Professional Writer & Amateur Scholar
Damn. I did think it would be difficult but not THAT much of a logistical nightmare.
Welp, back to the drawing boards it is.
I'm a (socialist) professional writer serializing a WWII alternate history webnovel.
The Cosmopolitan Fictioneer
How come the Gangut
class of battleships are alternately referred to as the Sevastopol class? I even noticed that the Russian Wikipedia exclusively refers to the class by the latter name on its article.
Blowout soon fellow Stalker
Both Gangut and Sevastopol naming refer to famous naval battles in Russian history.
As for the differences there's often a difference between the name that Western historians and observers use and what Russian historian and sources use when it comes to a lot of different things. The famous Mosin Nagant rifle for example is almost never named as such in any Russian historical source or even in common parlance today over there.
Why there's such a difference I don't know but it just being another example of naming differences between sources is my best guess.
Oh really when?
Because there's varying conventions about how ship classes are named if one isn't defined. Do you go by the first of the class laid down, which is Gangut, or the first one launched, which is Sevastapol?
"Yup. That tasted purple."
Cringe but free
There's also the fact that the lead ship was renamed after the Revolution, while the Sevastopol wasn't. So for the rest of the type's lifespan, they would've been overwhelmingly referred to as such in Russian-language texts.
Echoing hymn of my fellow passerine | Art blog (under construction)
General nautical question because I don't know if we have a general purpose boat thread.... How do automatic man overboard detection systems work?
Edited by Imca on Jun 28th 2021 at 3:45:43 AM
Cringe but free
Not familiar with them, but there are a lot of ways to tell when a hot, human-shaped blob is somewhere it's not supposed to be: IR motion sensors, radars, FLIR cameras are just a few of them. With FLIR specifically, it could be as simple as a matter of programming the software to think "okay, white is hot, black is cold; the left half of the screen is the deck and the right half is the sea, so if there's a white, human-sized thing tripping across the right half then something's not right".
Echoing hymn of my fellow passerine | Art blog (under construction)
That and the bit where the Sevastopol mutinied against the Bolsheviks just after the civil war.
"Yup. That tasted purple."
Re: Mustard gas attack on a battleship.
First question is why? Aerial torpedoes were invented right before WW 1, they first saw combat use against Ottoman freighters and transports in 1915 during the Gallipoli campaign. Several were destroyed this way.
If a squadron of planes managed to make it to Jutland and score hits against one or more vessels especially capital ships like cruisers and battleships, it probably would've changed the course of naval doctrine a lot faster than happened in reality.
Secondly, chemical attacks on a warship would be utterly ineffective. Like useless kind of ineffective. There were several period weapons available for aircraft that each would've done more effect on target than even mustard gas.
Professional Writer & Amateur Scholar
Simple: Lack of research on my part. I mistakenly thought that planes with engines powerful enough to carry torpedoes weren't invented until much later...
...Which is kinda stupid on hindsight, considering that in this world the naval aviation has been much advanced to the point where Royal Navy was already running aicraft carrier in WWI and US Navy has developed what is essentially prototype Polikarpov Po-2 planes. XP
I'm a (socialist) professional writer serializing a WWII alternate history webnovel.
Biggest problem with a gas attack against a battleship though would honestly just be airflow. You're pretty much never going to be able to get the ship to sit relatively still in the air as long as it is capable of moving under its own power. They just need to turn into the wind and go full speed ahead and they'll have 20-50 knot winds blowing across the deck. That's strong enough to risk getting blown off your feet if you're not braced for it (personal experience; I used to live in Wyoming).
On top of that, it's probably easy enough for the crew to get belowdecks and seal the hatches if they realize what's going on. But mostly I think the big practical concern is the big ships are surprisingly fast thing.
Now, it is a fun thought experiment to come up with some sort of cartoonish superweapon to dispense enough poison gas quickly enough to create a dense enough cloud to be a real threat, like a giant submarine just pumping it out via a funnel or something. Maybe a giant poison gas dispenser hidden inside of an island's volcano .
Edited by AFP on Jun 29th 2021 at 5:51:51 AM
The Cosmopolitan Fictioneer
Professional Writer & Amateur Scholar
Random question about US fleet commanders.
Has there ever been an admiral who served both as a commander of the Atlantic AND the Pacific Fleet?
No, I'm not talking about the United States Fleet commander, ala Ernest King.
I'm a (socialist) professional writer serializing a WWII alternate history webnovel.
rollin' on dubs
US Navy ditches futuristic railgun, eyes hypersonic missiles
BATH, Maine — The U.S. Navy has pulled the plug, for now, on a futuristic weapon that fires projectiles at up to seven times the speed of sound using electricity.
