It's time for another open thread, which I officially intend to do biweekly until they stop working. Talk about anything you want, so long as it's not culture war. Yes, this includes things unrelated to defense or the sea.
Also, a reminder that I have trips to Boston and LA coming up later this year. I'll be in Boston towards the end of the month, touring every museum ship I can. If anyone wants to meet up, let me know. For LA, I have a tour of Iowa planned for blog readers for the afternoon of September 8th. This should give anyone who wants to do so a chance to do the Full Steam Ahead tour of the engines in the morning.
Comments
I would be interested in meetups on the Boston museum ship tours, especially Salem in Quincy.
In another topic, I recently read A Sailor’s Admiral, by James M Merill. It was definitely entertaining, though it did seem to be attempting to depict as positive a picture of Halsey as it possibly could.
What are everybody’s opinions of Halsey’s actions: 1. During Leyte Gulf 2. During the two Typhoons the Third Fleet encountered when operating near the Phillipines
Since I can't edit comments, I was referring the the Salem above, which is in Quincy, MA.
Cool. The one issue is likely to be scheduling. I'm probably going to have to do Salem during the week, because the friend I'm visiting doesn't really want to come. (She's afraid I'm just going to talk about the guns. Which is a reasonable fear, because those guns are amazing.) But even if that doesn't work, I can hopefully manage an evening or something.
(Also, fixed the comment.)
Re Halsey, I think he was right during Leyte Gulf, given what he knew. The US didn't realize how badly the Japanese had screwed up their pilot training, and thought the carriers were still the main threat. There were multiple communications breakdowns that day, and not just on his end. But I deeply wish that he had detached TF 34. It would have helped the reputation of the battleship during the war immensely. I'd have to do more digging on the typhoons before I give an opinion. It's been a while since I looked into that.
I'm interested in everyone's thoughts on submarine aircraft carriers.
The World War 2-era Japanese submarines seem like the most obvious example. As far as I can tell, they "worked," but their strike capabilities were modest (1 or 2 planes, I think?) In modern times, I think aircraft-carrying submarines are coming back around in a low-key way, with scout drones launched from tubes.
Part of me does wonder, however, how viable a full-blown submarine aircraft carrier would be. Maybe not a super carrier sized one, but one the size of the French Charles de Gaulle, or even a large helicopter carrier.
It seems like the advantages would be obvious: you can hide from RORSAT, surface-scanning radar, surface assets etc. etc. etc. It might be a good foil to antiship ballistic missiles. I think its biggest advantage, besides the fact that it would be incredibly cool, is the fact that your enemy, which already has a hard enough time finding a carrier strike group, would have a doubly hard time anticipating where it could pop up next.
Obviously, it would have to surface to launch and recover, and that negates most of its advantages during a strike. If it was VTOL, then it might be able to do this quicker than a STOVL or CATOBAR carrier, but then of course it would limit its payload. A carrier that relied on CATOBAR launch and VTOL recovery might be interesting, since it would be most vulnerable after launching its strike, and speeding up the recovery time would be crucial. And, I would think it would be slower than a regular flattop, which might make it MORE vulnerable to retaliation after launching a strike.
(Of course, cruise missile equipped submarines have all of these advantages and pretty much none of the disadvantages, since they don't have to recover their payloads...)
What would be the downsides to this crazy scheme, besides the absolutely insane costs? And would there be any unique benefits?
I think that the Aircraft Carrier Submarine would have similar tradeoffs as the tradeoffs between a Guided Missile Cruiser/Destroyer and a traditional Aircraft Carrier.
One thing which may be different is the "stealth" aspect. An aircraft carrier is definitely NOT stealthy, while a submerged aircraft carrier would probably have to be to be stealthy to be viable. Thus, it would only make sense for it to support stealth aircraft.
Given that the F-35 has VTOL...I would not be surprised if the Marines have a concept for this already in the works. Imagine a Marine Recon/Raider team attempting to raid Chinese installations on the coast or in the South China Sea. If a submersible aircraft carrier can surface just outside Sonar range of the island and put 3 F-35's in the air within 5 minutes of surfacing, their CAS could be a major deciding factor in the critical first 30 minutes of the raid. They would also probably be able to destroy a significant number of aircraft on the ground.
It sounds like a submersible aircraft carrier would be an ideal complement to the F-35, in order to do "pop-up" raids on a near-peer adversary.
The US experimented with that, although we didn't bother bringing the planes back.
The problem with an aircraft-carrying submarine is that the two requirements are diametrically opposed. Submarines need to be compact and dense, so they can sink. Carriers work best when you have lots and lots of volume. So for a given tonnage, a submarine carrier is going to be able to carry very few aircraft relative to a surface counterpart. And the two sides aren't operationally compatible, either. Let's say our SSCVN is on the surface, and launches planes. The enemy finds it. Does it have escorting SSDDGNs to shoot them down? Or does it have to submerge, thus dooming the planes? How fast can it dive after recovering planes? How long does it have to be surfaced before it can launch? How fast can it go on the surface, and what will that hull form do to silencing? What is a submarine that big going to sound like? What about the various deck fixtures? Are they going to make noise that will give it away? (I'm not joking in the slightest about that.)
It's kind of a cool idea, but it just doesn't work. Cruise missiles are much better, as you rightly identify.
@Chris
The hanger for each of those F-35s alone will displace about 1000 tons. A Los Angeles class submarine has a submerged displacement of 7,000 tons. So three F-35s is a substantial volume, not counting the landing pad, fuel storage, or the hull necessary to haul all of this around. A better option would be to build a specialized missile (although the latest Tomahawk versions have datalinks which allow them to be retargeted in flight), or a stealth tanker for the F-35s.
