Battleships and costs

[HMS Sophia]

I'm to be writing my dissertation this summer, on the subject of battleships, and why navies don't have them any-more.
Anyway, my dissertation supervisor isn't getting back to me at the moment, and I would rather not splash out on books for a title I might not get to write.
I wondered if anyone had any sources for:
-Costs involved in building and maintaining battleships (preferably Late war British ships, such as Vanguard and King George V)
-Costs of similar era Aircraft carriers, either with or without aircraft
-Tests of similar ships, such as firing tests and the like. Results from those.
-Anything else applicable to those would be great.


Sorry to ask, but I'm struggling to find anything online, and I would rather not visit portsmouth until I know what I'm writing.
Thanks for any help.

[Raesene]

I'd say look out for books by D.K. Brown and Norman Friedman.
The former has written a four volume sort-of chronology of the RN since HMS Warrior from a design point of view, describing a lot of the topics you aks for, albeit mostly briefly
The latter picks a type of ships and describes them thoroghly.

Both provide references that can lead you to further, primary sources.

[Stark]

Contemporary naval stuff like Janes sometimes have estimates, but I doubt they're properly referenced or particularly accurate.

[HMS Sophia]

Does anyone have any online references?
I don't really want to be buying books until my title is confirmed to be approved

[Sea Skimmer]

What do you mean by tests?

Nelson to Vanguard by D.K Brown has some of that information including costs, I’d suggest trying to get it through the library system because even if you can't take the book out of the libary, its not going to take you any great deal of time to suck the needed information out of the book in hand as its not that big and well broken up by chapter-topic

Also a better place to ask for book suggestions would be the folks over at Warship Projects Discussion Boards 3.0. That place is not strong on the analysis side of things, but they have some good researchers.
http://www.phpbbplanet.com/forum/index. ... ipprojects

[HMS Sophia]

I bought a DK brown book, because i'm sick of being impossible to find anything online.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Eclipse-Big-Gun ... 790&sr=1-1

I'll start looking. If I can find them cheap, I'll buy. I love these books enough to keep them forever, I'd rather buy them than loan them.

[HMS Sophia]

Out of curiosity, does anyone know anything about Siegfried breyers books?
I cant get battleships and battlecruisers, as the only copies I can find are £40, but there are copies of battleships of the world 1905-1970, for about £5. I cant find any reviews anywhere, so any advice would be helpful.

[Thanas]

Let me get this straight - you are trying to write a reputable MA dissertation without really using books?

That is really bad science.

[HMS Sophia]

Let me get this straight - you are trying to write a reputable MA dissertation without really using books?

That is really bad science.

Ba for a start
But no. I'm struggling with money right now, and I cant get to my uni library. This should all change in the next month or so, but I would prefer to be able to start writing now, rather than putting it off. Hence looking for less expensive books to tide me over.

[Thanas]

From my own experience, doing so would be a bit of a waste, because you are going to have to recheck all the information from the cheaper books by the more costly ones anyway.

[HMS Sophia]

From my own experience, doing so would be a bit of a waste, because you are going to have to recheck all the information from the cheaper books by the more costly ones anyway.

Well hopefully I'll be able to get them from the library, or at least beg, borrow and steal them from my dissertation supervisor, rather than spending an exorbitant amount of money on them.

[Sea Skimmer]

Siegfried breyers books have some information and drawings which are not authentic, I've seen battleships of the world cited specifically for this, but are generally considered good resources for having so much data in one place. I can't say more then that since I've never had one in my lap, only excerpts. 5 pounds sounds like a can't go wrong price.

[HMS Sophia]

Siegfried breyers books have some information and drawings which are not authentic, I've seen battleships of the world cited specifically for this, but are generally considered good resources for having so much data in one place. I can't say more then that since I've never had one in my lap, only excerpts. 5 pounds sounds like a can't go wrong price.

Sounds like a plan then. Maybe I will be buying more books than I expected

[ComradeClaus]

Contemporary naval stuff like Janes sometimes have estimates, but I doubt they're properly referenced or particularly accurate.

Too bad you hase to sell a kidney to buy a single book!

Their should a be a law against a single company holding a stranglehold on a genre of knowledge & parseing it out for thousands of $ a piece. They don't even check for typographical errors or wrong facts! & they skimp on color photographs! Norman Friedmans otherwise great Naval Books have no color (despite my finding color versioms of almost every picture I've seen in the books, cost $200 & up (I had to buy used) Plus label range in thousamds of yards (WTF?! what person uses that over miles?) And nautical mile should be banned from all literature (along w/British Gallon & Long Ton). it's a big enough hassle just memorizing statute mile/ kilometer conversion w/out throwing in a 3rd needless value.

