Comments by "Vikki McDonough" (@vikkimcdonough6153) on "USS Salem - Last of the heavy cruisers" video.
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@WALTERBROADDUS It isn't always possible to keep from shooting your own ship using turret-rotation stops alone. For instance, any turret with two or more disjoint arcs of fire (which works out to any non-superfiring centerline turret that isn't at the end of the ship, such as the Nelsons' X turret, the Delawares', Floridas', and New Yorks' turret 3, the Wyomings' and Fusos' turrets 3 and 4, Dreadnought's, the Bellerophons', and the St Vincents' X turret, or Agincourt's P, Q, and R turrets, among many others, plus any wing turret with cross-deck firing capability, such as Neptune's and the Colossuses' P and Q turrets or the Rivadavias' turrets 3 and 4, among many others) has to train through at least one of the shoot-yourself arcs in order to get from one firing arc to another (and, in the cases of the non-superfiring centerline turrets not at end-of-ship, the fore-and-aft position - i.e., the turrets' normal stowage position - is within one of the shoot-yourself arcs); even for turrets with a single contiguous arc of fire, they tend to be designed to rotate as far as they can without physically running the gun barrels into the superstructure, which, for turrets with enough clearance, such as the Nelsons' B turret, translates into the turret being able to rotate a full 360°, meaning that it could train right around and blow up the ship's own bridge if the turret crew were so inclined.
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A few questions here - apologies for slight wall of text:
1. During the night action at Jutland, the crew of the destroyer HMS Spitfire saw a burning ship, described as being "...a mass of fire from foremast to mainmast, on deck and between decks" and as having "[f]lames ... issuing out of her from every corner". Spitfire's crew thought that this ship, which exploded around midnight, was a German battlecruiser, as it was seen to have two widely-spaced funnels; however, the only battlecruiser lost by the High Seas Fleet at Jutland, Lützow, did not burn and explode, but, rather, foundered due to progressive flooding. After the battle, it was then thought, for some time, that Spitfire's mystery ship was her seeing the last moments of Black Prince, whose outline would resemble that of a German battlecruiser if her middle two funnels had collapsed or been shot away; however, this is ruled out by the German records of Black Prince's demise, which show that Black Prince blew up at the wrong place to have been the mystery ship, and that, even if Spitfire had gotten her own position wrong in such a way as to be near Black Prince instead of where she thought she was, Black Prince (a) exploded and sank while being shelled at point-blank range by six German battleships (one of which then had to take evasive action to avoid colliding with the wreck), something that Spitfire would certainly have noticed, and (b) was shelled and rapidly blew up, instead of drifting ablaze for a prolonged time and only eventually blowing up. The trouble is, once we exclude the German battlecruisers and Black Prince, none of the other warship losses at Jutland, so far as I can see, really seem to fit what Spitfire's crew saw (the closest that I can think of is Pommern, and even that involved the ship exploding and then, immediately thereafter, catching fire, breaking, and sinking, as opposed to the drifting, burning, only-later-exploding mystery ship). So, what did Spitfire see?
2. Would a line of battle still be the optimal formation for fast battleships able to fire all their main guns forwards, like a fleet of Richelieus? Given that the advantages of a broadside-to-broadside line of battle in the battleship era seem to either revolve around being able to bring all or most of your guns to bear (which isn't an advantage if your ship can do that forwards as well as on the broadside), or else come into play specifically when crossing the T of an enemy line of battle that's pointed into yours (your entire line being able to fire on the lead ships of the enemy line, while all the lead enemy ships except for the very first have their guns partially masked by the ships ahead and the ships further back in the enemy line aren't even in range; there being a good chance that, even if you get the range wrong, you'll still hit an enemy ship further forward or back along the enemy line of battle, since your shells are travelling more or less straight down the enemy line), it seems like it might be better for the ships of such a fleet to instead simultaneously turn and charge the enemy line in line abreast, presenting much-smaller targets to the enemy battleships (due to facing them end-on) while still able to pour full-strength salvoes into the enemy line; alternatively, one could chase down the tail of the enemy line and use the massively-greater forward firepower of one's able-to-fire-all-main-guns-directly-forwards battleships to overwhelm the trailing enemy ships one by one (and, if the enemy attempts to counter this by turning the rest of their line around and back to support their embattled tail-end ships, they open themselves up for the aforementioned charge in line abreast by the rest of your ships).
