Well, no.Mahanian doctrine treats the Decisive Battle as a tool. It's how you get rid of the other side's battle-line - by assaulting a position it must defend, and crushing it against that objective. Then, once the enemy battle line has been removed, your cruisers, destroyers, etc. take control of the sea lanes, and you win.

For instance, you park your battle-line outside the enemy's homeport, out of range of their coastal defenses, and wait. They either come to fight you, you kick their teeth in, and you win, or their battle-line stays parked in port, and you win. The objective is to remove the enemy battle-line from the equation at sea, and it doesn't matter if you do that by sinking them or if they're unwilling to leave their homeport to come fight you.
And if you lose? You just lost all your capital assets and your lighter ships are doomed. Multiple attack groups of light capital and sub-capital assets allow you to either flank the enemy battleline or split it into more vulnerable pieces. And if you really need to, you've still got enough armor on your capital ships to do a battleline of your own.
So, you prefer the French concept of Jeune École then? Torpedoes from fast ships as party favors to everyone?
Pretty much, though with armor worth a damn and the torpedoes not being on the light cap-botes.
 
And if you lose? You just lost all your capital assets and your lighter ships are doomed. Multiple attack groups of light capital and sub-capital assets allow you to either flank the enemy battleline or split it into more vulnerable pieces. And if you really need to, you've still got enough armor on your capital ships to do a battleline of your own.

Pretty much, though with armor worth a damn and the torpedoes not being on the light cap-botes.
or they all get ripped apart piecemeal and your battleline is at the mercy of the enemy screening force and battleline.
 
And if you lose? You just lost all your capital assets and your lighter ships are doomed. Multiple attack groups of light capital and sub-capital assets allow you to either flank the enemy battleline or split it into more vulnerable pieces. And if you really need to, you've still got enough armor on your capital ships to do a battleline of your own.

If you lose you picked a fight with someone stronger than you and you were going to lose anyways.

You know if you're close enough to a battleship to hurt it it's close enough to hurt you, right?

And that if you're not also in a battleship, you're getting blown up first. Period.

There is no clever maneuver that can force an enemy battle-line to split into smaller, more managable chunks. Instead what the Standard battle-line does is it just turns to kick the teeth of each of those little fast groups in as they come in to try to do mean things to the battle-line. Thanks to the identical maneuver characteristics, the Standards stay a cohesive whole no matter how they maneuver, and you have twelve excellent battleships shooting at a bunch of glorified cruisers - excuse me, light-capital ships.

That only goes one way.
 
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Also important to note, He's not saying Mahanian doctrine is foolproof, just that it does account for what you're talking about and that it further has ways to deal with the potential threats posed.
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Point of order. The Standards had an excellent turning radius. They could and did dance around torpedoes aimed towards them.
It's all about the design of the ship, the longer you make it the larger the turning circle. There is a reason Jersey compared the Standards to corgis, and it's not because they're short, fluffy, and cute. Corgis were traditionally herding dogs, and needed to be agile enough to dodge between and around larger animals. They're bouncy, maneuverable dogs and the description of Ari and Pennsy is apt, aside from their speed, which was set to keep the battle line together and moving at a set pace.
 
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So I recently got into world of warships after growing bored of War Thunder. After finally unlocking my first carrier I got curious and did some research. So my question is, could we possibly see USS Langley being summoned? She was active in WW2 for about three months after Pearl as a seaplane tender before being sunk by japanese bombers.

I see her as rather terrified of the supernatural since all three of her Collier sister ships vanished in the Bermuda triangle.
 
It's all about the design of the ship, the longer you make it the larger the turning circle. There is a reason Jersey compared the Standards to corgis, and it's not because they're short, fluffy, and cute. Corgis were traditionally herding dogs, and needed to be agile enough to dodge between and around larger animals. They're bouncy, maneuverable dogs and the description of Ari and Pennsy is apt, aside from their speed, which was set to keep the battle line together and moving at a set pace.
Jersey: No, it's because they're fluffy and cute. I mean... you're right, but still. Standards are cute.
 
Iowa has a turning circle of 724 yards at 30 knots. It's not just the shape of the ship, rudder size and flow around the rudders matters.
 
the battle-line is where we get the word battleship from. ships of the line, or battle line. mahan's theory was a numbers game. to build, maintain, and keep a battleship afloat is expensive. resources, man hours, money. essentially his entire doctrine was ..."who ever can field the most battleships can be considered the strongest nation in the world." America had 23 battleships floating by the end of ww2. America proved the ideology behind the Doctrine as correct.
also, before getting into the cv's doing damage, rember that cv's had not been tested and proven like battleships had for over a century before. it is why the cv's were originally supposed to be scouts for the battleship tp help them get better aim to put rounds on target.
 
