Battleships

[pyro-manic]

Navalised MLRS system, with GPS guidance and thermobaric warheads. No need for massive, expensive artillery (and the huge hull to carry it).

[Mossie]

Thanks Sauragnmon.  So like you say, doable if tricky & the weapon knowledge is around to recue the weight & siaze, if not by huge margins.  Pyro's right, there probably no reason why you'd want to do it when there are other systems out there that can give a similar wallop with less messing about with the design.  My only real reason for asking was that the Kirov class just looks like an old fashioned Batlleship.  If nothing else, one of those things turning up with wopping great guns would give you quite a propaganda edge, similar to how the US used the New Jersey until it's retirement.

The only way I think you could justify fitting it with guns (other than it looking cool for whiffing purposes) is to look to future & maybe fit rail-guns or even slingatrons, if the technologies ever work out.

[Sauragnmon]

Pyro, the problem with a navalized MLRS system arises in that the rockets actually lack a log of penetrating force, for their impressive destruction.  Rocket artillery is good for surface bombardment, this is true, and it is beautiful in volumetric fire, this is why, notably, the Russian Assault Ships such as the Ivan Roganov, carry rocket artillery, but with regards to ship-to-ship combat, this is why anti-shipping missiles have taken the lead, for their range and their striking power.  The problem arises, these days, that anti-missile defences are rising in prominence, with systems such as Kashtan, which has short range missiles and 30mm chainguns and the ability to strike at sea-skimming missiles with rather potent force.  By contrast, an artillery round doesn't have something you could ostensibly track, it has no electronic emissions, and thus it would be ostensibly harder to detect, additionally for its much smaller size and thus detectable cross section.  There's something to be said for a ton and a half of armor-capped high explosive munition coming at you with a downward sloping angle, gravity adding to its velocity as it falls, when these days, most ships aren't very much as armoured as they used to be.

The effective difference between guns and missiles is that ostensibly, with a large gun, you could carry easily a hundred rounds in the magazine, compared to the limited number, only twenty, of surface-to-surface missiles that the Kirovs carry.  The hallmark of the Kirovs is their very large stockpile and variety of missiles, which in truth sticks to the Kruschev-initiated tradition of believing missiles to be far superior to guns and other unguided munitions.  The only guns mounted on the Kirovs, and on most Russian ships these days, are those capable of being used in defensive fire against aircraft or ostensibly missiles, and this does include the radar-controlled AK-130/AK-76/AK-100 "main" guns.

[pyro-manic]

Indeed, a 16" shell is pretty much impossible to stop, and will sink pretty much any modern warship short of a supercarrier with a single hit (and it'd make quite a mess of one of those), but the problem is firing the thing in the first place. To get that kind of artillery, the ship mounting the gun has to be very, very big. Big ship means expensive ship, because there's no way politicians will let you build a 30,000-tonne ship just to haul the big guns around. It will have to be multi-purpose, crammed full of all sorts of other equipment and technology that will push the price into the billions, and require the ship to have it's own escorts, pushing the price up even higher. And then you have the problem of range. The American 16"/50 gun had a maximum range of about 25 miles, far below that of anti-ship and land-attack missiles. Odds are, by the time you're in range of your target, you've been in range of their anti-ship missiles for a long time. If you're attacking land-based targets, that also puts you in shallow water, and very vulnerable to mines, diesel-electric submarines, and shore-based missiles/artillery.

IMO, a far better solution is a cheap, INS/GPS-guided rocket artillery system. Modern bunker-busting warheads will do a very good job against shore targets, and for anti-ship purposes blast/frag warheads are now the norm. You can mount such a system on a very much smaller hull (down to a corvette or OPV), which can be built cheaply, in large numbers, are much more flexible, and can be considered "expendable" (compared to a 30,000 tonne capital ship costing billions). This gives you a powerful capability, with much greater range than heavy rifles at a fraction of the cost.

