USN High-Pressure Steam: A Successful Detriment? | A Portholes Podcast Special ft.

In this special episode, we are joined again by guests Drachinifel and Rick Russell (Bearing Straight) to discuss whether the US Navy's adoption of high-steam propulsion plants during the 1930s and for the Two-Ocean Navy was the tactical, technological, and bureaucratic success that its advocates and some historians have portrayed it. Did the US Navy succeed in the war against Japan despite its high-steam propulsion systems rather than because of them? There's a lot to unpack regarding the US Navy's adoption of a novel technology on the eve of war, so full steam ahead!
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[@BearingStraight]

Thanks for watching! Let us know below if there’s a topic you’d like us to cover in a future episode.

[@tsufordman]

SS United States update, how we got it wrong in part 1 😁

[@KirkKnoferle]

A South Dakota class battleship versus Bismark.

[@exharkhun5605]

I remember when no one even knew Drach's voice. Now he seems to be there every time I open my internets. Well done. 😁

[@therealniksongs]

And he has such a great voice for narration! That voice, his knowledge and that wonderful sense of humor. It's no wonder he continues to grow in popularity and renown. Always a treat when he visits other of my favorite podcasts.

[@wrightsublette1701]

This is excellent! Even as a Gunner's Mate during the 1980s, I had to understand the steam cycle on our 600 lbs boilers on my ship, the USS Austin (LPD-4) Thank you for adding a new book to my Amazon wishlist. Cheers, - Wright Sublette

[@pedenharley6266]

I enjoyed the format and discussion! It was enjoyable to pull up a chair and listen to the discussion.

[@richardbennett1856]

Drach and Rick on the podcast!! How good does it get? Steam Engineer, grade 2 paid an extra $5/hrs in addition to houly wage. People don't realize a boiler is a potential bomb if the safeties fail. On ships, there are other nasty things that factor into the tea kettle going POP.

[@richardschaffer5588]

There are three issues: 1. Did the high pressure ships have shorter ranges than expected? A) due less efficiency v low pressure or just less than planned B) due to more than anticipated high speed usage C). USN didn’t know how much fuel they were using! (This is inexcusable.) 2. The gearing bottleneck. This was well known during the war! 3. Admiral Bowen’s CYA book. Brilliant Drac keeping the guys on topic and out of rabbit holes! Just my cup of tea (steamed with fuel oil)

[@olpaint71]

More importantly, did the 600psi plants have better energy density than 350psi? The answer is yes. And with the tyranny of the treaty limits, weight was critical. Every ton of machinery was less armor, stores, armament...and fuel.

[@alganhar1]

@@olpaint71 Yes, but the point of this is that those high pressure turbines were not in fact as fuel efficient as the USN had expected, not by a considerable margin. And certainly in the first half of the Pacific war that was an issue as all fuel had to be shipped to the USN. That means tankers and fast fleet oilers. For the first half of the war the US was seriously short on tankers (especially after the losses of tankers suffered on the East coast in the first 6 months), and *critically* short of fast Fleet Oilers. They only had six of the latter at the start of the war, and lost one at Coral Sea. O those high pressure boilers being far less fuel efficient than expected had a direct and negative affect on logistics because it means more fuel is required, and you have limited shipping capable of transporting that fuel, and that is going to limit your options operationally. Sure, this is less of an issue in the second half of the war, but in the first half its significant.

[@olpaint71]

@@alganhar1 But the high pressure plants enabled more compact and lighter machinery, which meant more protection, firepower, and performance on the same tonnage and, even if the range did not meet expectations it was still more fuel efficient than a 350psi plant. The Pacific War was never going to be fought without an extensive logistics tail, and the difference between the high-pressure plants and the earlier systems is well illustrated by the USN holding the remaining Standards at Pearl while the more modern ships fought the early war. If you are going to argue the 600psi plants were detrimental, you have to not only show that they didn't achieve the promised range performance, but that they also performed less efficiently and less effectively than the alternative, which is a ship with a 350psi plant that has reduced protection, armament, and even higher fuel consumption.

[@culturevulture3382]

The algorithm brought this up. Interesting. Thanks.

[@StylinandProfilinBBsandBBQ]

Terrific episode! This change by the USN definitely affected the war and beyond as high pressure steam was used for USN ships above and below the waves. The outside look by Drach was important too. Do some more of these!

