Bret Devereaux: Collections: Where Does My Main Battery Go? https://acoup.blog/2019/11/29/collections-where-does-my-main-battery-go/: 'This week, we’re going to have a bit of fun. We’re going to take a look at a science fiction ship design–the eponymous Battlestar Galactica–through the lens of some ship design principles developed for early dreadnoughts. We’re going to be talking about gun position.... These... issues–what sort of main battery to have, and where should it go–bedeviled naval design in the late 1800s and early 1900s, both before and for the first few years after the development of HMS Dreadnought (launched 1906).... Better loading systems and range-finding had improved accuracy (especially at long range) and rate of fire on the big guns, reducing the dependence of fast-firing secondaries (whose duties were, in many cases, offloaded onto escorting cruisers anyway), while improvements in battleship armor made it increasingly clear that anything less than the heaviest artillery was likely to be useless. Since all of the work was likely to be done by the main battery, it made sense to prioritize it more heavily.... There are a lot of really fascinating designs in the early years after Dreadnought and in terms of main battery layout.... Dreadnought cannot face all of her guns in any direction–of the five turrets, only four can fire to port or starboard (the two wing turrets being the problem here), only one turret can fire directly aft (due to the placement of the rear tower). In theory, three turrets can fire forward, but in practice–remember I said we’d come back to this–actually firing the wing guns directly forward was likely to blow out the conning tower (whoops…).... The South Carolina with just four double-turrets could put all four to either side, 2 to the aft and two to the fore, without any danger of accidentally blowing out her own conning tower. Now, there were some challenges for superfiring gun arrangements–taller turrets meant moving more mass up on the ship, bringing the center of gravity up and potentially destabilizing the entire ship. That, in turn, put a sharp limit to the number of turrets which could be ‘stacked’ (typically just two). Which was just as well, because it rapidly became apparent that–forced to choose between more guns and bigger guns–bigger was generally the best option. While it took a few years to fully catch on, for battleships, superfiring gun layouts eventually dominated battleship design, because it allowed the ship in question to concentrate all of its big-gun anti-capital ship firepower on a single target...
#noted #2019-12-16
