This site Warships1 has the most comprehensive detail about all the warships of the world including the Montana class battleships. It’s a great site with lots of technical stuff and message boards.
Well, in WWII, there were very few battleship engagements because Hitler was very concerned about the loss of prestige if one of their battleships had been sunk, so his specific orders to the german navy was that they should only engage when they had a ‘clear superiority’ over the opposing forces. If the allied naval forces were even close to equal, the german commander was supposed to take his battleship and head back toward safety. (Then Hitler yelled and complained about the Navy’s ‘lack of fighting spirit’.)
Given those rules, it’s clear that there wouldn’t be too many battleship battles, when 1 side was avoiding them.
Battleships certainly did fight and sank plenty of lesser ships and supported amphibious actions by firing on enemy ground positions.
However, it is true that there were very few battleship to battleship engagements and the only large scale example was the battle of Jutland in WWI. Historically, battleships fleets were constructed as a deterrence or as part of an arms race. For example the construction of HMS Warrior presented a ship that so outclassed everything else at sea that the French simply gave up trying to compete.
At the battle of Jutland the Germans sunk more tonnage than the British and then broke off the engagement leaving the Royal Navy to command the seas. The battle was in that sense indecisive, but the fact that the German navy remained intact meant that the British had to maintain the home fleet at great expense in men and materiel that could otherwise have been used in the ground war. In this case, for the Germans, maintaining a credible threat to the RN was enough of a victory and there was little point in risking all in a second engagement.
In WWII, AFAIK, British battleships did not have the range to go chasing round the world looking for trouble. Lightly armoured Cruisers and Battlecruisers were sent instead. It was these that engaged the German battleships etc in relatively small scale (but important) engagements. The Germans did not manage to get their battleships together in one place - things might have turned out differently if they had. Of course, by the start of WWII, air power was all important, if not universally appreciated.
Pick up a copy of Jon Keegan’s The Price of Admiralty; it has an extensive description of the battle of Jutland (as well as the Battle of the Atlantic and Trafalgar). I’d quote some to you, but I have to get my copy back from my brother.
I think you mean ‘quartic’ there. I believe form, parasite, and induced are always second power drag functions. As you point out it’s wave drag that tends to shoot off the scale.
And as a real useless aside, I think the practical exponent is around 4.5. God, whose phone number am I forgetting to be remembering stuff like that?
This has been done for over a hundred years with destroyers. By building a displacement hull that is very narrow for its’ length, the builders made a hull that could “slice” its’ way through the water, even above hull speed, since the bow and stern waves would be relatively small due to the narrow hull.
Here is a good example: The 1554 ton “Shakespeare Class” of the Royal Navy in late WWI had a length of 329ft, but a beam of only 31.5 feet, for a very narrow hull. It had 40,000 shp engines, and could reach 36kts, although the hull speed would only be about 25kts with this hull length.
The US Navy also built a lot of destroyers like this in WWI, and many of them were provided to the Allies during the Lend-Lease program in early WWII before Pearl Harbour.
Reference: See: http://www.world-war.co.uk/, select “Ships” -> “DDs” -> “Shakespeare”.
Note that this will only work with a very narrow hull and a LOT of horsepower. 40,000shp is more than many ocean liners of that era would have, all in a single small destroyer hull.
JS
No, you have it backwards. Hull speed is not defined as the result of a mathematical formula as a function of the length. Hull speed is defined for each hull as the speed at which the power requirements rise sharply for any increase in speed. The formula is a tool in trying to calculate and predict what hull speed will be for a certain hull but it does not define hull speed.
There are many formulas used to calculate hull speed and those base solely on hull length are gross oversimplifications which are applicable only in very specific types of hulls. As you say, beam is a significant factor and the narrower the beam the higher the hull speed.
In other words if the hull encounters hull speed at a higher speed than a given formula predicts then it just means the formula is wrong and not applicable.
Also note that the speed VS power curve starts rising but there is no one clear, specific speed which can be considered the precise hull speed. This rise is sharper in wider hulls and not so sharp in narrower hulls and, if a hull is quite narrow you get to a point where you really cannot appreciate the sharp increase in power needed because it is quite gradual. The steep increase in power required gradually diminishes as the beam narrows. So you get to a situation where the concept of hull speed is really not quite applicable.
Whack-a-mole, I think I managed to do a quick-and-dirty survey of every battleship sinking in WWII in this thread.
An interesting thing came up as a result of that survey. I realized that with a single possible exception, no battleship ever sank another battleship in a pure surface action.
No battleships were sunk at Jutland, although several battlecruisers went down there. In WWIII, of the five capital ships which went down in purely surface action, three of them (Hood, Scharnhorst, and Kirishima) were actually battlecruisers. The two battleships which went down in a pure surface confrontation against other battleships were the sister-ships Fuso and Yamashiro, in the same battle at Surigao Straight. Yamashiro was broken in two by destroyer-fired torpedos, but Fuso managed to steam within range of the old US battlewagon line. They managed to fire off over 250 14- and 16-inch rounds in addition to the fusillade of eight cruisers. Fuso was a pretty well put-together ship which should have been able to withstand 6- and 8-inch shells, so it is widely thought that the killing blows came from the American BBs.
Interestingly, two of the American battleships at Surigao, West Virginia and California, were sunk at Pearl Harbor and re-floated. Thus it can be said that the only battleship which was sunk by other battleships in a pure surface action was sunk with the help of two already-sunken battleships!
(The Bismarck may also qualify as a surface-sinking except for two important things. She was caught because British torpedo planes managed a lucky hit which disabled Bismarck’s rudder, and it’s beginning to look as if she finally went down because she was scuttled.)
(You may also notice that I claimed that I identified every post-dreadnought sinking. In fact I did, including the battleship and battlecruiser losses of WWI, but for some idiotic reason I failed to save the results before I hit the submit button. All that research became hamster food, and hell if I’m going to do it again.)
Oops, I forgot to mention that there is some remaining controversy about the Surigao Straight. The first question is which battleship actually managed to have its T capped by Jesse Oldendorf’s battleships–since Fuso and Yamashiro were sister ships and both sank that night there is some debate over which ship actually made it within range of the American BBs. Second, some accounts claim that both ships took torpedo hits.
As a testament to the almost unbelievable durability of battleships, it’s worth mentioning that after one of the two sister ships was broken in half it seems that both sections remained afloat, and the aft section appears to have remained partially navigable and underway for some two thousand yards.