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From: henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer)
Newsgroups: sci.military
Subject: Re: Naval vessel naming conventions
Message-ID: <11266@cbnews.ATT.COM>
Date: 9 Nov 89 15:28:39 GMT
References: <11070@cbnews.ATT.COM> <11149@cbnews.ATT.COM>
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From: henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer)
>From: eos!woody@eos.arc.nasa.gov (Wayne Wood)
>as a former naval gunfire spotter i can assure you that modern "cruisers"
>arte not anywhere as large as their WWII counterparts...

Early WW2 offical numbers put cruisers at 7000-10000 tons.  I don't have
good numbers for most of the current classes, but the Spruance class is
around 7500.

[mod.note: Actually, cruisers went as low as 3000-4000 tons.  The bottom
	edge gets a bit murky; the Japanese Yubari class CL, for example,
	was about 2900 tons (1923 vintage), while the French Fantasque
	class DD was a bit over 3000 tons (though it was abnormally large
	by any opinion).  The US Alaska class of Large Cruisers (CB) was
	about 27,000 tons, though most consider it a battlecruiser.
	Typically, though, a CL was 5000-8000 tons, a CA 8000-13,000.  	
	That, too, is murky, because the distinction was based on guns
	and armor, not displacement; the USS Cleveland class of 10,000 tonners
	were CL's as they carried 6" guns.  - Bill ]
	

>i've seen the
>old Oklahoma City and fired it once.  i think that while the high speed
>5" 38's and 54's of the newer ship can provide greater volume of fire the
>old 8" guns tore up bigger chunks of turf...

As I said, the new ships are not nearly as heavily *armed* as the old
cruisers.  There was a project to build a compact 8-inch gun that could
replace the 5-inchers of most of the current ships, to combine rapid
fire with heavier shells; the USMC (which cares quite a bit about shore
bombardment) was quite unhappy when the bean-counters cancelled it.

                                     Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
                                 uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu