Shipbucket

Here are a couple of personal designs that I am working through;



Class and type: Trenton-class armored cruiser (Trenton variant)
Displacement: 10,670 t (10,500 long tons)
Length: 108.7 m (356 ft 7 in)
Beam: 19.5 m (64 ft 1 in)
Draft: 6.9 m (22 ft 7 in)
Installed power: 10,500 ihp (7,830 kW)
Propulsion: 3-shafts, 3 triple expansion engines, direct drive, Bellevue boilers.
Speed: 17.0 knots (31.5 km/h; 19.5 mph)
Range: 5,400 nautical miles (10,000 km; 6,200 mi) at 10 knots (19 km/h; 12 mph)
Complement: 35 officers
480 enlisted men

Armament:
6 × 24 cm (9.4 in) / 40 caliber guns
6 × 15.0 cm (4.9 in)/40 caliber guns
18 × 8.8 cm (3.5 in)/35 caliber guns
6 × 1.5 cm (0.6 in) 40 caliber Gatling guns
8 × 45.8 cm (18 in) torpedo tubes

Armor:
Belt: 25.5 cm (10.0 in) down to ends 10.5 cm. (4.1 in)
Gun-house: face/mantlet; 30.5 cm (12 in)
sides; 20.5 cm (8.2 in)
roof; 10.5 cm (4.1 in.)
Barbettes: 25.5 cm (10.0 in)
Casemate shields: 15.5 cm (6.1 in)
Conning tower 20.5 cm (8.2 in)
Deck: 65 millimetres (2.5 in)

Class and type: Trenton-class armored cruiser (Tallahasse variant)
Displacement: 10,750 t (10,500 long tons)
Length: 109.0 m (357 ft 7 in)
Beam: 20 m (66 ft 8 in)
Draft: 7.1 m (23 ft 4 in)
Installed power: 11,500 ihp (8,575 kW)
Propulsion: 2-shaft 2 each triple expansion engines, Bellevue boilers.
Speed: 18 knots (33.4 km/h; 20.7 mph)
Range: 6,000 nautical miles (11,100 km; 6,900 mi) at 10 knots (19 km/h; 12 mph)
Complement: 36 officers
492 enlisted men

Armament:
6 × 24 cm (9.4 in) / 40 caliber guns
6 × 15.0 cm (4.9 in) guns
20 × 8.8 cm (3.5 in) guns
6 × 1.5 cm (0.6 in) Gatling guns
8 × 45.8 cm (18 in) torpedo tubes

Armor:
Belt: 25.5 cm (10.0 in) down to ends 10.5 cm. (4.1 in)
Gun-house: face/mantlet; 30.5 cm (12 in)
sides; 20.5 cm (8.2 in)
roof; 10.5 cm (4.1 in.)
Barbettes: 25.5 cm (10.0 in)
Casemate shields: 15.5 cm (6.1 in)
Conning tower 20.5 cm (8.2 in)
Deck: 65 millimetres (2.5 in)

Double bottom 80% overall length

I am thinking in this art that William Cramp and Sons (famous American battleship constructors) would be the likely fictional builders. I thought I would draw two iterations of what would be essentially very similar Repair and Construction Bureau supplied requirements for "armored cruisers". based on the SMS Brandenberg inspiration.

Now the Germans built their Brandenburg armored ships out of mild steel with compound armor plate appliqued. This is just before Krupp cemented armor became viable.

The Americans in 1889 had the good fortune to have a Mister Harvey working for them and were thus tinkering with Harveyized steels which while not quite as resistant as the soon to be invented Krupp cemented armor was better than the current foreign plate that was available and thus could be used in their protection schemes to produce thinner lighter yet equal defense to the contemporary foreign counterparts.

Some of the things I allow for my personal designs are the German inspired SK series naval guns. This is admittedly hindsight on my part and because I like their mechanical simplicity. At the time, the French and the British were fiddling around with the interrupted screw breech plug and the British especially were wire wrapping guns. I suppose the British were about the most tech advanced in gunmaking, while the French were the best pyro-chemists, but seriously both produced some rather lousy naval ordnance based on their combined history of breech explosions and barrel jacket failures.

