What was the actual purpose of cruisers? >Can't raid

>>32973089
kys

>>32973089
>problem too bug for raiders and escorts to handle
>not quite worthy of sending a battleship
Good thing we have an intermediate class with good all around characteristics.

>>32973089
Cruisers can do a little but of everything, but not too much so they would get too slow

>>32973416

And what would that problem be?

They add more ships to fight. they can take over if a dedicated ship is taken out, and if the enemy doesn't know much they might target it as opposed to another ship that can do more damage.

It has everything to do with speed. Cruisers are fast, maneuverable and have a smaller profile than battleships. That helps their survivability against submarines and aircraft (relative to battleships) while still packing a significant amount of AAA. They also take much, much more of a pounding than a destroyer can.

>>32973089
>cannot raid as well as a submarine
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_cruiser_Admiral_Graf_Spee

>>32973494
Scouting as part of a larger fleet that can also take care of itself, taking out shipping halfway across the world, their's a reason these ships were built, often by people who had an idea of what they were doing

>>32973089
Cruiser is a much broader term than those other things. Some cruisers were just larger destroyers and functioned pretty much identically. They were called destroyer leaders and more or less acted as the flagship of a destroyer squadron, but they had torpedoes, depth charges, etc. Usually slightly better firepower.

Other cruisers were just ships designed to function on some gimmick, use a certain weapon layout that was specialized like a shitload of light dual purpose guns for AA escort.

Heavy cruisers cost about half as much as a battleship, and clearly two of them were no match for a battleship, but they could be in two places at once, and could fight anything that was not a capital ship, and so they were great at projecting threat into areas that were mostly backwaters that had nothing but some DD and small cruiser skirmishes.

Another factor to consider with some cruisers is where the name comes from, cruisers were traditionally designed to cruise. They were much more fuel efficient than battleships, which are horribly costly due to how fat they are, and some had fairly comfortable crew accommodations in comparison, because they were designed for long duration patrols or spanning the oceans. BBs typically stay in or near their port unless they are going out to do something specific, cruisers are far reaching.

Cruisers are a diverse group of ships, and while some did have dedicated combat roles or places within a battlegroup, the larger ones were designed to be independent pseudo-capital ships to project power places where using actual capital ships and all the support that would require (raw ship cost is not the only cost) is just not worth it. Ships of this type are the only warships whos primary design consideration is not combat but duration and crew. So in a fight they are inefficient from a cost perspective compared to that much money worth of battleships or destroyers (or other kinds of cruiser), but they do a lot more in between.

Cruisers are the do-everything-and-be-cheaper-than-BBs ship.

Even in modern times, cruisers are needed in any serious naval combat group because they have all the space needed for real C3 equipment and command staff facilities. Nothing can replace the Ticos and there's a reason why Russia is trying to hang on to the Kirovs.

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Cruisers were for power projection overseas, far from the home country. They have long range, high speed, and decent firepower. The name means little in this day and age when modern destroyers are the size of cruisers (though lacking in the range department) and the modern capital ships (aircraft carriers and SSBNs) are unrestricted by fuel consumption.

Honestly the concept of the large surface combatant is outdated.

>>32973574
>posting a pocket battleship
>not posting a legendary auxiliary cruiser
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_auxiliary_cruiser_Pinguin

Fun fact: The permanent fleet order No.10 of the German Navy declares the Prize law still valid.

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>>32973574

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_cruiser_Admiral_Graf_Spee

I'm not sure why you think that abomination helps your case.

>>32973089
>pretend we know what we're talking hh about thread
Give me a few minutes to google/wiki some shit, bros

Damn, I paid money to get the Graf Spee in World of Warships before it was earnable...god what a pos...

>>32974237

Don't worry.

It also sucked in real life.

>>32973089
>Be destroyer
>Get shreked by every other surface ship above me
>"Hurr durr I wish I could do more than act as a meat shield against battleships and shrek subs"
Hence why cruisers were born.

>>32973810
>17 knots maximum speed
It really seems like they could have put a stop to this sooner

What is commerce raiding

What is flotilla logistics and C&C ship

What is AAA screen

What is maneuverability with enough firepower to decimate destroyers and harass battleships

What is OP is a stupid fag

>>32973810
> The permanent fleet order No.10 of the German Navy declares the Prize law still valid.
Most navies still have this, actually. The US Navy still recognizes prizes. I'm a merchant mariner, we're required to take a course on international law concerning commerce in war time and stuff. Legally, we can still be taken as a prize and forced into service aboard enemy vessels.

