In 1962
DGW pointed out that from a weapons point of view, the Type 82 was more Cruiser than Frigate.
DGS cautioned that it was an overgrown Frigate or Destroyer, not a true Cruiser: Frigate standards meant limited protection: machinery was not unitised and there was no splinter protection. In effect the ship had to be considered expendable.
I think that shows how wrong their thinking was. The US had unitised destroyer machinary and splinter protection.
Lacking those does not make it expendable and having them does not make it unexpendable (we expended a lot of well armoured ships in WW2). It just makes it a bit less survivable. Thats a sliding scale thing not a binary classification of a ship.
Postwar trends are clear that the DLG was the future for surface combatants. That a senior, DGS, sees it as “overblown” illustrates their backwards thinking and helps explain why we then had a generation of cramped ships that werent very effective and were a nightmare to try and improve.
The ship lacked a cruiser's stores, endurance and ability for self sustainment. She also lacked amenities.
And yet here we are decades later with all these “not a proper cruiser” ships doing cruiser tasks all over the world, year after year and it works just fine. The next thing, the big type 26, explicitly designed to do those tasks, is still essentially a type 22 or Leander in terms of “self supportability”. The irony being type 82 was so big it did have a lot of space for things such as amenities (a swimming pool for instance, how many cruisrs had one of those!).
Perhaps these “cruiser characteristics” just arent needed?
What does self sustainment actually mean?
i just find it staggering after the success thst was the Counties (and the insight from those that really fought the war and came up with the cruiser-destroyer) that they were still trying to go backwards into really little ships, and in parallel justify these super large ships (sea slug and escort cruisers) which were blatantly unaffordable. They had the answer as the DLG middle ground, and we know decades later that was the template for the future. It doesnt seem unreasonable to expect a bit more wisdom at the time, especially given many then did espouse it.
I love the 6” sea slug cruiser but it was insanity to waste effort on it and I see the escort cruiser as just a continuation of the same insanity. By then we knew county was the largest thing we’d build more than 1-2 of (those being carriers/capital ships) si we should have gone straight to a sea dart county. Cutting out the faff getting to type 82 by doing that means it might have been designed and built before 66 robbed us of a decent escort (albeit flawed as sans helo) and gave us the type 42 so bad it was actually dangerous.
The increasingly limited numbers of Type 82 due to cost escalations led to questions of whether a Cruiser was more efficient in terms of capability to cost.
June 1962 comparison study with a Escort Cruiser resulted VCNS recommending it. But Type 82 continued.
Given we ended up with 1 Type 82, thats one more than the zero escort cruiser we’d have got if they’d binned 82 for one.
Essentially the Cruiser was a better platform if only one such ship was to be provided per Carrier Escort group and offloaded Helicopters from the carrier.
But why this offload requirement? It took very little experience with helicopters and carriers to see they could work fine together. The reason this was being pushed was our carriers were so small every inch was wanted for fixed. Fine for that moment but solve that for the next generation by building a bigger carrier. That and a Type 82 is going to be cheaper and easier to sell than 3 types of ships.
Such a escort would have 2 Type 82 DDG at a cost of £20 million or one CG at a cost if £15 million.
The estimsted price of a cheaper attendant Sea Dart or Ikara Frigate.
Seems unwise to put any faith in their numbers tbh given how they usually turned out. Similarly estimates of how long things would take. I inore all that even today and it has served me well.
These be the opinions of the times and thus from their perspective an argument could and was made in certain quarters concerning a GWS fleet instead of conventional carriers.
They were “an” opinions. They didnt do it and I think we’d agree that a carrier fleet is far more useful than a GW fleet.
This is why we see a study of just 4 P.1154 operating from a small 15,000ton carrier. Studied.
A coal burning T43 was stuided iirc. I dont think that beijg studies gives an idea credibility.
Shades of a repeat of the DNC/DAW argument over Trade Protection Carriers from the 50's.
Which if we’d built would have been really handy, noting the Colossus types which abandoned all the previously sacrosanct rules for expedienacy, gave decades of effective and efficient servie to many. The “experts” gave hs armoured carriers which were basically junk by comparison.