I really appreciate all the comments, improved fire control will be one of Percy Scotts many tasks, I read his biography a while ago and it struck me how much more powerful the royal navy could have been if he had been more able to achieve his goals, their will be no false economies, a multi million pound battleship will have the best director and gunnery calculation system available. The ludgate analytical engine wont be going to sea initially, but what it will do is improved shell design, this will apply to both naval and artillery shells. So whilst we won’t have base bleed 15” shells initially we will have improved ballistics.
A Better Rifle at Halloween
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I really hate the r’s i would have cancelled them in the early tidying up exercise but i saw that they had all been laid down, I don’t much like battlecruiser either, i guess i watched sink the Bismarck one time to many. I think the Royal Navy would be better served moving to a smaller fleet of fast battleships, but i am happy to be persuaded that Hood et al were actually great. I do like the idea of turning the Rs into battle cruisers though.
The R's were not bad ships, their problem was that they had zero growth margins in them and so what you had is pretty much what you're going to get and there's not much way of altering that, in essence their design was a fixed one and because of that and because they had so little room for growth they got dated very quickly. Still they were very good gun platforms and sea boats and had better protection than a QE and better torpedo protection too. But they were inherently limited by their design.
Doesn’t matter how fast your battleship is, it’s never going to be in two places at once. You can only trade numbers for speed so far until you’re simply outgunned by any enemy who can corner you.
Fewer Rs and more Renowns is an intriguing possibility, if only for what it would do to the post war fleet.
Interesting. I am all for better shell design. Jellicoe, while he was at the Admiralty had undertaken to improve the design of naval shells. However, after he left the position his successors did not follow it up. If they had, the British would have probably at least had 4crh capped shells instead of the 2crh shells that many ships had until they had fired them out. If they were lucky they may have even found some of the problems with Lyddite shells and led either the pre-war suggestion for switching to TNT to be accepted or an earlier creation of Shellite. Both would have been a boon to British Naval efforts.
Fast Battleships were battlecruisers. Or at least the terminology between them is flexible. Hood's loss was a one in a million and may well have sunk a BB in the same circumstances. The BC's at Jutland can, I believe, be generally laid at the door of Beatty's ammunition handling procedures and a fairly sensitive primer and filler. If the later chemical changes to the explosive mixture or more careful ammo handling procedures were undertaken most of them would have likely survived. The additional speed that they bring to WW1 is, IMO, critical. If the British were deficient in anything I would say it was "heavy" BC's like the Lion class to match the German's
IIRC the minsiter for production was Lloyd George and to get shells in the numbers needed, they really skimped on quality control. The RN also had issues with its fuses and that was with the pre-war stocks too.
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Would anyone be able to do a 30-second elaboration on the "Canadian Battleships"? What was the design requested? Were they actually intended to be built in Canada? And was they intended to compose a larger portion of their Canadian War Effort (in place of Infantry Divisions)? Thanks in advance, Matthew.
Basically pre WW1 there was the idea that the Canadians were going to fund the construction of 3 Queen Elisabeth class battleships - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naval_Aid_Bill but the bill was hugely expensive (35 mil) and because everything would have been built abroad it wouldn't have benefited Canada as a country at all in terms of jobs or future development of facilities etc. And so it was canned because there wasn't the support for it.
In the immediate pre-war discussions of Naval spending in Canada Robert Borden of the Conservatives favoured sending money to Britain, with the ambitious plan to pay for 3 battleships in the same way that Malaya had paid for the QE that carried its name. Laurier and the Liberals drew a lot of their support from Quebec which did not really favour a navy at all but if they had to have one favoured one built in Canada and probably more of a fishing enforcement squadron. In the end, the RCN came into being but had almost no ships and little experience when war came along. Kind of a standard Canadian response to arms procurement.
The ships would have been built in Britain, and I have seen a few possibilities of what they were supposed to be. The design was to be based on the QE but I understand it was to be a modified version. Some things seems to indicate an improvement while others seem to be cut down due to cost reasons. The British figured that these three plus the four they had payed for and Malaya would give them a strong fast striking squadron. They could then focus on battle-line ships.
Hello,
There is this design...
And...
Hello,
Japanese Battle-cruiser Kongo - Naval Historical Society of Australia
IN 1905 JAPAN, WITH HER VICTORY over the Russian Pacific and Baltic Fleets, had become the major naval power in the Pacific. When HMS Dreadnought was launched in February 1906,
www.navyhistory.org.au
As for 16 inch guns, there is the possibility that such a design is floating around in the Admiralty as it considers the next step in main armament.
