USS Montana

No, if you supersize it they ships will become bloated monstrosities like Yamato and Montana......

Remember, they're in it to make a buck and boring isn't going to sell well.

service with a tour off Saudi Arabia in the 1991 Gulf War, I would say we definitely got better money's worth out of the three carriers.

Consider also that the older Missouri and Wisconsin also finished their service in the same war... there's no reason to think the Montanas would've been any less resilient.

Since it took something like 6 carriers to take down Musashi, and the efforts of 11 for Yamato... and a Montana could fight a Yamato one-on-one and at the very least hold its own - perhaps even win with the help of better gunnery radar and damage control?

As for the Japanese running from Taffy 3... hard to explain the panic. Carriers are helpless within gun range. Ask HMS Glorious about it.

- Sean F.

we want pictures....

Um, that is the gravy....or more specifically research pay.

That will be a few months after I finish the masters......

In many ways the Montana was a retrograde design anyway, returning to the 'slow but heavily armored' American approach to BBs. Add to that an inability to traverse the Panama Canal due to beam, and it becomes not only immensely expensive, but also rather inflexible, particularly with the unlikelihood of battleship-to-battleship gun duels. It would have made more sense to finish the Kentucky, but even that was considered redundant, and it sure is hard to argue with the historical result.

Mark Schynert

So what? We had the carriers, and put a lot less personnel in harm's way, in a manner that completely nullified the 18" guns. It's also much easier to bring clouds of 250 kt. aircraft to bear on a target than a 30 kt. ship. The Montana design is pretty, and a model of it would be interesting, but the concept was obsolete.

Mark Schynert

Ron wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@rcn.com:

All well and good but we need plastic heavy cruisers other thean Indianapolis. And I suppose Portland.

I've been to Shipcamoflage.com. Absolustely fantastic bit of research there. Those guys have done a great job.

So... my point was that, in defence of the earlier poster, a Montana would, in fact, be a good card to have with Yamatos running around. Which is not to say it would be the *best* card to have. In such circumstances, one Montana might be more useful than two Essexes, but ten Essexes would definitely be more useful than 5 Monties. That's what I was getting at. (Of course, tactics has a lot to do with it - like how Halsey let the Japanese sucker him into chasing empty carriers with his fast BBs, which let the Yamato and its cohorts make their run at Taffy 3. Thus, even *if* there had been a Montana there, it wouldn't have mattered.) But I have a hard time seeing something that can demand the attention of that much firepower from so many ships as being an obsolete concept. - Sean F.

Considering how far from its mission goal the Yamato was sunk, it's not clear that all those carriers were necessary to cripple it, much less sink it. In the end, it was nothing more than an impotent target that was so thick it took several/many hits to sink it. Likewise the Musashi. They were obsolete because there was no realistic hope that they could complete the designated missions in the absence of air power to cover them. The Montanas would have been no different.

However, the availability of the carriers illustrates another point that militated against the Montanas--time to service and cost in material and labor. If one assumes that displacement is a fairly accurate measure of material cost, each Montana would have cost slightly more than two Essex class carriers, but the specialized needs of the Montanas--the armor and the main batteries--probably dramatically escalated the real cost. You can talk about the comparative cost of the aircraft, but aircraft were relatively cheap in WWII. As for time to service, the Iowas, which were about 4/5 the tonnage of the Montanas, took about three years to go from start to commisioning. The Essexes were more like a year and a half. Even assuming the Montanas could be built as fast as a smaller-tonnage battleship type, the equivalent tonnage of Essexes would be in service about eighteen months sooner. And the kicker--they were probably more effective in the Pacific theatre.

Okay, turn it around. Would a Montana be a good card to have to confront a Yamato-class BB? I'll concede the point--it would probably have been a fair fight--which is to say, undesirable. In war, you want no fair fights, unless you think chivalry has some place on the battlefield short of burying your dead opponents with full military honors. You want overwhelming force (Jackie Fisher expressed the notion, I believe). Much better to send in the aircraft from the three to five carriers that would have reached service in the time it took for a Montana to stooge out there. Effectively, carriers could project force in a 300 mile radius (or more)--battleships were only as good as the range of their main batteries. Now, if the US had started the war with some Montanas, they would have given good service in all likelihood, but once the war started, we didn't even finish the repeat Iowas because they weren't needed. Even the Japanese caught on, since the last Yamato-class hull to more-or-less commision did so as a carrier.

Mark Schynert

confront

Certainly. Though I bet a "fair fight" would've been quite welcome in that first year of the Pacific War for the beleaguered U.S. Navy. :)

Now, if the US had started the war with some Montanas,

Which is all I was really angling at. I just ruffle a bit when the battleship gets a bum rap, the way the carriers did at the hands of the gun admirals back in the day. Personally, I think they could have - maybe even should have - built one or two Monties in lieu of a few Essexes (Considering the, what, 30 or so started, but only around 24 completed?) But I understand why they didn't, and while I disagree on a few points I have no objection - especially considering the end results :)

Well, they wouldn't have converted it had they not lost 2/3 of their main fleet carriers at Midway. Though I'd argue Shinano would have been much better off finishing as planned, considering the grossly inefficient concept of the conversion. An aircraft ferrying and maintenance ship, with a pathetically small aircraft capacity for its size. Which really doesn't make sense, since what they needed was more fully functional fleet carriers, not glorified fleet carrier tenders. I'm still puzzled how that much space could go to waste...

- Sean F.

Something I think everyone reading thius will be interested in-

Which is a page devoted to comparing and contrasting different battleships to determine the 'best', no Montana though. Be sure to click on 'Detailed Information' below each category- there's a lot there.

It turns out, surprisingly, that an Iowa SHOULD be able to defeat a Yamato, its superior technology, particularly in fire control, countering Yamato's brute force solutions (their armor and guns aren't has heavy, but their higher quality makes up for most of the difference). Shockingly, a South Dakota should be an even match for a Yamato. The 16/45s and 16/50s were very powerful guns, and Americans fire control was a LOT better than Japanese. In a long range gunnery duel the Yamato would be dead meat, the

16s actually had BETTER armor piercing performance at long rang than the 18s did.

plunging fire through decks?

Exactly. The 16s had better penetration for plunging fire than the Yamatos

18s did. Don't ask my why. There's a lot of discussion of ballistics on that site.

i suspect that quality of manufacture, materials, explosives and shape of the shell all affect that. the guys on the hood knew about plunging fire. i wonder how she would have fared if the upgrades had ever been done. did any of her updated sistes undergo such shelling?

I have to agree about the 'bum rap' thing--the existing battleships proved to be worthwhile in two key roles--pre-invasion bombardments and fast carrier escort. 8" gun cruisers simply weren't as good at either task. And battleship design is fascinating, especially when you follow the evolution from the 1880s through to the 1940s. The nuances of battleship design led to a diversity of approaches, which gave some pretty unexpected results, like the suprior ballistic performance of Italian 15" and American 16" guns in comparison with similar and larger guns used by other combatants. By comparisioon, I've never found carriers anywhere near as interesting, since, large gun batteries on some of the early designs notwithstanding, they simply weren't intended to do any more than supply a base for combat aircraft.

Mark Schynert

The simplest answer is cross-sectional density.