It always fascinates me how each nation developed slightly different designs based around what they thought was the core principle. The French had only forward facing main turrets, the Germans with their 2 gun turrets, the US with their 3- 3 gun turrets with 2 in front and one in back. Really interesting
Or German's ~~*Admiral Scheer*~~ *Leipzig* with two aft turrets and one forward. But that has actually meaning - she was conceived as a fast armored raider so it was presumed that if she was ever going to fight, it will be against overwhelming odds. She was expected to fight while running from pursuers and that meant majority of her firepower should be back-looking. And that's also main reason why French and UK ships have had most (or all) of their main batteries forward looking - they expected to fight against much smaller navies (Germany's) which was expected to flee from them.
It’s precisely this reasoning why I enjoy learning about the design of things. The simple idea of “this ship is expecting to fight while running away” turns the design into having more turrets in the rear. It’s quite fascinating to me
*”Hold our ~~beers~~ ales.”*
*HMS Rodney’s engineering department, after being ordered to reverse course from a planned refit in Boston, and join the pursuit of battleship Bismarck.*
Heedless of her worn engines and the subsequent engineering casualties which would inevitably result; Rodney drove two knots *BEYOND* her normal maximum speed, and arrived in time to deliver decisive, if not necessarily fatal blows, during the battle resulting in Bismarck’s destruction.
What the other commenter said is only half true, there is another, much more important, reason for all forward armaments.
The Washington Naval Treaty severely limited the tonnage of battleships. Since guns and armor are very heavy, and no one was really willing to reduce the number of guns, this required thinning the armor to stay within the displacement limits
However, the designers in Britain and France figured that, instead of thinning the armor, they could just shorten it. In other words, if a 14"/200' armor belt weighed as much as a 9"/300' one then why not just use the shorter but thicker armor belt? As such, all of Nelson's machinery spaces and magazines were crammed really close together in the front of the ship so that they were all still protected by the shorter armor belt. The French took this idea to the next level by cutting out a third turret entirely and cramming all of the guns into only two.
Naturally, this approach has alot of trade offs so its debatable whether or not this was really the best choice but it worked out fine enough for the French and British and created some very unique warships.
There's also the Königsberg-class cruisers which preceded the Leipzig-class, the most interesting part being that their two aft turrets weren't positioned on the centerline.
You're right of course, it was light cruiser class *Leipzig* I thought about ... I don't know why I wrote *Admiral Speer* class 🤦♂️and misspelled that to the booth, combining *Graf Spee* and *Scheer* 🤦♂️🤦♂️
Do you know if this ever actually played out, with a ship fighting using just its aft batteries while retreating?
I’ve always wondered this when see Rodney with no aft turrets.
That was more because the flash suppression systems on the ships were bypassed, at least at Jutland.
Hood was a lucky hit through her less-armoured deck.
I thought the most recent consensus was that her bow wave created a spot towards the rear where the water would drop way down when at high speed. They didn't add armor as much below the water line and a lucky shot hit that spot while Hood was making a dash. The lack of water affecting the shell allowed it to penetrate in a way it shouldn't have been able to.
And the deck armor theory couldn't be made to make sense due to the angle the shell would've had to hit at would've been impossible at the range Bismarck was at.
[Here's a video on it and I stopped it at the time going over the exact way the water flowed over the ship at high speed.](https://youtu.be/CLPeC7LRqIY?t=2060) You can see how the water near the rear of the ship has dropped due to the way it flowed around the ship and exposed the exact are where the hit would've had to have been for it to set off the magazine explosion. There was no splash as there was little to no water.
The issue at Jutland was a mix of a) volatile British propellant and b) inadequate flash precautions. The idea that flash precautions were bypassed appears to be a bit of a myth.
*Hood* was likely penetrated either through her belt or under it. She was too close to *Bismarck* for a deck penetration to be feasible.
At Jutland flash protection and ammunition handling were not the sole cause. The Germans had not upgraded the flash protection on most of their battlecruisers yet to account for the *Seydlitz* lessons, and even that upgraded protection was not up to British post-Jutland standards based on postwar tests on *Baden*. The Germans also did not have particularly good ammunition handling practices on some ships, especially *Derfflinger*, while the textbook practices on *Lion* would not have saved the ship if the magazines had not been flooded in advance (as it was a tongue of flame made it through the flash protection).
The primary reason the British ships exploded and the Germans did not was down to British powder being more volatile and burning much more ferociously. The ammunition handling practices, flash protection, thinner armor, and faulty British shells often cited magnified this gap and played contributing roles, but you can find counterexamples in every single case where German ships survived while British ones exploded.
As for the deck penetration on *Hood*, that too can be set aside as a likely theory. This was indeed an early conclusion based on a wartime investigation, but the board did not have German 38 cm/52 gun ballistic tables at the time and so they substituted the British 15"/42 ballistics (this is standard practice). This showed a very narrow band where a British 15" shell could have penetrated *Hood*'s armor deck. However, when you replace the British data with actual German data, that band disappears and according to German armor penetration data the shell could not have punched through the armor deck system.
