Comments by "Vikki McDonough" (@vikkimcdonough6153) on "The British Pacific Fleet - Foundations to First Strikes" video.

  1. 0. A battleship's main armor belt needs to extend a considerable distance below the waterline, both to protect against diving shells and to ensure that a shell can't sneak in under the bottom of the armor even if the ship's rolled a significant angle away from the attacker. A battleship's torpedo-defense system needs to extend some distance above the waterline to ensure that everything below the waterline is protected even if the ship's rolled a significant angle towards the attacker or sitting somewhat low in the water due to flooding. As a result, the two need to overlap for some distance. However, belt armor is a Bad Thing to have in the path of a torpedo detonation (as large rigid plates are very good at transmitting the shock of the explosion of a torpedo's relatively-humongous warhead to the battleship's primary hull structure), while a TDS has little utility against armor-piercing shellfire (as battleship shells are much too heavy to be stopped by the TDS's liquid layers and can easily punch straight through its thin plating and bulkheads). How did battleships handle the problem of overlapping their belt armor and TDS without compromizing the effectiveness of either? 1. The Royal Navy's apparent infatuation with open sighting hoods on capital ships placed serious limitations on these ships. Infamously, the RN was very slow in adopting superfiring turrets because the muzzle blast from the upper turret could enter the lower turret throught the sighting hoods and wreck it, and stuck with inefficient wing-turreted layouts with minimal use of superfiring stacks until their adoption of the heavier 13.5-inch gun forced them to move to all-centerline layouts to avoid excessive structural stresses in the hull. The ability of muzzle blast to enter through these hoods also placed severe limits on their ships' firing arcs, with the subset of the aforementioned wing-turreted ships that could fire cross-deck at all having this ability restricted due to blast effects on the nearside turret (where otherwise the muzzle blast of the farside turret would merely have resulted in relatively-easily-repairable damage to parts of the deck and superstructure) and even their ships that did have superfiring turrets still not actually being able to superfire due to the upper turret's muzzle blast endangering the lower turret if fired less than thirty degrees off centerline. Additionally, these open hoods were a severe liability when under fire, as they could allow the blast from a shell bursting outside a turret to nevertheless enter and wreck the turret in exactly the same manner as "friendly" muzzle blast, created a structural weakness in the turret roofs (as shown at Dogger Bank when the roof of Lion's A turret was partially caved in, disabling one of its guns for two hours, by the blast of an 8.3-inch shell when it should've been able to weather said explosion), and served as deadly shell traps for catching shells that otherwise would've passed clean over the turrets or glanced off their roofs (as shown once again by Lion, this time at Jutland with the hit that wrecked Q turret and caused a fire that nearly blew up the ship). Yet it was not until the launch of Furious (in her original hybrid configuration) that the Royal Navy had a capital-ship-grade turret afloat that did away with the open sighting hoods, and they would not have a single battleship with non-hooded main-battery turrets until Hood entered service; indeed, of the fifty-six all-big-gun capital ships completed for the navies of the British Empire, only thirteen (less than a quarter of the total) would ever be equipped with non-hooded turrets, and four of these thirteen only got theirs during interwar refits years after their entry into service. Why was the Royal Navy so persistent in compromizing the fighting capability of their capital ships by continuing to equip their main-battery turrets with open sighting hoods? 2. Which of the Ises' rear turrets couldn't be upgraded to 43-degree elevation due to a lack of available space for deepening their gun wells - was it just Y turret (as most sources seem to indicate) or both X and Y turrets (as Navweaps claims)? Why didn't the Ises' P and Q turrets (which're at about the same height as their X and Y turrets) run into the same issues as X and Y turrets? And why didn't the Fusōs' rear turrets, which're, again, at about the same height as those on the Ises, have any issues with upgrading them to 43-degree elevation?
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