The Germans lagged behind both those other nations. German SK guns usually were sliding wedge breech block and were metal hoop fretted tubes. This made for light stiff barrels, heavy breech blocks and rapid fire into the larger calibers.

The Germans out of safety margin necessity had to use 'cooler nitro propellants than the British and longer calibers to get the muzzle velocity push they wanted. As another result of this tech choice, their tube designs were usually a bore size smaller than British contemporaries.

Smaller bores, lighter shells, higher muzzle velocity, but about equivalent terminal strike velocity. And they did not have access to Hotchkiss anti-torpedo guns (Nordenfelt is a poor substitute.) and no Whitehead torpedoes.

The Americans starting from scratch faced much the same problem the Germans did. How could you compete with the Royal Sovereigns building?

The Germans had quick fire artillery up to 11 in bore that was twice as fast firing as British and French equivalent. (Not rapid fire, but quick fire, there is a difference.)

Brandenburg was their theoretical answer to broadside throw weight issues and volume of fire on a smaller displacement than the British builds.

Trentons are mine.

The drawings are getting much better Tobius, there are still a few minor details that do not look quite right which spoils the overall effect.

The entry of the screw/shaft into the hull, the entry point you should try and get it to look as if it flows into the hull proper. The break between the lower hull and upper hull could be delineated better by the black and lesser black stripe that most artists use. That helps to see where the high/low water marks as well.

With your shading, most of it looks like 2 tone shading which does not show the effect you want as well as the 3 tone shading. Even if you end up with a very light grey then your medium and darker shades, the overall effect is better. Your 2 tone shade on the turrets gives them a 'pointed' look which I know you do not intend. The funnel tops could be darker - not black if you are trying to avoid that look, just darker than they are and again they could do with 3 tone shading to make them look rounder.

The backstory to the choice of weaponry is interesting and shows that you are doing research before putting pen to paper, excellent work.

Thank you.
Valid and I will try that tweak, with a darker red band stripe as my plimsol. The black plimsol line is not something I think works for me. I already have to watch the cartoonishness.


That is three tone shading with the base color you complain as being too light and this bleeding into the light base shade, I think. I may have to tweak that balance as well.

The turrets (gun houses) are supposed to be rather odd shaped. The SK 240s are paired in narrow long rectangular trucks. The whole mount from mantlet back to rammers fits inside a rectangular box. What gives it the odd pointed look is the hemisphere plating that serves as shot deflectors and mating cover from the narrow gun house to the barbette race. That is the general shape of the C.S. 28 turrets the Germans used on the Brandenbergs. I just 'Americanized" it a little with a different ventilator and a slightly less sloped profile.
This isn't so much research as what I know. Take the maligned Schwartzkopf torpedo, the denigrated competitor to the "Whitehead".

If you like backstory, then the Schwartzkopf torpedo (replaces the Howell around 1896 as I conceive it ) should be a beaut. The Americans bought a dozen of the bronze fish in 1892 or thereabouts to trial against the Whiteheads. The Whiteheads were mechanically much simpler and cheaper and otherwise less of a mechanical manufacturing nightmare to copy so the USN plonked down the license fees for the Whitehead manufacturing rights as did anyone else who wanted to make sure they had domestic manufacture.

The problem is that no one ever understood/understands why the Germans built bronze torpedoes in the first place... and why their torpedoes' mechanicals were so complex and the British torpedoes by comparison were so simple.

Bronze is ductily far different from steel and iron. Stiffer, a bit more brittle in the glasslike sense. No getting around that. You need a heavier air flask to drive a much heavier Brotherhood engine's cylinders, the springs are different, the levers and rockers, the slide valves all function differently, the hydrostatic valve assembly, the rudder steer control all made of BRONZE or heavily galvanized steel when elasticity was a must. Everything Schwartzkopf, did to his torpedo to duplicate what he stole from Whitehead's engineering drawings had to be cam regulated or spring countered in a more complex way than Whitehead's simple mechanical slam stop methods or the bronze part would break or jam. And it was all metric graduated and made, not in Imperial measure which the US and the UK still used. So your Schwartzkopf torpedo will be a German cuckoo clockmaker's nightmare of precision cast springs, levers, rockers, cams and valves; all of or mostly bronze parts. The result is a heavy torpedo with a smaller warhead and shorter theoretical range compared to a similar sized Whitehead. A bit finicky mechanically unless packed together tightly and assembled correctly. It could however stand drop shock repeatedly without deformation or misalignments. A Whitehead couldn't. Remember that point.

