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Post by Antediluvian Monster on May 19, 2019 14:38:23 GMT -6
but you don't need to reach the magazines to destroy a Tone (or a myoko, or a Mogami) when the machinery is protected by 4 inches only, the turrets are popcorn and the command post has barely any armor worth calling itself such . 6'' guns would do a number on those kinds of ships with ease...while firing quicker and having more guns per ship per given tonnage . I wasn't disagreeing. I'd say that, theoretically, you do not even need to penetrate the 4" belt to destroy the ship. If the ends are riddled the magazine protection is pushed underwater and you can simply cause further flooding by destroying the unarmoured sides over the magazines. Against something like Zara or Hipper with more conventional belt that would be different.
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Post by bcoopactual on May 19, 2019 17:10:23 GMT -6
Which japanese ship had 6'' of belt armor the US 6'' needed to penetrate? . Heavy cruisers had 4 inch think belts (tops), the best armored of them topped 5.5'' covering the magazines (mogamis...but the mogamis had only 4'' covering the machinery areas). The next ships in line of protection were the Kirishimas who already had 8'' belts which the 8'' gun couldn't realistically do anything against unless at ranges where the 14'' japanese guns would've shredded them to bits. Yes, there's San Francisco's 8'' hit on the stern of Hiei that disabled it's rudder, but at that range a 6'' would've gone in just as fine as San Francisco's did. And...yeah...the Alaskas...no. They weren't created specifically as cruiser-killers. I really don't want to go there (that ship was a mess in almost every way and debates about it usually don't go very well XD), but it's origin and role was supposed to be a "RAIDER-Killer". As in a "Deutchland-destroyer", and ,for the time the US Navy thought the japanese B-65 project was a thing, as an anti B-65 too. For killing Takaos Alaska was absurdly overkill. You didn't need 12'' guns to pen those 5'' of magacine belt, much less to do work into the machinery areas, far less to rip open those turrets (25mm of face armor. Even destroyers could disable those without too much trouble), and 6'' guns would've done the job on them as fine as the 8'' . But the Americans had no way of knowing that the Japanese ships weren't armored that heavily. You normally have to assume that the enemy is going to armor their ships at least as well as you do your own unless you get intelligence or analysis that indicates otherwise. Plus you mentioned the Deutschland's. An 8 inch gun cruiser would be more effective against them than a 6 inch gun cruiser. The Baltimore's are more heavily armed and armored which means that against a Cleveland they are going to be able to do damage at battle ranges that the Cleveland won't be able to reciprocate. In my opinion rate of fire is heavily overrated unless you are fighting at "inside a phonebooth" range. The need to spot and correct fire and even having to wait on the ship's roll to fire all tend to bring the 6 inch gun's effective rate of fire down closer to that of the 8 inch gun. Having three more guns is an advantage but if you can't damage the vitals with them you're just wrecking berthing spaces and shops. With the notable exception of an increased chance for a lucky hit on something vital and unarmored like a director or radar. But they are small targets and not likely to be hit compared to the overall size of the ship. To each his own of course but unless I'm steaming into the Iron Bottom Sound I want a Baltimore 10 times out of 10 rather than a Cleveland or one of the other large 6 inch gunned light cruisers. I have to respectfully disagree about the Alaska's as well. They were excellent ships bordering on outstanding. Their only real flaws were the lack of underwater protection against torpedoes and the fact that they weren't effectively armored against a peer opponent. But to be fair, nothing that could steam at 32 knots on 30,000 tons was going to have armor that could stand up those 12 inch guns either so the enemy would be at at least equal disadvantage. It's not a fault of the design that their construction was delayed until after the ships they were designed to fight were already sunk or neutralized.
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Post by ramjb on May 19, 2019 21:41:03 GMT -6
Soma valid points here. Let's see.
re: hindsight "the americans couldn't know"... it's more of a thing of extrapolation, really. They had to know that unless space wizardry was involved, ships of the size of the Mogami couldn't be very well armored while hauling that kind of weaponry.
re: Baltimore vs Cleveland: On critical areas the Baltimore had slightly more armor than a Cleveland, yes. Out of those, nope. My whole argument here is that soft kills are hugely undervalued (or so it seems to me) in naval discussions when debating gun vs armor. Yes, a Baltimore magazine was better protected than a cleveland's. But you don't need to hit a magazine to get a soft kill; out of key unprotected components that can be knocked out (as you mention: radar and FC tops, or jamming turrets with glancing blows, etc) it's hard to fight while enemy gunfire is literally rearranging your ship's superstructure, killing crew and punching holes everywhere at an alarming rate. Your ship short-term survability might not be really at risk - but your battleworthiness is.
