Comments by "Vikki McDonough" (@vikkimcdonough6153) on "USS Silversides - Conducting more than one kind of operation!" video.

  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 their battleline would not have a single ship 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?
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