NationStates Jolt Archive

Welcome to Arendt Shipyards, a division of Arendt Arms Manufactures Ltd.

Devastation Class Dreadnought
Image (http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v297/Granzi/Arendt%20Shipyards/Dreadnaught.jpg)

Arendt Shipyards is proud to introduce the first in a series of next-generation naval vessels. The Devastation Class Dreadnought embodies a host of new technologies that renders all other battleships obsolete. She excels in traditional tasks such as providing heavy support in battlegroups or but can also be used in shore bombardment duties. Boasting superior firepower, increased armor, and new innovations such as binocular range finders, the Devastation Class brings an entirely new dimension to naval warfare.

The unique oil-burning propulsion system in the Devastation Class is a revolutionary departure from the noisy, unreliable reciprocating engines of the past. Each of her steam turbines generate an immense 18,000 horsepower in order to turn the ship’s four screws, allowing a cruising speed of 20 knots over a range of 7,200 miles. In addition, an unusually long forecastle and freeboard keeps her decks dry in bad weather.

Each dual turret is mounted upon a rotating steel barbette and is encased in sixteen inches of steel armor plate reinforced with vertical steel beams. The main guns can launch an armor piercing shell to a range of twenty-two miles with an effective range of twelve. A well-trained gun crew of thirty-eight men can achieve a maximum rate of fire of fourteen rounds in ten minutes. With each firing, the guns are designed to absorb the shock of recoil by recessing into the turrets and are rapidly brought back into position by a set of hydraulic pumps.

The Devastation Class is one of the most heavily armored vessels afloat. Notwithstanding her armored gun emplacements, special care has been taken to sheath the magazines and other vulnerable areas of the ship with additional steel plating. A fourteen-inch armored belt runs along the waterline and the deck has been protected with five inches of steel. A comprehensive flood control system hinges on the compartmentalization of the hull into twenty watertight bulkheads and the construction of a ‘torpedo bulkhead”, an internal steel wall that ran along the entire length of the ship. These improvements are sufficient to allow the Devastation Class to withstand the shock of several torpedo hits without serious damage.

Characteristics

Length: 170 meters
Beam: 35 meters
Draft: 10 meters
Speed: 20 knots cruising, 24 knots maximum
Propulsion: 8 Barson turbines linked to 20 Hamonn and Lee boilers, 4 screws
Displacement: 25,800 tons fully loaded
Crew: 762 Officers and enlisted
Armor: 16-inch steel plating on the turrets, 14-inch armor belt along the waterline, 12-inch steel plating around magazines and engines, 5-inch armored deck
Armament: Eight 14-inch Naval Guns (4 twin turrets), Eight 6-inch Rapid-fire Guns, Twenty 12-pound Close Support Guns, Six 18-inch torpedo tubes
Communications: Wireless panel
Sensors: Binocular Weapons Range Finders

Price: $500 million (adjusted for inflation)
Operating Costs: $80 million per year

(OOC: If you haven't caught on already this is a WWI-era storefront. Comments and critiques are welcome. More designs to come later.)

((I hope you don't take this as anything other than costructive criticism, which is how I mean it. Great War naval history is a particular passion of mine and I feel compelled to point out a few ways you can improve this post (and by improve, I mean make more accurate):

1) 24 miles is ~42,000 yards. Most Great War-era ships, as a result of inexperience brought on by the rapid changes in naval technology between the 1870s and 1914, prefered to keep their turrets sealed which reduced the distance a shell could be fired.

For instance, the British 13.5"/45 (as employed on Beatty's 'Cats') could elevate 20 degrees and chuck a shell ~24,000 yards (~13 miles), and this was still enough to impress on the German naval staff the inadequacy of their own 28cm/50 which in 1914 could only elevate 13.5 degrees and throw a shell ~20,000 yards.

42,000 yards is probably attainable by a 14" gun, I guess. But it would have to be able to super-elevate to a level unknown by Great War standards and only acheived by the Second World War. Even that's pushing it without rocket boosters or another '40s-era innovation.

2) Radar is a strictly post-war invention.

3) Your displacement, volume, and armor numbers don't match up. I'm using the St Vincent class (St. Vincent, Collingwood, and Vanguard) as a comparison, since at 23,000 tons fully loaded the two classes are roughly the same displacement. The St Vincents are slightly shorter (536' / ~163m), much narrower of beam (84' / ~25.5m), and carry five turrets (5x2 12") instead of four (which increases the relative armor burden from each turret system). Yet, they carry a maximum of 10" of steel on the belt and 11" on the turret faces and conning tower. In short, there's some magical weight-less steel on your ship somewhere.

