Star Trek Aesthetics

[Nealithi]

Hahahaha!

I was gonna warn you about raising the spectre given the literal decades on other boards I've posted on have debated this very issue.

... and I see it's been raised in this thread already!

Darn it.
The warnings should come before the spells not after them.

[Beastro]

Interestingly heavy cruisers even the improved ones were not that far off from the 10,000 ton limit. It wasn't until the Des Moines class with the automatic 8" guns that they grew to battleship size. Hell the Alaska class wasn't that far off from a treaty battleship.

Missiles changed everything though.

A proper 8" gun cruiser is not a 10,000 ton one. All heavy cruisers were by their nature very imbalanced by the restrictions. The Des Moines and the Sverdlovs displacements point towards what their natural displacement would be like.

Missiles did, but not overnight. The late 40s and 50s became a grey area in naval warfare where aircraft dominated fielding bombs no amount of armour could keep out while guns could no longer properly counter them and missiles remained too embryonic to be properly used by either to counter the other (all before the paradigm shift nuke subs would produce, too).

It's for that reason that the USN looked on nukes as the proper weapon to attack warships with at the time.

[Nealithi]

Interestingly heavy cruisers even the improved ones were not that far off from the 10,000 ton limit. It wasn't until the Des Moines class with the automatic 8" guns that they grew to battleship size. Hell the Alaska class wasn't that far off from a treaty battleship.

Missiles changed everything though.

A proper 8" gun cruiser is not a 10,000 ton one. All heavy cruisers were by their nature very imbalanced by the restrictions. The Des Moines and the Sverdlovs displacements point towards what their natural displacement would be like.

Missiles did, but not overnight. The late 40s and 50s became a grey area in naval warfare where aircraft dominated fielding bombs no amount of armour could keep out while guns could no longer properly counter them and missiles remained too embryonic to be properly used by either to counter the other (all before the paradigm shift nuke subs would produce, too).

It's for that reason that the USN looked on nukes as the proper weapon to attack warships with at the time.

So pulling the my father card again. Sorry. But you might want to add a decade or two on the missile embryonic stage. As Terrier missiles were no where near as reliable as people really wanted them to be. (If I recorded him talking about it you would have three hours of story. Trust me I have heard it several times.)

[Beastro]

Interestingly heavy cruisers even the improved ones were not that far off from the 10,000 ton limit. It wasn't until the Des Moines class with the automatic 8" guns that they grew to battleship size. Hell the Alaska class wasn't that far off from a treaty battleship.

Missiles changed everything though.

A proper 8" gun cruiser is not a 10,000 ton one. All heavy cruisers were by their nature very imbalanced by the restrictions. The Des Moines and the Sverdlovs displacements point towards what their natural displacement would be like.

Missiles did, but not overnight. The late 40s and 50s became a grey area in naval warfare where aircraft dominated fielding bombs no amount of armour could keep out while guns could no longer properly counter them and missiles remained too embryonic to be properly used by either to counter the other (all before the paradigm shift nuke subs would produce, too).

It's for that reason that the USN looked on nukes as the proper weapon to attack warships with at the time.

So pulling the my father card again. Sorry. But you might want to add a decade or two on the missile embryonic stage. As Terrier missiles were no where near as reliable as people really wanted them to be. (If I recorded him talking about it you would have three hours of story. Trust me I have heard it several times.)

I'm speaking relatively. From the dawn of jets to the early 60s missiles really couldn't do anything to counter aircraft and ASMs were just as bad against warships. Do not how Tartar was much improved arriving later despite being just a shortened Terrier in design.

Into the 60s, they still needed a lot of work, but they were finally reaching the point of practically doing their job rather than being gloried weaponry requiring 5in guns as back ups.

[McAvoy]

Interestingly heavy cruisers even the improved ones were not that far off from the 10,000 ton limit. It wasn't until the Des Moines class with the automatic 8" guns that they grew to battleship size. Hell the Alaska class wasn't that far off from a treaty battleship.

Missiles changed everything though.

A proper 8" gun cruiser is not a 10,000 ton one. All heavy cruisers were by their nature very imbalanced by the restrictions. The Des Moines and the Sverdlovs displacements point towards what their natural displacement would be like.

Missiles did, but not overnight. The late 40s and 50s became a grey area in naval warfare where aircraft dominated fielding bombs no amount of armour could keep out while guns could no longer properly counter them and missiles remained too embryonic to be properly used by either to counter the other (all before the paradigm shift nuke subs would produce, too).

It's for that reason that the USN looked on nukes as the proper weapon to attack warships with at the time.

All ships built during that time had some sort restrictions and there was a balance between speed, armor, weapons, sea keeping and top weight. For example the best heavy cruisers in WW2 were the Baltimore class and similar offshoots the US built. They had all of the above but they had a top heavy concern. They were well armed, well armored (US battleship armor at the time wasn't as good as the British or German counterparts due to a mistake or intentional metallurgy design. But applied proportionally to heavy cruiser level armor they made them much better armored inch for inch), and they had a comparable fleet speed. Growth in displacement was only to correct certain aspects of the class.

