Youtube comments of Vikki McDonough (@vikkimcdonough6153).
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57:00 - Being longer and thinner can also hurt your speed directly if you take it too far. As the ship's aspect ratio increases, its surface-to-volume ratio also increases; if displacement is held constant, this translates into an increase in wetted area, which, in turn, increases the frictional drag on the hull as it moves through the water, and the wetted area (which is directly proportional to the frictional drag) increases faster and faster as you keep increasing the aspect ratio. Past a certain point, going longer and thinner will actually increase your overall drag, as the increase in wetted area will add more drag than you save by decreasing the ship's frontal area. (The balance between pressure drag and frictional drag is also important for aircraft, and is one of the big reasons why you don't tend to see a lot of airliners with enormously long, skinny fuselages, nor ones with stubby, bloated ones.)
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33:33 - Of the two Ottoman battleships seized by the Royal Navy in 1914, Agincourt was an especially weird case linguistically, since it was originally built for the Brazilian Navy before they sold it to the Ottomans for want of money; as a result, it still had quite a lot of things marked in Portuguese, which, although somewhat less of a problem (in that it, like English, uses the Latin script, in contrast to the Arabic script used for Ottoman Turkish), added yet a third language to deal with (and, unlike with the fittings written on in Ottoman Turkish, they apparently decided to just leave in place many if not most of the fittings written on in Portuguese, resulting in quite a few jobs aboard what was now Agincourt requiring a British sailor to have a working knowledge of Portuguese!).
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In rifled breechloading small arms, when the action cycles, the projectile is rammed into a short section of freebore, only engaging (and engraving to) the rifling upon firing. In contrast, with large rifled breechloading naval guns, the projectile is rammed into the start of the rifled section of the barrel and engages (and engraves to) the rifling upon ramming; this greatly increases the force needed to ram the projectile and makes it much more difficult to unload the gun without firing it (which would be necessary if, for whatever reason, the gun becomes unsafe to fire while it's loaded - for instance, if part of the breech mechanism breaks and prevents the breech from locking shut, or if an enemy shell hit bends or distorts the gun barrel, or if a shell squibs in the barrel). Given these issues, why are large naval breechloaders built this way?
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@martinkirk3810 Lucky in timing (they were hit right when they had fuel-and-bomb-laden aircraft rearming on their hangar decks), not in location.
And it didn't happen consistently; the four IJN CVs at Midway were the only defended, maneuvering aircraft carriers to be destroyed by bombs in the entire war (and, even then, the burning wrecks only actually sank when they were scuttled). Every single other case of a defended, maneuvering aircraft carrier being sunk throughout all of World War II involved the carrier being killed (or at least mission-killed badly enough to necessitate scuttling) by torpedoes (which accounted for the vast majority, including a couple helped along by explosions resulting from poor damage control), either aerial or submarine-launched, or, for a few, by surface gunfire, kamikazes (and the two sunk by kamikazes were a light carrier and an escort carrier, both of them breeds much thinner-skinned than fleet carriers), and, in one case, the explosion of a sinking destroyerfull of depth charges right next to the carrier acting as a gigantic mine.
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Are there any known instances (in the period covered by this channel) of a turbine-powered warship suffering a turbine-rotor burst (i.e., the rotor disk itself coming apart, as opposed to merely shedding blades) for whatever reason (such as metal fatigue, manufacturing defects, battle damage, improper reassembly of the turbine following overhaul, something coming loose within the boiler or engine machinery and being ingested into the turbine, etc.) and were any warships actually lost primarily or solely due to such an occurrence? This would certainly seem at first glance to be a fairly-catastrophic failure mode, given that such a high-energy event occurring deep within the ship would almost certainly wreck (and possibly cause secondary disintegrations in other rotors of) the involved turbine (and quite possibly others in the same or adjacent engine rooms, depending on the trajectories of liberated rotor debris), kill everyone in the involved engine room(s) (if not from shrapnel, then from the liberation of vast quantities of high-pressure superheated steam), and tear out the bottom of the ship below the failed turbine.
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31:30 - Those critics actually had a very good point. All the way through WWII, carrier aircraft without torpedoes were pretty terrible when it came to killing defended, maneuvering capital ships, unless they managed to get in a very lucky hit. Barring such lucky hits, basically the only way carrier aircraft could reliably send capital ships to the bottom was with torpedoes, and even this wasn't a game-breaker, as torpedoes and torpedo defense were known quantities, and fast capital ships were very good at dodging torpedoes - for instance, look at how many Japanese torpedoes it took to land a hit on Prince of Wales. If you look at the famous engagements where carrier aircraft slaughtered enemy battleships en masse - battles like Taranto and Pearl Harbor - you'll realize, A, that those involved a defending force at anchor in confined waters (a situation that would be just as much of a massacre for the defending ships against a surface attack), and, B, the very situation that made the ships so easy to sink (being caught at anchor in harbor) also made them easy to salvage once sunk (recall that every single one of the capital ships sunk in the Taranto and Pearl Harbor attacks was refloated, with the exception of one battleship at Pearl whose magazines blew up from an extremely unlucky bomb hit, and all but two of those refloated were repaired and returned to service).
