What If: Lets build a better HMS Tiger

[stevep]

Dec 15, 2019 12:14:33 GMT lordroel said:

Dec 14, 2019 11:26:02 GMT stevep said:

  You might but the RN, once it learns how pointless they are, will want something that adds to the fighting ability rather than something that is largely unless and potentially dangerous to the ship.  IIRC they have relatively little armour - or none at all possibly - between each of those guns on each side.  As such a hit on one can set off a chain reaction or at least see the blast from the hit sweep through several mounts with a lot of deaths and destruction.

Going back to the hull counted casement guns removed, Tiger would look like this i guess.

  Probably something like that although if re-engined in the 30's say with more modern machinery she would probably lose a funnel or possibly two.  She will have some secondaries to replace the lost casements but they would be mounted on the main deck level, probably in turrets but possibly just with shields depending on the date of the main/last reconstruction.

[lordroel]

Dec 15, 2019 12:31:39 GMT stevep said:

Dec 15, 2019 12:14:33 GMT lordroel said:

Going back to the hull counted casement guns removed, Tiger would look like this i guess.

  Probably something like that although if re-engined in the 30's say with more modern machinery she would probably lose a funnel or possibly two.  She will have some secondaries to replace the lost casements but they would be mounted on the main deck level, probably in turrets but possibly just with shields depending on the date of the main/last reconstruction.

Would Tiger and Hood working together be able to go head to head with Bismarck during their first engagement that sank Hood in OTL.

[stevep]

Dec 17, 2019 4:54:05 GMT lordroel said:

Dec 15, 2019 12:31:39 GMT stevep said:

  Probably something like that although if re-engined in the 30's say with more modern machinery she would probably lose a funnel or possibly two.  She will have some secondaries to replace the lost casements but they would be mounted on the main deck level, probably in turrets but possibly just with shields depending on the date of the main/last reconstruction.

Would Tiger and Hood working together be able to go head to head with Bismarck during their first engagement that sank Hood in OTL.

  If both were upgraded then yes they would have a good chance.  Without a major increase in its armour Tiger would still be vulnerable to 15" shells but if Hood avoided the hit that destroyed her - either through armour upgrades or sheer chance as by some measures it was very bad luck - then with it in the lead and likely to attract the bulk of Bismarck's attention you could see Bismarck disabled fairly quickly and if it takes a hit that reduces its speed it would be unlikely to escape.

  If neither were seriously upgraded in terms of armour it could be a very bad day for the RN!

[lordroel]

Dec 17, 2019 11:08:07 GMT stevep said:

Dec 17, 2019 4:54:05 GMT lordroel said:

Would Tiger and Hood working together be able to go head to head with Bismarck during their first engagement that sank Hood in OTL.

  If both were upgraded then yes they would have a good chance.  Without a major increase in its armour Tiger would still be vulnerable to 15" shells but if Hood avoided the hit that destroyed her - either through armour upgrades or sheer chance as by some measures it was very bad luck - then with it in the lead and likely to attract the bulk of Bismarck's attention you could see Bismarck disabled fairly quickly and if it takes a hit that reduces its speed it would be unlikely to escape.

  If neither were seriously upgraded in terms of armour it could be a very bad day for the RN!

Well if Tiger is back in service in 1940, could Hood then not go into dock for here major upgrade, this could mean Tiger would have to face of with Bismarck instead of OTL Hood.

[stevep]

Dec 17, 2019 15:51:39 GMT lordroel said:

Dec 17, 2019 11:08:07 GMT stevep said:

  If both were upgraded then yes they would have a good chance.  Without a major increase in its armour Tiger would still be vulnerable to 15" shells but if Hood avoided the hit that destroyed her - either through armour upgrades or sheer chance as by some measures it was very bad luck - then with it in the lead and likely to attract the bulk of Bismarck's attention you could see Bismarck disabled fairly quickly and if it takes a hit that reduces its speed it would be unlikely to escape.