@Suvorov
I think the more interesting aircraft carrying ship from ww2 that never really was the flight deck cruiser:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flightdeckcruiser
Now, I know what you're thinking, hybrid designs are usually bad designs, and that's definitely true. I don't think these ships would have been particularly useful for the US Navy. I think they would have been extremely useful for the German Navy. These ships are about the same size as the the misnamed "pocket battleships", and they're massively better at dealing with the two biggest problems faced by surface raiders, finding the enemy transports and avoiding the enemy heavy surface units. The planes can scout for targets and threats, shoot down the planes that are scouting for them, and if they were armed correctly even be a serious threat to merchantmen on their own. Hunting them down would require even more disproportionate investment than normal surface raiders, and had the germans built a bunch of them instead of the hippers, I think they could have given the brits would have had real trouble.
So a thought that's been rattling around in my head since reading the Jutland series:
Suppose Yamato (say during the retreat from Midway) sails into a mysterious fogbank and emerges off Jutland on 31 May 1916. Suppose furthermore that Yamamoto is relatively quick to get his bearings, and decides that a) it is critical that Yamato be returned to Japan with relative haste and b) it would be highly useful were Yamato to make a decisive contribution to the Grand Fleet.
What would be the most effective contribution Yamato could make to the battle?
Some thoughts: by 1916 standards, Yamato has massive firepower, elephantlike armor, battlecruiser speed, incredible fire control - but I suspect that by far her most valuable asset here is that she's an aircraft carrier; with seven high-performance seaplanes and catapults to launch them from, she's more capable already than HMS Engadine, and Yamamoto isn't likely to overlook their use.
An important question: will Yamato's radios be compatible with the British sets? And does she have English-speaking junior officers to communicate with?
On the latter, pretty likely, being flagship of the Combined Fleet. Yamamoto himself is fluent, but manning a radio won't be his first priority. Ironically, one of her officers at the time of Ten-go was American, according to Requiem for Battleship Yamato - he was a Nisei who was studying at Tokyo University when the war broke out, and was drafted into the IJN. He had a brother serving with the 442nd RCT in Europe. No bets that he was aboard at Midway, however.
@Baker Easy
That's an interesting question. The big problem is going to be integrating with the British. Otherwise, you have no idea what they're doing, the floatplanes are useless, (good call on them being critical, though) and the risk of blue-on-blue is way too high.
Probably, but the second part doesn't matter. There were no voice radios in the Grand Fleet. It was all Morse, and not very good Morse. One of the reasons for the lack of radio use was the emphasis that had been put on radio discipline to avoid clogging up the channels, of which there were a single-digit number. If a mysterious ship shows up and starts sending in the clear (they definitely don't have the British codes) they're likely to be suspicious.
Going back to the earlier discussion about the mythical SSCVN, it seemed that the consensus was that a SSCVN was impractical compared to missiles.
However, I believe one of the advantages of crewed strike aircraft (and rotorcraft) is the ability to identify targets during attack, as well as to loiter near the strike area and disrupt repair and firefighting.
I presume that the recent strikes on Syria from Mediterranean missile surface craft had spotting information provided by Reaper drones, since we operate so many in the area. However, for a submarine-launched missile strike, as was imagined to be the alternative to the crazy SSCVN, it must be assumed that the submarine launches its own spotting aircraft.
Is there any public information about a SSGN-launched spotting drone? Can the drone be commanded from the submarine successfully, or does the drone command have to be routed through satellite?
Suvorov:
Only use I can see would be something that carries a small number of helicopters (maybe only one) for insertion of SpecOps teams (I'm assuming the helicopters will have something approximating stealth).
Suvorov:
You're going to need a way to get the aircraft out of the submarine if you want to launch it and large openings in a big pressure vessel may not be the best idea, also note that submarines with hull-form optimized for underwater efficiency and silence have crap seakeeping on the surface.
bean:
Not having enough aircraft to do a proper CAP could be a problem.
An anti-air submarine is technically possible, you could put a radar set on one and anti-air missiles instead of cruise or ballistic missiles but to work it'd have to surface and if it's surfaced you may as well just use a destroyer.
cassander:
A cruiser could just carry a couple of seaplanes for that, no need for a flight deck.
As for how a submarine helicopter carrier used for SpecOps insertion would work, I'd say they'd launch it, then submerge and move to a new position, once the team has done what they need they'd get back in their helicopter, SatCom command who would then tell the submarine where they are going and when they'll get there over VLF and the submarine would then surface, pick them up and then head to the nearest friendly naval base.
I doubt the capability would be used enough to justify the cost.
@Chris
Not that I'm aware of, but I haven't looked closely. And I doubt the sub is driving it directly. Submariners are paranoid about not emitting. They're only vaguely willing to do so towards space, and I wonder how long that will last in the age of cubesats. (Actually, that's an interesting question. I wonder how well that part of Seapower and Space has held up.)
@Anonymous
The other problem with a CAP is that it has to be recovered, and will leave a gap after it lands and before the submarine actually submerges.
The problem is that you can only operate a couple of light planes, and you can't land them in more than fairly mild weather. I'm pretty much with cassander on this one. It's a neat idea for raiding or commerce protection, and one the USN came pretty close to using.
I’ve been reading Massie’s Dreadnought, and I was originally planning to write a glowing review of it. It’s very well-written, and the first two parts were about things I didn’t know all that much about.
But today I started Part 3, and things went downhill. Besides taking a decidedly traditional view of the Victorian Royal Navy (they were a bunch of conservatives who only cared about brightwork and worshiped Nelson.) that I don’t think is justified, it’s got more factual errors than I’d like. There was the traditional misunderstanding of the press gang (only seamen were liable to impress, not anyone at all) the use of Merrimack for CSS Virginia (this is a serious peeve of mine) and a claim that Warrior was wooden-hulled (possibly arising from the wooden backing to her steel armor, which was to prevent the bolts shattering under the impact, but very wrong all the same). So now I can only say approach with caution. It’s good as a book, but I have a lot less respect for Massie’s research skills now.
Edit:
More stuff:
One of the worst bits was when he talked about the capsize of HMS Captain proving that sails aboard armored ships were stupid. That's not the lesson of Captain. The lesson of Captain is that you should not let idiots design your ships. Likewise, he misunderstands the purpose of a court-martial in line with the loss of Victoria, when it was in fact the standard way of doing a court of inquiry. He also strongly implies that the battleships being built in the 1850s were the same as those of a century earlier, which is not true. I want to force him to sit down and read a bunch of DK Brown.
