Comments by "Vikki McDonough" (@vikkimcdonough6153) on "The U.S. Naval Institute - Preserving u0026 Publishing the Past, Forecasting the Future" video.

  1. 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. This's a three-parter question. If you put the keel-laying and commissioning dates for the Invincibles, Bellerophons, St Vincents, Nassaus, South Carolinas, and Minas Geraeses in a spreadsheet and then subtract the former date from the latter for each ship, the Royal Navy ships mostly take between 800 and 870 days to go from keel-laying to commissioning (although there're outliers on both sides, with Vanguard commissioning just 698 days after being laid down, and Inflexible and Invincible taking a leisurely 988 and 1083 days, respectively, to get into commission after being laid down); the first two Nassaus also fall into this range (with Nassau herself in fact commissioning faster than any of the Royal Navy ships bar Vanguard, taking just 802 days), but Rheinland and Posen take much longer, at 1064 and 1085 days respectively; and the four American and Brazilian ships take a similarly-long-to-even-longer time to go from keel-laying to commissioning, with the grand prize for the slowest-commissioning of all the ships under consideration here going to a tie between South Carolina and São Paulo, each of which commissioned 1169 days after being laid down. So, now that we've set the scene: a. Why did Invincible (and, to a lesser extent, Inflexible) - take so long to commission, and, conversely, why was Vanguard so fast to commission? b. Why the dramatic split in the Nassaus' completion times, with those of Nassau and Westfalen forming a tight pair comparing favorably with most of the Royal Navy ships under consideration, and those of Rheinland and Posen forming a similarly-tight pair much closer to Invincible and the American and Brazilian ships? c. The slow completion times for the American dreadnoughts are pretty much as expected, but the similarly-slowly-completed Brazilian ships were being built in British shipyards, which were mostly churning out Royal Navy dreadnoughts much more quickly. Did the specific yards building the Minas Geraeses just both coincidentally happen to catch whatever curse had slowed Invincible's completion? Was the Admiralty putting pressure on the shipyards to take their time building Minas Geraes and São Paulo? Was the work slowed by Brazil having intermittent trouble paying the builders on time? Or was there some other reason? 3. What on earth went wrong with Invincible's electrical turret drive?
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