[@KPen3750]

So I have a long winded comment because I do want to have a discussion on this as I have been trying to research the development of USN high pressure plants of the interwar and WWII period. First caveat is I have yet to buy the book which I am going to because books about powerplants are rare and awesome. But I feel as if in this podcast there was no real defense for the USN machinery, which was overall lighter, had very good reliability for that pressure, and did produce fuel economies when cruising long distances. What wasn't considered in my opinion when it came to the operational ranges of the high pressure machinery was that wartime additions in weights. All ships in the USN got much more weight added to them as wartime progressed such that I'd argue every single USN ship got more AA guns and more radars and sensors than initially designed in lets say the mid to late 30's. This would explain the discrepancy between the advertised fuel savings and the real wartime economy of these ships. But I suspect that there was a decent amount of fuel savings with the high pressure plant as Bowen does mention in his book Ships Machinery and Mossback (granted that is his own personal biography so dose of salt here). I am as Othias from C&Rsenal says a determined idiot with internet access and not a proper archive and researcher but I do want to try and unravel the full story of USN machinery, which while it was not perfect or the one trick wonder the USN needed to win the war I still believe that it was not a hinderance but something that did help the USN win the war against Japan and also laid the foundations for the USN post war to have the best steam plants full stop. If you made it this far in this comment, give yourself a cookie because you earned it

[@olpaint71]

The elephant in the room are the treaty displacement limits which played a bigger role in machinery selection than trans-Pacific logistics.

[@surferdess494]

as a retired usn 1520...idk shite bout ships but dang this vid is super fun to watch. thanks )))

[@bobfognozzle]

I was chief engineer on Manley DD940… staying on top of maintenance was key to reliability. Fuel economy was greatly affected by the anticipated speed demands. If on a straight line ocean crossing we would be able to make 18 kts with half of the auxiliaries secured …ie one feed pump one forced draft blower on each of two boilers. If the XO wanted 27 kts available for training, the fuel economy was crap… it all depends on how hard you run the greyhound.

[@KeithAllen-jf1iv]

I admit I have not read the book yet, and in fact hadn't heard of it until now. This is an interesting discussion but I have to question a few things. First, the new ships with their high-pressure plants were making the same fleet speeds as the older ships. They weren't going faster than the old ships and burning up vastly more fuel than the old ships as this seems to imply. Their lb/shp/hr was still better. Second, while I would normally hesitate to correct Drachinifel on anything naval, it is not true that turbo-electric ships maintained a constant turbine speed and hence were more economical at high speeds than geared-turbine ships. Turbo-electric ships used AC motors whose speed was directly proportional (with some variations because of pole-switching) to turbine speed. They did not use a constant AC frequency; motor and shaft rpm changed with frequency. To increase speed in a T-E ship you increased turbine speed, just as in a geared-turbine ship.

[@phillipbouchard4197]

How you folks managed to film two videos over the October 26th weekend and run a seminar on the Leyte Gulf battle I will never know. I suppose that you were filming while I was touring and photographing New Jersey both before and after the seminar. What a great weekend it was to meet you all and all the author's you had aboard. Thanks for the video !

[@kennhi2008]

I steamed 1200 psi steam plants when I was a boiler technician in the Navy 🎉 they were very efficient in my opinion, we didn’t need a extra burnerman to operate the superheated side of the boiler because it was a internal part of the boiler which took the heat ahead of the generating tubes after the screen wall tubes which saved on manpower to operate a boiler

[@WingatesHellsing42]

This is getting out of hand, now there are four of them!

[@73Trident]

Great conversation guys. Thanks.

[@stevewindisch7400]

Great discussion. But perhaps without actually reading the book, the answer can be... boiled... down to : "It was wartime, it is what it is." Regarding turbo electric, it often gets a bad rap IMO. Comparing the Standard BB's from the late 1910's with technology 18 or 20 years years later, is hardly fair or accurate. Improvements in both motors, generators, and electrical drives did increase efficiency and durability. Today the improvements are very dramatic (although they are generally only paired with Diesels now). If the ship that destroyed the Keyes Bridge near Baltimore had D-E drive, that simply never would have happened. That disaster brought to light a dirty secret: Those failures are very common and it was only a matter of time it happened at just the wrong time and place..There are several maintenance and reliability advantages to having multiple smaller engines verses a giant one with pistons so large two men could stand inside them. The difference in fuel economy verses direct drive is slight. But despite the reliability and safety advantages, most ships are built the cheaper way. If we want America building ships again... Perhaps we should start insisting on only allowing D-E ships in our ports for safety... And then build them ourselves There are some very good designs for PM motors and drives done for the US Navy, that give us a technology edge.

[@tsufordman]

The high pressure plants may not have been "as advertised" but they did a job. If Essex class carriers were immediately scrapped 1:1 as new carriers were built like B-36s to B-52s, that would show a immanent deficiency.

