In 1945, Britain had a large and often hastily-constructed fleet which
was clearly close to obsolete, and very little money with which to
update it. This is the story of what happened next.
Brown himself worked as a Naval Constructor and in this volume
writes from his own experience; Moore supplements this with
declassified materials. The subtitle is "Warship Design Since 1945",
but clearly not all the information is available yet (the book was
first published in 2003), and things therefore get much fuzzier after
the early 1970s. Overall this is as good an account of post-war
British naval design decisions as one is likely to find for the
moment.
This is a short book by page count, but a pleasingly dense one. After
the first chapter introduces the overall situation at the end of the
war, division is by ship type: "reconstructions" (severe refits and
upgrades), carriers, submarines, destroyers, and so on. The political
angle is treated only superficially; the process as presented here is
very much one of the Navy making proposals and the Government cutting
them back.
There's a fascinating section on the physical constraints of modern
naval architecture, and another on other considerations (such as fire,
stealth, lifeboats, and general survivability). This also deals with
the lessons the RN learned from its experience in the Falklands; to me
that's one of the most interesting aspects of the whole business, the
feedback process from combat experience to future designs.
For me as a wargamer and alternate historian, the most valuable items
here are the accounts of design studies: the original "cruiser
carrier" that eventually became the Invincible class, the Type 19
frigate (which at one point was proposed as a 50,000 ton hovercraft),
the various incarnations of CVA-01, and so on. Hard numbers are
obviously a bit scarce, not surprising for ships that never actually
made it into construction, but what there is is generally in the book.
Not particularly light reading, but highly recommended if you have any
interest in post-war naval architecture.
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