Shipbucket

I actually have an answer for that one as I've done a few revisions to the USS Haupt and USS Longstreet. And that is to put electric final drives into the power train. With generator/motors I can use a giant rheostat control to match propeller spin counts into the two engine rooms. This is two decades earlier than turbo-electric drive; but why the heck not? It gives the Americans an excuse to use electric final drives much sooner as they find trouble with geared drives. It will also drive them even further into a direction in this AU that I want them to go.

Like this example...

http://www.ajc.com/news/news/local/firs ... ian/nQmYT/



And of course the army equipment for it to be used on land



And now the revised USS Henry Haupt below.



And the USS Winfield Scott;



I think I am happy with your suggestion to revise my initial work. It works out so much better. Thank you for the feedback.

Time for more fill-in about the AU, and what I suggest as deviations from real history.

The powered aerostat that Mister Dyer was supposed to have built is a lot like the Samuel Langley powered gliders. The myths and legends get in the way of any objective facts that can be proved. All I can cite with certainty is that the man lived and he claimed to have made a compound balloon and wing flying machine that carried a man aloft.

I don't believe it for a second.

On the other hand, there are reliable printed historical sources for the Samuel Langley series of powered unmanned gliders. There are good eyewitness newspaper accounts, including those from Theodore Roosevelt, that confirm sub-scale steam engine powered models actually flew straight and level for distances that proved that these heavier than air devices lifted under power.

From Rudyard Kipling...
What defeated Langley (and almost anyone else who tried until the Wrights solved the problem) was three axis stability in flight. That means the secret to manned flight that Orville and Wilbur cracked was not the lift problem, because they were not the only ones who solved the chord camber problem quickly. Otto Lilienthal was on that track and it was his work, the Wrights refined.

The problem was how to recover and point the aircraft in a shifting wind so that the nose and hence the wing would not rise or drop into a stall and fall out of lift, nor let the nose and wing side-slip and skid again into a fall out of lift condition or roll around the long axis with attendant crash. This was what killed Lilienthal.

Langley in his experiments was aware of the roll and the pitch problems, but like so many others before him he did not solve for yaw. he thought that once pitch and roll were handled he could assume yaw would take care of itself. It was lift which he thought was the great barrier. I have to admit, he did not even solve the chord/camber problem properly either, even though his symmetrical chord and 8 degree level camber wing prototypes actually flew and that was what he duplicated for his manned prototype.



Why did they fly and the manned type did not?

Put enough thrust into it and even a brick will fly.

Wait fifteen years and add Glenn Curtiss and you get a flying machine that works;



WHY?

Glenn Curtisss added flaps, elevons, a combined 2-d tail control to keep the nose from pitching and yawing. And he added power.

He also adjusted wing chord and camber to generate a true vacuum effect to produce lift.

Clever reverse engineer was Glenn Curtiss. He devined all of those secrets from just a few glimpses of the Wright Flyer in operation. If he was not such a crook, he would have gone down in history as a greater contributor to the science of aviation than even the great Frenchman Louis Bleriot.



But he was a crook who spent most of his time leading up to WW I trying to break the Wright patents.

What does this have to do with the AU?

The thing it has to do with the AU is that three Americans started on the airplane. Langley went at it first, from 1887 onward.

The Wrights started their hunt for three axis control possibly as early as 1892. Curtiss, the huckster, started around 1905 when he discovered the Wright Flyer's secrets by observation.

It doesn't take an aeronautical engineer to know that Charles Manley's 74 kWatt engine was powerful enough to lift the Aerodrome. What was needed was the Wright 3 axis control. That would not be available until 1903. Could it have arrived a decade earlier?

Maybe if Orville and Wilbur had been more trusting, if Samuel Langley had been less obstinate and Glenn Curtiss had not been such a crook. Lot of ifs there to overcome.

Let's see if Alexander Graham Bell and Theodore Roosevelt can overcome them.