4) Does your ship burn coal or oil? The speed numbers indicate coal, the range numbers oil. Oil is reasonable, but remember that while both the British and the Germans were moving towards oil, neither side introduced an oil burner in comission before the Queen Elizabeth in 1915.

Overall, this is a good start! I don't mean to be negative, just want to help =)

~Ian))

(OOC: First off, thanks for the critique. In the past I've designed mostly post-modern vessels, but since they have no RL equivalent, I thought I'd try something that could be compared to actual ships.

1. Sounds reasonable. The 24 miles is meant to be an extreme range, meaning that any shells actually thrown that far would be inaccurate at best and would stand little change of hitting pretty much anything. What I'm more interested in whether or not I got the effective range correct. I've since adjusted the range to be 21/12 miles.

2. I wasn't quite sure of that fact, thought maybe the British had an early working model before WWII. Thanks for pointing it out.

3. The wider beam is to stabilize the ship further, although I might have overdone the numbers. In addition, I've bumped up the displacement to compensate for increased armor.

4. Oil, since I didn't expect the ship to carry enough coal in its bunkers to last 7,200 miles. By WWI era I meant the time period, so I'd probably put this ship at around 1919. Is the speed too high for an oil-burning ship?)

((Of course the cost may go up with the displacement, owing to the increase in steel used... but that's really an aside. Oil is the more modern fuel, when compared with coal. If you're talking coal vs. oil, the higher speeds are always going to be fine if attributed to oil. If you made it coal-fired then you'd have to worry about top speed, but oil-fired will be fine.
Just out of curiosity, are the torpedo tubes above or below the waterline?
Also, welcome to the age of interesting military technology ;) ))

((Oh, I didn't mean to imply that your dimensions, particuarly the beam dimensions, were off. British dreadnoughts of the pre-War years were limited in beam by the width of existing dry docks and the difficulty of wrangling money out of Parliament. The Admiralty generally prefered to spend its money on new ships, even if they were unit-for-unit not as large as they theoretically could be. I don't have the numbers at my fingers right now (writing from the library), but I'd venture to guess that the Queen Elizabeths finally blew the ~80 foot limit away. You could probably look at German ships, too, but I doubt that they have a theoretical maximum of dimensions either, as they were limited by the Kiel Canal.

As for radar, I believe that it wasn't truly theorized until the late 20s and not implemented in any useful way until the mid-30s. Even then, like ASDIC, it was very much a British secret, only somewhat grasped in the United States and Germany and almost completely unknown in Japan and Italy.

If your guns can elevate to that angle, that's fine. Again, the problem isn't so much with the guns themselves, it's with your naval staff having the vision to grasp that by allowing them to elevate more than 20-25 degrees was a good thing (which, to many, it apparently wasn't as the missing armor made the turrets more vulnerable). Jackie Fisher understood it somewhat -- his credo paraphrases to "hit first, hit fast, hit hard!" -- but even he did not introduce the ~40 degree elevations you'd need to reach out to those kind of distances.

By the way, if you're sticking with Imperial measurements for these ships (as I'd recommend; most resources list contemporary ships with Imperial. Makes comparing them to RL easier), then weapon range is usually measured in yards, ship dimensions in feet, and dispacements in LONG tons (that's important to remember -- not short tons).

And the speed is fine, if even a bit slow. Oil burning battleships -- the Queen Elizabeths are a good example -- were often almost as fast as coal-burning battlecruisers. The Fifth Battle Squardon developed something on the order of 25 or 26 knots at Jutland.

Also, I'm not sure about secondary armarment, now that I read your post again. 12 pounder guns would work wonders against air attack, but no one during the Great War seriously worried about that. I think most ships carried a few 6" turrets to ward of destroyer attacks, but something as light as a 12pdr wouldn't make much impression on a 1,000 ton destroyer. I'll check on that later.

Oh, and as my friend Walmy says, welcome to the interesting era =)

~Ian))

Updated to reflect changes.
(OOC: And I think WWI ships had torpedoes above the waterline...)

Bump for more exposure.

Bump in the morning.

Bump for more replies.

From: The Lord Fenris Administration
To: Granzi

Lifesblood would like to purchase one [1] of these vessels for our purposes.

We also request that some form of tracker be placed upon the ship so we can be aware of its position at all times.

$500 million is being electronically transferred.

-Transmission End-

Official Transmission

TO: The Lord Fenris Administration
RE: Naval Purchase

We would like to thank the nation of Lifeblood for placing their trust in our merchandise. One Devastation Class Dreadnought is currently under construction and should be completed in 2 NS years time. As for your tracking device, we are able to provide a simple radio devise installed in the ship’s bridge that will periodically transmit a locator signal. We hope this meets your specifications.

Signed,

Ryan Seaburn
Director of Production
Arendt Shipyards

Bump in the afternoon.