Fun With Naval Terminology

[Notebook]

I always knew it as "Three sheets to the wind"?

N.

 

[K_Jameson]

Fun fact is that the Scharnhorst still has the record for the longest shot against a moving ship that hit its target, with 24 km against the Glorious. Despite its rather tiny gun calibre of 280 mm.

I've read that the record is held by the Warspite but I don't recall the distance and the battle.

Speaking on battleship designs, I still think that the US has realized some of the better classes. I'm not really a fan of the Iowa class, but I think that the South Dakota and North Carolina classes was very fine ships.

Regarding cruisers, a very strange type was the Alaska class. Battleship-sized, 305 mm guns, high speed, light protection. Battle cruisers? US call it "large cruisers".

 

[Urwumpe]

Speaking on battleship designs, I still think that the US has realized some of the better classes. I'm not really a fan of the Iowa class, but I think that the South Dakota and North Carolina classes was very fine ships.

Regarding cruisers, a very strange type was the Alaska class. Battleship-sized, 305 mm guns, high speed, light protection. Battle cruisers? US call it "large cruisers".

I would say the Iowa class is the best battleship in WW2, despite not having seen much combat at all. The South Dakota had been involved in more and in more significant battles, the Iowas simply arrived late.

But in terms of plain beauty, the Japanese win with the Yamato class.

 

[Linguofreak]

I've read that the record is held by the Warspite but I don't recall the distance and the battle.

Warspite on Giulio Cesare, battle of Calabria, about the same range (24 km / 26,000 yards), according to the Wikipedia article on Warspite. When I quizzed my dad on it, he could name Scharnhorst v. Glorious, and recalled that there was one between the British and Italians, but couldn't name the ships. He said that there's a fair bit of debate over which hit was longer ranged.

I figure it likely that if Iowa and Yamato had ever met, it's likely that Iowa would have attempted to keep the range open and this record would have been handily exceeded.

 

[Enjo]

I got SG for Christmas. I can't remember the exact year, but I was a lot younger:lol:

My favorite race is a tie between the Hressans and the Cephians, and my second fav has to be the Schleinel Hegemony

I was never that deep into the details of the game TBH.
However if Spring RTS attracts you, I could share with you some details of the game in regard to naval battles, which I think would suit you. As far as I can see, you're less of an action lover when it comes to strategy games. In Spring it is possible to degrade the game with too much of time acceleration and a mixture of (too) specialized units, like for example some ridiculous underwater spider-mines, destroying large ships. If I ever played the game with a friend, I'd restrict the naval battles in such way, that only "basic" units are available - scouts, destroyers, battleships and submarines. The submarines may only be detected via destroyers and air sonar support. Behind the lines, you can have long range artillery firing onto units which are visible to your ships, planes, as well to their radars (there are also radar-planes - short and long range). There are also long-range missile ships, which are able to slowly kill medium-range plasma cannons, while they're on the radar, or at least once visually confirmed. Your fleet could be distracted from time to time by some air attack, but there are effective AAA ships. Also, I find it fun, that there are radar jammers available as well, which could be put in the middle of your fleet, so the enemy has to try a bit harder than only building long range radars - he has to command cheap and fast scout aircraft to patrol the area, to get a visual.
Also I find it super cool, that there are also ground based aircraft auto-repair buildings, as well as aircraft carriers, serving the same purpose, which the aircraft automatically visit upon being damaged - remember carriers in Dune 2, automatically picking up damaged units? I found it fun.

If you read all this ( ), you might notice that the game can turn into a very nice tactical position war, where agility doesn't matter as much, as your brainpower and ability to use specialized units such as radar jammers and long range artillery effectively. The problem is that I've never played such a session with anybody. For example, some people disable "ghosted buildings", so that your artillery has to continuously have the target on the radar to keep firing. Then if the enemy jams your radar, you have to continuously send in your scout planes to get a visual to fire just one shell, having the planes immediately slaughtered... I guess everybody has their own idea how to play the game and you have to stay in the middle.

 

[TMac3000]

As far as I can see, you're less of an action lover when it comes to strategy games.

Oh, not at all! I LOVED Command and Conquer: Red Alert, Dune 2000, and even the computer version of Battleship in spite of its wonkyness. And you can't be a flight-sim lover like me without some appreciation of thick-of-it action

But I have a fondness for TBS games as well, whether they are development games where war is merely one possible means to an end, like Alpha Centauri and Master of Orion, or war games where war is whole point, like Star General and Walter Bright's Empire.

I like having time to think. Real war doesn't always give you that, so RTS games are in that way more realistic, but they tend to put you right at the scene, where TBS gives you more of a feel of being the big four-star flag officer who has to manage the whole theater.

