Your Nation's Warships, Batch 3

[Austrasien]

Idea:

Larger fishing trawler operating under no hull number, military ensign, or uniformed personnel which performs duties as a trawler aught. It would be armed with a pair of underwater 30in (Seawolf style) allowing for 21in torpedoes to 'swim out'. These torpedoes would be wire-guided only no sonar and not self-guided whatsoever. The trawler would use her commercial Furuno radar to guide the torpedoes to a close target (Within 10-ish nautical miles perhaps). If the plan went as it should, the target's navy (It's hopefully sunk) would assume a submarine attack.

And yes this is me trying to compensate for inferior conventional forces. This idea is linked to such as:
1) Use of commercial and civilian craft to lay mines (To be decided due to heavy submarine force)
2) Use of commercial and civilian craft to perform as AGIs
3) Use of the Klub K-style missile system with commercial box containers (To be decided due to massive political issues)
4) Heavy submarine to surface combatant ratio

The value of a Q-ship is that it is not expected. If you rely on them constantly, it will soon cease to be unexpected one way or another.

[United Earthlings]

The better question is: what is your carrier-arsenal ship hybrid doing providing shore bombardment, as that is the only role AGS is suited for. Or would be suited for, if it was actually a gun, rather than the billion dollar 100+ ton stowable flagpole the complete lack of any kind of ammunition whatsoever has turned it into.

Shore Bombardment was one of the mission design criteria for my Aviation Cruiser.

I’ve imaged a world where a facsimile of the AGS continued to see successful development including new kinds of advanced ammunition for the gun to fire. I call this universe nationstates Delta6 and it is wonderful.

For a ship that size, you're looking at 3000-4000 long tons, at least.

That’s not far from the truth; by my estimates after conversion from metric it would be somewhere closer to the 3,000 long ton range depending on too many variables that is beyond my expertise to accurately calculate with precise precision.

No, actually, it's a very specific term with a very clear meaning in naval engineering, and has been for centuries. It means you have a very low block coefficient for the draught and other dimensions of your ship.

I’ve read quite a few technical naval design and engineering books, never seen that specific term used when referencing hull shape. Just not how it’s describe in the literature.

As TBN said, it's performance will be very similar to (and probably worse than, given all the extra weight of armor and hundreds of VLS missiles) the Moskvas. As in, so terrible that the Soviets literally stopped building them specifically because they were such bad seaboats.

You're likely looking at excessive pitching and rolling, further exacerbated by the extra top weight of a thick armored deck. The ships will be incapable of operating helicopters in all but the most mild of seas. Your missile guidance radars might even have trouble maintaining target lock in heavier seas. Your crew will absolutely hate their lives.

A bulbous bow and flaring the bow will not fix an inherently flawed hull design, or the Soviets would have fixed the Moskvas this way. They may help, but not enough.

I know both you and TBN have become fixated on the Moskva design, but it’s a Bad Analogy.

Looking at the North Carolina class battleship which has similar hull dimensions as my design, the North Carolina class has an extra top weight of a thick armored deck plus three massive turrets on a stable design that doesn’t have excessive pitching and rolling. A single turret on said North Carolina class weighs more than all the VLS cells combined on my design and the VLS system on my design is spread out more evenly instead of being overly concentrated in a single area.

Somehow a good heavily armored warship can be designed in the late 1930s that doesn’t have a flawed unstable hull design, but by the Gods, can’t in the early 21st century without the design being completely flawed.

That makes no logical sense.

That’s why I would and did start with a hull design that isn’t inherently flawed from the beginning that includes a bulbous bow and the right bow flare combination. I’m sure my nation’s naval engineers would have mastered that skill before even the first steel was cut.

In summary to date neither of you has presented any evidence of how my design has an inherently flawed hull design within the actual stated specification parameters of the design itself as much as both of you want to seem to have the design itself be the Moskva class.

I’ve enjoyed this debate for the most part, but even I can only take so many straw man fallacies.

Contradicting yourself and/or backpedaling is often one of the first signs that you know you're wrong but aren't yet willing to admit it to yourself. Whether that is the case here or not, I won't say..

Don’t worry any Cognitive dissonance on my part caused by me holding two or more contradictory ideals in my head will be rectified in time.

Arguing over whether its AEGIS or Aegis is really dumb though.

That was the conclusion I reached as well. I didn’t think pointing out a simple discrepancy I happen to notice would cause so much consternation.

Taken from your chosen NS flag, I think Hobbes was right.

P.S. I have a few Calvin and Hobbes Collection editions as part of my library and I was able to find the comic strip where that end section was ripped from.

TYRANNOSAURUS IN F14s!! I still think Hobbes was right.

[Triplebaconation]

No, actually, it's a very specific term with a very clear meaning in naval engineering, and has been for centuries. It means you have a very low block coefficient for the draught and other dimensions of your ship.

I’ve read quite a few technical naval design and engineering books, never seen that specific term used when referencing hull shape. Just not how it’s describe in the literature.

"The block coefficient indicates whether the form is full or fine and whether the waterlines will have large angles of inclination to the middle line plane at the ends." Eric Tupper, "Introduction to Naval Architecture, 3rd Edition," page 11.

Looking at the North Carolina class battleship which has similar hull dimensions as my design, the North Carolina class has an extra top weight of a thick armored deck plus three massive turrets on a stable design that doesn’t have excessive pitching and rolling. A single turret on said North Carolina class weighs more than all the VLS cells combined on my design and the VLS system on my design is spread out more evenly instead of being overly concentrated in a single area.

The North Carolina-class has similar hull dimensions. It has much higher displacement. The hull is fuller. It has more buoyancy at the ends.

When discussing dimensionless coefficients, comparing ships with similar coefficients is in fact a Better Analogy than comparing two ships with similar dimensions but different coefficients. This is why scale models and ship model basins were the most important innovation in the study of hydrodynamics.

Somehow a good heavily armored warship can be designed in the late 1930s that doesn’t have a flawed unstable hull design, but by the Gods, can’t in the early 21st century without the design being completely flawed.

That makes no logical sense.

Of course it doesn't! And you're complaining about strawman arguments?

[Ormata]

Shore Bombardment was one of the mission design criteria for my Aviation Cruiser.

I’ve imaged a world where a facsimile of the AGS continued to see successful development including new kinds of advanced ammunition for the gun to fire. I call this universe nationstates Delta6 and it is wonderful.

