AHC Modern Monitor

I see China as one possibility; having monitors for service against Taiwan, Vietnam, and the Koreas. South Korea is another possibility for having monitors.
 

BlondieBC

Banned
The USA had active 8 inch (203mm) artillery in National Guard units until the mid 90's. Once you have a beach head, these can provide the needed fire support at a very low cost, compared to a modern battlecruiser. With 10 to 15 Supercarriers, marine amphib ships, and the US Airforce, an 8" bombardment ships seems to be an unneeded tool. Also, many ships have 5" guns, so this ship only helps in the first few hours or days of an amphib assault on targets too hardened for 5" guns but vulnerable to 8" guns where the enemy has air superiority and the USA has not had enough lead time to reactivate a battleship.

Do you have some particular battle scenario in mind to use the monitor?
 
The USA had active 8 inch (203mm) artillery in National Guard units until the mid 90's. Once you have a beach head, these can provide the needed fire support at a very low cost, compared to a modern battlecruiser. With 10 to 15 Supercarriers, marine amphib ships, and the US Airforce, an 8" bombardment ships seems to be an unneeded tool. Also, many ships have 5" guns, so this ship only helps in the first few hours or days of an amphib assault on targets too hardened for 5" guns but vulnerable to 8" guns where the enemy has air superiority and the USA has not had enough lead time to reactivate a battleship.

Do you have some particular battle scenario in mind to use the monitor?
Not use just have floating around, the 203mm was a minimum, hoping for 406mm

Say China has a few just in case they someday wish to try to retake Taiwan, Russia a few just in case, Britain one or two for Falklands 2.0, France just in case

Essentially wanted something for basing third world countries at low cost and providing a low cost contingency for shore bombardment
 

Hkelukka

Banned
Entirely possible, if you scale down everything else and REAALLY stretch the norm of what is a Monitor class.

You could get a small ship with one very large gun and nothing else. With a crew of maybe 8-12. Essentially a "mortar" ship. That is designed to be driven up riverlines and even risk being beached if neccesary.

The armament would need to be something with a effective range of 20-25km.

The ships goal would be to offer firesupport in a way that is organic to the ground units.

In other words, it would have to offer a direct link between the ship and the crews on the ground. It would in essence serve as a attached artillery unit which responds to the ground unit commands, not to the naval hierarchy itself.


So the closest niche for such a ship that I can think of is as a fast reaction close to shore mortar support for ground units engaged in guerilla actions where using a quarter million dollar cruise missile is both impossible, and not fast enough. The shells need to be on the ground within 10 seconds of the crew saying where they should be.

It would not be used to support any kind of beach landings, but instead fairly low intensity conflicts where things like ground mortar crew move futher inland and have their duties taken over by a close to shore mortar battery.

If you put a Coilgun with a solid slug that has a propellant included in it you could get a massive quick response to any low intensity coast area.
 

BlondieBC

Banned
Entirely possible, if you scale down everything else and REAALLY stretch the norm of what is a Monitor class.

You could get a small ship with one very large gun and nothing else. With a crew of maybe 8-12. Essentially a "mortar" ship. That is designed to be driven up riverlines and even risk being beached if neccesary.

The armament would need to be something with a effective range of 20-25km.

The ships goal would be to offer firesupport in a way that is organic to the ground units.

In other words, it would have to offer a direct link between the ship and the crews on the ground. It would in essence serve as a attached artillery unit which responds to the ground unit commands, not to the naval hierarchy itself.


So the closest niche for such a ship that I can think of is as a fast reaction close to shore mortar support for ground units engaged in guerilla actions where using a quarter million dollar cruise missile is both impossible, and not fast enough. The shells need to be on the ground within 10 seconds of the crew saying where they should be.

It would not be used to support any kind of beach landings, but instead fairly low intensity conflicts where things like ground mortar crew move futher inland and have their duties taken over by a close to shore mortar battery.

If you put a Coilgun with a solid slug that has a propellant included in it you could get a massive quick response to any low intensity coast area.

I would go with a small oil platform for this role, one with legs that could be attached to the ground. Being anchored to the ground gives more stability, therefore more accurate. It would also double as the command post for the operation. An oil platform could go into water only a few meters deep. The ship has no armor, and the ammo magazine is designed to direct the force away from human personnel. I don't know if you can actually fit say a single WW1 BB gun on a ship like this, but i can sort of see this ship. Also no idea for how fast this ship travels, but 10 knots would not surprise me. Basically a Vietnam era fire base on steroids, all anchored in a swamp. If the ship is only for land base fire support, all the anti-submarine, anti-surface ship firepower could come from other naval assets.