As a chess player by nature, I prefer TBS, but I can switch back and forth between the two quite easily

 

[Andy44]

Oh, not at all! I LOVED Command and Conquer: Red Alert, Dune 2000, and even the computer version of Battleship in spite of its wonkyness. And you can't be a flight-sim lover like me without some appreciation of thick-of-it action

But I have a fondness for TBS games as well, whether they are development games where war is merely one possible means to an end, like Alpha Centauri and Master of Orion, or war games where war is whole point, like Star General and Walter Bright's Empire.

I like having time to think. Real war doesn't always give you that, so RTS games are in that way more realistic, but they tend to put you right at the scene, where TBS gives you more of a feel of being the big four-star flag officer who has to manage the whole theater.

As a chess player by nature, I prefer TBS, but I can switch back and forth between the two quite easily

This is why I loved Great Naval Battles: North Atlantic. It's a realtime game and you're basically the admiral in charge of a squadron of ships in combat on either the German or British side. Naval big gun combat is a slow enough pace to think and make decisions but fast enough to be exciting.

And the game also had a strategic campaign mode where you few the theater as a whole and either try to bottle the Germans up to protect your convoys or try to run the British blockades. There are radio reports coming in, and you use light cruisers to scout the GIUK gap along with aircraft carriers to patrol the area, then build formations to go out the meet the enemy.

 

[K_Jameson]

I would say the Iowa class is the best battleship in WW2, despite not having seen much combat at all. The South Dakota had been involved in more and in more significant battles, the Iowas simply arrived late.

Iowas are usually indicated as the best battleships. They was the last (not counting the useless HMS Vanguard) and have benefited from all the experience accumulated in the previous years.
Anyway, their distinctive sign, the extremely high speed of 33 knots, was needed not for a tactical advantage as battleship, but merely to match the speed of the carriers, of which these expensive and beautiful ship had to be a sort of "deluxe" escorts. US philosophy on battleship has never been to emphasize the speed. Quite the contrary.
To obtain this record speed, Iowas had powerful engines and an enormous length of 270 meters, that had their disadvantages: the protection, analogue to the SoDak class, was proportionally thinner because of the bigger length. The result is that the Iowas was somewhat less protected than the previous classes. To cover this relative weakness, US Navy put out the story that the armor was made with improved steel, that was fake.
Surely their 406/50 guns was formidable and, overall, no other battleship was equally impressive. But I still think at the SoDak as a more balanced project. A little cramped, to be honest.

But in terms of plain beauty, the Japanese win with the Yamato class.

Surely the Yamato class was impressive and stylish. Maybe the most beautiful, i agree. Even the same Hood stands high in this ranking.
I have a soft spot for the North Carolina class, that I've homaged with an addon :lol:

 

[ex-orbinaut]

I always knew it as "Three sheets to the wind"?

N.

Yeah.

My dad used to say "in", which is where I've retained it from. He was the exception to the rule in his own occupations of an otherwise sea faring / naval family in various tenures that goes back several generations in the RN, merchant navy, and ship building, and obviously grew up with the household phrases in Barrow-in-Furness (if you know your history of ships, you'll certainly know why that location is significant). We could easily both be right about such a minor triviality on language evulotion through the years.

Know any others? I used to have a list I had compiled of such naval jargon ingrained idiosyncrasies in the language. Lost and largely forgotten or fragmented in memory now, after 20 years of not speaking much English day to day, but there were loads of entertaining ones.

---------- Post added at 12:59 PM ---------- Previous post was at 12:53 PM ----------

In fact, we are both right by evidence...

http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-thr1.htm

 

[clive bradbury]

Lots (mostly from the sailing days):

'copper-bottomed' - as in 'good'

'brass monkey weather' - freezing cold

'taken aback'

'sailing close to the wind'

'taking (or delivering) a broadside'

 

[Linguofreak]

To obtain this record speed, Iowas had powerful engines and an enormous length of 270 meters, that had their disadvantages: the protection, analogue to the SoDak class, was proportionally thinner because of the bigger length. The result is that the Iowas was somewhat less protected than the previous classes. To cover this relative weakness, US Navy put out the story that the armor was made with improved steel, that was fake.
Surely their 406/50 guns was formidable and, overall, no other battleship was equally impressive. But I still think at the SoDak as a more balanced project. A little cramped, to be honest.

According to Wikipedia, the Iowas had the same thickness of armor as the SoDaks (even very slightly thicker in places).

I've never heard the claim made that the main armor of the Iowas used any special type of steel. Western armor was in general superior to Japanese armor, and the US had enough money to throw around to use a light armor steel for the structure of its new-construction warships (not just battleships), which other nations could only afford to do in places where splinter-proofing was important, rather than throughout the structure. But there was nothing special about Iowa's armor compared to other new US battleships.

