It's time once again for our regular Open Thread. Talk about whatever you want, so long as it isn't culture war.
First, apologies for not having a Jutland post this year. I didn't really have anything to cover, so I left that slot empty.
Second, I recently watched the Prime documentary on the Blue Angels, and very much enjoyed it. Would recommend.
Overhauls are Coastal Defenses Part 3 and for 2023, The East Asia Squadron Part 2, my review of Rules of the Game and RTW3 and Information.
Comments
Every time I read a history (either WWI or WWII) of battleships, I read only rarely of "The shell was defeated by armor". Sometimes, but not too often. More often is a hit to a less-armored part of the ship, or much more likely a clean miss.
I wonder if the ever-increasing size of guns was a mistake. If a triple turret of 13.5" guns wouldn't have more effective killing power than a double turret of 16" guns.
This is not just an argument to "riddle the ends" but also an argument to "smash the superstructure". You cannot fight if your director is gone, and you cannot communicate when your radios/radiomen/antennas are smashed.
It's basically the 6" QF argument, modernized and with guns capable of long-range fire. And I'm not going to say there's no merit to it. But I do think that you underestimate how well armor worked, most notably at Jutland. Some of that was British shells not being great, but even the Germans were often stopped by armor. There was also at least one 14" on SoDak that the barbette (IIRC) stopped, and maybe one or two from the Massachusetts-Jean Bart duel. But to some extent we're victims of limited data.
Previous discussion of whether not trying to penetrate the armor and instead maximizing damage outside it is a reasonable choice.
Note that while not caring about armor penetration does favour smaller guns to some extent, it may not favour them as much as a simple (rate of fire * weight of shell / weight of gun+mount) calculation suggests. As part of deciding to adopt dreadnoughts (so c.1905), the British did a similar calculation for 6", 9.2" and 12" guns, but that also took into account that the 6" had worse long-range accuracy (and with the fire control methods then used, could not do maximum rate of fire and maximum long-range accuracy at the same time), and that a large ship with many small guns might not have enough space to give them all good arcs of fire, reducing the fraction of guns that were usable against any one target. They found that the 6" was better at short range but they were near-equal at long range (which then meant ~9000 yards) even without considering armor penetration.
It's a reasonable argument at least through 1940, though it might fail when fire control radar gets good enough to drop shells through the deck beyond the immune zone.
But if you're going to use that approach, it's going to rapidly point you away from building battleships at all, and all the specialized infrastructure needed for battleship-building. The optimum HE-delivery problem is almost certainly the flotilla of cruisers you built at the cost of one battleship, and the big question is whether you go with 6" guns or 8".
Something like an Alaska with its 12" guns might be a reasonable way to hedge your bets, but people would almost certainly try to call it a "battlecruiser" and that would make bean sad.
Bean, you've talked in your ironclad posts about the problems naval architects had with gun placement, and more specifically with how to avoid the sails and rigging interfering with the guns' field of fire. I was just wondering what you think the best solution was/would have been, given the constraints of 1860s-era technology? (Obviously I'd be interested to hear what other people think as well.)
Also, I don't know if you do requests, but it would be fascinating to read a post about the jeune ecole school of thought and whether it could have actually worked in practice.
Probably the way they did it on Monarch. I'm not quite expert enough on sailing ships to have an independent opinion here, in which case I will defer to the solution chosen by the experts. Or just mount the guns in the hull, although that becomes less feasible as guns get bigger.
I will put it on my idea list.
Or just mount the guns in the hull, although that becomes less feasible as guns get bigger.
Perhaps you could have a revolving mount inside the hull, with firing ports on either side? That might take up too much room, though.
Of 14-18(*) heavy-gun ships sunk by surface ships after 1906, 9-11 were by heavy guns, 0-2 disabled by lighter guns (and in both cases a critical hit was 8" and plausibly needed moderate penetration), 4 by torpedoes, and 1 involved all three.
This suggests that the chance of cruiser/destroyer guns doing serious damage to a battleship is non-zero but low, so worth attempting if you don't have better options and worth relatively cheap precautions such as "have more than one director" and "avoid unnecessary flammables", but not something to build your whole strategy around. However, this doesn't count cases where the battleship was damaged but not sunk, so may be an underestimate.
(*) Higher figures include all >=28cm-gun ships and kills shared with aircraft, lower figures only battleships and battlecruisers sunk solely by surface ships.
In the context of smaller ships doing damage to battleships its interesting to look at how the USN planned to use heavy 8" gun cruisers to do just that. If you read Learning War (which I highly suggest) he has the tables in there that show how 2 or better 3 8" gun cruisers could overwhelm a Kongo at short range. His analysis of Callahan's actions in the First Naval Battle of Guadalcanal show that contrary to what I thought and others have written he did actually have a plan. Just not one he communicated to anyone unfortunately.
When you think about what a treaty 8" gun cruiser could do to a Kongo if she can get in close with the element of surprise the value of something like a Des Moines gets really interesting. With the heavy US 8' shell and the rate of fire from the autoloaders those ships have the potential to overwhelm something like a Kongo in very short order.
That's arguably what they did with Captain, and it didn't work too well. Other versions are likely to just take up too much room.
That’s arguably what they did with Captain, and it didn’t work too well. Other versions are likely to just take up too much room.