[Sauragnmon]

Pyro, you're making one mistake here - the 16"/50 used by the USS Iowa is an old design, dating to WW2, and has not even been touched with regards to the arts of Gerald Bull - if you want an idea of what his early principles, not to mention newer ones, could do with a 16"/50, I suggest you look up the HAARP gun, or High Altitude Advanced Research Project.  That was originally one 16"/50 naval rifle, and behold the things he got that system to do.  You're looking at the original rifle, you're missing factors that could be used in the modernization of the gun in itself, such as:

Full-Bore Design, which alters the rifling of the barrel, eliminating the need for soft-metal driving bands, which allows the use of more powerful propellants, which in old guns would simply blow the driving bands off the round to no net effect.  This in itself will amplify the range.

Base-Bleed Munitions, the main step to increasing modern artillery accuracy and range, the Base Bleed concept deals with the aeronautic vaccuum caused by the flat base of the artillery round, by forcing a compressed gas feed into that section, increasing flight stabilization in the round, as well as reducing drag in flight.

Rocket-Assisted Munitions - this is your base bleed on drugs.  Adding to the flight velocity for the short burn of the rocket booster, it adds further velocity on the climb of the ballistic arc, raising the height of climb and extending range.

To give yourself an idea of the range increase benefits of these systems, compare older M109 artillery guns to guns such as the GC-45, or the PzH-2000, which reap the benefits of Mr Bull's work.  How do ya like Them apples?  Imagine if you will, a new age battlecruiser, with a two-gun turret mount designed similar to the AGS, with stealth profile, peripheral VLS, other modern designs, but carrying new full-bored 16"/50 guns.

[Jschmus]

Navalised MLRS system, with GPS guidance and thermobaric warheads. No need for massive, expensive artillery (and the huge hull to carry it).

When the San Antonio-class LPD was still in the planning stages, there was talk of fitting them with a modified ATACMS system (bigger missile fired from MLRS launchers) as a fire support weapon.  Now that a couple of hulls are in the water, I'm not sure if they went to sea with the system.

[pyro-manic]

Saur: It's certainly do-able, but I'd be willing to bet that such a ship would cost as much as a carrier. You'd need to spend vast amounts of money developing the new gun, new mountings, new projectiles, and setting up the production facilities to actually manufacture them. Modern artillery, using base-bleed, rocket-assisted projectiles, etc, doesn't need to be as big as 16". The AGS has cost a huge amount of money thus far, and developing a similar 16" system would be even more costly.

There is a current project for the Royal Navy that involves fitting surplus 155mm guns from the AS90 SPG into the standard 4.5" turret mount used by nearly all RN warships. This will provide significantly increased firepower and range, for a very low cost. Using NATO-standard extended-range projectiles and guided munitions which are already extant or currently in development, this will provide an excellent fire-support capability at a very low price. The AGS, by comparison, is basically a very complex guided missile launcher - it cannot fire standard 155mm ammunition, and the guided projectiles are extremely expensive.

Also, the AGS and the RN 155mm are small weapons - they can be mounted on fairly small ships (though I understand the AGS has a rather large below-deck volume requirement, so much that it is doubtful an Arleigh Burke could be refitted with one). A 16" turret needs an enormous ship, both to accomodate the magazines and systems, and to absorb the enormous recoil. The ship required would be very large, and therefore very expensive. No navy can justify building a 200 metre ship just to mount a couple of guns, and such a ship would not be "expendable", ie it would have to have it's own escorts, and would be very vulnerable in the littorals.

[Sauragnmon]

While this is true, development in the US for an advanced 16" gun with full bore design has already been done - Bull did it while working for NASA on the HAARP, before the US screwed him and he left for Belgium to build artillery.  You could go with new research into lightening the gun mount, increasing barrel life, or other things, but these are secondary, and could be transferred over from other already defined artillery projects.

In all truth, the requirement to absorb recoil off the 16" guns would not be as big as you think, still much smaller by far than a carrier.  A Ticonderoga carries 128 VLS cells, plus eight harpoons.  By contrast, a warship carries, normally, 100 rounds Per Gun for its main battery, if not more.  All you would have to do is advance the newer designs, munitions handling, and other systems, but you could cut the corners by using existing managed designs for the ends course, modified to handle the larger munitions.

