Treaties and Treasuries Oppressing Awesome Fleet Building in History

[ShadowArxxy]

The Congressional point of view was based on not knowing or caring about the advancing state of the art in naval warfare, yes. Congress didn't ultimately care that they were being "penny wise and pound foolish" because the cut-down, lower-tonnage battleship designs they kept forcing the Navy to adopt were vastly less capable both in absolute and relative terms.

It was pretty much, "Every two years, the Navy comes to us with ridiculously big and expensive budget requests for new battleships, we tell them to make do with less, and they grumble about it but do so. Yet instead of taking a hint and coming up with a sensibly smaller battleship in the first place, EVERY TIME they come back they've got a bigger ship."

 

[Aldarion]

The Congressional point of view was based on not knowing or caring about the advancing state of the art in naval warfare, yes. Congress didn't ultimately care that they were being "penny wise and pound foolish" because the cut-down, lower-tonnage battleship designs they kept forcing the Navy to adopt were vastly less capable both in absolute and relative terms.

It was pretty much, "Every two years, the Navy comes to us with ridiculously big and expensive budget requests for new battleships, we tell them to make do with less, and they grumble about it but do so. Yet instead of taking a hint and coming up with a sensibly smaller battleship in the first place, EVERY TIME they come back they've got a bigger ship."

On the other hand, tonnage limits did force technological advancements and some rather innovative technological solutions. Austrian-Hungarian navy (or, rather, Skoda) designed triple gun turrets in order to maximize firepower on minimum displacements, and used few more innovative solutions (designs also had major flaws, but that was down to Popper being nearly blind at the time he designed Tegetthoff class). Then you had Nelson class which combined all-forward gun arrangement with triple turrets, King George V which had quad turrets, and French designes which combined all-forward arrangement with quad turrets. Some of these were IMHO some of the most beautiful warships ever designed.

 

[Lord Sovereign]

Interestingly (aside from when for god knows what reason we signed the Washington Naval Treaty, or a Labour government is in office), it's the inverse with the House of Commons. The Royal Navy tends to get taken care of, whilst our poor British Army gets shafted.

 

[Knowledgeispower]

Interestingly (aside from when for god knows what reason we signed the Washington Naval Treaty, or a Labour government is in office), it's the inverse with the House of Commons. The Royal Navy tends to get taken care of, whilst our poor British Army gets shafted.

To be fair as an Island Nation which needs to import food the needs of the navy come first

 

[Spartan303]

Yeah, and the USN was made to suffer Congress's penny-pinching. The sad reality was that fossil fuel plants were simply not that capable as you start going into the really big wattage numbers, and this left the JFKs to be less capable of being upgraded overall when compared to the Nimitz.

Weren't those ships considered pieces of junk?

 

[Knowledgeispower]

Weren't those ships considered pieces of junk?

The JFK had some structural issues that were the result from switching to conventional power plant mid construction. The. America due to being a standard Kitty Hawk didn't have these issues and should have been retired in the early 2010s but post Cold War Budget Cuts axed her SLEP and she ended up being used as the world's largest target ship and then was eventually scuttled in such a postion as to lie in an ocean trench near Puerto Rico with the exact location being classified. The design of the Ford class in terms of improved survivability over the Nimitz class was in large part influenced by the data generated from hitting the America with a fair amount of ordnance(including submarine launched torpedoes)

 

[LordSunhawk]

Actually, the CVN-65 design was not all that good from the get go, all it was was a repeat of the previous conventional carrier with nuclear reactors replacing the boilers (is why it had eight of them). It had far too much power, to the point that to my knowledge they were never able to run her at full power as the reduction gearing couldn't take it.

JFK and America were near-sisters, in that America had a sonar installation that JFK lacked and a different arrangement for the self-defense weaponry and radars.

The Nimitz was the first actually optimized nuclear carrier, with a hull form optimized for nuclear propulsion, a plant that was of an efficient and optimized design, and a new flight deck layout that was an implementation of 'lesson's learned' from Enterprise and derived from the JFK/America layout.