Suddenly this all makes so much sense. Didn't realize exactly how detached the world you were trying to design for was from the normal one people stick to.

In other news I will next be designing submarine-carrier-battleships of 1mil ton displacements for use in littoral operations. It'll have 25cm guns that double as a surface propulsion system.

I know both you and TBN have become fixated on the Moskva design, but it’s a Bad Analogy.

Looking at the North Carolina class battleship which has similar hull dimensions as my design, the North Carolina class has an extra top weight of a thick armored deck plus three massive turrets on a stable design that doesn’t have excessive pitching and rolling. A single turret on said North Carolina class weighs more than all the VLS cells combined on my design and the VLS system on my design is spread out more evenly instead of being overly concentrated in a single area.

Somehow a good heavily armored warship can be designed in the late 1930s that doesn’t have a flawed unstable hull design, but by the Gods, can’t in the early 21st century without the design being completely flawed.

That makes no logical sense.

That’s why I would and did start with a hull design that isn’t inherently flawed from the beginning that includes a bulbous bow and the right bow flare combination. I’m sure my nation’s naval engineers would have mastered that skill before even the first steel was cut.

In summary to date neither of you has presented any evidence of how my design has an inherently flawed hull design within the actual stated specification parameters of the design itself as much as both of you want to seem to have the design itself be the Moskva class.

I’ve enjoyed this debate for the most part, but even I can only take so many straw man fallacies.

Wow it's almost like a 1930s warship and an early 2000s warships are designed to withstand different things. Oh wait. If you look at a warship armor scheme, the placement of it, the actual armor design, the studies conducted prior to the armor design, you see what sort of weapons the designers are trying to protect her against. In the case of a North Carolina, that weapon is a big ass shell, an aerial bomb, and aerial-launched torpedoes. Those weapons are for the most part not used (due to limited range as in case with the artillery) or have vastly improved their ability to kill shit really, really dead in a really fast manner (ASCMs, torpedoes etc).

What you are trying to do will not protect against the weapons you are trying to engage against because they have outpaced the ways to prevent damage. The time-tested ways to prevent a missile or torpedo is through active countermeasures instead of passive ones, things like RAM and CIWS, engaging the enemy before they get within gun range, information superiority, and aerial superiority with the capacity to place naval strikes on targets with impunity.

Your design is flawed in armor scheme because, frankly, it's armor serves little purpose that can be better served by other, superior systems.

But of course, I wouldn't be surprised if in your world armor just became better and better with no stopping, issues in construction, or issues in weight. Heck might as well just stick a forcefield on it if that happens.

The value of a Q-ship is that it is not expected. If you rely on them constantly, it will soon cease to be unexpected one way or another.

You're definitely not wrong honestly and yeah...I doubt I'll go on with the idea. It's bad for all relations and I've found that it is meant for some geopolitical situation that I'm actually not in.

Penny-wise, pound-foolish. Given that the guidance system is the most expensive part of a torpedo, you aren't really going to net any savings but will increase the cost of equipping all your surface ships with large, heavyweight torpedoes. While also limiting the ability of platforms like helicopters and ASW aircraft to carry and deploy these weapons. Given that these two platforms are critical, this is a rather serious problem.

Yeah...not wrong there. Fekkin heck, I'll look back into that sorta thing. 320mm for surface or something like that, 533mm for subs.

[Austria-Bohemia-Hungary]

Might as well go full FanT on the armour. <.>

[Connori Pilgrims]

Shore Bombardment was one of the mission design criteria for my Aviation Cruiser.

I’ve imaged a world where a facsimile of the AGS continued to see successful development including new kinds of advanced ammunition for the gun to fire. I call this universe nationstates Delta6 and it is wonderful.

The functions and requirements of carriers and of surface gun platforms are entirely incompatible ...the conceptions of these designs ...is evidently the result of an unresolved contest between a conscious acceptance of aircraft and a subconscious desire for a 1914 Fleet ...these abortions are the results of a psychological maladjustment. The necessary readjustments should result from a proper re-analysis of the whole question, what would be a balanced fleet in 1945, 1950 or 1955?

- attributed to the Director of the Gunnery Division, Board of the Admiralty Naval Staff, Royal Navy circa 1941 in response to Admiral Sir Bruce Fraser's requested proposal for a hybrid battleship-carrier derived from the Lion-class.

The context and details are somewhat different, but I believe this quote is relevant for summing up some of the fundamental concerns and issues people are having with your vision for your cruiser class. An aviation ship design, whether its an ASW-bird mothership or some kind of multirole (like the sadly unbuilt US MEU/CG-VSTOL) does not need to run around with big guns bombing shore positions.

A more sensible idea if one really wanted gunships (there's nothing inherently wrong with AGS or its like as a weapon concept) is to just have a separate conventional surface combatant class (of appropriate size for intended mission profiles) with said guns to join the task forces rather than complicating the design of the aviation ship by cramming big guns onto it.

Somehow a good heavily armored warship can be designed in the late 1930s that doesn’t have a flawed unstable hull design, but by the Gods, can’t in the early 21st century without the design being completely flawed.

That makes no logical sense.

Form follows function, not the other way around. One of the issues here is you're using the North Carolina-class gun battleship (a wonderful though treaty-constrained design) as the basis of comparison/analogy to justify design choices for an aviation cruiser-cum-arsenal ship, whose functions logically and obviously diverge significantly from the North Carolina, and therefore should have different forms and design features as a consequence.

The issue of this insistence on armour is another, although I believe armour is not fundamentally wrong in principle, but in distribution (to paraphrase Commander Yates Stirling's statement on battlecruiser armour in his 1908 USNI Proceedings article). As Ormata stated, the 1930s presented different threats to warships that are of a different context and magnitude to what threaten warships today.

Armoured decks for non-carrier surface combatants are nowadays meaningless as defense against direct enemy attack because the threat it is meant to defend from - armour-piercing shells and (non/semi)armour-piercing dumb bombs dropped from altitude with accuracies measured in hundreds of meters as Ormata mentioned - has been largely supplanted by very precise missile and bomb weapons that can hit within tens of meters or even within single-digit meters. With such accuracy they don't even need to penetrate your deck to mission-kill you.

