K.u.K. Edition
Talk about botes, bote based wargaming and RPGs, and maybe even a certain bote based vidya that tickles our autism in just the right way.
Games, Ospreys and References (Courtesy of /hwg/)
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Models and Manufacturers
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>While your idea of multiple classes seems sensible, Japan couldn't afford to build them.
>They simply couldn't build an air recon CA class, a torp attack CA class, and any other specialized classes they needed in the numbers they needed of each. None of the powers - except perhaps the US after entering the war - had the money or industrial capacity to do that.
The key here is to build as many as they can that are actually good enough at doing what they were built to do.
Instead of building as many as possible, and all end up moderately shit at everything.
Sure, they could not have built enough of each type to be everywhere and do everything. But they could not do that with their overloaded, fragile designs that ended up being bad at almost everything anyway.
inb4 hindsight etc., they knew they lacked the nubmer of cruisers, they knew the US would outproduce them horribly two or so years into the war, and they knew their designs were overloaded.
Their leadership decided to ignore reality, and convinced themselves that 'Yamato spirit' would be enough.
>the KuKs are comfy because they're in way very reassuring
>mediocre ships, mediocre crews, mediocre command, and it all worked out pretty ok
>they held on to their bit of Adriatic, and that's all they were trying to get done
>they weren't sure they could do it, but by golly they did it
>The key here is to build as many as they can that are actually good enough at doing what they were built to do.
>Instead of building as many as possible, and all end up moderately shit at everything.
Exactly. They needed to build good general types instead of a handful of super-specialized the other poster suggested or the over-built ones they attempted in real life.
>Sure, they could not have built enough of each type to be everywhere and do everything.
No one could do that except, as I pointed, the US and then only after the war began. By mid-44, the US had more warships building than the navy's planned percentage of the draft could actually man.
>mediocre ships
I'll quibble about that. While their BBs were less than mediocre, they had good DDs, subs, and other light forces. I few of their crusier designs weren't bad either.
>>mediocre command
Again, I'll quibble about that too. They had some good commanders with good ideas. Their fleet, unlike the Entente's use of a few monitors, actually provided fire support against Serbia and Montenegro early in the war. The KuK navy also bombarded Italian ports the morning after Italy entered the war while the RM wasn't even ready. One KuK DD commander had the balls to actually BACK his ship into an Italian harbor to perform a bombardment mission so he could steam away more easily once the mission was completed.
The KuK navy had a pretty good war record, albeit against the pathetic Italians and the RN/MN 3rd string. They held their end of the Adriatic until the end and it was politically-driven inaction plus domestic revolution which saw the KuK navy rot away.
Much like the constant fighting between RN and SM light forces in the Narrows, the Otranto Barrage can provide lots of plausible skirmishes for naval gaming.
>They needed to build good general types instead of a handful of super-specialized the other poster suggested
What I meant was NOT a number of super-specialized types
To throw out some random examples of what NOT to do: Post refit Kitakami with her gazillion torpedo tubes, or post refit Mogami i.e. a seaplane tender with six guns)
What I meant were cruiser types with general capabilities to still be worth the name, but less overloaded with ALL the fucking gadgets they had in their inventory.
Or just say to hell with the treaty, we lied about the tonnage anyway, and build them big enough to actually make it work.
>Or just say to hell with the treaty, we lied about the tonnage anyway, and build them big enough to actually make it work.
They didn't have the money to do that either.
>US Navy Escort Carriers 1942–45 (New Vanguard 251)
While not as famous as their larger and faster sister ships, escort carriers made an enormous contribution towards Allied victory both in the Pacific and Atlantic theatres. It was their sheer numbers that made them so effective. Indeed, the Casablanca-class escort carrier was the most-produced aircraft carrier in history. In partnership with the Royal Navy, they provided the backbone of Allied anti-submarine efforts in the Atlantic. In the Pacific, they provided the air cover for the series of landings which led to the doorstep of Japan by 1945. These robust ships faced submarine, air, and even surface threats from the Japanese, but proved able to contend with everything thrown their way. Fully illustrated with contemporary photographs and unique specially commissioned artwork, this book shines a new light on these unjustly overlooked workhorses of the US Navy.
mediafire.com
>British Destroyers 1939–45 - Wartime-built Classes (New Vanguard 253)
As the possibility of war loomed in the 1930s, the British Admiralty looked to update their fleet of destroyers to compete with the new ships being built by Germany and Japan, resulting in the commissioning of the powerful Tribal-class. These were followed by the designing of the first of several slightly smaller ships, which carried fewer guns than the Tribals, but were armed with a greatly enlarged suite of torpedoes. Designed to combat enemy warships, aircraft and U-boats, the British built these destroyers to face off against anything the enemy could throw at them. Using a collection of contemporary photographs and beautiful colour artwork, this is a fascinating new study of the ships that formed the backbone of the Royal Navy during World War II.
