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Ikasuhito posted:Torpedo boats Yup. For those unaware, "destroyer" came about as a short name for "Torpedo boat destroyer" dating back to the early 20th century when torpedo boats were perceived as a serious danger to lumbering capital ships.
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Apr 4, 2016 00:08
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Cool, thanks for that. In a similar vein, what is a cruiser? You've got patrol/torpedo boats to sink bigger boats, Destroyers to blow up torpedo boats and submarines in order to protect... Battleships to blow up boats and coastlines with big guns and Carriers to blow up everything (while requiring protection from all other boats) How do cruisers fit into this?
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Apr 4, 2016 00:14
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They were meant to go on extended cruises without the need for support or regular resupply.
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Apr 4, 2016 00:21
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Basically, all the names were outdated by the time WW2 came around and they have only got worse since then.
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Apr 4, 2016 00:24
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Splode posted:Cool, thanks for that. In a similar vein, what is a cruiser? A cruiser is capable of making solo extended cruises. Bigger than a motor torpedo boat or frigate, smaller than a battleship. Also much cheaper to build and maintain than a battleship or carrier. Cruisers as a ship type have a rather checkered history during the naval conflicts of the 20th century, mainly falling into the jack-of-all-trades, master-of-none trap. The Americans probably made the best use of the cruiser on a strategic level: late-war American cruisers were in large part designed as floating anti-aircraft batteries to the extent that the Americans were unique in designing and building an Anti-Aircraft Cruiser (CLAA) class. This concept of the cruiser has survived to the present day in the form of the AEGIS system and combining an air defense role with carrying large numbers of guided missiles.
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Apr 4, 2016 00:24
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Splode posted:Cool, thanks for that. In a similar vein, what is a cruiser? According to Wikipedia, Wikipedia posted:During the Age of Sail, the term cruising referred to certain kinds of missions – independent scouting, raiding or commerce protection – fulfilled by a frigate or sloop, which were the cruising warships of a fleet. Obviously the second mission listed was obsolete by the use of commerce raiding submarines as early as World War I, and a whole host of units smaller than a cruiser ended up fulfilling the role of commerce protection during the early 20th century. Independent scouting done by a cruiser by the time of World War II doesn't really make sense when you consider the impact of airpower, so aside from roles like the Japanese using their cruisers to launch torpedoes or the Americans building anti-aircraft cruisers I would say that cruisers as a class of ship were fairly redundant by World War II.
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Apr 4, 2016 00:26
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Splode posted:Cool, thanks for that. In a similar vein, what is a cruiser? Cruisers are fast, they are the "cruising warships" of the fleet and fulfill roles played by frigates in previous centuries. According to the 1922 Washington Naval Treaty, cruisers are ships with up to 10,000 tons displacement and guns 8" or smaller, though that displacement limit was often violated. There are several sub-classes. There are CLs - cruiser light - and CAs - cruiser armored - that can scout for the fleet, beat up destroyers, or go off on their own and raid merchants and commerce. There are CVs - cruiser voler - that are carriers, voler being the french verb "to fly", and they were considered cruisers at first because you have to be able to sail at cruiser speed to generate the wind on the deck for planes to be able to take off, and because carriers were originally thought of as scouting and raiding ships (like the other cruisers) rather than the offensive powerhouses they turned out to be. And then BCs - battlecruisers - that had cruiser speed and armor and battleship guns, and they kill enemy cruisers, they're fast enough to serve as the beefiest scouts on water, while still being able to dance with a battleship once in a while (and then blow up). The US also made a handful of CLAAs in WW2 that were dedicated anti-air CLs. Of course by mid-WW2 you have battleships that can move at 30+ knots and the battlecruiser is defunct, and then CLs and CAs basically merge later in the war to just be "cruisers", and nobody thinks of carriers as cruisers anymore, but a lot of these terms were created in the 1900-1935 period when naval technology was advancing by leaps and bounds constantly. gohuskies fucked around with this message at 00:34 on Apr 4, 2016 |
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Apr 4, 2016 00:27
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gohuskies posted:Of course by mid-WW2 you have battleships that can move at 30+ knots and the battlecruiser is defunct, and then CLs and CAs basically merge later in the war to just be "cruisers", and nobody thinks of carriers as cruisers anymore, but a lot of these terms were created in the 1900-1935 period when naval technology was advancing by leaps and bounds constantly. CL and CA merged in the war because the only difference between the two is the size of the guns and with no treaty limitations you no longer need to bother differentiating between them. Ships labeled 'CL' by the game are often heavier, faster and better armored than contemporary CA's, the only difference being size of guns.
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Apr 4, 2016 00:47
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Splode posted:How do cruisers fit into this? In a day and age when you can fire an anti-ship missile from any loving thing, and have it utterly annihilate pretty much any size vessel, they don't really any more. The US Navy has been phasing out their cruisers as they get older, and is replacing them with newer ships like the Litoral patrol boats that are supposed to be almost invisible to radar. Though, with the advent of serious Laser point defences, who knows? Maybe we'll see the return of the giant gun platform if the railgun becomes a workable weapon platform.