Retarded and outdated as fuck, but law has a lot of silly things like that. Remnants of a bygone era.

>>32974500
>Slavery is outdated
Not my fault your post modern values conflict with the law laid down by real men. Maybe you should suck some more cock to quell your raging bum pain.

>>32974437
>Eternal Kraut can't eternally be stopped

>>32974500
The biggest joke about it that it's essential the law from 1856, they just changed the header of it when the system changed and they even had this law in parliament in 1968 to adapt it to the new orthography

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>>32974390
Cruisers existed long before anyone even thought of making ships purpose-built to destroy torpedo boats.

>>32974437
The ocean is a big place.

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>>32974500
>you will never be a helpless merchant accosted by big strong uboats and forced to service their vessels

>>32973089
>Half the cost of a batteship
[citation needed]

>>32974959
>implying they would want us near their beautiful MAN diesels
Merchant mariners are sarcastic assholes and all around terrible human beings. I think a naval vessel could stand having a bunch of mariners on board for about a week before they threw us into the ocean.

>>32973089
To exist, unlike more battlecruisers or battleships which could not due to treaty restrictions.

>>32974484
>What is commerce raiding
Something cruisers acting alone could not successfully do.

>What is flotilla logistics and C&C ship
meaningless buzzwords

>What is AAA screen
Something more efficiently performed by larger BBs or smaller, AAA-specialized CLs

>What is maneuverability with enough firepower to decimate destroyers and harass battleships
Cruisers have nowhere near the firepower to harass battleships. "Decimate destroyers" is just not that impressive.

>What is OP is a stupid fag
OP is always a fag but holy shit you are a retard.

>>32973579
Not (you), but "armored cruisers" (later just cruisers) were just the steam-powered descendants of the Age of Sail frigate; *the* general-purpose warship used for everything from independent patrol to raiding to screening for the line of battle.

It wasn't until WWII that those pipsqueak torpedo-boat destroyers got large enough, fast enough, and long-ranged enough to essentially replace the cruiser, a process which was completed by the replacement of the relatively short-ranged torpedo with the fast, long-ranged ASCM as the primary weapon for sinking other ships without needing massive guns.

The result was more of a nomenclature shift than anything else, as the name "cruiser" now refers to the largest non-carrier warships afloat.

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>>32974437

Atlantis was even better.

It doesn't look very intimidating but she sank 145,960 t worth of ships. She also managed to intercept top secret documents at one point through pure luck.

>>32975128
Google tells me an Iowa-class battleship cost ~$100,000,000 and a Baltimore-class cruiser cost $40,000,000. Not half, but not nothing either.

>>32975227

And 1 Iowa would easily beat 3 or even 4 Baltimores.

>>32975128
A CA does cost about half as much as a BB. Of course smaller cruisers cost less.

>>32975199
Id call the cruisers of WW2 to be descendants of the early 20th century scout cruisers more than the armored/protected cruisers. Those totally went out of fashion or evolved into pocket battleships.

You cant talk about cruisers with out mentioning the washington naval treaty. The displacement limit, and capital ship limit, must be considered when looking at the larger heavy cruisers. They were both restricted in weight and also trying to compensate with larger guns that might be of some use in a large naval engagement. This left them underarmored. Later on when the treaty was over you can see the later cruisers evolving better armor protection, but id question whether the entire point of a CA was valid once you could just build more battleships. But since a war was on then they probably stuck to what they knew and they knew how to make large 8 inch cruisers and just putting more armor on them and increasing their displacement a few ktons was probably not that much of a hassle

>>32975261
but 2 baltimores can threaten two destroyer squadrons in two totaly different parts of the world

>>32975189
You are talking out of your ass. Cruisers are literally designed for solo commerce raiding. That's where the fucking terms cruiser came from. Remember all those German ships giving the allies hell with commerce raiding? All of them were cruisers.

Flotilla logistics is not a buzzword. Back then, every flotilla or fleet needed a flagship for the commodore or admiral to direct things. The Japanese made some experiments with using destroyers for this purpose. However, they soon realized that by the time you added all of the shit onto a destroyer than a flag officer needs to correctly coordinate a group of ships, you had a superstructure so fucking big that Pvt. Pyle with his M1 could hit it from 3 miles away. This necessitated moving it up to a cruiser-class ship. And surprise surprise, these fared much better in the war than the destroyer C&C ships.

