Perhaps the BEST B1G Forum anywhere, here at College Football Fan Site, CFB51!!!

USS MIDWAY & USS IOWA

Interesting size comparison, the Midway is basically the size of Nimitz class carriers.  The Iowa was designed to fit through the Canal (barely).  It's long length aids with speed, which is the highest maximum of any "real" BB.  (Some folks view the Iowa class as battle cruisers, but there is no end to that argument.)

PERSIAN GULF. CIRCA 1987

For historians and history buffs interested in naval history the Battleship / Battlecruiser / Fast Battleship distinction provides fodder for endless debates.  

Essentially, the Iowa Class Battleships were designed as Battleships but deployed as Battlecruisers.  

Trying to explain the contours of the debate without actually taking sides:
Battlecruisers were first developed and deployed at a time when Battleships were very large, very heavily armed, very heavily armored, and due to the enormous weight of all their guns and armor, very slow.  At that time, Cruisers served a different role, they were not nearly as heavily armed nor armored but they were much faster. 

Battleships of all navies were generally designed to a standard known as the "Balanced Battleship".  This refers to a ship having enough armor to withstand hits from it's own shells.  As guns got larger and more powerful it took enormous quantities of steel armor to accomplish that goal which meant that Battleships got heavier and weight retards speed.  

The original Battlecruiser concept was to build a ship that essentially:

• Could outrun anything that it couldn't obliterate, and
• Could obliterate anything that it couldn't outrun.  

This was accomplished by pairing Battleship sized guns (or sometimes slightly smaller or less of them than a Battleship) with usually more armor than a Cruiser but significantly less than a Battleship).  

One function of such ships was to serve as "Cruiser Killers" a role for which Battleships were not well suited since Cruisers could easily outrun Battleships.  

In practice, when the Royal Navy and the Imperial German Navy slugged it out off the coast of Jutland in 1916 both navies determined that the total number of big guns brought to the fight was crucial so they sent their Battlecruisers along with their Battleships in order to maximize their total firepower.  It did that but it also resulted in a number of Battlecruisers taking magazine hits and exploding.  

During the interwar years a succession of international treaties limited and governed Battleship design and construction.  The USN completed WWI era Colorado Class in the early 1920's then didn't build a new Battleship until the North Carolina Class in the late 1930's.  The Colorado Class ships could only manage 21 kn while the North Carolina Class ships could achieve 28 kn but that was still well below Cruiser speed (about 33 kn).  The North Carolina Class (mostly) stuck to the treaty limitations and it simply wasn't possible to build a balanced Battleship with 16" guns that could go much faster than that.  Actually, the North Carolina ships were not "balanced Battleships".  They had been designed to carry 14" guns and in that iteration they would have been but then the Japanese pulled out of the treaty system and the US invoked an "escalator clause" that permitted the construction of ships with 16" guns.  The ships were upgunned to 16" too late in the process to also uparmor them to maintain balance.  

Next the USN built the South Dakota Class ships which were still at least theoretically "treaty" ships in that they more-or-less stuck to the treaty limitations.  They were a slightly more well armored and otherwise slight improvement on the North Carolina Class but they were a hair slower at 27.5 kn.  

By the time the Iowa Class design was finalized they treaty system had completely dissolved so the designers didn't even have to pretend to comply with the treaties.  It is an odd situation.  The Iowa Class were designed as Balanced Battleships but they were built as something less than that.  They were designed to carry 16" guns and have sufficient armor to withstand hits from 16" shells.  However, during the design and construction of the Iowa Class, the USN Bureau of Ordinance designed what was called a "Super Heavy Shell" for the 16" guns and the new shell had greater hitting power so by the time the Iowa Class ships were completed they carried guns that their own armor couldn't withstand.  


The Montana Class which was the next class after the Iowa Class and was actually authorized but never built would have returned to a Balanced Battleship concept on a larger hull (machinery design was used for the pictured Midway Class Carrier) with 12 instead of nine of the 16" guns and sufficient armor to withstand even the newest 16" shells but that came at a cost in speed as the Montana Class would have returned to the speed of the earlier North Carolina and South Dakota Class ships which would have made them too slow to operate as carrier escorts which is why they were not constructed.  The USN realized by then that they didn't need Battleships to slug it out with Japanese and German Battleships, what they needed was carrier escorts.  That raises a whole separate question of why the Iowa's were built?  A  Baltimore Class Heavy Cruiser had more than half the antiaircraft capability on about 20% of the tonnage so there is a credible argument that the USN in 1945 would have been vastly better off if each Iowa Class Battleship had instead been replaced by multiple Baltimore Class Heavy Cruisers which could have been built for the same resources and crewed with the same sailors.  

