were successful, even though the 8 and 13 inch guns carried by the design were obsolete at that point. Amusingly the merits of the superposed design weren't the most notable features of the gunnery design of the ships. The 13 inch mount was flawed in a way that made the main battery guns be mounted too far back in the turret, which made for huge ports for the guns and potentially enemy fire (this failure, and a possibly contrived scenario by which a lit match (rather than a more likely ember) could be thrown straight through that gap into the magazine was the foundation of Sims' criticism of the design). The 5 inch battery wasn't subdivided by splinter bulkheads, which raised the possibility of a single hitting wiping out the entire battery of 7 guns on the side. Foreign observers didn't seem to hate the design, but nobody copied it, and it was considered to be a typical American overgunning of a ship.
The superposed turret was sidelined after the Kearsarge class, with the advent of a new rapid firing 6 inch gun. Since the 6 inch drastically outpaced the 8 inch in rate of fire and the 8 inch could penetrate enemy secondary protection but only with AP ammunition without HE, the 8 inch gun was rendered dubious in terms of value.
The Spanish-American war rolled around when the Texas, Indiana, and Iowa were the only battleship classes in service, and the 8 inch received favorable reviews for its decent rate of fire, flat trajectory, and actually scoring hits (13 of 319) at Santiago (unlike the 13s). Somehow nobody seems to have noticed that the weapons present for the battle were a generation old, and the rapid fire 6 inch (or even 5 inch) gun wasn't even present. The Virginia class was designed in a period where the 8 inch had a renewed cachet, and they were given two double turrets like the Kearsarge and two more 8 inch turrets in the waist for a broadside of four 12 inch and six 8 inch at the behest of seagoing officers in the Board on Construction (a design similar to the Indiana was favored until the objections of one of the officers meant a second board, which the chief of BuOrd still wasn't included in). It actually took two years to figure out what they wanted to build, and there were later claims that some of the votes in favor of the design built were to spoil a BuOrd proposal for replacing the wing 8" turrets with four additional 6-inch guns.
Unfortunately, while the Virginia class fixed the mounting, they weren't able to fix the passage of time. Heavy guns fired faster by that point in time, enough so that the concussion and smoke from the 12 inch guns alternating fire every 20 seconds, the 8 inch would only have 10 seconds to fire, and would likely interrupt the next 12 inch salvo. A variety of salvo techniques were tried, single barreled, double barreled, double barreled 8 inch combined with single 12 inch, and so on. Nothing really worked for that problem.
On the plus side, they had plenty of experience shooting guns over other turrets. That turned out to be nice to have as they entered the all big gun era. The South Carolina class was able to fit an equal broadside to the Dreadnought under better armor on about 3,000 tons less displacement (it's worth noting the US gave a damn about displacement and the UK didn't).

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 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...

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!
 

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.
 

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.

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!
 

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 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!
 

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.
 

Oil is pro tier for Dutch Disease, so yeah, it's perfect for keeping an immature oligarchy perched on top of a backwater shithole living the dreams of people who don't have the education to get into the really fucked up shit..

Definitely interesting, not sure if it's actually my thing.
 
 
You're not wrong that they look like neos. It's an intentional gimmick to go full on totalitarian kitsch, and kind of look either fascist or communist and be totally unclear as to which. Their usual line is they're as much nazis as Hitler was a painter, and I tend to buy it, because some stuff is pretty clearly warped-ass humor. Whole lot of weird, but some good stuff.
 
 
I'm reasonably fond of some of that synth stuff. I have literally no idea why.

Hearts of Iron 4 is a realistic game about realistic things:
 
http://images.akamai.steamusercontent.com/ugc/492401650195467777/8EFF4ACAC87B4C841414579741AFB92D8F221699/

I was recently introduced to the genre of folk metal, and some of it is actually quite good. It's interesting to see different bands of different nationalities and how they deal with the genre. For instance, Grai's songs are more towards the folk side of the spectrum, Tengger Cavalry (who include Throat Singing in much of their music) is more metal, and Heidevolk falls somewhere in the middle. They are Russian, Mongolian, and Dutch, respectively.
 

 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lEQWNPhu81I
 

I'm so glad I backed that. God damn. Also they're casually talking about systems I'd been desperately wanting in elder scrolls games.

I'm so glad I backed that. God damn. Also they're casually talking about systems I'd been desperately wanting in elder scrolls games.

Background
 
Your country has a pest-control problem.  Fascists have invaded and are up to their usual tricks.
 
But fear not!  Like the Poles before you, you can make cheap submachine guns in secret, and build up your stockpile in preparation for Operation Remove Fascist.
 
The only problem is that these are ultra-fascists, and the only cartridge with enough Freedom to kill an ultra-fascist is .45 ACP.
 
Goals
 
Design a submachine gun that can be mass-produced in secret to help cleanse the streets of ultra-fascists.  The design must be chambered for .45 ACP, but all other design choices are up to the designer.
 
