May be a pre-1914 design. The French had turrets like that on their planned BBs.
I question,
Having the third mount?
Turbo electrics this early?
Magazine space and why so high up? (especially for secondaries)
Space for the motors at the stern and TDS it's going to get very narrow or your hull form will be very inefficient?
Could you space out the BRs to give them better coal supply ie mix with SEEGCs?
No second mast at least for radio lines?
Your protection system, it looks like its uniform (AON?) and coving a lot of the ships (high and length %) therefore relatively thin?
That might be explained by stability issues.
On Springsharp super-firing turrets really effect this.
And lose the 6" secondaries and torpedo tubes, they were pointless.
Though the ship was fairly useless anyway.
First up, I like the picture and I appreciate the amount of work you've put into it and thinking about things like internal layout, which a lot of people handwave.
I'm guessing that this is an 1890s pre-dreadnought - I'm seeing similarities to the American-built Retvizan of 1899.
Assuming that scale is in metres, she's longer than most OTL battleships of the time (they tended to be around 120-130m). That suggests a fast ship, unless the beam is also increased.
- With the final drives right aft like that, you're committing to armouring at least 80% of the waterline. Standard OTL practice was to put the heaviest armour on the central citadel (from the front to the rear main barbette, around 2/3 of the length) with lighter armor at the ends. With a long belt on a long hull, the belt is going to be thinner or narrower, or there are sacrifices elsewhere.
- I assume those are reciprocating engines turning the generators - the engines in the last generation of pre-dreadnoughts had reliability issue when run at full speed for any length of time, so I'm wondering if they're suitable for an electric drive that has to maintain constant revolutions - or is there gearing between the engines and the generators?
- The big one - is the 3rd main battery turret worth it, compared to going with a conventional 2x2 with a bigger calibre main armament? Six guns gives you more hits, but at a shorter range with a lighter shell, and a 2-turret design saves space. OTL designers strongly favoured the 2x2 model, but I don't know if they had any actual data to back that up.
A couple of minor things:
- Those tertiary(?) guns in the main-deck casements fore and aft will be unworkable in anything but a calm - but that's a mistake OTL designers made over and over.
- I'm not a fan of having the magazines for the secondary armament above the waterline, but that also seems to have been standard OTL practice.
Overall, I suspect she'd be very good at chopping up armoured cruisers and older/second-class battleships, not so sure how she'd match up against the latest conventional pre-dreadnought which are likely to have thicker armour and throw heavier shells.
To be fair she did serve a useful role in making the Germans think that the Grand Fleet was unassailably larger than the High Seas Fleet in the time period before the QE and R classes came into service
McPherson
Banned
Source: Global Security/US Navy. This is your start point. Pay special attention to the USS Roanoke.
I will answer these questions below.
It is an 1890 design.
General characteristics
Class and type: ATL Indiana-class pre-dreadnought battleship
Displacement: 15,288 long tons (10,453 t) standard
Length: 500 ft 4 in (152.5 m)
Beam: 71 ft 4 in (21.75 m)
Draft: 23 ft. 9 in (7.25 m)
Installed power: 15,000 ihp at the final drive motors (11,185.5 kW) (design) with 16 Babcock & Wilcox boilers
Propulsion: Three horizontal rotary triple expansion Ericcson type rocker arm steam engines mated to the Westinghouse Type II generators. Also the forward power room Tesla oscillators are supplied directly from the forward boiler compartment. The final drive is 2 x Telsa M1888 electric motor sets each 7,500 ISHP reversible polarity at the motor buss inputs.
Steer control: (aft)2 shafts and 2 kingpost rudders with +/- 15 degrees, Turn radius at 10 m/s is 3 ship’s lengths
Speed: 19 knots (35 km/h; 9.77 m/s) (design)
Range: 5.500 nmi (10,186 km; 6630 mi) (design)
Complement:473 officers and men (design)
Armament: 3 × twin 11.81 in (30 cm)/40 caliber guns
10 × single 5.9 in (15 cm)/40 caliber guns
10 × single 3.9 in (10 cm)/50 caliber guns
16 × single 1.95 in (5 cm)/50 caliber guns
6 × single 0.9 in 1.95 in (2.5 cm)/50 caliber ‘Gatling’ guns
6 × 18.1 inch (460 mm) torpedo tubes (3 port, 3 starboard in fixed above waterline mounts.) with 1 set of reloads
Armor: ATL Harvey face hardened steel*
Belt: 18–8.5 in (46–22 cm)
Main gun-houses turrets: 15-4 in (38-10 cm)
Barbettes: 15-4 in (38-10 cm)
Conning Tower: 10 in (25.5 cm)
Casemate battery: 5.9 in (15 cm) shields for gun mounts and boxes around magazines and hoists
Aft steer control and propulsion: 5.1 in (13 cm) armored box.
