Shipbucket

What was happening between 1885 and 1889? Well that is an example. A few mistakes slid off the ways.

your Lake Tohopekaliga v2 has an bow that looks like something on an 1940's battleship and has non workable rigging. The underwater hull and rudder aft look like the boats I played with in the bathtub years ago. the black outlines are still missing on your mast and spars and your hull. rigging is not connected (some lines are floating) and incomplete to create anything that would work. (you have a shooner rigging, the bare minimum to make that work would be http://shipmodeling.info/fullsize/Schoo ... 0x1000.gif, and in your much larger and warship class vessel you would need more then that)
in addition, the few sails that can be carried are somewhat small, so this ship will slow on both steam and sail most likely. the shading on your hull, funnel and structure is not following shipbucket practice and I can not find any relation with the shape it shows and what was fitted on real life ships.

_________________
Drawings are credited with J.Scholtens
I ask of you to prove me wrong. Not say I am wrong, but prove it, because then I will have learned something new.
Shipbucket Wiki admin

No, it doesn't. Don't make comparisons with the Yamato, or any German Atlantic bow from the era. That bow looks nothing like any of those examples you seek to reference.

Your other complaints are repetitive and also confusing. You contradict yourself about outline. First there is too much line and now not enough?

Hmm, about the sails. Emergency sail, not primary propulsion. I am sure you are correct about sail area for shove, a la 18th century, but what about "Flying"? We're a lot smarter about that bit now. (In other words I used the SS Columbia as a real check for sail area.

Mr. Bernouli, you know?

I literally copied some of my earlier comments because the issue was not fixed. let me show you.......
what you are trying to draw is most likely something like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Newark_%28C-1%29 while you right now have something that looks like
alternatively, an clipper bow would work, which you might be trying to draw.... near the waterline you get quite close to that (apart from the shading, which suggests an round bow) but keep in mind that clipper bows at the time were there partially to support bowsprits. http://shipbucket.com/Real%20Designs/Gr ... e%20GB.png

in my earlier comment I was talking about double black outlines. issues with those still remaining in the drawing as I saw them on a quick glance are highlighted in green on the picture below. black blobs are frowned on, as they blur out the outlines of the vessel. in pink/purple I rounded areas which lack black outlines. all this as per shipbucket standards http://shipbucket.com/standards.php
I also circled in blue the lines which are at at least one side not connected to anything, so are defying gravity.

I stand corrected on the sail area (I supposed this was in the case were sail was the long range propulsion and steam in battle etc, but this is just before the sails disappeared if I see it correctly)

even so, the rigging as it is is incomplete, the booms are very high above the deck (how do you get crew on them too loosen or modify the sails) and you miss part of both your standing and running rigging to actually control those sails.

SS colombia? as in an transport ship? I am not certain which ship/drawing you are refering to. neither am I certain why you refer to bernoulli, who's laws refered to the speeds of fluids and gasses in piping and the flat water, non-wavemaking resistance of an object trough fluids and gases?

_________________
Drawings are credited with J.Scholtens
I ask of you to prove me wrong. Not say I am wrong, but prove it, because then I will have learned something new.
Shipbucket Wiki admin

I will address those comments, briefly . The bow is not functionally just above the water line. You, as an expert should know the drag is below the waterline. The flare I included was for work area where the cables land from the foremast. It has nothing to do with bow splash or forecastle wetting down which was the reason the Japanese bluffed their bows and the reason the Germans added Atlantic bows. ^the Japanese actually added a low drag bulb below the waterline which gave them a near straight bow wave cutter at the air water interface.

Even the Missouri bow (modified clipper is a square off below the bluff)

The black-belt on the hull is a one off idiosyncrasy for the yo-yos who painted the ship. (It is an AU ship, after all so if some whacko painted a wide black band under the mandatory gray? I've seen examples, both real and imagined).

The booms are reached by ropes. They are rather high to clear the deck obstruction arcs. Previously you complained that the chain frame would not work.

The aft boom is hawser connected to a power winch modern style and relies on wind pressure and line tension to maintain aspect and tautness,

SS Columbia, ran the Japanese blockade off Port Arthur in 1894. Was present at the Battle of the Yalu River same year as a troop transport. James Allen was an AB aboard who went ashore and witnessed the Japanese under Ito, blast the Beiyang fleet under Ruchang into scrap metal.

Which operates as seque into:

Battle Experienced American fleet commanders.

