Royal Navy Interwar Captial Ships

smurf

Post subject: Re: Royal Navy Interwar Captial Ships

Posted: March 9th, 2015, 10:46 am

Posts: 207
Joined: October 25th, 2014, 7:46 pm

I posted this on "personal Designs" in response to Krakatoa's
" (Oh dear, I feel another kitbash coming on....... save me, save me... Smurf, you got any oddities I can have a crack at?)"
As K posted his drawings here, this has I suspect got a bit 'lost'.
"Well .... as this is 25000ton battleships my love of cruisers doesn't fit. I'm also into 'neverweres' rather than personal inventions, and I've committed to Hood if he continues his Interwar Capital Ships beyond Nelson.
But I do know of one pair, a bit smaller than 25,000tons, for which there are no drawings so far as I know, so you could use your imagination on them in personal designs. In 1930-32, Charles Lillicrap, the chief cruiser designer, was seconded to the battleship section of the RCNC to design two small battlecruisers as examples for the 1932 Geneva talks on arms limitation.
1930. 20,000tons 680' waterline, beam 84', 90' over bulges; draught 22'; (3x2)12" or 10" (6x2)6" 6x4.7". Armour 9" side, 5" deck. 80,000shp for 30knots.
1932. 18,500tons 660', beam 83ft draught 21' (3x2)10" (4x2)6" (4x2)HA (2x8)2pdr. Armour 8" side, 3"+1" deck 80,000shp, 30 knots
Figures from his Workbook, with a weight breakdown and notes about armour to defeat 12" shells and poor underwater protection of second design (assume no bulges?)
So a bigger ship than Lillicrap usually designed, but his style in the days of Leanders, Amphion and Arethusa?"

I tend to be a bit careful with my claims, as things tend to turn up ...
However, the stuff in Lillicrap's Workbook is nearly all handwritten original calculations. In Workbooks any mistakes were crossed out and rewritten (in red if a more senior officer had a hand in the discussion. All pages are dated, so you can see how long a designer spent on any "design". Sometimes what a senior designer (head of section level) does is have two or three attempts at a design from different starting points. These are not really different designs, but rather different ranging shots at the same target.
A good example was Lillicrap's first tries at a design for the County class cruisers. He based those on Hawkins and on scaling up Adventure, the minelayer. Neither produced a satisfactory result, and DNC Tennyson d'Eyncourt told him to work on a flush deck high freeboard original design instead.
When I said "for which there are no drawings so far as I know" I really meant 'these designs don't ever seem to have got beyond the handwritten notes in L's Workbook and the Geneva talks led to no results. Over 3 years searching I've never seen any drawings, and don't expect to." That's why I chose them for Krakatoa to have a go at, expecting him to put them in "Personal Designs" There is little else to go on.

Now, thanks to Columbamike for the tables. Are these from Raven and Roberts' British Battleships, or original sources? 10G should be 10C?
It would be more accurate to entitle them British Battleship Design Studies 1928 AND 1934. All the first row 12A through to 12L were prepared in 1928 with two future events in mind: 1, designs for what might be achieved in lowering displacement treaty limits, and whether adequate designs could be prepared at various limits; and 2, what might actually be built in 1931 when the Washington '10-year holiday' ran out, even if there was no progress on 1. Nothing was achieved on 1, and the 'holiday' was extended until the treaty ran out in 1936, so 16A never got any further, either.
In ADM papers there were drawings of some of these designs, and for 11A at least a note that 'no drawings were prepared'

The designs on the second row 12N to 12Q were all prepared between January and April 1934, in response to Staff Requirements discussions in 1933, following on from proposals by UK and Japan at Geneva. Raven and Roberts include weight breakdowns in their table, and some notes about four boilers and four sets of turbines etc and refer to the "DNC's descriptions" of these designs, but do not refer to drawings (which may or may not have existed) DNC pointed to difficulties in efficient supply of four calibres of secondary ammunition. The 6in (in casemates!) were eliminated with 28 (12N) or 24 (12P) high angle 4.7in included. 12N and 12P were thought the best designs.
My own comment on them is that both were listed at 28,500tons with hull weights 12N 11,400 tons and 12P 11,100tons, though 12P was 20ft longer and 1.5ft wider with a fifth twin 12in gun turret. How could that be done? Answer: by making 12N better protected with more armour and a stronger, heavier hull.

These legends of designs at early stages must be distinguished from the legends put forward for Board approval, which were accompanied by drawings scale usually 1/16in - 1ft and a DNC guarantee that the arrangements of armour, armament and equipment had been subject to calculations sufficiently detailed to guarantee stability and level trim.
Another wide-ranging set was produced in response to Planning Division tactical studies in 1935, covering battleships of 23, 27 and 30 knots with 16,15 and 14 inch guns leading up to the King George V designs.
Such sets of designs were produced for purposes of comparison, not with the intention of selecting any one of them to build. A design seriously intended for construction would follow discussions of such alternatives by senior admirals or the whole Board.

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