Quote:
Originally Posted by Panther Al
Very good points on Manpower and Fuel issues, but there is a couple of countervailing points:
The steam plants in those ships used bunker oil - not diesel. Bunker oil is also considered garbage production in modern refining compared to the higher grade fuels: in essence, its the leftovers after making good fuel as far as I can tell by reading up on it. So fuel will be scarce yes, but it won't be anywhere near as bad to source it as it would be the high test. Even better; the engines that burn it - particularly the ones built in the first half of the 20th Century, such as those in the Iowa's, are sufficiently crude that in a pinch it could use the raw stuff at the cost of decreased efficiencies, more maintenance, and much more pollution (IE: Very a dark exhaust plume).
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As I said in my previous post, I had held off on making a post in this thread. I've learned the hard way that 9 times out of 10, the knowledgeable people here will find some gaping flaw in whatever I post. However, in this case I had looked around on the interwebs shortly after this thread started, and found in the Wikipedia article on the Iowa class, this:
Iowa class battleship (From the section "1980s refit")
Plans for these conversions were dropped in 1984, but each battleship was overhauled to burn navy distillate fuel and modernized to carry electronic warfare suites, close-in weapon systems (CIWS) for self-defense, and missiles.
It's common knowledge that most diesel engines will burn lower grade fuels, at least for a while. I haven't searched exhaustively enough to be sure but I would assume that even after the conversions, the Iowa-class battleships were still running steam turbines and it was just the boilers that were converted (I'm happy to be corrected on this) so converting them back to burning lower grade fuels probably wouldn't be a huge deal. Still, I can't help but wonder why any conversion was necessary at all, for boilers to burn diesel instead of bunker oil. So maybe they really did swap the boilers and steam turbines for gigantic marine diesel engines?
In any case I just wanted to show that I'd put some thought into my comments before I made them
