Quote:
Originally Posted by Subnuts
This graph, created in 1929 as part of the Royal Navy's official war game rules, would suggest otherwise.
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Can you show any reference that the "war games" were conducted by the RN, or that they were in any way "official"? I've had that chart for decades, and the more research I conduct the more suspect I find it. I'm fairly certain that it was created for a private game and I'm not sure exactly how they did their calculations, but I'm also reasonably certain that they didn't ride any ships with a stopwatch. If someone had done that the information would be available today, and it isn't.
Quote:
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(Amazon, V&W, Ambuscade, and Leander are destroyers)
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HMS
Leander was not a destroyer, and in fact there are only two
Leanders that graph could possibly refer to, and I have to wonder which one they meant. The first was a 4300-ton screw-and-sail cruiser commissioned in 1885 and sold in 1920. With an indicated horsepower of 5500, the power/weight ratio was a paltry 1.27.
The next
Leander was a light cruiser commissioned into the Royal Navy in 1931, two years after the date on that chart. If that's the
Leander they meant then the line for that ship was purely speculative, which means that might also be true for the rest of the chart. That it was the ship they meant is highly unlikely, since that
Leander wasn't even ordered until February 1930. With a full-load displacement of 9740 tons and pushing 72,000 horsepower she had a power/weight ratio of 7.39.
Ambuscade was indeed a destroyer, commissioned in 1927, and had a power/weight ratio of 22.4. Of course there are other factors involved, particularly propeller slippage at low speeds, but I highly doubt that
Ambuscade and
Leander (either one) had similar acceleration characteristics.