MVictorP wrote:Please don't turn another poster's ignorance against me. I am pretty sure the AGNT (or AGNA) has been abreviated before. And if not, well he could have at least figured it out, no offenses meant.
And thanks for piping in.
Please use the forum search tool to search for AGNT - you'll find on this forum anyways you're the only one who has ever abreviated it so.
He could have and probably would have figured it out but given that we've ***always*** spelt it out as the Anglo German Naval Treaty it's not surprising he didn't pick it up right away. It was only after rereading your context several times that it hit me what you were reffering to.
Again I don't think calling out another poster as being 'ignorant' or using the expression 'faintest idea' because he didn't immediately reconize an uncommon abreviation adds anything to the discussion.
You're right. The Dorias indeed had a TDS of a sort. Still, the Ganguts had no TDS. And I'm pretty sure there had been others.
But all
American Battleships since at least the Nevada class had TDS. The only ships the Americans rated as "Battlecruisers", the Lexingtons also had TDS. The Alaska class had none. Hence lwd's point is valid - the lack of a TDS in an
American context is a cruiser feature.
lwd wrote:What ships could do the same job at a fraction of the cost?
...
A real cruiser is suppose to be able to fight it out with a large cruiser?
I would have argued, given that the Alaskas had only marginal immunity against 12" gunfire, another pair of Essexes would have accomplished their
intended role as large cruiser killer much more effectively at marginal increase in cost (assuming already existing air resources were diverted to provide an airwing.)
As for all of the all of the roles the Alaskas actually
did perform either Baltimores could have performed them nearly as well for much cheaper or Essexes would have performed most of them much better. The only thing Alaska would have them
both beat in is
day surface action, but IIRC there are only 4 instances in the whole war (Glorious, Hornet, Samar, and IIRC one or two of Ozawa's carriers were finished off by cruisers) where surface ships actually fired on carriers so it seems a moot point.
lwd wrote:Source please. I have seen nothing to indicate that the Germans ever considered using them as battleships. I'm not sure how you can consider them the basis for the Scharnhorst class either. The twins were clearly battleships by the way.
Check out Whitley's German Capital ships of WW2. The ability to fight the French Pre-Dreadnaughts of the Danton class which France might risk in the Baltic to support Poland was a driving factor in their design. On the otherhand I would agree with you that the Scharnhorst is only vaguely related to the Panzerschiffe. While originally planned as such, during the convoluted design process they abandoned the upscaled Panzerschiffe designs and instead started with a fresh design for a proper fast battleship to match Dunkerque, albeit making use of the already ordered 11" mountings.
I don't know about the alternate world you are describing, but down here, a "12-inch cruiser' is called a battlecruiser, an armored cruiser or a battleship. same thing for 18-inch "cruisers".
The original Japanese equivalents to the Alaskas were rated as 'super A-type cruisers'... so it's not just lwd's part of the world that calls ambiguous ships by definitions other than your own. Once the treaty ended any standardization in Warship classifcation ended with it.
I would call the Alaska Battlecruisers if only because Battlecruiser sounds more epic than "large cruiser" or "Super Cruiser". But conceptionally it's hard to draw the conclusion that they were anything else but scaled up cruisers designed to fill a cruiser's role instead of scaled down capital ships.
The original WW1 BCs for example were as large as or even larger than contemporary battleships (Orion ~25000, Lion ~29000) and had the illusion of being capital ships able to stand in the line of battle as substitute battleships. The Alaskas on the otherhand were
far closer to contemporary cruiser size then contemporary BB size (~20,000+ for the unbuilt post-Baltimore designs vs 70,000 for the Monatanas) and they didn't even have the illusion of being able to take on even the elderly Fusos or Kongos with any degree of confidence. Likewise the Americans produced "true" battlecruiser designs in the lead up to the Iowa class - with 12x16" guns, high speed and light armor.
But again you both seem to be wasting alot of your time arguing over a trivial detail.