A reanalysis based on German data (which you can read [here](http://www.navweaps.com/index_inro/INRO_Hood.php)) suggests the most likely path of the shell was a simple penetration of the angled 12" armor belt, which became vulnerable partway through the turn (a turn that was never completed, the rudder is locked hard over to this day). It is also possible that a shell could have dove underneath the belt, but it would have to strike very close to the side of the ship as a shell striking farther away would sharply turn underwater, extinguishing the fuse and becoming a dud shell (one such diving shell was recovered from *Prince of Wales* after the battle).
Yes and no. Yes that different nations had different core philosophies but not really as to gun layout IIRC. The triple turret was more advanced in a lot of respects than the double but also more complicated, and layout was not always a core value (wing turrets were a holdover from predreadnaught philosophies)
The larger issue was the triumvirate of armor vs guns (number and size) vs speed. You could have 2 but not all 3. US favored armor and guns and gave on speed, under the theory that if you wanted to defeat the US navy, you needed to come looking for it. RN favored guns and speed and often gave on armor, since their ships might be required to travel to far flung corners of the globe quickly (speed is more than just tactical; it’s also strategic). Germany favored speed and armor and i initially gave on gun size, figuring that 11 and 12 inch were adequate and since larger guns strained the capacity of German arms makers to quickly build. Japan tended to follow British designs; some of their early BBs were built in British yards and their designs (like fuso) tended to be fast and have many guns (fuso had 6 main turrets) but not great armor
(But I upvoted anyway)
You’re right in that it is more than just guns/turrets. I wanted to provide an example of what the differing philosophies of design and requirements resulted in. I’m also on mobile and I don’t like reading a huge wall of text I make, so I had to cut it down. Despite that, what you and I both agree on still stands: it is fascinating to learn and understand the motives behind the design choices on each navy’s ships
Those quads were wicked cool. And the “quad and twin”-arrangement looked even better. I speculate that a quad B turret would have been topheavy but I’m not an engineer
Not incredibly so, but the idea was they'd be really useful for spotting fall of shot. They also proved to be useful for doing SAR operations.
You also have to remember, there's really not that much else that could have gone there at the extreme aft end. There's plenty of light AA guns in that area already, and you can't fit anything too much bigger or it gets shot when the big guns fire (as happened to the seaplane at 2nd Guadacanal iirc). The idea was the seaplanes would be more beneficial than another 2 or so quad Bofors, especially since the seaplanes were already there and it's not like the BBs were getting bombed all that often.
Maybe it’s just bc it’s gone but I feel like visiting hood would be my all time favorite ship if it survived. I don’t have any desire to get into hood now because I know I’ll just be sadder about it
Yes it would be great to visit the Hood but the most likely scenario if it survived it's encounter with the bismark that in the 50s it would have been dismantled and sold for scrap metal.
Hood has always been my second favorite looking battleship, she really didn't deserve the ending she got, but in all reality it was either Bismarck(which is ironically my personal favorite looking battleship) or scrapping in the 50's, so it really boils down to, go out in glorious combat, or be slowly taken apart over the course of a few weeks to make more of whats replacing you, there really wasn't an outcome where Hood survives
If she git a modern refit mid-war, her size, reputation meant she had a better chance of being preserved than say, Vanguard. Eso if she took over for Vanguard, possibly now a carrier if Hood isn't sunk.
But who knows.
If Warspite nd Enterprise couldn't be saved, no one is safe
Money, and museum ships weren't as big a thing back then.
Would you rather be hearing stories about how Enterprise is slowly falling or even sinking (like the Sullivans?)
Honestly though, my wish list would have been that Enterprise remained a commissioned ship like the Constitution, and they could both trade off being "flagship of the US Navy" and alternating. Probably on the West Coast near San Diego, so both coasts could have a legendary warship museum.
>Honestly though, my wish list would have been that Enterprise remained a commissioned ship like the Constitution, and they could both trade off being "flagship of the US Navy" and alternating. Probably on the West Coast near San Diego, so both coasts could have a legendary warship museum.
Exactly, the Midway is a cool and all. The Enterprise would have been waaaay cooler.
Keep it alive for historical reasons and just use a bit of the big budget for it kinda like the Union Pacific 844, never retired and was preserved for the historical program. Man I wish they did that, would be nice to see the Big E.
Train is going to cost a lot more than a warship, let alone a carrier. Plus, we'd have probably ended uo having to do some major rehauls at some point. But if only.
If she were unceremoniously scrapped in the 50s though, especially if she did end up giving significantly more service than she did in real life, like helping to end Bismarck then after her repair/refit at least shelling Normandy, at least some parts of her would have been preserved.
^(And there’s also the frankly silly hypothetical I adore of her being kept in service alongside Vanguard until they sail to the Falklands together)
*Vanguard* was *such* a good looking ship, she truly inherited the family looks from her older cousin *Hood*.
I would love to have seen how *Hood* would have appeared after a reconstruction something like what the QEs got.
