Campania-class cruiser (A derpy gunboat destroyer wannabe)

[kriegerfaust]

https://naval-encyclopedia.com/ww1/italy/campania-class-cruisers.php

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campania-class_cruiser

One of the smallest protected cruisers i have ever seen most ships of her classification are two to six times her size.  Add torpedoes or as is she could make a good mid-level destroyer.  With major refit could see her as a high-level destroyer if yo9u replaced the engines and gave her a decent gun and torpedoed armament.  Also she has six-inch main guns and is far newer than any protected cruisers of her size class making her a fine gunship destroyer for the game.  The only problem is her speed which is low for such a small ship, i also do not know how well she would handle turning.

https://naval-encyclopedia.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/RN_Campania.jpg

 

Edited March 27 by kriegerfaust

[Ensign Cthulhu]

The ship as built does 16kt. To make her a destroyer, she needs to do twice that at the very least. There's no way you're fitting enough machinery in that hull to do that speed. The hydrodynamics and the space available for plant are against you. 

[kriegerfaust]

Their propulsion system consisted of a pair of vertical triple-expansion steam engines each driving a single screw propeller, with steam supplied by four coal-fired, cylindrical fire-tube boilers. The boilers were trunked into a single funnel amidships. Campania's engines were rated at 5,001 indicated horsepower (3,729 kW) and produced a top speed of 15.7 knots (29.1 km/h; 18.1 mph), while Basilicata's produced only 4,129 ihp (3,079 kW) and 15.5 kn (28.7 km/h; 17.8 mph). The ships had a cruising radius of about 1,850 nautical miles (3,430 km; 2,130 mi) at a speed of 10 knots (19 km/h; 12 mph)

^{by converting from coal to diesel} 

[Project45_Opytny]

Stop right here before you become another "BlkberrytheGreat".

Being an extremely underpowered cruiser does not always equate "being able to be shoehorned as a destroyer". In this case it's more likely a crossover between a protected cruiser and a colonial sloop like the much later American Erie-class and earlier British 3rd class cruisers which has been rendered as "horribly useless" (commented by some Australian admiral) by the beginning of World War I.

3 hours ago, kriegerfaust said:

by converting from coal to diesel 

Why not gas turbines?

Not to say about why on earth would a fleet spending that much on refitting an obsolete colonial sloop that was even exempted from Treaty regulations thanks to their very limited usefulness.

[Andrewbassg]

7 hours ago, Ensign Cthulhu said:

The ship as built does 16kt. To make her a destroyer, she needs to do twice that at the very least. There's no way you're fitting enough machinery in that hull to do that speed. The hydrodynamics and the space available for plant are against you. 

You know the magic word 

 

Lesta

[Ensign Cthulhu]

7 hours ago, Project45_Opytny said:

Stop right here before you become another "BlkberrytheGreat".

Funny you should say that. For a time, I thought he WAS Blackberry - but then Blackberry would give us pages and pages of theorycrafting and Kriegerfaust doesn't. 

 

7 hours ago, Project45_Opytny said:

Why not gas turbines?

"In 1963, she received her final refit..." 😜

In fact, I read somewhere that Jacky Fisher asked Sir William White about just that thing as far back as the 19th Century. White apparently ran the numbers enough to tell him it wasn't possible, and with the metallurgy of the day, he was right. Neither of them apparently stopped to consider that they should push for the basic research into better alloys, which Corelli Barnett says in The Swordbearers was one of the signs of an empire in decline.

[Project45_Opytny]

1 hour ago, Ensign Cthulhu said:

Funny you should say that. For a time, I thought he WAS Blackberry - but then Blackberry would give us pages and pages of theorycrafting and Kriegerfaust doesn't. 

 

"In 1963, she received her final refit..." 😜

In fact, I read somewhere that Jacky Fisher asked Sir William White about just that thing as far back as the 19th Century. White apparently ran the numbers enough to tell him it wasn't possible, and with the metallurgy of the day, he was right. Neither of them apparently stopped to consider that they should push for the basic research into better alloys, which Corelli Barnett says in The Swordbearers was one of the signs of an empire in decline.

His insistence on... a number of (at least relatively) ill researched ideas reminds me of that famous ID from the defunct WoWS NA official community, and this time "just convert from coal to diesel" reminds me of how "Blackberry" attempted to defend his thoughts on modernization of the Tegetthoff-class and its viability and how community replied then (like, "I hope modernizing a ship is as simple as writing 'change to diesel engines, remove casemates and add AA'.")

I wasted quite a few hours of my personal free time navigating Blackberry's lengthy writings on modernizing Tegetthoff, converting capital ships into aviation hybrids by adding collapsible flight decks supported by main battery barbettes, an idea of "combat carrier" that would engage the enemy primarily with heavy secondary batteries while "enemy shells would just overpen the hangar structure (I'm not sure about the how the idea was written in exact originally)" and a stereotypical "modern ship of the line" that resembles a modern battleship armed in pre-dreadnought fashion with amidships dedicated to DP batteries, before belatedly realizing that all those are totally worthless hogwash produced by a "folk scientist naval architect" (who works in "folk scientist" fashion instead of a serious and meticulous manner) who has been refusing to accept any counter-argument, however detailed, reasonable and/or authoritative against him/her.