[@BigAmp]

Great plants and overall very successful. And, they were more efficient than the older lower pressure plants.

[@dogloversrule8476]

0:30 Drach, the Chieftan, Forgotten Weapons, & Military Aviation History should make some content together

[@brettpasquinelli7033]

Love this discussion I am a mechanical engineer that designed large gearing systems especially helical gears for Horsburgh & Scott in Cleveland OH . Double helical remove axial thrust loads down the shaft generated because of that angling in the gear tooth on the gear face. Double helical cancels out the axial thrust forces, the bitch is they are LONG lead items requiring grinding of the tooth involute, especially on high quality level gears (Ships gearing must be more accurate and precise than a concrete mixer reduction box ...then there is the heat treating. Replacement is not like switch out a transmission in a car as Ryan mentioned

[@olpaint71]

52:00 Good grief. No, you don't perform endurance trials by burning every drop of fuel oil to see how far it will go. You run the trial for several hours to get accurate speed and fuel burn numbers. It gets compared to the model test resistance data and the plant design data to correlate the theoretical curves and actual consumption. These guys should know this.

[@tomw9875]

Thank You.

[@nomar5spaulding]

I didn't expect that this video would demonstrate to me yet again that I suck at AoE II, but here we are.

[@cowboybob08]

20:15 the other problem with single reduction gears in trying to do anything in a single stage is gear wear. The driving gear would have to do so much work, it would wear out long before the driven gear would show any signs of wear. Manual transmissions in cars are double reduction for that reason. The counter shaft is reductive before going into gear on the output shaft

[@verysilentmouse]

Drach guest appearance means a sub from me

[@dmunro9076]

Volumetric and weight comparison: HMS Implacable (1942) vs Essex (1942). Both carriers produced about 150k SHP but Implacable's 400psi/750f steam power plant was fully equal to Essex and her 600psi/850F power plant, in that regard. Essex, primarily due to her double reduction gearing and economizers was more efficient at lower speeds, but there wasn't that much difference at higher speeds.

[@gdrriley420]

Diesel electric propulsion for rail was still very much so early stages in the late 30s. Large medium speed diesels like the Alco 239/240, EMD 567 and others were having lots of teething problems. Everything from large blocks being made at scale with ever changing materials to gasket materials being changed resulting in water and oil mixing.

[@robanson32]

I think one thing that was missed in the discussion is what happened with post war capital ships. The large super carriers after the war all increased in their steam pressure as did other navies ships. So it wasn’t viewed as too much of a hinderance and most of the plants on those ships would go on to do many more miles of peacetime steaming.

[@jetdriver]

This is the sort of topic I love. So please do more like this. That being said and I’m truly not trying to be a keyboard warrior you really failed to make your case on this one. We have allegations of falling short on range that are not substantiated in the video. We do have excuses in terms of the vast difference between wartime operating conditions and peacetime assumptions that may have had a lot to do with this. If your range assumptions are based on cruising at 15 knots with half the boilers secured and your operational conditions require all boilers lit and operational with regular bursts beyond 15 knots those range numbers are going to be garbage. And that’s not the fault of a 600psi plant. Another issue is that just like with standard vs full load displacement range is dependent upon a host of variables. Trials will give you good baseline data for the conditions they are run in. But higher sea states, heavier ships as crew and weapons are added, increased hotel loads on the plant, hull fouling will all have an impact and those are not the fault of the plant. If you want to argue that high pressure steam doesn’t deliver on the benefits it promised show some range tables (projected vs actual) that prove that out for example. You talk about manning and maintenance but provide little to support that. Comparing the manning requirements between a British light fleet carrier and an Essex is an apples and oranges comparison to a degree. How does the KGV class compare to NC or SD? That would be a meaningful comparison. And if your the US and you have plentiful manpower resources designing for reduced manning likely isn’t a consideration like it might be with other Navies. For example the Yorktown and Essex class have very similar manning numbers and one is high pressure and one isn’t. A look at the numbers in the engineering section of those two classes could provide meaningful insight. It also might be very interesting to look at the number of watch standers in a boiler room and engine room on New Jersey in 1944 vs 1989. How many man hours of maintenance were required per hour of steaming? Without comparisons of that type between USN High Pressure and older low pressure systems it’s hard to say these were maintenance intensive systems. I’ve never read anything that indicated the 600lb 850F plants were anything but extremely reliable in service in WW2. I know for a fact that in the 90s when I was on active duty they were considered to be very very reliable plants. Unlike the 1200lb plants which were always considered temperamental even though they continued to get better with each generation. Which brings up another point. If high pressure plants were judged a failure by the USN then why did it continue to press forward with higher pressures and higher temperatures in the post war era? It just doesn’t make sense that if the navy thought the move from 300 to 600 was a mistake that it would then proceed to press forward to 1200 and stay with 1200 even when the early generations of that plant really did have serious issues. To Drach’s credit we do see the issue of power density come up. It doesn’t take much reading of Friedman to know that was a really important consideration in the WW2 generation of ships. Iowa doesn’t happen if her machinery has to be 15-20% larger because it’s operating at lower pressures. Again I’m not trying to be a keyboard warrior but if your going to call into question something like the 600lb 850F plant technology that went into the vast majority of US WWII fleet units you need to actually make that case.