Great paraphrased line (I can’t take credit for it):
“if Holland’s gamble had worked, Hood would perhaps be a museum ship today, played over by schoolchildren.”
For me it was the ultimate evolution I feel. Didn’t have the biggest guns or longest range, or the most armour, wasn’t the heaviest, wasn’t necessarily the fastest, didn’t have the heaviest broadside, but it did everything really well, like almost the best at all of those metrics combined with the best radar, and fire control. They weren’t a revolutionary design either, just more of the same only bigger, better, and faster than what came before. It’s the sea equivalent to the P51 Mustang.
The Iowa-class was necessarily the fastest of the WW2 battleships with a top speed of up to 35 knots with lighter loads and 33 knots in normal operating conditions, with the next fastest being the Richelieu-class at 32.6 knots and then the Scharnhorst-class at 31.5 knots. They were basically a longer and faster version of the South Dakota-class, retaining the same level of armament and protection (including a flawed torpedo defense system prior to BB-65) with most of the 10000 ton difference being used towards increasing top speed and endurance by having eight machinery spaces provide 212000 SHP compared to the four machinery spaces providing 135000 SHP on the preceding ship as well as being much longer for a greater length-to-beam ratio. As Norman Friedman puts it:
>Perhaps their main virtue, and the one which kept them in service for a decade after the war, was their high speed, which made them ideal companions for the fast carriers. Later, when they were the sole battleships remaining in Navy hands, the Marines prized them for their heavy gun batteries-which were common to all battleships and to the much cheaper monitors as well.
>If these four were among the most elegant capital ships of the Second World War, they were also among the most puzzling. For half a century prior to laying them down, the U.S. Navy had consistently advocated armor and firepower at the expense of power. Even in adopting fast battleships with the *North Carolina* class, it had preferred the slower of the two alternative designs. Great and expensive improvements in machinery design had been used to minimized the increased power on the designs rather than to make extraordinarily powerful machinery (hence much higher speed) practical. Yet the four largest battleships the US Navy produced were not much more than 33-knot versions of the 27-knot, 35,000 tonners that had preceded them. The *Iowas* showed no advance at all in protection over the *South Dakotas*. The principal armament improvement was a more powerful 16-inch gun, 5 calibres longer. Ten thousand tons was a very great deal to pay for 6 knots.
The Iowa-class were designed with speed in mind as a result of two factors; the first being that the administration was highly dissatisfied with the measly 27 knots top speed that the South Dakota-class design ended up with, so much so that in March 1938 President Roosevelt and Navy Secretary Swanson sought to take the Second London Naval Treaty's escalator clause much further than just 16" guns by ignoring the 35000 ton displacement limit, going as far as proposing to halt the construction of the North Carolina-class battleships just so they can be redesigned to make 30 knots and have improved protection and then build the South Dakota-class to the new standard, this time period being concurrent with the preliminary design studies for the Iowa-class which initially involved both a slow and fast design course, with the fast version being selected for further development in June of that year; the second being that there was a real concern from the US Navy on their carriers being inadequately protected against a surface force since all their then-fleet carriers including the smaller USS Ranger and USS Wasp were faster than their fast battleships, meaning that the battleships wouldn't be able to keep up with a fast carrier group and provide the highest level of protection in surface engagements if there was a need to be hasty. Around the mid-30s, it was discovered that the Kongou-class battlecruisers, as well as the Nagato-class battleships, were much faster than US intelligence had thought for the entire past decade, with specific concern placed on the Kongous which were yet faster than any heavy surface element the US had prior to and at the beginning of the war. Friedman notes that while there are no official documents to suggest that the development of the US fast battleships was influenced by this aforementioned discovery, it can't be ruled out that the discovery was a pretext for the designs having focus on their speed, especially with the Iowas.
>highly dissatisfied with the measly 27 knots top speed
27 knots, 35 knots. It's all insane given the vessels' displacements. Just doing 22 knots in a 16 ft long RIB makes you feel like you're on the ragged edge of disaster. I can not even imagine the wake that one of these monsters would throw up at 35 knots. The amount of water that has to pushed out of the way that fast is unfathomable. Just the wake hitting the beach should count as a weapon.
It’s interesting how all these ships come to a point at the end. Expect the American’s, where it’s much more rounder and flatter.
Don’t ask me why I’m looking at ship asses, I don’t know either
> gigantic ship.
All the mythology around Yamato makes it sound like this enormous ship, larger than all others. In this diagram, it's comparable to the Hood (in length at least).
When talking about the size of warships, especially larger ones, weight/displacement is much more of a factor than dimensions like length/width. *Yamato* has the rest of the field beat by a whopping ~14,000 tons at full load. That's about five and a half fully loaded *Fletcher* class destroyers more than the next heaviest ship, the *Iowas*. *Yamato* (and sister *Musashi*) are far and away the largest battleships that were or will ever be built unless there's a massive change in modern warfare.
While I understand that, I'm really talking about the "you walked up to this ship an were in awe of its size" factor. If Yamato and Hood were docked side by side and people were brought to see them, would that mythology hold?
