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Notional British LPD/LHD with big guns
http://67.205.157.234/forums/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=1615		 Page 1 of 3
Author:  trap one [ July 29th, 2011, 7:52 pm ]
Post subject:  Notional British LPD/LHD with big guns
Could never understand why the LPD/LHD's weren't given the means to support the troops they were landing.
So in the tradition of waste not want not. Took a twin 14" from a KGV and lengthened the Fearless class into something that could. Add two each Phalanx and Goalkeeper to give close in protection and you get a much better class of ship.

Split from The Alternate Postwar Royal Navy - erik_t
Author:  Thiel [ July 29th, 2011, 7:55 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: The Alternative Postwar Royal Navy
No you don't. The Tarawa class LHA was originally equipped with guns for shore bombardment, but they were removed because they took up space better used for aviation facilities.
Author:  erik_t [ July 29th, 2011, 8:35 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: The Alternative Postwar Royal Navy
I know you can't see me over here, but I have a big vein bulging out of my forehead.
Author:  Bombhead [ July 29th, 2011, 8:45 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: The Alternative Postwar Royal Navy
Well well well.Its not often I'm lost for words so I will be as polite about this abomination as possible.If you must ruin someone else's well thought out and drawn ship please post it in your own thread :roll:
Author:  erik_t [ July 29th, 2011, 8:56 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: Notional British LPD/LHD with big guns
I need to go wash out my fridge - I'll be back to explain why something like this doesn't make very much sense.
Author:  TimothyC [ July 29th, 2011, 9:30 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: Notional British LPD/LHD with big guns
The not so bad: I've seen (and drawn!) worse kitbashes than this, so welcome aboard and I think I see real potential in this drawing. I also understand where you come from, but consider that the KGVs were scrapped in the late 50's while the Fearless class were not laid down until the early 60's. Possible, but highly unlikely.

By giving this ship a large gun, and the mission of supporting troops, you require that to provide said support you have to get in close - something you generally want to avoid with a ship like this that has a pot of very expensive things on it (politically expensive if it get blown up anyway). The ship also has a fair amount of things that might not be totally protected against the gun blast, and you don't want to be flying helos off when you're doing said fire support. I'll let Erik handle more, but I leave you with this: Pull the Phalanxes. They are not going to get any advantage over the Goalkeepers on the superstructure, and the bow one will suffer from being atop a mount that moves, while the stern one will interfere with helo ops.
Author:  Bombhead [ July 29th, 2011, 9:31 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: Notional British LPD/LHD with big guns
I apologise for that wee outburst Trap One.First of all welcome to SB I didn't realise you only had 4 previous posts.Apart from what erik will expain whats wrong with the ship,the last of the 14" guns were scrapped in 1959 along with the ships.
The barrels were physically cut off with a blow torch and the rounds were dumped at sea.The 1st of the Fearless class was not laid down untill July 1962.
Author:  erik_t [ July 29th, 2011, 11:22 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: Notional British LPD/LHD with big guns
(deep breath)


Okay, so let's talk a little bit about large-caliber artillery, first of all.

