The Landlubbers Battleship Thread - Now with 50% less cordite

[PhantomCruiser]

Yep. Hurt but not debilitate. I figure whoever gets a lucky shot in first will take the day. It's just a matter of shoot and scoot for the Iowas and maintaining the range/tech advantage. The Yamato would have to get lucky or maybe move in closer and try to force a slugging match at a shorter distance.

There are plenty of "non-essential personnel" to do damage control while the ship is fighting. Ships company when I was on her was just over 1600, so plenty of grist for the mill if the need were to arise. I wouldn't be thrilled being in the middle of a fight like that, but... You pays your money and you takes your chances.


Missiles (Vampire, vampire, inbound 270 relative) even with the CIWS, a 2000kg assembly of metal and HE moving at .8 mach is still a lot to impact the ship (even if it's in little bitty pieces). We had intel that Iraq had Frog missiles too, we weren't all that concerned about those though.

 

[Urwumpe]

I especially mean old-antiship missiles like this one:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kh-22

Europeans would call this a two-seat fighter plane....

 

[K_Jameson]

Not sure about the harpoon, but most anti-ship missiles use armor penetrating warheads. usually smaller than the missile diameter, so the old trick of a thinner layer of armor removing the ballistic cap does no longer work.

Surely some Russian missiles are far more lethal than Harpoon. My guess is that some of them, back in the Eighties, was developed with the newly commissioned Iowas in mind...

---------- Post added at 10:42 PM ---------- Previous post was at 10:37 PM ----------

I especially mean old-antiship missiles like this one:

Oh, the good old Kitchen. Back in the early days of flight simulators, I was used to annihilate enemy defences with a Tupolev Bear and a salvo of Kitchen in the "Birds Of Prey" computer game... A formidable weapon...

 

[Urwumpe]

Oh, the good old Kitchen. Back in the early days of flight simulators, I was used to annihilate enemy defences with a Tupolev Bear and a salvo of Kitchen in the "Birds Of Prey" computer game... A formidable weapon...

It was also fun in the old DCS, sadly the ships in the recent versions lack some of the fun.

 

[K_Jameson]

An interesting in-depth analysis of the "treaty" battleships.

http://www.chuckhawks.com/treaty_battleships.htm

 

[Urwumpe]

An interesting in-depth analysis of the "treaty" battleships.

http://www.chuckhawks.com/treaty_battleships.htm

Interesting analysis, and I can agree to it. Nice of him to say that the Rodney and the Scharnhorst classes had not been bad as such... after all most other candidates had less action. :lol:

 

[K_Jameson]

Interesting that, unlike many of the other observers, the author of the article gives the title of best treaty battleship not at the South Dakota, but at the North Carolina class. I'm glad because NC is my favourite battleship, but is unusual.

Aside from the NC underwater protection, that is commonly deemed superior to the scheme adopted for the SD and Iowa classes (at the point that the Montana would have adopted the same protection scheme of the NC), the author takes in consideration some points normally overlooked, as the superior seaworthiness and habitability in respect to the later class.

Also interesting that the Littorio is not completely ruled out from the best battleships of the periods... only too much extreme in some areas.

 

[Urwumpe]

Also interesting that the Littorio is not completely ruled out from the best battleships of the periods... only too much extreme in some areas.

Well, it was about treaty ships... this already made it easier for the Littorio.

But yes, that also made the NC more impressive since it had to fit into a tight design specification.

 

[K_Jameson]

"Treaty" or not, they (NC and SD) were fearsome ships. I agree completely with the author when it states:

"Washington served with the British Home Fleet in 1942, but despite the hopes and prayers of her crew, the German super battleship Tirpitz never came out to fight. I have always thought that if she had, Washington would have surprised a lot of people by taking her without too much problem."

 

[Urwumpe]

Maybe, of course the NC class was not beyond physics. It was just a VERY well designed battleship of the treaty era. The Bismarck class was post-treaty, but with pre-treaty guns... Likely a more fair match in the end.

But if you look at the quick fate of the Scharnhorst, the chances of the slightly better Tirpitz should have been low... I still think it was an error to just threaten with it and hide it in practically hostile fjords (since the Norwegians provided intelligence to the Allies). It would have been more effect on sea ... and much more so with proper escorts.

BTW: Are you planning to update your NC mesh one day, like texturing it or reducing the poly count?

 

[K_Jameson]

Surely in a one-on-one clash, the main problem of the NC is that, being developed with the Kongo class in mind, her armor was designed to withstand 356 mm shells. Obviously Tirpitz has 380 mm, so still can inflict critical damage in some areas (probably not at the main guns). But NC has far more destructive power, comparable speed, comparable damage control, better fire control and range. The odds are in her favor, altough not without some pain in the process...

BTW: Are you planning to update your NC mesh one day, like texturing it or reducing the poly count?

Surely the mesh still require some improvement (for example: the cranes, that are only notional). Texturing it with the paint scheme showed at the North Carolina Museum would be interesting:

And surely replacing some detail with textures I should help the poly count, but my plan was instead to complete the class with the Washington and then to produce a South Dakota, that being similar would be relatively easy.

 

[Urwumpe]

Well, the good thing is the USA used a very economic way of designing their ships, with many components being multi-purpose and being used in many classes instead of having thousands of specialized components.

