I could see more recent US governments being that daft, but at the time?
At the initial meeting all they would have to do is slip a opium laced cigarettes to their American Counterpart. That or treat them to a Salisbury steak covered in a delicious hallucinogenic mushroom gravy.
By the time the US figures it out the "Great Mustache of Kent" will already be at least half done.
McPherson
Banned
1. The SoDaks (double stack casemates) would have to be razed to modernize in the Mid-30s, plus there is a massive armor weak spot just past the aft funnel. Hit them there and it looks like the aft magazine would detonate.
2. Who says the Lexs wind up as battlecruisers? I think flattops would occur to someone (Moffett) very quickly.
Honestly it would be pretty interesting (though very unlikely) if all six Lexingtons do end up getting converted to carriers during construction. The US would have six (for the time) massive carriers to play with. Would that be enough to set off a "Carrier Race" or would other nations think the US was wasting it's resources with so many of them.
RamscoopRaider
Donor
So the SoDak's have flaws, they still have half again the firepower of anything else afloat and even with a weak spot they are still better than retaining South Carolina's, Delawares and Floridas (or worse Connecticuts and Virginias)
Because it would be cheaper to build new carriers by that point. OTL the difference was $4.7 million per ship, a few months more than OTL of construction work that needs to be undone and that difference evaporates
McPherson
Banned
Yes.
Depends how far the build is along. Below 27% and the barbettes are not formed in yet. If caught at this stage (Saratoga) it is cheaper to design on the fly than to build new from the keel up.
US has literally zero need of such a raid. They can just fight and defeat the IJN. We of all people should know that a Japanese victory in the Pacific War was impossible. US would just fight and win a conventional war with Japan without elaborate scheming.
McPherson
Banned
The Marianas Turkey Shoot was anything but "conventional". Ditto Coral Sea. The Japanese had two full years when on paper they were stronger in the air and in their surface fleet than PACFLT. It was in 1943 late that PACFLT doubles in size.
A 'raid' as seriously proposed by Tom Phillips in the ABC-1 staff conference with Ghormley (naval talks concerning the interaction of PACFLT and Eastern Command as mentioned by Andrew Boyd in "The Royal Navy in Eastern Waters" pp 191-192 and further), would have only been possible with such a huge aircraft carrier force.
That's what happens when a ten year period of anarchic anti-intellectualism (the Cultural Revolution) completely guts the civilian portion of your military industrial complex.
I remember reading that the key nuclear reactor designer for their first SSN was imprisoned for being to western or something and Mao had to intervene to save him and get him back to work. Even if its untrue the fact anyone would have come up with it says alot about China in the period.
Yes.
If you repeat Queen Elizabeth class there will be some minor revisions but I'm not sure what they will be.
It wasn't just Navy.
It took the Chinese more than a decade to properly reverse the MiG-21 as the J-7 and then debug it, IIRC.
And then there's the torturous route the J-8 took. While similar to a twin engine J-7, it flew in 1969 after the program was started in 1964, but really didn't enter production until 1979.
Jesus. To be fair the Indians took like 30 years to design/build the HAL Tejas.
I have been doing some reading, and I actually don’t think this is the case. Apparently Parsons was experimenting with geared turbines in ships from the Turbinia in 1897. In 1909 he bought a triple gear expansion ship and ran it for some time to get a baseline before inverting it to a feared turbine system. By 1910 it had sailed over 12,000 miles with no problems or wear on the gear teeth. He was continually increasing the size of the ships he could build them for. https://www.turbomachinerymag.com/trouble-free-geared-steam-turbines-for-ships/. The rest of the series I can’t get a hold of so I am not sure what point they were at in 1912, but it actually seems in the realm of possibility.
If nothing else I suspect that a near repeat of the QEs will have the improvements to the armor scheme that the Rs incorporated in otl
No, those reduction gears were deafeningly loud, which made them impractical until Parsons invented creep gear-cutting in 1912. For this reason 1912 is what I consider the year they became viable.
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McPherson
Banned
Pennsylvania Class.
then
New Mexico Class
By this time, there was a solution that was not reduction gear centric. Furthermore, the Standards had a better protection scheme as a result.
If you mean cruising turbines, the QE’s had those. Without gears but in cruising turbines they seem to improve economy more than speed. Turbo electric was experimental when the New Mexico was launched several years after QE. I am not sure they would be viable in 1912 either.
McPherson
Banned
1. USS Langley 1912. It was not that experimental.
2. No need for cruising turbines or a backing gear set or a backing engine with turbo-electric.
3. Better compartmentation and torpedo defense.
4. The downside is that the plant is HEAVY and the electrical system does not like salt water at all. These problems...
U.S. Navy photo - http://www.navy.mil/submit/display.asp?story_id=77322
still have not gone away.