Make of it what you will, but any reasonable look at heavier than air aviation seems to have 1903-1904 as the earliest possible date for a successful aeroplane. That is a firm date due to some technical factors involved with the Wrights 3 axis control work especially and specifically. No sooner can it happen. The first Curtiss seaplane is made maybe two years afterward if that soon. It occurs on or about 1906. The AU Dragonfly appears about 1908 with the definitive service version about 1910. The seaplane carrier conversion could come about one or two years later after the first Curtiss seaplane if the maximum effort is applied, but no sooner than 1907 or 1908 at the earliest. Operational experience will take at least another four years or about 1911-1912 before the Americans have a handle on scouting for the fleet from the air by using seaplanes. I don't expect routine landing onto ships by wheeled planes for at least another year after that (Eugene Ely in a 1911 test on the USS James Longstreet using Hugh Armstrong Robinson's arrestor cable and tail-hook invention in this AU will conduct those first experiments.) That makes it a part of Mister Teddy Roosevelt's Navy when the first aircraft carriers show up and takes it completely out of the running for this particular AU.

I tried to make it happen sooner, but I cannot strain credulity or believability that far outside what is possible to make it happen any earlier than 1911. The aerostat however is quite possible by 1895. So aerial reconnaissance can still be a part of this AU, if just barely credible in time for the Spanish American War. At the time of its use in 1898, it would be strictly experimental in nature as it would be new introduced to the fleet. The Americans would have to work out procedures during wartime for their "blimps" as much as they would have to work out fleet tactics using air scouts in their first "fleet problem" which would be about 1895-1896 for that blimp aerial reconnaissance.

Fleet Problem I

Fleet Problem I was held in April and May 1889. It was staged off the coast of Virginia The attacking Black force, using peace cruisers to represeent enemy battleships, tested the defenses of Chesapeake Bay. A single simulated coast artillery “fort” sited at the head of the Virginia Capes was able to prevent the Black Fleet's entry, calling into question the whole idea of a fleet based coast defense, an erroneous conclusion that took almost a decade to overcome inside an isolationist Congress as foreign navies went about their own business of bombarding Chinese and Ottoman cities without impedence by those same types of coastal forts in the real masonry, steel and earthworks that failed to deter or stop the British and French bombardments, an utterly useless coast artillery presence as demonstrated at Shanghai and at Alexandria.

Fleet Problems II, III, IV

Fleet Problems II, III, and IV were held concurrently in January, February, and April 1890. These maneuvers took place in and around the Hawaiian archipelago. The exercises were simulated actions that the USN might undertake in the Western Pacific in the pursuit of securing coaling stations from "unclaimed islands" and other "selected territories."

Fleet Problem II simulated the first leg of a westward fleet advance to Samoa as the US and Germany were still in a tense dispute over who would obtain those islands.

Fleet Problem III

This exercise focused on a defense of the California coasts from a foreign (British) attack. The US force was defending the coast from an attack from the north by the Red Force, operating from its Pacific advance base simulated in this case by Seattle. The fleet problem, as a tack on objective for the Red Force for the US Navy's further education and development, contained an evolution that Red was to practice amphibious landing techniques and the ability to support its fleet along a hostile fortified coast at sea without access to friendly nearby anchorages. This taught the need for a fleet train and for an ability to supply underweigh at sea.

In the exercise, a Red Force surprise submarine mining action resulted in the "sinking" of a Blue force “battleship” in a "narrow channel" that effectively bottled that Blue fleet up in San Francisco harbor. For the first time since the American Civil War the USN became aware of how dangerous mine warfare and the submarine diving boat could be.

Fleet Problem IV.

This problem simulated the movement from a main base along the American coast to the Mexican Pacific coast—represented in the case by an opposed movement from San Francisco by Red Force to Los Angeles with Blue Force seeking to bring Red Force to action. It was during this Fleet Problem that the USS Chicago blew up and brought an abrupt halt to the proceedings

Fleet Problem V

Fleet Problem V was held in March and April 1891 and simulated an attack on the Chesapeake Bay again. The Red Force, the aggressor, was given the United States' first true battleship, the USS Maine, The USS Maine along with two protected cruisers and other USN ships was outfitted with the highly experimental Fiske Bushnell telescopic stadiameter mast height rangefinder system for long range shooting. The defending Blue force had peace cruisers with standard horizontal eyesight limited bar gauge sights. In addition, the peace cruisers were limited to inferior war game ruled speeds to Red's fleet to get Blue used to a faster Spanish enemy fleet. Maine's positive performance helped speed up the completion of the two armored cruisers, USS Trenton and USS Tallahassee.