'The night before the championship fight, I bought my wife Phyllis a powder-blue negligee. I was confident. I was on a nine-bout winning streak and I bought the negligee and I gave it to her in Cleveland the night before the fight. I said, 'Tomorrow night I want you to wear this in bed because tomorrow night you're going to be sleeping with the heavyweight champion of the world.' She said, 'OK, no problem.' After the fight I came back to the hotel - I lost the fight - and walked into the hotel room. And there she is sitting on the end of the bed with the powder-blue negligee, and she says to me, 'Am I going to Ali's room or is he coming to mine?' She had real good sense of humor.'

- Chuck Wepner

THIS DAY IN HISTORY: 

NASA Announces the "Mercury Seven" (1959)
Project Mercury was the first successful manned spaceflight program of the US. It ran from 1959 through 1963 with the goal of putting a man in orbit around the Earth. The first Americans to venture into space were drawn from a group of 110 military pilots chosen for their flight test experience and their satisfaction of certain physical requirements; seven were selected to be astronauts in April 1959 and were quickly dubbed the "Mercury Seven."

THIS DAY IN HISTORY: 

First Arbor Day Celebrated (1872)
Generally observed on the last Friday in April, Arbor Day is an unofficial US holiday designated as a day for planting trees. The holiday was founded by agriculturist Julius Sterling Morton, a Nebraska resident who believed that the prairies were in need of more trees to serve as windbreaks, hold moisture in the soil, and provide lumber for housing. To this end, he proposed that a specific day be set aside for the planting of trees.

FACT OF THE DAY:

Lake Taupo was the source of the world’s largest known volcanic eruption in the last 70,000 years. It is estimated that its violent birth spewed 15,000 times the volume of material ejected when Mount Saint Helens in Washington State erupted in 1980.

'The night before the championship fight, I bought my wife Phyllis a powder-blue negligee. I was confident. I was on a nine-bout winning streak and I bought the negligee and I gave it to her in Cleveland the night before the fight. I said, 'Tomorrow night I want you to wear this in bed because tomorrow night you're going to be sleeping with the heavyweight champion of the world.' She said, 'OK, no problem.' After the fight I came back to the hotel - I lost the fight - and walked into the hotel room. And there she is sitting on the end of the bed with the powder-blue negligee, and she says to me, 'Am I going to Ali's room or is he coming to mine?' She had real good sense of humor.'

- Chuck Wepner

The Bayonne Bleeder

Chuck Wepner stood 6ft 5in tall, with broad shoulders and heavily knuckled hands; bone calluses serve as reminders of a life spent punching.

His vocation as a fighter scarred other parts of his body, too.

"I was a big bleeder. I had 328 stitches in my career. My nose was broken nine times in 16 years. And, uh, it never fazed me, you know?" Wepner tells BBC Sport, with a shrug.

In fact, so likely was his face to suffer injury in the ring that he eventually adopted the nickname others gave him as an insult.

The Bayonne Bleeder - Bayonne being the New Jersey town that Wepner still calls home - was a fighter who lived up to his billing.
So maybe it was fitting that the most famous bout of his career came soaked in claret.

"Tony Perez was the referee for my fight with Muhammad Ali," remembers Wepner of their 1975 meeting.

"After I got knocked down. he says to me: 'Chuck, you're bleeding too much.'

"I said, 'No way, give me this round. Let me finish the fight, I'm all right.' So Tony says: 'OK Chuck, how many fingers do I have up?'

"I look at his hand and say: 'How many guesses do I get?'"

Despite Wepner's protests and to the dismay of the febrile, 15,000-strong crowd inside Ohio's Richfield Coliseum, the referee stopped the fight just 19 seconds shy of the end of round 15.

From WIKI

He had formerly boxed while a member of the United States Marine Corps, and had worked as a bouncer before turning pro.[11] He was the New Jersey state heavyweight boxing champion, but after losing bouts to George Foreman (by cut eye stoppage in three) and Sonny Liston (by technical knockout in nine) many boxing fans thought that his days as a contender were numbered. After the match with Liston, Wepner needed 72 stitches in his face.[12] After his retirement, Wepner stated that Liston was the hardest puncher he ever fought.[13]