American militarism pre-WW2 and the Ultimate Battleship

[Robert Rojas]

Greetings to both brother "THE-MARCKS-PLAN" and the community as a whole. Howdy T.M.P. (or Erich if you so prefer) Well Herr General Oberst, in reference to your posting of Monday - October 28, 2019 - 12:51pm, old yours truly is mightily amazed over the continued survivability of this creation of yours. So, just to sate my curiosity, WHEN and WHERE did you acquire the skills requisite to be both a naval architect and naval engineer? Transitioning from wargame table exercises in National Socialist Germany over to a maritime design bureau somewhere in North America is quite a professional leap - OR IS IT!? Well, that's my latest two Yankee cents worth on this sojourn down the YELLOW BRICK ROAD - for now anyway. As always, I would like bid you an especially copacetic day from sea to shining sea - or is it THE LAND OF OZ?

Best Regards,
Uncle Bob

[paulrward]

Hello All :

In # 178, Mr. OpanaPointer posted:

You know that the US steel industry was largely rubble in the '30s, right? That the plants were largely antiquated and/or inadequate? That the companies were wary of expanding their facilities after the bubble-busts in 1919?

and In # 179, Mr. Richard Anderson posted:

I do, you do, Takao does, and I think that any number of other sentient adults with a modicum of knowledge of the era knows that and also realize what an oxymoron "American militarism pre-WW2" is...but of course reality is irrelevant in a "what if", so 1.2-millon tons of armor steel to build the USS Behemoth class? No problem, just go with it.

As the legendary Samuel Clemens once stated, " What gets us into trouble is not what we don't know. It's what we know for sure that just ain't so. "

The U.S. Steel Industry was NOT in a condition of obsolescence in the 1930s, in fact, it was still the world's leading manufacturer of high grade, high tech steels, as witnessed by the construction of the Golden Gate Bridge and numerous New York City Skyscrapers.

As to the volume of production, the following graph might be illuminating :

US Steel Production 1900-2020

From this graph, it can be seen that, while steel production had dropped dramatically after 1929, with the start of the world-wide Depression of the 1930s, in the year 1938, it immediately picked up again, and resumed it's upward trajectory in what is essentially a straight line projection from the end of the 1920s. This is a strong indicactor that, during the 1930s, there were in fact a large number of mothballed steel mills in the U.S. that could have been easily brought on line to make the steel for the U.S.S. Boondoggle.

It appears that sentience does not imply intelligence.....


Respectfully :

Paul R. Ward

[Terry Duncan]

Hello All :

In # 178, Mr. OpanaPointer posted:

You know that the US steel industry was largely rubble in the '30s, right? That the plants were largely antiquated and/or inadequate? That the companies were wary of expanding their facilities after the bubble-busts in 1919?

and In # 179, Mr. Richard Anderson posted:

I do, you do, Takao does, and I think that any number of other sentient adults with a modicum of knowledge of the era knows that and also realize what an oxymoron "American militarism pre-WW2" is...but of course reality is irrelevant in a "what if", so 1.2-millon tons of armor steel to build the USS Behemoth class? No problem, just go with it.

As the legendary Samuel Clemens once stated, " What gets us into trouble is not what we don't know. It's what we know for sure that just ain't so. "

The U.S. Steel Industry was NOT in a condition of obsolescence in the 1930s, in fact, it was still the world's leading manufacturer of high grade, high tech steels, as witnessed by the construction of the Golden Gate Bridge and numerous New York City Skyscrapers.

As to the volume of production, the following graph might be illuminating :

Steel Production 1900 - 2020.jpg


From this graph, it can be seen that, while steel production had dropped dramatically after 1929, with the start of the world-wide Depression of the 1930s, in the year 1938, it immediately picked up again, and resumed it's upward trajectory in what is essentially a straight line projection from the end of the 1920s. This is a strong indicactor that, during the 1930s, there were in fact a large number of mothballed steel mills in the U.S. that could have been easily brought on line to make the steel for the U.S.S. Boondoggle.

It appears that sentience does not imply intelligence.....