re: Rate of fire being overplayed: Depends a lot on your gun doctrine. When firing spotting salvos, yes, you wait and RoF is not that important. When fire to effect is at play, once the FC had a proper solution, you fire your guns as soon as you can as quickly as you can, no matter the range means that your second salvo will be on the way before the first one has landed. So, rate of fire while not as advantageous as nominally might seem "on paper", is still an advantage regardless of the range.
Also, you mention the americans - again the only nation who could really do whatever they wanted given their practically unlimited ship production. For every other nation and especially during wartime, a cleveland was:
-cheaper to build -faster to build -more economical to operate -More effective (or equally innefective) against destroyers and battleships respectively. -Equally effective in AA roles. -Arguably tied against the best heavy cruisers (at long range the CA is, depending on the opinion, better, but the shorter the range the better the CL is). And that's against the best ones, because until the last generation of WT heavy cruisers (and even in that group too) Heavy Cruisers were armored with the protective equal to paper mache.
While I can agree that your points, even where I have argumented about them, hold merit, in wartime it really was a matter of getting the most out of limited resources for every nation involved but the US. I repeat that IMO the brits got it right. They got it right from the get go since the beginning with the Arethusas focusing on getting as many hulls as possible rather than getting less but more powerful individual units. And during the war they got it right with the Town and Crown Colony classes: you can argue that individually they werent as powerful as a Baltimore could be, which I'll agree, but think of it: the british produced, for their capabilities, an astonishing ammount of Towns and Crown Colonies and experience shows they needed every single one of them...
how many baltimores could they build in comparison?.
That's the core of my argument. Not that a CL was better in a 1v1 vs a CA (in some cases yes, in some others maybe not), but that as a whole it's much better to have a bootload of lesser powerful per-unit ships, than a noticeably lower ammount of more individually powerful units, because the former can do almost all the jobs the latter can do as well or almost as well, while being more numerous.
as for the Alaska...look...the US navy itself didn't care for the ship ,and it wasn't for the lack of a proper matchup. Underwater protection was indeed something that raised many an eyebrow, but not by far the only. The ship was atrociously unmaneouverable, with a turning size equal to that of the Saratoga. An Iowa could turn circles around an Alaska, we're talking a 50k tonner leaving a 30k one for shame. You might thnk that's not a big deal but it compounds the problem with the underwater protection: if you can't avoid torpedos by combing them, and you don't have anything to hold their damage, your 30k ton ship is a huge ticking bomb.
Also, we're talking about a 30k ton standard displacement ship. Let that quite sink in. That's 5000 less than the nominal displacement of a Richelieu or a South Dakota. That's 2000k tons less than a Scharnhorst (a ship that, no matter how awful it could be as a battleship, which it was, could take a hefty pounding, something the Alaska could decidedly not).
There's so much quality you can get out of something with a hull design which lineage traces directly to a Brooklyn (the Alaska was nothing but an upscaled Baltimore, the Baltimore was an upgrade over the Cleveland basis, the Cleveland was an upgrade over the Brooklyn). Scaling up usually is a very poor way towards efficient design, and the Alaskas were terribly inefficient for their tonnage...but especially for their cost (damned thing was almost as expensive as a full fledged battleship).
Again the americans got away with it because the americans comissioned fleet carriers and battleships by the dozens, light and escort carriers literally by the hundreds, while putting in the sea the largest cruiser and destroyer fleet the world has ever seen and flooding it with submarines, destroyer escorts, etc, and STILL, waste effort on the Alaskas...and not even blink.
But that ship was a complete economical disaster. It's what it is, I'm sorry...I think I'll quote Richard Worth here because I think his words sum it up far better than I, not being a native english speaker (nor a writer xD) will ever be able to:
"At various points during its tortuous path to acceptance, the layout showed distinct balance, sometimes as a mini-battleship well protected like the Dunkerque, other times in more cruiserly form like an overgrown CA. But so many departments and individuals had a hand in the final product, it emerged with the size of a battleship but the capabilities of a cruiser".
Worth, Richard. Fleets of World War II (revised edition): Design History and Analysis for Every Ship of Every Navy
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