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Post by wlbjork on Jun 27, 2022 23:22:31 GMT -6
The Deutschland class were called Panzerschiff for most of their life, which is the same term that Germany used for...Armoured Cruisers.
So the Alaska class were designed to hunt down and kill Armoured Cruisers. I'm sure there's a term for that sort of ship...
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Post by director on Jun 28, 2022 4:26:40 GMT -6
Battlecruisers were not invented to fight battlecruisers. They were intended to hunt down and destroy armored cruisers and, once Germany began to build some, were tasked with blowing open the enemy screen so that effective scouting could be done. They did end up fighting other battlecruisers - and battleships - and armored cruisers - and light cruisers - and destroyers... well, you get the drift. Fighting other battlecruisers was not exclusively what they were built for but rather something they did. Twice...
The Alaskas were not comprehensively armored as a capital ship would be and were narrow in the beam, which limits armor protection and torpedo protection because there is a lack of width in the hull. There are resource materials you can access and form your own opinion, but generally the Alaskas are not considered battlecruisers. They were intended to fight Japanese heavy cruisers and possibly a mythical 12"-armed supercruiser that the Japanese never actually considered building until after the US authorized the Alaskas.
Um, no. The job of the very first BCs - the Invincibles - was to hunt down cruisers. Later BCs were supposed to serve the same role as armored cruisers, opening the enemy screen for reconnaissance. None of them were supposed to fight battleships - they were expected to use their superior speed to get the Heck out of the way if they ran into battleships. What we see at Dogger Bank is a clash of fast scouting assets, and at Jutland we see the chaos of bad weather, bad commanders and bad intelligence.
My whole point was to show that the last battlecruisers were (maybe) Renown and Repulse. Every capital ship built after that is a battleship or a fast battleship. The Deustschlands and Alaskas are not capital ships, they are armored and large cruisers respectively and neither had any business taking on a capital ship.
Yes. The US called them large cruisers and did not permit them the code CC for battlecruiser that the Lexingtons were awarded. The Alaskas were intermediate between a heavy cruiser - there were no more armored cruisers after WW1 since all post-WW1 cruisers were armored - and a capital ship.
Arguing over the definition of a battlecruiser is mostly pointless - it was a niche description brought about by special circumstances in WW1 and not really relevant at any other time.
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Post by oldpop2000 on Jun 28, 2022 6:51:04 GMT -6
I would like to suggest that Catamaran's, trimaran's, hydrofoils and maybe hover craft be added to the ship list. In the area of aircraft, Tiltrotor aircraft like the MV-22B Osprey.
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Post by benjamin1992perry on Jun 28, 2022 7:43:31 GMT -6
I would like to suggest that Catamaran's, trimaran's, hydrofoils and maybe hover craft be added to the ship list. In the area of aircraft, Tiltrotor aircraft like the MV-22B Osprey. For stuff built in what the 70's or 80's? I could see the different hull forms and hydrafoils since I believe we were running PC and some frigates like that pretty soon after ww2 but tiltrotors are pretty new I believe.
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Post by oldpop2000 on Jun 28, 2022 8:07:00 GMT -6
I would like to suggest that Catamaran's, trimaran's, hydrofoils and maybe hover craft be added to the ship list. In the area of aircraft, Tiltrotor aircraft like the MV-22B Osprey. For stuff built in what the 70's or 80's? I could see the different hull forms and hydrafoils since I believe we were running PC and some frigates like that pretty soon after ww2 but tiltrotors are pretty new I believe. A tiltrotor aircraft is a vstol and the first one was designed by George Lehberger in 1930 but never was produced. In WW2, the Focke-Achgelis FA-269 was designed but it never flew. In 1947, the Transcendental 1-0G flew in 1954. The SV-15 was developed by Bell in 1972 for research purposes and the V-22 Osprey was designed by Bell and Boeing in 1981. The designs have been around for a long time. OK.
