Questers
10-08-2007, 20:23
I was meaning to finish this but never did, so there you go. some of its unifnished and i don't mention some things but meh. I also lose context at some point; I dunno, whatever, just read the fucking thing.
This was typed up over the space of three days, several months ago. No, my mind hasn’t changed since then. No, Crimmond, I’m not doing this instead of posting, so don’t even bother asking.
And I was tired, so there may be mistakes.
Introduction:
The following document is an odd one: it is part treatise/essay/article, part guide/suggestion/description of battleship design. You’ll find the first parts regarding armour and armament of battleships more of an argument that vessels should be designed a certain way, and a description of this way and the argument I’ve set forth as to why. The other parts will be more of a guide, sharing the information that I know and how I apply it and how others apply it and why I apply it how I do. I hope you get something out of this, either just general knowledge or help for your NS designs, and I hope that you won’t just dismiss what I have to say because its against what’s considered “the norm”. I also hope you can tolerate my, in some cases, overbearing sarcasm. Its part of my nature, so I sometimes can’t resist slipping it in.
For several years the argument about superdreadnoughts and battleships has been brought up time and time again. Are they – or more precisely, are their big guns – worth it? After so long I have come, only recently, to the conclusion that the answer is an overwhelming no. The maximum range of the worlds best produced shells from the best produced cannons by the most accurate RADAR and most drilled crew simply cannot achieve the range, accuracy, and damage impact that a missile of similar size can. Let me assume that I can engage a target accurately at 100 kilometres with a 81cm gun – in actual fact I now find such a suggestion quite silly, but anyway, this is a third, or a sixth, of the range of a heavy SSM or bomber launched ASM. The SSM moves faster – up to mach 4 in some cases, has equal penetration with speed and penetrating tips, can defend itself with ECM, can dodge, and is guided. Yes, guided shells do exist, but when you put a rocket and a radar on a shell, what do you make? Essentially a missile with a different propellant, which is pointless and you may as well use a missile, and in any case the nature of the thing makes it less efficient anyway. I see no point in firing a missile from a cannon when you can fire it from a vertical launch cell with no drawbacks, especially when the cannon leads to a magazine which is powerful enough to destroy the ship and weighs, in the most extreme cases, more than a destroyer. Anyway, moving on…
For quite some time I have striven to make the battleship the primary capital ship, and the efforts of myself and many of my like-minded peers succeeded – mostly, I believe, in the 2005-2006 period, was the gun battleship the most popular. I have studied the battleship in depth (at least several hundred pounds worth of books on the matter, hundreds of images, internet sources, even games and documentaries [foul, FOUL TV DOCUMENTARIES]) and despite recently renewing an interest in the aircraft carrier, I still love the battleship, the Queen of the Seas. It is something I will never lose my love for, yet it is clear that the design doctrine that idolises heavy naval guns is outdated. The battleship as we see it today should not be claimed as a useful part of any Navy, sadly. Yet this does not mean that we need to scrap the idea. The resulting article, treatise, whatever, is the result of two long plane journeys and two hours in Chagki International. Make what you like of it – I don’t care if you don’t use it and I certainly don’t care if you criticise it (unless you’re a total idiot and don’t know what you’re talking about, and in that case I’ll probably tell you so), all I ask is that you read it with an open mind and consider what I have to say.
-Matt/Questers/Hogsweat
PS: There’s also a lot of pointless and irrelevant historical data I put in here just for fluff and because I thought it was interesting when I was researching. Ignore it if you like, its not too important.
Abbreviations
APWR – Advanced Pressurised Water Reactor
ASM – Air to Surface Missile
BB – Battleship
CAP – Combat Air Patrol
CONAS – Combined Nuclear and Steam
D/P – Dual Purpose
ERGM – Enhanced Rocket Guided Munitions
G4M – Questarian naval bomber
ICCM – Intercontinental Cruise Missile
HG – Heavy Gun
RORSAT – Ocean Reconnaissance Satellite
MCG – Medium Calibre Gun
Mio - Million
SAM – Surface to Air Missile
SD – Superdreadnought
SCRAMjet -
SCHG – Supercapital Heavy Gun
SSGN – Guided missile submarine
SSM – Surface to Surface Missile
TBd – Torpedo Bulkheads
UAV – Unmanned Aerial Vehicle
WTC – Watertight Compartment
And here (http://img217.imageshack.us/img217/1676/bbarmourtypesjd6.png) are the armour schemes of real battleships:
And here (http://img236.imageshack.us/img236/1789/hiqmsinvinciblebk1.png ) is what I’m proposing. You should probably read through the article then go back and look at these for easier reference.
Main Article:
The best non-ERGM naval guns can achieve perhaps a maximum of 120km range – and this isn’t an accurate figure, either, as I would say most would hope to engage between 60 and 90 kilometres and with a reliance on optics and a doctrine to close the distance, even perhaps at 20-60km. Therefore we can make the assumption any fleet commander with the intent of victory will engage with his aircraft (if he has them) and missiles before the enemy even comes close to gun range. Let’s call this Long Range Engagement. There are four main types of Long Range Engagement:
1. Surface to Surface Missiles from vessels – Sovremenny, Slava, and Kirov cruisers come to mind.
2. Air to Surface Missiles from naval bombers – Tu-95 and Tu-22M come into mind, or even Super Entendards and Skyhawks ala Falklands War.
3. Air to Surface Missiles and bombs from naval aircraft – Lots of cases. Falklands War, 1988 Operation Praying Mantis, both Gulf Wars, Konfrontasi, in any case I’m sure you know what I’m talking about here.
4. Subsurface to Surface Missiles from submarines – the Russian and American SSGNs and the SSNs that can fire these missiles – American and British mostly I believe, though only with TASM.
All these can strike from beyond gun range – some air launched missiles can’t, but the aircraft themselves obviously can and noone in their right mind is going to try engage a naval bomber with their main guns. Therefore, let us make the assumption that the majority of hits will be long range hits from missiles and most missiles are sea skimmers – if they are not, they will hit the citadel / superstructure which is rarely armoured to an appreciable degree anyway (except the conning tower). This means that the majority of hits will be to a ships belt. Ergo it must be the best protected part of the vessel – anti torpedo defences should be structural, since most air and naval branches no longer rely on direct hit torpedoes, and in any case the example I’ve chosen later on is perfectly fine at this anyway. Assuming this battleship uses HGs, attention should also be paid to the barbette and magazine protection, since this has meant the end for some of history’s great battleships – HMS Invincible, HMS [i]Hood, Yamato, etc. This perhaps is one reason for my later choice, as you will find out.
Since none of us (perhaps maybe one or two) are of the knowledge to construct our own armour scheme, and in any case it would be entirely theoretical and untested (though I suppose like many NS designs), the next best way is to rely of that of RL warships, and therefore the best and most logical approach is that of the Kriegsmarine’s Bismarck] and the United States Navy’s Iowa, as much as it absolutely pains me to admit it so. This is because, while King George V/Vanguard and Yamato were better protected vessels in regards to respective size, their design in this case favours an age of warfare that no longer exists. Bismarck was designed to fight at close range, and almost ironically, this makes her the best for the modern era, given the proliferation and great use of sea skimming weapons, and Iowa is the next most important, for one of the favoured ways of removing battleships is torpedoes, and personal judgements aside, I honestly believe the best torpedo defence goes to the American vessel. Remember, while British and German armour material may have been superior, the design is what counts, because in NS we can make arbitrarily better armour materials, so the layout design is what counts. These are the preferable methods of protection following the precedent set in the previous paragraph – as equally important, as I will discuss later, is damage control, but this is more doctrinal and drill than anything else, apart from access of movement and that really can be worked quite easily around armour and protection schemes.
Therefore, the best way to protect a battleship is really to armour it by an amalgamation of the Bismarck and the Iowa – the best protected belt and the best protected from torpedoes. Is this possible? Looking at four armour schemes, I believe it may be.
