Airships and their weapons.

Because the machinery to build those hulls is pre-existing. Making new frames and stuff is going to add time and cost to building new ships. Besides which, long and tube shaped provides the least air resistance for movement, extending the range for the ships.

Yeah. Keep in mind that despite this wonder material they still need to obey aerodynamics, and smooth, flowing shapes are best for that.

Excellent points, both.

So, if you wish to maximize firepower, then you'll have to have the ship turned somewhat, in order to allow all turrets to train onto the desired target.

If you have your main gun mounted along the long axis, then you present a smaller target to the enemy, which may be using three, four, five or even six turrets, and presenting a nice wide target for you to shoot at.

However, which is better? One turret set in a narrow target, or 3-6 multi-gun turrets on a long target? One is harder to hit, but can shoot less weight per given segment of time. The other is easier to hit, but can bring much more weapons to bear.

edited 4th Sep '10 1:29:59 PM by pvtnum11

I think that would be balance of fire power with a risky profile vs less fire power with a lower risk.

^By the end of WWI the airships will be more tubular in appearance.

The first airships will be built along the traditional ship lines with some modifications because they are familiar, as you guys already noted the foundries and yards will be set up for that design, and of course the good old guard dragging their heels as usual.

Center Line Aligned weapons will be a feature of the larger ships for the big punch cruisers and Battleships should have. There will be some turrets of ball type design I will make a messy sketch and post it here.

If there's not a huge tower in the middle of the ship, you could just make the turrets swing all 360 degrees and point them all over each other. Hang the primary sensor equipment on the front of the nose and hanging off the sides to get the effect.

Good point - why have a central superstructure towering far above the mass of the ship? the ship is already elevated off of the ground a great deal, making such a tower structure useless. In fact, turret arrangements are largely dictated by the other structures atop the hull. The typical arrangement is three or four turrets, able to rotate 270 degrees or so (135 off of whatever centerline they're usually faced), but with no large superstructure to get in the way, you could have six turrets mounted atop the hull quite easily.

Not saying that the designers would get rid of the towers immediately, or even at all. If they wanted to retain the large towering superstructure, they would have to have a good reason to besides "it looks cool".

I think I have gotten quite a bit of good ideas out of this thread. Pvt Num 11 you are extremely useful as someone to bounce ideas off of. If I ever get anything published on this I am going to cite you as a source of discussion and ideas.

Happy to help, man.

I think I found two reasons to include towers on the ships: 1) Radio aerials. This is way back in the ancient times of single sideband AM radio, so to transmit on a freq that is capable of broadcasting around the world, it's a low frequency, and usually done at night so as to bounce the signal off of the ionosphere and the ground, to whatever distant station you want to talk to.

To keep the antennas at half-freq length or even full freq-length, you can do that, while insulating them from the rest of the ship, by a series of towers.

2) Naturally, a crows nest will fit up on one of these radio masts as well, so you could have the ship "hull down" in a big cloud or behind a mountain or something, with just the observation platforms peeking out.

This gives the shipbuilders the excuse to keep making the towering superstructures we see today, although they might not be as bulky as they got with say, the Japanese and their hella-cool Pagoda masts.

Oh, and 3), this gets observation platforms above the coal smoke - which might make hiding hull-down behind anything rather pointless - why waste time obscuring your hull from prying eyes, when you're belching soot everywhere? The country that can afford to use kerosene will have an edge.

Why make a whole tower then? Wouldn't a folding periscope type thing work better without having all that excess tower frame work?

Towers are als Observation Posts.

But you wouldn't need an entire tower super structure, just the post. If you design it right, you could even make it retractable.

Periscopes are prone to breaking, although you wouldn't have to make them super-airtight like you would on a submarine. Periscopes are pretty delicate and finely-tuned optical instruments, whereas a 19-year-old with a pair of binoculars and a cold-weather coat up in a crew's nest is much simpler.

Plus, it's an excuse to have tesion-building blurbs about lookouts trying to keep warm up in the elements, whiel trying to spot a itty bitty dark coal-smoke clouds way off in the distance.