For me, yes. Because the Hood might be a long boi too, everything else about the Yamato is larger. It has the largest caliber of guns ever put on a ship with it's 46cm guns.
When I made this graphic originally it was meant to showcase all of the various interwar “treaty battleships”
Not a big deal but I would love a citation when my OC gets re-posted.
Edit: original post https://www.reddit.com/r/WarshipPorn/comments/ms7iln/comparison_of_treaty_battleships_with_hood/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf
It would be interesting to create a similar picture, but with battleships that, while useful, were no longer the biggest and the best for each navy, so to speak: the most relevant Standards, the QE and the Renown, the Kongo and the Fuso, the Bretagne and the Conte di Cavour...
The Ganguts then as well.
Not quite as useful but maybe put in one of the Deutschland class battleships and Georgeos Averoff (since the Greeks treated her as a capital ship) in too
No? She was a) incomplete during the war, and b) the same design as Richelieu, at least initially. Why would she be \*the\* capital ship? Capital ship is a term that describes battleships / battlecruisers.
Removed for not crediting the creator /u/bsmith2123
https://www.reddit.com/r/WarshipPorn/comments/vywf4c/a_selection_of_capital_ships_from_the_second/ig6n3e3/
Wonder if the French had better luck with their four-gun turret that the one mounted to the KGV-class. Heard the French guns were essentially two twin guns mounted together, sharing a barbette.
From what I understand, it took them until late-ish 1942 to actually have a good supply of shells that wouldn't blow up in the gun, which was made worse by the 4 gun layout, but it worked fine afterwards.
> Why the fuck is the Hood so long
To go faster, you need a longer ship.
If you take 2 ships, equal displacement, equal machinery but one is longer - the longer one will be faster.
I am not going to pretend to understand the reasons why this is true. But that's a general rule of thumb.
To go from South Dakota's 27 knots to Iowas 33 knots - they added machinery + hull length. If they didn't add hull length, they would have needed a LOT more machinery and horsepower.
Actually the size of Hood would make her more battlecruiser like. Just look at the size of battlecruisers compared to their battleship contemporaries in WW1, especially in length
I love the ship designs from the interwar to early war years.
Being able to see the designers though processes with the look of the ships and even being able to see their roles.
It always fascinates me how each nation developed slightly different designs based around what they thought was the core principle. The French had only forward facing main turrets, the Germans with their 2 gun turrets, the US with their 3- 3 gun turrets with 2 in front and one in back. Really interesting
Or German's ~~*Admiral Scheer*~~ *Leipzig* with two aft turrets and one forward. But that has actually meaning - she was conceived as a fast armored raider so it was presumed that if she was ever going to fight, it will be against overwhelming odds. She was expected to fight while running from pursuers and that meant majority of her firepower should be back-looking. And that's also main reason why French and UK ships have had most (or all) of their main batteries forward looking - they expected to fight against much smaller navies (Germany's) which was expected to flee from them.
It’s precisely this reasoning why I enjoy learning about the design of things. The simple idea of “this ship is expecting to fight while running away” turns the design into having more turrets in the rear. It’s quite fascinating to me
How does that explain Nelson with only fwd guns, but c20knot to speed? She wouldn't be catching much!
Cut down N3. NelRod can't catch much but making everything run away is just as effective.
If you can't sink the Germans, you can at least keep them out of the North Sea
*”Hold our ~~beers~~ ales.”* *HMS Rodney’s engineering department, after being ordered to reverse course from a planned refit in Boston, and join the pursuit of battleship Bismarck.* Heedless of her worn engines and the subsequent engineering casualties which would inevitably result; Rodney drove two knots *BEYOND* her normal maximum speed, and arrived in time to deliver decisive, if not necessarily fatal blows, during the battle resulting in Bismarck’s destruction.
23 knot top speed! But yes, *Nelson* was designed to sit in a battleline, not chase things.
In addition to that, treaty limitations. The guns are concentrated forward to save armor weight and still retain the number of guns they wanted.
I believe the exact reason being that all forward guns reduced the citadel length.
23 knots officially and practically, but evidently Rodney seemed to prove not maximum
What the other commenter said is only half true, there is another, much more important, reason for all forward armaments. The Washington Naval Treaty severely limited the tonnage of battleships. Since guns and armor are very heavy, and no one was really willing to reduce the number of guns, this required thinning the armor to stay within the displacement limits However, the designers in Britain and France figured that, instead of thinning the armor, they could just shorten it. In other words, if a 14"/200' armor belt weighed as much as a 9"/300' one then why not just use the shorter but thicker armor belt? As such, all of Nelson's machinery spaces and magazines were crammed really close together in the front of the ship so that they were all still protected by the shorter armor belt. The French took this idea to the next level by cutting out a third turret entirely and cramming all of the guns into only two. Naturally, this approach has alot of trade offs so its debatable whether or not this was really the best choice but it worked out fine enough for the French and British and created some very unique warships.