How many people have heard of Henry Walton Grinnell or of Philip N. McGiffen? Both of them were Americans who participated in the Naval Battle of the Yalu River. McGiffen was with the Chinese aboard the Chen Yuan while Grinnell was a staff officer advising the Japanese admiral Sukeyuki (I'm not making that name up .), Ito. Grinnell claimed he was aboard the Japanese flagship Matsushima, but I think he is a liar, since the Japanese tended to put their “foreign experts” ashore and make it an entirely Japanese commanded affair when they went out to sink Chinese and Russians . He did serve the role of fleet inspector general for that squadron, so his comments about material and training can still be accepted as possibly true.
I should add a few corrections to the above account.

According to the Englishman, James Allan who wound up aboard the American fast steamer, SS Columbia, that was used as a blockade runner and later a troop transport fetching Chinese troops from Tsientim to the mouth of the Yalu River before that Battle of the Yalu, the hired transports of the convoy had arrived at their destination and unloaded their ttroops successfully. Under the prevailing instructions of common sense and logic as well as good advice, the now empty transports should have retired under the cover of the Beiyang fleet back to Wei hei Wei and thereby completed their mission.

This did not happen. Again according to James Allen the Beiyang fleet pulled out during the night leaving the hired transports, 18,000 Chinese troops and three torpedo boats and a gunboat up the Yalu River in the lurch and hurriedly put to sea without telling anybody anything. Whether this idiocy was due to “foreign advice” from an incompetent Prussian named Constantin von Hanneken, imperial orders, or just general cowardice on the part of the Chinese commanders present after a 112 years is still uncertain, but the Japanese at sea caught notice of the movement and being Japanese were ready, eager and waiting to meet the enemy.

The Chinese fleet had therefore split itself into two portions with its lunatic movement and failed to escape the Japanese anyway. The part that fled during the night, the main body of two relatively large “battleships” of seven thousand tonnes, three somewhat misnamed armored cruisers of 2,300 tonnes, displacement, a coast defense monitor of 2,000 tonnes displacement, two 1,300 tonne gunboats, and a 1,200 tonne yacht was caught along the coast and was forced to offer battle as it cleared the mouth of the Yalu at dawn.

Under the circumstances, the truism that a cornered rat will still fight the cat hard, held true and the Beiyang fleet did try to fight. I still don't know what was in Ting's mind when he disposed his fleet to receive the Japanese, but apparently (under advice, source McGiffen) he deployed his ships to present a leeward defence in line abreast and let the Japanese come to him. Considering the nature of the ships the Chinese had, someone (probably McGiffen) thought he was giving Ting good advice as this would present minimum aspect target to receive Japanese gunfire and allow maximum Chinese end on gunfire. This would also provide the Chinese opportunities for ramming attacks which considering that Chinese ships were citadel and barbette design ironclad and post ironclad navy types (1880s tech) was considered prudent and viable as an option, even among the other expert Europeans present.

In other words that was exactly right out of the American naval academy playbook, circa 1890, which would be where Philip Mcgiffen as a midshipman learned such idiocy. If you did not catch the idea, someone thought he was fighting a replay of Lepanto. The Chinese admiral put his two battleships in the middle of his line abreast and stationed his “cruisers” on the flanks to anchor his line. And then the idiot advanced to meet the Japanese in that formation.

But let us not forget the Japanese. These guys had been saddled for years with the hired French lunatic Emile Bertin, the so-called great ship designer and theorist who argued the Jeune Ecole school to the Japanese and after they sent him packing with a “don't let the door hit you on the way out, buddy” after they proved in battle what a fool he was, went on to derail the French navy and saddle them with some of the ugliest and most worthless warships ever designed in the Edwardian era.

As a consequence of what he did, the Japanese had three naval monstrosities called the Matsushima, Itsukushima and Hashidate, (4,500 tonnes), three ships which embodied Bertin's theory of a small ship with a massive battleship destroying big gun. The Matsushima, the prototype, had its 12.6 inch Schneider Canet BLNR firing over the stern The Hashidate and Itsukishima at least had the useless thing, which took a half hour to load, pointed forward so that it could fire over the bow. This was kind of important the Japanese discovered. The gun was barbette mounted to provide forward 180 degree fire; but in practice the Japanese discovered that any attempt to fire the gun abeam outside the forward 90 degree bow arc (45 degrees left or right of the keel line) damaged the otherwise sensibly designed protected cruiser on which the monster was mounted. To add insult to injury, these three “modern” Japanese cruisers were slower than the two Chinese battleships they were specifically designed to kill!

These three nigh useless cruisers were paired off with the old rebuilt steam and sail central battery ship armor clads Hei and Fuso and a British built replacement for another Emil Bertin bad idea, the French built protected cruiser Unebi which was overgunned, carried too much topsail, had a serious error in freeboard which caused her to heel over and thus sink enroute to Japan fresh from the builders. The British replacement was a conventional “belted cruiser”, the Chiyoda of 2,400 tonnes similar to the Nelson class off which she was based. Good ship, probably assigned to the slow squadron because she was ideally suited for torpedo boat defense with all of her rapid fire guns, of which she carried aplenty in 12 cm.