All from Bean:
True, you'd have to design it to be able to submerge very quickly after the last plane lands.
VTOL seaplanes anyone?
That may have been the rule but was it always followed? Back in those days they probably could've used any able bodied person with minimal required training for most of the jobs they needed done (which is unlikely to work well today).
That seems to cover a lot of territory, though. How quickly is quickly, and how do you do it, particularly when you have to stow the planes in (likely) a very tight space?
If they’re VTOL, why do they need to be seaplanes? And in the 20s-40s context that the Flight Deck Cruiser came up, VTOL wasn’t a thing.
Your assumption about training/skill isn’t true. Working on a sailing ship, particularly up on the masts, was very skilled work. When you shout "clew up the buntlines" (which I think is an actual command, or if not, it's of the right style), you want the crew running towards the right line and doing the right thing with it. Captains wanted seamen, and getting a crew of landsmen was bad, possibly dangerous. There were landsmen sent involuntarily to sea, but they weren’t simply grabbed by the press gang. They were mostly drafted ashore by local authorities, or occasionally hauled out of jails.
Brian Lavey’s Nelson’s Navy is an excellent book on the Nelsonian RN, and one I’d highly recommend if you have any interest in that era.
As far as Halsey goes, I don't know enough about the typhoon to really have an opinion. As for Leyte Gulf, it seems to me that he got over-focused on the carriers and not focused enough on all-around reconnaissance and situational awareness. It's easy, of course, to say that in hindsight, but I do wonder if having the fleet commander on a battleship influenced his decision to bring the battleships along where he thought the main action was.
(And we should remember that it was by no means clear at the time that Japanese naval aviation had utterly foundered to the point of using the carriers as bait because they had no working airgroups...)
I don't think this was it. Carriers were terribly vulnerable to surface attack in conditions where they couldn't fly their airplanes. Night carrier aviation was still very primitive at this point, so battleships were valuable insurance against running across Japanese surface ships. I forget exactly how much Halsey knew about the location of all the Japanese battleships at this point, and even if they only had cruisers, it was still a threat which had to be honored.
Oh, there was something else I wanted to bring up. Guest posts. Work promises to be somewhere between frantic and insane for the next month and change. I’ve got most of the gap covered, but it would be nice if I had a bit more buffer. Is anybody interested in writing for Naval Gazing in the interim? I’m fairly open to various topics, although I don’t promise to pick any, and there may be a few I want to cover myself. Let me know if you’re interested.
Edit: Probably the best and easiest thing to do is personal accounts. Museum reviews, sea stories, and the like. It doesn’t even have to be stuff I haven’t done. If someone else wants to review Iowa or Midway, I’d be interested to see what you have to say.
@bean
While it was not the preferred quarry, one can't say landsmen were never taken up by press gangs. One source (Dancy) defending the practice notes that over a certain period only 18% of those pressed were considered landsmen. On even casual observation one notes that the practice of picking up random and most likely intoxicated men from seaport towns (every one of which will proceed to swear on their mother that they never saws a ship, no sir, not in me life) is likely to result in some bycatch.
@Chuck
Fair point. My issue was that Massie explicitly called them out as "the captain sends some men ashore and grabs whoever he wants". That's not true, and it's made worse as part of a pattern of constantly taking the worst of the RN before about 1890. He quotes extensively to support it, but he quotes from a fairly restricted set of people, all of whom were reformers, and thus were somewhat slanted. As best I can tell, he's setting up Jackie Fisher as the hero of the piece. Which isn't entirely unfair, but there was a lot more going on than that.
Side note about impressment. The system developed in the 1600s, when warships were commissioned during the summer and laid up over the winter. This meant that all pressed men were let go every year, and weren't necessarily in for the duration. Later on, they went year-round and the situation got worse.
Longtime lurker, first time poster. Recently visited Japan and made a point of seeing the Mikasa museum ship, the Yamato Museum and JMSDF museum in Kure, and the Yushukan (not a naval museum, but focused on a largely naval war). Would be happy to contribute guest post (s) on any of these, reviewing the museums and commenting a bit on related events. If that sounds interesting, I can send a first draft of the Mikasa post to you by some time tomorrow evening. I know you have no basis for evaluating the expected quality before then, but happy to send a draft if the topic seems interesting.
@bean
Good point on the codes, that hadn't even occurred to me. So that probably leaves two strategies for getting into proper contact with the British - very very gingerly, or very aggressively (by trying to tear into the Germans, so the Brits stop asking questions for a minute). That would make a lot depend on exactly when and where Yamato turns up - at 1400, out of contact with either fleet, recommends the first; at 1830, in sight of both, suggests the latter.
Although even if earlier, Yamamoto might want to have a go at Hipper straight away, just on general principle.
But it does sound as if Yamato ought to stick close to the Grand Fleet where she can pass recon info to Iron Duke by signal lamp.
So the question then is what does Jellicoe do with good information on the Germans' positions?
Then we get around to the fun question, which is what can Yamato's gunnery achieve? This is kind of the dream situation for her, but I think I expect 'good' more than 'spectacular'. OTOH, who knows, maybe those Type 91s actually score some hits below the waterline, or scores some plunging hits spotted by seaplane after Scheer thinks his battle turn has broken contact.
I'm thinking of 2nd Guadalcanal as a useful data point here; Washington landed 9 hits in 13 salvos at night and under 10k yards; I wouldn't bet on Yamato doing dramatically better even in daylight, at longer range, mediocre conditions, and no radar.
@bean
I see, he's going for the more sensationalist image. Interestingly enough, the selectivity of press gangs was one reason they were so hated in the Northern Colonies. A British ship showing up and scooping up your most able seamen was a frightening prospect for a fishing town.
On the subject of your pet peeve, how the name of the CSS Virginia got lost and found is an interesting question. I'm from Hampton Roads and we called it the Merrimac up until recently, and we built the thing. (Case in point: The Monitor Merrimac Bridge Tunnel) I guess at some point we forgot that it was renamed.