AAA screen is not more effectively performed by battleships. Every AA gun you add on a battleship is ammunition, personnel, and weight that could be better spent on the main guns and armor, ie the whole fucking point of a battleship. What's that, AAA-specialized CLs are better at AA? Wow, a CL, sounds almost like a fucking cruiser...

Decimate destroyers is pretty impressive when you have a ship that destroyers effectively can't do shit against that completely wipe out their opposition. The US Navy actually lost quite a few of the smaller engagements between destroyers and cruisers. You know why? Besides the fact that the Japanese initially had the advantage at night fighting, they used a lot more cruisers in their destroyer flotillas than the US did. This resulted in US DD's getting BTFO every time the nips even looked at the funny.

Basically, you're a fucking idiot and you're talking out of your ass about things you know nothing about.

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>>32974484

>What is commerce raiding
A stupid idea that cost Hitler the war

>What is flotilla logistics and C&C ship
Literally what

>What is AAA screen
Destroyers can do this just as well if not better

>What is maneuverability with enough firepower to decimate destroyers and harass battleships
Implying that a cruiser would be able to inflict any meaningful damage on a battleship without using torpedoes which could have just as easily been fired from a destroyer

>What is OP is a stupid fag
Pic related

>>32973089
>scouting
>commerce raiding
>helping to screen larger ships against destroyers and torpedo boats, and providing extra AAA firepower

>>32975345

>Remember all those German ships giving the allies hell with commerce raiding? All of them were cruisers.

For WW1 you have a point. The Emden is irrefutable proof of that. But by WW2 using surface vessels for commerce raiding was an outdated idea.

>>32975361
>Destroyers can do this just as well if not better
No way in hell. A DD is nowhere near as good at AA as a larger ship. Not only do they have fewer AA guns but you have to remember FIRE CONTROL. Destroyers were made cheap and disposable, only late ww2 did you start seeing DDs with sophisticated AA fire control systems, whereas such systems were standard on larger ships.

DDs were used as radar pickets to alert the fleet of incoming aircraft.

>>32973089
Destroyers really aren't all that versatile (at least until the modern era, at which point classifications of surface combatants are a meme anyway). They were very flimsy, and lacked the range to go at high speed for any length of time.

>>32975189
>AAA-specialized CLs
Which is still a CRUISER you dork

@32975361
Obvious troll is obvious. Fuck off to your anti F-35 threads.

>>32975438

>only late ww2 did you start seeing DDs with sophisticated AA fire control systems

I was under the impression that the Fletcher (along with its many variants) was pretty much the standard American destroyer throughout the war.

>>32975361
>A stupid idea that cost Hitler the war
It's the only thing a second rate navy can do. There's really no chance he could have seriously challenged the Royal Navy for naval supremacy.

>>32975467

This thread was mostly about heavy cruisers. Seriously, what are they for?

>>32975499
Killing light cruisers

>>32975489

He could have built a ton of U-boats.

>>32975430
>an outdated idea
Battleships were also outdated by WWII, and yet they were still extremely useful during it. Cruisers as commerce raiders being outdated doesn't change the fact that the Germans sank tens of thousands of tons of shipping with cruisers.

Which also reminds me of another use for cruisers, as submarine tenders. People who suck destroyer dick seem to be envisioning modern destroyers when they make that statement. They forget that back in WWII and prior, destroyers lacked any kind of range. There were actually very few destroyers until later in the war that were able to keep up with convoys during the voyage across the Atlantic. That's the reason the Brits and Canadians used the Flower-class so much instead of fleet destroyers. The Flowers were slow as fuck, ran on coal (I believe), and generally were incapable of any kind of ship-to-ship combat, but they had the endurance to stay with the convoy the whole journey.

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>>32975506

Could it really be that simple?

>>32975499
>what is moving the goal posts

OP should have specified heavy cruisers if that's what he fucking meant. Instead he was a retard and just said "cruisers" which literally encompasses everything from submarine tenders to battlecruisers to aircraft carriers.

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>>32973089
i dunno

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>>32975533

Alright, you win.

This is now a cruiser appreciation thread.

>>32975508
Which he did. But those are only good for commerce raiding.

