You're making me want to watch this now, and I hate you for it.
I watched it back when it was on Netflix. It's a low-budget mockbuster, but the story is *much* more plausible overall and is pleasantly free of any massive plot holes.
The Future of Current Battleships
- Thread starter Bacle
- Start date
I watched it back when it was on Netflix. It's a low-budget mockbuster, but the story is *much* more plausible overall and is pleasantly free of any massive plot holes.
Francis Urquhart
Well-known member
Let's see. Exaggerated ram bow, extreme tumblehome, undersized gun turrets with oversized barrels, idiosyncratic gun layout, overlarge superstructure. Definitely French 1880s. Back in (IIRC) Tony Preston and I were ambling around the Navy League show when we came across a model of the SC-21 (predecessor of the DDG-1000 that made even less sense). Tony took one look at it and said "Dupuy de Lome." Then spent half an hour explaining to the hapless company representative what the Dupuy de Lome was, why almost every aspect of her design had been a catastrophic blunder and why SC-21 had repeated every one of them.Point of order. The Zumwalts look like this:
Francis Urquhart
Well-known member
Made worse by the fact that we can't automate a steam plant, We tried, it failed. As I pointed out earlier, the steam plant in the Iowas is an 600 pounds per square inch with a maximum superheater outlet temperature of 850 °F. This was shared by the LHA-1 class and the first seven LHD-1 class ships - which is why the experience with the attempted automation of the steam plant on the LHAs is crucial. What made the Iowas possible was that the machinery from the two cancelled IOwas was used to power a class of four AOEs so we had people trained on that machinery.
Indeed so. It wasn't just material and crew; the ships themselves were at the end of their tether. They were 1930s ships being brought forward into a different age. Their habitability was nowhere close to modern standards and 1980s sailors really disliked the accommodation. What 21st century sailors would think of them is indescribable. By and large, their equipment fits were made up from leftovers and residue from procurement programs that had been cut back. Ironically the Carter years actually helped their since so many naval building projects had been axed or cut back, there was a lot of spare kit available. The museum ships were stripped of everything that was useful and still the Iowas were so short of unique kit that they had to have spare parts custom made for them (and that was eye-wateringly expensive).
Last edited:
It was still a dwindling number of older sailors by the 1980s reactivation, since the battleships and those AOEs were the only ships still using WWII-era 600 PSI steam plants as opposed to the postwar-era plants I mentioned, i.e. the 1200 PSI "D Type" boiler setups (there was also a 600 PSI variant of the "D Type" that was refitted to certain older vessels). But it's still massively easier to retrain someone who knows a "D" boiler setup than someone who hasn't ever worked steam plants at all. The operating characteristics of gas turbine engines are completely different.
D
Deleted member
Guest
Actually the steam plant on the Sacramento class is a plot point in the ISOT novel I am releasing here.
Except that the overly large gun barrels are hidden behind stealth domes which look like sonar domes, and the massive superstructure looks like a giant submarine sail. All she needs are some dive planes.
Francis Urquhart
Well-known member
We had that in the Royal Navy in the 1970s when gas turbine ships were just starting to join the fleet. engineering officers brought up on steam couldn't understand how gas turbines differed from anything they were used to and their operating practices stank. Caused major problems and eventually all we could do was shuffle the steam officers off to ships that still used that technology and take gas turbine trained officers straight out of school. The result was that the steam officers could see their careers were over and left while the gas turbine officers got seriously accelerated promotion.
This was also the root of yet another problem for the Iowas. The personnel took one look at those ships and realized that their uniqueness and obsolete systems made them career-killers. There was quite literally nowhere else to go once one's tour on them was over. So everybody who could badgered their detailers to arrange "anything but them". The battleships quickly became Omega Postings for people too dumb to realize their Navy career had just ended or were "hard cases" nobody else wanted. Of course that reputation meant nobody else in the fleet wanted anybody who had served on a battleship.
Francis Urquhart
Well-known member
So, we can compromise on a submarine built by the French in the 1880s?????
D
Deleted member 18
Guest
The advantages of a nuclear powered escort force for the CVNs seems so obvious I'm curious what the dispute is even over? Difficulty training up all the necessary nuclear-rated technicians, the higher upfront program costs, conflicts with allies, concerns about them sustaining battle damage?
D
Deleted member
Guest
Dupuy de Lome, for context.
Francis Urquhart
Well-known member
All of the above is a start. However, there are some more fundamental issues. (Don't get me wrong by the way, I'm a serious supporter of nuclear power for major surface combatants)
One is design. In a warship we use the fuel load to trim the ship. If she's bow or stern heavy or has a slight list, we can modify the disposition of the fuel load to compensate. What is more we can do this on a constant, iterative basis so that the ship remains smoothly trimmed all the time. Nuclear-powered ships don't have fuel loads so trimming and retrimming them is something that is a pain. The design has to be got right first time and careful supervision of construction standards is essential if they are going to stay right. That's expensive and it results in an inflexible ship that is hard to modernize. This is why the nuclear cruisers in the 1990s weren't upgraded or rebuilt.
As an example, the German F-125 frigates had a design error that gave them a 2.5 degree list to port. That may not sound much but its the sort of thing that gets the chief designer taken out into the car-park and beaten with canes. The problem has been fixed by, guess what, jiggling with the fuel load and fine-tunes by some minor internal changes. We couldn't do that with a nuclear-powered ship, at least not that easily.
