Montana Class BB

Orionblamblam

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I'm looking for the best drawings possible of what woudl be called the "definitive" Montana class battleship. I'm looking to make a 1/350 scale model, and that's big enough to make sure the details are right. I've googled around, but couldn't find much that was terribly impressive online... any web references I might have missed, or usable print references?

Thanks...
 
Orionblamblam said:
I'm looking for the best drawings possible of what woudl be called the "definitive" Montana class battleship. I'm looking to make a 1/350 scale model, and that's big enough to make sure the details are right. I've googled around, but couldn't find much that was terribly impressive online... any web references I might have missed, or usable print references?

Thanks...

Norman Friedman's "U.S. Battleships" has fairly detailed drawings.

There were also drawings in the "Spring Styles" book, which is only, although they would hardly be definitive.
 
Ask on-line at
http://www.phpbbplanet.com/forum/index.php?mforum=warshipprojects
or I will copy your request there.
 
what about that one?

http://www.navsource.org/archives/01/67.htm
 
Reviving this old thread, because in "Typencompass-Schlachtschiffe der US Navy" (Type guide-
Battleships of the USN) I found a preliminary drawing of the Montana class with just a single
funnel, so the superstructure a look more like the South Dakota class. This series of publications
generally isn't free from errors, so I'm not sure, if that's really related to the Montana, the
inscriptions aren't readable, too, but actually it seems to be a post-South Dakota design.
 

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IIRC that particular design is an Iowa preliminary. Originally the Iowas were just enlarged South Dakotas taking advantage of the 'escalator' clause in the London treaty to add ten thousand extra tons. As these were to be the same speed as the South Dakotas, the tonnage went into an extra turret and a bit more armor. The decision to produce a 7-8 knot faster battleship came rather late in the design process. Then it was just a South Dakota with the 10,000 extra tons spent on length, a bigger machinery plant and slightly more powerful guns and no real change in protection.
 
I'm not so sure it's an Iowa design study. The legend says "BB-65 Scheme 4," which suggests it's a preliminary Montana, before they decided to build two additional Iowas.
 
Match the Spring Styles schemes with the tables in Friedman's BB book and you'll have you're answer(s). Actually, the Spring Styles pages define each design as well.

http://www.history.navy.mil/photos/albums/s511-bb.htm

BB65-4 was from the Jan-Feb 1940 round of designs for the BB-67 class. Friedman says, and I'll paraphrase, "Designs -3 and -4 were more developed versions of an earlier set of 28 knot, 12 gun designs with 20k yard wide immunity zones, 52,500-54,500 displacements, and 5"/38s OR 5"/54s. They were designed prior to the decision to limit the draft to a max of 36 feet." They were part of round 2 of 5 of the designs studies that resulted in the final BB-67 design.

http://www.history.navy.mil/photos/images/s-file/s511-13c.htm
Scheme BB65-8 is the neatest listed in the Spring Styles in my opinion. A full 12 gun, 33 knot BB fully protected against 16" fire. Just shows what you REALLY need to make a 12 gun BB-61 while maintaining her speed and removing the shortfalls in her armor.
 
Orionblamblam said:
I'm looking for the best drawings possible of what woudl be called the "definitive" Montana class battleship. I'm looking to make a 1/350 scale model, and that's big enough to make sure the details are right. I've googled around, but couldn't find much that was terribly impressive online... any web references I might have missed, or usable print references?

Thanks...

Here is a very good rendering. It may require registration however...

http://www.shipbucket.com/images.php?dir=Never%20Built%20Designs/United%20States%20of%20America/BB-67%20Montana%201948.png
 
LSUfan said:
Orionblamblam said:
I'm looking for the best drawings possible of what woudl be called the "definitive" Montana class battleship. I'm looking to make a 1/350 scale model, and that's big enough to make sure the details are right. I've googled around, but couldn't find much that was terribly impressive online... any web references I might have missed, or usable print references?

Thanks...

