Talk:Alsace-class battleship

Image

I appreciate the desire to have an image with the article, and the drawing by user Rama is of good quality. However, it is not necessarily appropriate for this article. First, it is self-created, and not an official design, or an illustration of the official design (as is the image for the Montana-class battleship article. It conflicts with speculative drawings in other sources (such as Garzke and Dulin's illustration, which depicts a vessel with two funnels), with no explanation. It does bear a resemblance to the illustration in Dumas's book on the Jean Bart. However, the key problem is this: it represents the design which the text of the article says was rejected, the N 3, with its triple-quadruple 38 cm arrangement. The design chosen is believed to be the N 1, with its triple-triple arrangement of the main battery. Sacxpert (talk) 08:04, 1 April 2011 (UTC)

Design Section

While the information is there, this section needs a cleanup. Is the current prose rendering desired, or would a table comparing the differing designs be more helpful? I've thrown together something quick to illustrate the differences among the 3 designs.

Design Characteristics

Design	Length	Displacement	Power	Belt Armor	Armament
					Primary	Secondary	Tertiary
No. 1	252 m	40,000 tons	170,000 hp	330 mm	3 × 3 - 380 mm	3 × 3 - 152 mm	8 × 2 - 100 mm
No. 2	256 m	42,500 tons	190,000 hp	330 mm	3 × 3 - 406 mm	3 × 3 - 152 mm	8 × 2 - 100 mm
No. 3	265 m	45,000 tons	220,000 hp	350 mm	3 × 4 - 380 mm	3 × 3 - 152 mm	12 × 2 - 100 mm

Any thoughts on this would be appreciated, as would any information on the model number for the 100 mm guns intended for use, which I assume would be the 1937 model. Russ3Z (talk) 16:53, 13 May 2013 (UTC)

Nice work - too bad it was never added to the article - but I'll steal it now ;) Parsecboy (talk) 14:05, 20 August 2019 (UTC)

Number of ships ordered

@Anasaitis: - I figure I should ping you, since you seem to have trouble finding talk pages. A couple of things:

1. Garzke & Dulin is a 40+ year old source, Jordan & Caresse are much more recent. Do you not think that if there was firm evidence that the French command planned 4 ships, Jordan & Caresse wouldn't have mentioned it?
2. Are you aware that Garzke & Dulin have made a number of mistakes in their older books? In their book on Axis battleships, in the sections that cover the service histories of Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, they disagree with themselves over the number of ships sunk during Operation Berlin. That doesn't exactly inspire confidence, does it?
3. And perhaps most fundamentally, how do you think "considered ordering" equals definitively planning four ships? The relevant text reads "Two other unnamed ships were also contemplated"; how are you interpreting that to mean that the French Navy planned to build 4 ships of this class?

If you can't answer even one of those questions, undo your revert. Parsecboy (talk) 00:24, 18 January 2022 (UTC)

The presence of errors in older book does not mean that the source is entirely inaccurate. Lot’s of books, even recent ones, contain some errors. I have recently read a book on submarines that claims the Intelligent Whale killed its crew during a failed demonstration, when that is not the case. The rest of the information within the book was accurate. The age of the source is also irrelevant. Older sources still have value, and in some cases may be more valuable than newer sources. I’ve found information in older sources during research that was absent in later sources. The most recent source isn’t always the best. Anasaitis (talk) 00:51, 18 January 2022 (UTC)

And yet, that doesn’t directly refute either of the questions I’ve posed. That other older sources are better than other newer sources is a completely irrelevant assertion. Have you actually read either Garzke & Dulin or Jordan & Caresse? Or was this a drive-by edit you made after skimming the article?

No answer on your interpretation of the specific language in Garzke & Dulin, then? Parsecboy (talk) 01:21, 18 January 2022 (UTC)

It is completely relevant. You’re arguing that Jordan & Caresse, being a more recent source, would not have missed info that Garzke & Dulin had. You’re arguing that a more recent source would be more reliable than an older source. That is not always the case. Anasaitis (talk) 07:03, 18 January 2022 (UTC)

No, it's not; it's entirely a red herring. Stop deflecting from the fact that you haven't read either source, and go waste someone else's time. Parsecboy (talk) 10:18, 18 January 2022 (UTC)

I have read the source, and that is not a red herring. If that was not your argument, then perhaps you should have phrased your question differently. The fact of the matter is there is a lot of uncertainty regarding the Alsace-class. It’s not even certain which of the three designs would have been built, or if they would have done the same thing they did with the Richelieu-class and planned for different ships to have slightly different designs, like Clemenceau and Gascogne would have been different from Richelieu and Jean Bart, with Gascogne being far more radically different, with one turret moved to the quarterdeck. It has been proposed that more than one of the three designs would have been used. Furthermore, there is no way to say for certain whether France would have stuck with just the first two or made two more, though there is a good possibility that they would have ordered two more. I propose for the sake of compromise simply put 2-4 for planned ships to reflect the controversy over what the outcome would have been. There is no way to know for certain what would have happened if France hadn’t fallen. Anasaitis (talk) 21:22, 21 January 2022 (UTC)

Do you not understand that what you're making is a completely nonsensical argument? There's no way to know whether France would have built more than the two ships that were definitively authorized, so we should default to a hypothetical? We're not doing counter-factual history, France did fall, and the Navy never even requested authorization for two more ships, let alone received it. That some admiral may have scribbled on a napkin that he'd like two more of the ships is irrelevant. Your argument amounts entirely to WP:OR; you're projecting your own assumptions onto the very limited statement Garzke & Dulin made, which is wholly unacceptable.

Put another way, say I think to myself "should we go camping this weekend?", but don't actually ask my family if they want to go camping, and we don't decide to go camping, would I say on Monday that I had planned to go camping this weekend?

Two ships were authorized. That's all. Full stop. Parsecboy (talk) 22:06, 21 January 2022 (UTC)

@Anasaitis: - please respond to the above comments and stop edit-warring. Parsecboy (talk) 18:30, 24 January 2022 (UTC)

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