I myself would argue that, at least in the WWII era, a fleet composed primarily of fast battleships with top-notch torpedo protection, with a couple carriers in the rear to provide CAP if operating within range of land-based aircraft (a considerably-greater threat than carrier aircraft, both because they can be bigger, and, thus, carry more boom, than carrier aircraft, and because airfields on land are extremely hard to permanently knock out, given that you can't really sink most land masses), would be a considerably-more-potent striking force than an equal all-carrier fleet, since WWII-era fast battleships were far better at killing capital ships than aircraft carriers of the time were, and also far more able to take hits without seriously impairing their fighting ability (a carrier that gets a hole blown in its flight deck is effectively worthless, while a battleship that gets a turret blown into the sea can still fight with its other turrets). Recall (a) that the capital ships that did get mission-killed by aerial bombing (both carrier- and land-based) in WWII were mostly other carriers, and (b) that the usual outcome of a battleship coming across an enemy aircraft carrier was a one-sided slaughter of the carrier and its escorts (as happened to Glorious, as would've happened to Taffy 3 had Kurita not lost his nerve, and as was narrowly avoided in the closing stages of both Midway and Cape Engaño when U.S. admirals came close to unknowingly sending U.S. fleet carriers straight into the teeth of Japanese battleships).
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Historically, Beatty's "turn in succession" signal (rather than "turn together") at the end of the Run to the South, combined with Seymour's failure to haul the signal flags back down to actually execute this signal, sent Fifth Battle Squadron charging south at nearly the entire High Seas Fleet, resulting in heavy damage to Warspite and Malaya before Evan-Thomas doubled back on his own initiative. However, if Seymour'd promptly executed Beatty's signal, Fifth BS would've turned back while still significantly north of the surviving battlecruisers, and, thus, instead of the German battle squadrons and part of I Scouting Group concentrating their fire on the Queen Elizabeths (the toughest ships in Beatty and Evan-Thomas's combined force by a considerable margin, the only ones aside from New Zealand to not already have taken significant damage, and the ones able to deal out the heaviest return fire to the German ships to cover the British battlecruisers' retreat), Scheer and Hipper's heavy guns would've been concentrated on the remnants of the Battlecruiser Fleet, which had already been quite roughly-handled just by Hipper's ships, were less able to take hits than the QEs even in their undamaged state, had considerably less heavy firepower with which to return the German fire, and would've also, in this scenario, been slowed in their retreat by the 24-knot top speed of the QEs ahead of them, with the trailing ship, having the brunt of the German fire directed at it, being (depending on whether Beatty makes the "turn in succession" or "turn together" order) either New Zealand (whose divine protection probably isn't rated for quite this level of incoming fire, and which, being by far the thinnest-skinned of Beatty's surviving ships, has no capability to withstand any non-glancing hit should this protection fail) or Lion (which's already down a quarter of its main battery and lugging a magazineful of water). Given, historically, how badly even the much-tougher QEs got smashed up during this phase of the battle, it's hard to believe that Beatty's remaining battlecruisers would've survived if they'd been the ones taking the brunt of the German heavy gunfire instead; additionally, with these ships lost at this stage in the battle, they can't join up with 3rd Battlecruiser Squadron for the Windy Corner action, meaning that Hood's three twelve-inch tin cans're going to be facing Hipper's ships alone rather than as part of a force that also includes three Splendid Cats, in which case I wouldn't be surprised if all three of the Invincibles go kaboom instead of just the class's lead ship. All in all, did Beatty and Seymour's poor signalling at the end of the Run to the South actually save the Battlecruiser Fleet from destruction?
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While you were answering a question of mine in the January 2023 livestream, you said that attempting to use a cruiser with 32 6-inch guns as an "anti-destroyer machine gun" (a turn of phrase I quite like) wouldn't work, since it'd have to get close enough to the destroyers to run the risk of torpedo attack.
The secondary batteries of WWII-era capital ships and cruisers have, as either their sole function (for ships with dedicated anti-surface secondaries) or one of their two main functions (for ships with dual-purpose secondaries), the fending off of enemy destroyers before they can get into torpedo range.
If a broadside of 32 6-inch guns can't reliably stop a destroyer before it enters torpedo range, how can ten 5-inch guns, or nine 6.1-inch guns, or eight 5.25-inch guns, or six 6-inch guns, or six 5.5-inch guns, possibly be sufficient for anti-destroyer work? Doesn't this mean that not a single capital ship in WWII had a secondary battery that was actually useful in the anti-surface role? And doesn't that invalidate the entire dual-purpose-gun concept (at least for WWII), since reliably killing destroyers before they enter torpedo range requires a gun considerably larger than 6 inches in caliber - much too large to be useful as a heavy-AA weapon before the advances of the immediate postwar era?
If battleship design and construction had continued longer, would we have seen the return of the 8-inch-and-up intermediate battery for anti-surface work in response to the increasingly-long ranges of destroyer torpedoes?