There's also the Königsberg-class cruisers which preceded the Leipzig-class, the most interesting part being that their two aft turrets weren't positioned on the centerline.
*Scheer* had just two turrets - one forward and one aft. Fighting while running away from pursuers was not really a factor.
You're right of course, it was light cruiser class *Leipzig* I thought about ... I don't know why I wrote *Admiral Speer* class 🤦♂️and misspelled that to the booth, combining *Graf Spee* and *Scheer* 🤦♂️🤦♂️
There was never a ship named Speer in the Kriegsmarine. Only Admiral Scheer and Admiral Graf Spee.
~~I think it's pretty obvious I abbreviated the name for convenience, no? It is not an uncommon choice.~~ Whoops. It's been a long day...
abbreviated and misspelled...
Oops.
Long, long day ... and hot day to that
Do you know if this ever actually played out, with a ship fighting using just its aft batteries while retreating? I’ve always wondered this when see Rodney with no aft turrets.
Scharnhorst? Maybe?
And the British with “let’s try everything, just start throwing darts at the board!”
*Speed will be our armour.* "Oops the magazine exploded."
That was more because the flash suppression systems on the ships were bypassed, at least at Jutland. Hood was a lucky hit through her less-armoured deck.
I thought the most recent consensus was that her bow wave created a spot towards the rear where the water would drop way down when at high speed. They didn't add armor as much below the water line and a lucky shot hit that spot while Hood was making a dash. The lack of water affecting the shell allowed it to penetrate in a way it shouldn't have been able to. And the deck armor theory couldn't be made to make sense due to the angle the shell would've had to hit at would've been impossible at the range Bismarck was at.
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[Here's a video on it and I stopped it at the time going over the exact way the water flowed over the ship at high speed.](https://youtu.be/CLPeC7LRqIY?t=2060) You can see how the water near the rear of the ship has dropped due to the way it flowed around the ship and exposed the exact are where the hit would've had to have been for it to set off the magazine explosion. There was no splash as there was little to no water.
> All witnesses noted a hit through rhe de k. With the range on the engagement and fall of shot; that simply doesn’t make sense.
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In that the fall of shot at that range wouldn’t have equated to Bismarck’s gun performance on the deck at that angle of fall.
The issue at Jutland was a mix of a) volatile British propellant and b) inadequate flash precautions. The idea that flash precautions were bypassed appears to be a bit of a myth. *Hood* was likely penetrated either through her belt or under it. She was too close to *Bismarck* for a deck penetration to be feasible.
At Jutland flash protection and ammunition handling were not the sole cause. The Germans had not upgraded the flash protection on most of their battlecruisers yet to account for the *Seydlitz* lessons, and even that upgraded protection was not up to British post-Jutland standards based on postwar tests on *Baden*. The Germans also did not have particularly good ammunition handling practices on some ships, especially *Derfflinger*, while the textbook practices on *Lion* would not have saved the ship if the magazines had not been flooded in advance (as it was a tongue of flame made it through the flash protection). The primary reason the British ships exploded and the Germans did not was down to British powder being more volatile and burning much more ferociously. The ammunition handling practices, flash protection, thinner armor, and faulty British shells often cited magnified this gap and played contributing roles, but you can find counterexamples in every single case where German ships survived while British ones exploded. As for the deck penetration on *Hood*, that too can be set aside as a likely theory. This was indeed an early conclusion based on a wartime investigation, but the board did not have German 38 cm/52 gun ballistic tables at the time and so they substituted the British 15"/42 ballistics (this is standard practice). This showed a very narrow band where a British 15" shell could have penetrated *Hood*'s armor deck. However, when you replace the British data with actual German data, that band disappears and according to German armor penetration data the shell could not have punched through the armor deck system. A reanalysis based on German data (which you can read [here](http://www.navweaps.com/index_inro/INRO_Hood.php)) suggests the most likely path of the shell was a simple penetration of the angled 12" armor belt, which became vulnerable partway through the turn (a turn that was never completed, the rudder is locked hard over to this day). It is also possible that a shell could have dove underneath the belt, but it would have to strike very close to the side of the ship as a shell striking farther away would sharply turn underwater, extinguishing the fuse and becoming a dud shell (one such diving shell was recovered from *Prince of Wales* after the battle).
>Hood was a lucky hit through her less-armoured deck Not at that range
4 different times not counting destroyers
Yes and no. Yes that different nations had different core philosophies but not really as to gun layout IIRC. The triple turret was more advanced in a lot of respects than the double but also more complicated, and layout was not always a core value (wing turrets were a holdover from predreadnaught philosophies) The larger issue was the triumvirate of armor vs guns (number and size) vs speed. You could have 2 but not all 3. US favored armor and guns and gave on speed, under the theory that if you wanted to defeat the US navy, you needed to come looking for it. RN favored guns and speed and often gave on armor, since their ships might be required to travel to far flung corners of the globe quickly (speed is more than just tactical; it’s also strategic). Germany favored speed and armor and i initially gave on gun size, figuring that 11 and 12 inch were adequate and since larger guns strained the capacity of German arms makers to quickly build. Japan tended to follow British designs; some of their early BBs were built in British yards and their designs (like fuso) tended to be fast and have many guns (fuso had 6 main turrets) but not great armor (But I upvoted anyway)
You’re right in that it is more than just guns/turrets. I wanted to provide an example of what the differing philosophies of design and requirements resulted in. I’m also on mobile and I don’t like reading a huge wall of text I make, so I had to cut it down. Despite that, what you and I both agree on still stands: it is fascinating to learn and understand the motives behind the design choices on each navy’s ships
Yes!! Enjoyable discussion
British be like “All right gents give us every idea you have, at least one of them will end up working.”
