Comments by "Frank DeMaris" (@kemarisite) on "Sail to Steam to Iron - Half a Century of Change" video.

@renardgrise you said December 1941. Yamato was commissioned in the middle of that month, so it is unlikely to appear unless the Japanese bring a grass green crew still working up. The South Dakotas aren't commissioning until 1942, and while the North Carolinas were commissioned earlier in 1941 they were having machinery troubles and were kept in the Atlantic. Therefore, we can either have both North Carolinas (with some troubles) and a brand new Yamato, or neither North Carolinas nor Yamato. Either way, I believe the 15 US battleships would still win a night surface action against the 10 Japanese battleships, although it would be closer than a day surface action would be. Adding the Yamato on it's own is not likely to change that outcome given the newness of the crew to this ship. Adding both the North Carolinas and the Yamato is likely to be a wash.
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You're trying to argue with an engineer about materials science. While the material properties of a metal or alloy are established by the manufacturing process, I've seen too many examples of how substantially the material properties of a material can vary over a range of climactic conditions to simply assert that it's impossible for a particular iron or iron alloy to be brittle in the north Atlantic and become significantly less brittle/more ductile after spending months in the Indian Ocean/South China Sea.
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