The heavy uber-armour-piercing ASCMs of the kind the Russkies love, as well as the newfangled ASBMs popularized by the vile Chinese, are the kind of threat no armour can save you from (not even the vaporware electric armour that occasionally pops up in NS design and has gone nowhere IRL, not that it stops say me from using it), but if the enemy spams nothing but this then you have a different problem altogether.

[Austria-Bohemia-Hungary]

The heavy uber-armour-piercing ASCMs of the kind the Russkies love,

Once upon a time I found a P-700 Granit warhead and compared it to the Grand Slam bomb... and found that they were practically identical in skin thickness and shape. <.>
Also daily reminder that in the first Tallboy mission against Tirpitz they reduced the battleship to a floating battery without even exploding the bombs in the ship... and in the final Tallboy mission they struck a magazine first, and then struck a turret, lifting that bodily from its mounting. And then the near misses flooded and capsized the ship.

[Post War America]

I'm not going into fighting effectiveness, RCS or anything else but aesthetically are cargo aircraft good as a spaceship's design?

(Image)

(Image)

(Image)

Details: https://www.nationstates.net/nation=syn ... id=1237719

I mean, according to L. Ron Hubbard, the Galactic Federations space cruisers were DC-8s.

[United Earthlings]

Of course it doesn't! And you're complaining about strawman arguments?

Yes, I’m complaining about strawman arguments because they drive the topic off on these side tangents that are a waste of not only my time, but everyone else’s.

I vented my frustration now and I’m done complaining, in the future I’m merely going to ignore responses that use fallacies to divert the conversation from its central thesis. Which is what I probably should have done in the beginning, but unwisely didn’t.

When discussing dimensionless coefficients, comparing ships with similar coefficients is in fact a Better Analogy than comparing two ships with similar dimensions but different coefficients. This is why scale models and ship model basins were the most important innovation in the study of hydrodynamics.

I understand what you’re saying and I think I see where our point of contention has erupted. I’m under no illusion that there is no Better or Perfect Analogy to be had for comparison to my design I created, merely what various design elements can be match imperfectly to a Best as possible Analogy.

The Best As Possible Analogy would be a design that has both similar coefficients and similar dimensions to the one I created. I feel as if, if I’m wrong here then I’m wrong, that you have up to this point focused to the exclusion of all other variables and factors on what the block coefficients of my design is and as a result to put it simply, we’ve been trying to speak to each other in two different languages.

The North Carolina-class has similar hull dimensions. It has much higher displacement. The hull is fuller. It has more buoyancy at the ends.

Breaks out into song! Now were finally getting somewhere…I’m going to elaborate more further down this reply since others replied on why I was using the North Carolina class as an example.

That stated a quick brief to your statement: Why is the hull fuller and what elements if any can I use of that hull design fullness to incorporate into my design? What specific design elements created increased buoyancy that could possibly be incorporated into my Aviation Cruiser design within the stated displacement of the design? What specific hull fullness and buoyancy would my design need to provide a stable block coefficient design?

"The block coefficient indicates whether the form is full or fine and whether the waterlines will have large angles of inclination to the middle line plane at the ends." Eric Tupper, "Introduction to Naval Architecture, 3rd Edition," page 11.

Thank You, learned something new and why I never heard it described that way. Furthermore, I’m adding that book to my acquire for library book list, if I can find a reasonably priced one.

The context and details are somewhat different, but I believe this quote is relevant for summing up some of the fundamental concerns and issues people are having with your vision for your cruiser class. An aviation ship design, whether its an ASW-bird mothership or some kind of multirole (like the sadly unbuilt US MEU/CG-VSTOL) does not need to run around with big guns bombing shore positions.

A more sensible idea if one really wanted gunships (there's nothing inherently wrong with AGS or its like as a weapon concept) is to just have a separate conventional surface combatant class (of appropriate size for intended mission profiles) with said guns to join the task forces rather than complicating the design of the aviation ship by cramming big guns onto it.

Thank You, I believe you just perfectly addressed what others have been missing. So, to begin…

This Aviation Cruiser design of mine we have been debating is my nation’s separate conventional surface combatant class (of appropriate size for intended mission profiles) to join mixed amphibious-surface warfare or carrier-surface task forces as needed. Is bombing shore positions the class's primary mission, no, was it designed eventually to be able to have that ability, yes.

If it hasn’t been made clear before, here is it now. The Front part of my Aviation Cruiser design is a Battlecruiser and the Rear is the Helicopter Carrier. Is that a weird hybrid, yes, but it has historical precedence, I merely took it to another level as is the custom in NS Naval design. I don’t view three facsimile Advanced Gun Systems as cramming big guns onto it when viewed this way…

Many people had fundamental concerns and design issues with the US Navy Zumwalt-class destroyer before and during construction of even the first of the class. And yet, the US Navy at one time planned to ultimately build 32 of these vessels if not for politics and budget constraints. Navies sometimes build odd vessels, so while the US Navy and too many to list NS navies were busy planning to or did build dozens of the Zumwalt-class destroyers. My Navy looked at those equivalent NS building programs and said, yeah, no that doesn’t meet our naval requirements, let’s convince our politicians to build some small helicopter Carriers, only we won’t tell them there Carriers, but necessary Cruiser class replacements. And as what tend to happens, someone had the bright idea of turning the small helicopter carrier design into a hybrid Crusier-Carrier design. As can be summarized, I ran with that idea from there.

Form follows function, not the other way around. One of the issues here is you're using the North Carolina-class gun battleship (a wonderful though treaty-constrained design) as the basis of comparison/analogy to justify design choices for an aviation cruiser-cum-arsenal ship, whose functions logically and obviously diverge significantly from the North Carolina, and therefore should have different forms and design features as a consequence.

The issue of this insistence on armour is another, although I believe armour is not fundamentally wrong in principle, but in distribution (to paraphrase Commander Yates Stirling's statement on battlecruiser armour in his 1908 USNI Proceedings article). As Ormata stated, the 1930s presented different threats to warships that are of a different context and magnitude to what threaten warships today.

My point of using the North Carolina class was not to justify all my design decisions only a single specific point of one to show that an armored warship design specifically to address specific threats could be built. I know my Aviation Cruiser will have completely different forms and design features as a treaty era 1930s battleship, but then that wasn’t the point I was trying to convey.