One aspect of Fleet Problem V was conducted near Fort Fisher off the Carolina Grand Bankls and involved attacking a lightly held coastal position and coaling the fleet for the first time at sea.

Fleet Problem VI

Held off the west coast of Central America in early 1892 in response to popular unrest in Nicaragua. This so called exercise was a disguised cover operation for installing a US friendly government under the noses of the British who were attempting their own Fillibuster at the same time.

Fleet Problem VII

This fleet problem was held March 1893 and involved a simulated attack of Charleston, South Carolina. The notable feature of this exercise was the loss of Battery Moultrie on Sullivan's Island in which powder magazines and gun pits blew up in a series of chain reaction explosions. These killed over a thousand men. Along with the previous loss of the USS Chicago, this caused a serious rethink of US artillery practices

Fleet Problem VIII

Held in October 1894 between California and Hawaii; this one pitted Red, a protected cruiser force operating from Hawaii, versus Blue, the new battle line of America's three battleships. It also involved a convoy search and destroy and anti-privateer operations. The need for more protected cruisers as convoy escorts was highlighted.

Fleet Problem IX

This scenario in January 1895 studied the effects of a sneak attack on a fleet at anchor. San Francisco stood in the role as the Blue Force naval base. Red Force as the attacker conducted the operations necessary to carry out such an eventuality, and pitted the battle line (less scout cruisers and the USS Trenton against a combination of forces including the entire existing protected cruiser force (augmented by the armored cruiser USS Trenton), the Control Forces (Umpires), and local army coast defense forces. In a daring move, USS Trenton was detached from the Red fleet with only a single protected cruiser as escort to make a wide sweep north past the Blue Force which had sortied to intercept Red at sea swanning about to the south and "attack" the harbor, which was defended by a few guard ships and Trenton's sister ship, the USS Tallahassee. Trenton successfully mined the entrance to San Francisco on 26 January and, despite being "sunk" two times later in the day, proved the versatility of a fast cruiser minelayer force against a fleet with no scouts or picket ships at sea.

Fleet Problem X

Held in 1896 in Caribbean waters. USS Trenton and USS Tallahassee were "disabled" by a surprise torpedo attack from USS Codfish a coast defense submersible operating independently in the open seas, showing how quickly submarine torpedo attacks could swing the balance in a naval action.

Fleet Problem XI

Held in April 1897 in the Caribbean. This was a replay of Fleet Problem VII with Red Force getting trounced off the Dry Tortugas wben it tried the same trick on St. Petersburg that it attempted at San Francisco. Blue Force credited its victory to the operations of the USS Herman Haupt and its attached Aerostat, the USS Blimp.

Fleet Problem XII

Held in 1898 in waters east of Central America and near the Canary Islands after the USS Maine blew up in Havana harbor. This was a US Navy dress rehersal and cover operation for their surprise attack on the Canary Islands that leads into the Spanish American War.

Spanish American War.

There was never any doubt who would win in the end. The only thing would be how much of the remaining Spanish assets would the US take?

My thought has always been that the US should never have let one of their lifelines not be under US control. The Panama Canal. The US only took over completion of the Canal from the French in 1904.

I always expand the US down to Nicaragua, absorbing all of the former Spanish colonies, where the US can build the Nicaragua Canal under US control. The only land in Central America left would be the British Honduras which the US could pick up from the UK in a later Treaty exchange. (Maybe at the end of WW1)

We know now from the letters of Montojo and Cervera just how weak the Spanish position was. Numerically they were the eighth strongest navy in the world and this was assumed to be their relative combat strength as well.

