It's time once again for our regular Open Thread. Talk about whatever you want that isn't Culture War.
Next week, the first post in our Aurora game will go up, and you can start building ships. But before that can happen, there are a couple of details to sort out. Specifically, the name of our empire, the flag, and the naming themes for people and classes. (System theme is irrelevant because we're using real stars. Rank theme will be UK to avoid confusing everyone.) If you want lists of these, install Aurora 1.12 and take a look.
And if we want something more complicated than the default class naming themes, I'm fine with that. Something like "destroyers will be named with River names, Cruisers with Battle names, and transport ships after explorers" (all of which are separate lists in the database). I'm even willing to add custom lists to the database (just send the list as a text file, and it's trivial to load in). Flags have to come from the base game, though, because those aren't packaged in the database, and would need to be distributed separately.
We have now commenced the third round of overhauls. 2017 overhauls are A Brief History of the Battleship, the first part of my history of Iowa* and Fire Control Part 1. For 2018, we have firefighting, Underbottom Explosions, mission kills, The Last Days of the High Seas Fleet, Samar, Turret and Barbette and The Space Force and the FAA. And the 2019 overhauls are Riverine Warfare-Europe, Cluster Bombs and Leyte Gulf 75.
Comments
So I've been watching a lot of Youtube lately (Previously Recorded from RLM, if you're wondering), and in the ads for new Call of Duty (Black Ops: Cold War, in case you were wondering), I noticed President Reagan appears to have a model of the greatest battleship class ever made on his shelf behind him.
Looks like a typo in one of the overhaul links.
Oops. Fixed now.
War on the Rocks recently published some poetry that captures the feeling of being bombarded by jargon in a DoD briefing.
I occasionally attend that kind of meeting these days, and all I can say is "yes".
I had read many of those terms before, but "gonculate" was a new one for me. Apparently it's a portmanteau of "guess" and "calculate". I guess "guesstimate" just wasn't MILSPEC enough.
To be fair, if cliched jargon is the most offensive thing about a briefing your organization is probably ahead of the game.
So the USNI Holiday sale is on, but I'm a lot less ready to recommend it than in previous years. It's still a good deal, but at this point, there's no guarantee that you'll get what you ordered in anything like a reasonable time. I put in an order in July for books that were releasing between August/September and November 15th. They apparently decided to save money and ship them all at once, because I still don't have any of the books. The joke is on them, because at this point, I've requested to cancel that order. I'll reorder with the better discount and free shipping, because I think it's reasonable to expect pre-ordered books when they come out. And then there's the performance last year, where they charged me shipping on a bunch of stuff they shouldn't have, and canceled books without telling me.
This podcast episode of Bilge Pumps (associated with Sea Control) http://cimsec.org/bilge-pumps-episode-21-engineering-the-aircraft-of-the-falklands-war-with-stephen-george/46446 is a neat compliment to Bean's recently completed Falklands series. Wild tales of what it took to keep the helicopters running in South Atlantic conditions with a long supply chain pushed far beyond any peacetime contingency plans. Good reminder of how contingent the outcomes of well-known battles can be on mechanics bodging things together just in time.
So, following up from a Xinjiang discussion on DSL, since this is a smaller but much more seapower focused crowd...
The biggest advantage China has right now is simply distance: If it came to something like a military confrontation over the Spratly Islands or South China Sea territorial claims, or over Taiwan, etc, China has to project power a fraction of the distance the US does.
Over on DSL, I made the point in a discussion about China that one of the things we could do if we wanted to take a harder stance with China would be to work on repositioning our long term deployments in the Pacific to be more forward. The practical question I have here is: How practical IS that?
Japan (and especially Okinawa) isn't super thrilled to have the military presence we already have, I can only imagine how Japan would feel if we wanted to arrange to have a CSG and an ESG on permanent station in the area backed with a beefed up 5th and 7th Air Forces out of Japan and Korea.
On the flip side, negotiating a mutual defense treaty with Taiwan and then backing it up by basing forces -there- would be tricky. We could only do it if Taiwan's government was willing to accept that course (they lean more in that direction now than they ever have, but it would be a potentially risky move), and we'd need to make sure we could back it up immediately to prevent China from deciding that the best way to prevent a mutual defense treaty from coming into force is if there's no longer a Taiwanese state to negotiate WITH...
Thoughts? There's also Luzon, but I don't know that there's much in the way of good places to support either air or naval forces north of Manila, and I'm not entirely confident the Philippines would be all that much happier to host us than the Koreans or Japanese.
It's a good question, Comrade Academician, but we should note that we already do keep a CSG and an ESG permanently deployed to the region, and it acts (along with the USAF) as one of our main deterrents to the PRC. Additionally, CSGs on their way to the Gulf from the Pacific spend lots of time in the WestPac, and are balanced to try and keep 2 CSGs in theater as often as possible.