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Post by hawkeye on Jun 28, 2022 9:37:53 GMT -6
Arguing over the definition of a battlecruiser is mostly pointless - it was a niche description brought about by special circumstances in WW1 and not really relevant at any other time. May I suggest this vid by Drachinifel, which goes over this a bit? www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZkSY_ALpBQQ
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Post by Enderminion on Jun 28, 2022 9:41:49 GMT -6
Battlecruisers were not invented to fight battlecruisers. They were intended to hunt down and destroy armored cruisers and, once Germany began to build some, were tasked with blowing open the enemy screen so that effective scouting could be done. They did end up fighting other battlecruisers - and battleships - and armored cruisers - and light cruisers - and destroyers... well, you get the drift. Fighting other battlecruisers was not exclusively what they were built for but rather something they did. Twice... The Alaskas were not comprehensively armored as a capital ship would be and were narrow in the beam, which limits armor protection and torpedo protection because there is a lack of width in the hull. There are resource materials you can access and form your own opinion, but generally the Alaskas are not considered battlecruisers. They were intended to fight Japanese heavy cruisers and possibly a mythical 12"-armed supercruiser that the Japanese never actually considered building until after the US authorized the Alaskas. Um, no. The job of the very first BCs - the Invincibles - was to hunt down cruisers. Later BCs were supposed to serve the same role as armored cruisers, opening the enemy screen for reconnaissance. None of them were supposed to fight battleships - they were expected to use their superior speed to get the Heck out of the way if they ran into battleships. What we see at Dogger Bank is a clash of fast scouting assets, and at Jutland we see the chaos of bad weather, bad commanders and bad intelligence. My whole point was to show that the last battlecruisers were (maybe) Renown and Repulse. Every capital ship built after that is a battleship or a fast battleship. The Deustschlands and Alaskas are not capital ships, they are armored and large cruisers respectively and neither had any business taking on a capital ship. Yes. The US called them large cruisers and did not permit them the code CC for battlecruiser that the Lexingtons were awarded. The Alaskas were intermediate between a heavy cruiser - there were no more armored cruisers after WW1 since all post-WW1 cruisers were armored - and a capital ship. Arguing over the definition of a battlecruiser is mostly pointless - it was a niche description brought about by special circumstances in WW1 and not really relevant at any other time. Even Fisher himself expected battlecruisers to fight enemy battleships as one of their missions, not as an "oops we've been engaged by an enemy battleship" but intentionally going out to hunt down battleships.
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Post by aeson on Jun 28, 2022 12:07:30 GMT -6
Dunkerque is a full battleship, full stop, particularly Strasbourg French Wikipedia uses the term croisseur de bataille rather than curaissier for Dunkerque and Strasbourg, so I would imagine that there are a fair number of French people - and quite possibly period design documents - which disagree with you.
Also, regardless of whether you call Dunkerque and Strasbourg battleships or battlecruisers, calling them "full battleships" strikes me as facile; they're clearly inferior to any other modern battleship of the Second World War except perhaps Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, which are clearly a cut below Treatymax battleships like King George V, North Carolina, and Richelieu, so if battleships they are then it's battleships of the second - or, at least in Dunkerque's case, more likely third - class. I don't believe that there's any formal definition of 'capital ship' which cares about either armor or length-to-beam ratio; the Treaty definition certainly does not, and if you're not using that definition then a capital ship is just a "biggest" ship. If things like Dunkerque or the modernized Conte di Cavours and Andrea Dorias are capital ships, I really don't think you have a good case for Alaska not being a capital ship.
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Post by zederfflinger on Jun 28, 2022 12:55:06 GMT -6
I'd view Dunkerque and Alaska as both being either small battleships or battlecruisers. The Alaska's may be more of a scaled up Baltimore than a scaled down Iowa, but their tonnage and firepower makes them capital ships in my books.
Scharnhorst is a bit of an odd one, but I'd consider it a undergunned battleship rather than a battlecruiser.
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Post by director on Jun 28, 2022 14:58:18 GMT -6
No, but the armor scheme certainly does. Alaska was not rated a capital ship by the people who built it and used it. Deutschland was not. Dunkerque and Scharnhorst and the Cavour refits were.