Ultra-facists, not being completely stupid, will be on the lookout for subversive activity.  Therefore your design should use common materials that are extremely common and not obviously related to weapons' manufacture.  Historically, plumbing materials and sheet metal have been popular, but again this is up to you.  Your bill of materials should be as innocuous and secure as possible, and the number of manufacturing operations that give away that you're turning these things into weapons should have minimal man-hours required, to keep the number of conspirators down to a minimum.
 
Your design priorities are, in order:
 
1)  Secrecy
2)  Cost
3)  Weapon effectiveness
 
The strange economics of the guerrilla mean that cost, as such, isn't so much a concern as secrecy.  A design that requires laborious machining of a steel billet is better than one that is made of cheap stampings if you only need one small mill and one machinist versus a large industrial stamping press, specialized dies and an assembly team of operators.
 
Consider common, innocuous, every-day mass produced consumer items for parts.  Could a door-knob be finagled into working as a sear mechanism?  Can standardized square tubing be converted into magazines?  
 
Also consider the costs involved.  Who is financing this operation?  How are the finances disguised?  How are the purchases made to look innocuous?  Does anyone need to be bribed?
 
I expect to see reasonably detailed designs with basic relevant calculations for rate of fire and weight performed.  A good solid modelling program will be helpful, but this is the sort of thing that can be (and has, many times) been done on graph paper.  Or whatever they had in Leningrad when the Nazis were attacking that passed for graph paper.
 
Resources
 
Operating system I leave to your discretion, but since I assume most of the designs will be blowback operated, I am providing links to all the resources you would need to design a functional submachine gun in .45 ACP.
 
A pressure vs. time curve for .45 ACP.  The integral of this curve (times bore area) will be momentum.
 
A pressure vs bullet travel time curve for .45 ACP.  The integral of this curve (times bore area) will be energy.
 
Chinn's The Machine Gun Chapter 4
 
Semi-empirical notes on submachine gun design
 
Contest Rules Stuff
 
I will be sponsoring this contest.  The single, indivisible award is $50, deliverable by PayPal.  If you live in some horrible country that doesn't have PayPal and you intend to enter the contest, PM me so we can figure out something ahead of time.  I am also accepting applications for judging this contest, but per the master rules judges cannot receive prizes.  All submissions must be finalized by August the 29th, 2016.
 
 
 
Alright, time to get your STEN on.
 

 
There are fascists what need killed.

We're only just at the point where a PC is a more cost effective solution than a console, that giant window during the ps3/360 age where PCs could be cheaper and/or more capable basically hasn't existed for the bone and ps4. RAM has gotten way cheaper, but processors have done basically jack shit, if they're going to get a processor improvement it's going to be at the cost of moving from small cores to big cores in their design (and for back-compatibility reasons hoping that a virtual core on a hyperthreaded Zen design is worth a cat core) with the attendant cost in transistors. GPUs have gotten considerably more powerful for the price, but that's a borderline constant in the computer space (and in fact is quite possibly slowing down as well). SSDs getting cheaper is great but it still isn't relevant to the sort of bare minimum machine that would compete with consoles or with consoles that actually install their games.
 
What there is though, is a much sounder policy with the console makers to buy more performance with time rather than by asking their customers to fork over more money. As long as the now legacy consoles last well into the lifespan of their "successors", it's a much better model than subsidizing overly expensive hardware and then getting the customers to pay it back by riding an archaic console for too long with no upgrade path in sight. Xbone and PS4 have been pretty great consoles considering their low price tag, and have been a roaring success as far as sales go.
 
Incidentally, PC hardware is incredibly stagnant compared to any time in recent memory and isn't looking to get much better. The only huge advances in processors recently are Skylake having a killer memory controller which is great for people who like taxing their 980 Ti SLI, 1070 SLI and 1080 (SLI or otherwise), Broadwell-E is the worst E series in basically ever, with Haswell-E being straight out better considering the price hikes on BW-E, and GPU space finally got a node shrink and it's kind of a disappointment, with AMD seemingly having to hammer their chips with volts like goddamn Frankenstein and NV one step closer to Intel's business model of underwhelming performance upgrades and unprecedented price increases.
 
The days of the 8800 GT and C2D are long behind us. Heck so are the days of the 4870, Sandy Bridge and basically all the really really good stuff. There's only so much juice left in making transistors smaller and there's only so much design optimization left to do.

He seems to be impressed with Katukov (Lelyushenko as well) throughout Schwerpunkt.

I learned that Yorktown seems to basically just have been the US' best fleet carrier up till Midway, it's not just a combat experience from Coral Sea thing like Shattered Sword claims. They were the ones who came up with the stopgap solution to US fleet carriers not having nearly enough fighters in the early days of taking the scout SBDs on, gassing them up and adding them to the CAP to take on torpedo bombers and even at Coral Sea were bundling up their air wing into coordinated strikes (scout bombers go up first and circle, torp bombers take off and go straight to the target, then fighters go up a bit later, and they bundle up with their bombers en route, with the TBDs using a handheld light to show the dive bombers up above where they are).
 
So it wasn't just Midway, it seems that Yorktown's officers had the best grasp of things at the start of the war.
 
Also man was there a fighter shortage, it makes my HoI 4 shortage of modern types feel a lot less depressing.
 
(Source is The First Team).