Comments by "Steve Valley" (@stevevalley7835) on "USS Ranger - Guide 299" video.

  1. I see Ranger as the true heir to Langley, with the same sort of aft boiler room and swiveling funnel arrangement. To my thinking, the Lexingtons should never have been built, with carrier development proceeding directly from Langley to Ranger. Yes, I hear the cries. The Lexingtons are big, and they look nice, but they were horribly wasteful of displacement for the air group they carried. Reading newspaper reports of the time, the cost overruns on the Lexingtons were horrendous, with the ships ending up costing twice as much as originally claimed. The Lexingtons also had an excruciatingly long build time, evidence the USN didn't know what it was doing, and was changing the design frequently as experience was gained with Langley. And, without the Lexingtons, the USN would have had displacement available to build three Yorkowns, with enough left over to build Wasp as another full size Yorktown.
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  2.  @gregorywright4918  Besides Friedman, and other books on the subject, I have found newspapers of the time make for fascinating reading, and the papers will report all the debates in Congress. The Library Of Congress has a keyword searchable database for papers of that era. The annual reports of the Secretary of the Navy, which include the annual reports of the individual bureaus, are another great resource. I have even found the full text of some naval appropriation bills on line. Did you know that the appropriation bill that funded Langley, appropriated more money for zeppelins than for the carrier? I posted a question about the Langley vs zep funding for Drac in Guide 264, so maybe we will hear his views on that topic. While the Navy was considering another collier conversion before the treaty, I'm pretty sure they would have changed their mind after the treaty. The treaty decreed any carrier in service or building, which included Langley, as "experimental", and not subject to the 20 year replacement cycle of the treaty. Converting a second collier after the treaty would doom the navy to having a ship with zero combat value occupying part of their displacement allocation for the entire interwar period.
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  3.  @Philistine47  from my study on the subject, Ranger's lack of size was directly due to the Lexington's excess of size. The two Lexingtons used half of the US' tonnage allotment. Friedman on carriers talks about the debates in the Navy about how many carriers they wanted, and how to divide up the remaining tonnage. They soon decided Ranger was too small, so the Yorktowns were made larger, but not too large, so that enough tonnage allotment was left to build a minimally effective carrier, which became Wasp. Yes, the Yorktowns were vulnerable. They did not have staggered boiler and engine rooms. Considering how Yorktown and Hornet were both lost: dead in the water, but not on fire, can't help but wonder, if they had been built with staggered boiler and engine rooms, like an Essex, would they have survived?
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  4.  @christopherrowe7460  the USN did have a lot of input from the RN in carrier design. Stanley Goodall was seconded by the Admiralty to the USN during the war and was a major conduit of information between the USN Bureau of Construction and Repair and the Admiralty's chief constructor Eustace Tennyson-D'Eyncourt. Goodall provided in depth information about Hood to the USN. Friedman's book on carriers goes on to describe the continuing exchange of information between the USN and RN in the 20s, The RN went to larger carriers during the war. As soon as the war ended, enthusiasm for carriers waned significantly and Eagle and Hermes were both long builds. Seems the IJN took the rational approach to carriers. Hosho was laid down in 1920, when Akagi and Kaga were both intended as big gun capital ships. It would be interesting to see where IJN carrier design would have gone without the intervention of the treaty, and that special clause the US wanted, allowing the conversion of outsized battlecruisers. Yes, the USN was designing 35-39,000 ton carriers before the treaty. You know how we Americans roll, always want to have a bigger one. But reality, and a tight fisted Congress, resulted in Langley. I have read that, until the intervention of the treaty and availability of the battlecuriser hulls, the Navy was planning on converting a second collier. As for the dimensions of US carriers, beam is dictated by the Panama Canal. The need for speed, the more wind over the deck, the safer air ops are, as well as USN "scouting group" doctrine, dictates the length to beam ratio of a cruiser/battlecruiser. If I was in charge in the 20s, Langley would have been followed in 3-5 years, by Ranger. Even looking at Ranger, I can see the lineage going to Langley, not the Lexingtons. Ranger has the same far aft positioned boilers, with swiveling, deck edge funnels, as Langley. Ranger, as originally planned, was flush decked, same as Langley. The USN did not return to the Lexington's layout with midships boilers and an island, until Yorktown.
