Warship
Classification Warship
Classification>Can someone tell me the difference between a Battleship, Heavy Cruiser,
Cruiser, Etc.?
>
>I can't seem to tell the difference. For example, the HMS Hood was
a cruiser
>and it was 45,000 tons, and the HMS Price Of Wales was a battleship
and was
>42,000 tons. Also The USS Ticonderoga is a cruiser, and the USS Spruance
is
>a destroyer. Both are on the same hull!
>
>The same goes for Frigates etc. I can't seem to find a resource the
>explains the classification system, even in hard core Naval books
and
>websites. It seems like they assume you should know that!
>
>Does it have to do with Displacement, Armour, Aramament, or role?
The answer to your question is "all of the above."
The rules change with time and navy.
Toward the end of the age of sail, there was a nice, neat ranking system with first to fourth rate line of battle ships (ships of the line), frigates, sloops, brigs and so on. Some nefarious maniacs invented the steam engine and screw propellor, and the world started to go to hell. Then some other (some of the same ones too) anarchists made cheap iron and steel and really screwed things up royally.
The French started screwing iron & steel plate to the outside of some ships and the RN, as often, refused to be outdone, started later and finished first with a frigate calle HMS Warrior. She still exists, a magnificent museum with a nice web-site.
Warrior was a frigate, because she had all her guns on one deck. By the old rules, largish ships with guns on one deck were frigates, so she was a frigate. Never mind that she could shoot up anything that floated, was pretty much impervious to anything that anything else could do to her, and was about the fastest thing going, she had to be a frigate, the rules said so.
(HMS Warrior was fitted with Great Big Guns (a religious fetish/idol still worshiped today by the Iowans), rather than two or three decks of puny little guns.)
Things kept changing fast. Warrior's guns still shot straight out the side (broadside) but even bigger guns could be fitted, if one gun could be made to point in many directions. Lots of people played with this idea. The Europeans had useful ships in service first but the damn Yankees got one into service first (USS MONITOR) & got all the press. (Her opponent, CSS VIRGINIA was a version of a crimean war gunboat built on the burned-out hull of USS MERRIMAC, a fine example of ingenuity under pressure, but not of naval innovation.)
Back on the Good Old Days (also a religious fetish, but not phallic enough to attract young 'mericans (old ones seem to sign up)), a frigate could go anywhere at sea there wasn't a shore battery or a ship of the line. It could clean up commerce raiders (then called privateers), engage in a spot of malicious trade vandalism itself, scout for the big ships, escort convoys and so on. Warrior had ruined all that by being too big, tough and expensive. The word cruiser emerged for ships that could take on the old frigate role. As time went on, there were big ones and small ones and various experimental and specialized designs. Eventually the names stabilized, although there were exceptions:
Third class, scout or unprotected cruiser - a ship, generally of less than 3,000 tons, around twenty knots, several guns of one or two sizes, no protection to speak of. (Some of these got rerated as sloops or gunboats.)
Protected or second class cruiser - a bit bigger and faster ship with an armoured horizontal deck at about the water-line (but over the magazines, boilers and engines). This deck didn't have to be very thick to keep shells out of the vitals, with the short range shooting of the day blows would be glancing.
Armoured cruisers - a larger (many were as large and cost as much as battleships) better-armed (by WWI RN AC's had a combination of 9.2, 6 and 4" guns) ship. A lot of money went into making these ships really fast for their day, twenty-three knots being not uncommon.
Meanwhile, Warrior, and her generation had become obsolete, to a new sort of ship that had four or so really phallic GBG's in a turret at each end, a number of smaller guns that were still expected to be important and a tertiary battery for shooting up small stuff. They were meant to fight battles and named battleships.
Now that things were becoming reasonably rational (we're around 1900), the work of the necromancer Whitehead and his disciples started to bear fruit. Then, in an orgy of anarchy, Parsons, Marconi, Culbeneri (not sure of that name) and others stirred the pot. Finally a group, innocently named the Fishpond, took the reins of power, in the UK, the only place that mattered. They built a new battleship, better than anything that had gone before, HMS Dreadnought. She had almost no puny little guns but not four but ten GBGs that could shoot ten miles, nothing new, but because fire control was easier, might actually hit something that far away, which was. Because she had turbines, she could catch almost any cruiser in a long chase. (Never mind that the 'mericuns had started a similar ship first, the Brits finished first and got their press revenge for the Monitor fiasco.)
To scout for such a ship, you need something even faster. In those brief days, (from 1907-1911? I'm not sure of the year the first modern light cruiser was launched), it took a really big ship to go fast for a long time. It had to be big to carry powerful radio aerials of the day too. If it has to be really big, why not put GBG's on it? Enter the battle cruiser.
Everybody jumped in. The Germans built a pile of battleships that couldn't do them any good at all. The British built an even bigger fleet, to make certain of that. The Amercans built a bunch too, they're suckers for the phallic, but they had no use for the things. France built some to get at the Italians. The Italins didn't mind that, they were going to ally with the French, but they built a fleet, to counter the Austrains. The Austrians built a nice fleet that would have been usefull if their base weren't in the Adriatic with the Italians, French and British outside. The Japanese built a nicely balanced fleet appropraite to their needs, but who noticed Orientals in 1910, unless they had money?
Around 1895 torpedo boats became popular. The RN couldn't allow that and built torpedo boat destroyers to sink them. Naturally, once you've heroically destroyed the perfidious weapons of the dastardly enemy, you should repay in the same coin. By WWI, everybody was building TBD's although some still called them torpedo boats.