Respectfully :

Paul R. Ward

And how many of those can produce face hardened steel armour 24" thick?

[OpanaPointer]

Noise to signal ratio is increasing.

[paulrward]

Hello All :

Since you are just face hardening the steel, you can always take a sheet of 6" thick STS steel, face harden it, and then secure it to an 18" thick sheet of HTS steel by dovetailing the backside of the face hardened sheet and the frontside of the HTS sheet and then slotting them together, to form a single sheet of armour. This is referred to as 'compound armour, and is much used today on a variety of armoured vehicles.

In fact, you could dovetail both sides of four sheets of 2" STS, and four sheets of 4" HTS, face harden the STS, and then assemble them into a sandwich of 24 inches of alternating face hardened and High Tensile Steel to give you a similar effect to what is known as ' Chobham Armour ' .

Mr. Duncan, in my experience as an Engineer, I have learned that there are over 40 ways to skin a cat, and only 13 of them require the use of a knife....


Respectfully :

Paul R. Ward

[T. A. Gardner]

But, is that even enough to get the job done as TMP wants it? (A 2000 hp motor).

For instance, it took a 300 HP motor to turn the Iowa's 1,200 ton turret at 4 degrees padre second. Howeverb it took a 200 HP motor to turn the 214 ton turret of the Worcester at 25 degrees per second.

It might take more than that. The point I'm getting at is you'd need a very large steam turbine driven generator dedicated to provide power to this motor and basically, nothing else. That steam driven generator requires piping, lubrication, a condenser for the steam, etc. to go with it. I know the basic hull is huge, but you're now adding somewhere around 500 to 2,000 tons per turret in generator to get it to turn. Those generators also have to all go somewhere and be supplied with steam and sea water for condensing it after it passes through the turbine. The plumbing for all that is going to be complex too.

Given the number of turrets this is going to be a big issue to solve.

[T. A. Gardner]

[

The 2000 hp motor will also require it's own ship's service electrical generator

Yep.
And as I already noted upthread, there's plenty of room in this hull for a 100MW generator (or larger if necessary) dedicated to the turret machinery. That's ~1/15th of the propulsion plant's output; the propulsion plant needs only ~8% of the hull volume.

There's a practical size limit to how large a ship's generator can reasonably be. You have a certain amount of steam going in, and you have to be able to cool that steam coming out in a condenser. The size of that and the combination of the vacuum you can draw on it and the range of seawater temperatures expected, determine it's size. Thus, I don't think you could go much larger that the upper end of the KW range. A 100 MW would almost certainly be too large for shipboard use.

There's also a serious voltage limit. As you go above 600 VAC you get into problems with insulation space. You simply can't put more insulation on a cable but rather have to rely more and more on using an air gap with separation between the different phases of electricity and ground. That is, you find you can't put cables next to each other and where they penetrate a bulkhead they have to be separated from the steel by larger and larger insulators. Given the period this is being built, the choices are seriously more limited than they would be today.
There's also the need to consider if the cabling gets damaged (combat or just from in use), that it could result in serious danger to the ship's crew as that voltage climbs.

The same goes for the plumbing for all of this.

As generators get larger, they are usually either helium or hydrogen filled in preference to plain air. This is done to reduce rotational resistance and provide a degree of cooling to the windings (hence why a vacuum isn't used).
Of course, this also means more boilers, more fuel system, more lubrication system, more-- well, everything that's required to support this generator in use.

[T. A. Gardner]

[
[*]The ability to operate, say, A-26's and drop-tank-equipped P-51's from the mega carrier would allow it to strike the enemy far from where he could hit back.

The USN tried the P-51 on carriers.



They also tried the B-25J



The P-51 was rejected because it was found:

To have a poor view of the deck on approach.
A very narrow speed window for landing that would make it a difficult plane to land for average pilots.
The landing gear rebounded too much.

The B-25J worked out and was sort of a trial run for the later AJ Savage.



So, just because you can do it, doesn't mean you should do it.

[Richard Anderson]

Noise to signal ratio is increasing.