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According to the NavWeaps armor-penetration figures, the German 12"/50 gun used on the Helgolands, Kaisers, Königs, and Derfflingers seems to have hilariously overperformed, having considerably-greater armor penetration than the British 13.5"/45 Mk. V(H) despite the latter gun firing a shell over half again as massive (and thus both more-effective at a given impact speed and better-able to retain its speed in the face of aerodynamic drag). At a range of 10,000 yards, the British 13.5" gun's 1400-pound shell can penetrate 12.5 inches of Krupp cemented armor, whereas, at a range of 10,940 yards, the German 12" gun's 892.9-pound shell is listed as being able to penetrate 13.6 inches of Krupp cemented armor; although the German gun does have a 13%-higher muzzle velocity, the lower ballistic coefficient of its smaller shell should mean that it's lost this speed advantage by the time it makes it past 10,000 yards (and, even at closer ranges, that speed advantage has to fight against the disadvantage of the 12" shell being quite a lightweight compared to the 13.5" British shell). Why is the German 12"/50 overperforming to such a hilarious degree? Are the listed armor-penetration figures for the British gun using those early-war shells whose armor penetration was severely hamstrung by their tendency to detonate after penetrating only a small distance?
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0. Is it possible that Billy Mitchell's bias against armor-piercing bombs could've been a result of having only low-flight-ceiling (thus unable to drop armor-piercing bombs from high enough to have a reasonable chance of penetrating a battleship's deck armor), low-payload (thus unable to carry to any significant distance an armor-piercing bomb heavy enough to carry a significant explosive payload) airplanes available at the time, since an airplane that can't carry a heavy-enough armor-piercing bomb high enough to make it through the target's deck armor is basically just dropping a high-explosive bomb with a much-reduced explosive yield?
1. Why did the IJN, in the 1930s and 1940s, find the use of compressed oxygen as an oxidizer for high-speed underwater engines an easier engineering problem than the use of high-test peroxide for the same purpose (bringing the oxygen-powered Long Lance torpedo series into operational service in the 1930s and the derivative Type 1 kaiten later in the 1940s, while the HTP-powered Type 2 kaiten ran into insurmountable oxidizer-storage problems that prevented it from ever entering service), while for the Kriegsmarine it was the other way around (managing to bring a number of Walter U-boats close to entering service during the war years, while rejecting oxygen-powered engines outright because they realized they'd've had even more problems with that than they had with the HTP boats, only being able to finally start work on an oxygen design partway through the war as a result of a decade of additional technical advances)?
2. What was the burning (and ultimately exploding) ship that HMS Spitfire's crew saw during the night at Jutland? At the time, it was thought to be HMS Black Prince, but German records examined after the war showed that Black Prince's demise happened in a completely different manner from how Spitfire's crew described the final end of the ship they saw in the night, and none of the other ships lost at Jutland went down in a manner consistent with what Spitfire saw. Was the destroyer's entire crew subject to some sort of mass hallucination?
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The advantages of the Hedgehog system over conventional depth charges were that, by using contact rather than depth fuzes, a miss wouldn't produce a sonar-fouling detonation (with a detonation, if one did occur, thus providing direct, solid confirmation of a hit), and in the event of a hit, a direct contact detonation, even with the relatively-small explosive charge of a Hedgehog bomb, was much more likely to destroy the target than a detonation in the water some distance away from an enemy submarine would be, with the lightweight bombs allowing each Hedgehog pattern to use a massive number of them (thus providing many more opportunities for a hit). In contrast, the successor Squid/Limbo systems seemingly gave up all of the Hedgehog's advantages (with the sole apparent advantage over the Hedgehog being that the system was trainable rather than fixed to face forwards); they went back to launching depth-fuzed bombs, which would explode and foul the launching ship's sonar regardless of whether a hit was scored (and, thus, also provided no indication as to whether they'd actually hit anything) and required a much-larger explosive charge to maximize the chances of killing a submarine even in the event of a near miss (which, in turn, much reduced the number that could be launched in a single pattern from dozens to just three or six, sharply limiting the opportunities for a hit). Why did the Squid/Limbo apparently give up all of the Hedgehog's advantages?
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I can think of one justification for using the biggest round possible for sniping, iff you have accurate ammo and an accurate gun; a bigger, heavier round has a higher ballistic coefficient than a lighter one (lower surface-to-mass ratio, courtesy of the square-cube law), hence is slowed down more slowly by aerodynamic drag and less affected by crosswinds between you and your target, hence is (potentially) more accurate at long range, hence is (potentially) usable for sniping out to longer ranges than something smaller (also, even if a big round had the exact same ballistic coefficient and impact speed as an equally-accurate smaller round, the big round would still have greater kinetic energy at impact - and, hence, lethality - due to its greater mass, making it still, potentially, useful out to greater ranges), hence can take potshots at the enemy from further away than they can shoot back with their own rifles.