Deck: 2.9 in (7.5 cm) (design)
Hull: 5 in (130 mm) Conventional nickel-steel plate
Damage control system (retrofit): temperature sensitive automatic fire sprinkler system in coal bunkers and in mafgazines. Manual controlled McCoy valves as backup
Mine defense (see notes) Triple bottom and 3 cells inboard. Part of these cells are the coal bunkers
Notes: After losing 29 monitors to Confederate mines, collisions, groundings, coal bunker fires, and ammunition magazine explosions during the American Civil War, the USN becomes very excited about:
- Underwater protection against groundings and ‘torpedoes’.
- Fire in any form aboard its ships.
- Ammunition stowage and handling systems. The French system which the USN had used in the 1860s and 1870s was inherently an accident waiting for a flame or a spark. The German system was better and the USN adopted that one. (Endicott Mission 1885)
Torpedoes carried are 6 in the tubes and 6 spares. The type torpedo is the flywheel powered Howell torpedo which has its flywheel spun up to 12,000 rpms. You can hear the whine of that spin up from 2,000 meters away clear over the roar of a ship's guns. These "trumpets of Jericho" are so loud that American sailors have to wear ear muffs and use hand signals to protect their hearing and communicate when the torpedoes are spun up to launch.
a. The low rate of fire from large breach loading naval rifles (BLNRs hereafter) was 1 shot every 180 seconds for the USN for guns 20 cm bore size or larger in the era. if one adopts the system of odds and evens, one can put out a three shell broadside every 90 seconds, which is about the rate of fire cycle per barrel for British armored cruiser main guns in the 9.2 inch (23.4 cm) bore category. British pre-dreadnoughts actually used the odds-evens (left barrel in a 2 barrel barbette mount was odd) system themselves to generate 2 shell broadsides.
b. Not turbo-electric. Tesla oscillator and oddly enough; a rotary triple expansion steam engine. Think of the type engine that Hero of Alexandria originally conceived and wrap it in a condenser recovery jacket and you get Ericcson's 1866 patent for a steam engine.
Ammunition and propellant is light. The coal, the steam engines and electric generators, oscillators and motors are heavy===> very heavy and take up a lot of hull volume below the waterline.
I checked it against the motor generator sets at Niagara Falls. It will fit.
The bunkers are where they are as amidship defense. I have no idea what STEEGCs are unless you mean 'steam engine/electric generators/commutators'? If so, then the layout by volume and weight distribution is to prevent hogging and sagging of the ship over keel length by the distributions.
And no radios in the USN before the 1903 experiments. ATL you might get a Tesla sparker around 1895.
Thick around the barbettes and control systems, the gun-houses' mantlets and primary guns. The cellular compartmentation scheme should be apparent from the data. Also the coal bunkers provide a layer of amidships protection.
Just raising the BAKER gun-house 2 meters on a barbette collar changes the metacentric value to unstable and not acceptable values as a gun platform. She is already razor close on her stability as it is.
Thank you.
Exactly, she is supposed to follow the Cramp and Sons evolution in period design.
Beam to length ratio is roughly 7 to 1. Looking at the Cressy Class of RN armored cruiser, the length to beam ratio was roughly 6.84 to 1 and she was designed to do 21 knots (38 k/h, 10.8 m/s) on 21,000 IHP ,(16,000 kW). Since a Cressy is the likely design threat as well as a Royal Sovereign, the ersatz Massachusetts is designed to pace them and sink them or at least make them think about the problem.
The armor scheme is cellular. If you look at the internal layout diagram and stats you will see that it is thick at the control systems, at the barbettes and the main gun houses (face or casemate fronts) and that protection is incorporated elsewhere as armored boxes in the hull frame and compartmentation as part of the float bubble.