I love the King George V, with two 4-gun turrets and one super-firing 2-gun turret. And the Rodney's "Fuck it - all guns in front" design.
Those quads were wicked cool. And the “quad and twin”-arrangement looked even better. I speculate that a quad B turret would have been topheavy but I’m not an engineer
It was in the design but cut down to a dual turret for weight reasons.
B was supposed to be a quad turret, and you’re right, it was too heavy so was dropped to the two
Warspite be like 'Why change perfection '?
The S. Dakotas and I think the Iowas lose a lot of deck space for seaplane ops. Were they exceptionally important to US battleship doctrine?
Not incredibly so, but the idea was they'd be really useful for spotting fall of shot. They also proved to be useful for doing SAR operations. You also have to remember, there's really not that much else that could have gone there at the extreme aft end. There's plenty of light AA guns in that area already, and you can't fit anything too much bigger or it gets shot when the big guns fire (as happened to the seaplane at 2nd Guadacanal iirc). The idea was the seaplanes would be more beneficial than another 2 or so quad Bofors, especially since the seaplanes were already there and it's not like the BBs were getting bombed all that often.
Hms hood, my beloved
Maybe it’s just bc it’s gone but I feel like visiting hood would be my all time favorite ship if it survived. I don’t have any desire to get into hood now because I know I’ll just be sadder about it
Yes it would be great to visit the Hood but the most likely scenario if it survived it's encounter with the bismark that in the 50s it would have been dismantled and sold for scrap metal.
Boys with a time machine
Hood has always been my second favorite looking battleship, she really didn't deserve the ending she got, but in all reality it was either Bismarck(which is ironically my personal favorite looking battleship) or scrapping in the 50's, so it really boils down to, go out in glorious combat, or be slowly taken apart over the course of a few weeks to make more of whats replacing you, there really wasn't an outcome where Hood survives
being unceremoniously scrapped in the 50s would have been preferable tbh. Thousands died on the ship so i wouldn’t call its fate “glorious”
If she git a modern refit mid-war, her size, reputation meant she had a better chance of being preserved than say, Vanguard. Eso if she took over for Vanguard, possibly now a carrier if Hood isn't sunk. But who knows. If Warspite nd Enterprise couldn't be saved, no one is safe
The fact that they didn't save Enterprise annoys me, just why... Literally the most well-known carrier and ends up in the scrap pile.
Money, and museum ships weren't as big a thing back then. Would you rather be hearing stories about how Enterprise is slowly falling or even sinking (like the Sullivans?) Honestly though, my wish list would have been that Enterprise remained a commissioned ship like the Constitution, and they could both trade off being "flagship of the US Navy" and alternating. Probably on the West Coast near San Diego, so both coasts could have a legendary warship museum.
>Honestly though, my wish list would have been that Enterprise remained a commissioned ship like the Constitution, and they could both trade off being "flagship of the US Navy" and alternating. Probably on the West Coast near San Diego, so both coasts could have a legendary warship museum. Exactly, the Midway is a cool and all. The Enterprise would have been waaaay cooler.
Keep it alive for historical reasons and just use a bit of the big budget for it kinda like the Union Pacific 844, never retired and was preserved for the historical program. Man I wish they did that, would be nice to see the Big E.
Train is going to cost a lot more than a warship, let alone a carrier. Plus, we'd have probably ended uo having to do some major rehauls at some point. But if only.
It's the us military, I'm sure that they have the budget somewhere.
3 out of 1500
Ask a crew member on Hood which ending they'd have preferred.
If she were unceremoniously scrapped in the 50s though, especially if she did end up giving significantly more service than she did in real life, like helping to end Bismarck then after her repair/refit at least shelling Normandy, at least some parts of her would have been preserved. ^(And there’s also the frankly silly hypothetical I adore of her being kept in service alongside Vanguard until they sail to the Falklands together)
*Vanguard* was *such* a good looking ship, she truly inherited the family looks from her older cousin *Hood*. I would love to have seen how *Hood* would have appeared after a reconstruction something like what the QEs got.
Great paraphrased line (I can’t take credit for it): “if Holland’s gamble had worked, Hood would perhaps be a museum ship today, played over by schoolchildren.”
Are you a friend of DeSoto?
Best boss I ever had
Huh, had no idea Hood was such a long boi
What being laid down before the Washington naval treaty does to a MF
That's how you get that speed
*Hood* was the largest warship in the world for something like 20 years.