Here is a very good rendering. It may require registration however...

http://www.shipbucket.com/images.php?dir=Never%20Built%20Designs/United%20States%20of%20America/BB-67%20Montana%201948.png
The author of that picture has revisited everything, and finalized his work. See this thread of their forum: Scroll down a bit:

http://www.shipbucket.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=13&t=3517&start=210
 
MihoshiK said:
LSUfan said:
Orionblamblam said:
I'm looking for the best drawings possible of what woudl be called the "definitive" Montana class battleship. I'm looking to make a 1/350 scale model, and that's big enough to make sure the details are right. I've googled around, but couldn't find much that was terribly impressive online... any web references I might have missed, or usable print references?

Thanks...

Here is a very good rendering. It may require registration however...

http://www.shipbucket.com/images.php?dir=Never%20Built%20Designs/United%20States%20of%20America/BB-67%20Montana%201948.png
The author of that picture has revisited everything, and finalized his work. See this thread of their forum: Scroll down a bit:

http://www.shipbucket.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=13&t=3517&start=210

That's pretty cool, although I have a couple of caveats:

-he included a bunch of illustrations, but other than a short label, he didn't explain what they all were. My impression is that the latter versions are his extrapolations of what the ship(s) would have looked like if they had been built based upon similar modifications made to the Iowas. For instance, the enclosed trapezoidal bridge would have been added because it was added to the Iowas (starting with a curved bridge added to New Jersey in late 1943). I can accept his interpretations, but would have liked some explanations of what they were and what we should look for.

-no top views that I saw. From the side, the Montana looks a lot like an Iowa with an extra turret. But look at it from the top and you see that it is a much wider ship. That makes clear that they did not simply put a plug into the ship to make it longer, this was an entirely new vessel with a substantially larger interior.

I know that the carrier was the new capital ship of WWII and the Montanas were impractical and wasteful. Still, it would have been amazing to see them get built.
 
Writeup from War Is Boring

http://warisboring.com/articles/americas-super-battleships-that-never-were/
 
This is more about the story of the various designs, with some drawings as well:
http://forum.worldofwarships.eu/index.php?/topic/4124-uss-bb-67-montana-class-and-preliminaries/
 
"Montana: Everything You Need to Know About the Super Battleship America Never Built"
by Robert Farley

July 20, 2017

Source:
http://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/montana-everything-you-need-know-about-the-super-battleship-21603
 
The articles linked here are frankly pretty poor, and missing some details that I'll try to summarize here (books by Friedman and Garzke & Dulin go into much more depth).

BB67 (initially BB65 before 65 and 66 were reallocated to Iowas) were continuations of the "slow" BB61 schemes that were studied alongside the "fast" schemes after the tonnage escalation clause of the second LNT. Of course, the "fast" schemes resulted in the Iowa class, but slow schemes would be continued for the Montanas and studied/iterated for a few more years until 1942. The initial BB65 schemes did try to squeeze twelve 16" guns and BB57/61 levels of protection at 45,000 tons standard displacement and 27.5 knots, but with the new 2,700 lb Mark 8 "Super Heavy" APC shell and the abandonment of all naval treaties in 1940, the required protection ballooned the design to 63,221 tons standard displacement. Concurrent with the Montanas, there was a plan to expand the Panama Canal locks to 140 ft in width. Fast 33 knot Montana designs were rejected as they would have been impractically big for the time in order to maintain the same level of protection and firepower.

As far as the original request, here is a pretty good representation of what BB67 may have looked liked, based on the last iteration of the contract design, BB67-4.

Iowa Montana.png

Keep in mind that the contract design for the Montanas went up to BB67-4 in 1942, and that the detailed design would likely be assigned to the lead shipyard building the first ship. Because of that, changes to the design are still possible, and in some cases rather drastic. Just look at the Iowa class: the Brooklyn Navy Yard drastically altered the machinery arrangement and subdivision from the contract design, with the number of longitudinal compartments doubled and beam increased by a foot, and this change was applied to all ships of the class.

Some good drawings of the Montanas are available in this year's March INRO issue. As a side note, after speaking with naval historian Mr. Bill Jurens, William Garzke and Robert Dulin are planning on releasing updated volumes of their battleship books, which I very much look forward to (I have all of the current volumes).
 
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A world in which the USN got the Montanas and the RN the Lions would have been a great one for warship fans and modelmakers alike.
Perhaps if aircraft development had been slower and torpedo bombers and submarines less effective than in reality we might have seen another generation of battlewagons.
 