@DismalPseudoscience
That would be great. I do want to see Mikasa some day, but it's going to be a long time. If I'm traveling overseas to see a battleship, Warrior is at the top of the list. I'd be really interested in reading a review for my own edification, to say nothing of sharing it.
(And no time pressure. My buffer is about a month at this point, and my main concern is coming out of the current project with basically nothing left, not actually running out of posts tomorrow.)
@BakerEasy
During the day action, it makes very little difference. He did a great job until the second turnaway. Afterwards, it starts to be huge. If Yamato can tell him Scheer is headed for Horns Reef, then you've got the Germans pinned against the shore under heavy fire for a while. Possibly the total destruction of the High Seas Fleet.
I don't remember offhand what sort of numbers Japanese gunnery could achieve. It was almost certainly much better than either side could do at the time, but I'm not sure how much better. The big change is a ship that's as fast as a battlecruiser, and can laugh at any shell on the sea.
@Chuck
I think most fishermen were supposed to be exempt from being pressed. It was even respected a fair bit of the time, IIRC, although there were a lot more people claiming to be fishermen than actually fished.
That seems like a subject for a bit of reading, actually. And I do intend to write about Hampton Roads someday. I don't find the American Civil War that interesting (MONITOR WAS A DEAD END!), but that battle was definitely important.
@Anonymous
The panzerschiffes did have sea planes. There are a few problems with them. (A) They only had a couple, so the amount they could search was very limited. (B) They had limited room for repairs and spare parts, the Graff Spee gets caught in part because cracked cylinders disabled their planes. (C) Float planes are going to be mincemeat for proper fighters, and the floats are going to seriously cut down your range and increase your fuel consumption.
A carrier with a dozen or two proper fighters is a threat of an entirely different order than a few float planes. I'm not sure how reliably aircraft cannon could damage or sink or ww2 merchantmen, but even if you assume zero striking power for the air group, you have protection against all but the most serious enemy air attack (which you can use on yourself or in combination with supply ships or U-boats), massively increased scouting power for yourself (which, again, can be used to vector u-boats) and enough gun armament to make mincemeat of the the destroyers and corvettes that usually protected convoys. It's a powerful unit on its own, combined with U-boats, it's a paralyzing threat. And if the enemy sends out a carrier group to sink it, you just run away, happy that you've wasted far more of his resources than yours.
I'm not so sure about this. The problem is that the carrier features are really vulnerable to gunfire, and if they get damaged, you now have a poorly-armed light cruiser. That might be badly on fire. I wouldn't try this kind of thing in the North Atlantic. Too much chance of getting caught. In the South Atlantic or Indian Ocean, it would be great. There, there are no convoys, or if there are, the escort is a couple corvettes, which you can indeed dispatch. Destroyers are just too dangerous.
How much harder is to make a STOL aircraft than a completely VTOL and why wasn't F-35B made that way? It can't be all that technically complex, brits did it with an (obsolete now) Harrier. Potential upside is that one can operate aircraft of that type from potentially every and any surface combat ship available, because you only need a helipad and, if needed, from a non-combat ship as well (re Atlantic Conveyor), thus dramatically expanding the number of ships that can carry them. STOL craft still need a runway and a skyjump. The downside is that they might not be able to take off vertically with the necessary loadout and/or fuel (the latter can be remedied with tankers though). Still, it feels like a missed opportunity.
P.S. On a second thought, one reason might be that the sufficiently advanced vertical lift system could not be installed in the airframe without a serious modification, and F-35s mods still have to be more or less similar between one another to not drive costs completely overboard.
@Inky
The F-35B is capable of doing a vertical takeoff. The reason it never does is because doing a rolling takeoff allows a vastly greater payload. I don't have numbers on the F-35B, but for the Harrier, you're looking at 7.5 tons of payload for STO versus 3 tons for VTO. And that's everything above the basic airframe and pilot. So flying VTO is really inefficient. (The base Harrier airframe is 6.5 tons.) Note that the Harriers on Atlantic Conveyor were there only to be transported, not for operational use. Unless the engine is so powerful that it can lift full structural load, you're not going to see this problem go away, either.
The idea of dispersing aircraft throughout the fleet by use of VTOL goes back to the 50s. Beyond the payload issue, there are other problems. Basically, it's our old friend overhead. You'd either still need some form of carrier, or you'd need to have a lot more maintenance guys. In a lot of ways, that's the big problem with VTOL/STOVL. Operating with no runway sounds great, but the runway is only one facet of successfully supporting aviation operations, and the other parts are a lot harder to get rid of.
bean:
Which brings up the question of just how many non-fisherman would actually be eligible for enslavement?
Perhaps you have already done so and I have missed it. But if not, do you plan to do a segment on the advancement in anti-shipping missiles? I am thinking here of what I have heard the Chinese are working on in Anti Access/Area Denial (A2/AD) weaponry to be able to penetrate the picket around aircraft carriers.
I know there is a lot out on the web regarding these weapons in general, but I would be interested on your take on them as they pertain to modern naval strategy. Are they as much of a game changer as they are touted to be?
Quite a lot, actually. Nelson's Navy estimates the merchant navy at about 120,000 at the start of the French Revolutionary Wars. The navy proper got to about the same size at the height of the wars, although probably half of that strength was in men that were outside that number. I don't know how many fisherman are included (and apparently not all fishermen were exempt, just some), but at the time, Britain dominated the global cargo trade, which meant a lot of merchant ships. The same source states that most men taken by accident were quickly released, because Captains didn't really want them.
@Neal
I don't think that they're nearly as much of a threat as they're cracked up to be. Are the carriers perfectly safe? No. But the situation today is much more favorable to the carriers by any possible metric than it was in the 70s and early 80s.
Hey bean. Suppose the U.S Navy is in a wartime scenario and they want to protect an important non-combat naval vessel at a critical time, say a Naval Research Laboratory style ship performing some very sensitive experiment. What sort of escort would they send for it?
It depends.
