20th-century ships of war

Let me begin by saying that I'm an amateur at this. I may know the first thing about it, but that's entirely due to Grey Wolf's blogging on the subject himself. Today I'm going to talk about naval power.

Preliminary thought: Instead of tonnage, broadside

IRL, ship classes were based primarily in terms of gun calibers (anything below a certain bore being "small"), and the necessary weights to support ships like that. Andalusada being rather screwy with these things, I'm thinking that broadside weight becomes the normative mode of classing ships. My thinking on this is for no reason other than its repercussions:

• Broadside weight can obscure very real disparities in power caused by ordance technology. (This probably becomes a very real consideration in the East Sea battles of the Russo-Japanese War; late tsarist Russia strikes me as exactly the type of place to focus on big numbers over the actual performance of those numbers.)
• Broadside also specifically keys on gun weights. Torpedo tubes seem like an obvious way to get around any kind of international agreements on broadside weight; as things become more dieselpunk, rocket racks may serve a similar purpose, with the added benefit of being less labor-intensive to add.
• If naval power is defined in terms of absolute broadside weights, there are other ways to exploit that. The development of the dual-purpose battery would be one of them; fitting for-but-not-with, allowing for relatively rapid upgunning in the event of a treaty breach, would be another, leading to rather interesting engineering considerations.
• Using broadside rather than displacement tonnage as a measure of merit somewhat disconnects ship weights from their firepower. This could, taken to an extreme I doubt it'll reach, allow for many more discrete ship classes than remain in use IRL. (As an example, it'd leave open ships that are by our standards small, undergunned, and fast cruisers, which they might consider something altogether different.)

 

Basic thoughts on design allohistory

So given these thoughts, how are ships going to be designed?

• By IRL standards, Andalusada's larger warships are a bit undergunned. (They're especially undergunned if you look at what their turrets are built for.) At the times they were built, many of them were set up to maintain international parity, so they're fitted for bigger guns than they're fitted with.
• This is still the twin-turret age, but the corollary to this is that there's probably more experimenting with triple turrets.
• Great Russia's navy is an exception to this. They're significantly under the limits for broadside weight.
• If there's a split between dual-purpose and big guns, certain heavier escort classes may arise. The kaibokan was something like that IRL; there may be others.

As aircraft develop, and aircraft warfare with them, lower-displacement ships with dual-purpose guns are going to become more of an asset. (While they have a heavier logistical tail, in some cases that can be accepted, and they would allow for firepower to be dispersed across multiple hulls and, if necessary, multiple locations. This is going to be a consideration for the Japanese Empire, which is not the most powerful as of things.)

This is a long-term work in progress.