Shipbucket

The weight seems to line up perfectly fine for whichever open 5"/38 single you choose. E-boats would require maybe a small drydock to be built. Plus, you could potentially gain some Italian or Spanish vessels after the war. And if you're not going to be operating in coastal waters, then you could even spring for 110' subchasers or PGMs that were in surplus of the US. You could even get a squadron worth of PT boats from the Philippines, should your Ethiopian Navy have the means to operate them. They would be useful for operating in a confined sea more than they would be being burned to a crisp. Plus, they would make great interdiction vessels during peacetime.

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Worklist:
Puerto Oeste - AU - WWI-WWII

Getting ships post-war isn't going to be a problem so kong as you aren't too picky about them.

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“Close” only counts with horseshoes, hand grenades, and tactical nuclear weapons.
That which does not kill me has made a grave tactical error

Worklist

Source Materiel is always welcome.

They were in-service with two or so 3-inch guns and some light AA, and when they were passed off to foreign navies as patrol boats, they didn't get much more. But especially in the immediate postwar period those guns could still hurt.

There's also the question of who poses a threat to you. Since you're presumably allied to the UK the list of maritime nations who'd threaten you is very short, at least until the Suez Crisis.

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“Close” only counts with horseshoes, hand grenades, and tactical nuclear weapons.
That which does not kill me has made a grave tactical error

Worklist

Source Materiel is always welcome.

I'm going to accelerate Yemeni unification and have India independent with Pakistan for this AU. Might have both Yemen and Oman become Soviet-aligned (PR Oman, Islamic Republic of Yemen?), but besides that there really aren't any naval rivals worth mentioning until we enter the age of the missile boat.






Postwar Ethiopia
Ethiopia came out of the war better than it was coming in. While Allied aid to the African kingdom was little more than token gestures, it was the start of Ethiopia's modernization. The skeleton crew of advisers in the country helped set up the first modern irrigation networks in the country, starting the exploitation of Abyssinia's great rivers and its escape from the tyranny of the unpredictable Intertropical Convergence Zone, the bane of the African farmer since time immemorial. Several companies set up their African headquarters in Ethiopia, a trend which would continue through the "Ethiopian miracle" of the nineties and beyond. Most importantly, however, were the expansion of the schools, through both foreign aid (ironically, Italy was the largest contributor) and the Orthodox Church. For the first time in Ethiopian history, the average citizen could read his Bible, improving literacy rates to somewhere around 90% by 1970. The University College of Addis Ababa was chartered in 1950, and today is arguably one of Africa's finest institutions, and the equal of many a Western college.

On the political front, however, little had changed between 1939 and 1945. The triumph over colonialism left the old crown standing--a despotism whose ways had changed little since the first Solomonid took the throne. There was no modern administration, and Halie Selassie, a reformer at heart and about as liberal as an African despot could be, had little trust for many of the nobility--after all, feudal intrigue and internal warfare was the reason he had managed to rise to power. With the end of the war and the backing of the United States (Britain still had a few qualms about the effects of Ethiopian modernization on her African colonies), he drafted a new constitution in 1955 for his Silver Jubliee to replace the one from 1931. The rules regarding peerage were modified so that a commoner could effectively rise all the way to the Imperial Cabinet. Municipalities could now be governed democratically by a body called the Derg (Amharic for "council") and suggest potential provincial governors, who were still chosen by fiat. The parliament was reorganized into two councils, the High Council (Kaftanya Derg) and Common Council (Yagara Derg). Although less democratic than the similar Westminster system, it was successfully able to manage the (mostly) peaceful transition to a liberal form of government where an United States Air Force base couldn't.

The Ethiopian Army returned home with a swagger in their stride. Buoyed by the performance of the Kagnew Battalions, Halie Selassie I committed the entire division of the Kebur Zabagna (Imperial Guard) as an expeditionary force in time for them to take part in the invasion of Italy. The Ethiopians fought bravely and ferociously on the road to Rome and against the Germans further north, scoring the initial breakthrough in the Gothic Line in late 1944. War correspondents were even able to film an Ethiopian infantry section capturing a trembling Italian machine-gun crew, the irony of which was lost on no one. The Imperial Army would prove itself time and again throughout the 20th century, from Korea to Vietnam to the fields of Baluchistan to the sands of the Ogaden.

The Navy was a different matter. Its formation was largely a matter of national pride, as a fleet of some sort was something a country with a coastline ought to have. The Clemson-class destroyers served that role well and ended their lives in the scrapyards in 1945. The 3"/50 guns of the destroyers (30 in total) were converted to five batteries of field artillery, and given to the Ogaden provincial Sefar. These "Culverins of Prester John," as a British tabloid called them, proved useful in the opening shots of the 1969 war with Somalia. In its stead, ships more suited to patrol the Red Sea and the Horn of Africa took their place, bought at discount prices from the United States Navy. The largest ship was an Auk-class minesweeper rechristened the MIM Massawa. The other ships were PC-461 class submarine chasers and three slightly modified PCE-827 class corvettes. A squadron of twelve PT boats rounded off the fleet. They would be replaced almost entirely by missile boats by the late sixties but for now, it was a functional (if completely excessive) force to defend the waters surrounding the nation.

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Worklist: Portuguese Navy and Barnegat class seaplane tenders

I was afraid that this was going to happen.

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Yeah, I know I said that Biancini1995 should credit heuhen but that was because he was liberally borrowing significant portions of other people's drawings (large main gun turrets from heuhen's AU and now I'm convinced he may have borrowed liberally from some of my own AU drawings) but this is going the other way.

I remember Golly saying that he does not wish for people to use his AU parts on their AUs without permission so I like to think of that as the baseline rule in general. But real-life parts are pretty much fair game.

?

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Yeah, that was in response to another point I was thinking...I was having a brain-dead moment :p

But I agree with Golly's point here:

"Nothing can be more annoying when you have spend months and months around some ship with your arm paralyzed from too much of mouse movement and pixels popping in and out from your brain... and then some upstart geezer goes to change the flag and adds some superficial poor copypaste things atop of the drawing and claims the rigth place his name under the credits..."

Which I think was WhyMe's point.