Random thought: What if Pearl attack is Distraction Carniflex, and while all major actors is away, Abyssals launch major offensive in some other location?


 
If you lose you picked a fight with someone stronger than you and you were going to lose anyways.

You know if you're close enough to a battleship to hurt it it's close enough to hurt you, right?

And that if you're not also in a battleship, you're getting blown up first. Period.

There is no clever maneuver that can force an enemy battle-line to split into smaller, more managable chunks. Instead what the Standard battle-line does is it just turns to kick the teeth of each of those little fast groups in as they come in to try to do mean things to the battle-line. Thanks to the identical maneuver characteristics, the Standards stay a cohesive whole no matter how they maneuver, and you have twelve excellent battleships shooting at a bunch of glorified cruisers - excuse me, light-capital ships.

That only goes one way.
My light capital ship concept has near identicle armor to superdreads like the Standards, they're just smaller. And splitting the enemy battleline is frocing them to deploy it to multiple locations at once.

As for your assertion that only a superior force can destroy a Mahanian Standard battleline, that would be wrong. Even as early as Tsushima, it was demonstrated that groups of destroyers could cripple or even sink battleships. Hell, that was the whole point of the torpedoboat. Even without realizing the true power of aircraft, the US was moving away from Mahan's doctrine by the time WWII broke out.
 
My light capital ship concept has near identicle armor to superdreads like the Standards, they're just smaller. And splitting the enemy battleline is frocing them to deploy it to multiple locations at once.

As for your assertion that only a superior force can destroy a Mahanian Standard battleline, that would be wrong. Even as early as Tsushima, it was demonstrated that groups of destroyers could cripple or even sink battleships. Hell, that was the whole point of the torpedoboat. Even without realizing the true power of aircraft, the US was moving away from Mahan's doctrine by the time WWII broke out.

Here's how designing a ship works(in WW1, where Mahanian doctrine is applicable):

Firepower
Protection
Speed

Pick two. If you have speed and protection, you can't hurt the Standard battle-line until they've already kicked your teeth in. If you have speed and firepower, you can probably hurt the Standards, but they can still hurt you first, and you can't take anywhere near as many hits as they can.

By WW2, this becomes "prioritize two", but that's not terribly important.

As to torpedo boats and destroyers... you know that Mahanian doctrine says the screen comes along with the battle-line, and while the battle-line is kicking the teeth of the "light-capitals", the screen has a fun time playing target practice with the penny packets of screen you sent along with your penny packets of "light capital ships".
 
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Here's how designing a ship works(in WW1, where Mahanian doctrine is applicable):

Firepower
Protection
Speed

Pick two. If you have speed and protection, you can't hurt the Standard battle-line until they've already kicked your teeth in. If you have speed and firepower, you can probably hurt the Standards, but they can still hurt you first, and you can't take anywhere near as many hits as they can.

As to torpedo boats and destroyers... you know that Mahanian doctrine says the screen comes along with the battle-line, and while the battle-line is kicking the teeth of the "light-capitals", the screen has a fun time playing target practice with the penny packets of screen you sent along with your penny packets of "light capital ships".
I'm not talking battlecruisers or fast armor slabs here, I'm talking chibi Standards. Any difference in speed would be maybe a one knot advantage from having a slightly different displacement-horsepower ratio. And it wouldn't be penny packets, it would be several light caps with a pack of screening ships to rip through the enemy screen. Smaller ships are cheaper, so chibi Standards would be more numerous than the full sized versions.
 
The standards aren't 'super dreads'. New York and Wyoming were 'super dreads'. They weren't quite armored against their own guns and they didn't have the 'armored raft' that All or Nothing designs had.

New Mexico and Colorado classes were All or Nothing Standards with a belt and deck thick enough to resist their own shells in a large enough zone that they could murderize anything inside of it.

If you put 14" guns on a platform smaller or lighter than an actual battleship you will crack the keel every time you fire the guns. Graf Spee, the raider, weighed almost 15k tons and mounted 11" guns. Just...no. Big guns are expensive and have long lead times for production.
 
I'm not talking battlecruisers or fast armor slabs here, I'm talking chibi Standards. Any difference in speed would be maybe a one knot advantage from having a slightly different displacement-horsepower ratio. And it wouldn't be penny packets, it would be several light caps with a pack of screening ships to rip through the enemy screen. Smaller ships are cheaper, so chibi Standards would be more numerous than the full sized versions.

First off, goalpost shifting. This whole time you've been arguing for numerous faster, smaller forces. But let's go along with this.