[@BearingStraight]

Thanks for watching and taking the time to comment. New research is threatening to upset a lot of what we think we know about the early war operations, fleet logistics, pre-war training, and how the Navy implemented innovation. We're just starting to get our heads around the implications. We'll need a larger and longer format (with guests) to work through the US Navy's largely untested acquisition of high-pressure steam in the future.

[@UmHmm328]

The RN in the steel era is best known for exploding ships and memorials, so I'm not sure they're the be-all.

[@UmHmm328]

​@BearingStraight A careful look at new research in and of itself may also be necessary. Hone says the USN became a night fighting machine by late 1943, but at Philippine Sea, Lee hid under a table when asked to engage at night.

[@jetdriver]

@@UmHmm328 that is an incredibly offensive comment essentially calling Willis Lee a coward. It’s utter nonsense to say he hid under a table. Lee was asked if he desired a night engagement and said no. He was well aware that this didn’t mean the Japanese would be allowed to proceed unmolested. The carriers were still more than capable of taking the Japanese on and denying them the chance to achieve their objectives. Lee declined a night engagement because the previous months of carrier operations where his ships were focused on AA defense had denied them the opportunity to do any training together or operate together as a tactical formation. He was well aware of the problems that lack of training could create in a night engagement and his judgement was sound. Contrast that to several months later at Leyte Gulf where Lee is trying to prod Halsey into releasing TF34 so he can engage the Northern Force he knows is coming. The fact that Lee declined the chance for a night engagement in those specific circumstances does not remotely invalidate Hone’s research.

[@UmHmm328]

​@jetdriver Oldendorf didn't seem to have a problem at Surigao Strait. He was also busy as the same force was also at Philippine Sea. Hone, in a 2009 Naval War College article brings up how things mau have been different contrasting Lee at PS and Oldendorf at SS. Either Hone's later presentations on USN night fighting prowess is incorrect or Lee in 1944 wasn't the same one in Nov 1942. Is PTSD only for enlisted personnel? Mitscher was floored by his response, btw. And the hindsight response that aircraft carriers had supplanted the big gun (someone didn't tell much of USN leadership) is ass backwards history. It's OK to be challenged. Don't fret.

[@simonvalente2187]

Drachs.... 😍

[@mattsmelley5569]

I was a BT2 from 87-93 and going to Persian Gulf we burned 68k gallons of fuel in 3 days...we had fore and aft fire rooms and had 1200lb Foster Wheeler boilers in each FR

[@Halinspark]

Surely the gears were made with hydraulic set-ups and divider heads specifically so you don't have to freehand it?

[@olpaint71]

No, gear hobbing machines. Which is not free-handing like they made it sound.

[@olpaint71]

Helical cut gears of that era were hobbed. A hob can cut a straight gear or about any helix angle desired. Straight cut gears can be made on a variety of machines, including shapers. Hobbing machines are specialized tools.

[@olpaint71]

I should add that there were also specialized helical gear shapers. There's videos of both processes on KZbin.

[@josephpadula2283]

And Navy type locked train double reduction gears are even harder to make !

[@martinmarheinecke7677]

The Germans had massive problems with their high-pressure propulsion systems, compared to which the USA's problems were merely teething problems. It is a stroke of luck in history that the German engineers were perfectionists, but the hasty rearmament of Nazi Germany before World War II, the circumstances of the war and the lack of skilled workers prevented them from producing fully developed weapons. Airplanes and tanks in particular were often "bananas" that were delivered green and only ripened in use. With the large warships, even that was not possible. As an German I am lucky that back than the Allied Forces had the better functioning equipment to bet an actual Empire of Evil. For me as a not entirely "Aryan" German a German Victory in WW2 is the darkest nightmare I can imagine.

[@Yandarval]

Ryan really needs to grow a proper naval historian's beard. The goatee and stubble just does not work.

[@charletonzimmerman4205]

Till you go- 1200 psi ,steam It's a useless discussion.