What if the Washington Naval Treaty Failed

What I'm looking at is:
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All of these show turrets near the forward superstructure and definitely in the blast zone if the ship is firing over the shoulder. How many 6-inch turrets were there supposed to be?
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Original design
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Refined design
Possible rebuild
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But seriously, the big takeaway is that once WWII planes come around, it doesn't matter how big and bad your battleship is, you're going to have a bad time if you don't have a carrier or an island to fly your own planes off of.

Although against slow moving biplanes, enough HMGs can work, but all those 20mm cannon aren't much good by mid-war, and 40mm Vickers and Bofors guns are made obsolete by the Jet Age.

To be especially dramatic, even if you swapped all of Musashi's 25mm Type 96 cannon with 40mm Bofors... you'd have a sunk Musashi with a slightly higher kill count.
 
By the time you've got carrier borne jets able to carry battleship killing weapons the Battleships will either have SAMs or have gone to the scrap yards.
 
.@

as ever you bring up some interesting points however you raise an interesting point about directors and secondary armament. texas only ever had 76mm AA guns, I don't believe the Mk 33 or mk 37 were ever used to direct AA other than 5”.

Refit 1988-1990.

3'/50

USS TEXAS radars.

USS Texas gun directors. (AAA optical)

QTY OF 4, 3” DP GUN DIRECTORS MARK 51 MOD 3.
QTY OF 2, 3” DP GUN DIRECTORS MARK 51 MOD 4.
QTY OF 10, AAMG GUN DIRECTORS MARK 51 MOD 2.


Mark 51 director...

ie for most of her life Texas has no High angle fire controls at all.

in 1943 she was fitted with mk51 directors for the 76 mm guns which was a gyro gunsight Suitable for close range aa fire

The situation as AFAIC is that the 3"50 were fired using local predictors and sights.

Nelson and Rodney had HA directors fitted at their foretops in the 30’s and were fitted with Gyro predicted gun control for LAA in 1941 with the rest of the RN ( GRUB fitting to HACS)

presumably G4 class battleships would have been treated similarly.

WW II Op-hist showed that this HA director setup was NTG. 1943 refits reflected this realization. Better radar directed FCS and more AAA fitted to the surviving RN capital units. If any G3s survive, these most certainly would have received the same business.
 
Yes. Four 17,000 ton ships to replace Argus, Eagle, Hermes and Vindictive were part of the ten-year plan of 1924.

IIRC, they were to be completed between 1928 and 1938 at intervals of 3-4 years.

Had that plan been carried out the Royal Navy would have had 7 satisfactory aircraft carriers at the end of 1938, consisting of Courageous, Furious, Glorious and the four 17,000 ton ships.

However, I think the ships would have looked more like Courageous and Glorious with a capacity of 48 aircraft, which is still a massive improvement on the capacities of Argus, Eagle and Hermes. Plus they would be much faster and have longer flight decks.

This is because Sir Eustace Tennyson d'Eyncourt wrote a paper on the existing aircraft carriers. In it he said that if they had been designed and built as aircraft carriers "from the keel up" Argus, Eagle and the Follies would have displaced considerably less. His estimate for "keel up" equivalents to the follies was either 17,000 tons or 18,000 tons.

I suspect that sans-Washington the design would eventually have been larger, probably in the 22-24,000 ton range. Or even taking the 27,000 ton Washington limit on Carriers as an aspiration.
(How did that come about?)
 
I suspect that sans-Washington the design would eventually have been larger, probably in the 22-24,000 ton range. Or even taking the 27,000 ton Washington limit on Carriers as an aspiration.
(How did that come about?)

Length of flightdeck + unarmored (Lexington type) hull and powerplant.
 
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