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>This file was uploaded from New Zealand
God bless you, Kiwibro.
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A report on a sinking with picture of flooding etc that might be of interest
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A very stupid question regarding early steamships:
Why they were painted black? I'm not talking about those made from iron, that was just anti-corrosive coating, but what about those made still out of wood and painted black.
Why?
i think because the coal leave black mark anyway so a black paint don't require a new coating everytime your coal the ship
What about the white line for gun battery then? I mean I get it that both colours are probably just aesthetics at that point anyway, but I find it really weird.
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tl;dr
>use bow and stern thrusters that have a 'material saving' design
>they fai due to fatigue (because they are overstressedand) and cause the shaft tunnel to flood
>install wrong cable penetration seals in watertight bulkhead between shaft tunnel and engine, watch the engine room get flooded
>pilot is a useless cunt because aöö he does is screech at his radio in arabic
>when his boss turns up, he can't do jack shit either
>the tugboats were also fuckign useless becuase half their lines broke
>the ship was essentailly saved from sinking in the turning basin by a change of the wind direction that pusehd it alongside the quai
Funnily enough, the shipyard that built the ship and the subcontractor that installed the 'mysteriously' unnmarked seal parts in the watertight builkead cable penetration both do not exist anymore.
The Tone class were an attempt to move in that direction, dropping a main turret for increased floatplane capability in a scouting/escort capacity, and the Ooyodo deleted the torpedo facilities, but they never really committed to the concept of having their cruisers do one thing well.
Honestly with how volatile the torpedos were in surface combat no heavy cruiser should have carried them in the first place, and matters would have improved if the IJN had just done scouting with their carrier air wings like everyone else with carriers did.
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Didn't they originally plan to have the Tones carry one fuckhueg catapult plus just a normal number of higher performance recon planes?
And then either the planes or teh catapult ended up not working, and they reverted to the same catapult setup as on the Mogamis, and just added more planes.
Oh great, I'm almost delirious thanks to a complete lack of any kind of sleep rythm, and the monitorposting starts.
>The Tone class were an attempt to move in that direction, dropping a main turret for increased floatplane capability in a scouting/escort capacity, and the Ooyodo deleted the torpedo facilities, but they never really committed to the concept of having their cruisers do one thing well.
That was the IJN's problem. Their designs were either over-built in a doomed attempt to do everything well or over-specialized in an attempt to fill an over-specialized role in their Decisive Battle fantasy.
>Honestly with how volatile the torpedos were in surface combat no heavy cruiser should have carried them in the first place...
The Long Lance was dangerous as was it's oxy equipment, but how many DDs, CLs, and CAs were actually lost and/or heavily damaged when their own torpedoes hit and/or cooked off?
For decades the IJN lost pred-dreds and a BB to shitty shells and during the war they lost who knows how many other ships to piss poor damage control, but how many ship were lost because of the Long Lance?
>>... and matters would have improved if the IJN had just done scouting with their carrier air wings like everyone else with carriers did.
Another example of over-specialization. Other navies used ordinary fighters & attack craft to scout while the IJN chose to "stovepipe" roles and waste their limited budget on ship & aircraft designs which could only scout.
How many of those relatively worthless floatplane-carrying, sub-directing cruisers did they build in the mistaken belief their subs could/would regularly ambush warships? Wouldn't those hulls have been better off built as bog standard CAs or CLs?
If memory serves, she worked briefly with everyone's favorite RM "monitor" Faa di Bruno.
Let's talk about the best Cruiser of the modern age.
and how the Russian Navy basically is letting them all rot away?
>Decisive Battle fantasy
It wasn't so much a fantasy as what everyone thought would happen in teh 1920s and 30s, the USN planned for pretty much exactly that scenario.
But yeah, the IJN certainly went overboard with how they designed ships for a special role in their one glorious battle.
I think only one cruiser was lost directly to explosions of her own torps, but more than on Jap ship was ravaged by fires which may have been mde worse by the presence of pure oxygen in teh tanks around the torps.