  If neither were seriously upgraded in terms of armour it could be a very bad day for the RN!

Well if Tiger is back in service in 1940, could Hood then not go into dock for here major upgrade, this could mean Tiger would have to face of with Bismarck instead of OTL Hood.

  If its a fully modernised Tiger and a not yet worked up Prince of Wales then a lot would depend on the defences of the Tiger and that old battle winner luck.  Tiger could go the way of Hood or come through and Bismarck goes down in Denmark Straits. 

  Although I suspect that if Tiger was re-entering service in 1940, with the war on even if before the sudden collapse of France it would be deemed to be too late for Hood to start a major rebuild.  Think this would only occur if Hood started such a programme before WWII started and probably before the occupation of the rump Czech state in 1939 as war would be seen as too likely.  What it really needs is a different order for such rebuilds with the fast ships - Renown, Repulse, Tiger [in this case] and Hood before things reached crisis point. 

[lordroel]

Dec 18, 2019 18:56:22 GMT stevep said:

Dec 17, 2019 15:51:39 GMT lordroel said:

Well if Tiger is back in service in 1940, could Hood then not go into dock for here major upgrade, this could mean Tiger would have to face of with Bismarck instead of OTL Hood.

  If its a fully modernised Tiger and a not yet worked up Prince of Wales then a lot would depend on the defences of the Tiger and that old battle winner luck.  Tiger could go the way of Hood or come through and Bismarck goes down in Denmark Straits. 

  Although I suspect that if Tiger was re-entering service in 1940, with the war on even if before the sudden collapse of France it would be deemed to be too late for Hood to start a major rebuild.  Think this would only occur if Hood started such a programme before WWII started and probably before the occupation of the rump Czech state in 1939 as war would be seen as too likely.  What it really needs is a different order for such rebuilds with the fast ships - Renown, Repulse, Tiger [in this case] and Hood before things reached crisis point. 

Would Tiger be a good choice to send to Asia.

[stevep]

Feb 5, 2020 19:57:48 GMT lordroel said:

Dec 18, 2019 18:56:22 GMT stevep said:

  If its a fully modernised Tiger and a not yet worked up Prince of Wales then a lot would depend on the defences of the Tiger and that old battle winner luck.  Tiger could go the way of Hood or come through and Bismarck goes down in Denmark Straits. 

  Although I suspect that if Tiger was re-entering service in 1940, with the war on even if before the sudden collapse of France it would be deemed to be too late for Hood to start a major rebuild.  Think this would only occur if Hood started such a programme before WWII started and probably before the occupation of the rump Czech state in 1939 as war would be seen as too likely.  What it really needs is a different order for such rebuilds with the fast ships - Renown, Repulse, Tiger [in this case] and Hood before things reached crisis point. 

Would Tiger be a good choice to send to Asia.

  Well its fast which would give it strategic mobility and if its been fully modified it would have a decent AA suite hopefully.  Hence its possible although a lot would depend on where the German heavy raiders, i.e. the assorted cruisers/pocket battleships and the twins were as their an existing, known threat rather than a potential one.  If its present and not too many butterflies it might be a 3rd major ship in Force Z although how things develop from there would depend heavily on luck.

[lordroel]

Feb 5, 2020 20:20:56 GMT stevep said:

Feb 5, 2020 19:57:48 GMT lordroel said:

Would Tiger be a good choice to send to Asia.

  Well its fast which would give it strategic mobility and if its been fully modified it would have a decent AA suite hopefully.  Hence its possible although a lot would depend on where the German heavy raiders, i.e. the assorted cruisers/pocket battleships and the twins were as their an existing, known threat rather than a potential one.  If its present and not too many butterflies it might be a 3rd major ship in Force Z although how things develop from there would depend heavily on luck.

If it becomes the 3rd ship in Force Z, then it will also be sunk like the other two i think.