I'm not being difficult. It really depends on a lot of things. What's the threat? How important is this mission? What escorts are available? It could be anything from mounting a couple of machine guns on the rails to sending a Burke along.
Not putting ships doing sensitive experiments near the enemy would seem a far better idea than sending an escort.
Re the request for guest posts: I'm not expert enough to write on the usual Naval Gazing topics with confidence, but I'll be visiting Portsmouth to see Victory and Warrior in a month's time. I'd be happy to do a photo essay, if that'd be of interest.
@Alex
That would be great. I look forward to it.
As an addendum to my offer, it should be noted that I'm not a serious photographer, and I only have a cellphone camera.
But I'll be sure to take a bunch of photos, and try to say intelligent things about them when possible. Thanks.
Not a problem. Modern cellphones are remarkably good. All of my pictures are from a phone, including the ones on the America.
Continued reading of Massie is showing the same problem. He talks a lot about Fisher's reforms, but when talking about the finances, totally misses the massive cut in battleship build rate. Likewise, there's no mention of any of the net-centric/plotting stuff. In fairness, In Defense of Naval Supremacy was published only two years before, and I think the stuff on net-centric may have come out after, but it's still a bit jarring. Likewise, his description of Dreadnought's development isn't particularly good. He used "superimposed" instead of superfiring, and then muddles the whole issue, neglecting the different sighting port locations on opposite sides of the Atlantic and overlooking the armament arrangement on Neptune and Colossus. I'm not particularly impressed.
All that said, it's a good read, and so long as you read it knowing it's not a scholarly source, it's not bad.
Another re the guest posts: I'm not particularly knowledgeable of the naval, but I can do a photo essay of the naval museum in Haifa. It's not as big as they are in US, but there are some interesting exhibits, including the indigenous submarine INS ~~Gal~~.
@Inky
That sounds really neat. I'd love to see it.
Re guest posts, I got DismalPseudoscience's writeup of Mikasa yesterday, and it looked really good. It's currently slotted for the 20th.
And to clarify, I'm interested in military-related museums even if they aren't specifically naval. I've just been clearing the ships from my backlog of museums first, but I don't expect the interests of the blog's readership to stop at the edge of the water.
@bean
Do you have the USAF museum in Ohio on the list, or would you want me to do that?
I’ve been to Dayton, and plan to write it up. That said, it was 8 years ago and I wouldn’t mind getting a second opinion if you’ve been more recently.
(Spoiler alert: It’s something like a 4.8 or 4.9.)
Actually, I'm willing to take reviews of things I've already seen. It will be interesting to see how different people rate things.
So bean, is the comparison at http://www.combinedfleet.com/baddest.htm accurate?
It's very good. My only criticism, weirdly, is that they underrate Bismarck's armor. (I think I've adequately established my anti-Weheraboo credentials, so I can safely say that.) The numbers given are not incorrect, but they're misleading. Bismarck had a scheme where the belt was backed up by angled sides of the armored deck. This was common before WWI, but unique to her in the treaty ships. All the important stuff was protected by both belt and deck, and the numbers are belt-only, which doesn't reflect the real value of the protective scheme. But even if we raise the overall armor rating from 6.5 to 8.5 (I'm not going to run the full set of numbers now, so I'm guessing) it leaves her at 129 instead of 121, and doesn't actually change the relative order.
So, a bunch of questions about “bringing back battleships” on Quora got me thinking: what if you were to build a modern major surface combatant, designed to look intimidating but still be useful? My ideas here are based around the USN, since probably nobody else would bother, but one could posit a Russian, Chinese or maybe even British version.
What would it do? Well, you’d want something that looks suitably intimidating on camera, so, lots of guns. Guns are intimidating in a way that radars and VLS cells are not. You’d want it to have a reasonable role in a CVBG or amphibious strike group, especially the latter since the guns are useful for fire support. That means air defense, doubly so since this ship would be taking the slot of a Tico or a Burke if attached to a strike group. It also means being able to go at least as fast as a Tico - you don’t need to keep up with a Nimitz/Ford at a dead run for days, but if you can, doubleplusgood. You’d want command and control facilities too - extensive ones. If they’re good enough you can replace the hoary and vulnerable Blue Ridge class while you’re at it. ASW is an afterthought - you want some, just to avoid being helpless, but a hull sonar, some ASROCs in the VLS and some torpedoes for the helos should be more than enough. Stealth is cool, but don’t go overboard - it’s there to be seen and to pal around with CVNs or LHDs that are within delta of impossible to hide anyway. Use stealth features where it can be done inexpensively. All this means a pretty big hull, at least as big as a Zumwalt, but a conventional hullform, not that weird tumblehome and not some kind of “revolutionary” trimaran or other oddball. Call it a cruiser, or a battlecruiser if you must (it is fast, well-armed and weakly armored if at all), but definitely not a destroyer: the designation is part of the “I’m a big, visible stick”, err, shtick.
So, for the guns - let’s skip the gee-whiz rounds they wanted for the Zumwalts. The only real advantage of guns for NSFS is that they’re cheap and they react fast. If they aren’t cheap, then missiles or bombs probably do it better. So, we develop some kind of relatively straightforward 155mm gun system designed to accommodate existing 155mm rounds used by the Army and the Marine Corps. Develop a VT-FRAG and KEET round by scaling up the 5″ versions if something suitable doesn’t already exist. Make sure it can shoot Excalibur. Doubly nice if you could make any new rounds work in the Zumwalt‘s AGS and/or make this gun shoot whatever whiz-bang stuff they eventually cook up for the Zumwalts, but those are bonuses. If you can’t do that economically, scratch it. Mount these guys in two twin turrets, as much for the intimidation factor as for any real ROF improvement, stick one each fore and aft. The turrets don’t need to be optimized for stealth or light weight – we’re not trying to jam these on a light frigate – but prioritize looking sharp more than might otherwise make sense. Leave space/allowance as necessary to swap one or both of these out for railguns when the technology matures, but don’t block the whole thing on future railgun capability. If railguns can’t be added, scrap ’em, they aren’t the point.