Source - Normal Friedman, US Aircraft Carriers: An Illustrated Design History

 

[Knowledgeispower]

The one big advantage the Enterprise had over the Nimitz class was that due to having said eight reactors it was never short on steam for its catapults. Mind you they really should have gone with four reactors like the JFK was orginally supposed to have. To be fair as the first nuclear powered carrier and only the second nuclear powered ship period one can cut the design team a fair bit of slack

 

[Aaron Fox]

Weren't those ships considered pieces of junk?

From what I've heard, yes. To a point.

The JFK had some structural issues that were the result from switching to conventional power plant mid construction. The. America due to being a standard Kitty Hawk didn't have these issues and should have been retired in the early 2010s but post Cold War Budget Cuts axed her SLEP and she ended up being used as the world's largest target ship and then was eventually scuttled in such a postion as to lie in an ocean trench near Puerto Rico with the exact location being classified. The design of the Ford class in terms of improved survivability over the Nimitz class was in large part influenced by the data generated from hitting the America with a fair amount of ordnance(including submarine launched torpedoes)

Yep, fits with what I've heard.

Actually, the CVN-65 design was not all that good from the get go, all it was was a repeat of the previous conventional carrier with nuclear reactors replacing the boilers (is why it had eight of them). It had far too much power, to the point that to my knowledge they were never able to run her at full power as the reduction gearing couldn't take it.

JFK and America were near-sisters, in that America had a sonar installation that JFK lacked and a different arrangement for the self-defense weaponry and radars.

The Nimitz was the first actually optimized nuclear carrier, with a hull form optimized for nuclear propulsion, a plant that was of an efficient and optimized design, and a new flight deck layout that was an implementation of 'lesson's learned' from Enterprise and derived from the JFK/America layout.

Source - Normal Friedman, US Aircraft Carriers: An Illustrated Design History

You've got to cut the designers some serious slack here, we're talking about the very first surface vessel with a nuclear powerplant in the history of mankind and literally the second nuclear-powered naval vessel period...

The one big advantage the Enterprise had over the Nimitz class was that due to having said eight reactors it was never short on steam for its catapults. Mind you they really should have gone with four reactors like the JFK was orginally supposed to have. To be fair as the first nuclear powered carrier and only the second nuclear powered ship period one can cut the design team a fair bit of slack

... and I've been ninja'd.

 

[paulobrito]

I bet that using 8 reactors instead of two, the price and maintenance go up a lot.

 

[LordSunhawk]

No, it was not the 2nd nuclear powered vessel ever, nor was she the first nuclear surface vessel. USS Long Beach was ordered, designed, and laid down before her. Rickover somewhat screwed over both ships by insisting on using larger numbers of reactors than they actually needed, causing them to be effectively over-boilered in relation to their actual turbine plants.

Please, Aaron, do some actual research beyond reading wiki pages.

 

[Aaron Fox]

I bet that using 8 reactors instead of two, the price and maintenance go up a lot.

You've also got to remember that CVN-65 was a bunch of firsts in the first place...

No, it was not the 2nd nuclear powered vessel ever, nor was she the first nuclear surface vessel. USS Long Beach was ordered, designed, and laid down before her. Rickover somewhat screwed over both ships by insisting on using larger numbers of reactors than they actually needed, causing them to be effectively over-boilered in relation to their actual turbine plants.

Please, Aaron, do some actual research beyond reading wiki pages.

Then someone has been giving me some seriously bad information then. :\

 

[ShadowArxxy]

The eight reactor configuration on the Enterprise allowed for a one-for-one swap from conventional steam boilers, with a fully independent propulsion plant for each of the four propeller shafts and two reactors per plant. Rickover favored this for two reasons: it maximized reliability and redundancy, and it allowed for nearly "off-the-shelf" use of a modified version of the existing C1W reactors from the USS Long Beach. With typical Rickover confidence, he was completely undeterred by the considerable engineering challenge of a propulsion setup with more than one reactor in the same steam loop, which had never been done before (and as far as I am aware was never done again).

The level of "overkill" in this power installation is that a single A2W reactor is almost powerful enough to match both boilers of the conventional configuration, meaning giving Enterprise four reactors for four shafts would have been entirely possible with no loss in cruising speed and only a minimal loss in all-out emergency maximum.