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Apr 4, 2016 00:51
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A White Guy posted:In a day and age when you can fire an anti-ship missile from any loving thing, and have it utterly annihilate pretty much any size vessel, they don't really any more. The US Navy has been phasing out their cruisers as they get older, and is replacing them with newer ships like the Litoral patrol boats that are supposed to be almost invisible to radar. In the modern US Navy, "cruisers" are anti-air platforms while "destroyers" are anti-submarine and anti-surface platforms, with both categories being similar in size. The Navy has not been "phasing out" the cruiser, the next-gen cruiser design simply fell prey to budget cuts. The littoral combat ships aren't a "replacement" for anything - they're covering a capability cap that the USN hasn't covered in decades and will full the role of a PM or PT boat.
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Apr 4, 2016 01:26
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Since missiles see pretty much the torpedoes of this day, all the aegis ships and similar should be designated as torpedo boats, imho.  Because really they have as little to do with the concept of a destroyer, as they have with cruisers or battleships.
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Apr 4, 2016 07:48
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Cool, thanks everyone, that cleared up a lot.
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Apr 4, 2016 08:40
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To further muddy the waters, the Ticonderoga class cruisers are built on Spruance class Destroyer hulls and machinery, while a Flight III Arleigh Burke class destroyer displacement is almost exactly the same as a Ticonderoga, and both are the size of a WWII light cruiser. The Zumwalt class destroyer is a third again larger than either, the size of a WWII heavy cruiser. A traditional cruiser hull typically has other hydrodynamic and structural features that set it apart from destroyers, the details of which are beyond me. By that standard, the last true cruiser the US built was the USS Long Beach, commissioned in 1961. All US cruisers since then have been on converted or enlarged frigate or destroyer hulls. Additionally, in the USN, ships that perform the traditional screening roles of the destroyer (ASW in particular,) are called either destroyer escorts, or frigates, depending on what side of 1975 you're standing on. 
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Apr 4, 2016 15:57
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I think sloop is my favourite class of warship. Just because it's fun to say. Sloop.
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Apr 4, 2016 16:04
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Arent the Littoral combat ships super expensive and relatively lightly armed?
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Apr 4, 2016 17:44
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They're the ones where they forgot about mixing metals in salt water, right?
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Apr 4, 2016 17:53
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goatface posted:They're the ones where they forgot about mixing metals in salt water, right? if it's what im thinking of, "forgot" is a very charitable thing to say
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Apr 4, 2016 17:55
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Yes, the USS Independence, aka the USS Alka-Seltzer, is best known for what has been described as "aggressive disintegration at the molecular level".
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Apr 4, 2016 18:01
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the systems meant to prevent the galvanic corrosion having been left out, as a cost saving measure. "screw bits of metal on the wall at places" was too pricy compared to having to replace parts of your dissipating vessel. http://www.wired.com/2011/06/shipbuilder-blames-navy-as-brand-new-warship-disintegrates/
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Apr 4, 2016 18:05
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That LCS program sounds like a giant clusterfuck to me. Reading into it, these ships are super expensive, are lightly armed, and are supposed to do multiple mission types, while being near invisible to radar? But in littoral waters.... ?
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Apr 4, 2016 19:54
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The stealth on everything phenomena is probably a fad that will be frowned upon in decades to come.
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Apr 4, 2016 20:03
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I might be a bit late, but could I claim the Hornet as my lucky ship?
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Apr 4, 2016 21:23
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Trying to build those LCS stealthed was pretty dumb, I really don't see the need for a multirole ship like that having it. But stealth really is the way forward if you want to build competitive ships/aircraft.
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Apr 4, 2016 21:29
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Stealthy planes I can see. How do you make a ship stealthy? Theyre quite a bit bigger and have all sorts of things giving off emissions, and if you ever launch or fire anything I imagine it shows up quite easily on radar.
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Apr 4, 2016 21:48
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I think today is a Hawaii time special.
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Apr 4, 2016 21:56
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Ships are actually harder to detect than airplanes, they are embedded in clutter from waves, radar-propagation close to the surface is dependent on a lot of environmental factors (humidity, sea-state, movement of the illuminating ship), furthermore often only the masts are visible to radar. So using radar-transparent masts and radar-absorbing paint can actually go a fairly long way.
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Apr 4, 2016 22:02
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Kodos666 posted:Ships are actually harder to detect than airplanes, they are embedded in clutter from waves, radar-propagation close to the surface is dependent on a lot of environmental factors (humidity, sea-state, movement of the illuminating ship), furthermore often only the masts are visible to radar. See also the Sea Shadow project, a stealth ship built by the same group that brought us the U-2, SR-71, and F-117. According to the memoirs of the guy in charge of the group at the time, the Navy hated the Sea Shadow and killed the program for some goddamn ridiculous (but extremely Navy) reasons.
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Apr 4, 2016 22:12
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Stealth is a buzzword for 'more difficult to detect' these days instead of 'next to invisible' like it may have inferred in the past.