If we wanted to deploy another CSG and ESG, that gets hard to do in terms of the GFM piece of having a CSG/ESG ready to go out there (especially since we just burned the flagship of an ESG in San Diego not long ago). It also gets hard to deal with the sustainment piece of this (that is, maintaining the ships themselves). There are limitations to how long you can keep a ship over there, because there are requirements for what kind of maintenance you can do in foreign countries, and because forward-deployed ships tend to suffer in materiel condition, mostly due to how much operations they do. Then there's questions about where you keep the sailors and their families for this, or the aircraft for the CSG, or the Marines and their gear for the ESG. Those are all pretty big requirements that take a lot of money to solve.
The easiest, and frankly, best option is probably Guam, except that putting more forces on it would cause the island to tip over and sink.
(But seriously, probably putting more ships, if not a CSG itself, in Guam is probably the only good option).
As far as other countries in the region go, with some broad thoughts:
-Japan: I think the Japanese would be more accepting of this than we tend to think, but even still, there's limits to what you can get out of them, and Okinawa is always going to be a major issue
-Korea: armistice issues about basing more personnel on-pen, and also I don't think the ROKs would be terribly interested.
-Taiwan: It would be a major, major provocation (I might even think the PRC would actually view it as an act of war), and I don't think they are ready for it yet. Additionally, I am not that convinced that the US is really that die-hard to defend Taiwan as it was 50 years ago, or frankly even 25, and I think a fleet based in Taiwan might not even get to sea in a war with the PRC. -PI: lulz. Good luck getting that through Duterte, who has an almost pathological hatred of the US. It actually probably wouldn't be as hard to do-lots of the infrastructure could be repaired from Subic Bay-but politically hard for the Philippines to accept. Also, to be frank, I don't think the PRC would even need to go kinetic to disable a force based in the Philippines.
-Singapore: a real possibility politically, but not big and there's only so much you can base there.
-Vietnam: they seem to be interested in it, but I can't see us formally tying ourselves to a Communist regime that way. Also, my personal opinion is that all the issues we have now with the PRC, we are going to have in 25 years with the SRV. I can say that people have been thinking about this and trying to come up with a plan for this at least since I was last in Japan, and that was 2010.
-Australia: another pretty good option. But would cost a lot to build the infrastructure there, for the same reason it would cost a lot to build it in the US.
The line about "thinking about this since I was last in Japan" should actually be my last paragraph.
@Blackshoe
Russia and China are longstanding rivals. Maybe they would let us base a fleet out of Vladivostok.
I'm tempted to say that we should just build an island in the South China Sea for that purpose. Barring that, the Vietnamese government isn't on the greatest of terms with the PRC; could we talk them into leasing us a chunk of Cam Ranh Bay for old times' sake?
I don't know about Cam Ranh Bay, but US carriers have visited Danang fairly recently.
I guess Russia has decided that Novaya Zemlya isn't radioactive enough, as it appears they're making preparations to resume testing their nuclear-powered cruise missile.
Fun Fact, Tsar Bomba was, pound for pound, the cleanest nuclear weapon ever. Almost all of the U was replaced with Pb to save on fallout. The blast would have been twice as big if they hadn't.
So one sad thing about ending the RTW campaign is that we never got to see your ideal 1940s ship designs (other than the fast battleships we can guess about, lol).
Have you ever written anything up on what the ideal WWII destroyers and cruisers would have looked like, without the uncertainty, doctrinal confusion, and treaty restrictions?
@echo I think that's a great idea for a discussion/article.
@Blackshoe
Thanks for the thoughtful reply. I know we already keep some forces rotating through the region, although I didn't think we had a CSG and ESG -permanently- stationed in the South China Sea, so that's good to know. My main area of military knowledge is Army affairs, not navy. And yes, sustainment is what I was thinking about. Specifically, having the infrastructure to repair and resupply our forces for longer before they have to go off station and head for home.
The point about limits to the sort of maintenance you can do in foreign countries is well-taken. Does that still apply if the US has an actual installation with a secure perimeter, as opposed to simply putting in at borrowed berth in a friendly navy's base or a civilian port? I was thinking in terms of a permanent installation with a long-term (20+ year) lease from the host country.
Also a good point about Duterte. The US Army and the AFP had a strong working relationship when I was in, and OEF-P was live at the time, so I think that was coloring my thinking there.
@John Schilling
That DOES have a certain symmetry to it. I thought about that but decided against suggesting it on the grounds that it sort of undermines our criticism of the PRC on that count.
