It's time once again for our regular open thread. Talk about whatever you want, so long as it isn't culture war.
A couple of items of business to address.
First, a reminder that Naval Gazing has a discord, and it's probably the reason that the OTs have been fairly quiet recently. I've been having a lot of fun there. Link is in the sidebar.
Second, for any readers in the OKC area, we have the Tinker airshow coming up. I'm going on July 1st, and am more than happy to meet up with anyone else who is going. Send me an email at battleshipbean at gmail.
Third, I'm going to try to host another virtual meetup. Microsoft has sunsetted the Teams setup I was using, so I'm going to try the Discord again. Because of the airshow, I'm going to push this out two weeks, and do it at 1 PM Central (GMT-6) on the 8th.
Overhauls are Naval Rations Part 1 and for 2022 On the Border of Land and Sea and Museum Review - San Francisco Maritime.
Comments
Today I learned about the Ramform Titan, a very odd-looking ship that's apparently designed to provide a stable platform for seismic survey equipment even in rough seas.
When I initially saw it, my reaction was, "Okay, that's the bow, but did they forget to build the rest of the ship?"
I am a newbie to the site but am amazed at the amount of knowledge here - huge thanks to Bean for being the mastermind of all this! Would like thoughts and input on what the possibility/feasibility would have been of adding a Turbo Electric Drive to the Iowa Class steam propulsion system as a "booster" to be used mainly to gain maximum cruising speed, that could have been used in the Montana Class to get them above 30 knots with the planned size/tonnage/armaments? The Turbo Electric Drive could perhaps also be used to make other power for the ship during normal cruising, couldn't it? It would seem that the increased length of the Montana design would easily allow for it in the Engineering spaces. Thoughts?
Cool story on Japan's plan to attack the Panama Canal in 1945. What would have happened if they had been able to implement this plan in conjunction with the attack on Pearl Harbor...certainly would have made the beginning of the Pacific war significantly more difficult for our forces.
https://www.historynet.com/japans-panama-canal-buster/
Re tuboelectric, I'm not sure what that would have added. It's just an alternative way of moving power around a ship (via wires instead of shafts), and you're still limited by the basic problem of power generation. If you want a ship to go faster, you need to generate more power, which means more or bigger boilers. Frankly, that's usually a bigger bottleneck than anything else, and TE was never particularly efficient per unit weight. Its advantages lay elsewhere.
Roger that on TE, Bean. So I guess the answer would have been to add two Iowa Class boilers and perhaps even two additional shafts/props to the Montanas. I understand Gibbs and Cox had specified that arrangement for their Project 1085. It would also be interesting to find any serious research that may have been done on implementing Variable Pitch Propellers on the battleships and carriers of the day.
WW2-era turboelectric drives are unfortunately not directly usable for auxiliary power. The electricity is very "dirty", so to speak, its voltage is very dependent on how fast the ship is to move. (Perhaps counterintuitively, it's not "all power to propulsion" causing a brownout, but exactly the opposite. Power generation is mostly regulated at the steam plant, thus it is exactly in low-speed cruising, when the propellers are lightly loaded (and at low RPM), that the voltage is a small fraction of maximum.) It was easier to create a stable electricity supply for auxiliary uses by taking steam and having a separate small turbine.
However, with modern electronic regulators -- which can react quite a lot faster than sailors turning valves -- "integrated electric propulsion" has indeed become a thing.
Oops...I meant Project 1058!
Thanks Basil Marte - great info!
I read ycombinator news occasionally, and a couple of things popped out last week, despite it not being a marine oriented site.
(1) The recent NG post on Warship Taxonomies was linked too.
(2) A link to a visit to the NS Savannah, with some very neat pictures.
https://www.npr.org/2023/06/23/1182973358/step-aboard-the-nuclear-powered-passenger-ship-of-tomorrow-from-1959
I don't think there was any work done on variable pitch before the 60s or so. IIRC, the installation on the Spruances was controversial because it was so new. There also wasn't much reason. The only reason they use variable pitch propellers (or the main one at least) is when the engines can't turn the props backwards. That's definitely a problem for gas turbines. It's less of one for steam turbines (which usually get a separate set of blades inside the casing to turn backwards) and not a problem at all for TE, which can just run the motors backwards (which also means that TE has really good reversing performance). Note that ships which are CODLAG/CODLOG don't usually have variable-pitch props because the electric part takes care of backing.
It's weirdly hard to find out anything about (battleship) electric propulsion on the internet, but I got this cool USNI paper from 1915(!). That was after the Jupiter/Langley experiment, but before the New Mexico.
It looks like the generators couldn't be used for shipboard power because you still had to vary the frequency for fine control of the motors. That would play hell with any other equipment hooked up to the system, let alone the effects of cutting the engines in and out without a huge dump load.
Gross speed changes were done directly at the motors; with the steam turbine/alternator running at 2000 RPM, the motors could be switched between 24 and 36 pole operation for 165 or 110 RPM respectively. One turbine could run all 4 shafts at 110, or two at 165. But within those ranges the alternator itself would be throttled below 2kRPM for fine speed control.
It's really cool paper for a perspective on State of The Art in 1915: talking about the impracticality of double reduction gearing, etc. The actual turboelectric battleships may have used a different system, and I'd love to hear about it if they did.
It was also cool to see my previous question about direct bridge control of the engines being raised as a serious possibility.
I found a fair bit of detail on it somewhere in Google Books, but that was ages ago. I may have a saved copy, but it's late, and I don't want to look now.
Yet even today there are still ships that lack direct bridge control of the engines.
Tried to reply, got a "blocked by admin" error, although it shows up in the recent posts sidebar. Odd
And an
Undefined array key "ptv_entrydate" in /home/public/wiki.obormot.net/cookbook/blogit/blogit.php on line 659
My guess is that you stumbled across a banned word. Not sure exactly what it is, now that I've fixed some of the worse offenders in terms of spurious blocking. (The only reasonably common word is ES SAY, with the space removed. Too much spam offering to help people cheat on their homework.)
Also, the comment doesn't show up in my sidebar.
I'd better start A/B testing with all the extremist slang and slurs I know to figure out what it could be. Hang on, this could take a few centuries.
The TL;DR was saying that if you ever find that book again, I could write a guest =thing that sticks out of the ground to hold up fences= on electric propulsion with more detail than the old overview. Although it might be too into the weeds.
And it looks like it was éses that triggered the filter. Thought it might be the "Turboelectric Boogaloo" joke at first.
I was able to track it down faster than I expected. It's https://archive.org/details/electricshippro00robigoog. As for being too in the weeds, have you seen today's post. I'd be delighted to have someone else take a look and give more details on a really interesting system.
And there are surprisingly few bad words in the filter file. It's mostly to stop spam. (This is not an invitation.)
@Bernd: I get a similar error when I spend long enough writing a comment that the captcha code changes. (The one I've seen doesn't include "blocked", but does include the comment appearing in the sidebar despite actually being rejected.) If it happens again, scroll down to the bottom of the error page - when it happens to me, the comment is there in the comment box, so it's easy to try again.
It just happened again, the error messages are, at the top of the page:
Warning: Undefined array key "ptv_entrydate" in /home/public/wiki.obormot.net/cookbook/blogit/blogit.php on line 659
and near the comment box:
Must enter valid code Must enter valid code Unable to save page