HMS Captain had a big section cut out in her sides. I was thinking more a standard central battery style hull, with guns that could be pointed out of either side as necessary.
The problem with that is that central battery guns pivot near the port, to allow firing at a range of angles through the same port. (E.g. see here, note which way the tracks curve.) Hence, moving a gun between ports requires a mounting that does not simply pivot about a single point.
This wasn't impossible - HMS Hercules had some guns that could be moved between broadside and fore/aft ports (on the same side). However, it's plausibly difficult with a ~20-ton gun, and perhaps impossible to do quickly enough. (At the short combat ranges of the time, the enemy could go from one side of you to the other in a few minutes.)
Hence, as far as I know, central battery ships always had separate guns for each side and accepted this extra weight (~1% of the ship's total weight).
Ski206:
Though those were relatively lightly armored by battleship standards.
Between that (8" belt) and the very short range (~2km, in a time when ~20km was more normal), it's likely that an 8" AP from broadside-on would penetrate. And given that USS San Francisco wasn't shooting HC (at least when she accidentally hit USS Atlanta; I don't know if it was full AP or Common semi-AP), it seems plausible that she was trying for that, not superstructure-smashing.
I don't know whether this was a deliberate plan to take advantage of the US ships having radar and the Japanese not (making it unusually easy to get this close without being detected), or a hasty attempt to take advantage of essentially an accident. (The US ships also fired torpedoes, the conventional sneak-up-close weapon, which probably hit but failed to go off.)
Will there be a like for like replacement to the B-52? Or will that capability set be retired and replaced by whatever the next airframe after the B-21 is?
At the moment, I believe the plan is to fly them until 2050, replacement TBD, but presumably whatever they buy after the B-21. In practice, they're going to be around forever.
I found those c.1906 British numbers: in target practice at around 5km range, the 12" scored 37% hits and the 6" 15%, and the 6" fired ~4x faster. The 12" was heavier but not in full proportion to its shell weight (~6.5x vs 8.5x). This still gave the 6" the advantage in weight of hits per weight of gun+mount per unit time (4x rate of fire * 0.4x accuracy * 0.8x shell weight/mount weight = 1.25x), but a much smaller one than the naive guess, and one they expected to decrease with increasing range.
They also considered one 12" shell to be a more effective superstructure-smasher than an equal weight of 6"s, which feels odd when it's now accepted that many small explosions are more effective against soft targets. Possibly the "unarmored" parts of a battleship are still tough enough that they're not a soft target in this sense. (The 6" would have an advantage against light armor that stops splinters from a 12" but not direct hits from a 6"; possibly they didn't consider that important because enemies expecting to face mostly 6" didn't use that armor thickness. This may have changed later - on a 1940s battleship the directors and the secondary guns probably do.)
Hence, it seems plausible that the early dreadnought was a move from short-range 6" to long-range 12" superstructure-smashing, not primarily to armor-piercing.
I don't have the accuracy numbers to properly do a similar comparison for the 1940s, but if we take (danger space + deck area) as a better-than-nothing guess (this is roughly the assumption that they have the same pattern size), and consider the USN 6" and 12" at a range of 20km, we get 3x rate of fire * 0.8x accuracy * 0.6x shell weight/mount weight = 1.5x overall. (The 8" and 16" come out close to the 12", suggesting that the big jump is still between hand-loaded and mechanically-loaded guns, but this is too rough to be sure of that.)
At 20 km, the 6" is running into problems not just with angle of fall but time of flight, so I'd expect the accuracy loss to be rather greater than 20%. More time for wind and target motion to screw up your fire control solution.
But the 5 km result is interesting, because it's hard to see how the guns could be that different at that range. I'm wondering if it doesn't mostly reflect the different fire control systems being used? 1906 means the 12" guns are probably controlled by a proto-director; were the 6" under local control?
1906 is a bit early for a proto-director, actually. The prototype was installed aboard Africa in 1907. If anything, I'd expect the FC issues to favor the 6", as we're coming out of the era of continuous aim and 6" being a lot more accurate, so I'm not sure what's going on here.
I'm not sure why either.
The practice in question was probably the annual "battle practice" (all guns, participants were not told the range etc, so fire control was realistically important). At this time its rules didn't specify any particular fire control method, and a variety were in use.
While central control was becoming common, it wasn't director control at this time. The information passed from the central control to the guns was a range and deflection to set their local sights to, not elevation and train angles. Hence, it was still necessary to use the local sights, which could be impaired by smoke and heat haze from the guns. Possibly more so for the 6" because they fired faster and were often more numerous.
Danger space at 6000yd was 73yd for the 6", 132yd for the 9.2" (25% hits) and 144yd for the 12". (If that difference seems big, remember that 1905 shells are less streamlined than 1940 ones.) However, that early I'd expect pointing error (i.e. the ship's roll and pitch making it difficult to aim precisely) to still be important, and that does not increase with increasing angle of fall.
The 6" was more accurate in the short-range "gunlayers' test" (one gun at a time, participants were told the range etc in advance) - 63% vs 42% in 1905. And yes, the obvious guess is that this is because it could do continuous aim and the 12" basically couldn't. (The 6" was light enough to aim with a plain geared handwheel, but the 12" needed power and in 1905 that wasn't good at fine control.)
(And yes, I'd also guess at the 1940s 6" being worse than 0.8x accuracy; I was trying to keep that calculation to factors I had actual numbers for.)