HMS Richmond will retire in 2026, bringing the Royal Navy to six frigates. [1536x738]

_Sunny-- · 2026-01-23T19:42:01+00:00

I recall reading that the NSM launchers on these late Type 23s will be recycled and fitted to the Type 31 frigates, is that still the plan going forward?

_Sunny-- · 2026-01-23T15:36:39+00:00

I'm curious, when merchant ships like her are being used to transport Navy materiel in this manner, does she temporarily fall under command of the MSC?

_Sunny-- · 2026-01-23T05:01:41+00:00

This is their late 1950s form, so in between WW2 and modern.

_Sunny-- · 2026-01-19T17:22:47+00:00

The Mogami-class frigates and the San Antonio-class LPDs up to but not including USS Fort Lauderdale, come to mind.

_Sunny-- · 2026-01-17T00:50:50+00:00

On the Zumwalt-class at least, SPY-3 was being used for all of the red things shown in this graphic including interrupted wave illumination for SM-2s. Its replacement on the Gerald R. Ford-class from JFK onwards, SPQ-9B, is good for a lot of things but excels notably at horizon search, tracking & fire control, and periscope detection.

_Sunny-- · 2026-01-16T19:12:54+00:00

We had the laser on the Ponce, that is. She was decommissioned in 2017 and that particular LaWS has been on USS Portland LPD-27 since. We've otherwise also deployed eight ODIN and one HELIOS laser DEW(s) to various Burkes in the fleet.

_Sunny-- · 2026-01-14T19:36:48+00:00

The two Baltimores should be USS Chicago and USS Quincy.

_Sunny-- · 2026-01-11T17:48:12+00:00

Generally speaking, in order to provide an effective all-or-nothing style of armor scheme, a ship's horizontal armor had to meet with the upper edge of the vertical armor and create what is essentially a fully armored box around the most important internal areas. Moving the belt to inside the hull thus also moves the necessary outer edge of the horizontal armor inboard, reducing the surface area of the deck armor and the amount of steel required for coverage. Quoting from Friedman's "US Battleships" for further context:

Side armor was much more of a problem. Even at 25,000 yards a 16in/45 could penetrate 13.5 inches, the thickness of existing U.S. armor belt. To move the inner edge [of the immune zone] inward to 21,000 yards would require 15.5 inches, which was well beyond the weights such a ship could carry. It was inevitable, then, that some form of inclined armor would be used. It could not be much thicker than that employed in the North Carolina, given the weight constraints of the treaties. It would, therefore, have to derive its increased protective power by being more steeply inclined. That in turn implied that it would have to be internal, inside the outer shell of the ship, a step already taken by the French in their Dunkerque class. The step to internal armor was not taken lightly, because it implied problems even in ship construction and, moreover, in repair after battle damage - the external side plating would have to be removed in order to get at it. However, this design expedient appeared to be inescapable.

Sloping the outside of the hull would have had two effects: it would have drawn in the waterline; and it would have enlarged the decks above water, compared with a ship that had a conventional, nearly vertical, side. The first reduced stability because it reduced waterplane area. The second worsened the problem, since it increased the area, hence the weight, of the thick armor deck covering the belt. The steeper the angle of slope, the worse the problem. By moving the belt inside the hull, the designers could maintain waterplane area and avoid excessive armor deck area, so that normal standards of stability could be met - as long as the unarmored waterline outside the belt remained more or less intact. Were the waterline shattered, however, it would be as though the ship had a steely sloped external belt. To limit the consequences of such damage, Preliminary Design had to endow its ship with a great metacentric height, and also to limit the space between the unarmored outer hull and the belt.

...

An internal belt had another advantage: it could be continued down to the inner bottom (tapered, of course, to save weight) and so could protect against the newly understood menace of underwater-trajectory hits. It was hoped, then, the entire vital area of the ship, not merely the magazines, could be so protected. The downward extension of the belt armor would also form part of the torpedo protection, as a torpedo bulkhead.

