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Okay, here's a great site to check out, for all your Imperial Japanese Navy needs...guy seems really nice, too.

http://www.combinedfleet.com/

Now, the ultimate question...what is your favorite class and/or specific ship, that can appear in UV? I don't mean, which is the baddest (but that's perfectly alright). Take into account aesthetics, coolness factor, etc.

How about the Iowa class? The class of ship on which the official documents ending the conflict in the pacific were signed?

Not that it is my favorite, but for completeness I would guess it should be on the list.

Iowa didn't appear till later in the war than the UV timeframe covers.

My last two choices are a self-admitted fudge--but they *could* appear in UV, if they hadn't been sunk 3 days after Pearl harbor was attacked.

Sorry, item number nine shouldn't be Prince of Wales, but the Repulse BC. Typo...moderator?

Soooo,

As we have it right now (shameless self-bump), the North Carolina is barely eking out a victory over the Yamato. Funny-I thought it would be a hands-down victory for Yamato. I'm wondering why people gobbled up the N. Carolina but seemingly have shied away from the SoDak?

Yamato and NoCal are almost running neck and neck...it's a close race. Okay, the big question then--which one would win in a fight? Not as one-sided as you might think--NoCal had some very very good fire control radar in later days...plus I think the quality (if not the quantity) of her armor would be better.

I know this is a kind of stupid question, "who'd win in a fight," but let's assume a daytime 1 on 1 confrontation with commanders of equal aptitude.

How about the Nelson, three forward turrets firing forward. No crossing the T here.

Fuso--old and slow, GIANT super-high Pagoda mast (why didn't we have those?!)

Because we had the Bird Cages.

Gosh, I hate those things. And I would have hated even more to have been the lookout or whoever would sit up in those things. But I guess it's a convenient place to put the brig

It looks like the Yamato class is taking the lead...
for those who prefer the NoCal, I'm wondering, what is it exactly about that ship that is so attractive? Personally I voted for it because I like the shape, and the straightness of the accoutrements.

Originally posted by pbear
How about the Nelson, three forward turrets firing forward. No crossing the T here.

The oddly-designed Nelsons (and those who sailed in them should be thankful they never got into any serious sh*t) could fire forward only with the A and B turrets. The C turret was mounted flush with the main deck and could only fire to the port or starboard broadside.

Someone has got to break this tie between NoCal and Yamato...

... It broke!

North Carolina, in a heartbeat. Yamato was a fine-looking ship, but not as pretty as the Showboat. The North Carolina class also contributed more to the US war effort than the Yamato class did to Japan's. I give Showboat short odds vs Japan's biggest stick, though - 3:7 at best, and that mostly on the strength of her electronics. Yamato would only have to get lucky once...

I just love the NoCal's shape--compared to the later SoDak it's a beautiful ship.

But I think you're right, one hit from the badass 18"ers in the right place and she would have been on the bottom.

Weren't the NoCal ships the first ones to drop the "all or nothing" armor principal?

"All or nothing" was never really dropped. What happened was the Triumph of the Offense. Over the course of WW2, hitting power increased dramatically - torpedos carried larger warheads, the British developed the "Tallboy" bombs for busting hard targets, and Japan and the US deployed the 18" and the "superheavy 16" shells on their BBs. By the end of the war, naval architects were looking around and realizing that it just wasn't possible to armor a ship to protect against threats like these (graphically illustrated by the design studies carried out in Germany for the "H Class" and in Britain for the "Lion Class", both of which grew until it simply wasn't possible to build them). Since "All" was no longer possible on a realistic displacement, designers chose to save weight and volume by going with "Nothing" everywhere. "Protection" began to mean ways to avoid being hit, rather than ways to survive taking hits.

Specifically, the North Carolina class were adequately armored against 14" shells. Since she was originally planned to carry 12 X 14" (3 quad turrets) due to treaty restrictions, she would have been a "balanced" design in that respect - if she had completed as planned. Since the same treaty restrictions applied to the other nations capable of building modern battleships, it was assumed that 14" would be the largest weapons her armor would have to be able to defeat - and again, if things had gone according to plan (i.e., if everyone had adhered to the treaties) her armor would have been considered sufficient. Shortly after it became too late to make radical changes to the design, though, the soon-to-be-Axis nations started abandoning the treaty structure, and the gloves came off. Because the Bureau of Ships had had the foresight to design a triple 16" turret to be identical (in size and weight distribution terms, at least) to the quad 14" turrets North Carolina was supposed to carry, it was possible to change the armament to 9 X 16" - but there was no hope of similarly increasing her armor, as that would have caused serious structural issues. Far easier to just design and build a whole new ship, with the increased armor in from the start.

By All or Nothing I meant the principal that certain areas of the ship should be protected to the point, such as boilers, bridge, etc., but other areas could get by with little protection. I had read that the NoCals were the first ships to dispense with this idea and attempt to cover the whole ship--I think when you refer to the "nothing" principal you're talking about the post-war years, when few ships except the Russian Kirov class had any armor at all.

