Possible British 16inch guns on Battleships

[tameraire01]

I have been reading on super battleships and found this. The Lion class are the most restrained of the super battleships that never were. In fact, they would have been smaller than the later Vanguard, which was completed. (See my essay about the "Post Treaty Battleships" for a discussion of Vanguard.) They were designed for a new pattern 16in triple gun mount that, ultimately, was never produced. This is a shame, because Vanguard could have profited from them as well as the Lions. The design specifications below are for the original version of the Lions, two of which were laid down in 1939 (the two others projected were never laid down). From the drawings, the ships would have looked much like the King George V class.

There was also a later Lion design from 1946 that called for two ships with a 50,000t standard displacement (56,500 full load), 840ft length and 118ft beam. This version would have carried 9-16in guns (3x3) of an even newer type with a firing interval of only 20 seconds. The secondary battery would have been 24-4.5in DP (12x2) and the AA battery was to be 60-40mm Bofors (10x6). Speed was intended to be about 29kts. The increased beam would have allowed better underwater protection than Vanguard (against up to a 2000lb charge of TNT), and the armor protection included a 14in belt and 4in-6in deck. These sound like very formidable ships, indeed. There was as even larger version which hiked the displacement to 59,100t standard and 69,140 full load, but still retained the same basic armament (heavy AA increased to 68-40mm). Freeboard and the area of the ship protected by armor would have been increased; fuel oil capacity was up to 7870t, for greatly increased range. Details of these ships are unavailable, so the earlier version's specifications are used here (as laid down in 1939). Could anyone tell me if the planned 16inch rifles on the proposed lion would be any good or would they have the same problems as with the quads?

Could anything short of an iowa class BB stop them.

[pg55555]

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The 68,000 ton design was an OUTLINE design only, i.e. "back-of-the-envelope" only, there was never any intention to do any proper design work on it. It would have had six (two triple) 16-inch Mark IV guns in "automatic" mountings.

There were Mark II, Mark III and Mark IV test guns made and fired. The Mark IV had lots of work done on rifling and shell design the basic idea being that the HC and AP shell would be designed to have the same ballistics and that required careful design of both shell length and shell/rifling interaction. They were still working on it when all work on heavy guns were abandoned and the RN battleship essentially was dead.

[Dave Saxton]

There were several problems that made future battleship designs at least unpractical, and most theoretical design attempted to define what should be the goals. Meeting such goals turned out in most cases in unpractical design and scale. For example apparently as result of war experience, a torpedo defense system capable of withstanding a 2,000 lb high explosive warhead would likely be needed. But could that really be done on a practical size? As it turned out the 1,000 lb "rating" for KGV was obviously not obtained in practice.

As for battleship caliber ordnance, the British continued to research this problem into the 1950s. What they wanted was a do it all shell. It would preferably be AP, HE, SAP, and underwater trajectory, all in one shell. They would not need to change the shells in the automatic loading train to handle unamoured and heavily armoured targets, or when firing at shipping or during shore bombardment. This proved to be not a realistic goal. They wanted the shell to have no cap so it would not be subject to the effects of de-capping. But when testing their existing capped shells, taken from service inventory, against heavy face hardened armour, the shells (with the exception of the Nelson Class short body 16") were broken by the armour. The armour destroyed the shells rather than shells defeating the armour. A cap-less AP shell was not feasable. The longer the shell per caliber the more likely it was to be broken. The shell needed to have a blunt nose shape to obtain good performance at high obliquity and traveling through sea water, but this reduced penetration performance against belts.

After the war, the sobering facts were that even the most thoroughly modern, and thoroughly expensive, battleship design could be defeated by more modern, and increasingly more destructive weapons developed in a fraction of the time required to build a battleship. Moreover, guided missiles launched from flexible, and more expendable, platforms, with a reach measured in hundreds miles, were theoretically better than unguided shells with a reach of maybe 20 miles. One of the interesting aspects of Leyte Gulf was how ineffective USN artillery was at destroying the enemy. In almost all cases the enemy was destroyed ultimately by torpedoes. Either not that many hits were actually scored or the hits were not that destructive.

However, another lesson from the war was that future naval battles would likely be fought at night. Already 90% of all surface battles were fought at night after 1941. Night battles are almost always fought at relative short range and decided by relatively short range weapons systems such as torpedoes. But another lesson from the war was how unsuited light and medium caliber naval artillery, useful at short and medium range, was at destroying the enemy.

A case in point was the performance the USN cruisers sent to mop up Ozawa's forces in night battle near Cape Ongano. Armed with Mk-8 radar the Wichita was unable to score hits on the Tama before it pulled out of range. (The Tama was soon sunk by submarines, however, and that was most telling of future trends indeed.) The other cruisers (Santa Fe, Mobile, and New Orleans and rejoined by Wichita) also using Mk-8 radar took 20 minutes to score the first hits on a fleeing IJN destroyer from 12,000 yards and it then required a 2 1/2 hour stern chase with the cruisers shooting at the IJN destroyer, to finally get USN destroyers in position to launch torpedoes. This was finally facilitated by, at last, two observed hits scored which brought the IJN destroyer to a halt.

War experience indicated that the most viable warships for modern surface combat were the destroyer and the submarine, armed with torpedoes and/or guided missiles-not the battleship.