That was the “slow squadron”. A gaggle of “Elswick cruisers” and the Akitsushima was grouped together to form the “fast squadron”

Curious ship, the Akitsushima was. She was intended to be a Japanese repeat of the Hashidate, but someone British got hold of the plans for the projected USS Baltimore and passed those on to the Japanese and that was when Emile Bertin was given the boot back to France..

Anyway, the technology (ships with which they were saddled) dictated the Japanese tactics as much as it did the Chinese tactics.

The battle, itself, was not that special. The Chinese lined up in line abreast as previously described. The Japanese with the fast squadron in the van formed up line ahead and bore across the Chinese formation as James Allen describes them going from west to east with the fast squadron trying to get around the Chinese right (the Chinese are roughly facing southwest by his eyewitness account) and the slow squadron trying to get around the Chinese left. Fleet discipline breaks down in the Chinese line. Some of the Chinese captains turn chicken and ran for it. McGiffen in his account names them as Captain Fong (of the Jing Yuen, the Chinese state his name actually is Yeh Tus-kuei), a liar, McGiffen so maintains, a captain who claimed his guns did not work, which that lie was proved on him by post battle inspection and yet another rotten actor named Wu Ching Jung, who fled at the first shot and ran his ship, the Kwan Chia aground in his panic, disrupting the Chinese line.

Things did not go according to plan for the Japanese either. The four torpedo boats left upriver by Admiral Ting made their appearance on the Chinese left and while they did not do much, their mere sudden presence caused the Japanese slow squadron to sheer off from their plan to envelop that end of the Chinese line. Meanwhile, McGiffen, now in command aboard the Chen Yuen (Zhenyuen according to the modern Chinese) left station and formed up with the Dingyuan (flagship) the pair of battleships fighting a rear-guard action that allowed the rest of the surviving Beiying fleet to escape encirclement and retreat.

The battered Japanese rounded themselves up and allowed the two Chinese battleships to escape after this inconclusive final phase which was supposed to decisively defeat the other Chinese. For the most part neither side had achieved exactly what they immediately wanted, but the Japanese had attained their long range goal of driving the Chinese fleet from the area so that they could complete their operations in Korea without facing hordes of Chinese troops ferried across from Port Arthur to the Korean coast. The Japanese army and navy together would soon put an end to the Beiyang fleet now forced to remain in port to repair damage and avoid battle. This time we can blame the Dowager Empress and her rotten corrupt regime for porting that squadron decimatinmg its command group and otherwise sacrificing it on the corrupt whims of a Mandarin class who needed to scapegoat somebody for their losing the war.

But what does this have to do with Mister McKinley's Navy you ask?

McGiffen and Grinnell came back with lessons learned. They published those lessons. Along with the Englishmen, James Allen who noted them aboard the SS Columbia, these common sense lessons could be summarized as follows;

--As of 1894, the futility of shooting at ranges beyond 2,500 meters is quite apparent as the big guns could not be laid on with the current aiming methods. Rapid fire guns intended for anti-torpedo boat defense actually were the most effective ordnance carried by warships against each other at this date because of this limitation. Too late some of the American AU design choices, emphasizing all big guns are shown to be errors.

--Fire is the great ship killer. Paint and wood are definite no nos with that fact established.

No armor is actually better than thin armor which just confines shell explosions after the plate is pierced.. Thick armor is the only effective defense against shellfire. Thick armor can only be spared for guns, magazines, and engine spaces. Anything else, even crew spaces and bunkerage will have to do without. The expected holes can be plugged and the ship\s float bubble preserved.

As a corollary, the float bubble is the only important thing to a ship in battle. As long as the float bubble is viable, the ship can fight. Once the float bubble goes it is abandon ship. Hence in damage control it is the float bubble first, last and always. Even fighting fires comes second to it.

Ship's boats are useless and or actually dangerous liabilities in battle. Better life preserving measures are needed in the form of personal floatation jackets and perhaps buoyant non-flammable rafting materials as well.

It is anthracite coal, and wet dry bunker storage or nothing. The fire and smoke hazard with bituminous or soft coal is far too great.

Bagged charges are a BAD idea.

Cased charges are a whole lot safer as long as you don't spark or strike the fuses or primers.

