Pre Enterprise and Long Beach Nuclear Surface Combatants?

[BlackBat242]

BB-40 New Mexico (first major US warship with T-E drive, T-E drive replaced with conventional geared turbines March 1931-January 1933).
BB-43 Tennessee & BB-44 California (retained T-E drive throughout life).
BB-45 Colorado, BB-46 Maryland, & BB-48 West Virginia (retained T-E drive throughout life).
CV-2 Lexington & CV-3 Saratoga (retained T-E drive throughout life).

 

[Firefinder]

BB-40 New Mexico (first major US warship with T-E drive, T-E drive replaced with conventional geared turbines March 1931-January 1933).

Source on this?

All the source I've found states* she was only refitted with new boilers and turbines while maintaining her Electric set up. Her two sisters, Mississippi BB41 and Idaho BB42, had their gearing removed and replace with newer sets since they were built with gear turbines. With the Navy getting a deal

A Turbine Electric ship is fundamentally structurally different then a Turbine Geared ship. To the Point where whuoe you can convert Gear to Electric fairly easily, as seen by the USS Langry then Jupiter conversion to test it, but you can not convert an Electric to Gear due to needing to cut multiple bulkheads and the like to run the shaft. That is with them being structurally identical, if they took advantage of a Turbine Electric Flexibility in setting up you now have to rejigger a whole lot so you can line the turbines up with the props. Which is an extremely expensive deal to do and those dates is in the worse of the Great Depression.
Then you have to figure how to deal with the fact that the New Mexico was design and Built with 2 Turbines, and only two with them runing 2 generators that split off to run the 4 motors for her propellers. Compared to the Mississippi and Idahos being design and built with 4 turbines.


*Which includes a WW2 battle report stating that they dodge a torpedo by Flipping one set of screws hard reverse then forward again to avoid being rammed by a destroyer, which you cannot do on gear ships.

 

[Scott Kenny]

Okay, we're still getting very sideways from my point being that the USN had made large numbers of turbo-electric generators which were likely among some of the largest steam turbines ever made at that date.

We have since made bigger ones, but having 4 primary loops to handle the thermal load of that reactor and running them through battleship-sized turbogenerators wouldn't surprise me in the slightest.

Though available sizes of isolation valves could also be an answer.

Wish I had some time in S5W boats instead of just Ohios. IIRC the Ohios do have isolation valves on each primary loop, but those plants were designed in the 1960s or early 1970s so larger tooling could have been made since the late 1950s or early 1960s.

 

[BlackBat242]

Source on this?

All the source I've found states* she was only refitted with new boilers and turbines while maintaining her Electric set up. Her two sisters, Mississippi BB41 and Idaho BB42, had their gearing removed and replace with newer sets since they were built with gear turbines. With the Navy getting a deal

A Turbine Electric ship is fundamentally structurally different then a Turbine Geared ship. To the Point where whuoe you can convert Gear to Electric fairly easily, as seen by the USS Langry then Jupiter conversion to test it, but you can not convert an Electric to Gear due to needing to cut multiple bulkheads and the like to run the shaft. That is with them being structurally identical, if they took advantage of a Turbine Electric Flexibility in setting up you now have to rejigger a whole lot so you can line the turbines up with the props. Which is an extremely expensive deal to do and those dates is in the worse of the Great Depression.
Then you have to figure how to deal with the fact that the New Mexico was design and Built with 2 Turbines, and only two with them runing 2 generators that split off to run the 4 motors for her propellers. Compared to the Mississippi and Idahos being design and built with 4 turbines.


*Which includes a WW2 battle report stating that they dodge a torpedo by Flipping one set of screws hard reverse then forward again to avoid being rammed by a destroyer, which you cannot do on gear ships.

New Mexico was built with her engineering spaces and shaft runs the same as her sisters (in case the installation was declared a failure)... as can be seen in the Booklet of General Plans prepared October 1944: http://www.researcheratlarge.com/Ships/BB40/BOGP/
The "big 5" were, to my understanding, built to take advantage of the smaller size of the electrical drive installation.

I have seen several different articles, written independently, which state her electric drive was replaced with geared steam turbines in 1931-33, but none are particularly authoritative - one even claims the other 5 BBs had theirs replaced as well - despite those NOT being modernized before the war, and descriptions of the in-war modernizations of 3 never mentioning any propulsion changes.

I have also not seen anything that specifically states New Mexico had retained hers, so there is uncertainty here, I'll admit that.

I would like to have a reference for that battle report - it sounds like an interesting read.

Anyway, here are the three articles:
http://www.historyofwar.org/articles/weapons_USS_New_Mexico.html (this is the one that claims all got theirs removed - but the separate articles on those ships do not mention such work.)

https://www.militaryfactory.com/ships/detail.php?ship_id=USS-New-Mexico-BB40 (this one mentions issues which led to the re-engining.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_New_Mexico_(BB-40) (specifically mentions that the replacement geared turbines were made by Curtis like those of her sisters.)


I am considering buying this book - it should have more details and references: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/uss-new-mexico-bb-40-john-taylor/1126808916

 

[Hydroman]

The 8-reactor design of the Enterprise was way, way too expensive to operate more than one ship. Takes a huge number of bodies to man the powerplant compared to the Nimitz-class 2 reactor plant.

4-reactor designs obviously need about half the bodies to man compared to the Enterprise, but it's still a lot of very highly trained individuals.

Also, building two conventional carriers gave the reactor designers time to scale their naval reactor designs up enough to make 4x the power of the A1W of the Enterprise.

From what I understand from buddies who were CVN-65 nukes when I was on-board her was that the engineers during design wanted to make sure the The Big E had more than enough power and evidently, she was over-powered in regards to the reactor plants. Reactor tech has evolved for sure, hence two reactors for CVN-68 to present with the CVN-78 class. With that said, during the '79 to '82 overhaul in PSNS, automation was added which did reduce the head count but did not compromise the ability to safely operate the reactors. I do believe and agree with a 4-reactor plant, intermediate configuration for CV-66 and CV-67 which should have been fine regarding sufficient power. Hey, on CVN-65, we even had one auxiliary boiler, which was eventually removed!

 

[Scott Kenny]

From what I understand from buddies who were CVN-65 nukes when I was on-board her was that the engineers during design wanted to make sure the The Big E had more than enough power and evidently, she was over-powered in regards to the reactor plants. Reactor tech has evolved for sure, hence two reactors for CVN-68 to present with the CVN-78 class. With that said, during the '79 to '82 overhaul in PSNS, automation was added which did reduce the head count but did not compromise the ability to safely operate the reactors. I do believe and agree with a 4-reactor plant, intermediate configuration for CV-66 and CV-67 which should have been fine regarding sufficient power. Hey, on CVN-65, we even had one auxiliary boiler, which was eventually removed!

Great googly-moogly! Yall had enough steam to cook most of Louisiana!