I have a couple of moderately-odd Naval questions, about the last post-reactivation Iowa class battleships—if anyone here happens to know, maybe even firsthand.
First…how distinctly could one hear/feel a salvo from the forward two turrets, when in the Combat Information Center or Combat Engagement Center? (And I’m aware these were two separate areas.)
Second, and probably more general to Navy regulations…was food or drink allowed in the CEC or CIC, especially during combat operations? I have to imagine coffee and water probably permitted, especially the former, but I have no idea if so much as a Hershey bar or a sandwich was normally allowed, assuming one had time or need to eat one.
Okay, since it has been over a day and no one with more specific information has answered your question, I will take some of my Aircraft Carrier knowledge and take a swing at your Battleship questions. First, sound is conducted very well in metal, which is what a ship is mostly made of. The analogy of firing the forward guns would be the launching of an aircraft off the forward catapults, and specifically the sound of the shuttle slamming into the forward end of the catapult track. You can hear or feel it from virtually the entire ship. It might be a faint click if you are really far away, or just feeling a slight lurch in the deck, but you know what it is when you hear/feel it, because it happens as regular as clockwork. So I would assume that you can detect the force of the forward guns firing from the CIC. The second part of your question is much easier. When a ship goes into general quarters, it is designed to stay that way for hours or even days. In the event that a ship stays at general quarters for extended periods of time, there are plans in place to distribute food to each space on the ship, since they are all in lockdown. The food would consist of sandwiches, soda, and maybe some crackers, but it will be eaten in the whatever your workspace is. During regular time, not at GQ, Food is generally not allowed in the workspace. Hopefully that helps.
This video shows the two forward turrets firing all 6. Then pans to a camera crew filming. They are not quite at the bow. They are showing no signs of distress. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsNlmiLJGIw
Go to the Wikipedia page of the Iowa class, and you can see a good picture which will show you where they would have been standing, relative to the guns.
A large boat. 20% longer and 2.5x the displacement of an Iowa class.
When they test-fired antiaircraft missiles, which have relatively little impact on the ship he said you could hear it / feel it from stem to stern. Not violent, but obvious. A brace of 16 inchers firing on a much smaller ship would have to be much more obvious than that.
Actually camera man is in the white shirt with thick dark head hair.
At the first firing , there is footage of himself at the top right. The reason is he isn’t deafened and distressed is that the three in that area hunkered down and ensured ear protection was firmly and securely on their ears. They certainly kept their head down behind protection to avoid being bowled over by the shock wave.
Anyway the OP’s question was already answered. Metal conducts vibration well and the ships steel conducts vibration very very well - steel being very elastic (formal definition meaning it remains in the straight area - Hookes law - of stress strain graph… for the largest amount of stress and strain ) …
So there’s no way any part of the ship isn’t hearing the boom. Higher frequencies reflect more, so the sound becomes the low frequency part when it travels through more surfaces . (reflections - the echo - sound a bit higher in f frequency… as in the lower range is less obvious compared to higher)
Keep in mind, this is state of the art 1940s technology. No doubt modern technology could find a way to load that thing with less than 79 men - I’m not sure if the refit made that mechanism any safer or more efficient. I would guess they might have added more automated switches and sensors for some of the moving machinery but I wouldn’t think they could have changed how it works much without building a new battleship from scratch. The ship is basically built around those guns.
As a side note, missiles that fire from vertical launch cells with no crew involved certainly is a lot more efficient.
It’s required to align the barrel/chamber with the slide and rammer which are fixed in position. After firing, the breech is opened, the next projectile rammed into the breech far enough so that the rotating band engages the lands of the barrel in the forcing cone. You want the projectile “stuck” so that it does not fall backwards/crushing the propellant bags when the gun is elevated. The next step is ramming the propellant bags into the chamber, then closing the breech, etc…
Right, but this is because this is 1940s machinery. If there was no need for humans in the mechanism, you could make the entire reloading apparatus tilt back with the turret. There would be basically a sliding rack the shells would be on, and with careful machinery design, it could work at any angle the gun can elevate to. The shell + propellant would be a single solid stick that can be rammed in all at once. (it gets robotically assembled in a previous step and there’s no powder bags, the propellant is solid)
But basically the only economic case here for a 16 inch gun at all is that it’s presumably cheaper per shot that what Raytheon charges per missile. But you have all these immense operating costs to keep a ship like this running, while solid fueled missiles sit in their launch cells on a ship with a lot less crew and a lot less stuff to maintain. So this only makes sense if there’s an enemy army, near a shoreline within gun range, and they need to be rooted out with bombardment, and the enemy doesn’t retreat out of gun range and there’s no alternative to land elsewhere.
Just too narrow a tactical niche, I suspect that on paper these warships should have been retired many years before they actually were.
I wonder how many sailors were crippled working in that gun turret. During a rapid fire reload, there would be an awful lot of ways to lose a finger or a whole limb.
In the days when I was on a Submarine Tender, the commonly used figure was approximately US$40k per nautical mile sailed. Counting all costs, including sea pay for the crew. Not, mind you, that we were all that inexpensive in port, either.
A capital warship, with much greater mass, similar crew size, and much higher performance engines… Well, that’s going to be MUCH more expensive.
One BB could be replaced by several smaller hulls with the same cumulitive operational costs, carrying the same amount of ‘bang’ - per hull - in more versitile, longer-ranged packages - which means, among other things, that they can be in more places at once.
Really, there were just two reasons to have the BBs recommissioned: Prestige/nostalgia, and intimidation. Both have value, but not enough to offset the deficits.
If you had a gun barrel elevated to 30 degrees, the breech is going to be angled towards the deck. The loading equipment (unless you’re using transporter technology) is going to require a certain minimum amount of volume.
I suppose you could cut away parts of the deck, and have the loading gear poke up from the next deck below, but why go to all that trouble? Since the gun barrels need to elevate anyway (since target range is going to be variable… otherwise you have to do what the sailing ships did, which is “fire on the roll”), just move the breech into the loading position.