Triplebaconation and others implied that a modern 21st century armored warship, whatever their views on the value and merits of armor, couldn’t be built without the design being inherently unstable no matter the vessels dimensions or hull shape. That idea is what I found to be preposterous and illogical.

The Armor design and layout is going to be different as expected than one for a 1930s/1940s battleship.

Armoured decks for non-carrier surface combatants are nowadays meaningless as defense against direct enemy attack because the threat it is meant to defend from - armour-piercing shells and (non/semi)armour-piercing dumb bombs dropped from altitude with accuracies measured in hundreds of meters as Ormata mentioned - has been largely supplanted by very precise missile and bomb weapons that can hit within tens of meters or even within single-digit meters. With such accuracy they don't even need to penetrate your deck to mission-kill you.

The heavy uber-armour-piercing ASCMs of the kind the Russkies love, as well as the newfangled ASBMs popularized by the vile Chinese, are the kind of threat no armour can save you from (not even the vaporware electric armour that occasionally pops up in NS design and has gone nowhere IRL, not that it stops say me from using it), but if the enemy spams nothing but this then you have a different problem altogether.

I believe I addressed in detail in the write-up as to why the design utilized an armor scheme, but to elaborate further. Since the majority of RL modern navy vessels haven’t used armor since the beginning of the Cold War, the vast majority of modern RL anti-ship missiles have only a HE warhead which my armored design scheme is mainly intended to counter or at the least reduce the chance of the missile penetrating into a vital critical system area on the vessels.

Even the heavy ASCMs the Russkies and many NS navies love only have semi-armored piercing HE warheads, modern RL anti-ship missiles really aren’t design to counter a vessel that would employ a modern armoring scheme since no RL nations employ said armoring of their vessels. So, this is where the RL world and the NS world diverge. My vessels were designed with the NS world at large in mind, not within the real world political limitations. Because I know someone is going to get confused with the sentence above and want to make a comment about it, the RL world laws of physics still apply in this Alternate Reality NS world.

In closing, my navy doesn’t view armor as a primary means of defense, but merely as the second to last in a line of defenses that they would state in theory should reduce the effectiveness of a vessel being rendered a mission-kill. The vessels can still be rendered as a soft-kill, but the armor as part of the vessels defenses is merely intended to keep the vessels afloat and as many of the mission critical weapons systems functional until either the objective has been achieved or the vessel has managed to successfully disengage from combat to RTB {Return to Base}.

[Austria-Bohemia-Hungary]

170 mm's of total deck armour did not save the Tirpitz from getting its magazines exploded and one of its turrets sent flying with "semi-armour piercing" bombs.

[Connori Pilgrims]

That stated a quick brief to your statement: Why is the hull fuller and what elements if any can I use of that hull design fullness to incorporate into my design? What specific design elements created increased buoyancy that could possibly be incorporated into my Aviation Cruiser design within the stated displacement of the design? What specific hull fullness and buoyancy would my design need to provide a stable block coefficient design?

Danton should probably be the one to elaborate more, but this might help illustrate his point:

Compare USS North Carolina


to USS Alabama


Both are treaty battleship classes that are nominally 35-36Ktons standard. But North Carolina is leaner and gentler curving from the bow compared to Alabama, which looks almost dumpy and tanker-like. Alabama has a fuller hull with a higher block coefficient compared to North Carolina, which in turn is fuller compared to a true cruiser - look up overhead views of the Alaska, Des Moines or Long Beach cruisers as examples. This has consequences for hydrodynamics and weight distribution; the South Dakota design had powerplants rated for 9Kshp more than the North Carolina but could only achieve the same speeds since the fuller hull resists water more, and due to having a shorter hull South Dakotas had less margin for new heavy things not originally considered in the design (the class leader, South Dakota herself, had to lose two twin 5"/38 DP mounts when they turned her into a flagship with conn tower taller by just one level, to cite just one of the more obvious examples). Between the two designs, it was deemed that while both North Carolina and South Dakota would be uneconomical to rebuild to be proper carrier escorts like the Iowas, the SoDak was far worse in the amount of effort needed.

This Aviation Cruiser design of mine we have been debating is my nation’s separate conventional surface combatant class (of appropriate size for intended mission profiles) to join mixed amphibious-surface warfare or carrier-surface task forces as needed. Is bombing shore positions the class's primary mission, no, was it designed eventually to be able to have that ability, yes.

If it hasn’t been made clear before, here is it now. The Front part of my Aviation Cruiser design is a Battlecruiser and the Rear is the Helicopter Carrier. Is that a weird hybrid, yes, but it has historical precedence, I merely took it to another level as is the custom in NS Naval design. I don’t view three facsimile Advanced Gun Systems as cramming big guns onto it when viewed this way…

1) The common context of hybrid cruiser-carrier warships like the British 1970s Invincible (as designed) and the Moskva is compromise due to either, technological, financial or political constraints. Either one does not have unlimited money or tech base to build a proper combined fleet of true heavy/supercarriers and primary surface combatants whether it be battleship, big missile cruiser, or what have you (which is basically everybody); one's military has very specific doctrinal and operational needs which calls for this type of vessel (the various ASW-bird motherships when used in their intended role); or one's government and military is beset with heavy political chichanery which results in these kinds of maladjustments. From what you've written, its the third option.

2) The AGS is not some common DP weapon like the OTO-Melara 76mm/62 automatic gun family or the 5"/54 or 5"/62 or 64s made by the US and Italy. Given the size, the volume they occupy, and investment it is a capital weapon like the big battleship and cruiser guns of old (and arguably a greater failure IRL, given that most of the battleship and cruiser gun programs and initiatives of the past at least produced workable weapons and munitions for their time). Two of these weapons occupied a significant portion of the Zumwalt's design (which makes their failure IRL all the more damning), even with the large ship you have they will occupy not-negligible spaces and thus not be something one can or should just "cram" into a design.

Triplebaconation and others implied that a modern 21st century armored warship, whatever their views on the value and merits of armor, couldn’t be built without the design being inherently unstable no matter the vessels dimensions or hull shape. That idea is what I found to be preposterous and illogical...

I believe their critiques on stability are coming from what you yourself have written about the ship. Tracking down the writeup for said NS ship, there's an obvious imbalance between forward deck and the aft landing deck, with the former being thicker than the latter; the landing deck will not have much weight on it even if you crammed it full of heavily loaded helicopters (just to cite *one* potential issue). Given that and everything else you've written about it (especially the part where its cruiser front and carrier aft, so therefore more mass forward than just armored deck), their concerns are valid even without going into the niceties of ship design detail.