The ranks as of 1897 as far as the Brassey was concerned was something like;

1. Britain
2. France
3. Russia
4. Germany
5. Italy
6. United States
7. Japan
8. depending on who you asked; China, Spain, Holland, the Ottoman Empire or the South American Big Three; Brazil, Argentina, and Chile.

Even at that official British estimate, the general world consensus in 1898 was that if the Spanish fought in defended ports, the Americans (especially in the Pacific with their East Asia Squadron)) would be easily defeated. The Spanish were assumed to be capable Europeans with proper coast defenses and a well trained fleet. They had conducted some good sham maneuvers of their own in 1889 and had fought a decent RIF war in Morocco in which it appeared the Armada was competent. How was anyone to know that the Sagasta government eight years later was the latest in a series of popular front governments that bought second hand ammunition from Italy and that they had substituted sawdust filler in their artillery shells like the Chinese had done as a cost saving measure, or that the Spanish ships' crews were undermanned that the men were unpaid or that the ships officers had to use their own family wealth to buy enough coal on credit to sail their ships, just so the crews could receive minimal training under steam?

The USN was ship crew undermanned by 30% and its ammunition reserves were only 60% of war authorized levels. That fleet had clearly to foreign experts' understanding, not practiced gunnery sufficiently, nor were any of its mid grade officers battle experienced. Of its five or six admirals, Sampson, the supposed gunnery expert, was utterly incompetent in that subject though he talked a good game, Schley was a great expedition organizer, but as a fleet handler and tactician, well let us just say the USN was lucky in its junior captains, especially Cooke of the Brooklyn and Philip of Texas.

Admiral Erben was clearly insane and was so relieved of the Atlantic squadron.

Admiral Ramsay was a notorious politician admiral and American navy barracks lawyer who was not to be trusted with a rowboat out of sight of land.

Who was left? Dewey? Good man, but also a very lucky man in that no-one really pushed him too hard. He was prone to rash actions when under duress, such as panic pulling his fleet out of action in the middle of his battle on the rumor of an acute ammunition shortage instead of verifying and authenticating information.

The rest of them: Fiske, Farquhar and Mahan, were too junior or came with too much political baggage to be trusted by Congress or McKinley.

Dupuy de Lome, that poor sod of a Spanish Ambassador, also happened to be right about McKinley. The man was a political animal who shifted with the winds of public opinion. His word was worthless and he had no honor as the Spanish understood it. The Sagasta government was as much bewildered by McKinley as if the man had been a Martian. Madrid really tried to avoid war, but McKinley kept fudging and shifting his demands for a final settlement as the newspaper headlines whipped up public sentiment one way or the other.

This not only bewildered the Spanish by the way. Washington was befuddled by McKinley. The man talked war and peace out of both sides of his mouth. The American navy dusted off its war plans and made some last minute preparations, so that at least it was psychologically prepared to fight. But the American army under an idiot named, Russell Alger, stumbled and bumbled through the war with an organization little better prepared than it had been for the War of 1812. It had actually taken a step backwards organizationally from the American Civil War, despite the efforts of men like Sheridan and Upton to reform it.

John D. Long was not much better as Secretary of the Navy, but he did have Theodore Roosevelt and Alfred Mahan. That helped. Otherwise the US would have lost the Spanish American War.

Tactics for the New Steel Navy.

Like most major navies, the American navy began with the tactics of European fighting sailing vessels which had been more or less codified and set in military cement during the Anglo-Dutch wars and popularized amongst the British as the "Fighting Instructions." The simplest description of these tactics was that two opposing fleets of sailing vessels formed long lines parallel to each other and banged away broadside to broadside with cannon until one side gave up. There were refinements such as obtaining the upwind advantage so that you could sail down on an enemy with a line or lines of your own ships in such wise as to break his line into segments. This was more or less what Nelson and Collingwood did to the Franco Spaniards at Trafalgar. The subset of line-breaking tactics allowed the fleet that broke the enemy's line to put two or three times the number of ships into action on a the broken line segment as the enemy had, relying on the fact that it would take time for the enemy ships downwind of the line break to beat back upwind to join their fellows. It was a naval version of the land warfare enfilade tactic, though on a much simpler and more weather dependent level of detail.