With regards to building better QEs or better Rs what has to be remembered is that Britain was in an Dreadnought race with Germany
Had war not happened in 1914 then many of the desired features that some of the comments have suggested could or should have been incorporated would very likely have been included in follow on designs (and we saw that they were) - leading up to WW1 the British were building a class of 4 BBs every 18-24 months plus the odd BC
WW1 actually saw a slow down of Battleships being laid down (units 6, 7 and 8 of the Revenge class were initially cancelled with 2 of them eventually restarted as HMS refit and HMS repair - the largest Destroyers ever built) until about 1916 when the 4 Admirals were ordered due to concern that teh Germans were building more large BCs (and subsequently suspended after the onset of USW) - so this shows the evolution as it might have happened and many of the wish list of items would very likely have been included had the Great war not interrupted the process and hard lessons not also impacted the design process.
So what Britain did is probably the correct thing build something that is good enough now and build something better later which is how they approached every class all the way back to Dreadnought (which could have been an X4 fast BB design).
Had war not happened in 1914 then many of the desired features that some of the comments have suggested could or should have been incorporated would very likely have been included in follow on designs (and we saw that they were) - leading up to WW1 the British were building a class of 4 BBs every 18-24 months plus the odd BC
WW1 actually saw a slow down of Battleships being laid down (units 6, 7 and 8 of the Revenge class were initially cancelled with 2 of them eventually restarted as HMS refit and HMS repair - the largest Destroyers ever built) until about 1916 when the 4 Admirals were ordered due to concern that teh Germans were building more large BCs (and subsequently suspended after the onset of USW) - so this shows the evolution as it might have happened and many of the wish list of items would very likely have been included had the Great war not interrupted the process and hard lessons not also impacted the design process.
So what Britain did is probably the correct thing build something that is good enough now and build something better later which is how they approached every class all the way back to Dreadnought (which could have been an X4 fast BB design).
Hello,
There is another important notion that would have been implemented by Churchill...
There is another important notion that would have been implemented by Churchill...
That's true. In 1913 there was planned to be 4 ships built with 3 following in 1914. These were the ships that the designs U1-U5 and a few others of different letter codes were prepared for. Then the Germans passed the 1912 Naval Law. Though ostensibly the naval race ended in 1912, the Naval law of 1912 has several clauses that would concern the British. For starters it allowed them to dispose of the 4 BB's, 4 Large Cruisers and 4 small cruisers of their material reserve early. The immediate effect of which was that 3 BB's and 2 small cruisers to be added to the German Building Program. This law also allowed for an increase in active service personnel. This would allow the Germans to maintain 3 battle squadrons in full commission instead of 2.
In addition, by 1912 Italy had Dante Alighieri almost complete, 3 Conte de Cavour's launched, 2 Andrea Doria's in construction. Austria also had 2 Tegetthoff class in commission and 2 more under construction, with planning for the 4 Ersatz Monarch class already underway. The British had to plan around the idea that both nations may be supporting Germany in the Med and France may not be able to ensure control of the area.
This led to the 1913 building program to increase to 5 ships and 1914 to increase to 4, but the money for the naval estimates would likely have already been agreed with the Treasury. So the Admiralty had to try and get more ships out of the same money. This led to the U1 design being dropped and what became the R class ending up in service.
Though the Admiralty can generally be said to be a reasonable actor it is, I think, also important to understand that it was not a single actor. There were divisions and groups and differing opinions among those in charge of the Admiralty and not all of those viewpoints are equally valid. I do not think that it is a slander against the work of the Admiralty to examine the feasibility of some of the ideals put forward at the time and consider what it was that made them go a different way. I find that though many decisions have a very good reason for them some of them come down to poor relations between groups as much as to reasonable action.
The fears of moving to oil firing were largely due to the reluctance to be beholden to the US. Britain could source enough oil on its own account to fuel their submarines and destroyers, but it was feared that doing more would allow the US to control British policy. This was not entirely invalid but it was largely overblown. The adoption of Oil fuel was actually held up for some time by the insistence of several committees that before adopting oil firing for capital ships Britain needed to have about 1 years war supply of fuel in storage. This was a political impossibility and was never going to get passed. And as it turned out, what caused oil shortages during the war was not a lack of storage but a lack of transport. Had this been realized prior to the war the 1917 Oil crisis probably could have been butterflied.
Large numbers of shells don't do you any good unless they go bang when you want them to. There was a point in the mid war years when British shells were better at poisoning factory workers than they were at killing Germans.
Logistics is massively complex for a peacetime army, it is a lot harder for a wartime one. Combine this with patchy civilian telephone networks and the same could be said of the ad hoc military communications between the BEF and the UK, a lot of which routinely went by written dispatch and telegrams, there is significant scope for friction in the supply chain.