face it Tenryuu, the line between destroyer and cruiser has become more and more blurry these days.. hell, I think in the next 25-30 years there won't be anymore "cruisers"
face it Tenryuu, the line between destroyer and cruiser has become more and more blurry these days.. hell, I think in the next 25-30 years there won't be anymore "cruisers"
I personally wouldn't even consider the Tenryuu-class to be cruisers, IJN be damned. They're more like oversized, scaled-up DDs.
face it Tenryuu, the line between destroyer and cruiser has become more and more blurry these days.. hell, I think in the next 25-30 years there won't be anymore "cruisers"
All ships get bigger over time as capabilities grow and the displacement needed to fulfill those displacements grow.
People bring up that Ticonderoga and the Burkes are about the same size, but the Ticos were originally supposed to be destroyers, since they are built on the Spruance hull. The "actual" cruiser plan was for something in the 15,000 ton range, but that project was cancelled and the Ticos re-designated as cruisers to appease congress.
If you look at the Russians, the difference between cruiser and destroyer is still there, the Slava class are 12,500 tons, the Udaloy's only 8,500.
All ships get bigger over time as capabilities grow and the displacement needed to fulfill those displacements grow.
People bring up that Ticonderoga and the Burkes are about the same size, but the Ticos were originally supposed to be destroyers, since they are built on the Spruance hull. The "actual" cruiser plan was for something in the 15,000 ton range, but that project was cancelled and the Ticos re-designated as cruisers to appease congress.
If you look at the Russians, the difference between cruiser and destroyer is still there, the Slava class are 12,500 tons, the Udaloy's only 8,500.
yeah, but I also said "these days", these days (IIRC without checking Wiki or any other sites) there are only 3 countries still operation cruisers, USA, Venezuela(?), and Russia. and all of them are 60s-80s era warships, now it's nearing their end of service life. But what about future replacements? US is more focused on getting their Burkes to 100+ counts and Russia is developing Leader-class destroyer and Gorskov-class frigate and not a single cruiser on their agenda
I personally wouldn't even consider the Tenryuu-class to be cruisers, IJN be damned. They're more like oversized, scaled-up DDs.
(Which is why they suck.)
I have to agree, the Tenryuu-class cruisers were pretty bad designs.
They had several quite questionable design features. The all-raised main batteries steals precious structural strength from the ship as well as reduce the metacentric height. The belt armor was too thin at 63mm to be useful for much. The belt was not long enough to ensure a floating raft ala All-or-Nothing and was so short that moving through waves would have exposed significant portions of the unprotected hull underwater. The battery arrangement was strange and forced rather poor firing arcs - only 1 gun could fire at the ends, which negates the advantages of having rather high speed. When chasing the Tenryuu cruisers would only bring 1 gun to bare which makes it quite unlikely it hits anything with its salvos. Even the contemporary Clemson destroyer from the USN could bring more guns to bear, not the mention the British C-class cruisers (1917 edition).
All in all, the designs just showcased how new Japan was to small ship design at the time.
Of course, the Burkes are bigger than the Aoba-class.
Flight III is actually basically going to be the displacement of a full sized treaty cruiser with a projected displacement of 9,800 long tons. It's really become pure semantics at this point, by a WWII definition the US actually has a fleet of nearly a hundred cruisers, but it calls the bulk of them destroyers instead.
NNescio said:
I personally wouldn't even consider the Tenryuu-class to be cruisers, IJN be damned. They're more like oversized, scaled-up DDs.
(Which is why they suck.)
The Tenryuu class are clearly cruisers, even by the end of World War II they were over a thousand tons heavier then even extremely large destroyers like Akizuki or Shimakaze and closer to twice the displacement of merely 'big' ones like the Special types and the Fletcher and classes derived from it. Perhaps the biggest distinction though was that they had actual armor, thin armor, but all the same they had armor. Another thing to consider is date of design, true the Tenryu wasn't amazing even when built, but it wasn't really that bad compared to other cruisers of the era either.
Cruisers in WWI were different animals since there was no limit on capital ships the cruisers being built were almost purely as scouts and flotilla leaders, anything larger was basically a left over from the turn of the century.
The C-class in particular wasn't really any better IMO, the first examples were worse and even the 1917 version that moved to a unified battery of 6 inch guns had many of the same issues as Tenryu. The main battery has all the same issues although the arrangement was slightly better, though at the expense of having the a number of guns placed even higher in the ship to allow super firing of one gun fore and aft.
Protection wasn't really better it's armor was only about 10 millimeters thicker on it's machinery, but it had no real increase on it's magazines which where only about 58mm thick on the sides, deck protection was the same at about 25mm. Furthermore no cruiser of that era possessed anything like appropriate reserve buoyancy (for that matter neither did treaty cruisers!) so that can hardly be consider a problem inherent to Tenryu. The C class also had poor speed for a cruiser Tenryuu was already regarded as too slow for her jobs at about 32-33 knots but the C class couldn't even quite make 30 which was clearly inadequate by even the early 20s for a scout of flotilla cruiser.
The RN regarded them as pretty much useless for surface actions by the 30s and planned to convert them all to AA ships, as did the IJN with the the Tenryu's, but unlike Japan the RN actually managed that on a bit less half of them. No small cruiser from the WWI era was going to be useful by WWII because they had been designed for a different sort of operation without the benefit of experience regarding a number of new technologies or knowledge of the the weird political situation that was going to completely warp naval developments during the interwar years produced.
None of the late teens early twenties designs of any nation were honestly very good if judged against the standards of later vessels that were often over twice the size yet still considered of the same class despite totally different mandates and jobs envisioned for them.
