As the naval treaties lapsed in the late 30s, a new type of ship became possible, something more powerful than the treaty cruisers but smaller than a full-size battleship. Several nations looked into building this kind of ship, but only the US actually built them, in the form of the Alaska class large cruisers. The process of actually reaching a consensus in favor of the ships was tortuous, and things got even worse when it was time to actually design them.

Alaska on her shakedown cruise

The first batch of design studies were an interesting hybrid of cruiser and battleship practice. Unlike contemporary cruisers, they were given a proper TDS, although one designed against a 500 lb charge instead of the 700 lbs of the Iowas. The inner edge of the immune zone was set at a much shorter range than was common for battleships, as a ship operating independently might well have short-range encounters that a battleship's screen would intercept. Three of the four were to be protected against the extremely powerful 12" gun, which in turn pushed up size and led designers to use more elements of battleship practice. This formed a vicious cycle, and the largest design from the initial phase, armed with 12 12" guns, had a standard displacement of 38,700 tons, larger than the North Carolina and South Dakota classes. Another, with 9 guns and a bigger immune zone, actually had a thicker belt than the Iowas. All of these designs were rightly seen as too big, with two Iowas costing as much as three of the smallest design armored against the 12" gun. Read more...

Possibly the most controversial vessels built by the United States during WWII, the Alaska class were unique ships, somewhere between a battleship and a traditional cruiser. This hybrid status has led many to dub them battlecrusiers, although this is a reading that does not hold up in view of the history of that ship type. Instead, the role and design history of the Alaskas is best summarized by their official designation as Large Cruisers.¹²

Alaska

The Alaska class was the result of the 1936 London Treaty. The idea of a "cruiser-killer", capable of hunting down treaty cruisers but lighter and cheaper than a battleship, had long been attractive to the various navies. However, none had acted on it because of the treaties. Anything above the treaty limits for cruisers would have come out of battleship tonnage allocations, and nobody was willing to sacrifice full-size battleships to get cruiser-killers, even at a reasonably favorable exchange rate.³ The French came closest with the Dunkerque class, which was a moderately specialized design primarily intended to hunt the Deutschland class Panzerschiffe, but even these were essentially downsized battleships, with the design features and roles that implied. But after the Second London Treaty, with all restrictions on total fleet size abandoned, the USN decided the concept was worth a second look. Read more...

Gentlemen,

Since researchers at the École Polytechnique discovered Trans-Newtonian elements in the mid-30s, France has gone from strength to strength. This technology was revealed to the world in 1937 when Germany attacked us again, and we used it to comprehensively destroy their fleet in the North Sea. That war ended with Germany under French occupation, an occupation that continues to this day. We have spent the intervening years investigating these technologies, and the English and Americans have agreed to join forces under our leadership to exploit the cosmos. Now is the time for France to take her place not only among the nations, but among the stars!

So yes, the Aurora game ended up as a sequel to the RTW2 game, and it's now time to begin with the building of ships. I'm going to leave this in your hands. I've attached the starting database, so you can simply download it, unzip it, place it in your 1.12 Aurora game, and start designing vessels. Note that you'll need to design most of your own components, although I've pre-researched some basic stuff like the standard beam weapons. Post the resulting statblocks in this thread, and we as a group will decide what sort of ships we want. In some cases (transports) this should be pretty straightforward. In others (warships) it's going to require figuring out what sort of weapons we want to work with (beams, missiles, fighters), and then building the ships to use them. Feel free to do as much or as little building as you want. Also on the table is the general industrial/research direction we want to take, and the ground forces, if anyone is interested in building those. (If not, I'll just handle that myself.)

I plan to let this discussion run for the next week, with a possible extension if things haven't been settled. At that point, I'll take the general direction of the group and implement it in the master DB, then begin play. Because Aurora is a lot more free-form than RTW2, I don't have a defined time I'll play for. Probably until something interesting happens.