Shells have to be inspected for filler content to prevent corrupt armorers from selling off the contents. If cost cutting has to be done on the ammunition, then at least fill the shells with concrete as fully loaded concreted shot does more plate damage by smash than sawdust filled shells which simply shatter into fragments on even the medium thickness armor plates.

Hire Germans to build your ships, but don't use them to tell you how to run them.

Don't hire the French for anything to do with navies! At least not in this era.

Ramming does not work.

Running away does not work.

Torpedo boats do work. Even if they don't do anything, they still work. The enemy is afraid of them.

Don't skimp on training. The Japanese did not. Stuck with some really lousy ships and an incompetent French doctine that produced those ships, the Japanese trained their officers and crews to within an inch of their lives and managed sterling results with that defective doctrine and those lousy ships.

Learn by doing. The Japanese found out the limitations of their Matsushima class ships quickly and adapted to the limitations by using them as traditional cruisers more than the battlship killers that Emile Bertin, the lunatic, claimed they were intended to be. In the Sino Japanese War; these ships were used as cruisers. That did not mean the Japanese did not load up and take the main gun shot at a ship when accident provided such an opportunity, but they did not let the Schneider Canet gun's presence dictate their adopted British style line ahead tactics or how they would maneuver.

Speed is the weather gauge in the age of steam. The faster fleet can dictate the offer or refusal of battle. Similarly the faster fleet can dictate who will have position advantage. The Japanese had a hodge podge fleet with many ships slower than the mostly homogenous speed Chinese fleet, but the Japanese had enough faster cruisers to form a fast squadron and that was how they dictated the whole battle. They used that squadron to pin the befuddled Chinese on the right while they maneuvered their slow squadron to flank the Chinese on the left.

There is no cure for gallant ships manned by gallant crews except to close and kill them. The Chinese battleships put up one heck of a fight and Ito was too scared to close the deal on them. As a result, the battleships and the surviving Beiyang fleet survived on to bedevil the Japanese as a fleet in being until the final siege at Wei Hei Wei, when the Japanese captured the port and the Chinese fleet with their ARMY.

All other things being equal, end on aspect fire is a bad idea against a traditional broadside enemy. The fall, over and short, of the traditional line shot of that age is more likely to hit a ship which presents its length to the direction of that fall than its beam. Not only is that a truism of probability, but the end on armor is weak compared to broadside plate.

Finally, if you are in a lee defense close inshore, do not give the enemy the searoon to get around your line to flank you and rake you; especially if you are slower than he is.

Make of that what you will, the USN of that era ignored these accounts and had to learn those lessons the hard way in battle (mainly because it was too late in 1894 to absorb and act on the lessons by 1898), but then this is an AU and in this AU, the USN does what it can in three years, which is:

a. to install stack scrubbers on its ships to prevent flame flash and to create less soot blowoff.
b. where possible, convert over to cased ammunition.
c. make sure that ammunition budgets are priorities and that ammunition quality meets the same legal proof standards that the US army artillery ordnance does. (Not seen in US naval law until the great ammunition scandal of 1944).
d. replace wooden boats with steel ones.
e. teach sailors how to swim, equip ships with life vests and life buoys for the crews.
f. teach gunnery, practice gunnery, and preach gunnery.
g. teach how to maintain a float bubble as part of fighting the ship.
h. teach fire-fighting.
i. remove woodwork wherever possible.
j. paint it for camouflage and not for parade.
l. train in fleet tactical evolutions as well as fleet problems to avoid the fleeing cowards and ship collisions the Chinese demonstrated in the stress of battle at the Yalu.
m. select leaders for their courage as well as their alleged expertise. This may produce a bullheaded Tryon or two, but that's better than winding up with a Ramage or a Sampson when the crunch comes.

tobius, I will make one last comment and then give up as you seem to be an lost case as far as correct drawings go, or so it seems
- bows are not functional when above the water, but they do a lot when going into the water and when waves go around them, for example at sea or when moving that said, why is it so important for that work area to be there? I have never seen anything like it on any real life ship, nor do I think it has much value.
- the black belt I marked because you made it all black. in shipbucket, to avoid black blobs, painted black areas are painted dark blue or dark grey to keep the outlines clear.
- what you are saying about the rigging is more or less working, but it does not match and work in the way it is one the drawing.
- I don't get why an troop transport is used as reference for this ship?

_________________
Drawings are credited with J.Scholtens
I ask of you to prove me wrong. Not say I am wrong, but prove it, because then I will have learned something new.
Shipbucket Wiki admin

I have noted the comments with interest. Driving forward I will only say that where appropriate, I will attempt modifications, but where I know the history and examples conflict with the well intentioned criticism I must go with the history. Some "peace cruisers" were used primarily as American transports and military cargo ships during the Spanish American War, especially coming to mind the USS Columbia and USS Baltimore in the Pacific.