So, to help you w/ battleships being retired, here's some help:

First note how Navies SHRANK after WW2. Only the US, USSR, UK & France built heavy warships post WW2 (Carriers, which could deploy nukes, hundreds of miles away), well until recently all the miniflatops being built now. (for helicopters for "disaster relief")

Besides, most countries that COULD afford to build heavy warships, simply don't. IE Germany, #4 economy, has limited itself to 6000 ton frigates, w/ their largest vessel being a 20,000 ton cargo ship (Berlin Class) They don't have ambition, which countries building battleships, had.

Plus remember, from the USS Maine to the USS Iowa about 50 years passed, every few years each previous generation being outclassed by the next. Whereas Carriers OTOH aren't rendered obsolete really. They can keep flying newer planes until they rust away. The Essex class flew jets until the late 80's, the Midways lasted from 1945-91 & the Enterprise from 1960-2013

The only countries w/the "disposable" income to buy battle ships (3rd world arab dictatorships w/ oil cash) prefered wasting money on Scud missiles & fleets of useless T-72s. If Nasser paid for soviet help to construct a few battleships, Israel would've had it's Navy & coastal cities crushed. it could even support an Amphib invasion! a Carrier for Egypt, OTOH, would've required quality warplanes & a higher level of training than 3rd world countries can ever acquire.

For a modern NATO fleet, a destroyer or 10,000 ton w/ a couple 6"-8" NATO standard guns & VLS would be more than sufficient to replace classic Battleships in crushing 3rd world rogue states & state-less actors (Pirates, terrorists, Nigerian Protestors, Palestinians ). So the Classic Battleship will never be seen again, there is just no need for one. Sad, cause they are BEAUTIFUL!

Good luck on your dissertaion.

[HMS Sophia]

Right....

Anyway, I bought the eclipse of the big gun... It's pretty cool.

Also, i'm thinking about buying Battleships and Battlecruisers of the Royal Navy Since 1861, by B.R. Coward, and Battleships, 1856-1945 by Anthony Preston. Anyone got any remarks on them?

[Stark]

Too bad you hase to sell a kidney to buy a single book!

I bought my dad a book which is a reprint of a bunch of WW2 and immediately post-WW2 Janes stuff, and it cost about as much as any hardcover WAR BOOK. It's a badly edited hodgepodge (QE information from 1941 and Malaya information from 1915, lol) but there are a bunch of nerd estimates on price and construction time in there.

[erik_t]

Their should a be a law against a single company holding a stranglehold on a genre of knowledge & parseing it out for thousands of $ a piece. They don't even check for typographical errors or wrong facts! & they skimp on color photographs! Norman Friedmans otherwise great Naval Books have no color (despite my finding color versioms of almost every picture I've seen in the books, cost $200 & up (I had to buy used) Plus label range in thousamds of yards (WTF?! what person uses that over miles?) And nautical mile should be banned from all literature (along w/British Gallon & Long Ton). it's a big enough hassle just memorizing statute mile/ kilometer conversion w/out throwing in a 3rd needless value.

Heaven forbid people writing about an industry and professional community keep with consistent units used in said community. And dare to not print in full color for a rather specialty text.

Are you for real?

[Thanas]

I doubt he is, after all the other necros and his line how Egypt should have crushed Israel with Battleships....

That or he is Stewart at SDI level.

[ComradeClaus]

You don't think a 40,000 ton ship w/ 9x 15-16" guns (& a number of Styx launchers, why not?) would've been a bigger threat to Israel than those puny Styx armed Osa boats (destroyed in the dozens in Yom kippur) that the Arab Republics (Egypt/Syria) had?

Plus the fact a battleship could allow Egypt to land troops & armor in israel w/out having to cross the suez/sinai chokepoint would've greatly complicated Israeli defence strategy. Which WOULD have benefitted the Nasser/Sadat ditatorship.

You could claim the Israelis would just pull the Yamato stunt, but we used over 400 warplanes in that operation, the Israeli AF in the 1948-56 wars didn't have the airpower to seriously threaten a battleship. Plus in the early Cold War, jets rarely launched torpedoes (The Il-28 being a rare exception) & it wasn't until the Gabriel, Harpoon, Martel, RB 04, Kormoran & Exocet came out that fighters again had an anti-ship weapon. And even those would have a hard time defeating a battleships armor. (2 Exocet couldn't even sink the tiny, unarmored USS Stark!) Plus any IAF jets trying to attack an Egyptian Task force would also have to fight through the Egyptian Air Force supporting the invasion (which if properly used, fat chance I know, would be formidable) to get to them. So don't laugh it off as an impractical concept.