...since the majority of RL modern navy vessels haven’t used armor since the beginning of the Cold War, the vast majority of modern RL anti-ship missiles have only a HE warhead which my armored design scheme is mainly intended to counter or at the least reduce the chance of the missile penetrating into a vital critical system area on the vessels.

Even the heavy ASCMs the Russkies and many NS navies love only have semi-armored piercing HE warheads, modern RL anti-ship missiles really aren’t design to counter a vessel that would employ a modern armoring scheme since no RL nations employ said armoring of their vessels. So, this is where the RL world and the NS world diverge. My vessels were designed with the NS world at large in mind, not within the real world political limitations. Because I know someone is going to get confused with the sentence above and want to make a comment about it, the RL world laws of physics still apply in this Alternate Reality NS world.

Even if your scheme was effective, in a normal world with causality (NS or otherwise), your likely enemies will take note of your armour scheme (which they will, because this ship of yours is meant to be deployed in quantity I take it) and adjust accordingly by fitting their missiles with the appropriate armour-piercing or shape-charge warhead - the technology for very heavy shaped-charge warheads that can cut through at least a metre of metal dates to at least the 60s if not older. Even the modest Western subsonic AShMs like Exocet and Harpoon, with diametres of 340mm or so, could be fitted with shaped charges that can threaten your armour. Comparatively speaking, this is a low cost effort for any of these enemies. And again, looking at the writeup you yourself have written for the P&S class, the thickest plates you placed (6") will likely not save you from Kh-22, P-500, P-700, P-800 or BrahMos even with their current SAP heads; these big missiles weighing at least 2-3 tonnes by themselves crashing into your 30kton ship at mach 2+ will break through something. This is what Austria is alluding to with the Tallboy vs Tirpitz example - Tallboy being a massive 5.1tonne bomb meant to penetrate earth (not concrete or hardened armour) that would normally hit at Mach 1 or so on terminal impact.

And you did not address my statement regarding accuracy of today's weapons. Even if that was a 13" uberdeck and 20" uberbelt, unless your armoured decks cover every horizontal surface and your armour belt covers the whole side, crashing your armoured raft is unnecessary. Just need to tear large holes at or below your waterline, rip off your bows, blow the stern where your propellers/pumpjets and rudders are, or aim for obvious gaps like the hangars and the VLS roofs. This is very possible with today's weapons.

In closing, my navy doesn’t view armor as a primary means of defense, but merely as the second to last in a line of defenses that they would state in theory should reduce the effectiveness of a vessel being rendered a mission-kill. The vessels can still be rendered as a soft-kill, but the armor as part of the vessels defenses is merely intended to keep the vessels afloat and as many of the mission critical weapons systems functional until either the objective has been achieved or the vessel has managed to successfully disengage from combat to RTB {Return to Base}.

You say this, but given the significant mass budget invested in armour (it has at least reached 2Ktonnes of your total ship's mass) as well as the assorted impacts to ship design, this is far more effort than what should be for a "last chance" defence.

[Mitheldalond]

Since battleships have been brought up: BEHOLD, curtesy of SpringSharp and my inner mad scientist, after many hours of tweaking and probably at least a dozen design variants, my latest contribution to the realm of NS super-battleships! (Though this one is an actual WWII battleship, not an oversized missile cruiser.) Did somebody say 20" belt armor and 13" deck armor?

MRNS Gondothlimbar
Mitheldalondian Gondolin-class battleship
Laid down 1937 (engine 1941)

Displacement: 115,000 lg tn normal; 119,381 lg tn full
Dimensions:

• Length: 1125 ft waterline, 1150 ft overall
• Beam: 148 ft
• Draught: 39.5 ft normal, 40.75 ft deep
• Freeboard: 29.62 ft avg; 39 ft max, 26.5 ft min
• Block coefficient: 0.612 normal, 0.616 deep
• Metacentric height: 13.1 ft

Armament:

• 16 x 16"/50 cal guns, 4 x 4-gun turrets, 2-A-2
  - 120 shells per gun: 80 x 2700 lb AP, 40 x 2240 lb HC/SAP
• 24 x 6"/47 cal DP guns, 12 x twin turrets
  - 400 shells per gun: 120 x 130 lb AP, 280 x 105 lb AAC
• 120 x 40mm/60 cal Bofors AA guns, 30 x quad mounts, 2000 rounds per gun
• 120 x 20mm/70 cal Oerlikon AA guns, 60 x twin mounts, 4000 rounds per gun

Armor:

• Belts
  • Main: 20" thick sloped @ 20°; 787.5 ft long; 21.5 ft tall - 8-8.5 ft below waterline, 13.5-13 ft above
  • Lower: 10" thick vertical tapering to 1" at bottom of hull; 787.5 ft long
  • Steering gear: 16" thick; 112.5 ft long; 8 ft tall
  • 225 ft of unarmored length
• Decks: 12.25" total
  • Weather deck: 1.5"
  • Main deck: 10"
  • Splinter deck: 0.75" (average)
• Conning tower: 18"
• Main battery:
  • Turret face: 22"
  • Turret sides: 10" forward, 8" rear
  • Turret rear: 8"
  • Turret roof: 10"
  • Barbettes: 18"
• Secondary battery: 3" turret face, 2.5" other gunhouse, 3" hoists
• 40mm AA battery: 0.8" gun shields
• 20mm AA battery: 0.5" gun shields
• Torpedo protection system: 35 ft deep/thick each side

Propulsion: Turboelectric drive; oil-fired boilers, steam turbines, auxiliary batteries; developing 200,000 shp through 4 shafts
Speed: 28.05 kts max, 15 kts cruising
Range: 10,000 nmi @ 15 kts; 9859 tons of fuel
Crew: 3122-4059
Cost: $180.032 million

SpringSharp also notes:
• Adequate machinery, storage, compartmentation space
• Excellent accommodation and workspace room
• Ship has slow, easy roll; a good, steady gun platform
• Good seaboat, rides out heavy weather easily
• Overall strength score: 1.00

Originally designed in reaction to the supposed specs of the latest Mortauran battleship (basically a 1930s version of the Tillman IV), which were later found to be either wildly exaggerated or based on plans never intended for production. Four ships were initially ordered, but one was cancelled before being laid down. Construction of the remaining 3 was cancelled between 1938 and 1939, and 2 were scrapped. The money and materials saved by the cancellations and scrappings provided much of the funding for the 1939 build program, which as a result, produced a large number of ships built to far more sensible designs. The final Gondolin-class hull, the most complete at time of cancellation, lay largely ignored in her dry dock until war broke out in 1941, at which time it was decided to complete her to a slightly modified and modernized design. This became the Gondothlimbar. At the time of her commissioning in 1943, she was easily the most powerful Mitheldalondian warship ever put to sea, and she remains the largest to this day (not to imply she still exists).

