Battleships

[Thorvic]

Can't you replace the twin AS-14 ASW missile launcher towards the bows with the USN 8 inch automatic gun

[dy031101]

Can't you replace the twin AS-14 ASW missile launcher towards the bows with the USN 8 inch automatic gun

Done!

Actually I'm a bit tempted to mod. this further into a Westernised Kirov with AEGIS warfare system.  Although in that case the 8-inch gun will have to compete with ESSM VLS......

[dy031101]

Over at the SkyHook thread:



I think some surface to air missiles would also be in order, considering the era where VTOL fighters in general came into being.

With that in mind, would the SAMs render the DP guns surplus?  Or would DP guns still be more versatile than anti-ship guns?

[Weaver]

Well if you look at the history of American all-missile cruisers, they seem to have concluded that some DP guns are useful in addition to the missiles. Missiles were relatively unreliable until recently, and if they're jammed or spoofed there's no backup, wheras a gun with a jammed radar can still be aimed and fired by mk.1 eyeball. Missiles also can't engage the same range of targets: SAMs can usually be steered into big ships, but they risk crashing on the way to small ones, so guns provide a useful defence against torpedo boats and the like. Can't bombard a surface target with a SAM either, and you may not always want 15" levels of destruction.

The thing that most people forget when putting missiles on big-gun ships is muzzle blast. Fire a 15" sideways from A-turret and the blast will trash anything fragile like a missile as far back as the funnel on that side. Seaplanes on big gun ships used to get wrecked by blast and were often launched simply to avoid it. On the ship you've shown, I'd be inclinded to put big SAM immediately behind the superstructure, or small SAMs on either side of it in place of the aft secondary battery turrets, where they'd be shielded by the forward ones.

Another thing to consider is that launchers vary in their fragility: open launchers like Seacat or thin-box ones like Sea Sparrow are quite vulnerable. Sea Wolf isn't bad because it was specifically designed to keep the missiles out of the weather when mounted on the front of a small ship, so it's boxes are pretty hefty. Mk.13 is probably pretty good becuase it's speed means you can leave the missile in the magazine rather than on the rail and still have a decent reaction time. Probably the best is SA-N-4 of course, where the whole thing retracts into a below-decks bin.

[ALVAMA]

I designed some stuff you guys might like for ideas perhaps? ( if you don't I'll remove them)

[dy031101]

( if you don't I'll remove them)

(In a dismissive tone toward the quote due to the pic's fitting to topic and creativeness) What are you talkin' about?  

I'm thinking of adding missile launchers to the rear (indeed a factor behind choosing the "All Guns Forward" version of the Fujimoto battleship, out of thinking that it might reduce the gun blast problem inflicted on the launchers and the airplanes) and maybe replacing all the six-inch guns with 5-inch/L45 DPs.

[Weaver]

Hey Alvama, those are great! Could you maybe post them individually with some specs, because it's not immediately obvious what's going on with some of them?

[GTX]

 

[pyro-manic]

Hey Alvama, those are great! Could you maybe post them individually with some specs, because it's not immediately obvious what's going on with some of them?

Hear hear!

[dy031101]

According to Wikipedia, Iowa class battleships were originally meant to take the same Mark 2 guns as the BB-49 class battleship design; the requirement calls for a smaller (and therefore lighter) barbette than the ones to be used by the BB-49 class, and Bureau of Ordnance indeed did preliminary design on a turret that can make that happen but did not follow up on it until the discovery that the final battleship design is incompatible with the barbette carried over from the BB-49.

Granted, it led to the Mark 7 gun...... a good ending there.

Does anyone know what the lightened turret for Mark 2 gun would have looked like though?

[dy031101]

I want to portray one that was refitted with European influence (by the same bunch of people that built these Rotodyne-capable carriers).  What ship would you suggest that I base the sensory suite on?

[ytown2010]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Carolina_class_battleship

What would you do to modernize it? Swap out the triple expansion engines for Marine Trents? What would the fire control suite be? Radars? VLS? Based on this scenario

[Jschmus]

I'm not sure the SCs were good candidates for modernization.  More modern propulsion could have lengthened their service, but they had other issues, like their thin deck armor.  They were only in commission twelve years before the Washington Treaty required their dismantling.  If they had been properly laid up for later refit, who knows how they might've been reworked?  I don't seriously see them as candidates for VLS, though.  They'd have been 70+ years old by then.

[ytown2010]

In this scenario, the SC-class hasn't been built yet (On the alternatehistory site, I've been working with a guy on a scenario where 1905 North America and 2009 North America swap places).

[dy031101]

I think ytown2010 probably means "redesign" before the ships are built.

I'm, too, thinking of a derivative scenario from my Alt.-Military News posts concerning upgrading reciprocating steam engine dreadnoughts and armoured cruisers with modern weapons and electronics.  They might end up looking roughly like US late-WWII dreadnoughts (except with post-WWII-looking bridgeworks) and post-WWII FRAM destroyers, respectively, although I do want to give 'em some kind of SAM launchers......