The Russians still had a few capital ships they could've sold to a 3rd world client rather than scrap. & they had a few projects they canceled that they could've revived to earn hard cash & make trouble for NATO. We (US/UK) sold heavy cruisers to Latin America (Belgrano) as well as carriers (Venticinco de Mayo) so it'd be hard to complain if Stalin/Khruschev sold heavy ships to the 3rd world, though 8" heavy cruisers/ 12" super cruisers (USS Alaska/ Scharnhorst type) would've been less questionable while still being a potent force. Even the 6" Sverdlov cruisers could've been exported as battleship analogues.

Remember U.S. battleships did great service in Korea, Nam, raids on Syrian positions in Lebanon & finally Gulf War 1. I'm sure the British (HMS Vanguard) & french (Richelieu) are missing theirs now where they could help in Libya. On a related note, how much would it have cost to keep the Iowas operational through to today? (to save on fuel [oil] costs, just tow em w/ a Nimitz!) We still had 16" ammo left over after Gulf 1 right? It'd have been a shame to waste it all.

And yes, I'm for real, though i don't know what that has to do w/Stewart or SDI?

ps, while I know it's 'just a game', using battleships to support an amphib assault in sometimes preferable to launching overland frontal attacks in Warcraft 2, but it's not like I had the chance to command real battleships in war. I wish I did though.

[Thanas]

Any anti-ship missile would mission-kill or destroy a BB.

ANd as soon as Egypt had gotten a BB, guess what the israelis would get?

[Sea Skimmer]

You don't think a 40,000 ton ship w/ 9x 15-16" guns (& a number of Styx launchers, why not?) would've been a bigger threat to Israel than those puny Styx armed Osa boats (destroyed in the dozens in Yom kippur) that the Arab Republics (Egypt/Syria) had?

Such a ship would have been even more helpless against Gabriel missiles then the relatively small and agile Osa class missile boats were. Never mind what you know, airplanes would do against it. Never mind that Egypt would have never been able to support such a large ship. Egypt would benefit far more from additional SA-6 batteries.

Plus the fact a battleship could allow Egypt to land troops & armor in israel w/out having to cross the suez/sinai chokepoint would've greatly complicated Israeli defence strategy. Which WOULD have benefitted the Nasser/Sadat ditatorship.

How about no. You need you know, amphibious warfare vessels and trained men to launch an invasion, not battleships. Any attempt to land more then 5-10 miles behind Israeli lines would take the ship out of land based SAM cover and lead to its swift annihilation. A modern guided missile destroyer would have been far more valuable.

[quote\
You could claim the Israelis would just pull the Yamato stunt, but we used over 400 warplanes in that operation, the Israeli AF in the 1948-56 wars didn't have the airpower to seriously threaten a battleship.[/quote]

The strike on Yamato involved 376 planes, which sank her via massive overkill and also sank a light cruiser and four destroyer escorts while damaging four more destroyers. Now meanwhile battleship Roma was blown up by a single guided bomb. I'm not even going to bother going on with other examples because that's the only one that matters. An Egyptian battleship in 1948 doesn't even begin to make sense, I might as well claim Israel has 100 x B-50 bombers that explode it with Tarzon. 1956 is laughable when it would be 1 Egyptian battleship vs the entire French and British fleets, which included battleship Jean Bart anyway, backed up by several hundred land based aircraft. Meanwhile the 1956 Egyptian navy was so incompetent its own flagship was captured by the Israeli navy. By 1967 Israel had more then enough air power to destroy a fleet of battleships for all they would ever matter.

Plus in the early Cold War, jets rarely launched torpedoes (The Il-28 being a rare exception) & it wasn't until the Gabriel, Harpoon, Martel, RB 04, Kormoran & Exocet came out that fighters again had an anti-ship weapon. And even those would have a hard time defeating a battleships armor. (2 Exocet couldn't even sink the tiny, unarmored USS Stark!) Plus any IAF jets trying to attack an Egyptian Task force would also have to fight through the Egyptian Air Force supporting the invasion (which if properly used, fat chance I know, would be formidable) to get to them. So don't laugh it off as an impractical concept.

Bombs work fine against warships, all the more so guided ones. Anti ship missiles were a response to warships mounting surface to air missiles themselves forcing longer ranged attack. Meanwhile guided bombs existed in WW2 and are the reason why nobody ever laid down a new battleship after 1944. This is the very reason why nobody really bothered with torpedoes even by 1950, they are totally unnecessary when you can deliver 2000lb class bombs or even heavier ones onto the decks of ships from high or low altitude with reliability. See Roma. Never mind the fact that a just about anything that flies can carry a 5in Zuni rocket with a shaped charge can blow holes in a battleships turret armor and cripple it as a fighting unit without any need to sink it.

The Russians still had a few capital ships they could've sold to a 3rd world client rather than scrap. & they had a few projects they canceled that they could've revived to earn hard cash & make trouble for NATO. We (US/UK) sold heavy cruisers to Latin America (Belgrano) as well as carriers (Venticinco de Mayo) so it'd be hard to complain if Stalin/Khruschev sold heavy ships to the 3rd world, though 8" heavy cruisers/ 12" super cruisers (USS Alaska/ Scharnhorst type) would've been less questionable while still being a potent force. Even the 6" Sverdlov cruisers could've been exported as battleship analogues.