[stevep]

Feb 5, 2020 20:23:45 GMT lordroel said:

Feb 5, 2020 20:20:56 GMT stevep said:

  Well its fast which would give it strategic mobility and if its been fully modified it would have a decent AA suite hopefully.  Hence its possible although a lot would depend on where the German heavy raiders, i.e. the assorted cruisers/pocket battleships and the twins were as their an existing, known threat rather than a potential one.  If its present and not too many butterflies it might be a 3rd major ship in Force Z although how things develop from there would depend heavily on luck.

If it becomes the 3rd ship in Force Z, then it will also be sunk like the other two i think.

  There is a danger but a 3rd ship might cause no end of butterflies.  But for an unwise diversion to check out a [false] report of a Japanese landing in Malaya Force Z would have avoided destruction, at least at that point, simply because it would have been beyond the search range of the Japanese a/c.  Or the early hit on the PoW which crippled it so badly - possibly greatly worsened by an unwise decision to turn the turbine back on - doesn't occur.  In which case the Japanese could get a few hits, damaging especially the PoW as the primary target but still leaving it afloat and the others largely undamaged.

[1bigrich]

Dec 8, 2019 17:00:20 GMT lordroel said:

Coming from Avalanche Press comes the nice article called, lets build a Better Tiger

What If: Lets build a better HMS Tiger

The British battle cruiser Tiger, one of the Royal Navy’s most beautiful ships despite a rather mediocre fighting record. She would eventually be discarded and scrapped, but this was not a certain outcome.

Tiger 'what ifs' are a great topic.

Over on the BC board, our BC Renown had speculated on a continuation of the Tiger class during the Great War, with ships for the RCN. The design was improved by using small tube boilers, which BC Renown visualized as having two funnels:


img.photobucket.com/albums/v79/BCRenown/Never%20Weres/od-Lynx.png

Hopefully that image will be clear on BC Renown's photobucket; hot-linking provides only their now-blurred image.

The Royal Navy elected to retain the battle cruisers Repulse and Renown, chiefly because of their main armament of 15-inch guns. Tiger was a better-balanced design and better fighting ship than the two lightly-armored speed demons when new, and there’s no reason to think that the rebuilt ship would not have the same edge.

The 1930 London Treaty further limited the battle fleets of the signatories: Britain, the United States and Japan. Britain and the United States agreed to limit their fleets to 15 battleships or battle cruisers apiece, and Japan to nine. The Royal Navy would have to make the greatest sacrifice, deleting five capital ships (one of them, Iron Duke, becoming a mostly-disarmed gunnery training ship).

Britain chose to delete all of her coal-fired ships (incidentally, also all of those armed with 13.5-inch guns): the other three members of the Iron Duke class, and the battle cruiser Tiger. She would instead retain the five R-class battleships, which had 15-inch main batteries and were oil-fueled though hopelessly slow. At the height of the Depression, decreasing the battle fleet through international treaty allowed the government to make cuts to the naval budget without the political fallout of reducing Britain’s relative international standing. Ramsay MacDonald’s Labour government was determined to cut naval expenses, and came away from the treaty negotiations well-pleased with the result.

Tiger appears to have been a victim of poor timing: deleted in March 1931, she went to the breakers exactly one year later. In 1936, PM Stanley Baldwin’s National Government decided on maximum re-armament. Since no new capital ships could be laid down until 1937, that meant rebuilding all useful Great War-era capital ships: the five ships of the Queen Elizabeth class and the battle cruisers Hood, Repulse and Renown. The five ships of the Royal Sovereign class, however, were too small and short for the new machinery envisaged for the other eight ships and also had very poor underwater protection.

While Tiger shared the R-class ships’ lack of an internal torpedo bulkhead, so did Repulse and Renown. She would have been a much better choice for retention, so why was she scrapped instead of one of the battleships? With her main battery of 13.5-inch guns, she would have been an “odd number,” needing a separate supply chain (though the Royal Navy appears to have had plenty of 13.5-inch shell on hand, issuing the 57 remaining guns for coast-defense and other duties during the war).

