Gentlemen,

It has been a busy year for us. We've commissioned two battleships, a carrier and 10 destroyers, and, thanks to increased tensions with Germany, laid down a carrier, two light carriers and one heavy and three light cruisers. We also refitted four of our old BCs and started a major modernization for Saint Louis. And we have a significant budget surplus even after all of that.

The biggest concern is what to do about Germany. We defeated them a few years ago, but tensions are creeping up again. Fortunately, our alliance with the British is holding strong, and we should be able to face them if necessary. As for what to do with the surplus, the staff has worked out a design for a 70-plane 28,000-ton carrier, which should be able to help give us a serious striking force against their fleet. Another issue to address is the potential escort shortage. Our 600 and 700 ton destroyers are overage, and it might be a good idea to build new corvettes to replace them. On the good news front, we also recently developed the technology for dive bombers, and have a design in work. Read more...

All guns work on the same basic principle. Something is burned inside a tube, and the burning produces gas which pushes the projectile out. Traditionally, this something was gunpowder, also known as black powder, and by extension pretty much all solid propellants¹ for guns are known as powder.

Black powder is a mix of saltpeter (potassium nitrate), sulfur and charcoal, and was discovered in China during the early 9th century. Early formulations were only useful for fireworks and incendiaries, but by the 13th century, the knowledge had spread across Eurasia and the recipe had been improved to the point that cannons as we know them today were practical. The saltpeter is the largest ingredient by weight, and provides oxygen, allowing combustion of the other two components to occur much more rapidly than would otherwise be possible. Charcoal is the main fuel, while the sulfur lowers the ignition temperature of the mixture, improving reliability. When they burn together, about 43% of the mass becomes gas, while the rest remains solid. Most of this leaves the gun as thick smoke, but some remains behind to foul the weapon. Read more...

The Hanford Site, in southeast Washington State, was one of the fruits of the Manhattan Project. It was chosen because of ready access to hydropower and cooling water from the Columbia River and a large area of land well away from the coasts. These were the necessary conditions for the site that would house the plutonium breeder reactors which produced the vital ingredient in the world's first atomic bomb.

Me with some friends in front of the main face of B Reactor

Website

Hanford's active role in plutonium production continued until 1987, but as the Cold War wound down, the government realized that it was now the largest single contaminated site in the country. Work on environmental remediation began, and continues to this day. As you'd expect, the site is not accessible to the general public, but the various organizations involved (Hanford is the subject of some truly bizarre jurisdictional overlap) run occasional guided tours on certain days over the summer, which require advance ticket reservations. At least at the time I went (summer 2015), there were three major tours: one covering the site as a whole with an emphasis on cleanup, one specifically focusing on the Manhattan Project, and one looking at the history of the site before Leslie Groves and his minions showed up. I was able to go on the first two, which is what I expect most here to be interested in. Read more...

It's time once again for our regular open thread. Talk about anything you want, so long as it isn't Culture War.

I'm going to declare this OT the occasional "suggest topics for future Naval Gazing" thread. I don't promise to actually implement any of the suggestions, but it's always helpful to get a look at what people are interested in.

Also, note that our next Naval Gazing virtual meetup will be on Saturday the 21st instead of the 14th or 15th. Sister Bean is getting married, so I'll be on the road.

2018 overhauls are The 15" Battleships, Museum Ships - United States, my pictures from Wayne E Meyer, Information, Communication and Naval Warfare Part 1, So You Want to Build a Modern Navy - Aviation Part 3 and my look at the Operational Intelligence Center in WWII. For 2019, overhauls are Wolverine and Sable, Italian Battleships in WWII, So You Want to Build a Battleship - Trials and Commissioning, How to Build a Battleship - 1942, The Maximum Battleship and the Spanish-American War Part 6.

The most powerful weapons in the world are useless if they don't hit, and during the battleship era, an incredible amount of ingenuity went into solving the problems of fire control. So far, I've covered in some detail problems like finding the range in the first place and keeping track of it during an action. But as good as those systems were, there was no real possibility until the development of radar that they would pinpoint the target closely enough to get immediate hits. For that, the gunnery team of a ship would use the best data it had, the splashes of its shells that missed the target.

Shell splashes rise near a practice target

In the early days of modern naval gunnery, it was common for each gun to fire independently. Ranges were short, and the gunner could spot his shell's impact by eye. But as ranges climbed, it became easy for a gunner to get confused about which shell was his, and apply the wrong corrections. The solution to this was salvo firing, where a group of guns were fired at once, using the same set of targeting data passed from the central transmitting station. The shells would fall in a cluster, and while hits tended to be invisible, misses raised large splashes. A spotter, usually stationed high on a ship's mast in or near the director, would track where these were and pass that information to the fire-control team, who in turn updated their solution for the target's range and motion. Read more...

In the aftermath of the Crimean War, relations between Britain and France soured. The British were particularly concerned that steam power, still a novelty, would render their traditional strategy of close blockade obsolete, and make an invasion easy to pull off. As a result, and despite experience in the Crimea suggesting that fortifications were generally overrated, a commission was set up in 1859 to determine if Britain needed new fortifications, and if so, how many. The commission recommended a large program of fortification at the ports on the south and east coasts of England, and the program was pushed through by the Prime Minister, Lord Palmerston.