3. Why did the major naval powers of the two World Wars (especially the First), faced with significant numbers of complete or under-construction capital ships from their defeated adversaries, mostly not take the opportunity to significantly augment their own fleets for free, instead scrapping them or using them as target ships? Exhibit A: Baden, the sole survivor of the Grand Scuttle at Scapa Flow; judged, after thorough inspection and testing, to be measurably superior to any battleship in Royal Navy service; yet expended as a target ship in 1921. Exhibit B: the battleships and battlecruisers under construction for the High Seas Fleet at the end of the war (the last two Bayerns - Sachsen and Württemberg - and the four Mackensens - Mackensen, Graf Spee, Prinz Eitel Friedrich, and "A" / Ersatz Friedrich Carl / "Fürst Bismarck"? - respectively); all, except for the last Mackensen, either having already been launched or being complete enough to permit launching, and, thus, capable of being seized and towed to Entente shipyards for completion (and even Mackensen #4 could've been completed to launchability in situ and then followed its sisters abroad); yet all scrapped in 1921-1922. Exhibit C: Prinz Eugen (the Austro-Hungarian battleship of the Tegetthoff class, not the much-later German heavy cruiser of the Admiral Hipper class, as the reasons for the latter ship's nonpersistence after its capture are already well-documented), still in good condition at the end of World War I; ceded to France in 1920 under the terms of the Treaty of Saint-Germain-en-Laye; and expended as a target ship in 1922 (having already been relieved of its main armament by the French for examination of same). Exhibit D: the three Unryūs still intact at the end of World War II; one, Katsuragi, being complete (albeit somewhat damaged, due to an American bomb hit in July 1945, but still fairly-easily-repairable), and the other two, Kasagi and Ikoma, being 84% and 60% complete, respectively, and both having already been launched (and, thus, being capable of being seized and transferred to the United States for completion, or, alternatively, completed in situ for the U.S. Navy); yet all scrapped in 1946-1947 (in Katsuragi's case, after having served to repatriate Japanese troops and civilians from overseas in 1945-1946).
4. What, in your opinion, had a greater impact on naval warfare: the development of methods for accurately measuring longitude at sea, or the discovery of how to ward off scurvy?
5. I was watching your two alternate-history videos involving U.S. battleships at Samar, and was intrigued that the optimum tactics for the U.S. battleline in the two scenarios (excluding things like exploiting environmental-cover mechanics to make its ships invisible to the enemy) were almost opposites of each other; with the Standards facing Center Force, the best option was for the strongest U.S. ships to combine forces to overwhelm Yamato early on, whereas, when TF34 was the U.S. force involved, it was, instead, best to fight, basically, a holding action against Yamato and knock out the Japanese battlecruisers and Nagato first. In general, when facing an enemy battleline with a considerable disparity between its strongest and weakest units, what determines whether it's better to (a) keep the weaker enemy units tied down while you concentrate on overwhelming the enemy's stronger units, after which the weaker units can be blown apart with ease, or (b) keep the stronger enemy units tied down while you mow through their weaker units, after which you can now use your whole fleet to dogpile the stronger units?
6. How did the German auxiliary cruiser Pinguin manage to capture nearly the entire Norwegian whaling fleet on 14 January 1941, without the whaling ships scattering in all directions and most of them escaping over the horizon while Pinguin was dealing with the first few (for that matter, why were they bunched up close enough together for Pinguin to grab them all in one go in the first place)?
7. How common was piracy in the World War I / interwar / World War II era?
8. Could you do a video on the Battle of the Saintes (a.k.a. the reason Jamaica is still an Anglophone country and why the U.S. dropped its demands for half of Canada during the negotiations for what became the Treaty of Paris)?
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