Some other fun facts about her armor (which is obviously her most defining feature):
• The total weight of armor is 59,477 long tons, which is nearly 52% of the ship's total displacement, more than a fully loaded Iowa-class battleship, and pretty close to the standard displacement of a Yamato.
• The deck armor alone weighs 23,742 long tons, which is over 20% of the total displacement.

[ImperialRussia]

swarms of ships

[United Earthlings]

1) The common context of hybrid cruiser-carrier warships like the British 1970s Invincible (as designed) and the Moskva is compromise due to either, technological, financial or political constraints. Either one does not have unlimited money or tech base to build a proper combined fleet of true heavy/supercarriers and primary surface combatants whether it be battleship, big missile cruiser, or what have you (which is basically everybody); one's military has very specific doctrinal and operational needs which calls for this type of vessel (the various ASW-bird motherships when used in their intended role); or one's government and military is beset with heavy political chichanery which results in these kinds of maladjustments. From what you've written, its the third option.

Like many things in life, I’d say it’s probably a combination of the design meeting specific doctrinal and operational needs and political chicanery. For simplicity, say 1/3 for the former and 2/3 for the latter.

2) The AGS is not some common DP weapon like the OTO-Melara 76mm/62 automatic gun family or the 5"/54 or 5"/62 or 64s made by the US and Italy. Given the size, the volume they occupy, and investment it is a capital weapon like the big battleship and cruiser guns of old (and arguably a greater failure IRL, given that most of the battleship and cruiser gun programs and initiatives of the past at least produced workable weapons and munitions for their time). Two of these weapons occupied a significant portion of the Zumwalt's design (which makes their failure IRL all the more damning), even with the large ship you have they will occupy not-negligible spaces and thus not be something one can or should just "cram" into a design.

This is why I didn’t just copy and “cram” pace the AGS into my design. My nation’s version is something of a cross between the RL American AGS and the German MONARC study. As many of us designers are known to do, I’ve hand waived away any technical issues or problems that couldn’t have been solved due to real world constraints that wouldn’t apply to my nation, like financial constraints or political will, or the NS verse as a whole.

Taking in the factors others have stated, I envision my version of the AGS being slightly less weight and occupying less space. Gun #1 would be located on a raised superstructure located behind the Fore Mounted VLS cells which are subdivided into four 64 cell bunkers in whatever pattern would be optimal, I’m thinking either a 4-square arrangement or 1-2-1 Cross Arrangement. Gun #2 Port and Gun #3 Starboard will also be on a raised superstructure slightly further back down the hull probably looking akin to how late American Battleships had their first two 5in DP gun mounts positioned on the port and starboard sides.

I believe according to my calculations there should be sufficient design space for this arrangement, so hopefully that has addressed the, I hope you didn’t just cram the guns into the design at the last minute portion of this exam.

I believe their critiques on stability are coming from what you yourself have written about the ship. Tracking down the writeup for said NS ship, there's an obvious imbalance between forward deck and the aft landing deck, with the former being thicker than the latter; the landing deck will not have much weight on it even if you crammed it full of heavily loaded helicopters (just to cite *one* potential issue). Given that and everything else you've written about it (especially the part where its cruiser front and carrier aft, so therefore more mass forward than just armored deck), their concerns are valid even without going into the niceties of ship design detail.

Critiques and concerns are valid and fine, but the critiques and concerns have been at times vague and lacking in clarity, some of that is my fault which I’m now trying to rectify.

If that part was unclear in the write-up I did, I’ll add it to my list of things with the design to fix, but the landing deck is also an armored deck and where most of the weight of the armored deck will be concentrated.

Based on my calculations I was able to approximate, most of the mass of the P/S Class vessel design will be concentrated in the middle and aft. So, if the design of mine is obvious imbalance, which is the part, still lacking in clarity, then the imbalance will be towards the rear/stern of the vessels and not towards the forward ends like everyone has been assuming. Hence, confusion.

So my original question remains, which to date no one has been able to give me a clear answer to, Given my design’s currently stated specifications, what hull shape {form, etc..} is required to achieve a stable design that works? Is the vessel to short? Too long? Not enough Beam, too much Beam? Too much Bow Flare, etc…, etc…., etc….

These are the technical solutions I’m trying to solve and to date I’ve felt like I’ve been given the run around. If one doesn’t know, I wish they would just state that.

Even if your scheme was effective, in a normal world with causality (NS or otherwise), your likely enemies will take note of your armour scheme (which they will, because this ship of yours is meant to be deployed in quantity I take it) and adjust accordingly by fitting their missiles with the appropriate armour-piercing or shape-charge warhead - the technology for very heavy shaped-charge warheads that can cut through at least a metre of metal dates to at least the 60s if not older. Even the modest Western subsonic AShMs like Exocet and Harpoon, with diametres of 340mm or so, could be fitted with shaped charges that can threaten your armour. Comparatively speaking, this is a low cost effort for any of these enemies. And again, looking at the writeup you yourself have written for the P&S class, the thickest plates you placed (6") will likely not save you from Kh-22, P-500, P-700, P-800 or BrahMos even with their current SAP heads; these big missiles weighing at least 2-3 tonnes by themselves crashing into your 30kton ship at mach 2+ will break through something. This is what Austria is alluding to with the Tallboy vs Tirpitz example - Tallboy being a massive 5.1tonne bomb meant to penetrate earth (not concrete or hardened armour) that would normally hit at Mach 1 or so on terminal impact.

You just validity why my scheme is effective, forcing the enemy to develop countermeasures that may or may not be any more effective then there previous methods.