And Iowa was still carrying armor during ww2, as were many other ships--which meant that the idea wasn't dropped until later.

I'm wondering if people would be interested in describing *why* they voted for a certain ship.

Originally posted by rlc27
By All or Nothing I meant the principal that certain areas of the ship should be protected to the point, such as boilers, bridge, etc., but other areas could get by with little protection. I had read that the NoCals were the first ships to dispense with this idea and attempt to cover the whole ship--I think you're talking about the post-war years, when few ships except the Russian Kirov class had any armor at all. Iowa, for instance, was still carrying armor--which meant that the idea hadn't been dropped. Or am I misunderstanding you?

Heh. What were you reading that gave you a strange idea like that?

For starters, you've got the evolution of armor philosophies backward. "Protect Everything" was the original idea, going back to the first armored ships in the mid-19th century. "All or Nothing" was a new concept that was developed in the US in the first decade of the 20th century, and first put into practice on BB36 USS Nevada (laid down in 1912). Your description is basically accurate, though: "All or Nothing" proposed concentrating armor over the systems that the ship simply could not afford to lose - like propulsion and main armament. This would allow increased protection to critical areas, while actually saving weight. But all armored ships built for the USN after 1912, including the North Carolina, South Dakota, and Iowa classes of fast battleships, followed the "All or Nothing" philosophy.

In the days of the armored dreadnaughts, a "balanced" battleship design was one that was, in theory at least, reasonably well-protected against its own weapons. The armor scheme of the North Carolina class sometimes gets some flak because it was no match for that ship's (extremely powerful) main battery; the ship as built was not a balanced design (though as I posted before, it would have been had it completed to the original plan). Not because it was not "All or Nothing," because it was.

You also have the timeline for the Iowa class wrong. They were commissioned during WW2, then de- and re-commissioned several times in later decades before they finally left service for what is almost certainly the last time in the 1990s. The armor was never stripped out because there was no reason to do so - it was already in, and it would have been expensive (and structually unsound) to remove it. But they were not postwar ships, which is what you seem to be saying; and their design was most certainly not contemporary with the Soviet Project #1144 (NATO "Kirov") "large nuclear-powered rocket cruisers" which were laid down almost 35 years after the first steel was cut for BB-61.

Also, the 1144s were not armored ships. Compare the dimensions and displacement of the 1144 and the Iowa - 1144's length and beam are only about 10% less than Iowa's, but displacement (weight) is barely one-third that of the older ship. Therefore, 1144's construction is much lighter than Iowa's. Therefore 1144 does not carry heavy armor.

No, I wasn't implying that Iowa was built after WWII :rolleyes:
(gee, after all these years of study, I hope not!). What I was saying is that the navy seems to have gone to the 'nothing' approach after the advent of guided missiles; even aircraft carriers were armored right up till the end of ww2, but now it appears that even the heaviest ships carry *no armor at all,* with the exception of Kirov.

I was confused because in the first post of yours that I read, you stated that "all or nothing" meant a choice between trying to protect the ship with armor (all), or trying to protect it so that it wouldn't be hit in the first place (nothing)--as if it was an evolutionary trajectory, however I was referring instead to the design scheme that you're talking about in this last post--that certain vital components are sufficiently protected but others are not at all. My original question was, weren't the NoCal's the first ships to have used the 'all or nothing' principal in their design? It appears that the answer is "si;" I double-checked my favorite sourcebook--the David Miller handbook "Warships of the World."

I realize that there was an earlier "cover everything" stage in armor design evolution--perhaps going all the way back to the Monitor & Co., weren't both those ships so well protected that all of the shot they fired at each other simply bounced off?--but I hadn't intended to go into a long history of ship armor But I guess that's what's fun about these boards...

never know where something will lead.


Oh, I went back and re-read that other post, and I saw where I was unclear about my ship/armor chronology (3 AM drinkin' post). Anyway, fixed it.

From what I understand, while modern ships use kevlar to protect from fragments, the "armor" nowadays is the electronics and self defense weaponry.

I also don't know of Kirov having any major armor to speak of (tell me if I'm wrong, of course). Sure, it was big, but it wasn't a battleship, more of a really large cruiser with an extremely heavy missile battery.

And you know, I don't know if the Iowa's armor could have handled an SS-N-19 Shipwreck coming in at over Mach 1 with about a ton of explosives in it.

From David Miller's "Warships 1860 to the Present."

Kirov class Battlecruiser.

Armor: Nuclear Reactor, 3.9 in. sides, 1.4 in ends. Steering compartment 2.8 in sides, 2.0 in roof, conning tower 3.2 in.

Granted that's not very complete protection, but still it's better than the tincan-ness of most warships nowadays.

Interesting.