No screaming eagle shit. I wonder if anyone besides you, Takao, and me have bothered to read Chapter 3, "Armor" in U.S. Navy Bureau of Ordnance in World War II? Somehow I doubt it, especially when fatuous statements such as "you are just face hardening the steel" are made. No, it was not just simply a matter of face hardening steel. "A typical single plate of heavy armor, Class A (face-hardened), 17-inch gauge, weighs approximately 133 short tons, with dimensions of 12 by 32 feet. Since the kind of equipment necessary for such heavy work has almost no commercial use, private manufacturers had neither the tools nor the skilled for such a specialty. At least six months were required to produce the essential machinery. After the tools were installed, the treatment of the plate required another 6 to 9 months to travel from design to the machined sheet needed by the builder." (pp. 36-37)

No one, certainly not me, said anything about the "U.S. Steel Industry" being in a "condition of obsolescence in the 1930s", Mr.PaulRWARD. However, in terms of producing specialized armor steel it was practically NONEXISTENT. None - zero, zip, zilch - of the steel manufacturers in the US had received any orders for Class A armor plate for battleships between 1922 and 1938. The single Navy-owned plant was shuttered in 1922. Small amounts of Class B homogeneous armor were produced for the cruiser programs between 1926 and 1938, but that was it. In 1939, 19,380 tons of armor steel were produced...out of 75,000,000 million tons of steel produced in the US. Between August 1939 and May 1941, the Navy spent $293,894,835 to stimulate production at Carnegie-Illinois, Midvale, and Bethlehem steel and to restart South Charleston...and by 1940, the four were producing 4,050 tons per month. By 1942, after further expenditure, it was 15,700 tons per month.

Edited by this moderator to remove an 'adaptation' of another members name that could be considered derogatory. Please do not do this sort of thing as some members get agitated by it and do not see it is humourous, not everyone has the same sense of humour.

Terry Duncan

[Robert Rojas]

Greetings to both brother Richard Anderson and the community as a whole. Howdy Richard! Well sir, old yours truly must duly and freely admit that I have never had the opportunity to delve into the that technical slice of literature known as 'ARMOR' in the U.S. Navy In Bureau Of Ordnance In World War Two. Given his penchant for all matters technical, it would not at all surprise me if old brother T.A. Gardner could cite by chapter and verse of the contents of the work of literature in question. Now, do I qualify for any special dispensation for admitting my failings on this subject of interest. Now, with that said, when I wore a younger man's clothes, the only armor that I had any vague familiarity was the steel that surrounded me in an M60A1 Main Battle Tank a lifetime ago. Well, that's my latest two Yankee cents worth on this now meandering topic of interest - for now anyway. As always, I would like to bid you an especially copacetic day up in your neck of the woods that is the Evergreen State of Washington.

Best Regards,
Uncle Bob

[paulrward]

Hello All ;

I am not getting into a name calling argument. I am far to much of an adult for that. However, if anyone
wishes to learn a bit about armour in general, you can to to the NavWeapons site, where Mr. Nathan Okun
has an excellent summary article about it:

http://www.navweaps.com/index_nathan/me ... pt2009.php


It will be noted that he stresses that, by WW2, the use of Class A Face Hardened Armour had essentially
been phased out of use by the USN except in the 12" belts of the Battleships and some of the turret and deck
superstructure armor on the Treaty Cruisers. Instead the USN used large amounts of Class B homogenous armour,
which could be made thicker and was more ductile, providing greater ' resistance ' to capped AP shells.