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>>32973089
>useless against carriers

the Clevelands were brisling with AAA and usually played escort to larger ships

>>32975594

But unlike cruisers they were really good at it. At least early in the war before Britain developed reliable counter-measures. But realistically, Germany needs to win the war by the end of 1941 to have at chance at winning anyway.

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>>32975641

The most efficient escort ships during the war were escort carriers which were a lot cheaper to produce anyway.

>>32975671
but escort carriers didn't have 4x3 6in turrets

those 6in guns had flak rounds that could be used to further supplement it's AAA

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>>32975732

>6-inch guns
>Useful for AA

This is a joke right?

>>32975790
not at all

>>32976023

Then I'm afraid you're simply wrong.

http://www.navweaps.com/Weapons/index_weapons.php

Feel free to point out a few 6-inch guns that you feel would have been effective anti-air weapons.

The only one that I can find is:

http://www.navweaps.com/Weapons/WNUS_6-47DP_mk16.php

Which arrived too late to participate in the war and was quickly pulled out of service because it was seen as being inefficient compared to dual purpose 5-inch guns.

>>32976106
Effective? maybe not, but later in the war, the DoN made every Cleveland class able to elevate their guns to 60 degrees so that they would be able to engage targets at longer ranges and air targets

thing is, they could only be loaded at 5-20 degrees, so their rof was terrible

>>32976245

>thing is, they could only be loaded at 5-20 degrees, so their rof was terrible

That's kind of my point. Even if 6-inch guns could technically be used for anti-air, it was never very practical.

des moines 8 inch guns could be loaded at full elevation and were fully DP :^)

>>32976295

Indeed, but they arrived too late to participate in the war.

>>32975476
fuck off back to twatter.

>>32976314
>you will never directly intercept an enemy aircraft with laser accurate 8 inch AP and punch a nice clean hole through the cockpit removing chunks of the pilot as your shell continues on, undetonated

205 mm gatling autocanon when?

>>32974500
>>32974959
Well, the idea of looting at sea while still part of a national navy sounds pretty good to me
Get fucked merchant marinefags

>>32975671
During daylight hours and in good weather, sure.

You still need surface escorts the rest of the time.

>>32973089
Some of then were built for a singular purpose, like the Atlanta-class AA cruiser.

>16 dual purpose 5" guns
>16 × 1.1" guns
>16 × 20mm guns
>8 × 40 mm Bofors
>8 × 21 in (533 mm) torpedo tubes because why not?

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>>32977395
Forgot the pic.

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>>32974390
Alternatively...

>be destroyer escort
>btfo Yamato in a stand up fight

>>32975481
Eventually. Thise poor bastards in the US Asiatic Fleet that got rolled into ABDAFloat at the beginning of the war were still using Wickes-class DDs, which were hopelessly outdated even by WW1 standards.

>>32975489
I'm actually not convinced that's true, especially given how clownshoes the RN performed the few times it was called upon in the European and Pacific theaters. More importantly however, the Kriegsmarine believed it was true, so they tried not to engage the RN whenever possible.

>>32973089
Cruisers have actually gone toe to toe against battleships.

The naval battle of Guadalcanal

Google the USS Houston
Cruisers are great for destroying crushers,destroyers and troop ships

>>32973089
Their point is to outgun every ship they could not outrun and to outrun every ship they could not outgun.

>>32975552
Add to this that cruisers had better FC and radar than destroyers - on some classes just as good as BBs, at least for AA work.

>>32975671
You missed the part where CVEs were unable to keep up with any of the rest of the fleet outside of amphib and convoy work. None of them were rated for over 25 knots. For escorting CVLs and CVEs and protecting them against aircraft, CLs and CAs did most of the heavy lifting throughout the war.

>>32975227

http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/systems/ship/bb-61-design.htm

Each ship was to cost about $125 million to build, be constructed and commissioned in about three and half years, and displace about 52,000-tons (fully loaded).

Nice try. And a Baltimore is very large at 15k tonnes. The majority of WW2 cruisers were either 8k or 10k ones.

>>32975671

These ships were also built to commercial standards, like that one guy here always advocates we should do with modern carriers.

Really makes you think.

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>>32973089
>Can't raid as well as a submarine
Tell that to Hans Langsdorff, it appears he didn't get that memo.

>Useless against aircraft carriers
see pic related, the AA cruisers were THE anti air defense of WW2 naval forces