For it was bronze and extremely STIFF when assembled and it came with a floater exercise head. Which meant you could shoot it over and over and over again without the dangers of steel brittling, deformation, and rust. AND unlike the Whitehead; it was made in such a fashion that you could unscrew parts and replace them in one of the four sectional modules as they wore out or were mod improved. For example you could change the warhead from a needle fusiform to a blunt nose as soon as you figured out the blunt nose (hemisphere actually) was more wave efficient. Could not do that with a contemporary Whitehead. Add a Orbry gyro control (1897)? You could just squeeze one in the immersion float module to link to the steer motor (Germans 1906 before they got the rights). The British had to design a whole new torpedo to use gyro control (1902-1904). Americans because of the Howell gyro patent fight would know about Orbry gyro control and I assume would jump on it immediately. (Bliss did but could not get it to work in a Whitehead knockoff until about 1910. If they had the Schwartzkopf, who knows? Maybe by 1900 or a tad earlier?)

So suppose you do understand what the Germans are about?

a. Practice, practice, practice with your reuseable torpedoes.
b. You can backfit existing torpedoes with better air flasks, steer controls, and even better motors without junking the whole current inventory. (The Germans did this, so why not just follow their lead?)
c. All of a sudden, your mechanics have to become very good at maintenance in general, or the complicated fish won't work at all as the Spanish discovered at Santiago.
d. Since Americans are going to turbines anyway (first to do so) this torpedo has a mechanical drive train already designed that just begs for someone to install a turbine instead of a reciprocating radial.

I would be very surprised if these misunderstood advantages were not pressed to the limit in the New Steel Navy had the initial right purchase choice been made. The USN gunnery incompetents in command were American civil war veterans who knew full well the dangers of mines and spar torpedo boats that they encountered (Housatonic and the Battle of Mobile Bay). That they could not get the Howell flywheel torpedo to work was not from lack of interest or trying. If the Huascar wasn't a wake up call to them. (it was. The British had blatantly attacked the Peruvian ship without legal right or warning. The Huascar escaped.) then the Itibah (same year, for both events 1877 Peruvian civil war and the Russo Turkush war) was sunk as the Russians showed the world what could be done with the [Whitehead] weapon. Point being that during the Spanish American war, the Americans had not conducted one torpedo training exercise (nor decent gunnery drills, nor fleet tactical maneuvers) not once, because Whitehead torpedoes were too unreliable and too prone to corrosion damage to risk in exercise. The Spanish of course had practiced. They had some Schwartzkopfs, but they did not have the trained personnel to use them properly at Santiago or Manila Bay though they sure tried. Vazcaya and Pluton in particular. The USS Brooklyn was extremely lucky that she wasn't hit.

Now that is very interesting, I had not delved into the origins of the early torpedoes before, so the above information is a very good read.

That seems to be the Trenton I hunted for.



And that is the Tallahassee.

Refer to the above for the comments and adjustments.

Something to say about why I chose the layouts I did.

One of the things I noticed about turn of the 19th/20th century naval warfare when I first studied it is how misunderstood it is. Popular misconceptions about engagement ranges and naval tactics abound and persist to this day. People of our era used to long ranged engagements scoff at the numerous machine guns and naval howitzers that clutter the superstructures of those quaint ships, and wonder why ships that packed 12 inch naval rifles that could throw shells ten miles, would have reinforced beaked ram bows not too dissimilar from the ancient Greeks at Salamis or the medieval navies at Lepanto.

Well, there are a couple of practical British reasons for that. And since the British were the supposed best at the naval art, most everyone else either imitated them or the French who 'opposed' them.