A world in which the USN got the Montanas and the RN the Lions would have been a great one for warship fans and modelmakers alike.
Perhaps if aircraft development had been slower and torpedo bombers and submarines less effective than in reality we might have seen another generation of battlewagons.
Well, the simplest solution would be less destructive Great Patriotic War for USSR... so Stalin could proceed with his fleet of "Sovetsky Soyuz"-class battleships. A bunch of 65.000-ton battlewagons, armed with excellent 16-inch guns, could drive US and UK into completing something comparable (while "Iowa" was more or less comparable to "Sovetsky Souyz", the "King George V" and "Vanguard" weren't)
 
Well, the simplest solution would be less destructive Great Patriotic War for USSR... so Stalin could proceed with his fleet of "Sovetsky Soyuz"-class battleships. A bunch of 65.000-ton battlewagons, armed with excellent 16-inch guns, could drive US and UK into completing something comparable (while "Iowa" was more or less comparable to "Sovetsky Souyz", the "King George V" and "Vanguard" weren't)
Well no, because while on paper the Sovetsky Soyuz (Project 23) looked formidable, the ships had a litany of manufacturing issues and design flaws. For instance, the manufacturing flaws resulted in their attempt at replicating the Italian "Pugliese" torpedo protection system quite unsuccessful.

@Phoenix_jz can probably go more in-depth, as he has better insight into the Italian designs that the Soviets owe much of their early WW2 designs to. (BTW, I'm Delicious... from the WoWS forums)

The subsequent Project 24 design in the 1950s was more competent, but by then, the actual value of such a ship is frankly questionable and its mainly pushed by Stalin's outdated desire for a big-gun ship Navy. Once he died all work ok big gun ships, including Project 24 and Stalingrad, which was already under construction, ceased.
 
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Well no, because while on paper the Sovetsky Soyuz (Project 23) looked formidable, the ships had a litany of manufacturing issues and design flaws. For instance, the manufacturing flaws resulted in their attempt at replicating the Italian "Pugliese" torpedo protection system quite unsuccessful.

Yes, but who exactly could knew about it in hypothetical 1945+? :) And with all its flaws, the 65.000-ton battleship would clearly make short work out of KGV.
 
The KGV's were not the best performers against heavy armor. 16 inch
guns or larger on a large ship would have been very hard on them.
 
The KGV's were not the best performers against heavy armor. 16 inch
guns or larger on a large ship would have been very hard on them.
Who knows, it never happened.
KGV battered Bismarck into a wreck (with lots of help from Rodney, though the close-in low trajectory shooting was largely wasteful in the haste to sink her) and PoW had inflicted some critical damage on Bismarck (albeit beyond the main belt) despite being rushed out of harbour and with serious turret problems. DoY battered Scharnhorst into a sinking wreck too.

How many other battleship classes of WW2 can claim two enemy battleships sunk to their credit?

On the debit side PoW was lost to airpower due to some lucky hits (her propeller ripping a massive gash) buts its unlikely she would have escaped either way. Her armour scheme was about the best for her displacement and to be honest no battleship was ever completely proof from 16in shells.
A 65,000 ton ship could absorb a lot of punishment but there is no defence against underwater damage or fire-control systems being wrecked.
 
The shipbucket drawings does not fully gives back the true look of the BB67-4 Montana:

ddt7c8x-f30a95da-e190-4807-ad01-29449d92ebc6.png
 
Many hear are familiar with how the Iowa class was originally going to use the Mark 2 and Mark 3 16"/50 caliber guns left over from the cancelled 1920s construction programs for new battleships and battlecruisers. Yet lack of communication between departments during the design phase meant they wouldn't fit in the turrets so the new Mark 7 was designed and built.

However these guns were still around so why wasn't the Montana class designed to use them?
 
Logistics are always a factor but production of large caliber guns is often cited as being one of the bottlenecks of battleship production so reusing those old guns would have sidestepped that issue. Perhaps the US had reached a point by then where they could manufacture new battleship guns quickly enough where it wasn't a problem.
 