The gas turbine sentence is intended as sarcastic as both IRL and in game his idea makes little sense. The ship was just so obsolete even by World War I standards (the British P-class 3rd rate cruisers with comparable speed and protection were commented as "unspeakably useless" by then) while colonial sloops were not even regulated by the Treaty regime (hence the Erie-class) and there's no point in giving such a floating fossil any refit of significance (and by 1930s typical World War I light cruisers were also already considered so obsolete that were only fit for colonial duties, as how the Italians themselves treated their World War I trophies). In game wise, despite many Lesta-patented hypothetical modernization on World War I and interwar projects... I've yet to see one so extensive (despite their new addition, Tsarist 16-incher battleship projects buffed into 30-kts battlecruisers, come close) that completely changes the ship's basic configuration and performance, and it seems that examples of Elbing, Tromp and Regolo (that they are either fast flotilla leader designs riding on the boundary between very light cruisers and very large destroyers themselves, or cruiser-destroyer hybrid design intended to work as ocean-going destroyers) made a wrong impression. Campania rides on the boundary between very light cruisers and colonial sloops.

Perhaps research into metallurgy and better materials were out of their ranges of thought as an admiral and a naval architect then, I'm not sure about if such a systemic mindset came into existence only with the advent of total wars. Admiral Fisher never gave up his (largely correct) idea on the importance of speed for naval vessels, and HMS Swift (that also has displacement of a bit more than 2000-tonnes and could make ~35kts when contemporary destroyers struggled to made 30) comes to my mind. Though different sources seem to differ on whether she was a pet project, too ahead of her time and a costly failure or a forerunner of French, Italian and Soviet "super destroyers" decades later.

[Wolfswetpaws]

2 hours ago, Ensign Cthulhu said:

Funny you should say that. For a time, I thought he WAS Blackberry - but then Blackberry would give us pages and pages of theorycrafting and Kriegerfaust doesn't. 

 

Too many differences in style, word-usage and presentation.

Side-note, I saw BlkbrryTheGreat in a game several months ago.

[Wolfswetpaws]

14 hours ago, Ensign Cthulhu said:

The ship as built does 16kt. To make her a destroyer, she needs to do twice that at the very least. There's no way you're fitting enough machinery in that hull to do that speed. The hydrodynamics and the space available for plant are against you. 

Yeah, even a "clean Minbari power source" used in a Kawasaki Ninja motorcycle during a Babylon-5 episode won't help this situation.  😉 

[Wolfswetpaws]

9 hours ago, Project45_Opytny said:

Stop right here before you become another "BlkberrytheGreat".

While the enthusiasm of BlkbrryTheGreat may have run roughshod over their understanding of engineering and materials, they did write passionately and creatively about their ship idea proposals.  Paragraphs and pages of passionate writing.
BlkbrryTheGreat didn't merely copy/paste stuff from reference websites.

So, I feel there is little danger of confusing @kriegerfaust with BlkbrryTheGreat (in terms of writing style, at least).

[Ensign Cthulhu]

4 hours ago, Project45_Opytny said:

Perhaps research into metallurgy and better materials were out of their ranges of thought as an admiral and a naval architect then, I'm not sure about if such a systemic mindset came into existence only with the advent of total wars.

Possibly this is the case, although there were other issues, e.g. metallurgy QC problems affecting the performance of British shells at Jutland, which Barnett states probably deprived the British of several kills. (And that's before we get to the absolutely rotten QC which ensured that a third of the shells fired by the British in the lead-up to the Somme didn't go off.)

 

[invicta2012]

23 hours ago, Project45_Opytny said:

Though different sources seem to differ on whether she was a pet project, too ahead of her time and a costly failure or a forerunner of French, Italian and Soviet "super destroyers" decades later.

Too early, and not really a "super DD" (she was approx 1600 tons displacement, big for her time but nowhere near 2500 tons for a Le Fantasque). They managed to get the speed they wanted but at a shockingly high cost to fuel consumption and range, the technology wasn't *quite* ready. A few years later, though, White's yard was touting Destroyer Leaders of a similar size, with higher speed and better armament (like Broke, which fought alongside Swift in the Battle of The Dover Strait), and the RN was building 34/36 knot M,R and S class DDs like there was no tomorrow. 

If WG did want to take some ancient WW1 cruiser and turn her into a DD then the Pan-Euro Tier IX is the way to go - a fast cruiser (like the Italian Quarto) modified into a torpedo ship.

On 3/28/2024 at 12:03 PM, Ensign Cthulhu said:

In fact, I read somewhere that Jacky Fisher asked Sir William White about just that thing as far back as the 19th Century. White apparently ran the numbers enough to tell him it wasn't possible, and with the metallurgy of the day, he was right. Neither of them apparently stopped to consider that they should push for the basic research into better alloys, which Corelli Barnett says in The Swordbearers was one of the signs of an empire in decline.

That was outsourced to the yards and the engine builders (and rightly so, given the rate at which private British yards were innovating at this point in time). 

 

19 hours ago, Ensign Cthulhu said:

Possibly this is the case, although there were other issues, e.g. metallurgy QC problems affecting the performance of British shells at Jutland, which Barnett states probably deprived the British of several kills. (And that's before we get to the absolutely rotten QC which ensured that a third of the shells fired by the British in the lead-up to the Somme didn't go off.)

The RN knew their shells weren't top-notch. Jellicoe had identified the problem around 1910 (https://www.jutland1916.com/tactics-and-technologies-4/ordnance-2/) and it was compounded by years of inaction. The issues are normally attributed to the construction of the AP shells, the shell propellants and the choice of burster explosives, rather than metallurgy; but it's more than possible that was also involved.