Taiwan would be a very difficult operation for the Chinese after the Korean War started. The USA is going to try to stop the Chinese at sea, so a gun ship could be very hard to get near Taiwan. Making a ship able to easily take a long trip at good speed (fleet speed) will drive up the costs. I suspect for this role, a refitted BB is better. If say in the 1960's or 1970's, a BB was refitted to minimize crew, maybe you could make one economical to use. Maybe the UK leaves on active turret on a Vanguard, uses the rest of the space as a command ship and helicopter ship. The turrets take up a lot of mass and volume, and i guess could be refitted to something useful besides the typical idea to add anti-ship missiles. One turret area might be enough space to house a full corp size command area. This is a lot of speculation, i am not a naval engineer.

I guess i could see Korea trying this idea, even though, if Korea has access to BB guns, why not fortify them inside a mountain or the like. A few ships guarding the easier invasion terrain near Seoul, or a long range ship to try to take out the NK fortified gun positions one by one. The Russians tried some odd ideas by western standards, so maybe a few of these in the Baltic. It is hard to see who would do something like this, because it is hard to see it as cost effective compared to recommissioning a WW2 BB or even a WW1 style railroad gun.
 
So the closest niche for such a ship that I can think of is as a fast reaction close to shore mortar support for ground units engaged in guerilla actions where using a quarter million dollar cruise missile is both impossible, and not fast enough. The shells need to be on the ground within 10 seconds of the crew saying where they should be.

Just a nitpick - for most artillery, the time of flight for a shell over those sorts of ranges is going to be more like 30 seconds. And that's if the gun is already loaded and aimed at the target, if they have to do that (and the fire control calculations) as well then 2 minutes is a more realistic figure and would be pretty good performance. Heavier guns take longer to load and aim as well.
I can see a role for this sort of ship in areas with bad terrain, where waterways are practically the only form of transport - parts of South America or Africa spring to mind, maybe Southeast Asia as well in places. Getting conventional artillery into those places would be nigh-on impossible, but floating a ship like this up and mooring it in or near the operational area could be handy. Still, that's treating it more as an artillery raft than a monitor.
 
Say China has a few just in case they someday wish to try to retake Taiwan, Russia a few just in case, Britain one or two for Falklands 2.0, France just in case
Except that Monitors require you having air superiority, which means you need carriers, which means you can already hit the enemy pretty effectively, more effectively than you can with a big gun anyway. Really, a monitor of the type you're imagining is just a slow, lightly armoured battleship, with all the attendant issues that brings.
 
Except that Monitors require you having air superiority, which means you need carriers, which means you can already hit the enemy pretty effectively, more effectively than you can with a big gun anyway. Really, a monitor of the type you're imagining is just a slow, lightly armoured battleship, with all the attendant issues that brings.
Well yes which is why I figure it would only be used on countries that can't shoot back or when you have superiority already and want the extra support

Gunfire is more cost efficient than bombing (why else do we still have artillery) and can be ready in 2 minutes instead of 2 hours
 

Hkelukka

Banned
Just a nitpick - for most artillery, the time of flight for a shell over those sorts of ranges is going to be more like 30 seconds. And that's if the gun is already loaded and aimed at the target, if they have to do that (and the fire control calculations) as well then 2 minutes is a more realistic figure and would be pretty good performance. Heavier guns take longer to load and aim as well.
I can see a role for this sort of ship in areas with bad terrain, where waterways are practically the only form of transport - parts of South America or Africa spring to mind, maybe Southeast Asia as well in places. Getting conventional artillery into those places would be nigh-on impossible, but floating a ship like this up and mooring it in or near the operational area could be handy. Still, that's treating it more as an artillery raft than a monitor.

Exactly, which is why its stretching the convention of what a Monitor ship is to its absolute limit. Even then its mostly a naming issue not a class issue.

Such a ship would only be a Monitor in name, bearing almost no similarity to its historical counterpart and being more of a artillery raft.

And my concept for it would probably work best with two small independent crafts with a combined command where when one ship is ready to fire the other ship is not. That would cut down on the reaction time.

