Did the USN continue converting cruisers to missile ships for too long?

[uk 75]

I love the big US Navy missile cruisers. Only Long Beach was a new built ship the others were converted from legacy gun cruisers.
By the 1960s the US Navy had stopped building or converting cruisers instead of what it for a while called frigates then destroyer leaders. Later these ships of Bainbridge, Leahy, Truxtun and Belknap classes would be called cruisers.
Did the USN do the right thing by stopping building or converting real cruisers or should they have even done it sooner?

 

[Moose]

It's hard to argue against the advantages of "these ships already exist and are fairly low-mileage, why wouldn't we use them?" especially at the time. We can look back through history and point out how unoptimized the resulting ships were and how decisions based on bad assumptions or excessive optimism hurt them, but the solutions weren't as obvious in the environment these decisions were made.

 

[Archibald]

There were shitloads of Baltimore, Oregon and Des Moines CAs, plus even more CLs. So the temptation was strong. The ships were large and powerful, guns could be removed to make room - so why not ?

Asking in passing - were there any plans to convert Worcesters into guided missile cruisers ?

Baltimore-class cruiser - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Oregon City-class cruiser - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Des Moines-class cruiser - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Cleveland-class cruiser - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Fargo-class cruiser - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Worcester-class cruiser - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[pathology_doc]

Did the USN do the right thing by stopping building or converting real cruisers or should they have even done it sooner?

You can possibly rip the guts out of a Cleveland or Baltimore and stuff the missile system in faster than you can build a complete new ship. That gives you missile-armed hulls in the water while you work out what a clean sheet of paper design should look like.

It may be worth noting that:
a) Long Beach was the only new-build missile ship ever to operate Talos; all the other Talos ships were Baltimore or Cleveland rebuilds.
b) Long Beach was a one-off; the USN built multiple nuclear powered cruisers (well, DLGNs that were later redesignated), but no others quite like her. As I understand it, she was expensive and troublesome (and consequently even more expensive).

 

[A Tentative Fleet Plan]

As I've posted elsewhere a follow-on to Long Beach (Same armament as SCB-173/Albany-class, armed with with Talos, potentially with with Tartar and/or Regulus) was planned in 1957 to be built in FY60. This died due to a combination of Polaris eating up the funding, and over-optimism over how early Typhon would enter service.

 

[Scott Kenny]

I love the big US Navy missile cruisers. Only Long Beach was a new built ship the others were converted from legacy gun cruisers.
By the 1960s the US Navy had stopped building or converting cruisers instead of what it for a while called frigates then destroyer leaders. Later these ships of Bainbridge, Leahy, Truxtun and Belknap classes would be called cruisers.
Did the USN do the right thing by stopping building or converting real cruisers or should they have even done it sooner?

In terms of getting some missile capability right now (well, within a few years, but faster than a new build ship would be ready), then using the experience of those ships to design the next generation, I think the USN did the right thing. Get enough ships for each heavy carrier to have one or two cruiser escorts, then design some new ships from the keel up as missile escorts.

 

[Artie Bob]

I remember seeing the Long Beach in the late 1950s or early 1960s. My most vivid impression was that very little hull paint remained from the bow back to the superstructure region. Apparently, the ship had been making some high speeds runs before I saw her.

ArtieBob

 

[A Tentative Fleet Plan]

Asking in passing - were there any plans to convert Worcesters into guided missile cruisers ?

The Worcester-class were considered for conversion alongside the Baltimore-class and Oregon City-class as part of the design process for what became the Albany-class.

 

[Scott Kenny]

I remember seeing the Long Beach in the late 1950s or early 1960s. My most vivid impression was that very little hull paint remained from the bow back to the superstructure region. Apparently, the ship had been making some high speeds runs before I saw her.

ArtieBob

The Kentucky had a radioman come down with kidney stones blocking both sides, resulting in a week-long sprint towards the California coast to get close enough to medevac poor Dempewolf, and then two weeks more sprinting back to the area around Hawaii. When we pulled into Pearl Harbor for the exercise torpedo load, we didn't have much nonskid left on the hull, and the whole area was orange rust...

 

[BlackBat242]

What "Kentucky"?

 

[CV12Hornet]

Rereading Friedman's US Cruisers, there was expressed preference for new ships as early as 1953/1954, mostly to avoid having to rip out a bunch of bulkheads, but the design exercises of those years also showed that new-build missile cruisers would be prohibitively expensive. It seems that nuclear power proved the impetus to build new missile cruisers, rather than convert more ships; the nuclear cruiser was part of the ongoing push to bring nuclear power to the surface fleet.

The other major driver was Typhon, in that the Navy was unable to keep frigate designs out of the cruiser size bracket due to the power and space demands of SPG-59.

So given these factors, I don't think the Navy would have or should have stopped the conversions sooner.

 

[Scott Kenny]

What "Kentucky"?

SSBN-737 Gold.

 

[BlackBat242]

I see. So your reply to Artie Bob about something he had seen in the late 1950s or 1960s* was that he had seen CGN-9 after a run you made sometime after 1991**.

CGN-9 was fast enough to go back in time... cool.


* CGN-9 commissioned 9 Sept. 1961, decommissioned 1 May 1995 (deactivated 2 July 1994)
** SSBN-737 commissioned 13 July 1991

 

[TomS]

I see. So your reply to Artie Bob about something he had seen in the late 1950s or 1960s* was that he had seen CGN-9 after a run you made sometime after 1991**.

CGN-9 was fast enough to go back in time... cool.


* CGN-9 commissioned 9 Sept. 1961, decommissioned 1 May 1995 (deactivated 2 July 1994)
** SSBN-737 commissioned 13 July 1991

It was just about the impact of high-speed runs in general on marine paints, I think. They're all ablative to some degree, so speed scrubs the paint off.

 

[Moose]

Also applies to other hull coatings. The VA boats, earlier blocks in particular, have trouble with loosing their coating during prolonged high speed transits.

 

[Scott Kenny]

I see. So your reply to Artie Bob about something he had seen in the late 1950s or 1960s* was that he had seen CGN-9 after a run you made sometime after 1991**.

CGN-9 was fast enough to go back in time... cool.


* CGN-9 commissioned 9 Sept. 1961, decommissioned 1 May 1995 (deactivated 2 July 1994)
** SSBN-737 commissioned 13 July 1991

Commenting about how high speed, cavitation and vibration due to that speed, and how quickly bare Naval steel rusts.

That 3 week sprint was in 2003 or 04.