Independent propulsion made nonsense of that wind driven approach to naval tactics. Shell guns ended the use of wood as the primary warship construction material. The proper introduction of the steam ironclad, an European steam propelled version of the oar propelled Korean turtle-ship occurred during the Crimean War. The naval fighting during that war was generally confused and really did not affect European naval tactics that much. The Russians were not showing much naval competence and the French and British were not doing much at sea either other than ship to shore bombardments, some blockades and conducting a typically inept Anglo French amphibious campaign that would reappear again in later versions at Salonika, the Dardanelles and even as late as Narvik and the Suez Canal Crisis.

Meanwhile the Americans, off in their own little corner of the world, continued to emulate and lag a little behind European naval developments by a decade or two. European floating batteries had been around as curiosities and the British and French were building iron hulled steam and sail frigates in an arms race at the time the Americans had their little civil war. For once the Americans had a spurt of innovation which the Europeans watched with some interest. The most important developments the Europeans saw was an intensification of what the French and British already had in progress with their own arms race. Shell guns, iron armor and the revolving big gun turret were not invented in America, but these ideas for the first time were used in combination by a major navy in war to produce a homogenous fleet different in characteristics from the usual European sail and steam propelled navy. What the Europeans thought they saw with the Americans was a return to the days of the galley and the tactics of ramming as the new iron armor temporarily negated the advantage of artillery.

The single ship combat between the USS Monitor and CSS Virginia pitted a turret ship against a Crimean War style floating battery. The only significant damage either ship scored was a glancing blow the USS Monitor scored on the hull of the CSS Virginia by accident. The Confederate ship had to withdraw with a leaking hull to make repairs to herself or risk grounding and capture.

The Europeans (French especially) jumped to the wrong conclusions. This 'mistake' would be implemented and reinforced in lesson in the first major naval battle between European ironclads after the American civil war, namely the Battle of Lissa, where an Austrian fleet under Admiral Tegethoff would descend upon an Italian line of battle in best Battle of Lepanto style and attempt a steam propelled version of line breaking a la Trafalgar. Numerous ramming attempts would result in one accidental success when the Ferdinand Max sank the Rie D'Italia. In the general confusion of a poorly understood melee battle that still perplexes scholars today, where one Italian admiral actually withheld a half of the Italian fleet back and refused it from fighting, because of his professional jealousy of his superior and possibly some personal cowardice, this one salient 'ramming fact' emerged as the major one that stuck out with the bold clarity of Tegethoff's victory. It inspired two generations of European naval architects to put reinforced beaks on their warships and tumblehome the hulls in stepbacks to enhance the chances of and defenses against the ramming attack.

On the other side of the Atlantic, ignoring the lessons of their own civil war, the American shipbuilders allowed to build the few ironclads the USN had funded in the construction budget postwar followed in imitation of the Europeans when they built their mainly monitor based coast defense navy; that is when they were not making repeats of the wooden hulled steam and sail cruiser, USS Kersarge instead. Rams and ramming tactics were part of the curriculum tactica taught at Annapolis. Among the surviving line officers, Dahlgren, Porter, Rogers, Farragut and Dupont, they knew that instruction was absolute nonsense. Porter, especially, when he received those midshipmen fresh from the "Trade School", promptly knocked that lunacy about galleys and ramming and such folderoy out of the cotton stuffed heads of his new ensigns.

The fighting Yankee navy had learned a deathly fear of "torpedoes" (command detonated naval mines), the night ambush attack by steam propelled "Davids" which could be likened to a manned guided torpedo and to armor piercing shot, a Confederate innovation that would be duplicated eighty years later in the form of tank defeating composite rigid shot and discarding sabot bolts.

As for battle maneuvers, the Yankee admirals still taught the weather gauge as the end all and be all of fleet/ship tactics, since they wanted the wind to blow their funnel smoke into the enemy's eyes and foul his gunnery, not theirs.