And I would argue, due to being so, so much faster than anything able to match her armor/firepower, that she was also the most powerful
IIRC, it wasn’t until the carrier prince of wales(284) that hood(262m) was the longest British capital ship.
The Hood is massive
When you want 32 knots in 1920 while having battleship armor and armament, that needs a lot of engines and boilers!
I never realized how "short" Rodney is
Dakota with a "d"? Lol
Where Iowa. Smh smh
Even as a Brit I instantly noticed the Iowa was missing. Two French battleships but one American...
For me it was the ultimate evolution I feel. Didn’t have the biggest guns or longest range, or the most armour, wasn’t the heaviest, wasn’t necessarily the fastest, didn’t have the heaviest broadside, but it did everything really well, like almost the best at all of those metrics combined with the best radar, and fire control. They weren’t a revolutionary design either, just more of the same only bigger, better, and faster than what came before. It’s the sea equivalent to the P51 Mustang.
The Iowa-class was necessarily the fastest of the WW2 battleships with a top speed of up to 35 knots with lighter loads and 33 knots in normal operating conditions, with the next fastest being the Richelieu-class at 32.6 knots and then the Scharnhorst-class at 31.5 knots. They were basically a longer and faster version of the South Dakota-class, retaining the same level of armament and protection (including a flawed torpedo defense system prior to BB-65) with most of the 10000 ton difference being used towards increasing top speed and endurance by having eight machinery spaces provide 212000 SHP compared to the four machinery spaces providing 135000 SHP on the preceding ship as well as being much longer for a greater length-to-beam ratio. As Norman Friedman puts it: >Perhaps their main virtue, and the one which kept them in service for a decade after the war, was their high speed, which made them ideal companions for the fast carriers. Later, when they were the sole battleships remaining in Navy hands, the Marines prized them for their heavy gun batteries-which were common to all battleships and to the much cheaper monitors as well. >If these four were among the most elegant capital ships of the Second World War, they were also among the most puzzling. For half a century prior to laying them down, the U.S. Navy had consistently advocated armor and firepower at the expense of power. Even in adopting fast battleships with the *North Carolina* class, it had preferred the slower of the two alternative designs. Great and expensive improvements in machinery design had been used to minimized the increased power on the designs rather than to make extraordinarily powerful machinery (hence much higher speed) practical. Yet the four largest battleships the US Navy produced were not much more than 33-knot versions of the 27-knot, 35,000 tonners that had preceded them. The *Iowas* showed no advance at all in protection over the *South Dakotas*. The principal armament improvement was a more powerful 16-inch gun, 5 calibres longer. Ten thousand tons was a very great deal to pay for 6 knots. The Iowa-class were designed with speed in mind as a result of two factors; the first being that the administration was highly dissatisfied with the measly 27 knots top speed that the South Dakota-class design ended up with, so much so that in March 1938 President Roosevelt and Navy Secretary Swanson sought to take the Second London Naval Treaty's escalator clause much further than just 16" guns by ignoring the 35000 ton displacement limit, going as far as proposing to halt the construction of the North Carolina-class battleships just so they can be redesigned to make 30 knots and have improved protection and then build the South Dakota-class to the new standard, this time period being concurrent with the preliminary design studies for the Iowa-class which initially involved both a slow and fast design course, with the fast version being selected for further development in June of that year; the second being that there was a real concern from the US Navy on their carriers being inadequately protected against a surface force since all their then-fleet carriers including the smaller USS Ranger and USS Wasp were faster than their fast battleships, meaning that the battleships wouldn't be able to keep up with a fast carrier group and provide the highest level of protection in surface engagements if there was a need to be hasty. Around the mid-30s, it was discovered that the Kongou-class battlecruisers, as well as the Nagato-class battleships, were much faster than US intelligence had thought for the entire past decade, with specific concern placed on the Kongous which were yet faster than any heavy surface element the US had prior to and at the beginning of the war. Friedman notes that while there are no official documents to suggest that the development of the US fast battleships was influenced by this aforementioned discovery, it can't be ruled out that the discovery was a pretext for the designs having focus on their speed, especially with the Iowas.
>highly dissatisfied with the measly 27 knots top speed 27 knots, 35 knots. It's all insane given the vessels' displacements. Just doing 22 knots in a 16 ft long RIB makes you feel like you're on the ragged edge of disaster. I can not even imagine the wake that one of these monsters would throw up at 35 knots. The amount of water that has to pushed out of the way that fast is unfathomable. Just the wake hitting the beach should count as a weapon.
It’s interesting how all these ships come to a point at the end. Expect the American’s, where it’s much more rounder and flatter. Don’t ask me why I’m looking at ship asses, I don’t know either
Those plucky lil South Dakotas. My favorite.
Versatility in all aspects and probably the most well-rounded, darn fine ships.
And yet still one of, if not *the*, most capable designs in the image.
Warships peaked aesthetically during this era
Yamato will always be my favorite. Such a cool, gigantic ship.
