Comments by "Vikki McDonough" (@vikkimcdonough6153) on "The Invention of the Depth Charge - Kaboom? Yes Jellicoe, Kaboom!" video.
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During the January 2023 livestream, as part of your answer to one of my questions, you said that trying to use a cruiser with 32 six-inch guns as an "anti-destroyer machine gun" (a turn of phrase I rather like) would be risky, as it would need to get close enough to the enemy destroyers that they could potentially torpedo it. If 32 six-inch guns couldn't reach out far enough to reliably swat enemy destroyers before they can launch torpedoes, wouldn't the secondary batteries of WWII-era capital ships, with many fewer guns per broadside and usually also smaller in caliber (up to ten guns of 4-to-6-inch caliber being the norm for secondary broadsides), have practically no hope of being useful in the anti-surface role? Doesn't this also make an effective dual-purpose gun an unworkable concept until the immediate postwar era, because the anti-surface role, in order to reliably kill enemy destroyers while they're still well out of torpedo range, requires a gun too large and heavy to be useable as a heavy-AA gun until the breakthroughs in heavy autoloading guns immediately postwar? If battleship construction had continued, would we have seen the return of the heavy 8-to-10-in intermediate battery to take care of destroyers with increasingly-long-ranged torpedoes?
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