[Sauragnmon]

Well, I threw some paint on it, helps show me the problem spots, but so far it looks pretty smooth with the paint on it.  The putty isn't as messy as it looks on the other surfaces.  So far, so good.  I took a momentary break and decided to test out the look of Rodney Turrets with 50cal guns.  I figured I'd test-fit the guns on the turret that least interests me, the one made for boats up top.  Looks rather interesting, I think, but here it is.

[Jschmus]

It could be my relative ignorance of battleships, but those guns look out-sized, compared with the turret.

[Joe C-P]

If you need 5.25" twins, go to White Ensign Models. They have not only those, but many other such detail parts for not much money, and they ship for free! (I am a satisfied customer, not an employee.)

Regarding the modern 16" shells, there were plans to add Copperhead laser terminal guidance to the shells for improved accuracy, as well as 13" and 11" saboted rounds, which would have given much greater range.

JoeP

[Sauragnmon]

Jschmus, the guns are standard, the original guns are there for comparison.  What makes the 50cal barrels look too big is the blast bags around them.

Joe, I wasn't entirely aware of that - I could pop John from WEM a question on price for them, make a few inquiries here and there.  See what they can do for me.  I know they did pompoms in resin.

[Jschmus]

Are there any 1/700 kits of the American dreadnought-style battleships?  I'm especially interested in the USS Wyoming, but what I'm thinking of would work with a New York-class ship too, I think.  I read a big coffee table book on American battleships back in high school, and I've always been fascinated by this particular ship.

(There was supposed to be a Wikipedia link here, but for some damned reason, it won't paste properly.)

In real life, the Wyoming was built before World War One.  She escorted convoys across the Atlantic, but saw no combat.  After the war, she served as a fleet flagship and conducted numerous gunnery drills.  She underwent a couple of modernizations (conversion from coal to oil, addition of torpedo blisters, etc).  Then in 1930, she was stripped of half her main battery, in accordance with the London Treaty.  In 1931 she was redesignated AG-17, a miscellaneous auxiliary.  During World War Two, she spent the entire war off the coast of Virginia, conducting gunnery drills, where she became known as the "Chesapeake Raider".  In 1944, the rest of her main battery was removed and she was fitted with a mixture of different AA weapons.  She became the flagship of a unit which tested weapons for use against kamikaze attacks.  After the war, she continued as an AA training ship until 1947, when she was relieved by the USS Mississippi.  She was promptly scrapped.

I envision a scenario similar to sequoiaranger's Grand Fleet.  The timeline proceeds as normal until 1944.  Instead of being a test ship, a reworked Wyoming is put into service as a large AA cruiser.  In real life, her AA refit consisted of an asymmetrical load out of four twin 5"/38s (2 forward, one aft, one starboard), four single 5"/38s and numerous smaller weapons.  In my scenario, the ship is given a symmetrical load, with two twins forward, two twins aft, and additional twins on the wings amidships.  There would be a large secondary battery of 40mm and 20mm AA guns.  Under her original gun/armor, the Wyoming was only capable of about 20 knots.  With the revised armament scheme, I figure they could get a few more knots out of her.  It probably wouldn't work for screening the big carrier groups, but she could cover transports or the slower escort carriers.

This idea's been bouncing around my head for years.

[Sauragnmon]

Apparently, you can get your hands on the USS Wyoming, the version you're looking for, or at least the AG-17 model, from HP, in 1/700 scale.

Well, I got the Nelson today (FINALLY) and I should be getting my HMS King George V soon, so eventually, over the holidays, my whifbashing hammer shall come forth from the depths on these projects.  Hopefully, I can finish up Mo and my M60 Tiger beforehand.

[Joe C-P]

Wyoming also lost her belt armor when she was "downgraded", which reduced her displacement and therefore would have helped her speed.
Early in the war, she could have made a few Atlantic crossings, escorting convoys to protect against Nazi raiders. Even six 12" guns on an old battleship would have been enough to scare away most of the German surface raiders.
Later, though, with the rise of the kamikazes, she was  more valuable as a training ship.