Reddit reviews U.S. Battleships: An Illustrated Design History

The ships he is interested in are the so-called "Big 5" of the Tennessee and Colorado classes, as well as the Pennsylvania and Nevada.

The best single book for this would probably be Norman Friedman's US Battleships: An Illustrated Design History. Includes those classes as well as others before and after. That Amazon pricing is really good - looks like the 2016 paperback reprint did wonders for making it affordable (though, if the reviews are to be believed, less complementary to some of the images). It's 480 pages long, so that $37 gets you a lot of book!

Whilst waiting for the book, there are plenty of images and drawings on Navsource.org for those ships. He might also be interested in the weapons themselves, which can be found on Navweaps.com.

>No, I claimed that stripping off the TDS from South Dakota gave a hull nearly the same size as Baltimore in length and beam. Not volume, not draught, not anything else. 3d volume is irrelevant in a comparison of the 2d 1d beam measurements.

You asked why they had “the same hull size”. I have showed you they did not. You can either admit you were wrong or continue trying to claim why you were right when you weren’t.

>>But for the Iowa class the US decided to focus on speed, an extra six knots, accepting the protection penalty of a smaller immunity zone (due to new shells) and a fine hull near No. 1 turret, making it vulnerable to torpedoes, among other sacrifices.

>The design and development of the ships was undertaken with the knowledge a new shell was coming, but to claim that the then unknown performance of the new shell was a major design factor in Iowa is incorrect.

Here is the Amazon page for Friedman’s US Battleships: An Illustrated Design History. You clearly need to buy and read this. Quoting from page 314:

>Just as the Iowas were being designed, BuOrd adopted a new 2,700-pound, 16-inch shell, a magnificently destructive projectile, which shrank the immunity zone (against the 16in/45) to only 5,300 yards (20,200 to 25,500 yards). A similar shell fired by the Iowa 50-calibre gun would penetrate anywhere except in the band between 23,600 and 27,400 yards. There could be no hope of providing protection against such an attack and yet retain high speed on a reasonable displacement.

>For example, the 12.2-inch sloped belt was equivalent to a vertical thickness of 13.5 inches, as in earlier U.S. battleships. It would have to be thickened to be equivalent to 16.4 inches, and the armor deck increased from 6.2 to 6.75 inches. The net increase in armor weight, including deck armor, would be about 2,300 tons. A July 1940 sketch of a ship equivalent to the Iowa but protected against the heavy shell (and carrying the new 5in/54 secondary gun) showed a displacement of 51,500 tons. Even to hold to this figure, the hull had to be filled out to such an extent that the 212,000SHP of the Iowa would suffice for a little beyond 28 knots.

In other words, the designers accepted protection trade offs for the high speed requirements. They could not accept many improvements due to the weight penalties, but as with the South Dakotas did adopt a thicker turret faceplate, and due to the poor performance of US Class A face hardened armor against large projectiles (due the scaling effect, the thick hardened face was a detriment against larger projectiles, see Nathan Okun’s analyses) this was actually Class B homogeneous armor, though this required thinning the turret sides. Despite the extra year before they were ordered, Missouri, Wisconsin, Kentucky, and Illinois did not include additional belt or deck protection due to the weight penalties. These four did include thicker forward and aft bulkheads and barbettes, the cost of 132 tons being negligible, while the last two ships had “detail improvements…expected to improve performance by 20 percent and would also reduce flooding in the event the system was penetrated”. They could not take any more without sacrificing speed.

>It was a compromise to get the speed they wanted out of all of the fast battleships, not just Iowa.

Of course, but it was raised again for these ships with a proposed blister that would have cost 1.5 knots. “The General Board rejected it. Ten thousand tons had been spent to buy six knots; the General Board was not going to surrender a quarter of that gain.” This emphasizes just how important speed was for these ships.

>The names of battleships 40 and 44 were swapped 1916/7 to allow the state of California the honor of building it’s own battleship.

Good eye.

>Here is a source direct from NHHC giving the normal displacement as-built at 32k tons

Normal =/= standard displacement. Normal adds fuel oil, and when that is included the displacement rises to 31,660.3 tons.

This is the weight table for Mississippi as completely, pulled directly from Friedman.

| | Normal |
|---|---|
| Hull | 13,769.4 |
| Hull Fittings | 1,480.3 |
| Protection | 8,497.5 |
| Machinery (dry) | 2,435.4 |
| Armament | 1,859.3 |
| Equipment & Outfit | 404.0 |
| Total Light Ship | 28,455.9 (27891.9) |
| Ammunition | 1,343.7 |
| Machinery Liquids | 153.0 |
| Complement | 119.7 |
| Stores & PW | 445.1 |
| Standard Displacement | 29,953.3 |
| RFW | 225.2|
| Fuel Oil | 1,481.8 |
| Displacement | 31,660.3 |

Tell me why I should distrust this source and yours are better.

>The individual mounting/turrets for the 14”/50 were anywhere between 150 to almost 300 tons heavier than the 14”/45s on Pennsylvania. Lowballing the 50 cal and highballing the 45 cal, the difference is 150 tons. For four mount/turret groups, that’s 600 tons of added weight without factoring anything else in.

Friedman explicitly states protection includes “the weight of barbettes and turrets [italics in original], both of which could be substantial. Thus the listing for battery includes only the guns and their mountings”. He only includes data for the full load column for Pennsylvania, at least until light ship, which were 8,422 tons for protection and 1,658 tons for armament, total 10,080 tons. For New Mexico pulling from the full load column these were 8,489, 1,900, and 10,389 tons. Clearly they offset the heavier turrets, and while Friedman doesn’t provide much detail he does mention the secondaries were moved and “detail weight economies” allowed some armor changes. The other weights are similarly negligible, but his weight table does explicitly state 29,157.8 tons was the standard displacement in normal condition.

>>Pick a position.

>I have. The half assed armored conning towers sported by every US cruiser from the New Orleans to the Oregon City classes (excluding Atlanta and derivatives) was a waste of weight.

I meant pick a position of in they existed. You went from “they didn’t have conning towers” to “they did”. Pick one. Whether they were necessary or not is a different discussion to whether they existed in the first place.

>That’s not what you said earlier:

>…whereas cruisers often discarded a magazine belt entirely for internal box protection.

>Again, which ships entirely dispensed with the belt in favor of internal box armor only?

Every single one of those cruisers discarded a MAGAZINE belt for internal box protection. All had a machinery belt, but all discarded the aft magazine belt for internal box protection and the older ships also discarded the forward belt. That is exactly what I said earlier.

>The diagrams I’ve found for Iowa’s torpedo belt all call it NVNC, which leads me to believe that they may either be copied from the same erroneous reference, or wires have been crossed since then.

You’re looking at Japanese drawings, as NVNC was the homogeneous armor used for Yamato’s similar protection (New Vickers Non-Cemented).

>I’m inclined to belive it was Class B, as STS was typically used in the structure of the ship itself, with Class B being used for non-structural components.

I’ve stated my reasons for STS, as Class B was generally used for armor protection above water. The TDS was structural for warships.

Top left is a Treaty cruiser. Top right might be Alaska or Baltimore.

The image is from Norman Friedman's U.S. Battleships: An Illustrated Design History