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In the interwar era and WWII, U.S. and Japanese aircraft carriers had open-sided hangars, while British carriers tended to have sealed hangars. The open-sided hangar provided ventilation, allowing aircraft to be started and warmed up in the hangar and thus allowing for a faster aircraft-launch cadence, but it constitutes a massive vulnerability if the carrier comes under attack (it's easy to imagine skip-bombing attacks, air-launched rockets, glide bombs, kamikazes, etc., sailing into the huge openings in the side of the hangar and making lots of flammable and explosive stuff down there go boom) and poses the risk of high seas coming in through the side openings and washing the hangar clean of aircraft; the British sealed hangar eliminated the huge vulnerable openings in the side of the hangar, but its greatly-reduced ventilation capacity required aircraft to be started and warmed up on the flight deck to avoid asphyxiating the hangar crew, which slowed down flight operations. Why didn't anyone use a sealed hangar with high-capacity mechanical ventilation, to avoid the massive drawbacks of the open-sided hangar while still allowing aircraft to be started and warmed up in the hangar? Mechanical ventilation systems with sufficient airflow capacity for internal-combustion-engined vehicles to safely operate in the ventilated space were already a mature technology by the time of WWII (for instance, consider that the Holland Tunnel opened in 1927).
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Why was it that, of all the battleships the U.S. had at the end of World War II, we ended up preserving three near-identical fast battleships (not counting the Iowas in this total, as they continued to serve off and on until nearly half a century later) plus Texas, instead of taking the opportunity to preserve one of the Standards and at least one more of the pre-Standard turret farms (it would've been nice to be able to explore one of the Wyomings and their six turrets without having to go diving in Bikini Lagoon)? (For that matter, I'd've wanted the preserved fast battleship to be Washington, given her combat history, but at least for that one you can still go visit a near-identical sister in substitute.) I'm really sad that, although there are nine battleships preserved worldwide, so little of the diversity in battleship construction is represented in that total, as seven of the nine are all late-interwar/WWII-era 3×3×16" U.S. fast battleships (with the other two being Texas, a U.S. WWI-era 5×2×14" turret farm, and Mikasa, a Japanese predreadnought, so at least there's some diversity there); it seems a travesty that, of the twelve Standards, the best-preserved is the one mainly known for getting blown up, and none of the battle-scarred survivors of Pearl Harbor got to become museum ships (imagine the experience of being able to walk through California or West Virginia and see where men fought for their lives as the Japanese aircraft attacked, or of having a tour route retracing Nevada's run for the ocean and leading up to Nevada herself, permanently moored in an anchorage dug out of the coral ledge where she was grounded; having West Virginia and Nevada preserved as museum ships at Pearl would be an incredible complement to the Arizona Memorial), with the closest thing we have being, again, the one that exploded. I'm honestly surprised, and more than a little disappointed, that there doesn't seem to've been much effort put into preserving at least one of the veterans of Pearl on the parts of either the U.S. public or Congress!
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Why were there a number of cases from the first half of the 20th century of capital ships randomly exploding while at anchor (for instance, Iena, Liberte, Tsukuba, Kawachi, Vanguard (WWI edition), Mutsu, etc.), but none (so far as I've found) of capital ships randomly exploding while under way (excluding, obviously, those resulting from battle damage)?
Related: What's the largest warship to have survived a main magazine explosion and returned to service?
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Given the potential disastrous propaganda and morale effects of a ship bearing the name of its country going down, why did so many countries still name their major warships after themselves? Just off the top of my head, there's Deutschland (which happened twice, first with the predreadnought and then with the Panzerschiff that eventually got renamed Lützow), the dreadnoughts France and España (made even worse by the ignominious ways in which both of these met their ends, being the only two dreadnoughts ever to be destroyed not by enemy action, random explosion, or shipbreakers, but by simple shipwrecks), Italia (which also happened twice, first with the beltless ironclad and then with the ship that used to be Littorio, with the second also implicating the ship-renaming taboo for extra bad luck), and the shortly-post-WWII aircraft carrier United States (admittedly, that one was cancelled almost immediately after being laid down, but still). Did no one realize that it might be a bad idea to give a warship a name that creates the potential for headlines reading, say, "FRANCE WRECKED" or "UNITED STATES DESTROYED"?
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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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How did navies combat metal fatigue in warship armor, hull plating, structural beams and girders, etc. (assuming that they were even aware of the potential for problems in this regard)? Fatigue cracking could have catastrophic consequences on a warship (fatigue damage to armor plating could allow the armor to be penetrated by weaponry that it would be absolutely immune to in its undamaged state [which could potentially raise a lot of questions regarding who sank or damaged what in various battles, given that, if the recipient ship's armor was weakened by metal fatigue, this could potentially allow the fatal or damaging blow to have been struck by a ship whose fire theoretically shouldn't've been capable of defeating said armor, either at a certain range and angle or even at all¹]; fatigue damage to hull plating could weaken it enough for things like grounding, collisions, or mine or torpedo explosions to result in a far more extensive hull breach, with attendant massive flooding, than would otherwise occur, or, alternatively, result in seemingly-spontaneous hull breaches occurring without warning; fatigue damage to major structural elements could result in the ship suffering seemingly-inexplicable structural failures in a heavy sea or from the shock of heavy gunfire, or, if sufficiently severe, in the ship unexpectedly breaking apart either when under way or at anchor), undetectable imperfections (such as microscopic inclusions or bubbles) in the manufacture of ships' steel structural and armor components could serve as crack-initiation points, the flexing and pounding encountered by any warship under way would subject the structure and armor to stress cycling with a period of mere seconds over a duration adding up to many years for most warships, and it seems like it would be practically impossible to detect fatigue cracking by visual inspection alone (by means of comparison, visual fatigue-crack inspection of aircraft not-uncommonly misses potentially-hazardous cracks, and a large warship has several orders of magnitude more metal potentially subject to fatigue cracking than even the largest aircraft), while the various methods of nondestructive inspection for detecting fatigue cracks seem to by and large postdate (often by many decades) the era covered by this channel.