The scheme I proposed here is a mix of three of the best protected battleships which can be projected onto NS – in order of importance, Bismarck, Iowa, and Nelson. Bismarck’s armour is chosen here because of the way the it was structured meant that penetrating shells were often decapped and lost all their speed and power as, or if, they passed through the main belt and rarely got through the second or third layers of armour, especially since internally armour could be inclined by 45 degrees, whereas on the outside it usually presented only a low amount of inclination. This meant that though hundreds of heavy shells – 14” and 16”, were fired at Bismarck, only three penetrated because they were all defeated internally – it is best, in vertical armour, to stop a shell from doing any internal damage by any means, rather than just present a block of armour that a shell may either penetrate and do large amounts of damage or not penetrate – and after all, when there are missiles that can easily penetrate large blocks of armour, this is especially true. What I mean is that though a shell or missile can break through the outer, thickest layer, it loses most or all of its penetrating power and speed and is in no shape to break through the inclination and secondary layers of armour, though they may be fairly thin. This is, of course, unless the projectile is extremely fast and well designed to penetrate, SCRAMjet for instance. However, this does not mean that the armour is in any way invincible – the missile may break through the belt in such a fashion it penetrates the inclination at 0 degrees rather than 45, or it may just hit at such an angle it will smash through whatever the thickness. However, the method I just outlined is, quite simply, the best armour scheme possible. Interestingly enough it was actually used first on the British Nelson and Rodney and was later copied by the French and Americans, though not as well, and to give them credit I very much doubt the Germans knew these ships armour workings well enough to copy them when they designed Scharnhorst and Gneisenau and later Bismarck.
The Iowa’s underwater protection plays the second most important part here. The triple bottom vastly helps against and from torpedo attacks, the fact that the edges and corners of the armour protrude inwards means that the belt armour is flush with the hull – eg, straight, unlike most battleships (this actually is a feature on Nelson too, though I daresay it didn’t help them – they were slower than a Pentium II trying to run Supreme Commander), where there are all sorts of bumps and protrusions. I will try get front views of Yamato, Bismarck, Warspite, and North Carolina to show you the difference between ships that had a belt flush with the deck (Iowa and Nelson most specifically) but its not really all that relevant. Thirdly, the Nelson Class. Now, consider that this design of armour is optimised for anything of 200,000 tons plus – the three tiered system would mean each tier is too weak, even the main armour, on a smaller ship. If it is used on anything less than 200,000 tons, it would probably be ideal to simply cut out the first tier of armour and move back the inner TBds – cut out the third or second TBd to make space. Removing the first tier of armour would really remove any influence of the Nelson itself– designwise at least, though historically it is still impressed into the ships armour layout. Anyway, assuming a 200,000 ton plus ship, here is the influence of the Nelson. Firstly, the outer plating helps reduce the impact velocity even before the projectile hits the main belt. It is part of the armour system – like used in Bismarck – that when the shell penetrates through the main armour it has lost most of its impact velocity. This is known as the “turtle design”. The shell is then harmless against the internal inclined armour (which constitutes the third tier, in this design). However, given the massive beam increases of ships over 200,000 tons, there is no reason to suggest that the main belt itself (which constitutes the second tier, in this design) cannot be inclined if an outer plating is placed around it – the other important effects this outer plating, which constitutes the first tier, is as follows: One, it increases ease of construction, since the internal belt does not need to follow the shape of the hull, two it makes the belt flush with the deck (in theory at least – after battle the shape of the weaker outer layer may not be flush anymore), and three it provides a first layer – a decapping layer, so to speak, though it doesn’t necessarily decap, only weaken the velocity, effectively massively increasing the efficiency of the “turtle design” by providing the effect of the main belt before the projectile even hits the main belt. This is what was used on the Nelson, though the Nelson didn’t have a third tier – its beam was too small and all three armour tiers would have to be significantly weaker because of the displacement, which as mentioned isn’t an issue on a 200,000 ton plus ship. The Bismarck didn’t have the first tier – only the third and second, which really isn’t a problem on anything below the 200,000 ton mark, but when exceeding this range, it stands to reason that the two schemes could easily be integrated and the defence of the ship vastly increased, especially with the inclination of the main belt (second tier). This perhaps is one of the reasons why the Nelson and Bismarck were among a few of the very best protected battleships in history. Whether this scheme of armour, with the right amount of thickness, would stand up to missiles as well as it would stand up to shells is yet to be seen, and though I doubt that it makes an effective barrier to a heavy SSM – as I doubt anything does – I have yet to see an alternative method that could be as effective, which is why I am using this in my own Navy – As usual, I have no problem with anyone else using it either, unless they claim this piece of writing as their own, or take undeserved credit.
That then, is the design layout of the belt armour – the next most important is the actual makeup of the armour itself. Materialwise, the best material is steel. There is no substitute – the age of foam and fire extinguisher and all sorts of materials as part of armour layers is no longer. Titanium isn’t great – while it may be light, it also sets fire, and in any case isn’t as durable under the stress of a missile attack as correctly formed steel, which is the point of armour. If you want to design your armour to set alight when a missile explodes rather than penetrating it, thats your choice, but steel is the best material. Tungsten is extremely heavy and extremely expensive and is best used in transverse beams to hold up the ship, as I would think it would be far too heavy/expensive for longitudinals and perhaps it has a use in TBds, but I personally would just stick to steel. The Japanese used NVNC – New Vickers Non-Cemented, for most of their steel, the Americans used STS (Standard Steel, I think), the British cemented and HT, and the Germans used Wh and Ww (No idea what this is) and Krupp Cemented. It appears that cemented armour is only used on barbettes and in some ships, the deck armour or most things horizontal. I discovered that there was actually a historical KNC armour – Krupp Nickel Something, so for the record “KNC” in my designs stands for Kure Naval Composite, not whatever the German Navy used : P. In conclusion, Cemented (carbonised, basically) and non-cemented steel should make up the vast majority of your armour, not titanium and tungsten composites or alloys and mixtures of foam and whatnot – battleships armour is designed to take hits like a wall, not be soft and bendy like a pillow. Also, if you need to use wood, teak is an extremely strong wood – I have heard that when they tried to look inside the Bismarck in 2001, they had to get special equipment to cut through the teak, so that stuff is strong as hell (obviously not strong enough to take missile hits – its not 1805 ; ))
Next to be covered is deck armour. Deck armour, also referred to as horizontal, is whatever protects the deck from attack from above, mostly bombs or plunging missiles. No, I am not going to tell you how to stop a ship from being damaged by kinetic strikes – I won’t even mention these in this piece of writing again. While I already outlined why I believe the belt is the most important piece of armour and therefore should be the thickest and best protected, the deck is also important because it would be a fallacy to assume it would take no hits. Therefore, the proposal I make for armour is that the deck should protected to the extent that it stops major internal damage, on the assumption that it can not be heavy enough to resist anything greater and in any case the high penetrative value of missiles means it couldn’t be thick enough whatever the displacement, assuming you want any belt armour at all. Unless a missile is targeted directly from above, any hits will come in at an angle already, which means that flat armour is actually inclined for the purposes of a hit. It would therefore be counterproductive to either incline the armour, or make the assumption the enemy will do his utmost to get right on top of a ship – suicide for any pilot – to make an attack simply to get a higher chance of penetrating the deck armour. In any case, this means the deck armour is best flat, especially in regards to ease of construction and general layout. As you can see from the design – I will show it again [here], there is a three layer approach. However, one part, nearest to the superstructure, is thicker. There are two reasons for this: one, any hit outside this part comes under the effect of the belt armour’s third tier and therefore a thicker deck isn’t as necessary, and secondly because it would be too heavy to make this level of armour throughout the deck anyway. Therefore let us say that on a 250,000t design the thicker part would be 21cm of armour and the thinner part 14cm. The next two layers under the 21cm would be 11 and 5cm respectively, noting that the more the missile or shell penetrates into these layers the more they are going to lower its impact velocity until the final penetration, assuming it is achieved, will do little damage inside that can not be absorbed by WTCs and dedicated damage control teams. Assuming a timed fuse the shell or missile might explode in-between these parts anyway, doing no real internal damage – the same holds true for the belt armour. Right below each section of armour is a splinter deck which catches any rivets or splinters in the armour and holds them where they are broken, keeping the structure of the armour in better shape. This was adopted by the Japanese in the Yamato and in other ships around the world – in fact its quite useful in nationstates where often I imagine armoured ships use small plates rather than large ones for ease of repair especially on the larger ships and were the decks are so cluttered that lots of individual plates are necessary to hold everything in position.