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http://chestofbooks.com/crafts/scientif ... rceau.html


Mayhaps I will fare better with the USS Maine AU style, inspired by the French battleship Marceau to some degree.



It is a historical fact that the USS Maine blew up 15 February 1898. In the real time line, the United States Navy was quite aware that the Maine had probably exploded due to either an ammunition handling error or due to a spontaneous coal fire undetected in her fuel bunkers. That is not what the alternate universe version of events will show. There is a sneaking suspicion in some American scholarly circles recently that the USS Maine suffered an event similar to what happened to the USS Cole at Aden. The Cuban rebels might have arranged an “accident.”

According to the AU situation;

The USS Maine had been scheduled to be refit in the 1896-1898 fleet modernization program after the USS Chicago disaster, but since she was the first and oldest of the “battleships”, she was scheduled last in the modernization queue.

The military reasoning for this decision was fairly sound for many reasons. The ship had more than her share of design faults. She was built in the obsolete style of the 1880s European (French) capital ship (MNS Marceau, same as the Spanish battleship Pelayo) in which end on fire was as important as broadside fire. As was the case with the two torpedo rams and the USS Texas she was supposed to be a proof of concept and technology demonstrator ship to decide the questions that still surrounded steam warship tactics within the USN. She took forever to build as the builders and the navy constantly fought over her characteristics, her propulsion, and her costs. When finally delivered, she was demonstrably obsolete along with her sister ship, the USS Texas, despite her fairly modern steam electric propulsion and other electric ship power systems. It proved out quickly as seen within Fleet Problem V that she was now more of a fleet liability than a fleet asset, as she was rather slow with serious seakeeping issues. With the faster Wyomings and the Vermonts coming into service she could not keep her station in the line at the intended . Her guns were defective bag charge guns, as delivered, when the rest of the new construction (even the equally defunct and late delivered USS Texas) had adopted cased ammunition feed systems and Krupp style wedge blocked breech loading artillery. That made the USS Maine the American oddball battleship, so it was assumed that she could be possibly unloaded and sold, as is, to either Japan or China before she was drydocked and the expensive modifications to her coal bunkers and ammunition handling systems carried out. Last in the queue for modernizing and then further delayed as Congress dithered over the funding, the USS Maine still had to be used for something. Since she was not useful for the battlefleet the USN formed, it was decided to make her a training and receiving ship for cadets and reservists which could also show the flag overseas to let the rest of the world know there was a United States Navy out there.

For you see, with all of her hidden defects and problems, the USS Maine did have one attribute that she shared with the future HMS Hood, which would be the most famous 20th century British example of the “Build it wrong, but build it pretty school.” of naval architecture. She looked good. As a show piece, that ship with her four model 1884 25.5 cm (10 inch bore)/35 caliber BLNR bag guns, one bow and stern and one wing turret on each beam, she sure exuded an aura of strength. She had handsome lines and appeared to be formidably armed enough with a secondary battery of eight 15.2 cm (6 inch bore)/40 caliber BLNR bag guns, along with the usual scattering of Hotchkiss rapid fire 6 pounder cannons and 44 caliber Gatling guns.

Anyway... when the revolutionaries, Maximo Gomez and Calixto Garcia (both agents in the pay of the infamous William Randalf Hearst) cooked up their plot to lure the US into the Cuban War for Independence, their insane plans directly threatened American expatriats and sugar company employees living in Havana. Standard procedure for this kind of situation was and is to send a gunboat to remind the local banditos that a powerful nation was and is interested in the welfare of its citizens and property.

And of course the gunboat designated for this American protector role was the battleship USS Maine, the cadet training ship chockful of Annapolis midshipman. In this alternate universe timeline, the USS Maine steams into Havana and anchors next to the Spanish cruiser Alphonso XII on the 2nd of January 1898 as the American cadet receiving ship conducts its winter quarter training cruise for the Annapolis Class of '98. Captain Sigsbee of the USS Maine demanded anchoring priveleges next to the Spanish cruiser, reasoning correctly that the Spanish would not dare anchor their own precious warship at the edge of a minefield.

Whether the Spanish were lunatic enough to actually park the Alfonso XII at the edge of the Ramón Blanco minefield and subsequently allowed the USS Maine to park next to her, also at the edge of that minefield of Bustamente mines, or an old keg mine broke loose from the command linked barrier laid off Santa Catalina Point to defend the inner harbor, or as ONI subsequentely determined, possibly some banditos hired by Maximo Gomez rowed out under cover of darkness and affixed a crude explosive charge to the hull and set it off blowing it, their rowboat, themselves and the number three powder room and 117 American crewmen to glory, the result was that the USS Maine settled into the mud with a hole in her port forward quarter that you could drive a small locomotive through.