If you have a smaller ship, you have less firepower, armor, and speed.

So how much smaller are we going? A Standard comes in at about thrity thousand tons, so to get a meaningfully larger number of ships, we've got to go down to ~20,000 tons, assuming you're going to have a useful advantage in numbers. (Tonnage is a useful proxy for cost, so it's a good way to judge about how many more of these smaller ships we can build per Standard)

So let's start trimming. First, two turrets. Each triple turret on a Pennsylvania-class battleship weighs about 750 tons. If we include ammunition, that's about a thousand tons per turret. So we're down to 28,000 tons. Next, the barbette armor. If there's two less turrets, we don't need that barbette armor for those turrets. That's about another thousand tons per barbette, so we're down to twenty-six thousand tons. So far, we've halved the armament of Pennsylvania, and we're getting 1.15 of these battleships per Pennsylvania, and half the armament. Already, things aren't looking good. But let's continue.

Shortening the belt thanks to those deleted turrets(and thus, the ship) lets us drop another thousand tons or so, bringing us to 25,000 tons. We're now building 1.2 of these battleships per Standard, each of which has half the guns, so overall you're getting 60% as many guns to the battlefield for your money.

Reduced machinery and secondary battery drops another two thousand tons (roughly), bringing us to 23,000 tons. We're getting close! You're now building 1.3 of these per Standard, but again, each one brings half as many guns to the fight, and parks them on a less stable (which means less accurate) platform.
 
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First off, goalpost shifting. This whole time you've been arguing for numerous faster, smaller forces. But let's go along with this.

If you have a smaller ship, you have less firepower, armor, and speed.

So how much smaller are we going? A Standard comes in at about thrity thousand tons, so to get a meaningfully larger number of ships, we've got to go down to ~20,000 tons, assuming you're going to have a useful advantage in numbers. (Tonnage is a useful proxy for cost, so it's a good way to judge about how many more of these smaller ships we can build per Standard)

So let's start trimming. First, two turrets. Each triple turret on a Pennsylvania-class battleship weighs about 750 tons. If we include ammunition, that's about a thousand tons per turret. So we're down to 28,000 tons. Next, the barbette armor. If there's two less turrets, we don't need that barbette armor for those turrets. That's about another thousand tons per barbette, so we're down to twenty-six thousand tons. So far, we've halved the armament of Pennsylvania, and we're getting 1.15 of these battleships per Pennsylvania, and half the armament. Already, things aren't looking good. But let's continue.

Shortening the belt thanks to those deleted turrets(and thus, the ship) lets us drop another thousand tons or so, bringing us to 25,000 tons. We're now building 1.2 of these battleships per Standard, each of which has half the guns, so overall you're getting 60% as many guns to the battlefield for your money.

Reduced machinery and secondary battery drops another two thousand tons (roughly), bringing us to 23,000 tons. We're getting close! You're now building 1.3 of these per Standard, but again, each one brings half as many guns to the fight, and parks them on a less stable (which means less accurate) platform.

But he wants them to be faster than the Standards, so all the weight you save in reductions in weapons and armor, gets eaten up by the machinery to make them faster, and then you gotta put some of the armor back to protect the expanded machinery spaces.
 
But he wants them to be faster than the Standards, so all the weight you save in reductions in weapons and armor, gets eaten up by the machinery to make them faster, and then you gotta put some of the armor back to protect the expanded machinery spaces.

No, he's changed his desires to "chibi Standards", so no need to pile on speed.

Also, disclaimer that should have been in the post: armor and machinery weights are approximations, using the kind of math where anything I can hold in my hand is one pound, and one pound is one kilogram. If your math professor asks, I did not say it's okay to do math this way. But it's useful for getting an idea of what the numbers look like.
 
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So I recently got into world of warships after growing bored of War Thunder. After finally unlocking my first carrier I got curious and did some research. So my question is, could we possibly see USS Langley being summoned? She was active in WW2 for about three months after Pearl as a seaplane tender before being sunk by japanese bombers.

I see her as rather terrified of the supernatural since all three of her Collier sister ships vanished in the Bermuda triangle.

Old Iron has a character that's hinted at being Langley, but she's already dead. I could see Langley being summoned as she won't take away the Battleship's crown from them, but summoning any new CVs (heck, even any CVLs) isn't likely to happen.
 
I love how fast the thread went from 'silly care-packages to shipgirls' to 'debate over naval doctrine and ship design'. Better get checked for whiplash after that 180.

Edit: I'm not complaining, nor trying to stop the conversation, mind you. *distributes popcorn to the other observers*
 
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