You could take a Dunkerque up against a fast battleship and probably survive long enough to disengage. Try it with an Alaska and you will lose over and over.
I've never heard anything from Fisher except that he thought that turbine-propelled ships could use their speed advantage to hold open the range and their all-big-gun-battery to outshoot an opponent. But taking an Inflexible or a Lion up against a Dreadnought (or super-Dreadnought in Lion's case) would be extremely fool-hardy.[/quote]
Arguing over the definition of a battlecruiser is mostly pointless - it was a niche description brought about by special circumstances in WW1 and not really relevant at any other time. Every fast capital ship built from Hood on is a fast battleship.
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Post by oldpop2000 on Jun 28, 2022 15:01:48 GMT -6
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Post by cogsandspigots on Jun 28, 2022 15:27:45 GMT -6
As destroyers balloon in size into the Cold War, can they have their operational restrictions relaxed? With 3500 ton DDGs, I can’t see a reason they can’t operate as a scouting force or as raiders same as a 1900 3500 ton protected cruiser.
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Post by aeson on Jun 28, 2022 16:05:27 GMT -6
You could take a Dunkerque up against a fast battleship and probably survive long enough to disengage. Try it with an Alaska and you will lose over and over. Alaska is both larger and faster than either Dunkerque or Strasbourg, it's better armored than Dunkerque, and it's better suited to taking pot-shots at pursuers than either of the French ships. If Dunkerque can "probably survive long enough to disengage" from a fast battleship, Alaska probably can, as well. If Andrea Doria and Conte di Cavour are capital ships in the Second World War, then by what reasonable, uniformly-applied standard are the Alaskas - which are larger, faster, and at least comparably-armed and -protected - not capital ships?
Alaska was not rated as a battleship or battlecruiser by the people who built and operated it - though the "not rated as a battlecruiser" part is more than a little open to debate as that is one of the classifications applied to the ship during the design process and it is one of the classifications applied to the ship during its service life by people both in and out of the navy even though "large cruiser" was by then the official designation.
"Capital ship," meanwhile, is a mostly-informal classification for any sufficiently-large or sufficiently-powerful warship, and as far as I am aware the only standard that a warship of this period would need to meet in order to qualify as a capital ship is the standard promulgated in the Treaties - i.e. it's big and it has big guns - or possibly that it's an aircraft carrier (though the Treaty standard specifically excludes carriers from the capital ship category). Alaska is a large warship with big guns; it is in fact larger than and at least comparably-armed and -protected to a number of other ships that you accept as capital ships and, had it been built under the Treaties, would have counted against the US Navy's capital ship tonnage allocation. What uniformly-applicable standard would you care to suggest by which Conte di Cavour is and Alaska is not a capital ship in the Second World War?
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Post by zederfflinger on Jun 28, 2022 17:48:34 GMT -6
No, but the armor scheme certainly does. Alaska was not rated a capital ship by the people who built it and used it. Deutschland was not. Dunkerque and Scharnhorst and the Cavour refits were. You could take a Dunkerque up against a fast battleship and probably survive long enough to disengage. Try it with an Alaska and you will lose over and over. Just because the Americans didn't consider the Alaska's capital ships doesn't mean that they aren't. When you compare Alaska to Dunkerque, the American ship has more firepower, similar armor, and much greater speed. To me, the difference is that the USN has fast(and slow) battleships, while the French only had some slightly modernized dreadnoughts that weren't all that great when new, let alone 25 years old. The French likely intended to use the Dunkerque against other capital ships, and I doubt that the Americans intended to use the Alaskas in this way.
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Post by oldpop2000 on Jun 28, 2022 18:53:41 GMT -6
The Alaska's were designated CBs, or large cruisers, nothing more. Her job was to provide anti-aircraft protection for the carriers during raids on the Japanese home islands and Okinawa. She also provided shore bombardment She and the Guam were experiments.
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