For the alternate universe purposes, the safety conscious but security lax American navy does not lose the ship to five tonnes of bag charges stored under the forward six inch gun starboard ahead of the en echelon turret on that side of the ship, but rather the powder room that explodes is under #2 casemate gun port side, just a little ahead of the foremast. This magazine contains only 1/4 quarter tonne of RBY powder charges. It's enough to sink the ship and kill a lot of cadets sleeping in quarters adjacent to the magazine, but not enough to ruin the ship. It will be salvaged postwar, finally modernized and still be sent overseas to show the flag, serve as the cadet cruiser, and present herself as a propaganda symbol of the grim American navy determination to never give up the ship. In the meantime... The location of the explosion and the peculiar nature of the damage, it being nowhere near the amidship coal bunkers and thus ruling out a spontaneous coal dust explosion and fire next to the number four casemate gun magazine, will lead to the immediate ONI suspicion that someone who was not too clever or skillful about it had tried to mine the ship in such wise, so as to provoke American outrage while also not blowing the ship completely to smithereens. Somehow they had Fumble McGurked the job and did far more damage than they intended. ONI will rule out the Spaniards immediately, as being too competent and frankly scared to dare such lunacy, but then the politics and venility of the inept and corrupt McKinley Administration will force Captain Crowninshield, Commodore Dewey, Captain Mahan et al; to change their collective tunes and rule the Spaniards back in. I wish this did not resemble the RTL so closely, but some history is too stiff vectored to deviate much off course. The blame for the Maine will fall chiefly upon poor Spain. Teddy Roosevelt will insist upon it. He will blame the Weylerites.

As for the bewildered Spaniards in Madrid, the Sagasta government under thr regency of Queen Christina and the miserable administration of Práxedes Mateo Sagasta, know they are in deep trouble. For now they have a bellicose America making energetic war preparations while talking at them simultaneously about trying to resolve this latest Cuban crisis through diplomacy. The AU is still not that much different from the RTL. McKinley remains McKinley: that is. a politician who not only talks out of both sides of his mouth, but he lies through his ears as well, to borrow the Mexican expression about what a man chooses to hear as the truth instead of listening to sensible reason or the true facts.

Unfortunately, the Sagasta government will include two more individuals besides Sagasta, who are more incompetent than John Long, the US Navy Secretary, or more militarily untalented than Russell Alger, the morally bankrupt American Secretary of War, who are the congruent American officials to them inside the defective and inept McKinley Administration. The two Spanish officers, who are Long's and Alger's counterparties in amateurishness and lack of professionalism, would be General Martinez Campos for the Spanish Tercio, who is Spain's defacto dictator and Sigismundo Bermejo who does Campos' bidding for him within the Spanish Armada. In this alternate universe timeline it is hard for me to improve America's good fortunes as she goes to war with realistic alternate Spanish politicians who are more clueless and out of touch with reality than these two historic examples. Campos in the RTL, as he lived, was out for himself alone and did not give a peso for his country's best interests, but Bermejo, who at least proved patriotic in his intent, had to be an out of touch with reality Minister of the Marine. He must have been crazy. Nothing else can explain to me his activity or lack of it at all. In recent RTL memory, only Tariq Aziz and Saddam Hussein could be more defective in office than this politician, who told his best admiral, Cervera, that the United States Navy was manned by crews of shanghaied foreign born dock sweepings; that is the men were forced to fight cowardly sailors who would shirk from their guns at the first cannon shot fired from a Spanish ship. I'm not making that story up at all. It is real. He wrote that nonsense in a letter addressed to Cervera that became public knowledge after the custodian of Cervera's letters, the archbishop of Santiago, who kept them safe for history, released their contents.

It seems that Cervera not only knew his business as an admiral, but also as a politician. If those letters had not become public, he might have suffered the fate of a public trial and faced charges of treason and malfeasance as Montojo did. In the AU, Cervera manages the same political trick with the bishop of Cadiz who keeps the letters safe and thereby puts the AU blame for Tenerife where it belongs. On Sagasta, Campos and Bermejo. At least with Bermejo, the Sagasta government sacked him after the Manila disaster, but Ramón Auñón y Villalón was not much better as his replacement. This genius was the brains behind the abortive Camara movement in the RTL. In the AU he will serve the same function, with equally embarrassing and disastrous results; but for now let us proceed with the AU history of the USS Maine.