By the time big mistake number 1 started, people had decided that it didn't make much sense to send big ships without a foot of steel protection within shooting distance of ships that did. They'd also figured out that a little more speed made a ship more useful. The best big ships on both sides (the Queen Elizabeth BB's and the Derflinger BC's) show the convergence of the two lines.
Meanwhile, some genius tried building a fast turbine ship with good sea-keeping and a one-size armament on about 4000 tons. It was cruiser-sized, and cruiser tasked but didn't fit the standard moulds. It was on the light side (some armoured cruisers were over 15,000 tons) and got called a light cruiser. These ships were one surprise success of BM1 (the other was the submarine).
BM1 established the following incontrovertably, which didn't stop lots of people from denying, warping or ignoring the messages:
1) It is a lot easier to shoot something that you can see. (Virtually every gun duel in the war went to the side with the visibility advantage.)
2) Obsolete junk gets sunk quickly, only two of the seven? large combatants sunk at Jutland were modern, of the old ships present, only Van der Tann stood up well to prolonged shelling.
3) Skelton's law of comfy ships (the more comfortable ships win the campaigns).
4) The less fragile your propellants the better. (The RN lost three battle cruisers to propellant explosions.)
5) Submarines can be a pain where you sit.
6) People are the hard part.
As usual during a war, more small than big ships get built. The armoured cruisers, being old and built to an obsolete concept did rather poorly. The light cruisers did well but, even the late-war RN C D & E classes were not powerful enough to suit. In the first easily identifiable step of the post-war idiotic cotillion, the RN ordered the Hawkins class, magnificent ships mounting 7-7.5 inch guns on 9,500 tons. This would cost them dearly.
The politcal idiocy following WWI isn't part of this story, except that it coughed up efforts at arms limitation. Light cruisers had stabilized at 6" guns, the treaties enshrined that in granite. The Hawkins though, were too powerful. The treaties settled on a bit bigger - 8" guns and 10,000 tons. The tonnage per fleet was limited. (This screwed the RN royally. More, smaller ships would have worked out a lot better.)
The treaties ended some amusing lines of development. The RN turned the weird sisters into carriers. The USN did the same with two of the Lexingtons. Nobody built BB's for years (1925 to 35). The characteristics of warships were cast in stone (I'm not looking the numbers up MMV):
destroyers, 2,000 tons or less
light cruisers, less than 10,000 tons, 6" guns or smaller
heavy cruisers, less than 10,000 tons, 8" guns or smaller
battleships, less than 35,000 tons, 14" guns or smaller, or built before
the treaty (Nelson and Rodney being permitted exceptions)
Smaller, slower ships were not regulated. The name sloop had carried right through from the before the Napoleonic wars, first as a small sailing ship (escort, despatch vessel etc.), then as a patrol ship bigger than a gunboat and smaller than a cruiser, but very useful for policing the colonies. Some of these lasted right up to BM1, when the RN took the name for a new type of escort vessel, about destroyer-sized but slower and with much better range and improved sea-keeping. It built some very nice ships of this type between the big mistakes. New types, minesweepers, submarines and so on, proliferated.
Still, in 1939, things were pretty organized.
Battleships - fight other battleships (and raid commerce, a German mistake)
Battle Cruisers - beat up on commerce raiders, especially panzerschiffe
Cruisers - scout (gradually taken over by aircraft through the war),
patrol, etc.
Destroyers - escort anything, torpedo BB's
Frigate - name not used
BM2 immediately established that submarines were going to be a pain where you sit. In the frenzy to *do something,* a small uncomfortable escort that could be churned out like popcorn was given the honourable name "corvette." Hundreds were built. (These ships, although uncomfortable, were luxurious compared to submarines; their eventual victory is not a violation of Skelton's Law.)
Corvettes were nice enough, but something a bit bigger was needed. More sloops were an obvious answer, but sloops were built to naval standards and would take too long. A sort of super-corvette was built, but named frigate because the name is sexier. The durn 'mercans, having different politicians, and a CNO whose leg had been pissed on by a RN poodle at Scapa Flow in 1917 (TINS) wouldn't go along and called the same thing a destroyer-escort. The Buckey and Everts classes were frigates to the RN and DE's to the USN.
From early 1943 on, the other side had pretty much run out of effective ships (took until May for submarines in the Atlantic). Invasions became *the* thing, and an unseemly brawl broke out as more and more ships fought over fewer and fewer jobs. Despite the obvious superiority of destroyers with light cruiser support for moving mud and smashing concrete (sloops, minesweepers etc. did good stuff too but we don't talk about that), heavy cruisers and battleships were used as the the GBG fetish prevailed.
That brings us to the end of WWII. Things are reasonably understandable, so it's time for the anarchists to get going. Let's blame von Braun. Air and missles are the big thing now. Without going into details or tracing the history, we have:
Corvettes: small, fast ships designed to make a nuisance of themselves near shore (but not as near as FAC).
Frigates: general purpose ships affordable to middle sized navies. Many emphasize one aspect as the Halifaxes emphasize ASW. Many carry helicopters.
Destroyers: frigate to cruiser sized ships, generally emphasizing AAW, often called area AAW as opposed to just taking care of themselves (Spruances are ASW). Helicopters are common.
Cruisers: humongous, bloated frigates or destroyers only affordable by the USN. Tasked as AAW, except when the USN changes its mind.
The technical errors in the above are mine, as are the over-simplifications and gross distortions. Sort them out for yourself. The spelling errors are Viknce's fault, he lent me his old spell checker.