¹: Thinking about it, this seems like it'd potentially've been capable of being a possible factor in the loss of HMS Hood; Hood was an old ship, with the potential for her armor to've been weakened by two-decades-plus's worth of fatigue damage, which, if this were the case, could've allowed a shell from Bismarck or even possibly Prinz Eugen to simply punch straight through the armor belt that should've stopped it cold and then go on to detonate the ship's magazines. (Disclaimer: this is NOT, in any way, shape, or form, intended as criticism of your analysis of Hood's sinking. I'm simply curious about something that seems, at first glance, like a potential second plausible explanation for why Hood blew up.)
And apologies for the wall of text; this question ended up being far longer than I'd expected it to be!
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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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18:16 - It also leaves Furious the honor of firing a heaviest shell from a turreted gun of any warship ever, since a.) when the 18-inch guns intended for Furious were used on the Lord Clives, they were on a fixed mounting that required turning the entire ship to aim the gun, and b.) while the Japanese 18.1-inch gun had a marginally-greater caliber than the British 18-incher, it actually fired a somewhat-lighter shell (3,219 lb at most v. 3,320 lb), and, although the Americans had an 18-inch gun that could fire a 3,850-lb shell, they never ended up putting it on a warship.
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Why weren't destroyers in the WWI/WWII era typically built with ram bows? They fell out of use on larger warships after battle ranges lengthened to the point where a ship attempting to ram would be destroyed by gunfire long before connecting. Destroyers, however, did still routinely get into these sort of fist-range boiler-room brawls throughout both World Wars, both against surfaced submarines (which would routinely get rammed by destroyers even without the latter having ram bows to aid in the process) and against surface ships (for instance, Jutland-at-night and Dover Strait in WWI, and Narvik II, Glowworm/Hipper, and Friday the 13th in WWII, among many others), and ram bows would've allowed destroyers to easily cripple or sink larger ships even if they'd exhausted their torpedoes or were too close for them to arm (sure, this would've likely wrecked the ramming destroyers, but, to put it bluntly, destroyers are [unless you're the Kriegsmarine] expendable).
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Why did the Kaiserliche Marine rely entirely on second-class battleships for its capital-ship force until well into the dreadnought era? When most nations were building big predreadnoughts with 12-inch main guns, the Germans were relying on diminutive ships with 9.4-inch main guns (after their initial foray into creating a battleship with six 11-inch guns and no secondary battery to speak of); when other countries were building even-bigger, (relatively-)powerful semidreadnoughts with 8-to-10-inch intermediate batteries supplementing the big 12-inchers, the Germans were… going back up to 11-inch main guns and ~6-inch secondaries on still-relatively-small ships. Even the first German dreadnoughts, the Nassaus, still had only 11-inch main guns on a relatively-small-and-cramped ship (recall that Nassau displaced only about as much as Dreadnought despite having thicker armor and an extra main-battery turret as compared to the British ship); it wasn't until Thüringen was commissioned in July 1911 that the Germans had a battleship with 12-inch guns, and their battlecruiser force continued to be made up solely of 11-inch ships until Derfflinger was commissioned in September 1914 (and, even after that point, would remain a majority-11-inch force for its entire remaining lifespan). The 11-inch gun had great difficulty in usefully penetrating capital-ship-grade armor at typical battle ranges (as demonstrated by the battlecruiser action at Jutland, where the British 13.5-inch battlecruisers, despite having armor a couple/few inches thinner than contemporary battleships, were still generally able to tank dozens of 11-inch hits without significant degradation in fighting capability), and the 9.4-inch gun would've been essentially useless against capital ships except in a knife-range nighttime brawl. Even at close range, where the smaller German guns would've actually packed a useful punch, the German ships'd still've been less able to dish out damage than the 12-inch first-class battleships they'd've been fighting, and less able to absorb and withstand damage than their larger opponents. So why did the Germans choose to effectively hamstring their navy by building and operating exclusively second-class battleships for so long?
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Just FYI, the post appears to not actually've become pinned.
On to my Drydock questions:
1. How effective would something along the lines of the Disney bomb have been as a dive-bomber-borne anti-warship weapon? On the face of it, the extra acceleration provided by equipping the bomb with rocket motors would seem to solve the problem that occasionally cropped up in WWII where, in order to be sure of actually hitting the target ship, dive bombers ended up having to release their bombs at heights too low for the bombs to gain enough speed to penetrate the ship's armored deck (for instance, during Operation Tungsten).
