It's the FINAL COUNTDOWN [drawing challenge]

Hey Erik,

Yeah, I figured a freighter loaded up with a GPS constellation and instructions and plant for building GPS receivers and JDAM kits wouldn't be, shall we say, in the spirit of the competition. I'd imagine that whatever ship does get sent back has a fairly extensive slide \ microfiche library, however, and enough "spares" of, say, magnetrons for the radar gear, or, if you're stretching things, gas turbines to be able to hand them over for analysis.

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NSWE: viewtopic.php?f=14&t=5695

Or a Triple-EEE full of handheld laser rangefinders and AAA batteries... yeah, I had gun warships more in mind

Rats, I had started more or less like apdsmith above, with some backwards-compatible heavy gun cruiser with lots of modern AAA, only for the project to devolve into a mess of documentation of workshops and backups and training room and and and...
In addition to being not as fun, it would indeed be cheating in the context of this contest. Once we've reached the point of figuring out a backup data storage and how many spare silicon wafers you can pack, the whole circus is better off sitting ashore anyway.
There's not much I can contribute much towards gun cruisers, but I'll be sure to watch the proceedings

One more idea I wanted to throw around, though probably not an original one either: what about air-oriented units? I'd hate just throwing another supercarrier into the ring, but I could see a large LHD-like hull refitted to handle vintage prop fighters, with the hangar chock-full of kits and spares for throwing around custom-built recon UAVs. Add to that the onboard comms facilities, berthing and hospital and you have a very useful fleet support/flagship. Which, once again, will not duke it out with the Musashi, and will be much less interesting to draw.

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I think the Midways sort of show the folly of attempting to grow a 40s prop carrier much beyond an Essex, or at least illustrate a serious set of diminishing returns. Although how would an angled deck play at the time? I have no idea.

@citizen lambda,

Surely you'd be off-loading the fancy kit (I'd thought about carrying something that the 1940s engineers would find simply jaw-dropping like a CNC rig or some UV lithography gear to get them past the electronics of the 1960s and jumped straight into something a bit more solid - the problem being that anything that's not a party piece is damned heavy - anything involved in bulk metalworking is just massive and CNC mills, for all that they're hypnotic (matched only by pen plotters) aren't really suited to mass production, as I understand it) - I can certainly picture carrying the gear and the data, but why waste ship tonnage carrying the associated workshop and training rooms when they're relatively simple to build ashore?

Regards supercarriers, perhaps something like CVA-58 - the ability to launch USAF strategic bombers while at sea could be quite game-changing (it'd render a good chunk of the islands campaigns moot, potentially, if you already have a suitable carrier handy)

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That's a very interesting point on a singular CVA, although I don't think we had a bomb capable of being carried even by something like a AJ Savage until the early 1950s.

Regarding "modern" AAA, you certainly could explore some of the concepts that were played with in the 1950s, but with modern metallurgy for the barrels. Squeezebore medium-caliber guns, subcaliber long-range AA rounds for the 8", SAM-N-8 Zeus...

erik_t wrote:

apdsmith wrote:

Regards supercarriers, perhaps something like CVA-58 - the ability to launch USAF strategic bombers while at sea could be quite game-changing (it'd render a good chunk of the islands campaigns moot, potentially, if you already have a suitable carrier handy)

erik_t wrote:

That's a very interesting point on a singular CVA, although I don't think we had a bomb capable of being carried even by something like a AJ Savage until the early 1950s.

Re. the carrier thing, the angled deck wasn't far into the future and drastically improved landing safety IIRC, but you would still have to train everyone to it if you introduced it out of the blue. That's why I was thinking LHD, to have a minimal cross-decking capability with baseline carriers back then, allied with a deep shoebox hull full of support stuff.

apdsmith wrote:

erik_t wrote:

Regarding "modern" AAA, you certainly could explore some of the concepts that were played with in the 1950s, but with modern metallurgy for the barrels. Squeezebore medium-caliber guns, subcaliber long-range AA rounds for the 8", SAM-N-8 Zeus...