About the range question.

Time in flight for a shell at the usual 700 m/s muzzle velocity for the SK24/40 of the era is about 2.9-3 seconds to cover the parabola that will carry it slightly more than a mile (about 1750 meters). It's about ~25-26 seconds to 14,000 meters, its max. theoretical effective range.

Of course a ship moving 8 m/s for 25 seconds has moved 200 meters and at 14,000 meters distant that gives you a circular time in flight offset error of 200 meters. Somebody is going to have to invent a continuous update system to predict lead for that drift. (Range clock. 1903) and a way to plot for that drift (Dumaresq 1905)

Until then, it's stadia meter and telescope for the US navy, shooting deliberately every two minutes or so and no shooting beyond 6-8 seconds flight time (4000-6000 meters) for large caliber shells. For a navy with no medium caliber rapid fire guns, that is a huge handicap.

When the Iowa hit the Infanta Maria Theresa with a pair of 12 inch shells at ~2500 meters at Santiago, therefore, that was some mighty fancy shooting from that brand new American ship just using primitive telescopic sights. Whoever laid those shots on had to see through a kerfluffle of American smoke (the Americans did not have smokeless powder propellant for their guns.) and lead a 9 m/s fleeing Spanish target at 1/4 aspect on an opening bearing course. The Americans didn't have the range clocks, the Dresser tables or the coincidence rangefinders that the British would use 16 years later. Furthermore the Iowa gunners had to miss the USS Brooklyn because the Infanta Maria Theresa and the USS Texas were all three danger close to ramming each other, the two Americans by mistake and the Spaniard deliberately. Not exactly contiguous in time, but that was the confusion into which everybody shot that morning.

American shooting was compelled to be slow and methodical because of their artillery and they still mostly missed. They had few, no make that NO rapid fire guns of bore larger than 5.7 cm (6 pounder Hotchkiss) on their ships. The Spanish had the Hontoria 5.5 in (14 cm.) rapid fire gun as their main armored cruiser armament. This was a copied French Schneider Canet design that could spit out 6 shells a minute to the 1 shell per minute that an American 6 inch fired as it was as fast as it was safe to shoot, answered with. The American 5 inch was a slightly faster cyclic at 1 per 45 seconds.

Makes sense to design ships with a large battery of rapid fire guns when you have the certainty that the engagement ranges are three miles (5000 meters) or less (1895) if you are Spain and you follow the European trends.

So why the 12 inch naval guns on pre-dreadnoughts at all? And why usually only four? To prevent the ramming attacks of course and to act as finishing coup de grâce weapons when the opponent was been beaten into a flaming wreck by your rapid fire guns as the USS Texas used her 12 inch gun on Vazcaya after the Brooklyn and that Spaniard slugged it out for an hour.

That is why Spanish armored cruisers carried the seemingly too large Schneider Canet 11 inch mounts they had mounted fore and aft. Imitative of British and hence European naval practice, those guns were put there to stop a rammer and to punch holes in an enemy cripple to finish him off at close range.

But the Americans didn't have any rapid fire guns like that for a pepper box fight.... That's why it took USS Brooklyn an hour to stop the Vazcaya in such a parallel running fight. The Spaniard spat out 300 5.5 inch shells. The Brooklyn answered with about 80-100 8 inch and 5 inch shells of her own. Shooting was at about 1100 meters constant range going both ways.

The Spaniard scored ~20 hits. PH was 5%. The Brooklyn shrugged off a lot of duds and had a lot of holes to patch but at least two Spanish shells functioned, one hit of which wrecked a casemate 5 inch gun (no casualties). But the overall combat effect of these hits on the Brooklyn was zilch.