A bigger reason for Tiger’s scrapping may have been her poor record from the Great War, as we detailed earlier. She shot poorly and indiscriminately at both Dogger Bank and in the battle cruiser action that opened the Battle of Jutland, doing more to interfere with British gunnery than to inflict damage on the enemy. In both cases, the British would have been better served had Tiger simply stayed home. The prejudice carried over after the war, but Tiger’s performance had nothing to do with the ship’s design or construction, but arose from an incompetent crew scraped from the bottom of the Royal Navy’s barrel.

Repulse and Renown had poor reputations of their own; British sailors referred to them as “Refit and Repair” and shuddered at the sight of their long, unarmored flanks. The pair underwent considerable modifications, including a massive rebuilding of Renown between 1936 and 1939 that can serve as a general guide for how Tiger might have been reconstructed.

Renown had only three turrets (each with two 15-inch guns) compared to four in Tiger; Renown was fifty feet longer than the older ship. Even so, there wasn’t a whole lot of difference in the size of their machinery spaces. Renown received new machinery during her rebuilding: four Parsons turbines driven by eight big Admiralty three-drum boilers produced 130,000 horsepower, enough to drive Renown at 29 knots after all the added weight of armor and other additions during the rebuilding. The new machinery was lighter, smaller and more powerful than what it replaced. Despite her age, throughout the Second World War Renown remained the fleet’s fastest capital ship.

Tiger, designed for 28 knots, could make 29 knots despite lacking the greyhound lines of Repulse and Renown. She did have a rather anachronistic ram bow and would have benefitted from its replacement. With the same new machinery as Renown she should have been able to keep her 29-knot speed, even with her new armor, weapons and superstructure.

Tiger carried eight 13.5-inch Mark V rifles, which armed all of the British capital ships of her (very brief) generation. The new 14-inch Mark VII could be mounted in the same cradle as the 13.5-inch Mark V (probably to allow testing on Iron Duke, which had the same 13.5-inch Mark II turrets as Tiger, though this doesn’t seem to have been actually carried out) and doing so in Tiger would give her a very formidable main armament. The 14-inch Mark VII provided excellent shooting for the King George V class battleships, when those ships’ troublesome mountings allowed. Tiger would not have had that problem.

The rest of her reconstruction would have been very similar to that of Renown: all of the casemate-mounted 6-inch guns would be removed and their mounting plated over. They would be replaced by probably 12 or 16 of the excellent 4.5-inch Mark II dual-purpose secondary gun in double mounts (Tiger’s playing piece may be a little under-rated in Horn of Africa). Renown had her submerged torpedo tubes replaced by a strong battery of eight deck-mounted tubes; this was of dubious use and Tiger may or may not have carried them (we did not give torpedoes to Tiger in the game).

Renown had an aircraft in 1936, but the planes and their catapult were periodically removed and re-installed until they were set ashore for good in 1943. Tiger’s layout doesn’t really lend itself to aircraft handling and so she probably would not have had her own seaplane.

Tiger would need improved protection, though she was not as defenseless as the pre-reconstruction Renown. Like Renown she would receive thicker deck armor and most importantly an anti-torpedo bulge; Tiger had better side armor when new than did Renown after reconstruction. The lack of an internal torpedo bulkhead could not be corrected even in this fairly massive reconstruction.

A large superstructure similar to that fitted in Renown would probably also be added to Tiger, ruining her lovely lines but making her much easier to control in battle. Along with that would come control positions for her primary and anti-aircraft armament, and eventually radar, which Renown received in 1941 (four different sets, for gunnery, surface search, air search, and anti-aircraft control).