To be clear, I'd rather not fight China, for a wide variety of reasons starting with the fact that it would be the bloodiest and most costly endeavor we've faced in at least 80 years, but I am sincerely worried that spent the 70s and 80s complacently waiting for global economic integration and trade to produce liberalization, and then proceeded to sit on our hands and watch when the embers of that liberalization were thoroughly doused in 1989. I know I personally spent the 90s and early 00s generally thinking that China was totally going to lighten up any year now. Aaaaaany year now, only to realize sometime around the time they started getting serious about the Social Credit Score and cracking down on Hong Kong that, no, they'd gotten wealthier without getting -any- more liberal and that when it comes to access to markets the lever works from BOTH ends...
No, because I don't feel that's a question which actually has an answer. Uncertainty and doctrinal confusion are fundamental parts of the process of warship design, and even if we were able to send my library back in time to 1935 and they believed it, the butterfly effect would change what actually happened to the point that decisions taken to optimize for the battles fought IRL might well come back to bite them. (Battleship construction is the obvious example here. Say alt-Halsey leaves TF 34 behind, but alt-TF 34 is optimized for defending the carriers.)
There's definitely room to ask questions like "what would have happened if not for the treaties" and that's on my idea list, but it's not quite the same.
All that said, the short version is to look at the ships they were building/trying to build at the end of the war.
Re island-building, note that the big issue isn't the building, it's basing territorial claims off of it. It would be easy enough for us to build the island and say "yes, this is ours, but it's ours like an oil platform, not like a piece of sovereign territory that creates claims".
Also, for the Aurora game, if nobody has any opinion on how to set up the nation, I'm going to go with making them Space French, as an extremely loose sequel to the RTW2 game.
As long as it's not the People's Republic of Haven brand of Space French, and we can name our premier starship captain "Jean-Luc Picard".
@Trofim_Lysenko said...
I don't think liberalism is dead in china. in 1989, they had no trouble rolling tanks in and crushing tiananmen. they're not doing that in hong kong. China was never going to evolve into a carbon copy of the US, but that doesn't mean that it wasn't going to become a better place over time, and it is. Is it still communist state? Sure, but it's late USSR without the economic problems, not Stalin's USSR, or even Kruschev's. That's improvement. That's a change, and a change for the better. It's not nearly enough, and the fact that they have millions of people in camps demands a response, but it's not fair to say nothing has changed.
I'm not sure you can rename officers, but if you can, I'll pick the first really good one to come out of the academy, and do that. And I was thinking more of a Third Empire Space French. Or Twenty-Seventh Republic, if we want to go that way.
"Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, thrice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce, the third time IN SPAAAACE!" (Space Marx, 2052)
You can definitely rename officers, which is why half of mine are called things like "John tac35eng15r25#academy"
There's also a lot of familiar names in the name lists, and I'd be shocked if all the starfleet captains weren't in there.
But that means bean is going to have to screenshot every ship design for us (but we'll forgive the lack of battles, we're not following it for the battles anyway).
Removing the treaty restrictions would mostly just result in bigger ships (or result in Navies being cut as hard as the other branches in the depression) but difficult choices about trade-offs that had to be made to meet the treaty limits would be avoided, whether that would be good or bad is another matter.
I'm afraid all the screenshotting was part of the issue with the RTW2 series, so I'm not sure we'll see every design. There are probably also features of the game that push ship design in slightly different directions than reality, even in a hypothetical 'no treaty' 1930s. As I understand it, RTW2 sees your ships matched against enemies with the same hull symbol a disproportionate amount of the time, so there is pressure to go for the most powerful ship that still fits the game's categories. Also, for destroyers, guns are more important if you're often up against other DDs, and there was some discussion of torpedo attacks being difficult to execute, further discouraging a torpedo heavy armament. Looking at the Harpon class, I'd expect our destroyers to keep a 32kn speed, but switch to 5" dp guns and quintuple torpedo tubes as we get the technology. I think that we have the ability to build bigger DDs than we are doing, so we probably wouldn't add a fifth turret (or a third torpedo launcher). I don't think that our CLs would grow that much either, so Mulhouse and Amiral Cecille are probably representative, though I could imagine an even lighter 5" dp cruiser as well. CAs might remain similar to our current ships, but could grow to include a third turret, 5" dp secondaries and greater speed, though I expect the extra money would be better spent on carriers. It'll be interesting to see what actually gets built though, and where I've guessed wrong.
General question: Where do SSGNs fit into modern naval strategy?
There are obviously some things they're not very good at (like trooping the flag/gunship diplomacy), but it seems like they can provide a lot of strategic strike force without the same escalatory risks as SSBNs, while having a lower cost and risk profile than an equivalent carrier based strike. SSGNs are also less reactive, of course, so they're not really feasible for missions that require persistent presence or some of the other value that carrier groups provide, but in terms of taking it to the enemy and damaging their cities, bases, and infrastructure, they seem very under represented.
