1920s Sea Change

There is a practical physical limit to what armored hulls can do. It is about 90,000 tonnes or the size of a Nimitz.


That is a function of power plants and practical hogging size limits. (See above.)


Can you seriously look at the Lexingtons as battlecruisers, as a foreign shipwright, and not ROTFLYAO? C and R were smoking hemp.



Meet USS Puritan. To fool the US Congress, the ship was rebuilt on the old USS Puritan. Yup, I think it was the ship's bell that allowed her to be legally a "rebuild".

That physical limit is why I find the G3/N3s so interesting. Without WNT sooner or later you are going to hit that physical limit and start looking at creative compromises. I could easily see a situation where the fast battleship gets pushed to one side as those ultra heavy ships have to pick speed or fighting ability. While I honestly doubt ships would get that heavy before aircraft surpass them all in the 40s, designers would have to be thinking about it.

The Lexington BCs make some sense in that cruiserless USN context. They are a big ship with big guns and you have to respect that if you are smaller than a Hood. And they are a first go. First goes are always flawed. The laughable (and terrifying) bit is how the US could go all in with 6 ships on a first go.

Ahh the Puritan. That is the army's fault. If they had been on the ball all that Navy money could have been going to them ;)
 
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Ahh the Puritan. That is the army's fault. If they had been on the ball all that Navy money could have been going to them ;)

More pork barrel in the Congress critters PoV in Naval construction. That one reason why the National Guard was so robust, every county got a nice brick armory & a fat local contract building it. But, motorizing the Regular Army, thats just not the same visual as assorted big ship construction or destroyer contracts in the seaport cities.
 
I think it was fortunate for the world that the Germans and Italians didn't develop effective aerial torpedoes by 1939.

I think the Royal Navy would have suffered heavily off Norway, Dunkirk and in the Mediterranean in 1940 had the Luftwaffe and Regia Aeronautica possessed medium bombers armed with effective torpedoes in reasonable numbers.

They would also have been better off converting most of their maritime patrol squadrons from seaplanes and flying boats to landplanes when monoplanes with retractable undercarriages became available.

The W series were not effective aerial torpedoes? The Italians dithered about the plane, not the fish.
 

SsgtC

Banned
The Lexington BCs make some sense in that cruiserless USN context. They are a big ship with big guns and you have to respect that if you are smaller than a Hood. And they are a first go. First goes are always flawed. The laughable (and terrifying) bit is how the US could go all in with 6 ships on a first go.
The USN was trying to close the gap between themselves and the RN and IJN in fast capital ships. They figured that 6 good, but flawed, ships now was better than 6 perfect ships later when everyone else had 10+.
 
Ahh the Puritan. That is the army's fault. If they had been on the ball all that Navy money could have been going to them ;)
There was little money for new ships, and when Congress did approve, got things like USS Trenton, the absolute best 1850s wooden broadside screw frigate, built in the mid 1870s.

Congress was big on maintenance funding for the USN.
In years past, shipyards got rich 'fixing' Civil War era ships. The scandal came to light, when the Sec Nav Robeson decided to actually get a ship that wasn't obsolete a decade earlier, under the guise of being a 'Great Rebuild' in 1874.
So the 5000 ton wooden hulled single turret _Puritan_ became the 6000 ton steel dual turret _Puritan_.
The sad thing, was work was halted, so the USN didn't get their mini-me peer of HMS Devastation til 1896, when all that 1870s tech was as obsolete as the original Puritan was in 1874.
 
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