Damage control is equally important as armour, for the key reason that in an age were heavy missiles – the three I would identify here, the Rufous, Lance, and SS-25 SOVEREIGN (noting that Khan is more of an ICCM than an SSM and given its range, speed, and payload it penetrates anything and everything, which is probably the source of its notoriety) – carry warheads over a thousand kilograms at speeds in excess of mach 2, and can be stored and fired in great number, a ships armour is bound to be penetrated at some point or another and perhaps even quite quickly. It is therefore absolutely necessary that well drilled and trained and experienced damage control teams with correct equipment and access of movement around the key points of a ship are available, because a heavily armed and armoured ship is pointless if it cannot be kept alive, and past penetration of armour, damage control crews keep ships afloat while it begins to strike back. While even though its one of my Navy’s specialities, I’m quite ignorant on the matter of damage control, since its rarely covered as a topic in the sources I read (damn you Breyer and Skulski!), I can share a few key concepts: One, that strong bulkheads with both electrical and mechanical triggers are important to stop the spread of flooding. The Prince of Wales was one of the first British capital ships to be fitted with electrical controls over mechanical and I cannot begin to imagine how pissed off the damage control crews were when its main power battery was knocked out at the very beginning of the Japanese attack, especially considering how much the Admiralty was prone to taking new ideas (electrical power on ships, in this case) and exaggerating their application to dangerous levels, the most stupid of these I believe caused the tactical loss at Jutland (lol fritz y u close ur gun lockers ????? OSHI-) luckily, for some of us at least, the Admiralty had gigantic financial and economic support and it did have some outstanding designers which made some outstanding ships. Anyway, I am once again going off into an irrelevant topic.
Another key feature of damage control is access. Crew need to move around the ship quickly and freely to do their job and get to their stations – on the Hood for example they designed the WTCs around the machinery so that the damage control crew could get in and out easily and safely, not that it did them any good. As well, some ships have or had bilges were water is located and that can be flooded out in case of a flooding on one side – lets say three WTCs are flooded on the port side, the equal volume of water on the starboard side will be pumped out by the bulges to bring the list to 0 degrees. There are also pumps that pump water out of flooded compartments, though you should remember that if you’ve let water out on one side to balance the ship, removing the water that entered on the other side will just make the ship list again, though on the opposite side of the ship. Furthermore, this can’t always be maintained, especially if or when the bilge runs out of water or if you don’t put a bilge in in the first place, in which case you’ll have to flood WTCs on the other side to maintain balance. This, of course, lowers the ship in the water and if you do it too much – eventually even with bilges you’ll have to resort to doing it – the ship will eventually obviously take on too much water and sink. Also remember that the more water the ship takes on the lower its freeboard and higher its draught, but not from a design point of view, which means that it actually hurts maneouvrability, and if your list is high enough with a low freeboard you’ll capsize. This is especially important in tight turns. Again, with tight turns and a high list you can either capsize the ship or balance it out, depending on the direction of turn. You could theoretically balance a ship’s list by making a continuous sharp turn, though no doubt making your ship go in circles for the sake of reducing its list harms you much more than it helps you. Naturally, this is all in theory, in practice it would be much different to how I have described it, but practice can only be guessed and theory can be estimated or calculated.
No battleship, irrelevant of the protection, is useful without weapons. It is armament that defines the battleship – that makes it what it is, really, even if the protection is in some ways more important. For so long the primary armament of the Battleships of the World has been its guns. From all the famous designers their battleships are equipped with large naval heavy guns and in some cases, swaths of MCGs and D/P guns. I personally believe that it is now time that we move on from this doctrine of design, and here I am going to outline why it is my opinion that gun based capital ships are a thing of the past and will stay that way. Yes, it’s a radical change of mind from somebody I know more than a few people see as the biggest proponent of gun-armed vessels in NS, but whatever. If you want to question why, or suggest I have ulterior motives rather than question what I am about to propose then go ahead. I really see no point, but its your choice. From somebody that specialises in naval guns, this is a painful but necessary change.
The most important reason why, is range. Here I’ve compiled a number of anti shipping missiles, some NS, some RL, and foundthat the range of the oldest and weakest – the Exocet – still exceeds that of most naval guns.
This means that the battleship can easily be struck by missiles from well outside its gun range, sometimes, accounting for maneuovre fuel, in a figure of six or seven times its gun range. Thirty Tu-95’s can take off from an airbase with two Kh-22s each, be guided to an approximate location of an enemy battleship by RORSAT and with drones or top down RADAR on the missiles themselves or the aircraft RADAR can engage with 60 missiles moving over Mach 2 with a X KG HE warhead. If this battleship has no fighter cover it is unlikely it can even fire back. With a sufficient destroyer escort, many of the missiles may be shot down, but some will make it through and cause heavy damage, perhaps even critical damage. The Tu-95s head for home to refuel and re-arm.
To finish the job, a pair of SSGNs surface 60km away. An accompanying Tu-95 with the correct equipment is feeding them the location of the American battleship and its escorts and the SSGNs fire 24 sea skimming missiles which use their own sensors to locate the correct target and engage it, finally detonating a magazine, sinking the ship, or making it strategically and tactically incapable: one of the three will achieve the same end result, albeit with slightly different consequences. Now, NSify this situation:
Three hundred G4Ms take off from an airbase. Each carries two AS8A ASMs. They are accompanied by the same number of fighters (either from land or carriers, its mostly irrelevant) and some refueling aircraft that refuel the fighters before they come near the enemy air bracket – these refueling planes will hang around far outside the combat zone to assist after the battle is over. Also accompanying the group is a number of AWACs aircraft which are also backed up by naval recon satellites. At four hundred kilometres, the escort fighters clash with the enemy’s CAP, holding them from engaging the bombers, though some bombers are lost. At three hundred kilometres, out of interception range, the G4Ms launch their missiles – some staggered, some concentrated, and some will drop to 15 metres above sea level to engage, whereas some will hold a medium altitude to plunge. Accounting for losses, 500 missiles are launched, each moving at over Mach 3 with a n X KG warhead with a tungsten penetrator. The sea skimmers slip under the enemy RADAR until the last minute and score multiple hits across the superdreadnought’s belt, and the high altitude missiles are mostly destroyed, though some score hits and knock out a turret and some sensors. The aircraft pull out to rearm, and with minimal losses, the enemy warship has been heavily damaged, perhaps even sunk if its escorts are weakly armed or incompetently crewed. Even with good escorts the ship may be useless as the missile have struck and completely ruined its targeting arrays, meaning its guns can’t be aimed apart from optic rangefinders. Maybe its sea search RADARs were knocked out and the ship is incapable of detecting enemy vessels. Yet, this could be done to an aircraft carrier or any other ship, but with one critical factor:
In neither scenario could the battleship engage the attacking enemy with its primary weapons, eg, guns. Assuming an SD on SD combat, the SD that scores the most missile hits will win: 4,000 heavy missiles like the ones described previously will be of much, much more importance than the same number of shells (no, HGs aren’t Lara Croft’s pistols – they do run out of ammunition). Each of these missiles is much more capable of hitting the enemy than a 33” gun, because of their range, and even with rocket projectiles, superior speed and vastly superior accuracy. There’s no escaping this fact – though strong SAMs and point defence and flak barrages may help you, in the end they are all irrelevant when your primary armament can not engage, or has been knocked out. Missile hits against barbettes can destroy a ship by penetrating into its magazine, which is why the barbette is the heaviest armoured part of a vessel. I’ve no doubt that a dozen Khans could penetrate an SD, or heavy BB’s, gun barbette and score a critical magazine explosion, even going so far as knocking out the ship. Yet, barbettes, and large, concentrated stores of 7 ton shells are something not found on a ship without naval guns, though I’ll admit they do exist on aircraft carriers. Nevertheless, on a vessel with its main strike armament as vertically, or even horizontally/inclined launched missiles such as Kirov or even Arleigh Burke, to achieve the effects of a magazine explosion is near impossible.
Which is why my proposal are that future battleships must be armed entirely, or almost entirely, with vertically launched heavy missiles, perhaps slightly heavier than the Sunburn or its NS equivalents. I know, I know, what when you run out of missiles? Well, duh. What about when you run out of shells? Assuming a 3~ mio superdread with 20 30” guns, each gun will have, say 120 rounds. That’s 2400 rounds total. If you wanted to replace these turrets, there’s no doubt you could get that many vertically launched missiles, especially if you double stack them. I estimate that the Navies that are best drilled in accuracy can get an accuracy one fifth of that of a RADAR guided missile – the worst navies maybe even one tenth or perhaps one fifteenth (How to i Shot shell???? Aka hatarian navy), especially when engaging at ranges over the horizon. Here we can clearly see that the “well, if you only arm your ships with missiles, what do you do when you run out of guns!” argument is a fallacy, since you can fit more missiles than shells on a ship, especially when using SCHGs, and in any case missiles are far more accurate and are far more likely to hit: shells too can be shot down, especially large ones like 30”, and missiles can be fitted with countermeasures or can dodge SAMs. I can’t see a 30” shell dodging much and actually hitting anything afterwards.