To a large extent, SSGNs aren’t very common because SSNs can do the same job, as well as traditional SSN jobs. There’s no reason to spend the money to buy specialized boats for the job. Unless you happen to have some lying around, of course. Note that the US plan to get more Tomahawks on the submarines is a stretched Virginia.
As long as you can put a cruise missile through a torpedo tube (or in the later 688 boats, VLS tubes that appear to be outside the pressure hull? a quick google search failed me as to where the silly things are located) I don't personally see the point of a dedicated SSG/SSGN either.
Didn't some of the Ohios end up as SSGNs, though?
I thought US submarines were single hulled.
The pressure hull and the outer hull line aren't the same thing. There's a reasonable amount of equipment, including the VLS tubes and bow sonar, that are outside the pressure hull (and thus kept at the pressure of the surrounding sea) but inside the hydrodynamic hull.
Yeah, I knew the USN designs have a single pressure hull, and then what I think of as a hydrodynamic "streamlining shroud" that covers up the gear that has to be outside the pressure hull; because an efficient hydrodynamic streamlining form is different from an efficient pressure hull. (Teardrop vs round-end cylinder).
And even in the WWII boats, they had a hydro hull that was different from the pressure hull to streamline for surface ops.
Sorry, forgot to @ Anonymous there.
They did, hence my comment about "Unless you happen to have some lying around". It's the sort of thing that makes a lot of sense when you can do it for the cost of converting an existing sub and running it for a decade or two, but not when you'd have to pay full price for a new one. There's a lot of stuff like that in the defense world.
A few matters arose during the online meetup this weekend. First, as promised, here's a link to "Instructions for American Servicemen in Britain (1942)": https://www.johnbarber.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/Instructions-for-American-Servicemen-in-Britain-1942.pdf
Next: there was some discussion of the survival prospects of a submarine abruptly transported into orbit. Let's represent the submarine as a cylinder of length 115m and diameter 10m, so it has a cross-section of 79m^2 and total surface area of A=3770m^2, with an albedo of 1. If it's placed end-on to the sun, it absorbs P~100kW of sunlight. It will radiate this, in thermal equilibrium, when it is at a temperature of T=(P/A.sigma)^0.25, where sigma is the Stefan-Boltzmann constant, giving us T=147K. Inconveniently cold.
Now, say that it runs its reactor, with thermal output of 30MW. The same calculation again tells us that it will reach an equilibrium temperature of 612K, which is inconveniently hot.
Turning it around another way: the submarine would reach a comfortable equilibrium temperature of 300K when its 30MW reactor is running at 6% of capacity. If that's enough for its hotel load, then our submarine-cum-spaceship can remain habitable for quite a while without needing radiators.
Thanks for doing the math! Reinforces the Children of A Dead Earth lesson: reactors are hot, and space is not a fun place for heat engines.
I guess the biggest issue with a space submarine is the inability to thermally isolate the reactor and high temperature system (with relatively small, red-hot radiators) from the crew section.
You'd need to cool everything to man-safe temperatures, requiring enormous radiators. Unless you just ripped out the reactor and added an engineering section containing the NTRs, separated from the pressure hull with trusses.
@echo
We were discussing what would happen if a submarine was magically teleported into orbit as the result of a series of jokes about the Aurora game and the Dean Drive. Things would obviously be different if you were to do it deliberately for some reason.
@DampOctopus
That was interesting to read. Thanks.
Random question inspired by the picture of Alaska at anchor:
How often do ships actually anchor these days? It seems like most major combatants (and freighters) are either underway or tie up alongside a pier to facilitate cargo transfer, maintenance, etc, except for FPSO offload type arrangements.
I know some of the cruise ships and things are anchored out due to COVID, but do they have designated moorings for large ships? Also, are anchors strong enough to ride out a storm, or are they only for position holding with some assist from the propulsion system?
It doesn't happen as much as it used to, but it's still a thing. For naval vessels, there's generally more shore facilities than there used to be and fewer ships, so they'll usually tie up pierside. Freighters will anchor if they don't have a berth to tie up at (I've seen it off LA) but then they earn no money, so operators try not to let it happen. That said, there are designated anchorages for such things, and they can be found on charts.
And yes, the anchors are designed to work on there own. It's a very important safety system. Ideally, the weatherman will keep you out of the way of the storm, but that doesn't always work, nor do your engines. The anchors are passive, and less vulnerable to failure.
"Secretary Espurr, you've done enough. Come back!"
Trump fired Mark Esper yesterday via tweet. The reasoning is mysterious, and what we know verges on CW. I'm just sad that it removes a joke that I still find amusing for some reason.
Clearly intelligence revealed that Iran is secretly developing Dark-types, and Trump is just playing Pokemon 4D as usual.