 

[K_Jameson]

According to Wikipedia, the Iowas had the same thickness of armor as the SoDaks (even very slightly thicker in places).

Yeah but longer, so proportionally thinner, and then slightly less rigid despite the same thickness. Also, some sources claims that the public datas about the armor are incorrect. I don't say that Iowas aren't protected. In fact, along with SoDaks, it was far better protected than every other battleship with the exception of the Yamato class. In regard to the underwater protection, some analysts thinks that the North Carolinas was even better.

I've never heard the claim made that the main armor of the Iowas used any special type of steel.

My source is an old book of my dad about the naval vessels of the WWII. In fact, the autor was very critic about the Iowa class (too much in my opinion).
Another author, while recognizing the engineering value of these vessels, states that their construction should have been halted because of the futility of the big battleships in the last part of the war.

 

[Urwumpe]

Yeah but longer, so proportionally thinner, and then slightly less rigid despite the same thickness.

Does not matter unless the dynamic loads would also be proportionally larger.

 

[malisle]

On the taxonomy of spaceships

Took me a while to find it again, but it sums up nicely what different classes of ships represent in navy and sci-fi

 

[K_Jameson]

Does not matter unless the dynamic loads would also be proportionally larger.

Hmm... a more streamlined structure is subjected to a greater bending moment for a given load.

 

[Urwumpe]

Hmm... a more streamlined structure is subjected to a greater bending moment for a given load.

Yes, but that does not fall back on the material used. If the sections of the ship are equally spaced as for a smaller ship, the longer waterline has no negative effect on the armour.

 

[Linguofreak]

Yeah but longer, so proportionally thinner, and then slightly less rigid despite the same thickness.

For structural elements that's potentially a bad thing, but AFAIK battleship armor was not used as part of the load-bearing structure of the ship.

For armor less rigidity means more energy goes into bending the armor and less into the shell cutting a path through the armor, which is good, but probably irrelevant to an Iowa vs. SoDak comparison for the reasons Urwumpe mentioned.

 

[Andy44]

Last year I was aboard the Iowa-class New Jersey, now a museum ship.

Needless to say she is a thoroughly impressive ship. When you actually see that thick armor up close it's easy to get the impression that these things are indestructible. Not just the main belt armor, but the armor on the turrets, especially the forward faces, is amazing.

The conning tower armor also left a strong impression on me. The hatch that leads into it must weigh a few tons, it feels like it is almost as thick as it is wide.

And of course the main armament. Something Fred Reed wrote: "I had to reassess my definition of what a gun is. If you can't crawl up inside it, it's not really a gun."

There is also a combat center where all the radar, fire control computers, and missiles were operated from. The Iowas still have their built-in mechanical fire control computers, but they also have a lot of really cool-looking 1980s electronics and computers for the modern radars, Phalanx point defense guns, and of course the Tomahawk missiles. As if they weren't already destructive enough as built they even had nuclear capability with the Tomahawks.

It was a good way to spend an afternoon.

 

[Evil_Onyx]

Iowas are usually indicated as the best battleships. They was the last (not counting the useless HMS Vanguard) and have benefited from all the experience accumulated in the previous years.

I don't think the HMS Vanguard was useless, she was just too late to be used for the role she was designed for. She included war time experience changes to her design (one of the reasons for not getting commissioned during the war)

The BL 15 that she carried was an efficient and reliable main armament.

During 1953 NATO exercise ‘Mariner’ she proved that she was a better sea keeping ship than USS Iowa.

However the ‘star’ of the show was HMS Vanguard alone able to steam at 26 knots with
HMS VANGUARD (CONTINUED)
VANGUARD 19
no more than a 12 degree roll. “With
hardly a movement on her and the spray
flying out from either bow . . . directly into
the gale . . . a magnificent sight that few
of us will ever forget”. Interestingly, USS
Iowa did not perform nearly so well,
frequently rolling to 26 degrees with her
bridge hidden in spray.

from page 18-19 of THE OFFICIAL JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL NAVAL ASSOCIATION NO.10 AREA OCTOBER 2007

She was far from useless. Just had nothing to do during her career.

 

[N_Molson]

From my experience of Dangerous Waters, which still is quite realistic, it depends of the navies. Russians have really nasty cruisers, while the West has though small units (destroyers, frigates) that support the dreadful aircraft carriers and their hordes of missiles or torpedoes-loaded aircraft.

Also, a lot of relatively lightweight NATO warships carry an helicopter or two. Some, like the Seahawk, are amongst the russian sub commander worst nightmares.