Automatic artillery with the minimum possible human components so much so that the ground crew can automatically enter coordinates that are then transmitted to the nearest ship and to the fire control computer/staff bypassing the normal chain. That would also cut back on the time.

Either way, you could get a artillery platform with a response time well below 1 minute for anything inside a 20 or so km radius from the platform itself.

If you keep at least one weapon loaded at all times, which has its risks.
If you allow for direct target coordinates by the ground team to the fire team, potentially automatically and using a form of GPS. This would probably be best done in some form of automatic system where the position of every soldier is known within a few meters and all they have to direct is "fire at 300m in that direction".

It would require quite an accurate command and coordination system for the platforms, and redundancies that allow severeal ships to have weapons ready in any low intensity conflicts.

If it is done extremely well and the risks are understood, you could have a fireplatform with the ability to land something equivelant to 200mm artillery shell under a minute in any target in the field.

Combine 3-5 of these near any coastline with the appropriate force required and 1-2 in active duty and 2-4 in reserve and once a ground team needs fire support you could fire the 1-2 on active first while the 2-4 on reserve prepare their system and within roughly 5-10 minutes of calling for it the ground team could have something with the firepower of a Iowa BB at their disposal anywhere within 20-30km from the coastline.

If said platforms/monitors are designed solely as ground artillery support in difficult terrains and low intensity conflicts you could have a sizable cheap artillery presence anywhere in the world. This would probably be a massive thing for something like a low intensity pacification in a place like the Niger Delta or Somalia. You could build, man and fire 10 of these at the cost of much less than 1 missile frigate.

Anyway, its still not a Monitor ship on its own but its an interesting concept, "it has its faults" is a way to put it lightly, but other than that I really dont see a place for the Modern Monitor, that is unless we have some kind of star trek like shields in the near future.

EDIT:

Thought about that targetting issue quickly and the best way I can see of is a hand held device with a quickly adjustable range setting and a laser pointer and a compass.

A GPS picks up the location of the device.

A Compass the direction

And the laser either looks at the range to what is pointed at (by calculating time of laser return)

or failing that last one due to target being invisible or in cover

You can set the range manually.

The computer then calculates if any known devices or units are within range of the target radius and fires.

Only problem with this is that at a range of 20km from the ship, the shells have a very large area of impact so at longer rangees its not exactly useful for hitting a specific house.
 
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155mm

The germans have recently fitted the complete turret from a PzH2000 155 SPG on a frigate in place of the original turret. Let's say the US converted the old Sherman class Destroyers in the late 60s to take turrets from 155 M109 SPH and used them as fire suport ships...
Not real monitors. For the full monitor look, how about converted LST with WW2 era army spec 240mm Field Guns on limited tranverse mounts?
Plenty of space for fire control facilities, an Heli pad. etc...
 
The weapon

The idea would be to put two of this...

800px-ROC_M1_240MM.jpg
 
Naval Gunfire vs Carrier strikes

Even when you have air superiority and carriers avaible, naval gunfire still makes sense because:
It's cheap. Air sorties are very expensive, old ammo would have to be destroyed anyway.
It's great for SEAD in coastal areas. The USN used to blast known AA Vietnamese position close to shore with gunfire from it's BB or CA to make it easier for the flyboys. (The coastline is a great place to shoot lowflying aircraft, because they have nowhere to hide)
Planes get shot down, and downed pilots are a lot of trouble to rescue or become politicians later on. Nobody shoots down heavy shells (well, the brits used to claim the seawolf SAM could hit a gunshell in flight, but that seems far from pratical...)
Range is a problem, and monitors would be targets for 130mm M46 guns in most places, so our monitors would have to be given armour protection for it's vitals. If they stay out of M46 range they won't have much land to shoot at...
 
US Navy OTL efforts

To give it's ships land bombardment capability in the post VietNam era the USN produced the MCLWG. The test DD certanly has a monitor look to it

WNUS_8-55_mk71_Hull_pic.jpg
 
Gunfire is more cost efficient than bombing (why else do we still have artillery) and can be ready in 2 minutes instead of 2 hours
It is not, however, accurate, so cost-efficiency drops. Look at Omaha Beach, the only naval fire in support of the troops in the central section came from destroyers sailing into bottom-scraping range so that they could eyeball their targets. Naval Artillery is good for shaking up the enemy, but not much more than that really.
 
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