Comments by "Frank DeMaris" (@kemarisite) on "The Drydock - Episode 160" video.

@fizzyb00t I thought he said they used horizontally sliding breach blocks? Yep, pretty much every German heavy gun listing includes a similar line in the text description (this is from the 11" guns for the Scharnhorst class): "The breech block was a horizontal sliding type."
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@DeliveryMcGee this basic question, about applying more recent tank ammunition concepts(HESH, HEAT, sabot) to battleship guns, comes up once or twice a month. The basic issue is that a tank has lots of vital things located close behind the armor, so even spalling (fragments knocked off the back of the armor by impact or a HESH round) can knock out a tank. A warship has FAR more internal volume within which to distribute the vital components, so the shells need a more substantial behind-armor effect than tank ammunition requires.
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@gregorywright4918 .50 caliber and 1.1" were almost entirely extinct as AA guns in the US Navy before the first kamikaze took off. Yes, I'm aware that Enterprise carried a 1.1" mount until pretty late in the war, which is why I said "almost entirely". The 20 mm Oerlikon was in sufficiently widespread service by late 1942 that even cargo ships off Guadalcanal in November were carrying half a dozen or more. The Bofors came into widespread US service during 1943 but the Navy would not have all the Bofors guns it wanted until late 1944, by which time the kamikazes had created a new need to replace the smaller Oerlikons.
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@tomdolan9761 I'm going to disagree slightly on the last sentence. Post war US analysis showed that the Bofors scored more kills (742) than any other AA gun in US Navy service, with the 5"/38 second at 688 and Oerlikon third at 617. However, both the Oerlikon and Bofors ran into a bit of an outside context problem with the kamikazes during the last year of the war, leading to the Oerlikon being replaced with the Bofors (where possible) and the crash program to get the 3"/50RF into service.
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