Next fallacy: If you lose your RADAR, you can’t fire your missiles! This is why guns are better, because they can be optically guided at what in modern warfare is essentially point blank range, assuming the weather is good and your enemy actually allows you to close the 200 kilometres neccessary! WRONG. There are many, many types of missiles that can be guided by UAVs, can be tracked by escorting ships, or can use their own RADAR to engage the enemy after being pointed in the right direction by satellites. Can you redirect a shell to accurate hit a target by a UAV? Another ship? Another satellite? Well, yes you can. After you put a rocket booster, fins, and a RADAR on it. Oh, wait, you just made a missile that is still vastly less accurate and still much slower. Now consider that I don’t even have to destroy your targeting systems to make your guns worthless, I can actually jam them instead to the same effect. I don’t even need to fire a shot to stop your guns from tracking and engaging with RADAR, which really says something about their guidance reliability.
Next fallacy: Oh, well, shells are vastly better at penetrating even though they hit their target at slightly above mach 1 and some missiles hit theirs at mach 3-4, but the shell makes up for this by being pointy, having an armour piercing cap which is quite obviously impossible for a missile, and uh… its just somehow better at penetrating. WRONG. Impact velocity is extremely important, in fact I believe it to be the most important factor in armour penetration. When a missile has a scale factor of, say, 3.5 that of a shell in impact velocity, what does this tell you about a shell? It hits the target slower, is absorbed by void spacing and turtle armour easier, and against large single plates of armour it might not penetrate anyway, whereas in such a situation the missile would easily chop right through the armour and explode inside. Both missiles and shells can have armour piercing tips with tungsten penetrators and whatnot, however, the missiles penetrator hits at three times the speed of the shells, making it much more efficient at its job.
Next fallacy: YEA BUT IF I MAKE MY BB STELTHY U WILL NOT HIT IT: WRONG. You want to make a 3 million ton ship stealthy? Piss off. An escort or a cruiser or a standard battleship, alright. Not a superdreadnought. Besides, again, unless you plan to engage with only optics, a stealthy ship will be harder to target with naval guns, too, given that shells don’t just go “Oh, its stealthy. It doesn’t matter to me even though I use the same basic principle of targeting that a missile does apart from the fact I don’t move in flight.”
The last thing I would like to cover is propulsion of a ship and water resistance, some basic things that you may or may not already know which can help you anyway. The quickest and most efficient way of decreasing water resistance is by installing a bulbous bow – Yamato’s decreased water resistance by 7%, and that was one of if not the first capital ship fitted with one. Transom sterns, I believe, decrease water resistance at high speeds by tricking the water into believing the ship is longer than it actually is, but not wider. A belt that is flush with the deck – eg, forms a 90 degree angle, decreases water resistance too. In regards to nuclear or conventional, some prefer conventional for the usual higher dash speeds giving a tactically faster ship, some prefer nuclear for strategically faster and more sustainable. I myself prefer mixed nuclear conventional, which basically allows you a degree of strategic sustainability with comparatively high dash speeds. Some will argue they can make a ship equally as fast with nuclear propulsion. The best choice in my opinion for a nuclear engine is the APWR, though as Vault 10 pointed out, the advanced tag won’t stay for long.
This is the best choice for naval warfare simply because nuclear reactors are large, and in general any space and weight saving measures that can be made where efficiency is not lower accordingly must be implemented, and especially in regards to machinery. Given that pebblebed offers nothing better than APWR and is considerably heavier I would choose APWR over pebblebed, though it’s by no means obsolete or pointless. Navies that make extremely heavy use of nuclear reactors: I can name offhand the Imperial Scandavian and the Incorporated Sarzonian Navies prefer pebblebed because of said reasons. Ultimately it’s up to you but this document, because it is written by me, favours the use of APWR and CONAS for the reasons I’ve laid out before.
Types and parts of propulsion are many, and I’ll go into detail and list them here: this part of the document has become more of a guide or an information piece as opposed to actual objective essay, which isn’t such a bad thing, though you will always find pieces of my bias in this work, so don’t take everything I say as correct gospel. There are two types of propulsion used by battleships: conventional and nuclear. Generally speaking, conventional is gas or fuel, and nuclear is nuclear. The hybrid, used by the Soviets, is combined nuclear and steam, which I’ll explain later. All ships contain several key parts of propulsion: reactor or turbine, boilers, turbogenerators, shafts, props or pumpjets and rudders. In a nuclear propelled ship your reactor is the nuclear reactor, be it pebblebed or APWR. In a conventional ship the turbines are the fuel turbines – for example, in the case of the Bismarck, the 3 Blohm and Voss Parsons Type turbines. In the case of Bismarck, they used three different types of turbines, each one having a different type of pressure and being known as High Pressure, Intermediate Pressure, and Low Pressure (HP/IP/LP) each connected to a single reduction gearbox. In the case of Hood, which had four turbines (It didn’t use the Parsons type turbine like most British ships and the Bismarck – the designers chose an impulse turbine, licensed from the American Curtis type), with two low pressure and one high pressure. The Japanese too used this configuration in the Yamato; with four Kanpon boilers. In the American Iowa used turbines manufactured by General Electric, so did its sister Missouri, whereas the New Jersey and Wisconsin used Westinghouse turbines. In any case, that was mostly irrelevant, only proving to show that a four-turbine setup was common. Given that battleships like Queen Elizabeth that weighed only 26,000tons used four turbines, in comparison to the mighty Yamato which weighed almost three times as much but used the same number of turbines. We can see there that it would probably be possible to keep the turbine number of a 250,000 ton battleship, the number I now see as optimum, at maybe six turbines – there’s no need for any more and in any case the number of turbines almost always matches the number of props, so six would suffice. When it comes to nuclr reactors:
Turbo generators are used by conventional ships to generate electricity; generally they’re not installed on ships with nuclear reactors because using the “power station” doctrine the nuclear reactor provides power to the vessel instead, so turbo generators aren’t necessary. I won’t pretend this makes up for the massive increase in weight, however. On a CONAS ship, there are usually turbo generators fitted since the nuclear reactor is typically only for propulsion and not for anything else, seeing as it isn’t big enough to service the ship like a full on nuclear vessel would. Turbo generators are usually diesel powered. Shafts are the tubes that send the power from the turbines to the props or the pumpjets to power the ship – the propellers and pumpjets are what actually moves the ship through the water and the turbines, boilers, and shafts move the power to turn them. The rudders are what turns the ship; the modern battleships, Iowa, South Dakota and Bismarck especially have two parallel rudders, one on the port and one the starboard, which I believe increases maneuoverability. [i]Yamato[i] had an auxiliary rudder, which they really didn’t want to put in and when they did they found out it wasn’t strong enough to move the ship anyway, making the whole thing pretty pointless. Coincidentally, this is an overwhelmingly American and German design protocol; I can’t find any traces of a double ruddered British battleship or battlecruiser, and none to a Japanese either, except in regards to Yamato’s auxiliary rudder. All four German WW2 capital ships had two rudders, and all American battleships from North Carolina onwards did too. Breyer lists two Japanese ships with a pair of rudders; the Yamato class and the B-65 battlecruiser project, and says that on both ships the two rudders were abaft of each other, whereas Skulski’s more modern source claims that the second rudder was auxiliary as I claimed earlier. The fact they put this auxiliary rudder on the B-65 perhaps shows that the B-65’s auxiliary wasn’t as useless as Yamato’s reserve, so putting faith into one or two auxiliary rudders in a superdreadnought probably isn’t such a bad idea.
The last thing I’d like to talk about is aircraft. Most battleships ended up carrying spotter aircraft and in NS it is uncommon to see BBs with UAVs or helos. What I rely don’t like are battleships and SDs with air complements – one critical difference between a battleship and an aircraft carrier is that a battleship is designed to take hits. Aircraft decks are not, and having them on a battleship is a waste of space and is a liability. Your aircraft carriers should be doing the task of providing air support, not your battleships. UAVs are critical to naval warfare in that they are very very very useful in guiding your missiles and some can have godly endurance once in the air. They also provide extended RADAR coverage for battleships if their sensors are knocked out or simply just to act as smaller AWACs. Helos are useful because they can provide light ASW cover for a battleship in the case it has to travel alone, so I would suggest that if possible you allow space for at least one or two, and definetly for a few UAVs. In general though, the age of the Doujin style SD with large air complements is over – I see less and less of these type of ship as time goes on and
There’s really not else much I have to say. I’ve gone way over what I intended in this piece, both in words and subject. You can take what you like from this, but in the end everything (almost everything) is just theory. Very little of what I have talked about will ever be proven and perhaps that’s for the best. However, I hope that some people at least considered what I had to say before they start ranting at me.