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  5.  @christopherrowe7460  buying the books can be an expensive endeavor. Well worth it for someone who will refer to them repeatedly, like Drac. My local public library doesn't have much, that is of this specialized nature, but they can transfer in a great deal from other libraries in their exchange network. I have had them transfer in Friedman on carriers, battleships, and cruisers. as well as other works on the Washington Treaty, and ships of the IJN. The IJN inquiry was fascinating: working on a hypothesis that the Kii class was not a distinct class, but a proposal to up-armor the Amagis on the slipway and reclassify them as fast battleships. Information I was able to find was too fragmentary to be sure, but the Kii and Amagi designs are so similar it bucks the percentages that they were distinct classes.
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  6.  @chrissouthgate4554  I don't view Ranger as a cheaper option. It was the USN's first purpose built carrier. Ranger was larger than either Hōshō or Hermes. Especially with the treaty limiting displacement, it would be foolish to waste a lot of displacement, as well as money, on concepts that may not prove out in use. Think, for instance, about the triple flying off decks that Akagi and Kaga were originally built with, and what it cost to rebuild them with single, full length, decks. Imagine if the Brits had actually built a carrier with islands on both sides of the flight deck, and what it would cost to fix that mistake. The USN was remarkably lucky the Lexingtons came out as well as they did, because the USN didn't know diddly about carriers at the time. I envision the Lexingtons accumulated a pile of change orders the size of a house as experience was gained with Langley. The cost overruns on a Lexington, alone, would have paid for Ranger.
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  7.  @gregorywright4918  the Navy had plenty of options in 1922. Congress essentially was hoodwinked with an unrealistically low initial estimate for the cost of the conversions. Once millions more had been poured in to the project, more than what a clean sheet carrier would have cost, Congress kept approving increases in the appropriation for them. Admiral Moffett was claiming, in 1922. the conversions could be done for $12M each. The Wiki article on them says the conversions were budgeted for $23M. In Feb, 1925, newspapers reported the budget was increased to $34M each. In March of 1927, the budget was increased to $40M each. Ranger cost about $20M.
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  8.  @gregorywright4918  yes, I agree, no experience. That was a major risk in tying up half the US' tonnage allotment in only two ships, which forced the choices for later ships to smaller designs. What if the Lexington's design was totally wrongheaded and irrecoverable? The treaty would not have let the US replace them for 20 years. We were lucky they turned out as well as they did. The navy opting for ineffectively small designs in the absence of the Lexingtons is not a sure bet. C&R had drawn up a 35,000 ton, 32kt design in 1920, which had the key feature of the hull flairing out, above the waterline, aft, so the hangar could be 64' wide all the way to the fantail. The designers knew how to get more aircraft into a carrier of a given displacement, but they were hamstrung by the requirement to use the battlecruiser hulls, which had been sold to Congress with wildly lowballed estimates.
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  9.  @christopherrowe7460  you're not late to the party. I have been holding forth on the waste of the Lexingtons and the virtues of Ranger for years. The first purpose built Japanese and British carriers were small too, smaller than Ranger. I would interpret these "baby steps", as their recognition that they don't know what they are doing. Clean sheet 27,000 ton carriers would be almost as wasteful as the Lexingtons, due to the lack of operational experience. Clean sheet carriers would probably have had the same magnitude of delays and cost overruns, because they would probably have had a lot of revision during construction.
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  10.  @echoveria  pretty common it seems. Hornet gave B-25s a piggy pack to Japan. I have read of Ranger delivering P-40s to North Africa and Wasp delivering Spitfires to Malta. I know, in the case of Hornet, her own air group was in the hangar, while the B-25s filled the deck. I think it was in "Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo" where the author talks about the Navy pilots showing off their planes, in the hangar, to the Army pilots.
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