So, for USS Boondoggle, we might see a large amount of Class B ( an STS type steel ), with relatively smaller amounts of Class A Face Hardened laminated to it. ( For example, a very easy to make Deep Cemented 4" Class A plate dovetail laminated to a pair of 10" Class B STS plates that are also dovetail laminated together. )

Respectfully :

Paul R. Ward

[Richard Anderson]

Greetings to both brother Richard Anderson and the community as a whole. Howdy Richard! Well sir, old yours truly must duly and freely admit that I have never had the opportunity to delve into the that technical slice of literature known as 'ARMOR' in the U.S. Navy In Bureau Of Ordnance In World War Two. Given his penchant for all matters technical, it would not at all surprise me if old brother T.A. Gardner could cite by chapter and verse of the contents of the work of literature in question. Now, do I qualify for any special dispensation for admitting my failings on this subject of interest. Now, with that said, when I wore a younger man's clothes, the only armor that I had any vague familiarity was the steel that surrounded me in an M60A1 Main Battle Tank a lifetime ago. Well, that's my latest two Yankee cents worth on this now meandering topic of interest - for now anyway. As always, I would like to bid you an especially copacetic day up in your neck of the woods that is the Evergreen State of Washington.

Best Regards,
Uncle Bob

As an old M60A1 tanker, you might find it interesting that the total weight of armored vehicles manufactured for the US Army in the same period, 1921-1939, was probably less than 10,000 tons.

[Richard Anderson]

Yes, Class B armor was procured primarily for battleships. This thing isn't a battleship? Class B armor cost about $100 less per long ton and took "only" 4 to 7 months to produce instead of 6 to 9 months. The same issues applied, none of the steel manufacturers produced more than tiny amounts of Class B in a year and produced essentially none 1921-1926. From 1926-1938 enough was produced for the 27 interwar CA/CL, probably under 40,000 tons of it over 12 years, so about 3,333 tons per year...out of about 30-million tons produced each year.

[TheMarcksPlan]

Noise to signal ratio is increasing.

Indeed. That's typical of this forum, especially this sub-forum.
There are many members - some in this thread - who claim to despise alternate history, yet whose most active forum is always "What If."

This is a strong indicactor that, during the 1930s, there were in fact a large number of mothballed steel mills in the U.S. that could have been easily brought on line to make the steel for the U.S.S. Boondoggle.

The whole steel industry thing is a red herring, whether we're looking at total steel production or armor production specifically.
When the U.S. decided it wanted to do something on a grand industrial scale, it did so. See for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willow_Run

Our friendly pal Richard Anderson is always posting about "what was" in "what if." Best not to engage in these contretemps, as you have chosen.

The point I'm getting at is you'd need a very large steam turbine driven generator dedicated to provide power to this motor and basically, nothing else. That steam driven generator requires piping, lubrication, a condenser for the steam, etc. to go with it. I know the basic hull is huge, but you're now adding somewhere around 500 to 2,000 tons per turret in generator to get it to turn.

As I've already said, we can call it a 100MW power plant devoted exclusively to the turrets. Or 300MW.

And to repeat, the electric motors are outside the turret rotating structure, as there's no armored barbette. So they add no weight whatsoever to the turret.

Those generators also have to all go somewhere and be supplied with steam and sea water for condensing it after it passes through the turbine. The plumbing for all that is going to be complex too

That's true of any ship-born power plant. This ship's plant is big but no more than 10x Iowa's for ~300x the firepower.

Given the number of turrets this is going to be a big issue to solve.

Everything in a battleship is a big issue to solve. There were tens of thousands of pages of plans/diagrams for the Iowa BB's, for instance.

But we're not solving the complicated problems here because we don't have the staff, time, and expertise of the BuOrd.
What we're doing is determining whether the basic dimensions accommodate the basic, large-scale equipment.
They do. Our ATL BuOrd staff will figure out the wiring etc.

[TheMarcksPlan]

The P-51 was rejected because it was found:

To have a poor view of the deck on approach.
A very narrow speed window for landing that would make it a difficult plane to land for average pilots.
The landing gear rebounded too much.

Arghhhh... It doesn't need to be the P-51 specifically, though each of these demerits would be diminished in the presence of a landing deck 3x longer and wider.

The point isn't about the P-51 or B-25 or He-177 or Lancaster specifically!
It's that a much-larger deck would enable operation of larger, more capable planes.
Does anyone disagree with that?

I believe I said "for example" the P51/A26 or "something like" it.

It's a bit frustrating when folks refuse to see a forest because they're arguing about what kinds of trees are there.