As a general rule US PH during Santiago was 1% but in this action Brooklyn put maybe 8 shells into Vazcaya to stop her, about half of them 8 inch (3 or 4 hits of the 8? ~7- 10% of the hits out of 40 count of 8 inch fired.) . AFACBD those 8 inch shells did most of the internal damage to Vazcaya and started most of the fires. Vazcaya was shrugging off US 5 inch shells (4-5 hits? of the 60 fired.) which killed exposed topside crew and guns but which wasn't hurting her armored vitals. Exactly what the Spanish armored cruiser's protection scheme was designed to do at those ranges, it did. It kept the medium caliber stuff out of the vitals. Not the larger bore shells though.^1

*1 At the Battle of Manila Bay, the USS Olympia put an 8 inch shell completely the length stern to bow forward through the Reina Christina, and blew the Spanish ship's engine room apart in the process. That one shot put an end to that ship and to any Spanish attempt at all to fight back.

The Texas may have worked Vazcaya over with a couple of coup de grâce 12 inch shots as she beached herself, but that does not change the main findings the Americans discovered when they examined the Spanish wrecks.

Large US caliber guns did most of the critical system kill damage to Spanish ships at Santiago. And it was mostly the cruiser and battleship 8 inch guns which were responsible. Note that at Santiago, those US 8 inch/35s fired once every 2-4 minutes? And they were fired in full broadside salvoes a la Nelson at Trafalgar with much the same devastating results?

Racking and internal explosions in the enemy vitals was what the Americans wanted when they made these choices and that's what they got.

Foreign navies rightfully ballyhooed American naval tactics and their deplorable shooting accuracy, but at least two nations noticed what came out of the Spanish American war.

One was of course, America, who would take 10 years to completely digest the lessons she learned (all or nothing THICK protection being one of those lessons). The other was Italy where a certain Vittorio Cunniberti^1 immediately recognized what had happened to the Spanish and drew the correct conclusions before Tsushima or the Japanese and the Russians would sort of left-hand confirm Santiago's artillery results. The British layout model of large numbers of rapid fire guns as the broadside and the few heavies as incidental hitters did not work. The [American at least] armor was too good at close range for anything under 6 inch and anything like 12 inch which could take up to 3 minutes to fire as a laid on gun would likely mostly miss and be a wasted shot in singles and twos.

And even the 6 inch RFG was suspect. So from where did HMS Dreadnought ultimately come?

Meet the USS Brooklyn.

Six shot broadside, main battery, same caliber and same fall of shot.

And since the Germans were making quick fire guns that at least in the larger calibers were operating at the 1 shot per minute cyclic from 1890 on. (Brass-cased propellants, behind the shell do ease of machine load and cargo handling, just the thing to go with those sliding wedge breech block Krupp guns.) if you need your large caliber guns to shoot fairly quickly and hit in salvo at the 1895 ranges, you can't go wrong with such kinds of guns. The Americans followed [obsolete] French practice and paid for it with some lousy naval artillery about a decade behind the latest British innovations. The Germans were initially on the right track after all. They even had a dry run of it with their first true battleships. They thought that a large caliber main broadside was the theoretical way to go in a naval artillery fight. So six 11 inch guns into a broadside to smash ships, not deter rammings.

^2 Cuniberti, Vittorio, "An Ideal Battleship for the British Fleet", All The World’s Fighting Ships, 1903, pp. 407-409.

All of which the Germans groped toward with their Brandenbergs, but when the mixed caliber main guns proved to be impossible to pattern match in shot fall, they reverted back to the British model of demolition with rapid fire guns and missed the point they accidentally found when they tried to match broadside weight of metal.

It was the British practice they subsequently followed and what was expected (by them) to [theoretically] work best.

Trenton would be my answer to the question of what the Americans could do with German type technology. The 17 cm/40 does not exist yet and the 28 cm/35 is a bit too big for the experiment this early. American gun-making science as of 1885 was all imported, with true domestic designs at least a decade away. And if I have to pick a German gun to model I want the best match to purpose I can find. I suppose the 21 cm/40 was possible, but then the mythical Trentons might have to fight genuine (2nd class) British Centurion and Renown class battleships known to be headed or prowling in American waters. The 24cm/35 or 40 Krupp is a good match to the British 10 inch of the era. Its shell can defeat British compound and early cemented steel armor of the era... easily.

And as you can see by my prior comments, the Harvey steel armor scheme I outline is designed to resist 10 inch bore British naval gunfire.