Military procurement is a weird field. Particularly in western countries, systems are ultimately bought by a group of people who are selected by a process having nothing to do with military expertise.¹ Often, those charged with asking for systems take advantage of their confusion, with hilarious results. The most obvious examples of these can be found in what systems are called, which can greatly affect the chances of getting funding.

Super Hornets and legacy Hornets fly together

The most obvious dodge is to sell a system as an upgrade of an existing one, when in practice it's a new system that looks a lot like the old one and has the same name. The best example of this is the F/A-18E/F Super Hornet, which was sold to Congress as an evolved version of the F/A-18C/D Hornet in the early 90s. In practice, it was an entirely new aircraft, 4' longer and weighing 30% more. It just looks a lot like the legacy Hornet, which was enough to fool Congress and get the Navy an aircraft it desperately needed to revitalize the carrier strike force for the 21st century. Read more...

It's time once again for our regular open thread.

I recently finished an interesting book, The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean by David Abulafia. It's a look at the various communities that have dotted the shores of the Med throughout history, and how they used that sea to communicate. Heavy on commerce and sketches of life, rather light on battles and naval power, but still very interesting for a wider look at maritime power.

2018 overhauls are Amphibious Warfare parts two, three and four, Why Military Acquisition is So Hard, Classes and Dreadnought. 2019 overhauls are Rangekeeping Part 1, Commercial Aviation Part 7, Falklands Part 11, So You Want to Build a Battleship - Construction Part 1, Pictures - Iowa Boiler Room and German Guided Bombs Part 2. And 2020 overhauls are Aerial Cruise Missiles, Southern Commerce Raiding Part 1 and the Proximity Fuze Parts one and two.

Most of the naval propulsion systems developed in the aftermath of WWII were intended to replace steam, which had dominated the field for a century. But one alternative was intended not to replace steam, but to generate it using a different heat source. Instead of buring coal or oil, Uranium atoms would be split, giving vast quantities of heat without the need for fuel or oxygen.

Hyman Rickover

Independence from oxygen made nuclear propulsion particularly attractive for submarines, who had been searching for ways to get greater underwater endurance than was possible on batteries. A number of methods had been tested, but results had ranged from "unsuccessful" to "ludicrously dangerous".² The Navy put together a small team in 1946 to begin work on power reactors, led by an engineering officer by the name of Hyman Rickover. It proved to be an inspired choice. Rickover was a difficult man, prone to screaming at subordinates and more than a little obsessive, but also supremely effective at getting things done. He managed to set up an organization known as Naval Reactors under the joint control of the Navy and the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), which allowed him to evade many of the Navy's bureaucratic obstacles. Read more...

I've previously discussed the use of steam, diesel and gas turbines for warship propulsion. During these discussions, I've mentioned benefits and drawbacks to each, and the obvious way to deal with this is to combine them, an option I've mentioned several times. Today, such combination plants are nearly universal, and it's time to take a closer look at the various ways that different propulsion systems have been made to work together.

HMS Kent, an early COSAG ship

As there are a lot of these, it's first worth looking at the standard nomenclature used to describe them. All combination plants have a specific acronym, which starts with CO for "Combined", followed by a series of letters based on what sort of systems are being combined and how they are combined. For instance, many warships from around 1960 used a steam plant for cruising and added gas turbines for boost power, and their plants are described as Combined Steam And Gas, COSAG. Later, it became common to use one set of turbines for cruising, and take them offline when more speed was needed in favor of a second, more powerful, set of turbines, a system known as Combined Gas Or Gas, COGOG. If the same thing was done with diesels in place of the cruising turbines, it would be known as CODOG, or if both systems could work together, CODAG. Read more...

We have been in space for a decade now, and the last year has gone quite well. The AKX buy is finished, for now at least, with 10 units, and we've got over a million people on Gliese 892, with the first terraforming units being shipped out now. We've also finished adding nitrogen to the Lunar atmosphere, with oxygen addition expected to be finished within two years. It's going to take longer to make Luna fully habitable, due to the lack of surface water, but we should see infrastructure demands begin to fall within the next few years, and can also look at redeploying some of the terraforming facilities to Mars.

I'm also going to say that this is the point when we need to actually get our starting fleet fleshed out. We have 16,421 points left to spend on the various designs. These need to be restricted to tech we had at the start, with one exception. Large and Very Large fuel tanks are allowed, as those should be, IMO, unlocked at the start. To that end, I offer the Suffren class replenishment ship: Read more...