Another issue is operational cycling. Basically, no matter whether nuclear or conventionally-powered, an operationally deployed carrier needs to be resupplied with food and munitions every three days. If push comes to shove, she can refuel her escorts herself but that's not smiled upon. The point is, the unrep ships carry fuel as well so since they are feeding and bombing-up the carrier, they might as well do the escorts at the same time. What this means is that the operational advantages of a nuclear-powered screen are less than one might think.
Then we have acceleration. This is seriously important. Nuclear-powered ships are basically steam ships with a reactor replacing the boilers. They handle like steam ships and that means it takes time for them to go from cold iron to enough power to get out to sea. One figure available is that it can take six hours to go from cold iron to operational deployment. It also takes time for them to accelerate. Gas turbine ships handle like muscle cars. They can start up almost instantly and can be under way just as fast. They can accelerate and decelerate quickly which makes them maneuverable. What this means is a gas turbine ship can be out of harbor fast which can be very important if something nasty is coming in.
By the way, this has an interesting bearing on the DF-21D. That's the Chinese "anti-ship ballistic missile". Now, guess what, that missile is NOT intended to hit ships at sea. It's intended to blow them up in port which is quite a different thing. It does place importance on getting out of port fast though.
The cost issue is an important thing. As a rought ball-park, there is a $400 million price premium on giving a ship nuclear power. That's a flat-rate charge; it doesn't really matter too much how much the ship actually costs otherwise. Build a 3,000 ton frigate will cost around $400 million; give it nuclear power and the bill becomes $800 million. A 6,000 ton frigate will cost around $700 million, the nuclear powered version $1.1 billion. A 9,000 ton destroyer costs around $900 million. with nuclear power $1,3 billion. A 100,000 ton aircraft carrier costs around $10 billion; with nuclear power around $10.4 billion.
In other words, the cost penalty of nuclear power gets significantly less important as ship size goes up. This makes small Surface combatants look very unappealing since they are right at the point where they are most heavily penalized by that cost. In US Navy terms, if we had a putative nuclear-powered Arleigh Burke, building it as an escort for the CVNs will reduce the screen by one ship. Now, we have to ask ourselves, do we want our CVN escorted by four DDGNs or five DDGs? That's a good point of debate.
Then we have the time taken to refuel nuclear-powered ships. They do not require fuelling often but when they do, it takes a long time (2 - 3 years) and costs a fortune. In some ways that's artificial since we do a lot of work in that refueling period but that brings problems all of its own especially at a time when the speed of weapons and sensors development is picking up. essentially, waiting for half a ship's life to pass before upgrading her weapons and sensors (and battle management system) is no longer acceptable - but pulling nuclear powered ship in between refuelings wastes precious tween refueling life.
Harlock
I should have expected that really
very 40k
Dupuy de Lome, for context.
I do recall a nice video speaking about what the French got right and wrong, mostly wrong, but I suppose it's all a learning experience
If we are ragging on submarines, we have to find a way to insult the Germans somehow.
@Francis Urquhart, while this might sound silly, does a combined gas-turbine/nuke plant make sense at some point?
D
Deleted member
Guest
Arguably why not just combined nuclear-diesel? Then you don't have the volumetric waste that is the massive air intakes and uptakes for a gas turbine that are its main weakness. For high speed and economical cruising you use the nuke; for everything else the diesels.
P.S. isn't that fixed cost per reactor so since we use redundant reactors our modern nukes are really about a $800 M premium on a carrier?
P.S. isn't that fixed cost per reactor so since we use redundant reactors our modern nukes are really about a $800 M premium on a carrier?
KIROV had a mixed dino-nuke plant. How well does that work, is it worth stealing/refining, etc?
Francis Urquhart
Well-known member
These are called flume tanks and are used to control roll etc. The anti-roll system is quite valuable although these days we tend to use stabilizing fins instead. The system you suggest has several drawbacks for warship use. One is that it consumes internal volume that is at a premium for other purposes. Essentially its replacing a fuel oil tankage and pumping system and a better solution would be to fill it up with MFO and use it to supply conventionally powered ships. A second problem is damage control. The system you suggest would be an open path for flooding in the event of the ship being hit by something nasty (torpedo, mines, bombs, shells, other ships and large uncharted rocks). The worst enemy of a ship after fire is progressive flooding. This is where water seeps (or floods or torrents) throughout the ship and damage control efforts cannot establish a flooding perimeter. Progressive flooding by definition can't be stopped and will sink the ship in time unless we can get her back to port first. I was at a live-fire demonstration once of an air-launched anti-ship missile that had a pre-fragmented warhead. It exploded over the target ship (an old destroyer) and apparently didn't do any damage. Only every bulkhead and every deck had dozens of little holes in it about the size of my little finger. That ship was going down and nothing could save her. She wouldn't even be worth repairing. Recently, Helge Ingstad was a case of a ship that sank through progressive flooding, in this case through her hollow prop-shafts.
The third problem is cost. Essentially we would be installing a fuel system in the ship that had no real use. This adds to cost and would probably exceed the cost of designing and building her right to start with.
D
Deleted member
Guest
Having nuke ships carry fuel for buddy refueling of other escorts does seem nice in the abstract.
Um the youngest Sailors to have served on a Battleship are only 47 years old. We ain't exactly Geriactric.