2. Pretty much all coal-fired warships used their coal bunkers as, essentially, additional armor. This seems, intuitively, like it would be a terrible idea, as coal has rather a tendency to create dust, which, one would think, would give it the exact opposite effect of armor, since an incoming shell penetrating into the coal bunkers and exploding would loft huge quantities of highly-flammable coal dust into the air, followed by a much larger explosion as the coal-bunker-sized fuel-air bomb that's just come into being ignites (like what may have happened to the Lusitania after it was torpedoed). How did coal-fired warships make it so that their coal bunkers actually helped protect the ship rather than helping to blow it up?
3. Why didn't submarines carry some sort of weapon for hitting back while submerged and under depth-charge attack, like a dispenser for releasing mines to float up for the depth-charging destroyers to run into (and, if provided with enough mines, potentially allowing the submarine to shelter in its own little minefield), or upwards-pointing torpedo tubes to fire torpedoes vertically or at a steep angle upwards at the attackers?
4. Why did the interwar U.S. Navy apparently conclude that a battleship attacked with gas shells would have to be scrapped? Chemical decontamination is a pretty-mature science, and, of the chemical agents that would've been widely used in this era, the pulmonary agents like chlorine, phosgene, and chloropicrin are gasses, which don't tend to persist for particularly long anyways and could be removed without too much trouble with enough forced-air ventilation and airing out, while, although the mustard gasses are liquids, contamination by liquid mustard gas would be essentially limited to the area where the shell actually hit and the volume within its blast radius (which would be much smaller than that of a typical HE or AP shell, given that [a] much of the shell's internal volume is occupied by some poison gas of whatever type rather than by explosive, and [b] put too much oomph into the explosion and the heat and pressure effects start to end up destroying quite a bit of the chemical agent), and evaporated mustard gas could mostly be removed in the same manner as the pulmonary agents; besides, a battleship with pretty much any warning of chemical attack would be able to quickly seal itself off both externally and internally, confining even gaseous contamination to a fairly-small area of the ship and preventing it from spreading through hatches or ducts, thereby greatly reducing the portion of the ship needing decontamination in the first place.
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While limping home after its joust with SMS Nassau, HMS Spitfire sighted a fiercely-burning ship which the crew described thus: "...a mass of fire from foremast to mainmast, on deck and between decks. Flames were issuing out of her from every corner." This ship exploded around midnight. Spitfire's crew thought at the time that they'd seen a German battlecruiser, but none of the German battlecruisers at Jutland were lost in such a manner (the only German battlecruiser lost at all in the battle being Lützow, which succumbed to progressive massive flooding, not to fire). Later on, it was thought that Spitfire had seen the end of HMS Black Prince, which had vanished at some point during the night, but this is irreconcilable with the actual circumstances of Black Prince's sinking as established by the German accounts of the engagement, which show Black Prince blundering into the German battleline and being rapidly and violently destroyed by point-blank gunfire from at least four German dreadnoughts which would've been obvious to (and prominently-noted in the accounts of) the crew of Spitfire had the ship whose death they saw actually been Black Prince. However, none of the other ships lost during the night action at Jutland were lost in a manner matching the ship seen from Spitfire; the one that probably comes closest is SMS Pommern, but that ship was aflame only momentarily before it blew up and sank, and Pommern's torpedoing occurred both several hours too late (after three in the morning) and far too far to the southeast for the mystery ship to have been Pommern.
So what was the ship that Spitfire's crew saw?
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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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Different countries. Some (US, UK/Commonwealth) used imperial (or, in the U.S. case, U.S. customary) units for measurement. All the other major naval powers (Germany, France, Russia, Japan, Italy...) used metric units, but commentators from (or catering primarily to users in) U.S./UK/Commonwealth countries, like Drach, will frequently convert metric measurements to their imperial (or U.S. customary) equivalents for ease of comparison (and I suspect that the reverse is also true).
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08:58 - That's one of the reasons (albeit, to be fair, a fairly-minor one, as rearmoring a ship is a fairly-rare occurrence) using armor as a structural element is generally a dumb idea, alongside "armor steel, even the relatively-supple backing layer, is quite brittle compared to structural steel, and normal flexing of the ship's structure could well snap the armor plate right in half" and "even if you somehow made armor steel no more brittle than structural steel without compromising its protective ability, by integrating the armor into the ship's structure you're coupling all the cyclical stresses encountered by the ship's structure into the armor, which will badly compromise its protective ability via progressive fatigue cracking".
11:03 - You say "absurdly-too-well-protected", I say "future-proofed against enemies introducing bigger and better guns".
33:54 - And, on the flip side of things, we have Aki and the Dantons, which, despite only being semidreadnoughts, use steam turbines and thus can just about keep pace with Dreadnought.
35:34 - By that definition, the Kawachis aren't dreadnoughts either!
38:58 - And, if the air attacks do start to do them serious damage, in extremis they can run themselves aground and fight on from there.
