This is something of a prequel to my other drawing of the USS Kentucky.  In fact it is actually a major reworking of that drawing that also includes a number of elements of the base drawing by A.D. Baker III worked back into it.  My drawing of the Kentucky was in poor material condition when I unearthed it and required a lot of restoration before I could post it here.  That involved cleaning up the image and even separately redrawing some parts and then pasting them onto the image.  Like I said, it needed a LOT of restoration because it had deteriorated so much in a poor storage environment. 

I had always wanted to do a 1960 version of the ship and realized that I could actually use the techniques I had developed and used to repair and restore the drawing to create such a prequel version.  It has taken about a month to do it and I am quite pleased with the end result.  Correctly scaling the separately drawn elements like the radars so I could scan and then paste them into the drawing was frustratingly difficult and took a lot of trial and error.  In some ways this project was harder than the drawing I did from 2009-2012 that led to this project and certainly harder than most of the freehand figure drawings I have done. 

As for the fictitious history of this (mostly) fictional ship, I figure due to strains on the US Navy’s manpower resources and budget around 1960, this ship would have essentially been commissioned right into the reserve fleet.  It would then remain there until about 1991 or so when it would be activated and rebuilt for service in the 1990s and beyond.

Specifications (when completed in 1960) would be:

Length (WL): 860′

Beam (max): 108’2″

Draft (max): 35’10”

Displacement (full load): 57,000 tons

Power Plant:

Propulsion: 4-Shaft Geared Turbines (53,000shp each; 212,000shp total)

Electrical: 8x 1250 kW Ship Service Turbogenerators, 2x 400-cycle 1,000 kW Diesel Generators (12,000 kW total with no emergency generators)

Maximum Speed: 32knots

Crew Complement: 1,720 Officers and Enlisted Personnel

Armament:

6 (2×3) Mk7 16″ 50cal guns

16 (8×2) Mk12 5″ 38cal guns in 8-Mk28 twin mounts

12 (6×2) Mk22 3″ 50cal guns in 6-Mk33 twin mounts

1 (twin arm) Mk10 missile launcher (holds 80 RIM-2 Terrier surface-to-air missiles on 4-20 round missile rings)

4 (4×1) .50cal machine guns

4 (4×1) 7.62mm machine guns

Search Sensors:

Sonar: The ship as completed would not be equipped with sonar

Air Search: SPS-39 S-Band radar, SPS-37 L-Band radar, SPS-30 height finding radar

Surface Search: SPS-10 C-Band radar

Aircraft:

Provision for the DASH remote ASW helicopter as well as other period helicopters is made in this design.  Like the 1995 version, it could probably carry up to 4 helicopters at one time (but there’s no hangar to store any of them).

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