Missile cruisers, the ones that were around in the early Cold War were in fact heavily rebuilt heavy cruiser hulls. And there was alot of experimentation in the layout too. The heavy guns of battleships or cruisers were never meant to be anti missile or aircraft weapons. Guns that could down a jet were to slow to accurately hit them and the gund that were fast enough to track them were too light.

Armor is interesting because you can armor a ship for most missiles. But such a ship like a battleship were too expensive for the post war and Cold War to use. You could argue the growth in damage control during the war lead to the de-armoring of later ships.

[Nealithi]

Armor is interesting because you can armor a ship for most missiles. But such a ship like a battleship were too expensive for the post war and Cold War to use. You could argue the growth in damage control during the war lead to the de-armoring of later ships.

I have a further question along this line. Where do you put torpedoes?
I ask because my understanding is modern torpedoes don't impact the hull. They detonate under the keep as a spine breaking effect.

[Beastro]

The heavy guns of battleships or cruisers were never meant to be anti missile or aircraft weapons. Guns that could down a jet were to slow to accurately hit them and the gund that were fast enough to track them were too light.

Five and six inch guns were nominally effective into the 50s, even as anti-missile defence weapons. AA suites modeled around those size gun were perfected by the end of WWII. The trouble was that jet engines had increased aircraft speed enough that reaction time simply wasn't quick enough to properly counter them. A ship might get one salvo off before a jet could pass over head dropping bombs that, combined with the dive speed of a jet that might exceed the speed of sound, couldn't be kept out (The less said about a nuke dropped, the better).

Reaction time needed to be increased for the processing loop to properly acquire targets again, which meant increasing the attack distances warships fired from, which were beyond the range of guns. That's where the 50s limbo came in where missiles simply couldn't do the job and only became unreliably feasible in the early 60s.

Kamikaze's had already showed the writing on the wall which remains true to this day: The only proper counter to attacking aircraft after 1944 were other aircraft.

Armor is interesting because you can armor a ship for most missiles. But such a ship like a battleship were too expensive for the post war and Cold War to use. You could argue the growth in damage control during the war lead to the de-armoring of later ships.

Battleships weren't disposed of in the 50s due to cost or relative obsolescence, they were due to lack of proper role. The largest surface threat NATO faced were the Sverdlov cruisers (which they took seriously), that were overkill for navies to field battleships against when they had a profusion of wartime cruisers to still make use of.

Had Stalin lived to realize his conventional blue water navy that might have kept some NATO BBs around active for longer, but by the time the Soviets started fielding a proper navy to fight against they'd invested in submarines and ASMs as their main offensive weapons.

I have a further question along this line. Where do you put torpedoes?
I ask because my understanding is modern torpedoes don't impact the hull. They detonate under the keep as a spine breaking effect.

I can't say for certain, but I'd suspect it comes down to ship size and structural reinforcement to withstand. Armour would have no use what little it might add to the latter. The potency of modern anti-ship torpedoes would probably render a surviving warship a constructive total loss (not worth the time or money to repair) if it survived anyway.

Back in the 50s, torps would be more akin to what they were like in WWII, but even by the end of WWII torpedo bombers were in eclipse. Aircraft and crew (In the USN, even A-4s originally came equipped to drop them) retained the ability and training into the 60s. The requirement to go low, slow and near enough to drop a torp in the face of a determined enemy's fire made it impractical, however. It would only be useful against undefended targets, like merchant shipping.

[Nealithi]

I was more referring to submarine use. As a nuclear attack submarine could wreck a ship no matter the armor. So if armour was not going to help and was expensive. . .

[Zatman]

For the Enterprise-D, I think it looks awesome...from any angle below the equator of the saucer. Thanks to the technology, or lack thereof, when TNG was being produced, we rarely saw the D from anything bu a low angle. I have a model of the old girl which sits on an alcove above my desk. From above, the saucer dominates, you get a glimpse of the nacelles and secondary hull, but otherwise, it's a potato. It's one reason the Constitution class works so well, no part of the ship dominates from any other angle. It's why the Sovereign class works well, it's basically a stretched, angular Constitution. The Intrepid class could have worked better, it has the same problem as the Galaxy class, the primary hull dominates the secondary hull and nacelles. But, with bigger nacelles, it would look a lot like the Sovereign class. Maybe that's not a bad thing, the Intrepid could have been to the Sovereign what the Miranda was to the Constitution. Heck, maybe even a rue Miranda-ization of the Sovereign could have worked with the Intrepid having virtually no secondary hull and nacelles tucked under the primary hull, with a much different aft section of the primary hull.

[McAvoy]

I was more referring to submarine use. As a nuclear attack submarine could wreck a ship no matter the armor. So if armour was not going to help and was expensive. . .

Yes there are torpedoes that can do that. Hell there were missiles powerful enough even in WW2 late in the war. Armor specifically anything thicker than let's say 2 inch can actually be worse than no armor at all. The development of the torpedo protection on battleships found that a hard immovable surface where a torpedo explosive force makes it worse where as a flexible series of bulkheads could absorb the explosion.

In the end, it really did come to damage control. Armor is heavy and expensive. And there is no realistic way to armor the bottom of a ship. Best you can do it triple or quadruple bottom the ship.