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@DERP_Squad In that case, I wonder if there're any surviving records of Greek fire being used in rainy or foggy weather, and, if so, how the fire reacted. Contact with bulk water spreads and disperses oil fires, but rain or (especially) fog, being composed of tiny drop(let)s, evaporates completely while passing through the flame and never brings liquid water into contact with the fuel itself, so it simply robs an oil fire of heat (and of quite a lot of it, because of water's ridiculously-high heat capacity and heat of vaporization) without spreading it (hence why water-fog systems are used in places like oil refineries and fuel farms); this effect would be quite noticeable to a casual observer, especially to someone used to Greek fire burning more fiercely on contact with water (rather than less).
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2:11:23 - Funnily enough, though, even the Spanish Armada is still close enough to the present to be reachable without too many degrees of separation; it's entirely within the realm of possibility that there are (admittedly quite old) people alive nowadays...
...who, when they were small, met and talked to a much older person...
...who, when they were small, met and talked to a much older person...
...who, when they were small, met and talked to a much older person...
...who, when they were small, met and talked to a living veteran of the battles against the Spanish Armada.
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Historically, Beatty's "turn in succession" signal (rather than "turn together") at the end of the Run to the South, combined with Seymour's failure to haul the signal flags back down to actually execute this signal, sent Fifth Battle Squadron charging south at nearly the entire High Seas Fleet, resulting in heavy damage to Warspite and Malaya before Evan-Thomas doubled back on his own initiative. However, if Seymour'd promptly executed Beatty's signal, Fifth BS would've turned back while still significantly north of the surviving battlecruisers, and, thus, instead of the German battle squadrons and part of I Scouting Group concentrating their fire on the Queen Elizabeths (the toughest ships in Beatty and Evan-Thomas's combined force by a considerable margin, the only ones aside from New Zealand to not already have taken significant damage, and the ones able to deal out the heaviest return fire to the German ships to cover the British battlecruisers' retreat), Scheer and Hipper's heavy guns would've been concentrated on the remnants of the Battlecruiser Fleet, which had already been quite roughly-handled just by Hipper's ships, were less able to take hits than the QEs even in their undamaged state, had considerably less heavy firepower with which to return the German fire, and would've also, in this scenario, been slowed in their retreat by the 24-knot top speed of the QEs ahead of them, with the trailing ship, having the brunt of the German fire directed at it, being (depending on whether Beatty makes the "turn in succession" or "turn together" order) either New Zealand (whose divine protection probably isn't rated for quite this level of incoming fire, and which, being by far the thinnest-skinned of Beatty's surviving ships, has no capability to withstand any non-glancing hit should this protection fail) or Lion (which's already down a quarter of its main battery and lugging a magazineful of water). Given, historically, how badly even the much-tougher QEs got smashed up during this phase of the battle, it's hard to believe that Beatty's remaining battlecruisers would've survived if they'd been the ones taking the brunt of the German heavy gunfire instead; additionally, with these ships lost at this stage in the battle, they can't join up with 3rd Battlecruiser Squadron for the Windy Corner action, meaning that Hood's three twelve-inch tin cans're going to be facing Hipper's ships alone rather than as part of a force that also includes three Splendid Cats, in which case I wouldn't be surprised if all three of the Invincibles go kaboom instead of just the class's lead ship. All in all, did Beatty and Seymour's poor signalling at the end of the Run to the South actually save the Battlecruiser Fleet from destruction?
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2:50, 4:41 - The technical term for the Ge'ez script (that used for Ethiopian and Eritrean languages like Amharic, Tigrinya, Oromo, etc.; its namesake is the ancient Ge'ez language, which is nowadays used only by the Ethiopian and Eritrean Orthodox and Catholic Churches and the Beta Israel Jews, and then only as a liturgical language) is an abugida. Each individual glyph is composed of a base form which represents a consonant followed by a certain default "inherent vowel"; if a consonant is followed by a vowel other than the default, or by no vowel at all, this is indicated by tacking a small modifier decal onto the glyph. (The script was originally an abjad, where vowels simply aren't indicated and have to be inferred [like in non-Biblical Hebrew, r lk 'm dng n ths sntnc cls fr prpss f dmnstrtn]; when it was in this stage, the glyphs that today represent consonant + inherent vowel were used to represent the bare consonants. The Ge'ez script evolved from an abjad to an abugida by about 350 C.E. at the latest [around the same time as the Christianization of the Kingdom of Axum, the predecessor of modern Ethiopia], and possibly much earlier; around this time, it also switched from being written right-to-left [like Arabic and Hebrew] to being written left-to-right [like Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, Devanagari, etc.].)
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Given that total shell mass is irrelevant for armor penetration, with the important factors instead being the impact speed and angle and the construction of the shell, on the one hand, and its sectional density (its mass per unit frontal cross-sectional area), on the other, why did navies continually keep increasing their guns' shell caliber rather than their shell length?