 

[Knowledgeispower]

The eight reactor configuration on the Enterprise allowed for a one-for-one swap from conventional steam boilers, with a fully independent propulsion plant for each of the four propeller shafts and two reactors per plant. Rickover favored this for two reasons: it maximized reliability and redundancy, and it allowed for nearly "off-the-shelf" use of a modified version of the existing C1W reactors from the USS Long Beach. With typical Rickover confidence, he was completely undeterred by the considerable engineering challenge of a propulsion setup with more than one reactor in the same steam loop, which had never been done before (and as far as I am aware was never done again).

The level of "overkill" in this power installation is that a single A2W reactor is almost powerful enough to match both boilers of the conventional configuration, meaning giving Enterprise four reactors for four shafts would have been entirely possible with no loss in cruising speed and only a minimal loss in all-out emergency maximum.

We see the lessons from this applied to the JFK as orginally designed which had four albeit somewhat more powerful reactors. The hull hull form did still need some optimizing for nuclear power though

 

[ShadowArxxy]

We see the lessons from this applied to the JFK as orginally designed which had four albeit somewhat more powerful reactors. The hull hull form did still need some optimizing for nuclear power though

Exactly, and then the Nimitz took it further with two even more powerful reactors driving four shafts, two shafts per propulsion plant. Multiple shafts in a propulsion plant isn't super difficult, it's having multiple *reactors* in the same loop that gets into ugly amounts of complexity.

 

[Flintsteel]

Interestingly (aside from when for god knows what reason we signed the Washington Naval Treaty, or a Labour government is in office), it's the inverse with the House of Commons. The Royal Navy tends to get taken care of, whilst our poor British Army gets shafted.

Everyone signed onto the Washington Naval Treaty because no-one could afford not to. As in dollars. A naval arms race in the 20's would have bankrupted everyone, eventually.

 

[Aaron Fox]

Everyone signed onto the Washington Naval Treaty because no-one could afford not to. As in dollars. A naval arms race in the 20's would have bankrupted everyone, eventually.

Britain was already bankrupt by that point due to the RN's policies draining a lot of its capital. The thing is, the Washington Naval Treaty was agreed by everyone mostly because everyone knew at the time that the US would have been the last nation standing, so to speak, because of its economic capacity. The only thing holding the USN back was Congress being filled with Tillmans than anyone else.

The eight reactor configuration on the Enterprise allowed for a one-for-one swap from conventional steam boilers, with a fully independent propulsion plant for each of the four propeller shafts and two reactors per plant. Rickover favored this for two reasons: it maximized reliability and redundancy, and it allowed for nearly "off-the-shelf" use of a modified version of the existing C1W reactors from the USS Long Beach. With typical Rickover confidence, he was completely undeterred by the considerable engineering challenge of a propulsion setup with more than one reactor in the same steam loop, which had never been done before (and as far as I am aware was never done again).

The level of "overkill" in this power installation is that a single A2W reactor is almost powerful enough to match both boilers of the conventional configuration, meaning giving Enterprise four reactors for four shafts would have been entirely possible with no loss in cruising speed and only a minimal loss in all-out emergency maximum.

... oh my... that is some serious oomph...

 

[Knowledgeispower]

Everyone signed onto the Washington Naval Treaty because no-one could afford not to. As in dollars. A naval arms race in the 20's would have bankrupted everyone, eventually.

Well except the US but Congress as always didn't want to spend the cash.

 

[ShadowArxxy]

Then someone has been giving me some seriously bad information then. :\

The first nuclear-powered surface vessel was the Soviet icebreaker Lenin in 1959 , followed by the USS Long Beach in 1961 and the USS Enterprise later the same year. Fourth came the American fast cargo ship NS Savannah in 1962.

 

[Lord Sovereign]

Everyone signed onto the Washington Naval Treaty because no-one could afford not to. As in dollars. A naval arms race in the 20's would have bankrupted everyone, eventually.

And it permitted the Japanese an overwhelming naval advantage in the late 1930s and early 1940s which cost the allies dearly.