But IJN firefighting setups were terrible, and as you said their propellant and shell filler could explode from bieng dropped to the floor.
>Wouldn't those hulls have been better off built as bog standard CAs or CLs?
Sure. They should've used dedicated floatplane tenders (as in, a bunch of repurposed cheapass freighters) to set up and support island bases, and let the Germans explain to them how to uboat.
>how many DDs, CLs, and CAs were actually lost and/or heavily damaged when their own torpedoes hit and/or cooked off?
Furutaka was sunk by her own torpedoes cooking off.
Chokai was lost when a single 5" shell hit her torpedoes.
Maya wasn't lost to her own torpedoes, but was once forced to jettison all of them due to fires on her deck.
Mogami was severely damaged by her torpedoes cooking off and lost her starboard engine in the blast, contributing to her loss.
Mikuma was lost after a bomb set off her torpedoes and gutted her amidships.
Suzuya was lost when her torpedoes cooked off and the resulting fires spread out of control.
Chikuma was nearly lost at Santa Cruz, like Maya only having been saved by a crewman jettisoning her torpedoes minutes before a bomb scored a direct hit on where they'd been.
So five CAs lost to damage from their own torpedoes and two which would have been lost had they not jettisoned their torpedoes. I'm not going to go through all the CLs and DDs, but I know there were a few destroyers lost to torpedo detonations. With so little target to hit it's not surprising.
Thanks, user. I truly didn't know and that's why I asked.
Jettisoning torpedoes was quasi-defacto SOP, but it was entirely on the Damage control officer to actually decide it. At Midway Mogami did. Mikuma didn't.
>It wasn't so much a fantasy as what everyone thought would happen in teh 1920s and 30s, the USN planned for pretty much exactly that scenario.
Not to the same extent as Japan. It was a matter of degree and not kind.
Orange wasn't as simple as people tend to think it was. The pre-WW1 version gets much of the press while the updates & variations from ~1910 thru the mid-30s get ignored. The "cautionary" school won out over the "thrusting" school. Miller's "War Plan Orange" from USNI is a good book on the subject.
Jutland, games at NWC, and fleet problems disabused the US from any "one big battle" thinking. Japan never made that conceptual leap and fell so far down the rabbit hole that she built over-specialized ships to fill over-specialized roles in that fantasy.
>>They should've used dedicated floatplane tenders (as in, a bunch of repurposed cheapass freighters)
Just like nearly everyone else did and did successfully.
>>to set up and support island bases, and let the Germans explain to them how to uboat.
Great torps and good long range sub designs coupled with Three Stooges level doctrine and operations. It was so bad that US didn't have to bother convoying east of Pearl and merchant ships sailed independently along the West Coast.
I actually took a look through records for the CLs and DDs, since I was also curious. It wasn't as pronounced as with the CAs, partly because a lot of the CLs were sunk by submarines and the DDs were lost at night or with all hands, meaning there aren't any detailed damage reports. But the CL Abukuma was definitely lost to a massive explosion of her torpedoes as were a couple of destroyers.
>... detailed damage reports.
That's to be expected. As you note, the CLs and DDs were lost in ways that weren't really conducive to detailed AARs.
That being said, the woeful record of Long Lance/oxy equipment aboard the CAs most certainly points to each being both sole and contributory reasons for the loss of those smaller ships.
i'm not so sure about the torp detonations causing so many losses on the smaller ships, a big part of the reason why they fucked over so many ca's was that they were placed in a middle deck, completely surrounded by their ship. this meant when they were hit or a fire reached them, the blast was contained inside the ship and invariably caused catastrophic damage. on cl's and dd's, the torps were topside and a lot of the blast would have been directed upward.
i'm not saying that the blast wouldn't have completely destroyed the ships, just that the positions they were mounted on would have saved them from the catastrophic damage that the ca's typically took.
So, ass-torps?
Picture very much related.
>i'm not so sure about the torp detonations causing so many losses on the smaller ships
There's a difference between "causing" and "being among the causes".
That's why listed both cases in their excellent list and I specifically wrote "sole and contributory reasons".
each one of those torps was like what 1000 pounds of tnt? i wouldn't want to be in an enclosed space near them during a gunfight or air raid
If I'm reading the book right and Tribals existed to sink enemy destroyers with gunfire so other, smaller, older destroyers could safely go about the business of torping everything making a wake, I pretty much replicated that circumstance in RtW. Nifty.
>was life ever so sublime as it was in Vienna of those bygone days?
1080 pounds of Type 97 powder, which is around 7% more powerful than pure TNT according to a quick google search. But yeah, nothing to be sneezed at.
That's why nearly all torp mounts/launchers were designed & placed with jettisoning the torpedoes in mind.
The same was true with depth charges. While ready use charges were stored on the weather decks by the launch rails, additional charges were stored on deck too.
>I pretty much replicated that circumstance in RtW.
Did you remember to use quad turrets (once available and reliable) for your gun-focused DDs?
No, I used doubles. It's really quite freaky.
Ooooo... a big DD with reliable quads...
Nasty indeed.
This is the price we pay for having all ships registered in places like Panama - it's 40% cheaper to pay taxes for them, but half of world merchant marine is floating scrap and rust
The ship in question was registered in Denmark, and the American Bureau of Shipping doesn't exactly make up classifications and then hands out certificates for teh lulz, either.
What the ship encountered was a combination of two unlucky point failures.
One of which had already been noticed by Rolls-Royce, and corrected in later models of their thruster, the second was probably a cheapass counterfeit part installed by a long-defunct subcontractor for a defunct shipyard.
The third bit is that the shaft tunnel being flooded was pointed outas a possible weakness in the post-panamax designs with teh engine mounted centrally, but was dismissed as 'unlikely'.
Well, turns out the shaft tunnel DID flood becasue the thruster shredded itself and broke the seal, and the water entered teh engien room because the cable penetration did not hold.
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Oh god the USN caught the infection from the Japs.
Imagine cruisers with six or seven turrets.
You didn't say that they couldn't be singles.
God, they should have just let the kebabs have it. They fire all the guns at once, damned thing capsizes, Russians sail into Constantinople.
Instead you get a HSF battlecruiser with something to prove and a world to prove it against.
Excuse me, but the Brooklyn and St.Louis classes had zero problems with their turrets that were actually caused by the arrangement (aside from the obvious limited fire angle of Turret #3). The only reason why the Clevelands deleted the #3 turret was weight issues, and the Surface School wasn't happy about losing such a massive amount of firepower as (later) war proven by the 'Sic-Inch Machine Gun' USS Helena (pictured in the previous post).
Not exactly. Remember up-thread I wrote about how perhaps only the US (and UK with US backing) had the money and capacity to build specialized classes instead of generalized ones? The AA CLs are an example of that.
user, the Brooklyn and St.Louis classes (St.Louis class Helena, pictured in that image) were just Surface Warfare Cruisers, as typical of the US' Light Cruiser doctrine. They weren't AA Cruisers.
The US was inspired by the Japanese Myoukou-class of Heavy Cruiser and built a Light Cruiser version of them, except better, our Navy BuCon openly admitted this.
Interestingly, the hull of the Brooklyns would later be scaled up a bit, and this would be the basis for USS Wichita and the Baltimore class heavy cruisers.
I used the term "AA cruisers" because it was something non-grogs would be able to grasp.
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They used a CLAA designation for some which suggests that they saw them as being at least slightly than the usual Surface Warfare Cruisers.
user, CLAA was only used by the US for the Atlanta-class and variants, it had fallen out of use by the time the Worcesters were brought in.
None of the Brooklyn or St.Louis class Light Cruisers ever received the CLAA designation in US Service.
That's true, but they still used the designation. They saw the Atlantas & variants as something sufficiently different from the Surface Warfare paradigm to rate a slightly different classification. They created and used it for a reason, not for shits and giggles.
All I'm saying is that it was used for a small number of ships for a small period of time.
user, the post you had been replying to was specifically talking about the Brooklyn and St.Louis classes, which had the 3a2 turret layout and were simple surface warfare Light Cruisers.
If you want to go into left field, the US had designations for Aviation Cruisers (CLV/CAV), Anti-Submarine Cruisers (CLK), Anti-Destroyer/Assault/Strike Cruisers (CAK, later CS), Shore Bombardment Cruisers (CAS), Scout Cruisers (CS, was later taken by 'Strike Cruiser'), and more even though most of these were never used operationally. The US recognized a lot of potential specialist roles for Cruisers and gave a lot of thought into building them. But when it came down to brass tacks, the US didn't care much for expanding the cruiser role beyond DL (a type if CL to the USN), CL and CA. Functionally and designwise, the Atlantas were DLs, they only came into their CLAA role well after they were designed and built. A happy accident, not a planned development.
>user, the post you had been replying
No, the reply chain is far deeper than that.
I've been carrying on a discussion about how the US alone had the money and industrial capacity to build warships which tended to be more specialized. That discussion began on the previous thread with a question about IJN design issues.
The US primarily built "generalist" ships but, for a brief period, they built a class and some variants which the men of the time felt were different enough and used differently enough to require a different designation. That's all.
I'm not interested in some military trivia dick sizing contest regarding the classes. If you want to count rivets, be my guest but that's not what this discussion has been ever been about.
Do you understand now?
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Are cruisers even useful in the modern day? what do they offer that guided missile destroyers and frigates dont?
Are they just bigger with more guns and more missiles, so essentially could be replaced by the same tonnage of destroyers but with more redundancy (ie. 2 ships to try to sink instead of 1)?
I've heard people call the Zumwalts basically cruisers with the ship type entry crossed out and "destroyer" penciled in above it.
I've heard proposals (on the net) that modern ships be rated just like Royal Navy's Rating system - but with Missiles instead of guns.
So, 1st rate would have over 120 missiles,
2nd Rate would have 100 to 120 missiles,
3rd Rate would have 80 to 100 missiles,
and so on ...
In the US navy there's not a significant difference between the role and capability of destroyers. Both terms just refer to a medium sized surface combatant.
I have a soft spot for refitted Standards.
Post-WW2 you just call your ships whatever the fuck you want to bomboozle the government into handing over the shekels.
No, user.
You made a veritably incorrect assertion (that some of the Brooklyn and/or St.Louis class Light Cruisers were CLAA, via THE topic [not subject] of the post in question) and were corrected. You came back with ACKTUALLY-tier bullcrap and attempted to move the goalpoasts. You were again corrected. You then continued to move goalposts and resorted to accusations of dick measuring, which is no better than a muh dick argument.
Do you understand now? You are either too short for this ride or you don't understand English grammar and failed to recognize a topic instead of a subject.
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I love a southern belle with a great ass.
I prefer a girl who's stacked up front.
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>Are cruisers even useful in the modern day?
The first question you have to ask yourself, user, is what are you actually talking about.
Cruisers in the actual sense or cruisers as the US Navy calls them, even though their own actual paperwork clearly says they are full of shit?
Because as per role and hull standardization, the US Navy has only '''Cruisers'''.
Yes, you read that right, according to the US Navy's own codes on hull classification, the Burkes are ''Light Cruisers'' because they do not meet the requirements of being mass producible and replaceable during wartime losses, while also being far too many eggs in one basket.
They also lack the technical requirements to be labeled Cruisers (they are not stand and fight ships).
Cruisers in the actual sense, well, look at the Kirov. That's one ship that I would not like to meet as a CV (or anything else below a date-comparable Battleship) on the ocean on a bad day.
If we were to adapt WWII definitions to the modern day, would a modern battleship be an arsenal ship loaded with a blend of cruise missiles for land attack and anti-ship missiles for use against enemy surface combatants (seeing as how the last battleships alternating between shore bombardment and trying to kill everything else afloat)?
>modern battleship
We already have them, user.
They're called aircraft carriers.
It is true though.
>Arsenal Ship
user, no. Those are deathtraps and wastes of ammunition, which we already don't have enough of.
On a more serious note, to answer the assumed gist of your actual question, firstly ignore memeheads like CVmemers above, they either don't understand what a Battleship actually is (by US parlance, and in general this is to no fault of their own) or are just memeing.
It would take several posts to try to explain what a 'Battleship' is in US parlance/hullrole in detail. But suffice to say USN doctrinal strategy is, when actually intending to fight wars, still based on the Mahanian concept of the strategic 'Battle Lines' (not to be confused with the tactical 'lines of battle'). All of the USN's ships were supposed to be by this doctrine, but then they canned the Sprucans and multi-roled specialists, but I digress.
Cutting short here, but in a modern circumstance, it'd be easiest to analogue a Modern Battleship to floating A2/AD zone, the most powerful and capable 'Bodyguard Ship' afloat that could handle pretty much any threat (at varying degrees of efficiency and would naturally be specialized to two or three) while also taking over heavy strike/anti-surface duties in the area. When taken with its 'battlegroup', it becomes essentially a 'no go zone' for the enemy.
Put one of these with a CV and you've freed up the CV to do what the CV does best: Air Superiority and Reconnaissance. Two things even the Modern Battleship designs out there can't really do that well.
Or, as fmr US CNO, Adm. Albert Herman Trost put it:
"Put a Battleship with an Aegis cruiser and you've got something that can go anywhere in the world. Put a battleship battle group within a couple of hundred miles of a carrier battle group and you've got something no one in the world can beat!"
The two ship types compliment each other very well, like King and Queen of the Oceans. Which is kind of why I still advocate the old 'Chess' Fleets.
>would a modern battleship
It would be a battleship. Likely the Iowas under their flight 3 outfit. Or new ones. Both the Navy promised, but here we are.
>user, no. Those are deathtraps and wastes of ammunition, which we already don't have enough of.
I disagree on the deathtrap statement, but ships would have to be built and launched for my final opinion. The ammunition issue on the other hand I will not contest but is something more easily addressed.
Guess who got his ticket to the commissioning of the LCS Little Rock today lads?
Standards are great.
The problem with Arsenal ships is they had essentially no way to defend themselves properly.
If they were built high enough to have C-RAM type defenses, they were easy pickings for missiles. If they were built to hide from the missiles, they were easy pickings for Artillery.
And so on and so forth.
The happy median wasn't easy to hold either, and took its cost in crew and cost.
Realize, the proposed Arsenal Ships were somehow magically supposed to have a crew of about 20 to 30 people, very limited communications equipment, and no capability to target for itself. It also had virtually no compartmentalization, being little more than a hull with VLS bolted on. I have actually seen several drafts for some of the designs, speaking as an Engineering guy they were absurd and terrifying things to look at and there was no way I would ever put my signature on that, I'd have rather lost my job.
By the time that you addressed all of the myriad of problems with the designs that made them entirely incapable of combat service (the communications equipment they had was incapable of secure operation at all, it was a civilian model, a nonstarter if I ever saw one), you would have had ships the size of the USS Texas with 200 crewmen (educated guesstimate here).
At that point, it wasn't an Arsenal Ship anymore, it was a Monitor, and anyone in their right mind would have rather had the 850man Battleship (again, educated guesstimate).
So as I understand it the idea simply isn't well developed.
Probably because there's no need to.
I still think it's a good concept, just executed (on paper) poorly.
>So as I understand it the idea simply isn't well developed.
From a Naval Engineering standards, that's not really the issue.
The issue is that when you fix the Arsenal Ship concept's flaws, you either have a towed barge with missiles on it or you have a Guided Missile Monitor. And in either case, you may as well just admit it and built that instead.
I don't believe those are the only applications at the end of the day. But then I don't have any blueprints in front of me to go over. And the concept has been buried since the 60s.
>And the concept has been buried since the 60s.
user, the last Arsenal Ship proposals were in 2011.
You would think they would have addressed these issues more thoroughly.
They...they didn't present this to congress like you said did they?
Of course they did. They had an ulterior objective, to save pic-related, which Congress was already disillusioned on.
They presented absolute 100% Grade-A Bull Cookies to make even shit look appealing in comparison.
The guys they forced to work on those designs would've liked to neck themselves from the stress this gave them. Impossible design requirements.
It's the same bull that produced the LCS, except LockMart and Austel were both more mercenary and gave the Navy exactly the crap they asked for.
>They had an ulterior objective, to save pic-related
But the only reason pic related exists is because the admiralty previously screwed over congress and threw pic related at them as a half-assed distraction.
Why the hell is the USN doing this to itself? And more importantly how is congress allowing it?
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>Why the hell is the USN doing this to itself? And more importantly how is congress allowing it?
They have forgotten what it means to fight a war which meant death for losing instead of just egg on their faces.
Their most important thing isn't winning battles, it's winning a larger slice of the budget pie.
This is the same reason that maintenance and training has been lapsing, because bad maintenance and training mean equipment runs down more meaning Congress HAS TO allow more money to replace equipment.
The Airforce and Army have also been guilty of the same thing, though the Army seems to be waking up (albeit very, very slowly).
Is it even remotely sensible? No. But it makes the money.
Why does the Navy/Congress go along with it?
Easy. Look at the records of the people who put these lunatic contracts and deals through, from both the military and congressional sides of the arrangements. More often than not, they stand to directly profit from it.
As President Eisenhower put it, "beware the Military Industrial Congressional Complex, lest their corporate schemes doom us all".
Except they've of course, built the arsenal ship. And they're submersible! SSGNs fill the role perfectly, and are more survivable. They're even named after the States. So what if USS Florida is SSGN-728 instead of BBG-67?