RN Old AND New Cruiser eratta

[el cid again]

ORIGINAL: Dili

British didn't rated 5.25" much. 100mm French Gun is probably dead. New French Frigates/Destroyers will have the ubiquous 76mm Oto-Melara (Italian). Western Guns are probably reduced to Italian 127mm(with Vulcano long range projectiles) and 76mm from OTO plus Swedish Bofors 57mm, US 127 mm also still gets some sells.

PRC is now producing the French 100 mm - and that probably means it isn't dead.

[el cid again]

ORIGINAL: mikemike

ORIGINAL: el cid again

For example - rereading materials closely I conclude one must have a typo for Argunaut - and it should indeed be 1944 - as the operations described seem to be those of 1944.

The same appears to have happened to the Euryalus data - off by exactly one year.

Today only Italy and Sweden make guns in this class - both 127mm - and only in singles. USN has given up - in spite of the DP liniage of the 5 inch 54 (and the version I served with achieved 42 rounds per minute) - reliability was horrible (just over 50 per cent) - and cost was very high (those guns actually firing shells weighing more than WWII era 6 inch).

There is one modern DP gun you omitted: the Russian AK-130 twin. Apparently, the Russians are keeping the faith; they have always put great store in their artillery. In both World Wars the German military had enormous respect for Russian/Soviet artillery - both the guns and their handling - both Army and Navy. If you read about naval skirmishes in the Baltic in WWI there are lots of remarks like "the Russians displayed their usual excellent gunnery".

You are correct - I forgot that one.

[EUBanana]

ORIGINAL: Dixie

ORIGINAL: Terminus

I would submit that tradition and history dictate most navies' naming practices...

Bah! Tradition? Some of these other navies have only been around for three hundred years! You call that enough time to build a tradition? [:-][:D]

"It takes three years to build a ship; it takes three
centuries to build a tradition."
- Admiral Cunningham

[:D]

[Capt. Harlock]

ORIGINAL: el cid again

And you are correct - the problem was related to slow delivery of the 5.25 inch turrets. These were remarable things - and several navies - before, during and since WWII - tried to do the same thing with 5 and 6 inch - with very mixed results. The first such effort - triples on a French BB - failed. The later efforts (USN and RN) took so long they missed the war - and were too expensive. Only the Dutch kind of sort of succeeded - and they took the cheap route of not using power ramming in the pre war form - resulting in adequate elevation and training - but a slower ROF - so a marginal result. The 5.25 was a brilliant compromise - just big enough to be high performance - but not too big to make into a practical twin turret you might afford - and develop before the war. Yet it was never easy to do this task - and the superb guns served a long time after the war.

I can't fully agree with this assessment. The 5.25 fell into what I call the "muddy medium", rather than the golden medium. Too big to track fast enough to engage the higher-spped aircraft of WWII, and too small to be effective against armored warships. (The Brits didn't bother to produce an AP shell for it.) Tje historians I've read generally say that the USN 5"/38 was the most successful DP gun of the war -- it damaged more than one IJN CA. Have a look at the admittedly biased Wikipedia article about the 5.25. (I should know it's biased: I wrote it.)

[el cid again]

The later 5 inch 54 series - there was one at the end of WWII - another post war - and a third one now (which has given up on the AA part altogether) is not exactly a happy medium either - but it does have a shell that, in basic form, out ranges a WWII six inch, with more weight on arrival. [Variations with rocket assist achieve truly phenomenal ranges] The initial design - intended for the Midways - missed the war - because it proved difficult to achieve the rate of fire and rate of elevation and traverse needed. Ultimately it evolved into the gun we used in the Viet Nam era (with it very noisy autoloader - I slept under one) - and one must say when it worked it was a wonder: a five inch machine gun - with automated loading. [The Swedish and Italian guns do the same thing - at the expense of - you must slow down when the ready ammo on the mount is expended - but they are at least reliable] Still - the mechanical failure rate is amazing - and only ships with two mounts could be assured of one in action. For the present era they cut the ROF back to 28, reduced mount size and weight, and gave up on trying to do AA at all. Bad idea - guns are very efficient in close in AAA - about 100 per cent more than in WWII - and the Swedish and Italian solution is better. Nor do we face armored ships - so a five inch is also a good surface weapon.

The Japanese did better. Scaling up the successful (but little used) 3 inch 60, and the widely used (mainly ashore) 100 mm, they achieved a somewhat better compromise with the Type 5 127mm (almost too late for the war). Not attempting the vast complexity of an autoloader, they achieved a rate of elevation, traverse and fire significantly better than the six inch (149 Army and 152 Navy) attempts - which were themselves on the edge of success. There was also a US Army very heavy AA gun that was very fine - late in the war - but long abandoned now - which perhaps the Navy should have adopted - but that was an era when "not invented here" was a near necessity. For non autoloaded guns - the pre war Dutch six inch was probably the best. For autoloaded six inch - the post war (intended for the war) US and RN guns probably were the best. But these latter suffered from extreme weight and cost - and were not pratical to mount in twins because of the required platform size - which might as well have been a heavy cruiser. Possibly a single mounting would have been wiser - but we went with a 155 instead - an unhappy gun that has often been cancelled - finally will reach service - but only in two 17 000 ton ships. We would be wiser to buy the Italian or Swedish guns and be done with it.

[el cid again]

The Cruiser data spreadsheet has been updated to include USN CAs - also to give somewhat better labels - and clean up eratta.
It is uploaded in this form. USN CL and CLAA remain to be done.

[el cid again]

There appear to be problems with the later Cleveland class cruisers.

First - I noticed the second Atlanta - which saw war service was missing. Possibly due to naming issues. I renamed her
Fargo [Atlanta (ii)] for clarity.
I also added Portsmouth - which was too late for war service - in case the war lasts longer. That was her name. She arrives near the end of the cutoff point for ships.
Vincennes was missing and she did make it - early in 1944 - so I renamed her Flint - her original name.
Vicksburgh also made it - in January 1946 - and she is renamed Cheyenne.

For this reason we will issue a micro update just with the ship file. We will collect data for a few houws more.

[Mifune]

The latest RHS Cruiser spreadsheet has been uploaded to the RHS web site.