Do note that I plan to stay out of the discussion as much as possible, with a few exceptions. I'll audit all designs to make sure they make sense (so, for instance, a ship that's bigger than your shipyards won't be allowed) and I'll reject anything which requires too much micromanagement on my part. Yes, your 13-ship, 4-design survey squadron is very cool and would be very efficient, but running it is going to suck a lot of the fun out of the game for me, and that's bad for the longevity of the game, as well as being annoying.

In many ways, the last years of the 19th century and the first decade or so of the 20th were the golden age of coastal artillery. While the guns themselves might be no more powerful than those taken to sea, and the ability of fortifications to stand up to direct hits was dubious, weapons mounted on solid ground were far more accurate than those on a moving ship, and could thus strike at greater ranges.

A coastal battery at Port Arthur

As with previous wars, coastal defenses played an important part in the conflict between Russia and Japan. The batteries protecting the Russian base at Port Arthur were unable to prevent the surprise torpedo attack that the Japanese opened the war with, but they were quite effective at driving off a Japanese attack the next day. Despite some initial problems, these batteries continued to be effective in keeping the Japanese at bay until Port Arthur was taken from the landward side. The siege also saw the Japanese use 11" howitzers to sink most of the ships of the Russian Pacific Fleet. The fact that the Army had sunk the ships was a significant blow to the Japanese Navy, although they were able to redeem themselves at Tsushima. Read more...

Why are ships so slow? A typical trip to the store probably sees your car go faster than a typical merchant ship can, and even the fastest warship at full speed would be passed by a typical truck on the highway.⁴ For that matter, ship speeds have stayed roughly the same for at least the past half-century, if not longer.

William Froude

The basic reason for all of this is that water is very dense and pushing through it is difficult. But to understand this, we'll need to look in more detail about the sources of ship resistance, and how all of this was figured out. Before the mid-19th century, nobody was quite sure how to predict a ship's performance. Understanding of fluid dynamics wasn't nearly advanced enough to pull it off from first principles (and still isn't today) and while many people had hit on the idea of using models, they had been flummoxed by their inability to correlate the results they got at scale with full-sized ships. The problem was eventually solved by an English engineer by the name of William Froude, who began as an associate of Brunel and did important work on ship rolling in connection with Great Eastern before turning his attention to the problems of hydrodynamics. He proved that most of that resistance could be broken down into two major components: frictional resistance and wavemaking.⁵ Read more...

It's time once again for our regular Open Thread. Talk about whatever you want that isn't Culture War.

Next week, the first post in our Aurora game will go up, and you can start building ships. But before that can happen, there are a couple of details to sort out. Specifically, the name of our empire, the flag, and the naming themes for people and classes. (System theme is irrelevant because we're using real stars. Rank theme will be UK to avoid confusing everyone.) If you want lists of these, install Aurora 1.12 and take a look.

And if we want something more complicated than the default class naming themes, I'm fine with that. Something like "destroyers will be named with River names, Cruisers with Battle names, and transport ships after explorers" (all of which are separate lists in the database). I'm even willing to add custom lists to the database (just send the list as a text file, and it's trivial to load in). Flags have to come from the base game, though, because those aren't packaged in the database, and would need to be distributed separately.

We have now commenced the third round of overhauls. 2017 overhauls are A Brief History of the Battleship, the first part of my history of Iowa* and Fire Control Part 1. For 2018, we have firefighting, Underbottom Explosions, mission kills, The Last Days of the High Seas Fleet, Samar, Turret and Barbette and The Space Force and the FAA. And the 2019 overhauls are Riverine Warfare-Europe, Cluster Bombs and Leyte Gulf 75.

I recently moved to a new house, and took the chance to rearrange my library, and buy some desperately-needed new shelves. Now that I've got everything assembled, I thought it was time for a look at the reference material that forms the basis of this blog, and maybe some discussion of the process that turns it into finished posts for you to enjoy.

My desk and immediate-use bookshelves. The pictures on the wall are both from Lord Nelson. She gave me the one on the left as an anniversary present, and drew the one on the right.

And the rest of my bookshelves, at least for the library in my office. There are more books elsewhere in the house.

I did my best to set it up in a reasonably logical order, while keeping the most frequently-used stuff close to me. So the books that I can reach most easily are the Friedman warship design series. There's also some room to expand, because this is definitely not the final form of my library. But I'll walk you through the shelves as they stand in late September. Read more...