Add on four OTO Melara 76mm/62 STRALES as a combination close-in AA gun, anti-small-boat defense and enough punch to matter if you have to fire it at land targets or larger ships. The Mk 110 57mm is overrated and underpowered, and no, the 30mm guns they glued onto Zumwalt don’t cut the mustard here. Might as well go with the STRALES version: DART already exists and buys you some interesting capability (and if you can make the new 155mm guided round use the DART radar, that might save some trouble), and VULCANO might extend the 76’s range to match the 155, which could be useful in a pinch, and might increase the number of calls for fire the ship could effectively respond to.
Air defense-wise, AEGIS is pretty much required here. Go with SPY-6 since they’re integrating that into the new Burkes. Might as well throw in the BMD capability if you can have it for free (and as I understand it you mostly can), even though that’s probably not the ship’s major mission. Then add a bunch of VLS cells - a bare minimum of 128, 256 if you can. Stick with the Mk 41, no need to faff about with the Zumwalt’s PVLS baloney unless it can actually do something that Mk 41 can’t and that anyone actually cares about. Assuming the combination of active-radar missiles and new radars doesn’t let you do without them, go with four or more SPG-62s.
Anti-ship missiles – I’d go with whatever goes into the VLS: maritime-strike Tomahawks, LRASM, NSM as they come online, SM6 in surface mode in the interim. If there’s room, it can’t hurt to bolt on some Harpoons, but they’re not real high priority, since the Navy’s already working on solving this problem. This isn’t the main mission at all, despite what “make it battleship-like” might seem to imply.
Propulsion is where I’m a bit divided. I’ve got three ideas here, in increasing order of gee-whiz - a very standard COGAG plant like on the Burkes, a Zumwalt-style turbo-electric drive or a nuclear turbo-electric setup. The first one is tried and true, but lacks the electrical oomph to drive railguns, and it’s probably not sufficiently future-resistant. The nuke setup gives it long legs, so it can keep up with a CVN at speed, which was the rationale behind the California and Virginia CGNs, IIRC. OTOH, having a nuke plant limits where you can pull into port somewhat, which might hamper the “be a big visible stick” mission. So, cost and convenience make the call here, along with how important it is to leave some electrical power capacity for railguns.
Round it all out with a pair of SeaRAM (the independent radar is nice if you have to shut down the SPY-6 for some reason), a SQS-53C sonar, SPS-67 radar, a flight deck and a largish hangar (2 MH-60R and 2x Fire Scout or similar), the usual triple torpedo tubes (that you might as well have, if you’re going to carry the torps anyway), and the typical fit of light autocannon and machine guns. If I understand correctly, the ship impact of electronic warfare systems is fairly minor, so we probably want the shiniest EW fit that can be reasonably added, with all the associated bits, ESM, jammers, chaff, flares, Nulka. The usual torpedo defense suite, too, maybe including those whizzy new anti-torpedo torpedoes they’ve talked about for CVNs, if they’re tested and working. If we’re looking to add more shinies, some of those light autocannon mounts could be something like the MLG 27 and be tied into the main combat systems as some kind of emergency CIWS, but I’m not sure if that buys us anything, and while integration might be cheap, it’s not free.
So, all in all, I’m not sure how much sense this makes, but I thought it was interesting to ponder the notion of something that looks like a battleship while still being something that’s useful to a modern navy, and doesn’t make the mistake that the Kirovs did of trying to be the best at everything. It’s interested in being useful fire support, a big, intimidating platform for showing the flag and a command ship that doubles as an AAW escort.
Well, crap, the formatting on that got eaten, either by my own stupidity or by the idiot censorware on this machine, and I don't see any obvious way to fix it...
I've fixed the formatting. You need an extra line between paragraphs or it merges the text. No idea why.
I'm a bit too tired to look over the full set of stuff you propose in detail, but it doesn't sound different from what I proposed in my column on bringing back the battleships, or have speculated on a couple of times. I'd definitely include the Blue Ridge replacement, and probably try to go with a slightly larger helicopter deck than you propose here, but other than that, it looks fairly sensible. Although I'm not sure it's sensible enough to be worth buying.
bean:
Jade Nekotenshi:
A guns really more intimidating than cruise missiles with greater range and more destructive power?
Jade Nekotenshi:
With modern fire control you may not even need that many guns to be able to get hits and VLS cells are likely to be more useful (at least until they get naval railguns working).
But I would be inclined to say two twin turrets is the maximum sensible (if there's automated ammo loading it's likely only single turrets make any sense).
Jade Nekotenshi:
The US already has to put up with that with their carriers and subs so probably not too big a deal and if you're going for impressive…
Besides, you don't really need to intimidate New Zealand all that much.
Jade Nekotenshi:
Modern attempts to re-invent the battleship|battlecruiser are probably going to end up looking a lot like the Kirovs, i.e. big cruisers with lots of missiles, maybe nuclear powered.
Absolutely. I've been on a Burke, and while I know very well that the VLS is a lot more powerful than the gun, even my lizard brain was more impressed by their gun. And I was making fun of that for being undersized.
One of the missions for this ship is to look impressive. That's something that guns are best at, and they aren't that expensive unless you get very clever (like they tried to with the AGS). Again, we're trying to use this ship to hack monkey brains, not for strict combat effectiveness.
Anonymous:
I wouldn't think they'd be that much bigger than the AK-130 twin 130mm on Russian ships, and an 8000 ton Sovremenyy has two of those. Those have fully automatic ammo handling too, from photos of the gubbins of one taken on either Pyotr Velikiy or Varyag, not sure which. Though they do use fixed ammo, which surprises me (I'd think 130mm is up-to-and-touching the limit for practical fixed ammo). These wouldn't, of course, since the idea is to be able to use Army ammo stocks. That said, the Des Moines CAs had mostly-automatic loading and ejection on triple 203mms in the 40s, so the problem is definitely tractable.