A Sverdlov was exported, to Indonesia. The one time it attempted to sortie to do battle, against the Royal Navy in the 1960s, a boiler exploded and the ship never left port because the crew was unable to operate the ship properly. It spent most of its life laid up and useless. Navies like Argentina had a long history of operating major warships and generally being competent. Give a battleship to someone like Egypt and it will just rust at anchor. That's exactly why the USSR scrapped all its heavy ships, it in fact had nobody to give them too who could make use of one.

Course a Sverdlov is hardly a battleship analogue at all when you consider that the armor on the ship you find so precious is in fact thin enough that every anti ship missile in the world will in fact go through it. Indeed most NATO anti ship weapons were designed to either pierce Sverdlov armor, or pierce the pressure hulls on Echo II class SSGNs which are just as thick. The hull plates on some container ships and tankers are thicker today, even if it isn't armor grade material.

Remember U.S. battleships did great service in Korea, Nam, raids on Syrian positions in Lebanon & finally Gulf War 1. I'm sure the British (HMS Vanguard) & french (Richelieu) are missing theirs now where they could help in Libya. On a related note, how much would it have cost to keep the Iowas operational through to today? (to save on fuel [oil] costs, just tow em w/ a Nimitz!) We still had 16" ammo left over after Gulf 1 right? It'd have been a shame to waste it all.

It costs far more then such a ship is worth which is exactly why nobody on earth kept any of those battleships around. The US battleships only came back in the 1980s as a quick way to field nuclear Tomahawk cruise missiles, and in Nam a single battleship did a barely 100 days of combat service in a eight year war. 16in shells are shitty for anything but engaging other battleships in an era before guided weapons. The weapon the British and French want in Libya are Reaper drones and AC-130 gunships, not a fucking worthless battleship that is hard pressed to drop shells within 700 yards of the target area. That's totally worthless in a modern war when collateral damage matters. Even back in WW2 the vast majority of naval gunfire was done with 5in guns, exactly the same as mounted on modern warships. Battleship guns are shit ways to deliver high explosives onto a target.

now since you are obviously a very ignorant person please stop polluting threads with complete nonsense that isn't even on topic.

[Beowulf]

Plus label range in thousamds of yards (WTF?! what person uses that over miles?) And nautical mile should be banned from all literature (along w/British Gallon & Long Ton). it's a big enough hassle just memorizing statute mile/ kilometer conversion w/out throwing in a 3rd needless value.

Unsurprisingly, I use all nautical miles, statute miles, and kilometers every day at work.

[Sea Skimmer]

Any anti-ship missile would mission-kill or destroy a BB.

ANd as soon as Egypt had gotten a BB, guess what the israelis would get?

Using the level of logic this guy employs and citing of specifications of a non existent battleship, clearly the US would have transferred a one of its paper project SSBNs with a dozen Jupiter missiles. Opps Alexandria harbor was just vaporized battleship and all by a 1.45 megaton ground burst, and so was the Aswan Dam!

[Simon_Jester]

Plus label range in thousamds of yards (WTF?! what person uses that over miles?) And nautical mile should be banned from all literature (along w/British Gallon & Long Ton). it's a big enough hassle just memorizing statute mile/ kilometer conversion w/out throwing in a 3rd needless value.

Unsurprisingly, I use all nautical miles, statute miles, and kilometers every day at work.

You can also count to eleven without taking off your shoes.

Arithmetic skills and a moderate to long attention span help with unit conversions. A lot.

[ComradeClaus]

Aww, I typed a post & lost it cause my computer logged out

I'll be brief:

Thanas, you're spot on about the Israelis getting a battleship if anyone else did. I was thinking more of Israel getting more submarines than just 3, since they seem to only use that many at a time. And a sub can wreak havoc on an incompetent navy, like US subs vs Imperial Japan Navy.

As for the Sverdlov losing it's boiler in indonesia... pbbt It's like all 3rd world soldiers are Keystone Kops, though all that matters is if someone has the money to pay the USSR for something, they can fail as much as they want afterward, as long as the Soviets/Russians get paid more than the scrap value.

My first post did mention was on topic re: "battleships & why they aren't used anymore" I said carriers can do more at a comparable price. (ie, dropping nukes from planes at REALLY long range) Then mentioned Egypt as an Example of one of the few nations that might impulsively buy one regardless of unsuitability or cost & how even in incompetent hands, it would cause more trouble than a carrier in the same inept hands (visualise plane after plane hitting the water or splatting in the deck or crashing into the bridge island ) Since it's within the questions asked in the OP, right?