On 12/24/06, Oerjan Ariander <oerjan.ariander@xxxxxxxxxx
> wrote:
Richard Bell wrote:
>> >It got me thinking about how battlecruisers are handled in games.
>> >They are usually ships between a heavy cruiser and a battleship. Only
>> >one navy (the USN) ever built ships like that, and they were called
>> >"Large Cruisers" (the Alaska class).
>>
>>At least one other navy built ships like that. Compare the stats for the
>>Alaskas with those of the Scharnhorst and Gneisenau - you might get
>>surprised by the similarities...
>
>I was under the possibly mistaken impression that the germans called
>them battleships.
Sure they did; just like the USN called their pocket battleship-equivalents
"large cruisers" rather than "battlecruisers". What they were called by
their builders doesn't change the fact that the WW2 Scharnhorst and
Gneisenau were quite similar to the USN Alaskas in both displacement and
performance, contrary to your above claim that "only the USN built ships
like that".
When they were built, they were the largest ships in the
kriegsmarine. They only appear to be between cruisers and
battleships after the construction of Bismark and Tirpitz.
>> >For an FT ship to be the equivalent of a true BC, it would need to
>> >combine a thrust of eight with enough class-4 beams to threaten a CA
>> >at the 24+ rangeband (preferably 36-48),
>>
>>With most GZGverse capital ships restricted to thrust ratings of 2-4, and
>>fast cruisers and destroyers generally having thrust 6, a "Fischer-style"
>>GZGverse BC would only need to *match* the fastest smaller cruisers - ie.,
>>thrust 6.
>>
>>Similarly with armament: when most GZGverse capital ships relying on
>>class-*3* batteries for their main armament (except for the Komarov, that
>>is), and cruisers having at most 2 class-3s, giving your "Fischer-style" BC
>>a main armament of 3-4 class-3 batteries would allow it to comfortably
>>outgun any heavy cruiser it encounters while rivalling most slower
>>battleships and dreadnoughts in firepower (though not in survivability, of
>>course).
>
>The BC needs class-4's, not because the capital ships use them, but
>because the cruisers that it hunts have class-3's.
You only need class-4s if you want to be *completely invulnerable* to the
cruisers. You don't need them to *defeat* the cruisers. If you're prepared
to take some return fire (and possibly even some damage) in the process, it
is enough to merely outgun the cruisers at any range they can shoot back at
you from while being at least as capable to absorb damage as they are
(which FWIW is how the RN beat Spee's squadron at the Falklands).
>Only having class-3's would force the BC to trade fire with the cruisers.
>Class-4's give the BC a measure of impunity. The WWI Battle of the
>Falklands would have been very different if the CA's Scharnhorst and
>Gniesnau were able to reply from the get go
No, it wouldn't change anything in that battle - because in the historical
battle, the Germans started scoring hits on the British BCs before taking
serious damage themselves. Their problem was not to *score* hits, but that
their guns were too small to penetrate the armour of the British ships when
they *did* hit. Invincible was hit 22 times during the battle, over half of
those by 8" shells, yet only 1 crew member was injured and no-one aboard
her was killed.
Replace the BC's 12" guns with even a larger number of 9.2" and things
look really bad for the british, as they no longer really outgun the S
& G in a serious manner and they suffer from having only the same
armor the S & G. In that fight, the S & G may even have a
small range advantage as Spee's squadron had won the Kaiser's gunnery
prize more than once. Historically, the British BC's were able to
stay in the sweet spot were the german 21cm guns could neither
penetrate the belt, nor plunge through the deck. Firing 12" guns,
the British need not care that the S & G had similar
protection. Spee's squadron may still have been sunk, but the
british losses would have disproved the concept of BC's, if they only
had comparable armament to the CA's. Especially if they fought
under the same historical conditions that forced them to shutdown and
restart their gunfire computers, this time under the flail of the
german guns, at ranges that allowed the shells to punch right through
the belt.
Which is exactly what I'm talking about above. The British did NOT win at
the Falklands by pounding the Germans to submission from outside the range
of the German guns the way you want your class-4-armed FT BC to handle
enemy cruisers. They won because their heavier armament and stronger
protection allowed them to shrug off the hits the Germans could and did
inflict, whereas the German ships couldn't shrug off hits from the British
guns. In FT terms both sides had "class-3" batteries but the British ships
had more of them (giving them heavier firepower at the same range), in
addition to having stronger screens and/or more armour and hull boxes than
the German ships.
The protection of the ships was actually quite similar; although the
belt of the BC's was thicker on average, the german CA's had the same
max thickness of belt, the same deck armor, and same protection for the
main guns. They won because of their longer ranged armament,
which could engage the CA's outside of effective return fire.
A ship with two class-4's against a ship with two class-3, that can
also keep the range at 24+ will get some return fire, but will do at
least twice as much damage, each turn.
>To control the range, you have to be faster.
Or have an energy advantage, gained eg. by wrong-footing the enemy (or
having him wrong-foot himself like Spee did). Very few if any historical
BCs were faster than smaller cruisers of the same age and at the same level
of maintenance. (Being faster than *older* ships was no big challenge due
to the rapid technological advances of the era.) At the Falklands the
German cruisers were in need of boiler refits and therefore couldn't manage
their official maximum speed; the BCs OTOH were in good repair and could
reach their official maximum speeds.
Going by lists of british light cruisers of WWI, It was 6-8 years
before new light cruisers exceeded the speed of the first
battlecruisers. Except for the 'wierd sisters' (light cruisers
with battleship main guns), no british light cruiser before WWII had
the turn of speed designed into the Repulse and Renown (laid down in
1915-16). So, for the Royal Navy, no equally modern light cruiser
had a snowball's chance in hell of outrunning a battle cruiser.
The german light cruisers were equally slow footed. Long ships
have a higher hullspeed than shorter ships, so at 32 knots, the HMS
Hood was likely one of the fastest, as well as largest warship afloat,
if only for a short time.
The ship you are trying to design is not a repeat of the historical
Fischer-style BCs that were actually built, but a dream image of an
idealised Fischer-style BC that never was built in the real world. Of
course such a Full Thrust ship will be outrageously expensive; chasing
dreams almost always is.
The problem with my vision of Fisher-style BC's in FT is that there are
no battleships, let alone dreadnoughts in FT. There are CA's,
large cruisers labelled BC's, larger cruisers labelled BB's, even
larger cruisers labelled BDN's, and the largest cruisers are labelled
SDN's. The mass penalty for the larger beam classes pretty much
prevent the existence of fisher style DN's; although Phalon-style multi
layered hulls, thrust 6 and a bunch of class-4's might cut
it. The resulting ship would be very large, and very
expensive.