This was typed up over the space of three days, several months ago. No, my mind hasn’t changed since then. No, Crimmond, I’m not doing this instead of posting, so don’t even bother asking.
And I was tired, so there may be mistakes.
Introduction:
The following document is an odd one: it is part treatise/essay/article, part guide/suggestion/description of battleship design. You’ll find the first parts regarding armour and armament of battleships more of an argument that vessels should be designed a certain way, and a description of this way and the argument I’ve set forth as to why. The other parts will be more of a guide, sharing the information that I know and how I apply it and how others apply it and why I apply it how I do. I hope you get something out of this, either just general knowledge or help for your NS designs, and I hope that you won’t just dismiss what I have to say because its against what’s considered “the norm”. I also hope you can tolerate my, in some cases, overbearing sarcasm. Its part of my nature, so I sometimes can’t resist slipping it in.
For several years the argument about superdreadnoughts and battleships has been brought up time and time again. Are they – or more precisely, are their big guns – worth it? After so long I have come, only recently, to the conclusion that the answer is an overwhelming no. The maximum range of the worlds best produced shells from the best produced cannons by the most accurate RADAR and most drilled crew simply cannot achieve the range, accuracy, and damage impact that a missile of similar size can. Let me assume that I can engage a target accurately at 100 kilometres with a 81cm gun – in actual fact I now find such a suggestion quite silly, but anyway, this is a third, or a sixth, of the range of a heavy SSM or bomber launched ASM. The SSM moves faster – up to mach 4 in some cases, has equal penetration with speed and penetrating tips, can defend itself with ECM, can dodge, and is guided. Yes, guided shells do exist, but when you put a rocket and a radar on a shell, what do you make? Essentially a missile with a different propellant, which is pointless and you may as well use a missile, and in any case the nature of the thing makes it less efficient anyway. I see no point in firing a missile from a cannon when you can fire it from a vertical launch cell with no drawbacks, especially when the cannon leads to a magazine which is powerful enough to destroy the ship and weighs, in the most extreme cases, more than a destroyer. Anyway, moving on…
For quite some time I have striven to make the battleship the primary capital ship, and the efforts of myself and many of my like-minded peers succeeded – mostly, I believe, in the 2005-2006 period, was the gun battleship the most popular. I have studied the battleship in depth (at least several hundred pounds worth of books on the matter, hundreds of images, internet sources, even games and documentaries [foul, FOUL TV DOCUMENTARIES]) and despite recently renewing an interest in the aircraft carrier, I still love the battleship, the Queen of the Seas. It is something I will never lose my love for, yet it is clear that the design doctrine that idolises heavy naval guns is outdated. The battleship as we see it today should not be claimed as a useful part of any Navy, sadly. Yet this does not mean that we need to scrap the idea. The resulting article, treatise, whatever, is the result of two long plane journeys and two hours in Chagki International. Make what you like of it – I don’t care if you don’t use it and I certainly don’t care if you criticise it (unless you’re a total idiot and don’t know what you’re talking about, and in that case I’ll probably tell you so), all I ask is that you read it with an open mind and consider what I have to say.
-Matt/Questers/Hogsweat
PS: There’s also a lot of pointless and irrelevant historical data I put in here just for fluff and because I thought it was interesting when I was researching. Ignore it if you like, its not too important.
Abbreviations
APWR – Advanced Pressurised Water Reactor
ASM – Air to Surface Missile
BB – Battleship
CAP – Combat Air Patrol
CONAS – Combined Nuclear and Steam
D/P – Dual Purpose
ERGM – Enhanced Rocket Guided Munitions
G4M – Questarian naval bomber
ICCM – Intercontinental Cruise Missile
HG – Heavy Gun
RORSAT – Ocean Reconnaissance Satellite
MCG – Medium Calibre Gun
Mio - Million
SAM – Surface to Air Missile
SD – Superdreadnought
SCRAMjet -
SCHG – Supercapital Heavy Gun
SSGN – Guided missile submarine
SSM – Surface to Surface Missile
TBd – Torpedo Bulkheads
UAV – Unmanned Aerial Vehicle
WTC – Watertight Compartment
And here (http://img217.imageshack.us/img217/1676/bbarmourtypesjd6.png) are the armour schemes of real battleships:
And here (http://img236.imageshack.us/img236/1789/hiqmsinvinciblebk1.png ) is what I’m proposing. You should probably read through the article then go back and look at these for easier reference.
Main Article:
The best non-ERGM naval guns can achieve perhaps a maximum of 120km range – and this isn’t an accurate figure, either, as I would say most would hope to engage between 60 and 90 kilometres and with a reliance on optics and a doctrine to close the distance, even perhaps at 20-60km. Therefore we can make the assumption any fleet commander with the intent of victory will engage with his aircraft (if he has them) and missiles before the enemy even comes close to gun range. Let’s call this Long Range Engagement. There are four main types of Long Range Engagement:
1. Surface to Surface Missiles from vessels – Sovremenny, Slava, and Kirov cruisers come to mind.
2. Air to Surface Missiles from naval bombers – Tu-95 and Tu-22M come into mind, or even Super Entendards and Skyhawks ala Falklands War.
3. Air to Surface Missiles and bombs from naval aircraft – Lots of cases. Falklands War, 1988 Operation Praying Mantis, both Gulf Wars, Konfrontasi, in any case I’m sure you know what I’m talking about here.
4. Subsurface to Surface Missiles from submarines – the Russian and American SSGNs and the SSNs that can fire these missiles – American and British mostly I believe, though only with TASM.
All these can strike from beyond gun range – some air launched missiles can’t, but the aircraft themselves obviously can and noone in their right mind is going to try engage a naval bomber with their main guns. Therefore, let us make the assumption that the majority of hits will be long range hits from missiles and most missiles are sea skimmers – if they are not, they will hit the citadel / superstructure which is rarely armoured to an appreciable degree anyway (except the conning tower). This means that the majority of hits will be to a ships belt. Ergo it must be the best protected part of the vessel – anti torpedo defences should be structural, since most air and naval branches no longer rely on direct hit torpedoes, and in any case the example I’ve chosen later on is perfectly fine at this anyway. Assuming this battleship uses HGs, attention should also be paid to the barbette and magazine protection, since this has meant the end for some of history’s great battleships – HMS Invincible, HMS [i]Hood, Yamato, etc. This perhaps is one reason for my later choice, as you will find out.
Since none of us (perhaps maybe one or two) are of the knowledge to construct our own armour scheme, and in any case it would be entirely theoretical and untested (though I suppose like many NS designs), the next best way is to rely of that of RL warships, and therefore the best and most logical approach is that of the Kriegsmarine’s Bismarck] and the United States Navy’s Iowa, as much as it absolutely pains me to admit it so. This is because, while King George V/Vanguard and Yamato were better protected vessels in regards to respective size, their design in this case favours an age of warfare that no longer exists. Bismarck was designed to fight at close range, and almost ironically, this makes her the best for the modern era, given the proliferation and great use of sea skimming weapons, and Iowa is the next most important, for one of the favoured ways of removing battleships is torpedoes, and personal judgements aside, I honestly believe the best torpedo defence goes to the American vessel. Remember, while British and German armour material may have been superior, the design is what counts, because in NS we can make arbitrarily better armour materials, so the layout design is what counts. These are the preferable methods of protection following the precedent set in the previous paragraph – as equally important, as I will discuss later, is damage control, but this is more doctrinal and drill than anything else, apart from access of movement and that really can be worked quite easily around armour and protection schemes.
Therefore, the best way to protect a battleship is really to armour it by an amalgamation of the Bismarck and the Iowa – the best protected belt and the best protected from torpedoes. Is this possible? Looking at four armour schemes, I believe it may be.