The Navy spent more than a decade developing the electromagnetic railgun and once considered putting them on the new, stealthy Zumwalt-class destroyers built at Maine’s Bath Iron Works.
But the Defense Department is turning its attention to hypersonic missiles to keep up with China and Russia, and the Navy cut funding for railgun research from its latest budget proposal.
“The railgun is, for the moment, dead,” said Matthew Caris, a defense analyst at consultancy Avascent Group.
The removal of funding suggests the Navy saw both challenges in implementing the technology as well as shortcomings in the projectiles’ range compared to hypersonic missiles, he said.
The Navy’s decision to pause research at year’s end frees up resources for hypersonic missiles, directed-energy systems (like lasers) and electronic warfare systems, said Lt. Courtney Callaghan, a Navy spokesperson. Information gleaned during testing will be retained in the event the Office of Naval Research wants to pick up where it left off in the future, she added.
All told, the Navy spent about $500 million on research and development, according to Bryan Clark, an analyst at the Hudson Institute. Sign up to get The Drift Sign up for our weekly newsletter to go deeper into all things Navy with David Larter.
The technology was close to making the leap from science fiction to reality in the 21st century with the testing of prototypes. The concept held the possibility of providing an effective weapon at pennies on the dollars compared to smart bombs and missiles. That’s because railguns use electricity instead of gunpowder, or jet or rocket engines, to accelerate a projectile at six or seven times the speed of sound. That creates enough kinetic energy to destroy targets.
But there were a number of problems. Those included the range of about 110 miles in testing. A Navy vessel could not employ the gun without putting itself within range of a barrage of enemy missiles. And its usefulness for missile defense was also limited by range and rate of fire, Clark said.
The idea dates back to the 1940s. But there have always been major hurdles because the parallel rails, or conductors, are subjected to massive electric current and magnetic forces that can cause damage after a few shots, said defense analyst Norman Friedman. A big question was always whether the gun could stay together during continuous firing, Friedman added.
A normal gun can be fired about 600 times before the barrel must be refurbished, but the barrel on the railgun prototype had to be replaced after about a dozen or two dozen shots were fired, Clark said.
A few years ago, the Navy was talking about putting the gun on the future warship Lyndon B. Johnson, the last of three stealthy destroyers. It’s nearing completion and builder trials at Bath Iron Works.
The 600-foot-long warship uses marine turbines similar to those that propel the Boeing 777 aircraft to help produce up to 78 megawatts of electricity for use in propulsion, weapons and sensors. That’s more than enough electricity for the railgun, and the ship has space following the cancellation of the advanced gun system, leaving the ship with no conventional cannon-based weapon.
Instead, the Navy is pursuing an offshoot of the railgun, a hypervelocity projectile, that can be fired from existing gun systems.
The Cosmopolitan Fictioneer
Say, have any of the Soviet Navy's WW2-era warships been especially famous during that period? The Imperial Japanese Navy, for example, had the destroyer Yuudachi earn infamy for her actions in the First Naval Battle of Guadalcanal (though IIRC there's debate on whether her impact was exaggerated), and the US Navy had the USS Enterprise, which became famous for not only having participated in more major Pacific War actions (including being the first to sustain casualties during the Pearl Harbor attack) than any other US ship and being the most decorated of them all, but also the first US ship to sink a full-sized enemy warship after the Pacific War's declaration, and earned the nickname of the "Grey Ghost" for being declared sunk by Japan three times and coming back every time, along with other nicknames such as "Lucky E", "The Big E", and the "Galloping Ghost".
Edited by MarqFJA on Jul 4th 2021 at 12:25:02 PM
Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.
Blowout soon fellow Stalker
Not really, the Soviet Navy was small to begin with and their actions during WW2 were minimal, not even really contributing to the defense of the arctic trade routes.
Heavy losses early in the war and a lack of shipbuilding capacity forced Stalin to play very conservatively with the few vessels available. At one point he even issued a mandate that held destroyers in reserve to prevent irreplaceable losses.
After the war the Soviet Navy actually gets interesting with the Soviets fielding some very advanced for the time designs like the Sverdlov Class and a lot of missile cruisers and destroyers.
To say nothing of course of their famous submarines.
Edited by LeGarcon on Jul 4th 2021 at 12:22:33 PM
Oh really when?
