Comments by "Vikki McDonough" (@vikkimcdonough6153) on "Context, Cordite and Perspective - Thoughts and Clarifications" video.

  1. Bit of a long one: Why did torpedo cruisers fall out of fashion, and why didn't we see torpedo battleships? It seems to me like a ship armed with lots and lots of torpedoes, without needing heavy, thickly-armored big-gun turrets, would be considerably lighter and cheaper than a gun-armed ship (as the main armament, being underwater, can essentially use said water as armor, so you only need a simple armored deck and side belt); it's a lot easier to pump up torpedo power, range, speed, and number, even on a fairly-small ship, than with big guns (really big guns need huge amounts of steel and design and engineering expertise and precision machining to make them accurate and keep them from blowing up when fired, plus needing shells and fuzes that work reliably after enduring the massive shock of being fired from a gun, and none of these things are really problems for torpedoes and their tubes), allowing a ship armed with suitable torpedoes to sink even much-larger ships at very long range (again, assuming that their navy puts the effort into developing long-range torpedoes); and it's a lot harder to see that a ship carries torpedoes (as long as you don't display them on deck), or even, when using underwater tubes/launchers, seeing when a ship has launched torpedoes, especially at longer range. Basically, it seems like a torpedo-focussed navy could, with some R&D, turn torpedoes, and ships carrying them, into the sort of massively-game-breaking weapon that the IJN planned to use the Long Lance as in a fleet engagement, only with even-bigger and even-longer-range torpedoes in much greater numbers, with big ships carrying hundreds and hundreds of torpedoes apiece slaughtering the enemy fleet with wave upon wave of big, fast torpedoes before the enemy's guns could knock out the torpedo ships (and imagine what such a navy could do if it added submarines into the equation!). Did the world's navies of the late 19th and early 20th centuries really miss such a golden opportunity purely through their fixation on big manly guns, or are there other factors that I've missed that prevented navies from attaining near-invincibility through ALL THE TORPEDOES?
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