The scheme I proposed here is a mix of three of the best protected battleships which can be projected onto NS – in order of importance, Bismarck, Iowa, and Nelson. Bismarck’s armour is chosen here because of the way the it was structured meant that penetrating shells were often decapped and lost all their speed and power as, or if, they passed through the main belt and rarely got through the second or third layers of armour, especially since internally armour could be inclined by 45 degrees, whereas on the outside it usually presented only a low amount of inclination. This meant that though hundreds of heavy shells – 14” and 16”, were fired at Bismarck, only three penetrated because they were all defeated internally – it is best, in vertical armour, to stop a shell from doing any internal damage by any means, rather than just present a block of armour that a shell may either penetrate and do large amounts of damage or not penetrate – and after all, when there are missiles that can easily penetrate large blocks of armour, this is especially true. What I mean is that though a shell or missile can break through the outer, thickest layer, it loses most or all of its penetrating power and speed and is in no shape to break through the inclination and secondary layers of armour, though they may be fairly thin. This is, of course, unless the projectile is extremely fast and well designed to penetrate, SCRAMjet for instance. However, this does not mean that the armour is in any way invincible – the missile may break through the belt in such a fashion it penetrates the inclination at 0 degrees rather than 45, or it may just hit at such an angle it will smash through whatever the thickness. However, the method I just outlined is, quite simply, the best armour scheme possible. Interestingly enough it was actually used first on the British Nelson and Rodney and was later copied by the French and Americans, though not as well, and to give them credit I very much doubt the Germans knew these ships armour workings well enough to copy them when they designed Scharnhorst and Gneisenau and later Bismarck.
The Iowa’s underwater protection plays the second most important part here. The triple bottom vastly helps against and from torpedo attacks, the fact that the edges and corners of the armour protrude inwards means that the belt armour is flush with the hull – eg, straight, unlike most battleships (this actually is a feature on Nelson too, though I daresay it didn’t help them – they were slower than a Pentium II trying to run Supreme Commander), where there are all sorts of bumps and protrusions. I will try get front views of Yamato, Bismarck, Warspite, and North Carolina to show you the difference between ships that had a belt flush with the deck (Iowa and Nelson most specifically) but its not really all that relevant. Thirdly, the Nelson Class. Now, consider that this design of armour is optimised for anything of 200,000 tons plus – the three tiered system would mean each tier is too weak, even the main armour, on a smaller ship. If it is used on anything less than 200,000 tons, it would probably be ideal to simply cut out the first tier of armour and move back the inner TBds – cut out the third or second TBd to make space. Removing the first tier of armour would really remove any influence of the Nelson itself– designwise at least, though historically it is still impressed into the ships armour layout. Anyway, assuming a 200,000 ton plus ship, here is the influence of the Nelson. Firstly, the outer plating helps reduce the impact velocity even before the projectile hits the main belt. It is part of the armour system – like used in Bismarck – that when the shell penetrates through the main armour it has lost most of its impact velocity. This is known as the “turtle design”. The shell is then harmless against the internal inclined armour (which constitutes the third tier, in this design). However, given the massive beam increases of ships over 200,000 tons, there is no reason to suggest that the main belt itself (which constitutes the second tier, in this design) cannot be inclined if an outer plating is placed around it – the other important effects this outer plating, which constitutes the first tier, is as follows: One, it increases ease of construction, since the internal belt does not need to follow the shape of the hull, two it makes the belt flush with the deck (in theory at least – after battle the shape of the weaker outer layer may not be flush anymore), and three it provides a first layer – a decapping layer, so to speak, though it doesn’t necessarily decap, only weaken the velocity, effectively massively increasing the efficiency of the “turtle design” by providing the effect of the main belt before the projectile even hits the main belt. This is what was used on the Nelson, though the Nelson didn’t have a third tier – its beam was too small and all three armour tiers would have to be significantly weaker because of the displacement, which as mentioned isn’t an issue on a 200,000 ton plus ship. The Bismarck didn’t have the first tier – only the third and second, which really isn’t a problem on anything below the 200,000 ton mark, but when exceeding this range, it stands to reason that the two schemes could easily be integrated and the defence of the ship vastly increased, especially with the inclination of the main belt (second tier). This perhaps is one of the reasons why the Nelson and Bismarck were among a few of the very best protected battleships in history. Whether this scheme of armour, with the right amount of thickness, would stand up to missiles as well as it would stand up to shells is yet to be seen, and though I doubt that it makes an effective barrier to a heavy SSM – as I doubt anything does – I have yet to see an alternative method that could be as effective, which is why I am using this in my own Navy – As usual, I have no problem with anyone else using it either, unless they claim this piece of writing as their own, or take undeserved credit.
That then, is the design layout of the belt armour – the next most important is the actual makeup of the armour itself. Materialwise, the best material is steel. There is no substitute – the age of foam and fire extinguisher and all sorts of materials as part of armour layers is no longer. Titanium isn’t great – while it may be light, it also sets fire, and in any case isn’t as durable under the stress of a missile attack as correctly formed steel, which is the point of armour. If you want to design your armour to set alight when a missile explodes rather than penetrating it, thats your choice, but steel is the best material. Tungsten is extremely heavy and extremely expensive and is best used in transverse beams to hold up the ship, as I would think it would be far too heavy/expensive for longitudinals and perhaps it has a use in TBds, but I personally would just stick to steel. The Japanese used NVNC – New Vickers Non-Cemented, for most of their steel, the Americans used STS (Standard Steel, I think), the British cemented and HT, and the Germans used Wh and Ww (No idea what this is) and Krupp Cemented. It appears that cemented armour is only used on barbettes and in some ships, the deck armour or most things horizontal. I discovered that there was actually a historical KNC armour – Krupp Nickel Something, so for the record “KNC” in my designs stands for Kure Naval Composite, not whatever the German Navy used : P. In conclusion, Cemented (carbonised, basically) and non-cemented steel should make up the vast majority of your armour, not titanium and tungsten composites or alloys and mixtures of foam and whatnot – battleships armour is designed to take hits like a wall, not be soft and bendy like a pillow. Also, if you need to use wood, teak is an extremely strong wood – I have heard that when they tried to look inside the Bismarck in 2001, they had to get special equipment to cut through the teak, so that stuff is strong as hell (obviously not strong enough to take missile hits – its not 1805 ; ))
Next to be covered is deck armour. Deck armour, also referred to as horizontal, is whatever protects the deck from attack from above, mostly bombs or plunging missiles. No, I am not going to tell you how to stop a ship from being damaged by kinetic strikes – I won’t even mention these in this piece of writing again. While I already outlined why I believe the belt is the most important piece of armour and therefore should be the thickest and best protected, the deck is also important because it would be a fallacy to assume it would take no hits. Therefore, the proposal I make for armour is that the deck should protected to the extent that it stops major internal damage, on the assumption that it can not be heavy enough to resist anything greater and in any case the high penetrative value of missiles means it couldn’t be thick enough whatever the displacement, assuming you want any belt armour at all. Unless a missile is targeted directly from above, any hits will come in at an angle already, which means that flat armour is actually inclined for the purposes of a hit. It would therefore be counterproductive to either incline the armour, or make the assumption the enemy will do his utmost to get right on top of a ship – suicide for any pilot – to make an attack simply to get a higher chance of penetrating the deck armour. In any case, this means the deck armour is best flat, especially in regards to ease of construction and general layout. As you can see from the design – I will show it again [here], there is a three layer approach. However, one part, nearest to the superstructure, is thicker. There are two reasons for this: one, any hit outside this part comes under the effect of the belt armour’s third tier and therefore a thicker deck isn’t as necessary, and secondly because it would be too heavy to make this level of armour throughout the deck anyway. Therefore let us say that on a 250,000t design the thicker part would be 21cm of armour and the thinner part 14cm. The next two layers under the 21cm would be 11 and 5cm respectively, noting that the more the missile or shell penetrates into these layers the more they are going to lower its impact velocity until the final penetration, assuming it is achieved, will do little damage inside that can not be absorbed by WTCs and dedicated damage control teams. Assuming a timed fuse the shell or missile might explode in-between these parts anyway, doing no real internal damage – the same holds true for the belt armour. Right below each section of armour is a splinter deck which catches any rivets or splinters in the armour and holds them where they are broken, keeping the structure of the armour in better shape. This was adopted by the Japanese in the Yamato and in other ships around the world – in fact its quite useful in nationstates where often I imagine armoured ships use small plates rather than large ones for ease of repair especially on the larger ships and were the decks are so cluttered that lots of individual plates are necessary to hold everything in position.
