Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!clyde!att!cbnews!henry@zoo.toronto.edu
From: henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer)
Newsgroups: sci.military
Subject: Re: Montana battleships
Message-ID: <6146@cbnews.ATT.COM>
Date: 2 May 89 03:29:33 GMT
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From: henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer)
>: This is essentially it.  In WWII and before, the "big three" items
>: in warship design were armor, propulsion, and armament; a gain in one
>: could only be achieved to the detriment of the others...
>
>How would fission reactor affect this tradeoff?  How would a fission
>powered Iowa compare to the fossil ones? 

Not a lot of difference.  The problem is not fuel storage, not to any
great extent anyway -- fuel tanks can be used as ersatz armor on a
battleship, so they aren't waste space -- but power output.  Warship
engines are enormous, especially on WW2-vintage ships which put a
premium on speed.  (The Iowas are not only the biggest non-carrier
warships in the world, they are also among the fastest -- faster than
many of their modern escorts.)  This means they're heavy, which is
where the tradeoff comes from.  Nuclear propulsion doesn't help the
weight much (might even hurt it), although it does wonders for high-speed
endurance.

>I believe a couple large carriers are fossil powered(JFK or America?)
>while most are fission(Nimitz, Enterprise).  Did their designers throw
>out armor totally in favor of armament(aircraft).

Carriers generally aren't armored to speak of, unless you count the
armored flight deck (which is pretty well necessary for structural
strength anyway) and the limited armor around the magazines.  The main
penalty the non-nuclear carriers suffer (apart from reduced endurance)
is less aircraft-fuel capacity, since a hull of unchanged size had to put
a fair bit of ship fuel *somewhere*.