Heck, they even claimed a credible AA mode for the Des Moines main battery. I've heard anecdotally that the Newport News actually used it in that mode against MiGs in Vietnam, though I'm not sure if any hits were scored. If you can get a modern 155mm autoloader to manage 20 rounds/min/barrel, you've got a credible backstop defense against subsonic SSMs, too (assuming the 76mm doesn't get it, and the ESSM/SM2/SM6 before that, of course).
Bean:
I was stationed on a Burke for a while - the reaction some of our guys had to seeing an Italian Durand de la Penne-class was amusing. It was exactly that - their gun fit was far more impressive. There's something about having lots of topside shinies that successfully hacks monkey brains indeed. (Very good way to put it.)
As another good example - which looks better-armed? A Leahy or a Virginia? The Virginia, objectively, packs a fair chunk more firepower and better fire control besides, but its decks look so spare and spartan that it just looks too clean somehow, like it's a command ship with a self-defense fit rather than a proper cruiser.
Why doesn't the USN have more nuclear powered surface ships? Seems like you'd want, say, a pair of AEGIS ships with nukes for each CVN to provide long range high speed escort capability. You don't want your CVNs unescorted, so in practice isn't your big shiny nuke plant on those ships kind of wasted (since you're limited by the legs of your escorts)?
Given the number of SSNs in service, it doesn't seem like manufacturing/operating a large quantity of small reactors is a deal-breaker. What gives?
They essentially decided it was too expensive. That's also why they decommissioned the Californias and Virginias. They keep using it on subs because you can't run a gas turbine while submerged, basically.
On the Des Moines? Are you sure you're not getting them mixed up with the Worcesters, which were supposed to have that capability? I've never heard of that, and I really should have if it was a thing. A check of references shows no mention in Friedman's US Naval Weapons and Campbell's Naval Weapons of WWII, and a passing mention at NavWeps and in the Friedman article on the Mk 54 director. At least one of the sources should mention actually shooting at MiGs. I can ask at Salem when I visit next week.
@gbdub
A mix of luck, politics, and stupidity. I looked over this last night, and when you're looking at ships with really expensive combat systems, like Aegis, the cost delta is surprisingly small. It probably would have been no more than 20% in 1980 to build a nuclear version of the Tico. At the time, Congress was viewing the Ticos as too expensive, so the nuke version died. Then focus switched to the Burkes, which were an attempt to build a cheaper Aegis platform. There was serious talk of CG(X) being nuclear, but it died when they realized that the USN was basing its shipbuilding plan off of Star Trek. At the moment, that's left us with evolutions of the Burke, which means we're stuck with fossil fuels for a while. But I suspect that the battleship replacement might well be nuclear. I doubt naval reactors has given up the dream of expanding the kingdom.
@Jade
Not quite. They were retired under the "peace dividend", when the surface fleet had to be slashed. They were rightly seen as less capable than the Ticos, which cost about the same to run, so they went first. In a couple of cases, they'd recently been refueled, and the whole thing was kind of stupid.
bean:
Well, so claim these two Navy training/propaganda videos, at any rate, and so said assorted sea stories from very old-salt GMs when I first joined (some of whom were actually old enough to have at least seen one firsthand, though none were actually in Vietnam). Not sure how much that's worth - such things are often wrong, or they're talking about things that were planned but never implemented. That's also my source on the anecdote about Newport News firing at MiGs. Could have been shooting at them with 5", too, and my source was just confused. That said, apparently Japan had some time-fuzed 18.1" shells for the Yamatos, so weirder things have happened. (Can't imagine those were worth a pinch of owl dung, or even worth the energy to stuff 'em into the breech, but then...)
But, if you could get 10 rounds/min/barrel out of a triple-mount 203mm back then, then I can't imagine getting 15 rpm/b out of a 155mm twin today would be out of the question! (And unlike back then, making that shoot at air targets now would probably be pretty trivial.)
That would be my guess. As I said, these things are often a contingency, but not taken that seriously.
I'm not sure if you're talking about the infamous incendiary shrapnel rounds, or actual time-fused HE (they only used the former in combat, and you're spot-on about effectiveness). I have seen the actual range tables for AA fire with the Iowa's guns, but it wasn't a capability that was taken very seriously.
They got 12 rpm/barrel out of the 6"/47 DP guns on the Worcesters in that era, although they were never the most successful guns. On the other hand, I suspect those were insufficiently debugged. That said, RoF is almost harmful in this role. The main reason for guns is to impress visitors, and more guns does that better than faster-firing guns. Maybe we should go for triples instead of twins...
As for air targets, the math is trivial, but the targets are much faster and higher-flying, so the guns are pretty much useless, except maybe against missiles. Although they aren't that effective there, either.
bean:
Understandable, but if that doesn't work and you end up having to actually use the ship you might have wished it had less guns and more missiles.
bean:
I understand that it was determined that the economics worked better on large landing ships than destroyers (which are the real battleship replacement) so maybe LHDs and the like will be next.
@Anonymous:
And if you end up fighting submarines, you might wish to have less missiles and more sonar. All warship design is tradeoffs, and the proposed ship is big enough that its missile loadout is probably going to be more limited by the principle of not putting all of our eggs in one basket.
I think this betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the purpose of nuclear propulsion. A nuclear task force is capable of going anywhere in the world at high speed, without support. That's a very valuable capability in a carrier, and in a carrier's escorts, so it's potentially worth paying extra for. It's significantly less valuable in one amphibious ship out of a task force.
bean:
All design is tradeoffs. But if you're building a ship so big that you're unwilling to arm it to avoid putting all your missiles in too few baskets then that ship is too big.
There are other ways to impress, carriers, having a fleet with a lot of ships (a good way to make some even more useless), making everything nuclear powered, etc.
bean:
I agree that it's worth paying extra and there'd be more benefit switching all escorts to nuclear than just the largest amphibs but that doesn't appear to be what the politicians care about.
If nuclear propulsion is about saving money then the biggest amphibs are the next to split atoms, if it's about increasing capability then you'd focus on the escorts for the existing nuclear powered ships (though you may end up doing Ls and As at least destroyer sized anyway, mass production would reduce costs for them).