Damage control is equally important as armour, for the key reason that in an age were heavy missiles – the three I would identify here, the Rufous, Lance, and SS-25 SOVEREIGN (noting that Khan is more of an ICCM than an SSM and given its range, speed, and payload it penetrates anything and everything, which is probably the source of its notoriety) – carry warheads over a thousand kilograms at speeds in excess of mach 2, and can be stored and fired in great number, a ships armour is bound to be penetrated at some point or another and perhaps even quite quickly. It is therefore absolutely necessary that well drilled and trained and experienced damage control teams with correct equipment and access of movement around the key points of a ship are available, because a heavily armed and armoured ship is pointless if it cannot be kept alive, and past penetration of armour, damage control crews keep ships afloat while it begins to strike back. While even though its one of my Navy’s specialities, I’m quite ignorant on the matter of damage control, since its rarely covered as a topic in the sources I read (damn you Breyer and Skulski!), I can share a few key concepts: One, that strong bulkheads with both electrical and mechanical triggers are important to stop the spread of flooding. The Prince of Wales was one of the first British capital ships to be fitted with electrical controls over mechanical and I cannot begin to imagine how pissed off the damage control crews were when its main power battery was knocked out at the very beginning of the Japanese attack, especially considering how much the Admiralty was prone to taking new ideas (electrical power on ships, in this case) and exaggerating their application to dangerous levels, the most stupid of these I believe caused the tactical loss at Jutland (lol fritz y u close ur gun lockers ????? OSHI-) luckily, for some of us at least, the Admiralty had gigantic financial and economic support and it did have some outstanding designers which made some outstanding ships. Anyway, I am once again going off into an irrelevant topic.
Another key feature of damage control is access. Crew need to move around the ship quickly and freely to do their job and get to their stations – on the Hood for example they designed the WTCs around the machinery so that the damage control crew could get in and out easily and safely, not that it did them any good. As well, some ships have or had bilges were water is located and that can be flooded out in case of a flooding on one side – lets say three WTCs are flooded on the port side, the equal volume of water on the starboard side will be pumped out by the bulges to bring the list to 0 degrees. There are also pumps that pump water out of flooded compartments, though you should remember that if you’ve let water out on one side to balance the ship, removing the water that entered on the other side will just make the ship list again, though on the opposite side of the ship. Furthermore, this can’t always be maintained, especially if or when the bilge runs out of water or if you don’t put a bilge in in the first place, in which case you’ll have to flood WTCs on the other side to maintain balance. This, of course, lowers the ship in the water and if you do it too much – eventually even with bilges you’ll have to resort to doing it – the ship will eventually obviously take on too much water and sink. Also remember that the more water the ship takes on the lower its freeboard and higher its draught, but not from a design point of view, which means that it actually hurts maneouvrability, and if your list is high enough with a low freeboard you’ll capsize. This is especially important in tight turns. Again, with tight turns and a high list you can either capsize the ship or balance it out, depending on the direction of turn. You could theoretically balance a ship’s list by making a continuous sharp turn, though no doubt making your ship go in circles for the sake of reducing its list harms you much more than it helps you. Naturally, this is all in theory, in practice it would be much different to how I have described it, but practice can only be guessed and theory can be estimated or calculated.
No battleship, irrelevant of the protection, is useful without weapons. It is armament that defines the battleship – that makes it what it is, really, even if the protection is in some ways more important. For so long the primary armament of the Battleships of the World has been its guns. From all the famous designers their battleships are equipped with large naval heavy guns and in some cases, swaths of MCGs and D/P guns. I personally believe that it is now time that we move on from this doctrine of design, and here I am going to outline why it is my opinion that gun based capital ships are a thing of the past and will stay that way. Yes, it’s a radical change of mind from somebody I know more than a few people see as the biggest proponent of gun-armed vessels in NS, but whatever. If you want to question why, or suggest I have ulterior motives rather than question what I am about to propose then go ahead. I really see no point, but its your choice. From somebody that specialises in naval guns, this is a painful but necessary change.
The most important reason why, is range. Here I’ve compiled a number of anti shipping missiles, some NS, some RL, and foundthat the range of the oldest and weakest – the Exocet – still exceeds that of most naval guns.
This means that the battleship can easily be struck by missiles from well outside its gun range, sometimes, accounting for maneuovre fuel, in a figure of six or seven times its gun range. Thirty Tu-95’s can take off from an airbase with two Kh-22s each, be guided to an approximate location of an enemy battleship by RORSAT and with drones or top down RADAR on the missiles themselves or the aircraft RADAR can engage with 60 missiles moving over Mach 2 with a X KG HE warhead. If this battleship has no fighter cover it is unlikely it can even fire back. With a sufficient destroyer escort, many of the missiles may be shot down, but some will make it through and cause heavy damage, perhaps even critical damage. The Tu-95s head for home to refuel and re-arm.
To finish the job, a pair of SSGNs surface 60km away. An accompanying Tu-95 with the correct equipment is feeding them the location of the American battleship and its escorts and the SSGNs fire 24 sea skimming missiles which use their own sensors to locate the correct target and engage it, finally detonating a magazine, sinking the ship, or making it strategically and tactically incapable: one of the three will achieve the same end result, albeit with slightly different consequences. Now, NSify this situation:
Three hundred G4Ms take off from an airbase. Each carries two AS8A ASMs. They are accompanied by the same number of fighters (either from land or carriers, its mostly irrelevant) and some refueling aircraft that refuel the fighters before they come near the enemy air bracket – these refueling planes will hang around far outside the combat zone to assist after the battle is over. Also accompanying the group is a number of AWACs aircraft which are also backed up by naval recon satellites. At four hundred kilometres, the escort fighters clash with the enemy’s CAP, holding them from engaging the bombers, though some bombers are lost. At three hundred kilometres, out of interception range, the G4Ms launch their missiles – some staggered, some concentrated, and some will drop to 15 metres above sea level to engage, whereas some will hold a medium altitude to plunge. Accounting for losses, 500 missiles are launched, each moving at over Mach 3 with a n X KG warhead with a tungsten penetrator. The sea skimmers slip under the enemy RADAR until the last minute and score multiple hits across the superdreadnought’s belt, and the high altitude missiles are mostly destroyed, though some score hits and knock out a turret and some sensors. The aircraft pull out to rearm, and with minimal losses, the enemy warship has been heavily damaged, perhaps even sunk if its escorts are weakly armed or incompetently crewed. Even with good escorts the ship may be useless as the missile have struck and completely ruined its targeting arrays, meaning its guns can’t be aimed apart from optic rangefinders. Maybe its sea search RADARs were knocked out and the ship is incapable of detecting enemy vessels. Yet, this could be done to an aircraft carrier or any other ship, but with one critical factor:
In neither scenario could the battleship engage the attacking enemy with its primary weapons, eg, guns. Assuming an SD on SD combat, the SD that scores the most missile hits will win: 4,000 heavy missiles like the ones described previously will be of much, much more importance than the same number of shells (no, HGs aren’t Lara Croft’s pistols – they do run out of ammunition). Each of these missiles is much more capable of hitting the enemy than a 33” gun, because of their range, and even with rocket projectiles, superior speed and vastly superior accuracy. There’s no escaping this fact – though strong SAMs and point defence and flak barrages may help you, in the end they are all irrelevant when your primary armament can not engage, or has been knocked out. Missile hits against barbettes can destroy a ship by penetrating into its magazine, which is why the barbette is the heaviest armoured part of a vessel. I’ve no doubt that a dozen Khans could penetrate an SD, or heavy BB’s, gun barbette and score a critical magazine explosion, even going so far as knocking out the ship. Yet, barbettes, and large, concentrated stores of 7 ton shells are something not found on a ship without naval guns, though I’ll admit they do exist on aircraft carriers. Nevertheless, on a vessel with its main strike armament as vertically, or even horizontally/inclined launched missiles such as Kirov or even Arleigh Burke, to achieve the effects of a magazine explosion is near impossible.
Which is why my proposal are that future battleships must be armed entirely, or almost entirely, with vertically launched heavy missiles, perhaps slightly heavier than the Sunburn or its NS equivalents. I know, I know, what when you run out of missiles? Well, duh. What about when you run out of shells? Assuming a 3~ mio superdread with 20 30” guns, each gun will have, say 120 rounds. That’s 2400 rounds total. If you wanted to replace these turrets, there’s no doubt you could get that many vertically launched missiles, especially if you double stack them. I estimate that the Navies that are best drilled in accuracy can get an accuracy one fifth of that of a RADAR guided missile – the worst navies maybe even one tenth or perhaps one fifteenth (How to i Shot shell???? Aka hatarian navy), especially when engaging at ranges over the horizon. Here we can clearly see that the “well, if you only arm your ships with missiles, what do you do when you run out of guns!” argument is a fallacy, since you can fit more missiles than shells on a ship, especially when using SCHGs, and in any case missiles are far more accurate and are far more likely to hit: shells too can be shot down, especially large ones like 30”, and missiles can be fitted with countermeasures or can dodge SAMs. I can’t see a 30” shell dodging much and actually hitting anything afterwards.
