From: Adam Flinton 

Frank Haber wrote:
> Curiosity question:
>
> Thinking back to accounts of chasing down the Bismarck, etc., I remember
being
> struck by the fact that the ?Hood, was it, had to stop chasing because it was
> running out of fuel.  I also seem to remember that it had only been steaming
> 1000 mi. or so. So,
>

It wasn't the Hood she was a battlecruiser & they had good range as
part of their design......but the rest of the ships had got low on fuel
which is partly why the swordfish attack was a "last roll of the
dice".

> o Was fuel consumption so high at flank speed that a battleship couldn't
carry
> enough fuel for more than that?
>

Yes & no. It depended on the battleship. The US & Japan had long
range battleships because of the scale of the Pacific. The UK had shorter
range battleships partly because the Atlentic was more important to us
& partly coz we had lots of re-fuelling points round the globe.

This mattered quite a lot near the end of the war where there were combined
UK/US task groups formating on Japan & the US fleet had much better
endurance than the UK one.


> o One would assume that they'd have to build for a 4-5000 mile range at
> cruise, at least?  Did flank burn 4-5x the fuel?
>

Take the GGV'es which had in many ways the worst range of the UK main battleships.

http://www.ptbo.igs.net/~howe112/King%20George%20Class.htm

"Range in Kilometres
(unless otherwise specified)    Howe: 6,000 nautical mmiles at 14 knots
with clean bottom."

> o And when did capital ships go from coal to oil in the US and Brit navies?
>

WW1. The UK Queen Elizabeth class of "superdreadnoughts" (inc
warspite etc) were oil burners.

> o For coal-fired ships, was it all slurry-coal and automatic stokers after
the
> WWI era?
>

Lots of the old uns were cut up because of the washington naval treaty
& most pre 1914 ships were scrapped as they cost more than (post war)
they were worth.

> o How did a collier (ship) work in the Dreadnought era?  Was there mid-ocean
> refueling?
>

I don't think so. Maybe but it would have been very difficult. e.g. the 1st
battle of the falklands occurred while the British Battle cruisers were in
Port Stanley refuelling & as such the German ships didn't see much
smoke or indeed masts till it was too late to run.


> -from NYC, where they're just getting rid of the last *manually-fired*
> anthracite furnaces in our public schools, fercryingoutlout, in 2003.
>


There's nowt wrong wi'coal 

Adam

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