Perhaps the biggest distinction though was that they had actual armor, thin armor, but all the same they had armor.
I disagree. The armor covered such a small section of the hull and it was completely pointless and only served to reduce the structural strength of the ship. The belt on the Tenryu was about 2m tall and covered only about 30% of the entire hull length. In other words, the design attempted to be armored in the Armored Cruiser style, but failed to meet any semblance of those requirements. Rather the designers should have adopted the Protected Cruiser style which would have added significantly more protected buoyancy to the ship and freed up strength for a much thicker deck. In addition, such a deck style would have given the ship a higher metacentric height and thus much better buoyancy curves.
The C-class in particular wasn't really any better IMO, the first examples were worse and even the 1917 version that moved to a unified battery of 6 inch guns had many of the same issues as Tenryu. The main battery has all the same issues although the arrangement was slightly better, though at the expense of having the a number of guns placed even higher in the ship to allow super firing of one gun fore and aft.
That's not true though. The Tenryuu had all 4 of it's main guns raised one deck above the weather deck whereas the 1917 C-class cruisers (Carlisle) had 3 guns raised and the rest on the weather deck. The guns on the C-class cruisers were not raised higher than the Tenryuu.
Another design advantage of the C-class cruisers was the close to uninterrupted superstructure amidship which the US also adopted in the later Gearing destroyers. This was interrupted twice by the centerline torpedo tubes (which are rather long by default) on the Tenryuu. Or we could talk about the A-C and X-Z arrangements of the main battery on the Tenryuu which squeezed the forward and rear bridges. This prevented the ships from being refitted later with a large bridge for the increased number of instruments and larger fire control systems later on in their lives. This design flaw carried onto the design of Japan battleships, most notably in the Pagoda masts which resulted from the inability to enlarge the bridges in the horizontal plane.
The firing arcs on the C-class were also significantly, not slightly, better. There is a reason why no other nation arranged the main batteries on their ship like the Japanese did on the Minekaze, Tenryuu, and other such ships.
The C class also had poor speed for a cruiser Tenryuu was already regarded as too slow for her jobs at about 32-33 knots but the C class couldn't even quite make 30 which was clearly inadequate by even the early 20s for a scout of flotilla cruiser.
Speeds above 30 knots was not really as a big a deal as it is thought of today.
The French barely broke 30 kn on their destroyers. The Germans had cruisers designed for 30-31 kn on paper and ~28kn cruisers in practice before the dismantling of their navy. The Americans (the main Japanese opponent) had no modern cruisers to speak of and their destroyers hovered at 35 kns on a good day. The destroyers were extremely wet and rolled rather easily - it's unlikely that they could have sustained such speeds at any combat condition. The Japanese destroyers were faster, closing in on 40 kn, but even more fragile and wet - they too could not sustain that speed except in perfect conditions and probably reduced load (a practice the French and Japanese shared). In fact, the only ships of that period that could reliably break 30 knots were the later Japanese cruisers and the old British battlecruisers. The former were extremely structurally weak and had very poor buoyancy curves. The latter were extremely large.
If we apply the power and seakeeping equations we have nowadays, we can see that their sustained power at full displacement load was nowhere close to their stated maximum speed. We can however reach those speeds through overloading the engines and keeping the ship at reduced load. This is a rather important distinction given that most navies fought at wartime (full) displacement, not lightship.
Provisio that I don't mean to say the C-class cruisers and other of their ike were good ships - they weren't great either, but at least they encapsulated better design practices than the Tenryuu.
Tenryuu was built to lead destroyer formations instead of building destroyer leaders like the British were doing. She was built to be excellent for the then current destroyers entering service (Kaba-class, Isokaze-class, Momo-class, and Enoki-class)
The problem was, the destroyer designs got faster while she was still being built and ended up not being fast enough to do her intended job. However she was the first new Japanese cruiser design in nearly a decade at that point. She was no longer able to keep up or outrun the Japanese destroyers once the Kawakaze-class and Momi-class came out just before her.
So where does Amatsukaze fit into this? Wasn't Amatsukaze a testing ground for Shimakaze's equipment or have I got that around the wrong way?
IIRC, a prototype boiler was installed on Amatsukaze. The boiler design was improved based on the gathered data, and the final version was installed on Shimakaze.
People bring up that Ticonderoga and the Burkes are about the same size, but the Ticos were originally supposed to be destroyers, since they are built on the Spruance hull. The "actual" cruiser plan was for something in the 15,000 ton range, but that project was cancelled and the Ticos re-designated as cruisers to appease congress.
It wasn't just the Ticos. What the US Navy calls cruisers today were origingally classified as destroyer leaders. After the last of the 1940s-era cruisers were retired in the 1970s, the destroyer leaders were reclassified as cruisers.
40.7knotsShimakaze40.9Knots (fastest record)Shimakaze First genarationCompleted in 1920Until January 13,1943 sunk,she didn't have a chance to meet her second genarationCompleted in May 10, 1943I am No. 4AkikazeMinekaze-classYakazeTotal 15 shipsShiokaze2nd generation3rd generationWho are you?MinekazeYūkazeHokazeNumakazeNamikazeMom?HatakazeTachikazeTotal 2 shipsDDG-172 ShimakazeNo sistersNever mindDidn't use kanji, just hiragana1 big sisterSawakazeHatakaze-class missile destroyerNadakazeOkikazeBuilt during 1918~19223rd generation3 big sisters, 11 younger sisters.Shimakaze(1st generation)NokazeHakazeJMSDF1st generation2nd generationPastYou are definitely my second generation who inherited my speed.Who are you? Why do you have the same face as me?