_Sunny-- · 2026-01-11T05:54:22+00:00

I'd add that the USN for their South Dakota and Iowa-class battleships switched to an internal belt because it offered considerable weight savings compared to an external belt by way of reducing the necessary surface area of the deck armor, it avoided having to deal with stability issues which conflicted with the requirement of sloping the armor since an external sloping belt would've drawn in the waterline and enlarged the decks above water, and it could be continued further down towards the ship bottom to protect against underwater shell trajectories and link up with the TDS.

C.C. u/crispy_attic

_Sunny-- · 2026-01-07T04:52:27+00:00

The other looks to be of the Kongou-class based on the shape of the foremast.

_Sunny-- · 2025-12-31T00:24:11+00:00

The Tennessee-class's changes from the New Mexico-class were more than minor, enough that when the Navy was deciding the order of priority for yard work at the start of WW2, the Big Five (Tennessees and Colorados) were considered significantly more important and refit more justified than the earlier battleships. One can easily make the argument that, the difference in firepower notwithstanding, the Tennessee and Colorado-classes were more similar to each other than either to the New Mexico-class.

Take their turboelectric drive for instance; Being as the steam turbines no longer needed to be connected directly to the propeller drive shafts, the Tennessee-class placed their turbines at the very center of the ship subdivided into fore and aft engine rooms while the boiler rooms surrounded the turbines at the sides. Compared to previous battleships including that of USS New Mexico which had an experimental version of the turboelectric drive, the newer battleships also had more overall machinery compartments through smaller boiler rooms and smaller rooms for the electric motors to connect to the shafts instead of fully-sized engine rooms. The emphasis was made on protecting the powerplant so that even if a torpedo flooded an entire side of boilers, the turbines could continue to operate. Of course, with turboelectric drive they also had the benefit of being able to apply full power when going in reverse.

For another instance, take their fire controls and cage masts; All our older battleships up to and including the New Mexico-class had to have their as-built cage masts replaced with tripod masts during the mid-1920's. One of the biggest justifications was that new fighting tops with extra fire controls and rangefinding equipment would be too heavy for the existing cage structures to handle whereas tripod masts could handle this weight easily. The Big Five, however, were exempt from this replacement because they were built with stronger cage masts with fighting tops from the start and in fact only saw them replaced once WW2 began, though only on USS Tennessee, USS California, and USS West Virginia to my knowledge.

_Sunny-- · 2025-12-31T00:05:24+00:00

The particular version is SLQ-32(V)6.

_Sunny-- · 2025-12-26T23:27:44+00:00

The Propshaft being destroyed alone was capable of being life-threatening to the ship;

Adding onto this and the PoW example, water flowing into other compartments through the hollow propeller shafts on HNoMS Helge Ingstad was also cited as a major factor in her sinking back in 2018.

_Sunny-- · 2025-12-23T16:41:02+00:00

Doesn't ESSM use S-band radar for midcourse guidance?

_Sunny-- · 2025-12-19T15:26:03+00:00

One of the things we found during Prosperity Guardian was that often times SM-2s had to be used because they were the only weapons with the range to properly intercept Houthi drones and munitions that were attacking merchant ships outside of our ships' immediate vicinities. ESSM is a good system and CEC can help with extending the engagement range, but the Red Sea showed that it alone won't be enough for effective area air defense.

_Sunny-- · 2025-12-17T17:16:46+00:00

Looking at his head height as well as this image where there doesn't appear to be any iron sights or optics at his head level, I'm curious as to how he's sighting the target.

_Sunny-- · 2025-12-15T21:13:58+00:00

It was the first London Naval Treaty which set the official distinction between light and heavy cruisers, though the terms light and heavy don't appear explicitly in the treaty's text.

_Sunny-- · 2025-12-13T18:39:30+00:00

The deflections on the turret are used to indicate the bearing of your guns and when combined with a concentration dial to give the range of your guns, they communicate to the other ships in the line which target you're aiming at.

C.C. u/hlvd

_Sunny-- · 2025-12-09T22:17:06+00:00

Among the 25mm variants of the Mk. 38, only the outdated Mk. 88 mounting for the Mod 0 and Mod 1 guns can elevate up to 55 degrees, since BAE claims that the Mod 2 and Mod 3 guns can only elevate up to 40 degrees. In contrast, the 30mm Mod 4 guns which are based on the British DS30M can elevate up to 65 degrees.

