Comments by "" (@RedXlV) on "The Drydock - Episode 263" video.

  1. While Drach didn't go into detail about why Yamato's 460mm triple turrets are so absurdly heavy, the reason is that they've got absurd armor. The turret faces were a whopping 650mm (26 inches) thick. I think that is the thickest armor plate ever built, and it's certainly the thickest ever put on a ship. (Bunkers, even those designed to protect against nuclear attack, are not made of a single steel plate. So I'm presuming none of them have a plat as thick as Yamato and Musashi's turret faces.) I can't find any data for what the Number 13's turret face thickness would've been, but seeing as the proceeding Kii-class would've had 356mm turret faces, the most this is likely to have been upgraded to would be 380 to 410mm. I'm assuming they would've been upgraded in some way, since when you upgrade from 410mm to 460mm guns you'll want more armor as well. But the general design trend in Japan's pre-treaty battleships was for much thinner turret armor than was seen in the 1930s designs that led to Yamato.
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  2. Nor was the USN able to make up in volume of fire what they lacked in accuracy, since both the 12" and 13" guns took at least 5 minutes to load. Not that a trio of Pelayos would've done any better if they'd been available to the Spanish, since their 32cm guns also took 5 minutes to reload. And that's a best-case scenario; the same gun in Japanese service took an hour to reload when they were used in combat in the First Sino-Japanese War (though it's possible this had a lot to do with cramming such a large gun onto a 4,200 ton cruiser, which presumably caused more cramped quarters for the gun crew).
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  3. Technically, wouldn't the first battleships to have no casemates is HMS Dreadnought? Since she had all of her secondary guns (such as they were, being mere 12-pdrs) in open mounts either on the deck or on top of the main gun turrets. (The Lord Nelson-class pre-dreadnoughts also had no casemates, with the 9.2" secondary guns in turrets and the 12-pdr tertiary battery as open mounts. But they weren't actually completed until after Dreadnought, in part because their original main guns and turrets were swiped for Dreadnought to speed up her construction.)
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