The technology exists to develop armor that is resistant to armor-piercing AKA KE and shape-charge warheads AKA CE. Wouldn’t it be nice if my nation developed that kind of armor technology for naval applications. Let’s assume they were successfully able to and deployed this armor type on a new ship class, say a hybrid Cruiser-Carrier.

To borrow a concept from the Big Gun battleship days, the armor’s not there to save or prevent, but to reduce. Like how battleships and other armored warships weren’t impervious to all AP rounds, but designed around something known as Immunity Zones. The question you’re not asking is not if a heavy ASCM will break through something, but how depending on where the vessel is struck will the armor minimize the amount of damage inflicted. Ask this question, when, not if, a large ASCM hits the vessel, all things being equal, will the vessel with armor or the vessel with no armor protection suffer more potential damage?

This is while I said the armor is only one part in a long line of defenses for the vessel class. Large inventory of anti ASCM missiles, 40mm and 20mm CIWS to spit out a wall of lead to break up the missiles incoming trajectory, IRCM/ECMs, sealed transverse bulkheads to contain damage to small sections of the vessels when a missile does get through and a well trained crew in damage control. Everything that can be found on modern naval warships.

No one is going to drop a Tallboy on any of the vessels in question, unless the vessel somehow magically time travels. So, it’s a moot point.

And you did not address my statement regarding accuracy of today's weapons. Even if that was a 13" uberdeck and 20" uberbelt, unless your armoured decks cover every horizontal surface and your armour belt covers the whole side, crashing your armoured raft is unnecessary. Just need to tear large holes at or below your waterline, rip off your bows, blow the stern where your propellers/pumpjets and rudders are, or aim for obvious gaps like the hangars and the VLS roofs. This is very possible with today's weapons.

The armor belt extends the length of the vessels with specific armor thickness more than likely thinning as the ends of the vessels are approached as was done historically to save weight. The Belt also extends to slightly below the waterline, still deciding if it’s better to keep the thickness consistent or have the belt thin as it approaches up to and below the waterline as was done historically on armored warships.

Vessels can have their bows ripped clean off and still stay afloat thanks to compartmentalization. Plenty of pictures of vessels with their bows gone that survived extensive battle damage and managed to get back to port.

Blowing the stern {fantail} off does nothing as that’s not how modern propulsion systems are connected to the shafts and rudders excepting submarines.

Who knew modern Guided Missile Cruisers, Destroyers and Frigates had potential weak spots every naval designer is aware of that can be targeted. Shame they didn’t think to design countermeasures {and I don't mean armor} to minimize potential damage when these areas are struck by enemy weapons so as to prevent the entire vessel being lost in a single hit.

At least we agreed on the last part that all that is possible today.

You say this, but given the significant mass budget invested in armour (it has at least reached 2Ktonnes of your total ship's mass) as well as the assorted impacts to ship design, this is far more effort than what should be for a "last chance" defence.

Agree to disagree…

Since battleships have been brought up: BEHOLD, curtesy of SpringSharp and my inner mad scientist, after many hours of tweaking and probably at least a dozen design variants, my latest contribution to the realm of NS super-battleships! (Though this one is an actual WWII battleship, not an oversized missile cruiser.) Did somebody say 20" belt armor and 13" deck armor?

Little busy at the moment to comment, but I wish you the best of luck in having fun in defending and justifying the thing, because it seems this thread doesn't like NS Super Ships.

P.S. Watch out for Tallboys, it's apparently going around.

[Triplebaconation]

Nobody was arguing that a properly-designed modern armored warship couldn't be built. We were arguing that yours isn't properly designed. Particularly, that you've grossly underestimated the hull necessary to carry around 2-3 ships worth of systems. This is strongly supported by the fineness of the hull. The optimum Cb for a warship is probably between .5 and .55, maybe a little higher for a helicopter carrier. Yours is .397, so the displacement for the given dimensions should be increased to 36-40,000 tons.

I'm not sure antiship missiles are quite as powerful as the NS-consensus, and in fact a little bit of protection goes a long way against them. However, armor schemes should be logical. Five inches of flight deck armor would seem to provide limited protection against rare threats while actually decreasing survivability against more common ones.

[United Earthlings]

Nobody was arguing that a properly-designed modern armored warship couldn't be built.

Thanks for the clarity, I’m glad another part of this long debate is now settled...

We were arguing that yours isn't properly designed. Particularly, that you've grossly underestimated the hull necessary to carry around 2-3 ships worth of systems. This is strongly supported by the fineness of the hull. The optimum Cb for a warship is probably between .5 and .55, maybe a little higher for a helicopter carrier. Yours is .397, so the displacement for the given dimensions should be increased to 36-40,000 tons.

Understood…Clarity Acknowledged, I will exam and revise the vessel classes dimensions ASAP and post the updated changes here for review once I complete the revisions.

In the interest of clarity, your stated displacement range is that for standard, full displacement or a general range for both?

I'm not sure antiship missiles are quite as powerful as the NS-consensus, and in fact a little bit of protection goes a long way against them. However, armor schemes should be logical. Five inches of flight deck armor would seem to provide limited protection against rare threats while actually decreasing survivability against more common ones.

Sadly, no RL examples exist for proper comparison, but British Armored Flight decks with only 3inchs of armor seem to perform well against semi-armor piercing bombs flown by high speed Kamikazes which is probably the closest one could get to simulating the impact of what a modern Western diving anti-ship missile like Harpoon would do. 127mm should be sufficient, but I can make the armor layout more uniform where everything is 152.4mm or 6 inches.

[Taihei Tengoku]

why waste all that tonnage on dumb steel, buy more countermeasures and SAM with it instead

[Gallia-]

Steel is cheap and anti shipping missiles aren't going to go through armor, which is why it'll be making a comeback anyway.

Iowa was already an immune-to-rockets floating fortress before she got her retrofits for SLQ-32 and Phalanx.

So you're not really buying anything with steel, because all of the steel a Burke accounts for single digit percents of the warship's total cost. Passive armor might as well be a rounding error in contracting TBH.