Old crows nest towers ended up being refitted into the more bulky towers in between the war years, too. The Japanese took their old British-built warships and refitted them extensively, as the Washington Treaty prohibited them fro making more than a certain tonnage of new ship construction. Or something.

The old ship treaties were paid hearty lip service for the most part. But there was some limited attempt at being honest.

For all intents and purposes all these silly treaties on weapons and ships limitations are blatantly ignored by everyone and they all eventually withdraw from the treaties.

edited 13th Sep '10 1:09:37 PM by TuefelHundenIV

Well, another point on the treaties. That was imposed after WWI. I'm assuming that you will have a far different outcome to the Great War? Ending treaties and restrictions will differ as well, I'd be inclined to think.

But what someone else said earlier, until war breaks out, you'd have an arms race of nations building up their airship fleets, along with a pretty explosive growth of development.

Did the turn-of-the-century Russian-Japanese thing happen prior to this development, or no?

I think the Russians and Japanese will still go at it and true to form the Germans will have learned through observers of that conflict just like in real life interesting ways to arm their ariships.

World War I Zepplins We really should have though to look this up. Take a look at the artwork and the observation pod.

Sweet.

So, will there exist dirigibles alongside your airships, at least, for a time?

maybe. As simple observation platforms I see why not. I like the look of the interior of that Zepplin cabin. It gives me some good ideas on how to make the first airships look.

I have another thread covering the ground war portion of called The New Ground War.

edited 16th Sep '10 9:17:21 PM by TuefelHundenIV

Just had a thought:

A large ship in water will split in two if her keel is broken by sufficient amidships damage, usually due to an underwater explosion that displaces the water underneath the ship in an expanding gas bubble and the shockwave of the explosion itself.

Building an airship, in effect a long metal can, I can see design changes needed to keep the airship in one piece. Couple of ways of dealing with that:

1) Provide sufficient lifting grids distributed along the whole length of the hull, so that you minimize the amount of flex that the hull has to deal with.

2) Provide additional structral elements running fore to aft, that resist any compression adn tension that may result as the ship flexes from maneuvers and whatnot.

3) Make the hull shorter and chubbier, although that might require wider berths to be built to accomdotate the construction. I would think that airships coudl be built in berths typically used for traditional ships, only that they're lifted out on their own power when completed, rather than slid out the slip into the water.

I also think, for awhile, that most construction would remain near existing shipyards, as they have all the infrastructure and all that needed for making large mobile objects. As cargo airships become more commonplace, it might be cost-beleficial to move construction yards inland closer to steel mills or whatnot, unless the mills are already near the water anyway.

I think it would be pretty neat to see one of these ship under construction, actually.

That is a good point. I think a mix of frame and lift grid placement will be what works. Since they are overall smaller compared to wet navy ships but if they are "chubbier" the traditional ship yards could probably still handle them.

Since a mention of this thread was brought up I thought I would revive it again for discussion sakes. Please read through the already posted topics before posting.

Yay, my favorite thread!

Okay, so we figured out a system of movement (fixed and movable grids), some attempts made at working out power sources (coal-fired boilers), discussion on how three-dimensions will affect tactics and combat compared to wet-navy two-dimensional systems, and placement of weapons and internal machinery.

hat's left to discuss, crew berthing, command and control and some other stuff?

Pretty much. Also various resupply methods of consumable stores.

I have been thinking on the upper limits of the ships and the only thing I could come up with is that they do not yet have nuclear power plants. But I did some research into that and the Russians built a very simple one and it is still running to this day at a low output power of course. Once they reach nuclear capability they could in theory reach orbit with their ships.

Perhaps fleshing out the trends and history in their designs and manufacturing might lend some insight into how the more modern developments would take place? With all the details you've got to keep you grounded, it shouldn't be hard to fill the gaps in history while staying nice and consistent with your original concept plans.

And since politics and the economy are always a huge feature in warfare, it would probably be a good idea to lay out in more detail precisely how either stupid constraints, or encouragement for pioneering engineers might have shaped the reasons behind some of the gains and setbacks of the people designing and making these things, along with their eventual influence upon the battlefield. Sooner is better than later when you've got an entire history to rewrite.