The primary mechanical fail moments with reciprocating engines of the era was the slide moment on the cylinders and torque moment exerted on the crank arms below the pistons in the effort to convert the linear slide motion into a rotating one. The only way to get around it is to adopt a form of Hero of Alexander type of spinner inside a condenser jacket. This makes the steam engine an armature turning unit complete with the steam engine acting as a whole flywheel. (Ericsson about 1866).
Explained earlier, but the lack of a good quick fire gun in the USN inventory (1903) kind of makes a BLNR broadside of at least 3 shells necessary every 90 seconds. Statistically (Spanish American War results.); getting hit by a USN large caliber shell on a Spanish cruiser sized target (100 meters long), was 1 war-shot in 50 throws using a 2 shot broadside or roughly 2% at battle ranges of 3000 meters or less.. The USS Brooklyn with her 3 shot main gun broadsides improved that to 5% or 1 shot in 20 throws. Significant difference is that this means in the knife fight off Santiago de Cuba, the USS Brooklyn was able to hammer and mission kill two heavily armed Spanish cruisers of the IMT class even though her own 20.3 and 15.2cm bore artillery was much slower firing then the Spanish cruisers with their "state of the art" French 14 cm bore rapid fire guns.
c. There was a good reason to be terrified of torpedo boats in the era, because those pests could get into their Whitehead torpedo launch range easily for they were almost impossible to hit with any kind of main gun caliber that cycled less than 15 rounds a minute, (Hence the quick fire 6,4,3 and 1 pounder Hotchkiss guns.). The torpedoes of the era had the same exact effective ship hitting and KILLING (PH%,PK%) (Roughly 2,000 meters) at effective ranges as the main medium gun batteries on the capital ships of that era. For the tertiary guns to have any chance at the torpedo boats, the guns have to fire in pairs at the quadrants of the ship, not amidships or even abeam. The practical effect is to set up paired crossfires that will catch the torpedo boats as they cross the 1,000 meter line.
I think against the Royal Sovereigns and most of the armored cruiser threats (especially those nasty French and Spanish classes) the ersatz USS Massachusetts would be a good match. The Marceaus, the Pelayo and their similar ilk would be sink-exs. Even a Brandenburg could be DOA and that type was a rather tough PDN. it is the Majestics that I think is when the trouble starts. Anything like those monsters and later are just too tough.
McP.
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Is this OTL? I was aware that the USN lost monitors to mines and other causes in the Civil War, but not that they lost that many.
If it is the case I can understand the USN being paranoid about torpedoes - I think OTL it took WW1 to make everyone realise just how vulnerable most of the pre-dreadnought designs were to underwater damage.
Cool. If it can be made to work effectively, it's a neat solution to the problem. A quick Google didn't turn up much on Ericsson's rotary engine - do you know if it was ever tested/used at scale?
Oh, I'm not objecting to including the tertiary armament, just pointing out that where they are mounted they are likely to be less useful in any sort of seaway. Designers right up to WW1 loved their main-deck casemates - probably because they kept the weight low down compared to an upper-deck mount - and mounts near the ships' ends nearly always turned out to be impractical.
Say, would it be possible to build Yamato with 16" Quad turrets instead of 18" triples? It shouldn't affect anything practically speaking other than probably being (much?) more malfunction prone. I don't think the extra one gun per turret would be worth it but the idea just came to mind and wanted to ask.
The armoured box concept is something I like, but obviously you face the issue of buoyancy outside the armoured boxes, similar to the issue faced by Inflexibles armoured citadel, which although similar, was more an evolution of the central battery than anything else.
Alas I propose a solution similar to the one used on Inflexible, that of compartments partial filled with cork.
My proposal would be to have cork almost as a backing to the 'upper hull' to aid with buoyancy and prevent capsizing. I can't imagine having lots of cork low in the ship would be a particularly good idea.
What I find interesting is some of the earliest ironclads often had 3 turrets, but 2 twins would take the preference for the next 30 years.
Reed had expressed his dismay at Monarchs forward arcs being impaired by the masts, an issue fixed with both devastation and, far more relevant to Monarchs design, Inflexible and her kin. Would it be possible to push for en echelon Monarch and see the degree of standardisation that was beginning in the late 1870s and 1880s a decade earlier?