Interesting enough, it is the emptiest of ships that are the most prone to cost increases, since amphibians have grown in cost more per hull than any other battle force ship for the USN between 1990-2004. It's almost as fast as aircraft carrier cost escalation. Something like a 3-5" array of HY80 or HY100-type steel would render a warship completely immune to attack by pretty much all sea skimming missiles, though, which is the most common threat faced by USN warships for now and for the foreseeable future. Since armor piercing bombs and missiles have vanished from naval inventories in favor of lame HC bombs it seems very unlikely the most common threats (North Korea, Iran) would be able to muster big enough and quantity enough of such armaments to punch through that sort of passive protection.

If 3" steel can stop a 5,000 lbs aluminum cylinder going 300 kts I suppose somewhere between 3-5" could stop a 1,200 lbs aluminum cylinder going at 450 kts with similar lack of issues (at least until you need to put in for overhaul after the war, but that's another story).

Maybe a Kh-22 would be able to hurt you. Or an Oniks. Or some outsize super rocket. Maybe. With most missiles being thin walled cylinders of aluminum barely strong enough to hold their shape, they would probably just collapse into tiny pieces more or less harmlessly, like pretty much every kamikaze attack against armor plate.

I think the real reason kamikazes were (barely) dangerous to ships of the 1940s is because they had a lot more fuel than you'd see in a tiny cruise missile and also sometimes bombs attached, so they tended to start larger fires, and because they were terminal divers instead of sea skimmers they tended to evade the thickest protection zones of the warship. So a real future cruiser will probably have some sort of deck array or a quasi-belt that looks like USS Cole's STS-HY80 strakes but more inches, to stop sea skimmers and shallow divers.

Not sure why it wouldn't work or anything, or why it wouldn't be cheap.

The real difficulty is going to come when someone starts hitting you with GBU-53s, since the USN accidentally reintroduced the armor piercing bomb to the world, but thankfully the USAF looked at it and replaced the dangerous bulk blast warhead with a useless armor piercing anti-tank warhead.

[Taihei Tengoku]

If the only reason why armor-piercing munitions aren't around is the lack of armored ships, then they'll probably just return whenever somebody makes an armored ship.

[Triplebaconation]

Even in a pop-up attack, sea-skimming antiship missiles will strike at shallow angles - 30 degrees or so at most. They don't shoot up, do a graceful little pirouette, and then slam straight down on top of the ship. Five inches of plate is complete overkill for a threat like this, which will seldom strike top decks anyway.

On the other hand, modern high-level attacks striking at near vertical, especially in "Nationstates delta6," will almost certainly ignore five inches of plate.

For any attack near or below the waterline, the flight deck armor two or three decks higher will be a liability. Far better would be a layered scheme.

[New Vihenia]

Yay, so Supersonic AsHM with 1 metric tonne of warhead will return . Smaller AsHM will go Hypersonic but shorter range.

[Connori Pilgrims]

If the only reason why armor-piercing munitions aren't around is the lack of armored ships, then they'll probably just return whenever somebody makes an armored ship.

The people who can afford new armour-piercing warheads or missiles can be counted on one hand. Maybe two if lucky.

Kh-22/Granit/Oniks/BrahMos class weapons - the only antiship missiles around right now that could negate light armour schemes or have the growth potential for it, as well as reasonably have a shot at breaking through modern air defence - are enormous and platform-limited. To carry a meaningful number would require larger ships, overly specialized "small" ships that are in reality already light frigates/bloated "corvettes", or geography-limited shore batteries. Zircon and the touted hypersonic weapons won't be any different - that is if their stats are even half what the Ivans say they are.

And despite the (weirdly optimistic) fearmongering of proliferation by Western think-tanks, Oniks is the only one with real export success thus far, and only four states (five if you count Hezbollah) have bought it despite the thing being available for eighteen years and having no shortage of targets (the USN and its allied navies, or the PLAN depending on where you stand). BrahMos may be maturing right now with the Indian armed forces, but so far it remains masturbatory fantasies for the many, many poor states that have been reported to be interested in it but have yet to pony up an order. The less said about the Chinese YJ-12 and its export performance the better.

The West have bigger issues, since practically all their weapons are size-limited, with the largest being whatever can fit in the Mk 41 or SYLVER A70 VLS. Further, the West's current preference for multipurpose and long-range weapons to strike China/Russia/brown people in the inland/littorals (to the point even Exocet and Otomat have gotten with the program) further adds compromises that would probably reduce their effectiveness against an armoured ship target (as their warhead gets smaller for more fuel). Now of course, this doesn't mean they're completely devoid of options for beating armour; they could base it on BROACH or similar for SCALP-NG and other like weapons, but whether they can actually adapt this successfully on time and on budget is another question.

The various Western supersonic AShM/SLCM programs like Perseus have gone nowhere for what I guess are the usual decadent Western reasons (as well as the apparent preference for stelf over speed). This is unlikely to change even if armoured ships appear in the PLAN's inventories tomorrow; we'd be fortunate if a reactive program to develop supersonic/hypersonic anti-armour anti-ship missiles in the West would result in a viable weapon in a decade.

But that's of course the real world, where nations can't just develop weapons on the fly/on the cheap/buy them wholesale, which could allow for an armoured comeback at least for a couple of decades before the cycle begins again.

The absurdity of NS is that even the smallest tinpot dickhead can get himself a dozen batteries of DF-26 ripoffs in a week, or stockpile a million Oniks/Granit clones, or handwave themselves shape charges for their Harpoons.

[Taihei Tengoku]

AP warheads aren't particularly hard to make. The current state of naval exports isn't indicative of anything--nobody is buying missiles with considerations for armor penetration because nobody is designing ships with armored citadels. If somebody were designing armored ships again the introduction of armor-piercing weapons would certainly be faster than the production of new armored cruisers, which will still have critical systems in the superstructure vulnerable to this new "shattering missile" meme.

[New Chilokver]

Cost issues aside, wouldn't the Russian Klub cruise missiles also be suitable for adaption into an anti-armour role? I suppose if it was developed, an anti-ship Tomahawk would be around the right size as well right?

Also, just out of curiosity, what kind of damage, if any, would a Harpoon/Exocet that's simply had a shaped charge warhead slapped onto it do to a "lightly" armoured (say 1.5") ship?

[New Vihenia]

Cost issues aside, wouldn't the Russian Klub cruise missiles also be suitable for adaption into an anti-armour role? I suppose if it was developed, an anti-ship Tomahawk would be around the right size as well right?

I think they have that in mind already. and yes TASM and subsonic Klub have kinda very similar size.