Week 2 - Developing the Concept

Hello Readers,

    After successfully testing the experimental construction technique I detailed in last week's blog post, it's time to get into actually designing the ship. I started by drawing up some loose sketches to get my ideas onto paper. Naturally, I started from the fundaments of a ship; its hull.

    There are many, many variables to consider when designing a boat hull, and I'm no hydrodynamicist so I sort of guesstimated based on existing designs. But basically, the three important aspects of a hull are its length, its beam (width at the widest point), its depth (how tall it is from the keel to the deck), and the ratios between them. The depth measurement can be further subdivided into draught (pronounced "draft") and freeboard. Freeboard is the distance between the waterline and the deck of the ship, and its draught is the distance from the waterline to the keel, or put more simply the amount of the ship that sticks up out of the water and how much of it is submerged

    Drawing inspiration from the likes of Bismarck and Hood, I imagine my ship sitting deep in the water, with a long depth and draught and very little freeboard. Many battleships and battlecruisers are constructed this way due to a few reasons. Firstly, they naturally sit low in the water due to the weight of their large guns and water. Second, this effect is intentionally exacerbated by minimizing the depth of the hull, as it provides 2 main advantages in combat. Primarily, it reduces the hull area exposed to enemy fire above the water, which is a massive weak point, as a penetrating shot in the hull would allow water to enter the ship. The draught is much harder to shoot because the incoming shell would have to travel through water first, destabilizing and sapping kinetic energy from it, such that by the time the shell hits it's too weak to do anything against the armor. Additionally, it also reduces a ship's profile above the water, making it harder to spot, and also a smaller target for enemy gunners to try and aim at.

HMS Hood (top) and KMS Bismarck (bottom)

Note the high draught-to-freeboard ratio, particularly on the Hood

    Where my design differs from any other ship is its size. The record for largest battleship ever made belonged to the Japanese Imperial Navy, the IJN Yamato, and had a length of 863ft. The largest warship ever made was the aircraft carrier USS Enterprise, at a little over 1,100ft. My ship would be 1,200ft long, which would make it the largest warship ever built. I determined the beam by taking the Hood's length-to-beam ratio and multiplying it by the length of 1,200ft. My ship is attempting to replicate a ship of the Battlecruiser class. The length-to-beam ratio is one of the defining features of a battlecruiser, being very long and narrow, along with being faster and less armored than a battleship, but with equal or better armament. (I'll refer to both battleships and battlecruisers generally as "capital ships")

    More loosely, I also drew up a sketch of what I might imagine the superstructure and armament might look like. Of course, this will probably end up changing once I finalize the hull design and see it in real life. Starting from the most basic features of a ship's deck, its main armament. The main armament of a capital ship is usually found in multi-gun turrets, with 2, 3, or in some cases 4 guns per turret. Most capital ships have 2 sets of guns on two "tiers", with two turrets on the higher tier, one facing forward and one back, and two turrets below those. One set of guns is elevated so that both turrets can fire at a target directly ahead or behind the ship, and so that they can be placed closer together without hitting their barrels on one another

    

    My ship design has 3 tiers rather than 2, for a total of 6 main-caliber turrets. As for the turrets themselves, I'm torn on whether to do 4-gun turrets or 3-gun, though I'm leaning more towards 4-gun turrets simply because they're not seen very often and they look cool, and 3-gun turrets are very common and overdone. This makes for one of the most heavily-armed capital ships, as even the USS Iowa, arguably one of the most powerful battleships ever, only has 3 turrets of 3 guns each, for a total of 9 main caliber guns. With 6x4 gun turrets, my ship would have an astounding 24 main-caliber guns.

    As far as secondary armaments, I plan on having as many as possible. When I look at real capital ships, I find the lack of more guns underwhelming, and there's a lot of empty space on their decks, especially further toward the edges like on the Hood pictured above. I've sketched my design packed full of secondary-caliber and anti-aircraft guns all along the sides and on multiple tiers of the superstructure for firing at smaller, more nimble targets such as destroyers, frigates, and torpedo boats, and for warding off attacks by aircraft, as capital ships tend to be huge targets of aircraft attacks by bombs and torpedoes alike. Capital ships without adequate anti-air protection succumb to such strafing runs, as was the fate of the legendary Yamato.

    That's all I have for this week, next week I plan on getting a solid design down for the hull, and starting its construction.