Given YAMATO's beam I don't see this being a problem. And it would reduce the severe blast problem they suffered with the 18.1-inch guns as well as reduced stress on the guns and hull.
Lattice masts are typical of US dreadnoughts of the period, height alone is the issue.
Personally I do it because somehow, in the matches I play all the enemy battleships and cruisers get shots on me first
McPherson
Banned
29 monitors sunk.
Source: Doug Foulk on Pinterest.
Hmm. Coles turrets with the 'enormous' handling machinery required for the 12 inch muzzle loaders? That is a good question whether sponsoning off the hull is even possible for such turrets. I honestly do not know. I think it was tried when the British introduced their first BLNRs.
McP.
Yes.
Except the Indianas and follow on US classes.
Here.
True. Events like the circumnavigation by the Great White Fleet are necessary for such lessons learned. During the Spanish American War, the naval gun battles took place in glass calm seas; so the problem with hull mounted casemates was not noticed.
The Japanese would have problems getting their hoists to fit inside their barbettes.
YES! He found the design flaw in the protection scheme. All joking aside, the problem was present in the Indianas as designed and the Americans tried a solution...
That was the stupid solution the Americans applied in our time-line. In a more practical fashion, the solution is multicellular air voids as was used in the Standards, but this is the 1890s and we cannot have ASB knowledge invoked; can we?
But it can catch fire as it did on the USS Massachusetts. Flood the cells to put it out. Almost capsized, she did.
This was before the advent of quickfire (USN rapid-fire guns.) guns of medium bore size that actually was the main damage infliction means in the pre-dreadnought era. Navies that did not understand or lacked the means to make such central batteries tried to fake it with adding large bore guns (the 8 inch bore guns on the Indianas) or adding another main gun turret as the Germans did with the Brandenburgs. The explanation of the practical effect for the ersatz Massachusetts I gave upthread.
Source: Doug Foulk on Pinterest.
Hmm. Coles turrets with the 'enormous' handling machinery required for the 12 inch muzzle loaders? That is a good question whether sponsoning off the hull is even possible for such turrets. I honestly do not know. I think it was tried when the British introduced their first BLNRs.
Once you pass the 40cm mark in bore size; 'blast' becomes a relative problem. The danger zones on the Iowas were huge. I would expect shock would be less severe, but then the IJN by that time were 'rufus wavers'. They had gone past practical into 'Mine is bigger than yours', territory.
McP.
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Ah fire, what a terrible oversight I have made! Surely if the royal navy or US navy had done some kind of further testing with it, coming to the conclusion of multicellular air voids would be a reasonable conclusion? Technically they were using air voids and it held a great advantage over the significant tumble home of french ships, in which once any serious list starts, the great top weight and complete lack of reserve buoyancy in the upper hull would see a few of the ship's 'tumble' indeed! Even just a few tests in testing baths and you have the basis to go off. Of course then it's prodding naval designers to actually put 2 and 2 together, which is an entirely different effort...
Other thing I really like is the proto torpedo defence system. This is truly something both the US and Royal Navy both had necessity for and experience or actually the very least potential experience with! Perhaps if the fenians had more patience with Holland..
Nonetheless it's something I find very interesting and indeed it's interesting that it was usually the simpler torpedo defence systems that worked best, a good example being filling the buoyancy space on the G3s torpedo defence system with water rather than the sealed steel crushing tubes was equally effective for less weight (and presumably much cheaper too)
Onto Monarch, an increase in size would probably be necessary. Could of course go with the italian thing of saying to hell with the turret if it saved any weight or space. Beam would need to be wider anyway. The flying bridge is pretty significant on Monarch, some of that could potentially be narrowed at the least to improve the arcs on an en echelon arrangement. End result is probably a mini inflexible, but the idea is to have an en echelon Monarch that retains its ocean going capabilities. Inflexible practically lived in the Med for good reason, she'd be extremely wet in rougher seas. Alas perhaps it's impossible to have ones cake and eat it so early on in the ironclad era. Italias were quite high sided, but sacrificed quite a bit for their speed and power
Edit: Dulio and Dandolos layout
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