Good points all around, but we are bumping again into the technology wall that made me ditch Transtemporal Naval Command to go found the Transtemporal Engineering Academy somewhere near Mare Island

If I may go on a tangent here to try and explain why I keep getting swamped in this line of thought, then I'll leave you fine gentlemen discuss the actual shipbuilding if you prefer:

Bear in mind, this is all based on the assumption that we're in for the long haul and that our little expedition has to be sustainable over the course of the war.
@apdsmith, agreed, you can't carry enough CNCs to mass-produce modern ammunition forever, but a few high-quality, compact machines of every type can make critical spares and (in our case) prototypes while only taking up a few dozen tons and dozen square meters. I'm not talking about carrying a steel furnace onboard either. Now if you want to spread out the knowledge and tech based on that, you will need the ability to produce these CNCs more or less from scratch. After all, you will need them to assemble the advanced fuzes and steering kits for the guided shells you will lavish on the rest of the USN, right? You don't get to be stingy with that stuff when it means watching your comrade in arms drown in battles you already know the outcome of... IN which of those burning ships is your great-uncle, by the way?
So you need to train Navy engineers to use digital CNCs, sure. Nothing unfeasible, they are smart guys and they can learn. You also need to train them or others to build more CNCs. Thing is, a CNC, like any other tech, doesn't happen in a vacuum. If CNCs weren't being built in 1941, it wasn't for want of ideas, but because all of the prerequisites weren't available. There's the chips and computers, of course, but what about the carbide tools, high-speed synchronous motors, self-lubricating bearings, high-tensile alloyed steel?
That works for the CNCs to build shells or gunbarrels, as well as for the electronics for the comms, the aircraft engines, the propellants, the code machines, the fancy drugs your crew will need to keep healthy in the 1940s Pacific campaigns...
This is why you need the complete stack of blueprints for everything down to the furnaces, and restart the technological food chain, as it were, from the bottom up, if it is to be sustained.
@erik, you touch on exactly the same point from a different direction when you mention using modern metallurgy to improve on traditional gun designs. Anything that can't be reproduced with vintage technology will not be sustained and extended to the rest of the fleet. The only other solution would be to take the future/present tech you want to bring back and retro-engineer everything to make their reproduction 40s-proof before leaving, and that won't work with everything. Forget on-board electronics, for one.

Ah well, we could go on forever on the requirements for rebuilding a technological base from scratch and the epistemological underpinnings thereof, but that's not what we're here for, is it?
And be glad I'm sparing you the excruciatingly Stephensonian debate over how to hide the whole time-travel shenanigans and the ensuing bending of the laws of probability...
I'll see myself out now, have fun!

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Hi both,

A couple of points:
First, I should have clarified - when I said "strategic bomber" I was thinking "strategic" in the WWII sense, something along the lines of a B-25 or a B-26 platform. I doubt that you'd be able to build something a B-17 could use, much less a B-29, but that's still a useful upgrade over the SBD Dauntless, for instance, both in terms of payload and range. <EDIT> Plus, you could use perhaps use more capable land-based aircraft for fighters as well, it may have enough of a takeoff run to use P-39s for a long-range CAP, for instance </edit>

Second, re tech transfer, it's a good point, but if we're talking a single ship, particularly if it's only next-generation (from the 1940s) rather than 1990s-2010 era then the 1940s USN can probably afford a maintenance regimen that would make the 1960s USAF blush. That's why I'm thinking that for our putative time traveller, much as it would be cool to match up modern EO systems and radar with the "no missiles" requirement, it's not ultimately a good long-term plan - there's very little that isn't a consumable part when you look at it over a long enough timespan (true story: old boss has a Ferrari. One of the many things he didn't know about Ferraris was that even the suspension is a replaceable part, service life of around 10,000 miles or so. And yes, he found that out at around the 10,000 mile service mark.)

Of course, if you're really looking for "mind ahem job" territory we only really need to bring back one thing - tooling to make a time machine (if you get really good at this you can give anybody reading this thread a migraine). But yes, in a larger sense, you need to bring back two sets of stuff:
1. Stuff to keep your ship \ ships operable in the immediate future
2. The base-level tech to boost the target era up to yours. Probably actual kit for their next-gen stuff and just reading material for the rest, unless you've brought a very big ship.
Oh, and of course 3. Hazmat facilities. Your entire crew are carrying around years and years of viruses and bacteria that the 1940s have had no exposure to.

But, as you've said, this is getting more and more time-travel and less and less ship-drawing, so I think I'll stop there

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Thoughts:

You'd want something that can be supported for extended periods in the 1940s. To that end, I'd want to rule out a gas turbine engine despite the advantages they offer. Nuclear power is marginal, except as a source of HEU to give the Manhattan Engineering District a kick start (Shades of an RP I partook in once where one player scrapped half of his SSN fleet to get at the HEU for a fast bomb program).
We known that at least the British 3"/70 worked in Canadian service when the proper pins were in place (steel vs Aluminum). I can't find the link at the moment, but when they were EOLed, they shot off the ammunition stocks very very quickly.
Going back to the first part, steam is the likely engine power source, with either geared or electric drive.
I might not push Radar beyond what was being fielded in the 1950s, but in that case, an SPS-2 seems required on anything larger than a CL.

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