Not necessarily. I'd expect this kind of ship to be 2-3 times the size of a Burke, but that doesn't necessarily mean it makes sense to put 2-300 VLS cells aboard. You still only have a single Aegis system (maybe with more illuminators) and that's a single point of failure. And missiles are expensive, so we can't just assume we'll fill any VLS we send to sea.
I'm usually fairly dismissive of politicians, but I suspect they're playing to the public, and know better themselves. Naval reactors has a really strong lobby in Congress. Nuclear power for surface ships is generally thought to have gone away because it was too expensive, so saying "these days it's economical" is how you make it acceptable again.
The choice isn't mutually exclusive. A destroyer actually has more power than an LHD/LHA, so you could potentially just reuse the plant.
If you're not going to pack it with more missiles what capability is worth the extra size?
It really depends on the price of oil, if oil prices increase to the level of the OPEC embargo and stay there…
Checking up that is indeed true (and a bit surprising to me), it looks like a single A4W or A1B may be a bit overpowered for a destroyer but not by all that much. Whether you could get away with a single reactor is an open question but the submariners seem to have done alright with single reactor boats.
First, remember that steel is cheap and air is free. Making a ship bigger isn't that expensive these days. Even the propulsion system doesn't scale directly with size. So the drawbacks to an extra few hundred tons for guns are pretty minor. Second, there are lots of things we can do with size. Better seakeeping, improved air facilities, replacing the Blue Ridges, and yes, guns, are all ways you can spend the extra tonnage. Even improved habitability. The Burkes are not the most comfortable ships around, and you could do better.
Big Book of Warfare suggests that the A4W originated out of an attempt to build a single-reactor destroyer/frigate/cruiser, so I think it would be acceptable.
My thinking was that more than 256 cells would be too many eggs in one basket. The extra size is for exactly what bean mentions: flag and command facilities and better air facilities, in addition to the guns. I wouldn't drop down to fewer than 128 cells to gain the 155mm mounts, for sure, but more than 256 is probably too many in one hull unless you're looking for a ginormous floating Tomahawk magazine (which is a job better served by SSGNs). I've never been exactly convinced by the Arsenal Ship idea (and tagging those as BBs, as some ideas do, is kind of a joke) - a giant floating magazine that depends entirely on external fire control seems far too vulnerable to the usual peacetime RF gremlins, to say nothing of what happens when the enemy tries to disrupt it.
My original idea had room for two helos and some drones, but I think - on the "steel is cheap" theory - that going with a bigger hangar, for at least four (maybe six if you can) H-60 class birds and/or a larger number of drones makes a fair bit of sense. That's another case for making the hull a bit bigger than might be strictly necessary.
bean:
Bigger shipyards too?
bean:
Is this because of the longer hull being more efficient?
Big question, how could the costs of missiles be reduced? I mean if you got into a serious shooting war you're going to be doing through a lot of them, would just the larger production runs be enough?
From a US perspective, I don't think this is very much of a design driver. We have the capability to build 25,000 ton warships, so the extra cost of doing so is fairly small. This might be different for paperclipistan, granted.
Yes. For instance, the Des Moines class cruisers, despite being about 30% bigger than their predecessors and using the same powerplant, were just as fast because the extra length cancelled out the extra tonnage. I really should write about ship speed some day.
Larger production runs would help a lot, although to get the cost really low, you'd probably need to compromise capability a bit and do a new design. Not sure how that would work in a serious war, but it's an area I should probably recommend the Build a Navy group look into when I get around to doing more work on that.
Nah, the defense minister can just order that the shipyards be able to make big ships when they're built.
The whole quality v. quantity tradeoff, maybe twice as many half-cost missiles are going to be more effective at getting past enemy defenses.
I wonder about some kind of ASROC-like missile that's designed to fly high and release an SDB with an IR or millimeter-wave radar seeker, as a sort of cheap anti-ship/anti-boat missile that can do double duty for land attack? Some cases call for volume over precision, after all, and Tomahawks get expensive. (Which is another part of the reason for the 155mm guns on my CCGN idea - dumb arty shells are cheap. Of course, the flipside is that it needs to be actually cheap: LRLAP ain't.)
That said, this varies a lot based on what you're shooting at: if your most likely targets are over-armed, under-defended 70s era frigates from North-Blue Trashcanistan, then a small number of big, stealthy missiles loaded with the latest in gee-whiz are probably great. They can't shoot 'em down except maybe with blindly lucky shots, and so it's excellent from the hacking-monkey-brains perspective: "Oh no, we can't hope to fight that, we're screwed!" But if the targets are likely to be more capable - carrier groups, amphib groups or even surface raiders that have air defenses closer in capability to the state of the art? Well, if the gee-whiz missile is only a little less likely to get splashed than the el-cheapo SDB bus, and you can afford 8 busses for each gee-whiz missile, then the cheaper missile in much greater quantity makes sense. (And that's where you might start wanting the deeper magazines, and/or the ability to usefully reload at sea.)
@Jade
Interesting that you mention ASROC in that context. There was actually something called SMARTROC that was an ASROC booster with a 500 lb Paveway strapped on top that was used by a few ships off Vietnam. Unfortunately, internet references are very skimpy.
But there have been serious discussions of VL SDBs, and SDB-II is supposed to have some kind of moving target capability, so we're most of the way there. I'm in favor of this, but it doesn't seem to be happening yet.
Odd series of coincidences, this - I just tripped over another reference to SMARTROC in the context of refitting some Gearing or Sumner-class DDs for NSFS, with SMARTROC for longer range or more accurate shots. Chased some links from there and found out that apparently there was a design for a twin-mounted version of the Mk 45 gun! I wonder if that came from the same line of thinking that led to the Russians cooking up AK-130?
Correction, that twin 5" was a twin version of the Mk 65, not the Mk 45, with the Mk 65 being essentially a rapid-fire version of the Mk 45. I suppose AK-130 is the closest modern analog. Or maybe one could cook up a twin-mounted version of the OTO Melara 127mm/L62.