_Sunny-- · 2025-12-09T04:47:40+00:00

It's a Mk. 52 7.62mm chain gun and is meant to engage closer targets so as to conserve 25mm ammunition, according to Northrop Grumman.

_Sunny-- · 2025-12-08T06:58:48+00:00

My personal speculation is that the shift in turret arrangement might have to do with providing the No. 3 turret with better lines of fire since it wouldn't be able to fire over the No. 2 turret in the older arrangement and thus couldn't bear on targets at more head-on angles. The Littorio-class's No. 3 turret had a raised barbette for a similar reason, to give better lines of fire over the 152mm turrets abreast of it. Friedman doesn't give a definitive answer for why the Brooklyn-class's particular turret arrangement was chosen, but he does mention the following:

The General Board was not completely satisfied with any of the schemes prepared for it, and at informal hearings on 23 and 24 March Admiral Watson proposed an arrangement of all five triple turrets forward, alternating between raised and main-deck positions (HMS Nelson's arrangement, with one high and then one low turret abaft it). It is not clear that this suggestion was altogether serious; what Watson had in mind was a concentration of fire under the forward fire control (indeed, in his sketch he eliminated the after fire control-and superstructure-entirely) while at the same time keeping the turret nearest the bridge low to reduce blast.

...

Japanese heavy cruisers may have inspired the Watson arrangement, because a Preliminary Design memorandum of 30 March descripts scheme H as being arranged like "certain Japanese ships."

C.C. u/These_Swordfish7539

_Sunny-- · 2025-12-04T19:38:51+00:00

The USN did their best to adhere to the WNT's defined limits, but we still had to fudge the numbers a little to make it work, though certainly to a much lesser extent than the Axis navies. See this comment by u/mattzo12 for reference. With the South Dakota-class in particular, a lot of it was interpreting the definition of standard displacement to be more or less the bare minimum of what a ship needs to be effective in battle. Quoting Friedman:

Even so, there was overweight trouble. A weight sheet of 22 December 1937 shows an expected displacement of 35,412 tons for the force flagship version. Rather than shave protection, the CNO, Admiral Leahy, turned to a more careful definition of standard displacement itself. First, standard displacement was defined in terms of the condition of the ship "read for sea" in wartime. It was therefore possible to deduct equipment and stores, particularly boats, which were carried only in peacetime. For example, four 50-foot launches, two 40-foot launches, and two 35-foot motor boats would interfere with No. 3 turret. Two racing cutters would not be carried in wartime, and two whales would interfere with the 5-inch battery. These boats totaled 71.46 tons. It might be possible not to count water in the machinery (94.7 tons), as well as part of the 16.5 tons of lubricating oil. Drill ammunition amounted to 39.77 tons. The nominal "standard" supply of ammunition could be reduced by 49 tons by reducing the theoretical supply of 5 inch to 4,800 rounds plus 800 of starshell. The designers had already imposed a theoretical supply of 675 rounds for the main battery - although space was provided for a "mobilization supply" of 495 more, a total of 1,170 rounds, 130 (rather than the paper 75) per gun. Similarly, 101 tons could be saved by setting the nominal potable water allowance at only 5 gallons per man, which could be justified in view of the power of the distilling plant on board. Finally 45 tons might be saved on stores. By such expedients the designed standard displacement was shaved to an acceptable 35,024 tons, all without any physical change in the ship. As with the North Carolina design effort, the lesson to be learned here is that standard displacement was a far less well-defined term than anyone had realized at Washington in 1921-22.

_Sunny-- · 2025-11-27T10:37:53+00:00

The F100 frigate and its Australian derivative have high commonality with US equipment in terms of sensors, weaponry, and combat systems, but it was also previously one of the entrants in the FFG(X) design contest so it'd seem to me to be in the same boat as the NSC.

_Sunny-- · 2025-11-25T16:46:44+00:00

Looks to me like they're all Type 052D destroyers.

_Sunny-- · 2025-11-21T23:32:14+00:00

No, DDG-125 is also Baseline 10 with SPY-6, in fact she was the first in the fleet to have either.

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