Your job is to design a new tank. \u00a0You have a weight and size limit – your tank has to fit evenly onto a flatbed rail car, so it can be moved around the country. \u00a0In your design you’re going to cram a huge, powerful cannon into it, along with thick, heavy armor. \u00a0But that means you’re going to have to put a big engine into it, so that it can actually move. \u00a0Within the size restrictions you have, that means building a taller, more capacious vehicle to hold the engine – but tall tanks are easier to see at hit, which affects survivability. \u00a0Making it smaller requires either accepting \u00a0a slower tank (compromising Mobility), or a smaller gun, or less ammunition for a larger gun (less Firepower), or making it lighter (reducing armor, and thus reducing Survivability).<\/p>\n
Naval ships have the same set of compromises.<\/p>\n
Global<\/strong>: \u00a0In the early 20th century, it could be fairly said the sun never set on the British Empire. \u00a0The Empire and Commonwealth – the network for former colonies that had become independent, but remained part of a close-knit economic and defense alliance – stretched from (using current names except as noted for all the below) Canada, the Bahamas, the Falklands and Belize in the west, east to the Home islands, to colonies, to its Mediterranean holdings (Gibraltar, Malta, and of course the vital Suez Canal, in an Egypt that Britain ruled as a puppet proxy), to the protectorates and Commonwealth states that dominated Africa (Nigeria, Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, and the commonwealth nations of Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and South Africa) and the Middle East (Palestine, Jordan, Iraq, and Britain’s then and present ally and client Oman), its keystone possession India (which then also included what became Pakistan and Bangladesh) and Sri Lanka, and \u00a0to its’ far eastern colonies in Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong, Fiji, and of course its Commonwealth allies Australia and New Zealand.<\/p>\n And from the 1600s on, the Royal Navy was designed to sail, and fight, anywhere in that massive slice of the world – from the stormy, sub-arctic expanses of the far North Sea and North Atlantic, to the temperate reaches of the Mediterranean, to the dolorous tropics of the Indian Ocean.<\/p>\n And over the years, the Royal Navy arrived at a design formula that institutionalized the order of importance of the four key design factors, based on the mission “fight anywhere in the Empire”.<\/p>\n Mobility came first – in terms of “Seaworthiness”, as opposed to “Speed”. \u00a0A British ship had to be able to weather sea conditions ranging from North Atlantic gales to Indian Ocean cyclones. \u00a0This meant building ships that were designed and engineered to remain not merely afloat, but controllable in terrible seas. \u00a0(Mobility expressed as “range” was less important – Britain’s empire had refueling bases about every 2,000 miles, from Halifax Nova Scotia to the UK to Gibraltar to Suez to Mumbai to Sri Lanka to Singapore to Hong Kong. \u00a0British designers assumed those bases would be available. \u00a0World War 2 showed it a bad assumption – but we’re jumping ahead, here).<\/p>\n Protection – armor, damage control and catastophe-proofing – as a general rule, came in second. \u00a0Firepower came in third; too many, too heavy guns and torpedoes made the ships top-heavy, which made them less stable and harder to handle (and more importantly, handle in a combat-effective way) in heavy seas.<\/p>\n Different nations made the compromise differently. \u00a0The Italian navy emphasized speed over range – they fought in the Mediterranean exclusively, and their main goal was to react quickly to contingencies in that ocean. \u00a0Its rather placid weather meant “seaworthiness” was less vital. \u00a0The US Navy, whose main theater of operations was the Pacific, emphasized long range over pure seaworthiness; their firepower was on paper more modest, although greatly augmented by superior technology like fire control radar.<\/p>\n And the German Navy? \u00a0 It was designed to operate in the stormy but confined North and Baltic Seas. \u00a0Its mission was not to project power around the globe; it was to sink the British Fleet. \u00a0Range was more or less irrelevant – most missions were measured in days, not weeks (for surface ships – the submarines, or “U-Boats”, were another matter). \u00a0 The crux of the design battle was between raw, pure firepower – cannon and torpedoes – and mobility expressed in terms of speed.<\/p>\n With that in mind, the Germans in 1939 commissioned their second <\/em>most-famous warship (after the Bismarck<\/em>, of “Sink the Bismarck” fame), the KMS Scharnhorst<\/em>.<\/p>\n KMS Scharnhorst<\/em><\/p><\/div>\n Scharnhorst<\/em>\u00a0and her sister Gneisenau\u00a0<\/em>weren’t really “battleships”; they were “Battle Cruisers”; more speed and less armor (but not much less) than battleships, faster and more heavily armed than cruisers (but not quite as powerful as a battleship), the idea was to be able to kill anything that could catch it, and outrun anything that could kill it. \u00a0But it was built to the German design standard; Speed and Firepower trumped raw seaworthiness (although at 32,000 tons, it was still plenty seaworthy).