This is a forum for discussion of topics relating to the Dreadnought era, prior to the ascendency of naval aviation. We will be discussing history, ship design, and naval wargaming.
Saturday, December 18, 2004
The optimal super-large battleship
I spent much of 1999 drawing very large battleships and battlecruisers. I just opened a record book to a page that has a large battleship drawing with some specifications. The ship carries 9-21in/45, 12-6in/50, 8-4inAA, and 44-40mm AA guns. The displacement is given as 115,000 tons. The speed given is 31 knots. The armor mentioned was 17in belt and 7in + 4in decks. I did a few calculations with the BigGun program and designed the 21in/45 gun. The muzzle velocity is 2,575 ft/sec, and the AP shot is 5,000 lbs. The piece weighs 311 tons. That is using my design coefficients, and may be heavier than someone else's design. The question is: how well does this design stand up with the preliminary design program? I had some sort of problem on my first run, but one goodie is that the triple 21in gun barbette is 45 ft in diameter. I suspect that some table lookup in the power calculations was out of range for a ship of this size! If I give a power of 190,000 SHP, the expected speed is 29.6 knots. The normal displacement is 108,008 tons. I should probably be able to tell what the issue is, with a little debugging, sometime tomorrow.
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