Battleship rifles are:
  • Expensive. Great Britain had (as seen above) no mounts sitting around at that point, and building new ones would have been terribly expensive.
  • Manpower-intensive.
  • A pretty major explosive threat. Magazines are armored for a reason!
  • Not great for sustained operations. Total barrel life for the 14"/45 was rated at 340 rounds. Changing the barrel involved disassembling the gunhouse. Likewise, ammo capacity is intrinsically very limited (100 rounds per gun on KGV), and resupply is much harder than for medium-caliber weapons.
  • High ship-impact. They produce lots of blast. They need a clear field of fire. They must be positioned carefully due to their weight and size. Their magazines are quite voluminous.
A good amphibious ship is:
  • Cheap. Cheap cheap cheap. They aren't subjected to great shock or punishment, and have well-distributed loads, so can be built lightly.
  • Full of troops and equipment. The payload fraction should be maximized to the greatest extent possible.
  • Able to disgorge those troops and equipment quickly and efficiently. This means maximum-sized and reasonably uncluttered well decks and flight decks, to support high-tempo operations.
  • I'll mention this one a second time: cheap. Cheap. Very very cheap.
Put these lists together and we see some major problems with the basic idea of a big-gun 'phib.
  • You won't build a lightweight or cheap 'phib with a heavy-caliber gun turret. Just won't work. Battleships were heavily constructed for a reason - that huge concentrated weight is a real bugger to deal with. The shock from firing doesn't help either.
  • If you go ahead and build it anyway, you'll find that such a LSD/LHD has pretty poor payload fraction compared to a traditional amphibious assault ship. That gun and magazine take up a huge amount of space and weight. The crew demanded by the system will impose other design constraints.
  • Probably for the best that you can't carry much payload, because you won't be able to get it offboard as quickly. Your flight deck will end up small and cluttered (and a deck park will get wrecked by lots of gun ops), and the below-decks arrangement will suffer as well (which means slower loading of a smaller well deck).
  • Self-defense will be an issue in the modern day. Blast and electronics don't mix very well.
There are some other intrinsic problems here.
  • You've got, to be charitable, maybe 400 rounds of 14" ammunition aboard. Best-case, you've got full tube-life magazines, a total of 680 rounds. This is just barely more than half as many rounds as Spruance carries of 5/54 ammunition. Of course Spruance can do easy 5/54 UNREP, and probably replace barrels at sea. You can't. Reload means regunning, which means you're in port. Your entire mission is limited to maybe 400-600 rounds of gunfire support. Each round is very potent, but a 14" round can miss just as effectively as a 5/54. And for suppression, the difference is not a huge one.
  • Even when both calibers were available, 5" ammunition was vastly more popular for NGFS in WW2. Battleships were quite often used as huge buckets of 5/38 ammunition, not to use their heavy guns. See Table 9 of Okinawa ops. Something like 4% of the total rounds expended were larger than 8". Something like 85% were 5/38 shells.
  • Note star shell in that table above. Good luck convincing the MoD to buy either in 14" (same for smoke).
  • You aren't going to have a lot of these around to make up for the gun scarcity problem, because they're expensive.
  • NGFS is badly-conducted from the landing ship. In WW2, the USN found it helpful to conduct NGFS from the flanks of a landed formation. This is because range error is always much much larger than deflection error. You want to shoot across the length of the enemy line, not over the heads of your troops. Thus guns are best located some distance away from the landing ships.
Saying "support the troops they were landing" sounds very nice as a single sentence on paper, but in practice it would work very very badly unless you have almost arbitrarily large ships to play with. Note the USN looked at several large-caliber NGFS weapons during and after Vietnam (up to 12"), but these were always mixed with lots of 5/54 and were always separate ships, not built into the 'phibs. The 'commando conversions' of the Iowas were more to take advantage of a useful and existing hull, not as a sensible new-built configuration.
Author:  rifleman [ July 30th, 2011, 7:08 am ]
Post subject:  Re: Notional British LPD/LHD with big guns
have done an ocean update with a 155mm Mk8
Author:  knut 75 [ July 30th, 2011, 8:54 am ]
Post subject:  Re: Notional British LPD/LHD with big guns
trap one

The answer to your initial questions: why were Fearless and Intrepid built without
guns? is actually quite straightforward.

The two ships incorporated lessons learnt during the 1956 Suez operation when
British forces had conducted an amphibious landing. A combination of Fleet Air
Arm aircraft (Britain still had 4 carriers in service when they were ordered) and
cruisers' heavy guns (Again, the three Tiger class and HMS Belfast were still in service
with 6" guns when the Fearless and Intrepid were ordered).

After 1967 it became official British policy that no major amphibious operation would be
conducted without US support (Suez had been a political debacle and loomed large
in British planning). Admiral Sir Hugh Leach conveniently overlooked this point in his
advice at the time of the Falklands, much to the horror of his boss, John Nott. Many on this
board will praise Leach for his bravery, but the fact remains that he was not an elected politician. At the time the British Government were reminding the Reagan administration that
Britain was a key NATO ally and Secretary of State Schulz and Defense Secretary Weinberger
subsequently ensured Britain got full US support. Without Leach they might even have had to put real pressure on Galtieri to withdraw (you know pulling the plug on Argentina's economy
like Ike did to the British in 1956..) But of course wars save military men from the folly of political responsibility and Leach is now a hero (to all except the families who lost sons mamed and killed in UK and Argentina) and Nott the villain.

All in all, better not to give the admirals ships with big guns (remember what happened to the Belgrano!)

Knut 75
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