Battleship size comparison, because I'm a Naval Nerd
Last three generations of American battleships, compared.
I made this for Jeffie, because she saw me looking at a picture of Montana and asked how it compared to Alabama, which we've walked around on. I put way too much time into this, scaling them to match the turrets, then scrapping that and starting over with a better method (crop to hull edges and resize) once I realized the turrets weren't to drawn to scale. The extreme hull dimensions are to scale here; I can't guarantee anything else (damned Navy draftsmen!)
Click for big-enough-to-read-the-text version.
Notes:
*Alaska and Hawaii not eligible, because they weren't states during the battleship era, but they do have SSBNs named after them. There's not one of those named Montana either.
I made this for Jeffie, because she saw me looking at a picture of Montana and asked how it compared to Alabama, which we've walked around on. I put way too much time into this, scaling them to match the turrets, then scrapping that and starting over with a better method (crop to hull edges and resize) once I realized the turrets weren't to drawn to scale. The extreme hull dimensions are to scale here; I can't guarantee anything else (damned Navy draftsmen!)
Click for big-enough-to-read-the-text version.
Notes:
- Alabama is of the South Dakota class; the other two are the name ships of their classes.
- They all fired the same shells -- 16" diameter, 2700 pounds in the armor-piercing flavor -- but the latter two classes had slightly longer gun barrels, giving a tiny bit more range/accuracy.
- The class preceding SoDak and kin was a bit longer -- 700-some feet -- but it wasn't part of the discussion and thus I couldn't be arsed to add it. Just picture something halfway between the first two in size, but with thinner armor and the short guns.
- The first two are Panamax width; Montana would've had to take the long way around the Horn, though work was in progress on bigger locks on the Panama Canal (canceled along with the Montanas and last two Iowas at the end of the war).
- The AA gun emplacements on the bow and stern of the Iowa class totally make it look like a cock & balls.
- ETA: Montana is the only state* that never had a battleship named after it -- There was also a Montana in the works as part of a different South Dakota class in the '20s, but it was scrapped before it was finished because of the Washington Treaty. Oddly enough, they also had twelve 16" guns, despite being about the same size as the South Dakota class that actually got built.
*Alaska and Hawaii not eligible, because they weren't states during the battleship era, but they do have SSBNs named after them. There's not one of those named Montana either.