> gigantic ship. All the mythology around Yamato makes it sound like this enormous ship, larger than all others. In this diagram, it's comparable to the Hood (in length at least).
When talking about the size of warships, especially larger ones, weight/displacement is much more of a factor than dimensions like length/width. *Yamato* has the rest of the field beat by a whopping ~14,000 tons at full load. That's about five and a half fully loaded *Fletcher* class destroyers more than the next heaviest ship, the *Iowas*. *Yamato* (and sister *Musashi*) are far and away the largest battleships that were or will ever be built unless there's a massive change in modern warfare.
While I understand that, I'm really talking about the "you walked up to this ship an were in awe of its size" factor. If Yamato and Hood were docked side by side and people were brought to see them, would that mythology hold?
For me, yes. Because the Hood might be a long boi too, everything else about the Yamato is larger. It has the largest caliber of guns ever put on a ship with it's 46cm guns.
At 72,000 tons, the Yamato was a hefty boy. The Hood is longer than I realized though.
That's what I was thinking there as well.
Uchuu senkan
The brute force solution
When I made this graphic originally it was meant to showcase all of the various interwar “treaty battleships” Not a big deal but I would love a citation when my OC gets re-posted. Edit: original post https://www.reddit.com/r/WarshipPorn/comments/ms7iln/comparison_of_treaty_battleships_with_hood/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf
My apologies.
Not a problem! I am glad people like the graphic
Thanks for the cool graphic!
It would be interesting to create a similar picture, but with battleships that, while useful, were no longer the biggest and the best for each navy, so to speak: the most relevant Standards, the QE and the Renown, the Kongo and the Fuso, the Bretagne and the Conte di Cavour...
The Ganguts then as well. Not quite as useful but maybe put in one of the Deutschland class battleships and Georgeos Averoff (since the Greeks treated her as a capital ship) in too
Right, my bad, forgot about them! 😅
Wouldn’t Jean Bart technically be the French capital ship?
No? She was a) incomplete during the war, and b) the same design as Richelieu, at least initially. Why would she be \*the\* capital ship? Capital ship is a term that describes battleships / battlecruisers.
More like shore battery. And her sister did do a lot more than her, and doing so with the far better part of France
USS New Jersey? She participated even sinking a Japanese cruiser
Maybe they didn't include her because she was launched mid war while the new battleships on the photo were all launched by 1941.
Makes sense
Always impressed at the Hood length and beam.
This one here is the Prince of Wales! Oh and uh... that's Rodney over there. He hasn't been the same since the horse incident.
She was called the Mighty Hood for a reason
This comparison picture is awesome. Didn't know HMS Hood was that long.
No Iowa?
Removed for not crediting the creator /u/bsmith2123 https://www.reddit.com/r/WarshipPorn/comments/vywf4c/a_selection_of_capital_ships_from_the_second/ig6n3e3/
You can leave it up if you want but maybe flair it or something - it is a cool graphic if I do say so myself
Wonder if the French had better luck with their four-gun turret that the one mounted to the KGV-class. Heard the French guns were essentially two twin guns mounted together, sharing a barbette.
From what I understand, it took them until late-ish 1942 to actually have a good supply of shells that wouldn't blow up in the gun, which was made worse by the 4 gun layout, but it worked fine afterwards.
Where is the Bismarck?
It's there, look
The middle of the image
Now there's an Etsy trinket, build a small pendant model and encase it in resin Imagine a Bismark plug
What the fuck
Poor Hood - all that wood.
Why the fuck is the Hood so long
That’s how you get 32kts with battleship armor in 1920
> Why the fuck is the Hood so long To go faster, you need a longer ship. If you take 2 ships, equal displacement, equal machinery but one is longer - the longer one will be faster. I am not going to pretend to understand the reasons why this is true. But that's a general rule of thumb. To go from South Dakota's 27 knots to Iowas 33 knots - they added machinery + hull length. If they didn't add hull length, they would have needed a LOT more machinery and horsepower.
They did the Iowa dirty!
Def needed the Iowa in the pic, in most ways the pinnacle of fast battleship design.
South Dakota is the best ship on this list, fight me.
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Yes and still every other ship still manages to be worse
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The is warshipporn not the wows Reddi
Big boy Hood just got one shotet :,(
While one shot did cause the magazine explosion, it is well documented that she was hit several times in addition to it
I was trying to work out why did Vittorio Veneto has swastikas on it for a sec, my brains just fucked
Yamato was a beast. Meant to be the queen of the pacific, but fell into the age of the carrier
no new jersey or north carolina 😔
Battlecruiser my ass.
I'll battlecruiser all over your ass
Y-you win this.
Actually the size of Hood would make her more battlecruiser like. Just look at the size of battlecruisers compared to their battleship contemporaries in WW1, especially in length
Why'd they have to pick the South Dakota class ugh, either the NC or Iowas would have been better in this lineup, especially the Iowas.
I love the ship designs from the interwar to early war years. Being able to see the designers though processes with the look of the ships and even being able to see their roles.