Horse Sand Fort, a sea fort guarding Portsmouth

Unfortunately, this all took place right before the American Civil War gave final proof that the masonry forts which had dominated coastal defenses for the first half of the 19th century were obsolete. The so-called Palmerston Forts mostly belonged to this type, although some forts made extensive use of iron plates to supplement their masonry walls. They also introduced a gun mounting that would become common over the next half-century, the disappearing gun. This was a variant on the barbette mount which improved protection by lowering the gun entirely below the parapet for loading, then bringing it back up to fire.² This mount had a number of advantages over the casemates used by previous forts. It provided more protection to the crew, the positions themselves were cheaper and lighter to construct, because they were simple pits instead of massive masonry structures, and they were much harder for attackers to spot. It was also easier and faster to load the gun after it had been retracted than to do so in a more traditional mount. Read more...

It's almost time to resume our RTW2 game, paused for the Aurora series and my move. Below, I've included the last post from our previous game, ending in January 1929. But there is one thing I'm going to change. Instead of posting every week, I'm going to go to every other week. Posting every week doesn't really give me enough time to play and write up the game while still leaving you sufficient time to think and talk over the plans for play. This will alternate with the OTs, and be on the same weekends as the virtual meetups. (Hope to see a lot of you on Sunday, by the way.)

January 1929

Gentlemen,

It has been an interesting year. First, we laid down 10 new destroyers, with twin DP 4" guns. Then the government got a weird idea that we needed more battleships, and we ended up with three new ships, which more or less got paid for due to increased tensions with Germany. Right now, we have two battleships, a carrier, and 10 destroyers about to complete, which leaves future building programs open. The best suggestion is probably to lay down more colonial CLs, as our ships of that type are rapidly growing obsolete.

Read more...

In the aftermath of WWII, NATO saw a growing threat from the Soviet submarine fleet. Nuclear weapons were an attractive means of solving this problem, as they offset the inaccuracy caused by the "dead time" between the target being located and the weapon reaching it. The US began with nuclear depth bombs (NDBs) deployed from carrier or shore-based aircraft and helicopters. But submarines also got nuclear weapons for use against other submarines, in the form of the ASTOR torpedo and the SUBROC standoff rocket.

ASROC launcher aboard destroyer Joseph P Kennedy at Battleship Cove. Note the reload equipment and dummy rocket at lower left.

The surface fleet didn't want to be left out of the fun, and as simple NDBs were obviously ruled out due to risk of destroying the launching platform, they developed the anti-submarine rocket known as ASROC. ASROC carried either a W44 NDB, with a yield of around 10 kT, or a lightweight torpedo, either a Mk 44 or Mk 46. It was usually launched from an 8-round box launcher on deck, although some ships launched ASROC from rail launchers intended for SAMs instead. Each pair of cells would elevate individually to 45° for launch, with the rocket following a ballistic path. Range, to a maximum of 10,000 yards, was set by a timer which would separate the booster from the payload.³ If the payload was a torpedo, it would be lowered into the water via parachute, and begin to circle and hunt for the submarine. If it was the depth charge, it simply fell into the water and went off at the preset depth. Read more...

In the years after WWII, the western navies faced a crisis. The Soviets were believed to be building a massive submarine fleet, and the weapons that the US and Britain had developed to fight the U-boats would be ineffective against the faster, deeper-diving submarines derived from the German Type XXI. One obvious solution was nuclear weapons. They would certainly be useful to attack the submarine's bases, but they also offered a weapon with a lethal radius large enough to allow attacks on fast submarines despite the inevitable lag between acquiring the target and getting the weapon in position for the attack. Of course, there were drawbacks, too. Any nuclear depth bomb (NDB) would blank out sonars and threaten any nearby ships, as well as spreading radioactive contamination. As a result, no NDB was ever deployed directly from a surface ship.

The Wigwam test

The first ASW nuclear weapon was a variant of the Mk 7 that had first given tactical aircraft a nuclear strike capability, known as the Mk 90 BETTY. Work on this design began in 1952, producing a parachute-retarded weapon with a yield of 32 kT, intended to be capable of being delivered by airplane or blimp.⁴ There was still a great deal of uncertainty about weapon effects in deep water, so in mid-1955, a test designated Wigwam was conducted using a Mk 7 warhead about 500 miles southwest of San Diego. It proved that a typical submarine within about 1.3 miles of the blast would be destroyed, and the BETTY began entering service later that year. There were three fuzing options: impact (with the seabed), hydrostatic (set depth) and time. It was fitted to carrier aircraft including the F7F Tigercat, AD Skyraider and S2F Tracker, as well as land-based planes like the P5M Marlin and P2V Neptune. Read more...

It is time, as usual, for our Open Thread. Talk about whatever you want, so long as it isn't Culture War. If you want to do that, go to Data Secrets Lox, a forum set up by Said Achmiz (who also hosts Naval Gazing) that seems to be the hub of the SSC community.

Our first meetup went well, with 9 people signing on. I'm planning to hold another one on Sunday the 2nd at 3 PM Central (8 PM GMT). I'll try to have a bit more structure this time.

Also, one thing that did come up was a book recommendation. I've recently gotten into the Seaforth World Naval Review series. It's an annual that looks at developments in naval matters worldwide, and unlike other publications (such as Warship) it is focused entirely on what's going on today. Each volume has an overview of all of the major navies with in-depth profiles of 2 or 3, along with detailed coverage of a couple types of warship and some looks at specific aspects of naval technology. Volumes from a couple years ago are usually available at quite reasonable prices, and if there's something specific you want to know about, I have all but one of the previous year's volumes and can tell you which one it's in.

Overhauls from 2018 are Missouri Part 1, So You Want to Build a Modern Navy - Coast Guard Part 2, The QF Gun, Yalu River, DismalPseudoscience's review of Mikasa and German Battleships in WWII. 2019 overhauls are The Pepsi Fleet (and it turns out that the perpetrator there was all of our favorite newspaper, the New York Times), Falklands Part 16, Signalling parts three and four, my pictures of Iowa's communications gear and Lion and Vanguard.