How real proposals sometimes are worse then kitbashes: Polaris/Talos Alaska

[acelanceloet]

The CBG would have 52 more Talos (the forward launcher has a double magazine) and I think I could rearrange the missiles and gain a helo hangar aft instead (the original sketch showed them as 4*5 instead of 2*10, but oversized them so much that I used 2*10 instead). The CBG also got better armour I suppose, which is what most of that displacement difference goes towards, I suppose.

That said, here we indeed see that displacement not always says everything about missile ships, especially when converted from displacement limited to volume limited.

That said, getting some gun mountings on board seems logical (seeing that albany got them very late in her design/construction process) but I am not certain where to put them

[Cascadia]

Sorry, yes that is a Wessex, but with a few mods to the engine area it could be made into an S-58 pretty easily.

How about this?

Seems I forgot to upload it.

[erik_t]

Ace, that's definitely a fair point that a lot of the extra tonnage went into armor (not only armor, but armor that had already been manufactured). As I understand it, Albany and her sisters were not stupendous seaboats after their conversions... perhaps a giant hulking Alaska would be better in this regard.

I'd still rather offload the Polaris to a SSBN and use the deck area more productively, though A large, unmistakable surface combatant is kind of a crappy nuclear deterrent in the first place, and the latter role would undoubtedly have cramped the ship's service career as long as the missiles were shipped. Imagine the geopolitical complications of stationing a Polaris ship off the coast of Vietnam in the late 1960s... even if all you wanted it for was PIRAZ and carrier escort.

The calculus changed somewhat, I suspect, when Tomahawk made every VLS ship a nuclear strike capable platform. When everything is a deterrent ship, nothing is. But there would have been only one or two CBGB-Alaskas.

[acelanceloet]

as for her seagoing conditions: The references included 3 sets of active stabilisers, even one at the extreme bow (worst place ever for them IMO) so if that is really correct, there would at least have been concern for the ships stability.

That said, were the geopolitical difficulties not just as bad when an aircraft carrier, which was also a nuclear strike capable platform, was stationed in positions like that?

[erik_t]

No, it's because Polaris demanded a relatively steady launch platform, with its early crappy guidance systems.

With regards to carriers, I don't believe so. From an airplane's perspective, a nuke is just a sufficiently heavy object, or alternately, from a carrier's perspective a nuke is just an object that requires a sufficiently large aircraft. A large carrier of a nuclear state is intrinsically a nuclear launch platform, but it is not explicitly so. There are other things it might be doing with its aircraft, but there is only one thing you can do with Polaris.

[acelanceloet]

updated.

[knut 75]

These and the Battleship missile conversions in the Friedman US Navy books are just so 1950s. The Albany conversions were my favourite warships as a kid. A chap at school made a beautiful 1/1200 waterline model of Albany. Years later I bought one made in Germany, but his was better..

[seeker36340]

Love it, and its nice to see an appreciation of Talos, which was by far the most reliable of the Three Ts. I am biased, of course....