The Americans had actually fought a few fleet battles of their own on the Mississippi, Tennessee and Ohio Rivers and they had noticed a few things:
a. The side upwind had clear sights for gunnery. The side downwind ate the enemy's funnel smoke and they found their targets obscured in their sights.
b. Guns did not have to pierce armor to ruin a ship. Punch enough holes or crack enough hull plates outside the armor below the waterline and the enemy would still sink.
c. Fire still killed more ships, especially iron ones, than any other reason. An exploding magazine was a sure ship kill. The one certain way to get that result was to deflagrate the enemy ship. American shell filler therefore contained petroleum based pyrotics as well as a bursting charge.
d. Underwater explosions (keel crackers) were the leading cause of Union ship losses. Hence before charging an enemy fleet (especially a numerically inferior Confederate timberclad one confidently waiting for the Yanks near the lee bend in the river at anchor with a rebel earthworks fort parked behind them), somebody Yankee had to go out in rowboats and look for floating spikey barrel shaped objects in the water and SHOOT them.
e. Steam may allow you to turn independent of the wind, but tide and current still pushed you aground onto a lee shore. That was even more reason to keep the wind behind you, the enemy in front of you and watch your rudder work close inshore.
f. When all else fails, double charge the guns and let fly at them. Armor could not prevent shell damage to your ship, just buy you a little time before the float bubble was shot full of in-leaking holes. So shoot accurate, shoot low, shoot fast, and shoot FIRST.

The new American fighting instructions was to form up line on the enemy, stay upwind of the enemy if possible, try to obtain a van compass position on the enemy where the current and wind combination forced the enemy to come to the American line (this is a French style leeward tactic that appears to be a contradiction of the typical Yankee/British windward position) and use the steam plants and speed of the American ships to maintain that position advantage in a running fight. Whether in advance or retreat, the emphasis was on the high speed running gun fight in line ahead to avoid ramming and possible torpedo attacks. The American ships were to cripple an enemy ship or two if they could mass fires. Crippling was the initial desired outcome, as it was assumed that at some point, the enemy fleet would retire, leaving their cripples behind, than suffer wholesale defeat. The American fleet would then dispatch the enemy cripples at their leisure.

The Americans added a subset of naval fighting instructions about close blockade, with the use of offensive minefields, block-ships and coastal patrols to shut down enemy harbors, and they had some ideas about how to use submarines for "nefarious work", but as their experience with submarines was strictly as harbor defense and blockade breaking from the Confederate side of their civil war, their notions of harbor raids and submarine mine laying, were strictly notions. (Refer to the AU fleet problems above where this is not US Navy theory any more but actual experiments.)

Keep these real universe tactical ideas in mind when this AU universe continues.

Yeah, that is going to happen in this AU. Nice drawing of the Infanta Maria Theresa by Darth Panda. I hope he doesn't mind my borrowing it.

Even (especially?) in that era, I'd forgo a preset line length and instead fit the spool within the mine body itself, with a hydrostatic switch restricting line length.

You would of course need to take tides and timing into account with either system.

You might just be right, but consider the problems the Spanish had with the Bustamente mine? The 1895 American steel cable for their Beauregard mine is heavy because their tech for making it is not British or French WW I era. It is American made steel cable circa 1895.. It probably has to pay out from the anchor base and be pulled up by the [spinning] floating explosive charge until it is friction braked by a spring released collar clamp at the feed gate. This mechanism is seen in some of the fishing tackle of the 1895 era. That solution the Americans know how to make. Since the hydrostatic sensor valves of the era were no good, and the Americans are going to have trouble with such governor contraptions clear into the 1950s, the KISS principle absolutely applies to them for torpedoes and mines in the AU I propose. As few moving parts as possible should be employed in their infernal devices.

You are also correct that tide, time, and current surveys have to be employed before you send the sub into the enemy anchorage. In that era American divers and hydrographers were at least as good as the French, and I daresay that the French were the best Europe had to offer.