<\/p>\n Floating Tin Cans<\/strong>: \u00a0In large ships, like battleships and aircraft carriers, of course, there’s plenty of room to make those compromises.<\/p>\n In smaller ships, it was a much tighter set of compromises.<\/p>\n Destroyers – at least up through the 1960s – were smaller warships designed to escort fleets of larger warships, and to attack much larger warships using (until the missile age) torpedoes. \u00a0They have to be fast, to not only keep up with the battleships and aircraft carriers they escorted, but to keep their station in formation with the larger ships as they zigged and zagged in evasive maneuvers. \u00a0So a Destroyer would generally be from 1,000 to 2,200 tons (battleships were 26,000 to 80,000 tons, and aircraft carriers were generally from 12,000 to 30,000 tons in World War 2)<\/p>\n To make things more complicated, the various arms control treaties of the 1920s and 1930s – especially the London Naval Treaty, which sought to curb the naval arms race of the era – placed a statutory limit on the size of warships, and the number of tons of warships that could be built in each class. \u00a0The limit for most destroyers was 1,500 tons.<\/p>\n So the design challenge for Destroyer builders in the 1930s was, within the treaty tonnage limits, to build an warship that was effective in furthering the nation’s strategic doctrine.<\/p>\n For the British, then, Destroyers were designed within a 1,500 ton limit to be:<\/p>\n HMS Hunter<\/em>. Built in 1936, it was fundamentally similar to nearly every British destroyer build from 1918 to 1943; four 4.7 inch guns, eight torpedoes, 35 knot speed, and very seaworthy. Hunter<\/em> was sunk at Narvik in 1940.<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n The Germans, given their mission that was short on range but long on “sinking British ships”, had a different set of compromises. \u00a0They enabled these compromises, in part, by ignoring the London Treaty’s limits, and building destroyers that were nearly 1,000 tons heavier than the British ships. \u00a0Within that limit, the Germans focused on:<\/p>\n The German Z36<\/em>, short for “Zerst\u00f6rer 36”, or “Destroyer number 36”. German destroyers were numbered, not named.<\/p><\/div>\n Among the nation’s destroyers, a “Tortoise and Hare” comparison works; British destroyers were slower and more lightly armed, but seaworthy enough to not merely survive, but fight, in much worse weather. \u00a0 The Germans had the edge on speed and firepower.<\/p>\n (The US Navy, by the way, split the difference, more or less. \u00a0Our destroyers, until the eve of war, were designed to operate in the vast ranges of the Pacific; an American destroyer could steam three times as far as its Brit counterpart. \u00a0 They also had only four or five guns – five-inchers firing 60 pound shells. \u00a0But those five inch guns were able to shoot at both surface ships and aircraft; this made them a bit heavier than single-purpose anti-ship guns, a technology edge that gave US destroyers an immense advantage in anti-aircraft firepower over those of any other nation on earth at the time, a difference that was absolutely crucial as air power supplanted surface to surface action as the main form of war at sea. \u00a0And to pay for the weight that went into fuel and dual-purpose guns, the US destroyers sacrificed some <\/em>seaworthiness (three sank in a typhoon in 1944) and a little speed and, on the eve of the war, the treaty limits themselves, dumping the 1,500 ton limit and building destroyers of 2,200 and later 3,000 tons).<\/p>\n USS Fletcher<\/em>. Built after the US belatedly abrogated the London Treaty, the Fletchers were 2,200 tons, and armed almost identically to the earlier 1,500 ton ships. This made them rugged, seaworthy, powerful-enough, with plenty of fuel to tackle the vast Pacific – and able to be updated continuously. Fletcher-class destroyers served into the 1970s in the US Navy, and the last one, the Mexican Cuitlahuac<\/em> ( formerly USS John Rodgers<\/em>), remained on active service until 2001 – a phenomenal record for a ship class.<\/p><\/div>\n Duel In The Sleet<\/strong>: \u00a0In December of 1943, the German high command realized that the war was going badly. \u00a0Especially on the Eastern Front, where the debacle at Stalingrad had been followed by a series of gruesome setbacks.<\/p>\n Part of the problem for the Germans was that the Soviet military’s main weakness – its inability to support lengthy operations due to the difficulties in providing supplies to the front and communications among units – was being rapidly fixed by an onslaught of American equipment, especially trucks and radios – in addition to weapons to augment the Soviets’ own production, especially fighter aircraft.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/upload.wikimedia.org\/wikipedia\/commons\/3\/34\/Bundesarchiv_DVM_10_Bild-23-63-07%2C_Schlachtschiff_%22Scharnhorst%22.jpg\")
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