Logistics are always a factor but production of large caliber guns is often cited as being one of the bottlenecks of battleship production so reusing those old guns would have sidestepped that issue. Perhaps the US had reached a point by then where they could manufacture new battleship guns quickly enough where it wasn't a problem.
That is a bottleneck. When you're building huge numbers of big gun ships in a short time frame (or in the case of the UK, you've allowed your building capacity to fall below your minimum requirements). Given the rate at which US battleships were being built and the industrial capacity of the US, reusing the old guns wasn't needed. Not to mention, the Mark 7 was just a better, more accurate gun.
 
Penetration power.
While they could save off costs by using the older guns of the Lexingtons and South Dakota I's for the Iowas. The new cannon under development had promising results for range and muzzle velocity.
Originally the 4 Iowas would require 36 barrels which the USN might had in adequate supply but for another 2 Iowas and 5 Montanas that is way too much barrels!
Altogether 70+1 (1 prototype) was finished by 1922 and 44 was still under construction for a total of 114 barrels.
6x8=48 was required for the Lexingtons and another 6x12=72 for the South Dakotas meaning a total of 120 barrels was required.
50 Barrels was ready for the Iowas (20 was transferred to the army) for which 36 for the 4 Iowas could be used and say 9 barrels and spare parts for a 5th Iowa but they were not enough for the Montanas (60 barells required).

The New guns on the other could be constructed on time and had much better ballistic properties.
 
There isn't a "true look" of the Montanas as even BB67-4 was a contract design that could have seen significant revisions when the plans are handed to the lead shipyard for detailed design. As such we can only hypothesize on its likely appearance based on trends observed during World War 2.

Regarding the original 16"/50 cal Mark 2/3, the General Board wanted to use these guns on BB61 because they demanded more capabilities over BB57 than just 6 knots more speed. Of course, we now know these guns were never used due to the turret debacle in late 1938, and the new lighter Mark 7 gun was with more advanced materials was developed and used instead. For BB67, since the Mark 7 already exists, there isn't much impetus to reuse the Mark 2/3.

Interestingly, an 18"/48 cal gun was considered for "slow" 27.5 knot BB61 proposals, but this was no longer considered in any BB65 schemes that I'm aware of (one of which actually had 14"/50 cal guns, interestingly enough).
 
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There ever a long spinal mount Uber-bow chaser that could be fired straight ahead?
 
There ever a long spinal mount Uber-bow chaser that could be fired straight ahead?
There was Vesuvius, but experience with her convinced everyone (who needed convincing) that fixed gun(ish) weapons were impractical. Earlier Battleships sometimes had a fixed bow torpedo tube, but they essentially never did anything except take up space.
 
There ever a long spinal mount Uber-bow chaser that could be fired straight ahead?
The Matsushimas didn't mount their main gun spinally, but otherwise they come pretty close to the idea. In particular because the mount was not balanced, and also oversized for the ships carrying it, so turning it off-centerline caused the ships to heel.
 
There was Vesuvius, but experience with her convinced everyone (who needed convincing) that fixed gun(ish) weapons were impractical. Earlier Battleships sometimes had a fixed bow torpedo tube, but they essentially never did anything except take up space.
Well, the idea basically was to augment the ramming attack with torpedo - in case enemy would evade the ram, it could still be torpedoed (the ram was more reliable, but harder to employ; the torpedo was easier to employ, but less reliable). But the bow tube usually weren't fixed; it could train to aim on the target not directly forward.

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As you could see, the tube have rather good train ability.
 
I was thinking something like a stem to stern Paris gun that would have its own deck...lots of shock absorbers so the ship could flex around it...shocks also in the frame. Some play in aiming. Vertical missile tubes to either side. No turrets.
 
was thinking something like a stem to stern Paris gun that would have its own deck...lots of shock absorbers so the ship could flex around it...shocks also in the frame. Some play in aiming. Vertical missile tubes to either side. No turrets.
Basically you described a Rendel gunboat)
 
I think he wants a WW2/Cold War esque naval version of the Sovereign and Eclipse class Super Star Destroyers from Star Wars (These ships had a spinal mount super laser as their main weapon)
eg a warship built around a fixed mounted 80cm/41 Schwerer Gustav cannon
 
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