Glen
Moderator
MBarry said:Jefferson Class Nuclear Powered Battleship
USS Jefferson
Displacement: 80,000 tons standard; 87,000 tons fully loaded
Length: 1,047ft
Beam: 121 ft
Powerplant: 4 A2W Nuclear reactors
Armament: 12x 20 inch guns, in 3 gun turrets; 10x dual mounted 5 inch guns; 20x quad mounted 40mm AA guns; 10x .50 cal MG
Armor: To defeat 20'' shells
Speed: 34 knots
Crew: 1,500 officers and men
The first nuclear powered vessel launched for the US Navy in ME7. Despite the accelerated tech devolpment(the ship was launched in the late 40s) the aircraft carrier had not yet asserted itself as the dominant means of naval conflict. Thus the battleship era last longer. The Jefferson (named after the state not the president) class was designed to compliment a whole plethora of nuclear powered ships, designed to work together in a single task force. She and her sister ships (Ohio, Lewis, Vermont) gave good account of themselves in the Japanese-American War of 1953, and later in the Chinese Wars of Independence. In the Great Drakan War, Jefferson and Vermont were both sunk by aircraft in the beginning stages.
Very cool. ME7 forever! So, why do you posit that carriers wouldn't develop as quickly? I'd say by the 1920s airplanes would have caught up to OTL standards, and the airships would start to enter a period of very slow decline. I'd say in the 1953 war you posit that it would have been shown that the carrier age was upon us, if nothing else did in the interim.
Hmmm, maybe New Granada would have gone along with an extended era of the battleship. Can aircraft carriers transit the Panama Canal?
So, a Japanese American War in 1953? That would have pulled in all of the Americas on the Japanese...would likely have been a rather brutally short war, with the Japanese getting hit very hard indeed unless they had some powerful allies.
Chinese wars of independence sound cool, and would have been fought at what approximate tech level, 1990s?
Great Drakan War? Sounds interesting, but coming at such a late period, unlikely. The ME7 Draka would have either entered into a long period of decline, much like the Soviet Union of OTL, or undergone heavy reform (or even revolution) that would make it a more respectable member of the international community. And in any event, they would have had nuclear weapons by that time, at least. MAD for an isolated African nation seems extreme....