I was reading through some web sights about battleships, and was reading about
american battleship designs and intended battleships in WW2. The interesting
thing was the fact the missui (I cannot spell) and her sisters were designed
not as pure battleships (which they were anyway), but as escort battleships
for the carriers. A 50 THOUSAND TON ESCORT!! The battleships that were
intended (or proposed) to be built, in answer to the 2 japanise monster BB`s
(yamato, musashi) were going to be built with 4 tripple turrets with 18" guns
(ouch). These ships were going to be proper BB`s in the american sence, with a
speed of only 27 knotts. The high speed
of the missuri and her sisters (32+ knotts) gives a clue to the fact
they probably were designed primarally as carrier escorts.
Anyway, the FT question I have is what is the biggest escort designed ship
that people out there have used? I know there are designs for BC sized
escorts, and I have used CH sized escort ships, but has anybody designed BBE,
or even SDE ships?
> Anyway, the FT question I have is what is the biggest escort designed
In Death Ground, Starfire fiction by Weber, mentions ships such as SDEs etc.
If you're faced with a big enough fighter threat, and have a big enough
economic base, I suppose...
I've never played with anything larger than the standard CE.
> I was reading through some web sights about battleships, and was
Funny thing, there was a show about Battleships on the History Channel today
convering that exact topic. Turns out that even though the American BB's were
designed as an escort role, they were still primarily designed as ships of the
line, and their high speed, and state of the art targeting computers, and
other systems made them the best BB's of their time! Of course they were on
the drawing boards for 10 years! If fact, their armor is so effective, that
even ion modern naval warfare it would take several direct missile hits to
take out one of the BB's. When they were brought out of mothball, gosh its
been a while now, the WWII era gunnery computers were not replaced, because
they were still as accurate as any modern computer that they could have
replaced it with!
Great stuff!
George
> Bif Smith wrote:
> I was reading through some web sights about battleships, and was
Not quite... the Montana class, which is most likely what you're talking
about, was to be built with 16" guns, not 18". We wouldn't have built anything
with 18" guns in response to the Japanese ships, because we weren't aware that
they were armed with such weaponry until after the war. We'd thought they just
had 16" guns as well until we dug into Japanese documents detailing their
design when it was all over.
> Anyway, the FT question I have is what is the biggest escort designed
I've designed a few fast battlecruisers armed with needle beams as escorts for
carrier-based forces, which usually had the mission of flying ahead of
the fighter assault at high speeds and needling out ADFCs. I've also built a
few
multi-role dreadnought ships that were designed as carrier help as well,
which carried a few fighters themselves to bolster fighter superiority but
which also had somewhere between modest to heavy armaments of their own.
Sometimes
I won't bother with escorts and all of the ships will be multi-role
dreadnoughts
of some form, bearing both the fighter elements and a strong plasma armament
all in the same vessels in the desired balance. Plasma and fighters are a
wicked combination.
I designed a Kra'Vak SD for high fighter/SM threat environments (hunting
carrier groups). Mass 240, thrust 4, FTL, 72 hull integrity, 6 FC's, 10 K1's,
4 K3's, 18
k-packs, and 36 scatterguns. It is a bit large as an escort (a ship
thrown to the wolves of fighter stacks), but it can get close enough to slow
carrier forces to