 

[Andy44]

A new "what if" article popped up: Iowa vs. Bismarck

http://nationalinterest.org/blog/th...atch-nazi-germanys-bismarck-vs-americas-21356

Kind of a silly matchup, if you ask me, but these things are fun anyway.

 

[Andy44]

Here's an odd thing I found; while watching the miniseries "John Adams" I was prompted to look up a character in the show by the name of Capt. John Tucker, based on a real life US Continental Navy captain Samuel Tucker, a quite successful naval officer who was charged with transporting Mr. Adams to France during the War for Independence. The US Navy has named two ships in his honor.

It the second of these, Tucker DD-374, which I find interesting; during a fleet exercise in June of 1940, this modern Mahan-class ship was rigged with sails to save fuel. According to Wikipedia, she was able to make 3 kts and maintain steerage.

This is one of those weird things that reminds you of the crossover between yesterday's technology and tomorrow's.

 

[Urwumpe]

Adding a Fock sail or Genua might have been better... But nice picture, must have been fun to test.

 

[Andy44]

I was surfing Wikipedia earlier and re-read the page about the naval battles around Guadalcanal. It's common for people to think of WWII as a submarine war in the Atlantic and a carrier war in the Pacific, but when you really look at it WWII was still in large part a war between gunboats in many instances. The fighting around Guadalcanal was done mostly at night, between battleships, cruisers, and destroyers, at brutally close range in wild melees of shell and torpedo fire.

The Imperial Japanese Navy had its problems, but their crews were well-trained and drilled in night fighting and they clobbered the Americans (and a few Australians) near Savo Island. Yet they still managed to lose the battleship Hiei, which sank hours after the fight had ended, and their commander, Admiral Abe, withdrew even though he had clearly won the fight and could now bombard the American air field.

A few nights later the famous fight between Washington, South Dakota, and Kirishima took place, with South Dakota suffering electrical problems and unwittingly acting as a decoy, drawing Japanese shell fire while Washington obtained a solid gunnery solution on Kirishima and then laid into her hard with main and secondary batteries, crippling her and eventually causing her to roll over and sink.

Aircraft played a role in the overall fighting; both from Henderson Field on the island and from the distant Enterprise, but the heaviest, most brutal fighting was conducted the old fashioned way, by ships at point blank range blasting each other into oblivion. In the first battle, the destroyer USS Laffy passed within 20 feet of battleship Hiei, raking her with 5" shells and machine gun fire! Neither of these ships would survive the battle. Over 3500 men on both sides were killed.

Battleships were still a force to be reckoned with in the 1940s, that's for sure.

I've read this history before, but it is still amazing to read the tale of such a huge and brutal fight.

 

[N_Molson]

Well, the good thing is the USA used a very economic way of designing their ships, with many components being multi-purpose and being used in many classes instead of having thousands of specialized components.

They thought "mass production" and "assembly chain". It won the war. US factories and shipyards were spitting too many "Liberty ships" for the U-boats to sink them all. Quite amazing. And on the other front carriers began to arrive in fleets with full complements of F6F Hellcats. Ultimately, it led to the battle for the Mariannes, where the remains of the Japanese Navy were annihilated. The US main weapon was the incredible ability to industrialize the war, and put all the workforce availble (including women) in those factories. They understood quality hardware in great numbers was the way to fight modern wars.

 

[Andy44]

They thought "mass production" and "assembly chain". It won the war. US factories and shipyards were spitting too many "Liberty ships" for the U-boats to sink them all. Quite amazing. And on the other front carriers began to arrive in fleets with full complements of F6F Hellcats. Ultimately, it led to the battle for the Mariannes, where the remains of the Japanese Navy were annihilated. The US main weapon was the incredible ability to industrialize the war, and put all the workforce availble (including women) in those factories. They understood quality hardware in great numbers was the way to fight modern wars.

Also, the US Navy had a better method of training pilots in wartime than the IJN did. The IJN put its pilot candidates through very long and harsh training, basically training them as if they were samurai warriors, a knight class held above non-pilots. This meant that at the start of the Pacific war, they had the very best naval aviators in the world.

But as the war wore on, they never rotated their best pilots out of combat, keeping them in action until they were killed or too wounded to fly. Some of them racked up large numbers of victories. Meanwhile, they never figured out to speed up the pipeline for new pilots to get to the fleet.

The US Navy, in contrast, would rotate veteran pilots back to school as flight instructors after only a few combat missions, enough to gain valuable experience to pass on, but not enough to get killed. So when new carriers and planes came along later in the war, the US had some decently trained pilots to fly them.

The Marianas Turkey Shoot was the result. Later in the war the IJN had carriers but few planes and pilots left.

 

[Urwumpe]

Yes, but mainly, the Japanese feared correctly the US industrial capacity - that is what their 6 months estimate was based on. They required outstanding victories in every battle to make sure, the losses to the US Navy are higher than they can replace, while having just small losses that the Japanese economy can compensate. If they did not defeat the USA in 6 months so much, that the US Navy can't become a threat again, they will loose the war. And they did. Even though it was close to the Japanese plan initially, the later battles had been just tactical victories and then came Midway...

 

[N_Molson]

Yes and the USA had all the required ressources in quantities : Steel and Oil.

Japan had from the beginning a serious problem with resources. It was why they tried to expand into a huge colonial empire. Even with that their supply lines were very long and hard to defend. In contrast, USA had almost everyting they needed within their borders, except rubber (critical for tires, water-resistant gear for the Marines) they had to import from South America.