It's time once again for the traditional day when the US Navy is celebrated, chosen because it was Theodore Roosevelt's Birthday. Of course, official recognition ended in the late 40s under the perfidious influence of Louis Johnson. But I've already spent time complaining about him this year, so we'll move onto the blog anniversary.

First, I'm grateful to everyone who reads and comments. Your interest is what makes research and writing so much fun. Notable highlights include passing 100 comments on an Open Thread, the RTW2 game and the virtual meetups, which have been particularly enjoyable.

Second, there are some people I need to thank in particular. Lord Nelson, for putting up with a husband who occasionally launches on tangents about obscure naval trivia, then disappears to blog about it. Said Achmiz, for hosting and making sure I can concentrate on writing instead of having to deal with the technical stuff. Dndnrsn, for making sure what I say makes sense. And Mike Kozlowski and Suvorov, for guest-posting.

Overall, I'm not planning to change much about the blog going forward. Two posts a week seems very sustainable at my current schedule, along with the OTs and whatever Aurora stuff follows the RTW2 game. The virtual meetups are enough fun that I expect to continue them even after COVID ends, although probably at a reduced pace. COVID obviously explains the lack of in-person meetups, but I'm aching to get steel underfoot again, and I'll definitely try to do some when things get back towards normal.

Oh, and Falklands finally finished after 24 parts spread across 2.5 years. I'm quite happy with the result, and glad it's over. But we'll have to see what Year 4 brings. Thanks again for reading.

Today is the 76th anniversary of the Battle of Leyte Gulf, and as such, it's worth looking at one of the most controversial elements of the battle. The Japanese plan to counter the American landings on Leyte in the Philippines was to distract the American carriers covering the landing with a carrier force of their own coming in from the North, and then pincer the amphibious landing with two battleship forces. One of these would approach from the south, while the other would come from the west, pass through the Philippine archipelago and fall on the landing force from the north. On October 24th, both the Southern Force and Center Force were located and attacked by aircraft. Center Force took the brunt of the attack, which sunk battleship Musashi, sister to Yamato, but left the other four battleships and most of their escorting cruisers intact. Admiral Kurita, in charge of Center Force, briefly turned to the west, but resumed his course for Leyte shortly before nightfall. The Japanese Southern Force never wavered, and was destroyed that night in the last clash of big-gun warships in history.

Iowa follows other battleships of Third Fleet to sea

Shortly before Kurita turned back towards San Bernadino Strait, the route he would take to reach Leyte, Admiral Halsey's planes finally located the Japanese carrier force well to the north under Admiral Ozawa. Northern Force's job in all of this had been to draw Halsey off, but Ozawa's attempts at producing radio traffic for the Americans to intercept had failed⁶ and his force, the one the Japanese wanted the Americans to find, was actually the last to be located. Halsey immediately jumped at the bait, sending all three carrier groups under his command tearing north, planning to attack Ozawa at dawn. Based on the reports of the pilots who had attacked Center Force, he believed that it was "beyond doubt that Center Force had been badly mauled with all of its battleships and most of its heavy cruisers tremendously reduced in fighting power and life."⁷ Read more...

Gentlemen, I am sad to inform you that your time in office has finally come to an end. Your work has remained exceptional, even to the very end, but after over three decades, the latest government has decided that it is time for a new team to take over at the Ministère de la Marine. When you came into office, France was a second-rate naval power. Today, we and our British allies inarguably rule the waves. We have defeated everyone we have fought against, expanding the French Empire and ensuring the security of the seas. In an extraordinary gesture, the government has approved promotions for all of you to the rank of Grand officier in the Légion d'honneur.

I am bringing the RTW2 game to an end. It's been fun, but I've gotten tired of writing stuff up, so here we are. I do plan to continue some form of gaming, probably with Aurora, because I can dodge the worst of the problems. At some point soon, I'll play through the existing game to 1950, and provide a report of that. Also, I can upload the save file as of March 1933 if anyone wants that. Thanks to everyone who participated. Read more...