Cringe but free
The heavy cruiser Kirov was pretty famous for leading the evacuation of the Soviet Navy fleet out of the besieged Tallinn, near the beginning of the war. And the aforementioned Sevastopol (aka Parizhskaya Kommuna) took part in the defence of her besieged namesake city. The siege and evacuation of Sevastopol is probably the Soviets' most famous naval action of the war by far, though by no means the last one in the Black Sea theatre: the Soviet fleet later supported the 1943 landing on the Kerch peninsula (where the Soviet attackers were embarrassingly beaten back by outnumbered Romanian mountain troops), and played a minor role in the final recapture of Crimea the following year.
Soviet pre-war naval doctrine was geared towards large numbers of small, short-legged submarines and torpedo boats that could punch above their weight, which is why they didn't see setpiece surface actions to the degree that the other major combatants did. They also carried out some minor landings in the Baltics and some pretty bold amphibious assaults and commando raids against German-held port cities in the Finnmark as part of the Petsamo-Kirkenes offensive, which was probably the northernmost major campaign of the war.
Aside from that, their submarines saw the most action against German shipping: the S-class submarine S-13 was responsible for one of the deadliest sinkings in history when it torpedoed the MV Wilhelm Gustloff, a requisitioned cruise ship carrying German evacuees from the Baltics, with the loss of over 9,000 lives. They also interdicted the German transport of strategic materiel from neutral countries like Sweden and Germany. Most of the fleet were the tiny M-class subs, which were basically underwater torpedo boats. The Baltic Fleet spent half the war bottled up in Leningrad, trying to navigate its way through a maze of mines and break the German naval blockade, so their short range wasn't generally a huge issue.
Echoing hymn of my fellow passerine | Art blog (under construction)
The Cosmopolitan Fictioneer
... This heavy emphasis on submarine warfare is strangely convenient for justifying Command & Conquer: Red Alert's depiction of the Soviet navy as comprising nothing more than landing craft and submarines.
Cringe but free
It was also mirroring the Cold War. The entire Soviet surface fleet in the real Cold War was vastly outnumbered by NATO or even the US alone for most of the period. It was not until the 1970s when the bulk of the WW 2-era construction and immediate post-war generations retired or started being withdrawn that the numbers evened out.
So for the bulk of the Cold War era the real danger was their submarine fleet especially once the nuclear-armed Boomers like the later Typhoon-class were built.
Cringe but free
Soviet submarine doctrine early in the Cold War mainly envisioned the use of nuclear-tipped cruise missiles, carried by missile subs like the Juliett, Charlie and Echo classes, to counter US carrier groups. Their conventional attack subs were also tasked with intelligence gathering and (to a degree) open-water interdiction of surface convoys, though they were never as obsessed with Kriegsmarine-style "wolfpack" warfare as NATO planners thought they were.
As nuclear propulsion, guided weapons and long-range SLBM technology matured, the Soviet naval strategy shifted around their SSBNs, which were now meant to hide in deep-water "bastion" areas close to Soviet home waters (just far enough out to hit the US mainland) while the attack subs and surface fleet guarded them from NATO subs trying to shiv them from below. The mid-'70s onwards also saw a massive expansion in terms of principal surface combatants: this was when the Kirov, Slava, Sovremenny and Udaloy arrived on the scene, as well as aircraft carrier projects of dubious utility like the Kiev class.
For what it's worth, that last part was very heavily criticised within the USSR's own military establishment, with the Chief of General Staff Ogarkov labelling the whole program as a waste that ran counter to their traditionally land-oriented strategic outlook. It was also a major motivation for Reagan's 600-Ship Navy plan, which resulted in, among other things, the Iowas being brought back into service.
Echoing hymn of my fellow passerine | Art blog (under construction)
Blowout soon fellow Stalker
The Soviet aviation cruisers were neat.
They were missile cruisers first and the plans were for fleet defense rather than force projection. That's true even of the Kuznetsov.
Shame their actual carrier never worked out though.
Oh really when?
For car carriers, alternatively called roll-on/roll-off ships, is the prefix really "C/F"? I can understand what "C" and "F" mean but why are separated by a "/"?
I can't find the C/F prefix in the article you linked, so it's hard to say.
And just to get to that point, you'd need to:
Chemical weapon delivery in WWI basically had two forms: projector cylinders, which could pump out massive quantities of gas but had to be stationed right at the frontline and could catch your own forces if the wind blew in the wrong direction, and artillery shells, which were safer to use but kind of sucked at actually delivering enough gas to make a decisive impact. I can see the 100 lb or 200 lb British bombs of the period delivering a fairly impressive amount per, but probably nowhere near enough to saturate a battleship-sized target. Even under absolutely perfect conditions — clear weather, no wind and a lone, stationary target that doesn't shoot back — I just don't see WWI bombers delivering enough direct hits to do that.
Echoing hymn of my fellow passerine | Art blog (under construction)