So, the USS Maine blows up and sinks blocking Havana harbor in two... The Spanish investigate the incident and suggest the cause is a smoulder fire in the coal bunker adjacent to the #2 portside casemate gun, ignoring that the Maine's portside coal bunkers are below and behind the forward casemate guns and that a void space is intruded between the coal bunkers and the magazines as a lesson learned from the USS Chicago disaster. Furthermore (and I was surprised to learn about this fact), US warships in the RTL 1890s were fitted with a complex thermocouple fire alarm system in their magazines and fuel bunkers which would ring an alarm bell on the bridge, not only to alert to fire, but ring another alarm bell in the compartment where the thermocouple thermometer was located. The crew nearby was trained to react to the alarm by immediately flooding the compartment from the onboard fire main by turning a relief valve. Such a fire alarm system was not unique to the USN, (the French had something like it), but the flood controls from a central water main reserve by turning a valve that the crew could use to douse the fire was. That was a top secret feature, along with airlock magazine doors and static dampers in American warships of the era. These were secrets the Americans did not want to reveal about the USS Maine along with other details on how their ships were put together.

This is quite understandable as the USN is reluctant to have “foreigners” poking around the inside of one of their “new experimental battleships” with all the RTL steampunk automation installed in the AU version even though the USS Maine was laid down in 1885 and it still took ten years to build.

General characteristics (as built)

Type: Protected cruiser
Displacement: 4,500 tonnes (4,960 tons)
Length: (105 m) wl
Beam: 15.25 m (50 ft 1 in)
Draft: 7 m (23 ft) at normal load
Installed power: 6 × 300 psi (2070 kPa) B and W coal-fired boilers
Propulsion: 3 × VTE steam engines
10,168 ihp (7,582 kW)
2 × screws
Speed: 20 kn ( 23 mph; 37 km/h)
Capacity: 830 short tons (750 t) of coal
Complement: 45 officers and 350 enlisted men
Armament: 2 × 25.5 cm (10 in)/30 caliber Mark 2 guns (2 x 1)
8 × 15 cm/(5.9)/30 cal Mark 2 guns (4 x 2)
2 × 9 cm)/(3.54 in) 45 cal Mark 1 guns (2 x 1)
2 × 1-pounder 3.7 mm (1.5 in) Hotchkiss guns
4 × 3-pounder 47 mm (1.85 in) guns
2 × 1-pounder 37 mm (1.46 in) Hotchkiss revolver cannon
2 × .45 caliber (11.4 mm) Gatling guns
Armor: Gun house shields: 10 cm (3.9 in)
Deck: 5 cm (2 in)
Conning tower: 76 mm (3 in)
General characteristics (1897 rebuild with the Fiske Bushnell cage mast)
Displacement: 5,000 tonnes (5,511 tons)
Installed power: 2 × Triple expansion engines
*8,202 kW (11,000 ihp)
Propulsion: 6 × Babcock & Wilcox boilers
4 × Single ended boilers
2 × screws
Speed: 18 knots (33 km/h; 21 mph) (Speed on Trial)
Armament: 4 × 20.0 cm (7.9 in) /35 caliber Mark 3 guns (2 x 2)
8 × 15 cm (5.9 in) /40 cal Mark 1 guns (4 x 2)

The backstory to the Omaha class and US cruiser history in this AU is below.

US cruisers following the Civil War.

The RTL cruiser development was a further extension of the evolved US steam and sail frigate line of development that began in the 1830s, continued through the American civil war and beyond until the beginning of the New Steel Navy.

That basically was an evolution of the broadside double tiered gun deck sail cruiser armed with solid shot firing brass smooth bore naval guns, of two initial types, the culverine (long ranged disabling gun) and the carronade (short ranged hull breaker gun). The US 1870s sail and steam cruiser was essentially not much evolved too far away from that old fashioned way of doing things. The changes in the ships produced by the Paixhans and Colombiad shell guns did lead to the American fascination with heavy pivot guns which were prominently featured in Federal warships like the USS Kearsage or the Confederate raider Alabama.

This is not too much different from French or Russian developments of the period. The British were still experimentalists in their own naval line of development and had attempted to introduce breech loading iron cannon into naval warfare around 1862, mainly with Armstrong 7 inch breech loaders.

We can see the RTL British results:
US experiments had equally disastrous results. In the AU, I assume that the Americans pay attention to Herr Krupp and to an American inventor, William Kelly from whose actual work the British metallurgist, Sir Henry Bessemer, developed the Bessemer forced draft steel production process.

The British government and Mister Bessemer patented the process in 1855, but Mister Kelley had seen Chinese or Japanese immigrants to the American west use this Chinese forced draft technique to mass produce (manually on a small scale) good quality steel tools for railroad and farm work in the late 1840s. Kelley's innovation was to apply scale up and industrial machinery assistance to an otherwise manual process.