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Apr 4, 2016 22:42
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Cythereal posted:See also the Sea Shadow project, a stealth ship built by the same group that brought us the U-2, SR-71, and F-117. According to the memoirs of the guy in charge of the group at the time, the Navy hated the Sea Shadow and killed the program for some goddamn ridiculous (but extremely Navy) reasons. "Starve before doing business with the damned Navy. They don't know what the hell they want and will drive you up a wall before they break either your heart or a more exposed part of your anatomy."
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Apr 4, 2016 22:57
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Apparently low observable features on ships do wonders against missiles' terminal guidance systems. Combine them with active countermeasures and your survivability rate goes up up up!
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Apr 4, 2016 22:59
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Ardeem posted:"Starve before doing business with the damned Navy. They don't know what the hell they want and will drive you up a wall before they break either your heart or a more exposed part of your anatomy." A statement only made regarding the Navy because he'd never done business with the Marines.
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Apr 4, 2016 23:03
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Cythereal posted:See also the Sea Shadow project, a stealth ship built by the same group that brought us the U-2, SR-71, and F-117. According to the memoirs of the guy in charge of the group at the time, the Navy hated the Sea Shadow and killed the program for some goddamn ridiculous (but extremely Navy) reasons.
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Apr 4, 2016 23:34
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NGDBSS posted:What was the story behind this? From a cursory search I'm getting a bunch of articles on the event of it being scrapped, but not why it was scrapped. I'll post some quotes from the memoirs for you once I get home in an hour or so, but the Navy's objections boiled down to the Sea Shadow being something analogous to a submarine that happened to not be underwater: a tiny crew, very different maintenance requirements (the Navy objected to the ship not having a paint locker, yes really), and the ship not contributing anything to its captain's career. Had the Sea Shadow gone into production or a ship very much like it, it would have been a tiny, potent air-defense/ambush ship with essentially no role or utility outside a major naval conflict between the USN and a credible opposing navy. It's quite arguable that the Navy was basically right, that the Sea Shadow and its entire avenue of ship development would be a white elephant in the absence of a perceived naval threat on par with the USN. The Sea Shadow would have been useless for SAR work, disaster relief, showing the flag, maritime law enforcement, or any of the countless other roles most navies' ships actually do instead of fighting. The Soviet Navy at the time was the only conceivable enemy the Sea Shadow might have been employed against at the time, and even today the only potential enemy that could offer the kind of naval conflict the Sea Shadow would be useful in is China. Low-observability technology has become more and more common in modern navies worldwide, but if there are dedicated stealth ships like the Sea Shadow around they're not public knowledge.
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Apr 5, 2016 00:28
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The scandies have a few don't they?
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Apr 5, 2016 00:37
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goatface posted:The scandies have a few don't they? Yes, among others including the US. It's a popular trend in wealthy, industrialized countries investing in their navies to incorporate low-observability technology and design principles in their latest ships, has been for the past twenty years or so. However, there is a difference between low-observability designs and dedicated stealth ships like the Sea Shadow - the Sea Shadow was estimated to have a crew of about twelve, and was little more than a mobile missile launcher that was exceedingly difficult to detect. One of the quirks to one of the main ways to achieve stealth is that size doesn't actually matter - the shape of the hull (or for aircraft, frame) does. IIRC, the Skunk Works book mentioned that for a laugh they briefly looked at proposing a stealth aircraft carrier, and that the hull in and of itself could be brought down to the size of a steel ball bearing on radar. (A stealth aircraft carrier is an absolutely terrible idea for a huge number of reasons, but the principle behind that aspect of stealth design stands)
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Apr 5, 2016 00:45
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Skunk Works posted:Unfortunately, Soviet long-range fighter-bombers using new look-down, shoot-down radar-guided missiles caused worrisome losses to our carriers and escorts in the computerized warfare exercise. To counter this threat, the Navy was crashing production of a billion-dollar missile frigate that would fire the new Aegis ground-to-air missiles designed to destroy incoming cruise missiles. I thought, Why go after the arrows? Go after the shooter. To the chagrin of the billion-buck Aegis frigate backers, our SWATH boat would cost only $200 million. We could arm it with sixty-four Patriot-type missiles and send it out three hundred miles ahead of the carrier task force as an invisible, amphibious SAM missile site. We'd shoot down the Soviet attack aircraft before they got in missile range of the fleet. And because they couldn't see the stealth ship electronically, they'd literally never know what hit them.
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Apr 5, 2016 01:53
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elitebuster posted:I might be a bit late, but could I claim the Hornet as my lucky ship? It's never too late to claim a ship. Unless it's already been claimed (like CV Hornet).
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Apr 5, 2016 02:24
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Chiming in late on Japanese ASW in WWII but one of the most important reasons for why it was ineffective is that for the first third of the war they doctrinally set their depth charges to the wrong depth. Many a US submariner owed his continued existence to that fact until a US Senator who was let in on the secret blabbed to the press. But by then Japan was on the defensive and US submarines had improved immensely.
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Apr 5, 2016 02:28
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Jobbo_Fett posted:It's never too late to claim a ship. How about the Princeton?
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Apr 5, 2016 03:47
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elitebuster posted:How about the Princeton? CVL-23? Not according to the lucky ship page; added you.
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Apr 5, 2016 04:15
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