At the end of WWII, the steam turbine was the standard means of powering large warships, turning propellers with reliability and economy. Today, steam propulsion all but gone from the world's oceans, and while large warships are powered by turbines, the turbines in question are turned not by steam, but by combustion gasses.

A turbine is, at its heart, a very simple machine, one that takes high-energy fluid and extracts energy from it, producing lower-energy fluid and rotary motion. A wide variety of fluids can be used, ranging from water (in hydroelectric dams and obviously of little interest in warship propulsion) to steam to the combustion gasses produced by burning jet fuel and air at high pressure.³ The last is known as a gas turbine, and it propels not only warships but also likely the last airplane you flew in. Read more...

I've previously covered the development of naval steam propulsion systems, focusing on those used aboard battleships. But from the dawn of the 20th century, other systems were developed to push ships through the water, and today, variants of these systems dominate the marine propulsion landscape.⁴

Diesel engines are checked aboard USS San Antonio

The first serious challenger to steam was the diesel engine, which began to go to sea even before WWI. It had three major advantages over steam. First, it was significantly more efficient at turning the energy of the fuel into rotation, with diesels having two to three times the horsepower per unit weight of fuel per hour as contemporary steam engines. Second, they were easier to run and maintain, requiring fewer crew. These two advantages made diesels attractive to merchant ships, although adoption wasn't universal until after WWII. And third, they were far faster to throttle. A boiler could take an hour to produce steam from a cold start if another boiler on the ship was available, and far longer if the entire plant was cold. This often meant that warships had to operate inefficiently, with more boilers online than they needed at the moment in case demand for steam increased. Diesels could be turned on and reach full power almost immediately, then shut down just as rapidly. Read more...

It's time once again for our usual open thread. Talk about whatever you want that isn't culture war.

Scott Alexander, formerly of the blog Slate Star Codex, where Naval Gazing came from, is back, with a new Substack blog, Astral Codex Ten. And DSL is running the monthly effortpost contest, with 17 entries for January.

2018 updates are Russian Battleships Part 2, Why the Carriers Aren't Doomed Part 4, SYWTBABB - Strategic Background, Early US Battleships, Aegis and Amphibious Warfare Part 1. 2019 overhauls are the Mk 23 Katie, Commercial Aviation Part 6, the King George V Class, German Guided Bombs Part 1, The PHS Corps and my history of Wisconsin. And 2020 overhauls are Operation Crossroads and Battleship Torpedoes parts one, two and three.

The story of the lighter-than-air craft at sea is not one of success. Early attempts were not particularly successful, with the RN being a particular loser when their first rigid airship broke in half before its first flight. The Germans did somewhat better, with Zeppelins being used extensively on patrol missions in the North Sea and the Baltic. But bad weather and poor doctrine meant that they were generally not particularly effective, and the Naval Airship Division began to look for other missions.

The most obvious of these was using the Zeppelins as bombers, attacking far behind the lines. The Army had used its airships in a number of raids on targets in continental Europe, with little success and fairly heavy losses. But the Navy believed that bombing London could, in conjunction with unrestricted submarine warfare, destroy British morale and bring the country to its knees. Eventually, the Kaiser consented to the raids, provided they avoided threatening the Royal Family and instead focused on military targets. Nobody seems to have realized that the inaccuracy of bombing made this completely impossible. The first raid was carried out on January 19th, 1915, and attacked several towns in Norfolk, killing four. More raids followed throughout the year, and the Royal Navy, as traditional guardians of the British isles, was given responsibility for defending against them, although the Royal Flying Corps got into the game later on for overland interceptions. Read more...

By 1960, the age of the battleship was clearly over. Not a single one remained in active service anywhere in the world, although some of the treaty battleships still lingered on in reserve fleets. But while they were clearly outdated in fleet combat, the presence of such large, fast, and relatively young hulls drew interest for a variety of purposes.

Iowa as a Commando Ship (from Shipbucket)

One particular area of interest was an amphibious conversion. With the end of WWII and the advent of the atomic bomb, amphibious warfare was undergoing major changes, and the idea of turning a battleship into a helicopter carrier held some appeal. An early plan for the North Carolina class foundered when it was found to be more expensive and less efficient than a new-build ship, but plans for the Iowas, under the name "commando ship", lasted much longer. The basic idea was to disperse the amphibious force across more ships, to reduce vulnerability to nuclear attack, and to get the 16" guns back to sea to provide fire support, including the Mk 23 nuclear shell. Read more...