We shall ignore the American financial panic of 1857 and the incompetent Buchanan administration to allow the natural progress of scientific inquiry to take its course. Nothing in the AU changes much during the American civil war since experimentation on the battlefield is not a practice favored by generals or troops who because of their experience know full well what the results usually are. (See above.)

This will not stop inventers, madmen, and speculators from trying unsuccessfully to convince the American military conservatives though. The real time line result was that the US was trying to catch up to the Europeans by 1885. In part, the reason for the USN's late introduction of modern steel warships was due to the tardy development of a new family of steel breech loading artillery. Like her future enemy, Spain, the US in the 1870s and 1880s used or built old technology cast or wrought iron iron guns and milled on local copies of French designed and patented screw breech four action or three action interrupted screw breech blocks. The Spanish would still have Ordunez style screw breech bag charge guns that they would ineffectually use in the RTL Spanish American War. Significantly a large percentage of the existing RTL USN would also be leftover peace cruisers and other sail and steam ships (especially in east Asian waters, as seen in the Apia Harbor typhoon disaster victims `1889.) equipped with similar modified RBL Parrott and Dhalgrun Columbiads left over from the civil war.

This AU version of events runs along a slightly different path. Now, what is interesting in the Krupp line of devlopment is that Herr Krupp's large naval guns historically prior to WW II used a complicated bag and case charge system that required the loading of the shell from one hoist system, a set of bag charges from another hoist system, and additional handling and ramming gear that fed brass cased final charges which served as primer charge and igniters to the bagged charges (called first or fore charges) which were rammed in behind the projectile and ahead of the cased charge sealer which was the actual gas seal and obturation plug for the Krupp gun. Typically German and complicated, this crazy system was a guaranteed disaster and is the fictional reason for going to the shell bullet and fully encased propellant charge system. While the USS Chicago which will blow up using the French three action interrupted screw bagged charge system, could have used something like this system and still blown up, I think the Yanks will go straight to the encapsulated cased charge system after the disaster. This may present complications as the brass cases start to increase in diameter beyond 15 cm. in diameter. The obvious solution is to make thick walled brass cartridge cases with a base lip and a lead slip collar which would seal when the brass case was forced by propellant to seal against the wedge breech block. The ramping action of the wedge can be used to drive a shell and the follower brass cartridge into the breech chamber, seat it, with the lead or soft iron band seal and then fired. The extraction action was the reverse motion of the wedge and the push outs attached to that mass.

For fictional purposes this system (eventual Krupp/Bethlehem Steel system), I assigned to a neurotic nutcase and technology addict, P.T.G. Beauregard, as inventor. He is famous in US military history as championing the CSS Hunley. Arguably therefore the father of the US submarine, this interesting peculiar character also dabbled in “Confederate” artillery as an army ordnance enthusiast. It would be either Beauregard or Parrott as the culprit for this AU system. I think Beauregard is the better more believable ordnance specialist of the two.

Driggs, Seabury and Schroeder are RTL American naval artillery designers who receive further blame in this AU. They actually go on to either infringe on French artillery patents or monkey copy British designs during the Sampson Program (1885-1890).

What has all that got to do with American cruisers in this AU?

The battleships being built are supposed to be defensive in function so far as the fooled US Congress is concerned. The US cruiser program was therefore for patrol, presence and in the last extremeity in case of war, was for commerce raiding. Never mind that deception, though. In the AU as it was the RTL the USN is telling Congress one story while it builds to another one.

The cruisers represented are supposed to be for screening, escort, and scouting. The ships by mission require rapid fire guns, a good ranging system (Fiske Bushnell stadiameter stereo coincidence) which is slightly better than the British local control continuous aim rangefinding in bar lime system perfected by Percy Scott. In any case the Fiske Bushnell stereo stadiascope mount as installed on the O-class cruisers was set to detect target masts at 18 nmi. or 33,000 meters and engage that target inside of 9 nmi. or 16,700 meters. In practice that means salvo shooting somewhere between 2 nmi. and 4 nmi. or 2500 to 5000 meters practical.

So the ships are designed for distance fire and the guns mounted are either designed with similar ballistic trajectory or same type so that massed broadside fire could be applied.

In a strange way, the Omahas are very like the Infant Maria Teresa class doctrinally.

Medium caliber guns of same uniform type or at most two types would be mounted with only the minimum number of rapid fire guns for close in defense against torpedo boats being mounted. The plan of offensive use is clearly evident.

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About the Fiske Bushnell director system.

Tobias, I had a heavy battleship design of the era, also very AU, here's the end result: