作者： Morgane

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Subcorner 18 – Intro to Geneva

by Morgane 2017年9月24日

IN OTHER WORDS: SILENT SERVICE: ON SUBMARINE DESIGNS AND WHY LE SURCOUF IS BEST SUBMARINE OF DEUXIÈME GUERRE MONDIALE

Hohum! Now that the Morgane is currently sick in bed no one is going to do sub-corner. Which means it is time for I, Surcouf, to save the day! Surcouf will teach you about the engineering marvel that is the Surcouf, which is biggest and best allied sous-marine of –

ENOOOOUGH!!

OUT! I’M ANGRY NOW! EVERYONE KEEP ON HIJACKING MY SUBCORNERS! THEY’RE MY SUBCORNERS! IT EVEN HAVE MY NAME ON IT! LITERALLY! TITLED! TAUTOG’S SUB! CORNERS!

Uh oh –

YOU HAVE THREE SECONDS TO GET THAT STUFF OUT OF HERE BEFORE I SHOVE YOU OFF INTO THE APPENDIX SURCOUF!

O-okay, okay! Bonne mère, you are in a bad mood …

MORGANE’S SICK! DO YOU SEE THE BACKLOG OF WORK UP THERE? I DON’T KNOW ANYTHING ELSE OTHER THAN SUBMARINES! AND I DON’T SPEAK CHINESE! I CAN’T MAGICALLY MAKE BOOKS SHIP FASTER! GAAAAAAH –

Tautog? Oh. Hey. So I got that –

NOT NOW TAMBOR THIS A BAD TIME. I’M PRETENDING TO BE SARGE AND YELLING. IT CALMS MY NERVES!

– research page you wanted.

OH. Good. Okay. We’re actually going to talk about this today. Surcouf, you can actually hang around. This actually involve you (sort of).

Hi everyone! It’s another one of my sub-corners. Today’s topic is actually a very simple one. It’s politics.

Specifically, the politics that lead to the U.S. navy’s development and design of submarines. We’re going to talk about the Geneva and London conferences (since they happened more or less closely).

Now, we’ve touched on the Washington naval treaty before, where a number of great powers came together to discuss and develop limitations on naval build-up. We came up with this idea called “collective security,” after all, and we were pretty happy to generally keep massive shipbuilding to a minimum.

Not so the other countries. Battleships were still being developed and built, and there was no agreement on an overall tonnage limit for smaller ships. So, everywhere you see, cruisers and destroyers, and yes, submarines, were all being built. This put the US navy at a pretty tough spot, since Congress really didn’t give it much money. What money went instead to the modernization of the Battle fleet (if you read vol. 1 and some of the BB girls talk about that? Yeah. It’s a reference to that process) and the conversion of the Lexington and Saratoga into aircraft carriers.

The problem here is that if you look at other countries, they were building a lot of stuff. Below I’ve put a table of new ships authorized to be built from 1922 to 1926 by the other major powers.

America Britain Japan France Italy
Cruisers 5 14 8 7 2
Large destroyers N/A N/A 9 12 12
Destroyers N/A 2 12 26 16
Large submarines 3 9 16 24 5
Submarines N/A N/A N/A 19 10

Where’s Germany?

Silly kraut Germany can’t into boatbuilding honhonhonhon –

Let’s not interrupt. Come on.

Hey! Peanut gallery! Settle down! I’m still talking!

…

Okay. Where was I? Right. Look at that chart up there. The only new things we were building at this time were the large submarines we’ve already talked about and the Omaha-class cruisers. Meanwhile, the Japanese and the English were both building some pretty advanced ships of all types. Thus, president Coolidge thought it might be a good idea to call the other powers together to see if we can’t put some limitations on what kind of smaller ships could be built. This first conference was the Geneva conference in 1927.

The British, of course, had more plans. The Admiralty planned at least seventy cruisers, and the British Empire would need to construct close to fifty ships by the 1930s to maintain imperial hegemony. They came in wanting the limits lifted, because funding issues prevented the RN architects from fully optimizing their ship designs, and they weren’t really interested in taking on the Japanese and French cruisers armed with the big 8” guns.

Japan, too, of course wanted more tonnage. France, however, along with Italy, declined to attend.

In fact, to further insult the US, the French foreign minister submitted a draft treaty to outlaw war to the League of Nations on the same day this naval conference began.

We had our reasons! First of all, the Washington Treaty was not fair to the French! You can’t trust the English to keep their word! Not when they design their forces explicitly to check the Marine Nationale!

A French shipgirl, attacking the English, when they aren’t even here to defend themselves. Why am I not surprised.

If any such conference is to take place it will happen AFTER they are built. Do you see how many submarines we are building? THE FRENCH ARE THE MASTER OF SOUS-MARINE COMBAT –

Yeah, well. The massive rearmament coming out of the UK and France basically scared the Italians. They really didn’t want to come into a conference where there was always a chance that everyone else’ll gang up on them and stop them from building more ships. You have to remember that basically everyone other than the US was still in a massive, massive shipbuilding frenzy right now.

By the way, this conference really went nowhere. America went in wanting to limit everyone’s shipbuilding. Britain went in wanting to make sure the Empire stays on top, and so wanted to push out as many ships as possible for the maintenance of the empire. Japan went in offended by western bias – literally calling the US and UK “imperialist hegemons” attempting to keep the definitely-not-invading-Asia Japanese inferior – and came out even more offended by western bias. I mean, people got assassinated back home because of these treaties!

You know what, I underestimated the length of this particular piece. I’m going to talk about London in the next sub corner instead. Or, actually, probably the next few sub corners.

… I’m seriously confused. Why did I dig out those documents again?

You know, I started out wanting to talk about how the British constantly tried to outlaw submarine warfare at every major naval conference. The one they came close to was at London, and this would end up significantly influencing submarine design of pretty much all the countries that had good submarines.

Well, to do that, I need to explain what the naval conferences are. Specifically, I’d need to talk about the London naval conference in greater detail.

To do that, I need to basically dig out the context for why these terms are discussed. Submarines were a small part of the conference overall, but the implications behind trying to limit the submarines was much bigger, since it revealed different historical objectives by all these powers.

In order to do that, I need to probably talk about Geneva, and what didn’t work there. Since, well, if Geneva had worked, maybe the start of the war would have turned out differently.

To explain Geneva I probably should go research just what the period was like. After all, we called that convention…

To do that, well, I had to look at what led to Geneva. That’s how the table got made.

…Hmm, we should probably talk a bit more about Washington too… That’s how this started after all.

Okay, so, dear reader, if you were to just remember one thing after reading this, I’d say it’d be this.

“The Geneva Naval Conference was initiated by the US due to concerns over increasing numbers of new ships being built by foreign powers. Meant to reach an agreement over limitations on naval construction, it failed.”

Hmm, yeah. That sounds good.

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[Mail Call] 9/23/2017 – Weekly Round-up (ish)

by Morgane 2017年9月23日

Hi everyone! Just thought I’d sort of leave a note on where things are. Morgane is obviously sick (it explains why no new content, for instance), so she probably shouldn’t be working.

Everyone else has been pretty busy, too. Zero is running around working hard at both his job and on Pacific, so we’re expecting to bring a new batch books to print when he can return to Chengdu to oversee printing. The artists are drawing (as well as settling in their new jobs, too) and the rest of us are either busy with exams or other forms of assessments.

So have a cute fat bird. I’ll be back later! 🙂

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(Historical Inspirations) Nose art in the Pacific War

by Morgane 2017年9月21日

I’m still sick, but I thought I’d talk a bit about something an old, old reader of ours asked.

Reading your creations was a pleasure & I’d like to comment.

[Commentary on shipgirls removed]

Your grand father surely are aware that WHILE the NAVY had stricter rules from THIS OLD FARTS PERSPECTIVE plenty of WARPLANES had nose art on them THOUGH I THINK (I MIGHT NOT BE WRONG HERE …) the BRITS had a lot MORE of their planes with nose art on EM

BUT WE HAD

yes we definitely had nose art on our aircraft. MIGHT BE TOO RISQUE FOR YOUR WEBSITE but it WOULD BE NICE to SHOW THE JAP GIRL & YOUR CHINAMEN what some of the ART looked like. I WAS ON SAIPAN IN 1944 & THERE WERE DEFINITELY BOMBERS THAT HAD TO BE PATCHED UP I DEFINITELY REMEMBER SEEING NICE YOUNG WOMEN PAINTED ON THE SIDES OF ‘EM

ONE OF THEM LEATHERHEADS THAT WAS REAL GOOD AT IT TOO HIS NAME WAS MARK I WONDER IF YOU’D KNOW HIM

ONE HAD A NICELY PAINTED YOUNG LADY THAT LOOKED KIND OF LIKE YOUR IOWA BUT SHE WAS COYLY HIDING HER ASSETS BEHIND A NICE BIG BOMB

You should see if you can find some to show IT WOULD BE NICE

[Rest of the message redacted]

Firstly, thank you for writing in. You’re definitely not wrong in your memories there. Family members mention that while the officers are generally very strict on nose art/pin-ups being not allowed on the planes, below decks & inside the cockpit were different tales.

Secondly, as the war went on, these standards became less and less relaxed. I am more familiar (ironically) with nose art over in the European theater, but it took me a while to find nose art in the Pacific.

Simply put, they did exist. In fact, there were a lot more of them than we’d realize. They went from something simple – such as this one here, “Barbie” is the name of the pilot’s wife…

To this particular P-38 in the Philippines in 1945…

“If it moves, salute it. If it doesn’t, paint it.”

I don’t know how true this is, but it’s what I’ve heard some of the older folks in the other side of the family say. It certainly seemed to be the case. For instance, this one’s from a fighter.

Of course you have stuff like the iconic “Shark Mouth” – here’s a commemoration P-40 that’s pretty colorful.

Then as bombers started showing up, the designs become increasingly more elaborate.

YOU EVER THINK ABOUT PUTTING YOUR GIRLS ON A PLANE? SURE HOPE YOU WOULD. MAKE THE LITTLE FAIRY MEN DRAW EM ON BOMBERS. BIG ONES. I SEE MITCHELLS ALREADY

Er… Well, yes and no. We actually did have something rather entertaining in mind. For instance, I’m sure you recognize this dashing gentleman here.

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Silent Service: Principles of Submarine Design (1)

by Morgane 2017年9月17日

Tautog here. I’ve been reading the comments and the mail and I’ve just realized that we haven’t talked about the very basics behind submarine design yet!

(Also, I’m a little tired of people arguing over which submarines are the best. The answer is of course the AMERICAN one, but you can make a good argument for many other countries’ creations, too!)

We’ve talked about the necessity of maintaining buoyancy before. However, I think it’d be good to just list off some general constraints that submarine designers are working under. So, in order, we’re going to be talking about the pressure hull, the materials of construction, the conning tower and periscope, and the powerplant. I’m also going to use the American ones during WW2 as an example – if you’re interested in the submarines of the other countries, I can grab one of our other girls to answer instead!

Since this is somewhat long, today we’re just going to talk about the hull of the submarine itself.

Okay. So. Pressure hull. This is the submarine itself. If you think about it, the submarine is literally just a giant metal floating box that needs to sink on demand, right? The pressure hull is the “wrapper” around all the machinery that goes into a submarine. Generally speaking, submarines are volume critical and not weight critical. This is because the submarine is completely enclosed, so any attempts to save weight will not necessarily result in smaller displacement, because the volume of the materials don’t change.

What this means is that weight saving measures can then translate into thicker pressure hulls. A thicker hull means that you can dive deeper. While it’s tempting to think that it would be good to make a submarine with a super-thick hull, eventually you hit a point where most of the weight comes from the hull itself. We call this being “weight critical.”

(If you have very heavy batteries or machinery, it might cause the same thing. Remember! You want to distribute the weight in a generally even way.)

This is not good, because it means special precautions must be carried out to make sure your submarine don’t sink like a rock. This issue is typically solved in modern submarines via a combination of very light but sturdy materials or careful placement of their inner machinery. Pre-WW2 US steel, by the way, was rated at a dive depth of about 250 feet. Today submarines obviously go a lot deeper than that!

Speaking of the hull, the shape of the submarine matters, too. In theory, a completely spherical object would be the best at resisting pressure. You actually see this principle at work in deep sea science exploration probes. However, a spherical submarine wouldn’t have very efficient use of space. As such, most submarines are in those long cylinders that you are familiar with today.

The important thing about cylinders isn’t that they’re cylinders, though, but rather, just what sort of a shape it is in. Generally, the designer have to keep in mind the overall surface to volume ratio, since higher surface area naturally causes more drag, which makes the submarine less agile. However, longer submarines could also fit in more powerful machinery. So in cases like the modern day Los Angeles class submarines, it actually worked out to be positive overall.

Anyways. Generally, there are three types of submarine hulls during WW2 times.

  • Single hull: All of the tankage (the ballast tank; what controls the buoyancy of the submarine) is found in one single “shell.” It’s easier to build this type of submarine, and it has the least amount of surface area, so it is stealthy and fast. The downside is that with the tankage being inside the sub, you have a lot less space to fit in machinery. The US started out building single hull submarines, then went away from it quickly enough. It isn’t until modern day nuclear subs that we see the single hull submarine come back again.
  • Double hulls: It’s as the name suggests. A floodable second hull encases the pressure hull, and reserve buoyancy is provided in the tanks located between the pressure hull and the case. The advantage here was that the submarines were bigger, they ran more efficiently on the surface (because of their larger freeboard, which improved seaworthiness), and they generally have greater range (owning again, to their greater size). Some think that the extra layer of “armor” makes it tougher against the lightweight submarine-killing torpedoes, but others don’t think so. In either case, the downside was that the double hull was technically challenging to build, and it dove very, very slowly. While it was pretty commonly used by many European countries around WW1 and inter-war eras (including the Surcouf, teehee), today only the Soviets (Russians) really stick to the double hull design.
  • Then we have the compromise, or what is called the saddle tank design. Here, you have tanks mounted externally on a single hull submarine. This allows for much better compartmentalization and habitability since you’re carrying all that water outside, and the extra tanks actually allowed for a measure of stability due to the greater contact area between the submarine and the water. The downside? It had significant underwater drag, and it dove somewhat slowly as well.

So, yeah. I’ll probably go over some notable submarine examples in the next piece. In any case, I feel like it’s just something people should know about. Submarines are pretty neat, after all!

See ya next time.