What would emerge from the dockyards would be an expensive but very useful ship. Tiger would be the fastest large ship in the Royal Navy, well-suited to escort aircraft carrier task forces, and a better fighting ship than Repulse or Renown despite her smaller main caliber guns. On the other hand, she would be tremendously expensive: Renown cost just over £3 million to rebuild; by comparison the new battleship King George V, ordered in July 1936 (more or less when Tiger would have started her reconstruction) cost £7.3 million.

And finally, in 1939 when Tiger would have emerged from reconstruction, Winston Churchill was at 10 Downing Street and not at the Admiralty as in 1914. Without Churchill’s spectacularly foolish decision to dispatch the Royal Navy’s trained ratings to infantry combat in France, Tiger would have the well-trained crew she deserved and did not receive in her first war.

In the early days of Bob Henneman's BC forum (ez-board, before Yuku and tapatalk), we had several conversations on a rebuilt Tiger in World War 2. I've even published some naval fiction on the Waships1/NavWeaps Fiction board (now long gone, also in the ez-board days).

BC Renown visualized some of that past speculation with these;

img.photobucket.com/albums/v79/BCRenown/Never%20Weres/nw-Tiger-Rebuild-1.png

Again, I hope that image can be viewed and is clear.

She would have been a great asset for the RN in World War 2. especially with a full rebuild like Renown got. (Tiger was refitted before her last service, covering a refit for Hood. So she could have gone into the yards for rebuild with Renown...

A modern AA suite like Renown would have made her an ideal carrier escort. In addition, there were a number of ships she could have matched or outgunned, including the panzarshciff, Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, the Italian rebuilds and the Kongos among capital ships. She would have had much more use than any R class, especially Revenge with her machinery limitations (18 knots, IIRC)

Thinking of the operational lives of the R class, they were clearly in the front line during the first half of the RN's war, including Calabria, Spartivento, Operation Catapult, the Bismarck chase, Sommerville's Eastern Fleet and Operations Menace and Ironclad.   With her greater speed, Tiger would have been an asset in any of those.

My thoughts,

[lordroel]

Feb 6, 2020 14:03:45 GMT 1bigrich said:

BC Renown visualized some of that past speculation with these;

img.photobucket.com/albums/v79/BCRenown/Never%20Weres/nw-Tiger-Rebuild-1.png

I always wondered if having a catapult (i think that is one) atop a aft turret is a good idea.

[1bigrich]

Feb 6, 2020 18:13:10 GMT lordroel said:

Feb 6, 2020 14:03:45 GMT 1bigrich said:

BC Renown visualized some of that past speculation with these;

img.photobucket.com/albums/v79/BCRenown/Never%20Weres/nw-Tiger-Rebuild-1.png

I always wondered if having a catapult (i think that is one) atop a aft turret is a good idea.

I think it is.   It's minimal risk traded for aviation capability.   In the case of the prewar US Standards, redundancy.   Planes stored on the catapult on a turret top are further out of the seaway, less subject to spray.   Also, they would be de-fueled before storage, so there is no (or minimal) fire risk.    BC Renown's idea was to give Tiger an indigenous scouting capability.  Ships with unique layouts like Tiger the Ganguts or an en echelon arrangement have limited deck space for such things, so turret tops become valuable real estate.   

Incidentally, the US Standards' catapult atop Man Battery Turret 3 was angled, to provide length without interfering with guns or sighting.    See the plan of California below:



Regards,

[lordroel]

Feb 6, 2020 18:44:21 GMT 1bigrich said:

Feb 6, 2020 18:13:10 GMT lordroel said:

Also, they would be de-fueled before storage,

Regards,

What about in combat, and also can the turrets fire with a plane sitting atop of them.

[1bigrich]

Feb 6, 2020 18:47:04 GMT lordroel said:

What about in combat, and also can the turrets fire with a plane sitting atop of them.

I believe they could. Blast from the turret itself would be minimal. Blast from surrounding turrets might be more stressful on the airframe.


In combat, it is more likely thought that the aircraft will be aloft, providing spotting/scouting.


My thoughts,