Next fallacy: If you lose your RADAR, you can’t fire your missiles! This is why guns are better, because they can be optically guided at what in modern warfare is essentially point blank range, assuming the weather is good and your enemy actually allows you to close the 200 kilometres neccessary! WRONG. There are many, many types of missiles that can be guided by UAVs, can be tracked by escorting ships, or can use their own RADAR to engage the enemy after being pointed in the right direction by satellites. Can you redirect a shell to accurate hit a target by a UAV? Another ship? Another satellite? Well, yes you can. After you put a rocket booster, fins, and a RADAR on it. Oh, wait, you just made a missile that is still vastly less accurate and still much slower. Now consider that I don’t even have to destroy your targeting systems to make your guns worthless, I can actually jam them instead to the same effect. I don’t even need to fire a shot to stop your guns from tracking and engaging with RADAR, which really says something about their guidance reliability.
Next fallacy: Oh, well, shells are vastly better at penetrating even though they hit their target at slightly above mach 1 and some missiles hit theirs at mach 3-4, but the shell makes up for this by being pointy, having an armour piercing cap which is quite obviously impossible for a missile, and uh… its just somehow better at penetrating. WRONG. Impact velocity is extremely important, in fact I believe it to be the most important factor in armour penetration. When a missile has a scale factor of, say, 3.5 that of a shell in impact velocity, what does this tell you about a shell? It hits the target slower, is absorbed by void spacing and turtle armour easier, and against large single plates of armour it might not penetrate anyway, whereas in such a situation the missile would easily chop right through the armour and explode inside. Both missiles and shells can have armour piercing tips with tungsten penetrators and whatnot, however, the missiles penetrator hits at three times the speed of the shells, making it much more efficient at its job.
Next fallacy: YEA BUT IF I MAKE MY BB STELTHY U WILL NOT HIT IT: WRONG. You want to make a 3 million ton ship stealthy? Piss off. An escort or a cruiser or a standard battleship, alright. Not a superdreadnought. Besides, again, unless you plan to engage with only optics, a stealthy ship will be harder to target with naval guns, too, given that shells don’t just go “Oh, its stealthy. It doesn’t matter to me even though I use the same basic principle of targeting that a missile does apart from the fact I don’t move in flight.”
The last thing I would like to cover is propulsion of a ship and water resistance, some basic things that you may or may not already know which can help you anyway. The quickest and most efficient way of decreasing water resistance is by installing a bulbous bow – Yamato’s decreased water resistance by 7%, and that was one of if not the first capital ship fitted with one. Transom sterns, I believe, decrease water resistance at high speeds by tricking the water into believing the ship is longer than it actually is, but not wider. A belt that is flush with the deck – eg, forms a 90 degree angle, decreases water resistance too. In regards to nuclear or conventional, some prefer conventional for the usual higher dash speeds giving a tactically faster ship, some prefer nuclear for strategically faster and more sustainable. I myself prefer mixed nuclear conventional, which basically allows you a degree of strategic sustainability with comparatively high dash speeds. Some will argue they can make a ship equally as fast with nuclear propulsion. The best choice in my opinion for a nuclear engine is the APWR, though as Vault 10 pointed out, the advanced tag won’t stay for long.
This is the best choice for naval warfare simply because nuclear reactors are large, and in general any space and weight saving measures that can be made where efficiency is not lower accordingly must be implemented, and especially in regards to machinery. Given that pebblebed offers nothing better than APWR and is considerably heavier I would choose APWR over pebblebed, though it’s by no means obsolete or pointless. Navies that make extremely heavy use of nuclear reactors: I can name offhand the Imperial Scandavian and the Incorporated Sarzonian Navies prefer pebblebed because of said reasons. Ultimately it’s up to you but this document, because it is written by me, favours the use of APWR and CONAS for the reasons I’ve laid out before.
Types and parts of propulsion are many, and I’ll go into detail and list them here: this part of the document has become more of a guide or an information piece as opposed to actual objective essay, which isn’t such a bad thing, though you will always find pieces of my bias in this work, so don’t take everything I say as correct gospel. There are two types of propulsion used by battleships: conventional and nuclear. Generally speaking, conventional is gas or fuel, and nuclear is nuclear. The hybrid, used by the Soviets, is combined nuclear and steam, which I’ll explain later. All ships contain several key parts of propulsion: reactor or turbine, boilers, turbogenerators, shafts, props or pumpjets and rudders. In a nuclear propelled ship your reactor is the nuclear reactor, be it pebblebed or APWR. In a conventional ship the turbines are the fuel turbines – for example, in the case of the Bismarck, the 3 Blohm and Voss Parsons Type turbines. In the case of Bismarck, they used three different types of turbines, each one having a different type of pressure and being known as High Pressure, Intermediate Pressure, and Low Pressure (HP/IP/LP) each connected to a single reduction gearbox. In the case of Hood, which had four turbines (It didn’t use the Parsons type turbine like most British ships and the Bismarck – the designers chose an impulse turbine, licensed from the American Curtis type), with two low pressure and one high pressure. The Japanese too used this configuration in the Yamato; with four Kanpon boilers. In the American Iowa used turbines manufactured by General Electric, so did its sister Missouri, whereas the New Jersey and Wisconsin used Westinghouse turbines. In any case, that was mostly irrelevant, only proving to show that a four-turbine setup was common. Given that battleships like Queen Elizabeth that weighed only 26,000tons used four turbines, in comparison to the mighty Yamato which weighed almost three times as much but used the same number of turbines. We can see there that it would probably be possible to keep the turbine number of a 250,000 ton battleship, the number I now see as optimum, at maybe six turbines – there’s no need for any more and in any case the number of turbines almost always matches the number of props, so six would suffice. When it comes to nuclr reactors:
Turbo generators are used by conventional ships to generate electricity; generally they’re not installed on ships with nuclear reactors because using the “power station” doctrine the nuclear reactor provides power to the vessel instead, so turbo generators aren’t necessary. I won’t pretend this makes up for the massive increase in weight, however. On a CONAS ship, there are usually turbo generators fitted since the nuclear reactor is typically only for propulsion and not for anything else, seeing as it isn’t big enough to service the ship like a full on nuclear vessel would. Turbo generators are usually diesel powered. Shafts are the tubes that send the power from the turbines to the props or the pumpjets to power the ship – the propellers and pumpjets are what actually moves the ship through the water and the turbines, boilers, and shafts move the power to turn them. The rudders are what turns the ship; the modern battleships, Iowa, South Dakota and Bismarck especially have two parallel rudders, one on the port and one the starboard, which I believe increases maneuoverability. [i]Yamato[i] had an auxiliary rudder, which they really didn’t want to put in and when they did they found out it wasn’t strong enough to move the ship anyway, making the whole thing pretty pointless. Coincidentally, this is an overwhelmingly American and German design protocol; I can’t find any traces of a double ruddered British battleship or battlecruiser, and none to a Japanese either, except in regards to Yamato’s auxiliary rudder. All four German WW2 capital ships had two rudders, and all American battleships from North Carolina onwards did too. Breyer lists two Japanese ships with a pair of rudders; the Yamato class and the B-65 battlecruiser project, and says that on both ships the two rudders were abaft of each other, whereas Skulski’s more modern source claims that the second rudder was auxiliary as I claimed earlier. The fact they put this auxiliary rudder on the B-65 perhaps shows that the B-65’s auxiliary wasn’t as useless as Yamato’s reserve, so putting faith into one or two auxiliary rudders in a superdreadnought probably isn’t such a bad idea.
The last thing I’d like to talk about is aircraft. Most battleships ended up carrying spotter aircraft and in NS it is uncommon to see BBs with UAVs or helos. What I rely don’t like are battleships and SDs with air complements – one critical difference between a battleship and an aircraft carrier is that a battleship is designed to take hits. Aircraft decks are not, and having them on a battleship is a waste of space and is a liability. Your aircraft carriers should be doing the task of providing air support, not your battleships. UAVs are critical to naval warfare in that they are very very very useful in guiding your missiles and some can have godly endurance once in the air. They also provide extended RADAR coverage for battleships if their sensors are knocked out or simply just to act as smaller AWACs. Helos are useful because they can provide light ASW cover for a battleship in the case it has to travel alone, so I would suggest that if possible you allow space for at least one or two, and definetly for a few UAVs. In general though, the age of the Doujin style SD with large air complements is over – I see less and less of these type of ship as time goes on and
There’s really not else much I have to say. I’ve gone way over what I intended in this piece, both in words and subject. You can take what you like from this, but in the end everything (almost everything) is just theory. Very little of what I have talked about will ever be proven and perhaps that’s for the best. However, I hope that some people at least considered what I had to say before they start ranting at me.