As an example, consider three different guns:
- A British 12"/45 Mk X gun (shell mass 850 pounds, frontal area [6^2]π=113.1 in^2, sectional density 850/113.1=7.52 lb/in^2)
- A British 15"/42 Mk I gun (shell mass 1,938 pounds, frontal area [7.5^2]π=176.7 in^2, sectional density 1,938/176.7=10.97 lb/in^2)
- A gun firing a 12" shell with twice the length of the 12"/45 Mk X's shell (shell mass 1,700 pounds, frontal area [6^2]π=113.1 in^2, sectional density 1,700/113.1=15.03 lb/in^2)
The third gun (the one firing the long 12" shell) would punch through armor almost half again as well as the 15"/42 Mk I (in practice, this increase would be even higher, as the high aspect ratio of the third gun's shell would reduce the aerodynamic drag experienced by the shell compared to that experienced by a shorter, fatter shell, causing the shell to lose speed more slowly and retain a higher speed at impact upon a target at a given distance) and do so with a lighter shell (allowing the ship to either carry more shells and propellant charges, or carry the same number of these smaller shells and charges and use the saved displacement for things like more armor or more fuel bunker or more powerplant). So why didn't navies go down the route of longer-shell guns, instead choosing to upgrade to guns whose shells were just bigger overall (a much-less-efficient way of increasing armor penetration)?
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1. Why did the German hexagonal dreadnoughts slow down so badly in turns? Given that the increase in the frontal area that a ship presents to the oncoming waterflow at a given sideslip angle is relatively lower for a fat, low-aspect-ratio ship like a Nassau than it is for a ship with a higher aspect ratio, one would've thought that the early German dreads would've been less affected by turn-induced increases in drag than most other dreadnoughts. Did their low aspect ratio allow them to yaw quickly enough to cause them, when turning, to reach a sideslip angle so much higher than that of a finer-lined ship as to outweigh the lesser increase in frontal area for a given sideslip angle?
2. Could one have trained an actual monkey to act as a powder monkey?
3. How much of a numerical disadvantage could the USN have been at Midway and still been willing to give battle? Historically, they were willing to give battle outnumbered four CVs to two (although they ultimately didn't have to), and may've been willing to give battle outnumbered five CVs to two, but that gap could've widened even further with some altered decision-making on the part of the Kido Butai; if the IJN'd kept their forces together whenever they possibly could, rather than splitting their forces again and again and giving the Americans the opportunity to defeat them in detail, then by the time of the Midway operation the numerical disparity could've been as large as seven CVs and three or four CVLs on the Japanese side (Akagi, Kaga, Sōryū, Hiryū, Shōkaku, Zuikaku, Jun'yō, Hōshō, Ryūjō, Zuihō, and possibly Shōhō), backed up by a powerful surface force including up to eleven battleships and battlecruisers, against just two or three CVs on the American side (Enterprise, Hornet, and hopefully Saratoga if it can get there in time) backed up by no escort meaner than a heavy cruiser (and the cruiser and destroyer force they did have still being outnumbered 2-to-2.5-to-one). Would the U.S. fleet still've accepted battle despite being outnumbered effectively 4.5-to-one in carriers (taking two CVLs as roughly equivalent to one CV) and at a grievous disadvantage in the surface department as well?
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Are there any known instances (in the period covered by this channel) of a turbine-powered warship suffering a turbine-rotor burst (i.e., the rotor disk itself coming apart, as opposed to merely shedding blades) for whatever reason (such as metal fatigue, manufacturing defects, battle damage, improper reassembly of the turbine following overhaul, something coming loose within the boiler or engine machinery and being ingested into the turbine, etc.) and were any warships actually lost primarily or solely due to such an occurrence? This would certainly seem at first glance to be a fairly-catastrophic failure mode, given that such a high-energy event occurring deep within the ship would almost certainly wreck (and possibly cause secondary disintegrations in other rotors of) the involved turbine (and quite possibly others in the same or adjacent engine rooms, depending on the trajectories of liberated rotor debris), kill everyone in the involved engine room(s) (if not from shrapnel, then from the liberation of vast quantities of high-pressure superheated steam), and tear out the bottom of the ship below the failed turbine.
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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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1. Historically, Beatty's "turn in succession" signal (rather than "turn together") at the end of the Run to the South, combined with Seymour's failure to haul the signal flags back down to actually execute this signal, sent Fifth Battle Squadron charging south at nearly the entire High Seas Fleet, resulting in heavy damage to Warspite and Malaya before Evan-Thomas doubled back on his own initiative. However, if Seymour'd promptly executed Beatty's signal, Fifth BS would've turned back while still significantly north of the surviving battlecruisers, and, thus, instead of the German battle squadrons and part of I Scouting Group concentrating their fire on the Queen Elizabeths (the toughest ships in Beatty and Evan-Thomas's combined force by a considerable margin, the only ones aside from New Zealand to not already have taken significant damage, and the ones able to deal out the heaviest return fire to the German ships to cover the British battlecruisers' retreat), Scheer and Hipper's heavy guns would've been concentrated on the remnants of the Battlecruiser Fleet, which had already been quite roughly-handled just by Hipper's ships, were less able to take hits than the QEs even in their undamaged state, had considerably less heavy firepower with which to return the German fire, and would've also, in this scenario, been slowed in their retreat by the 24-knot top speed of the QEs ahead of them, with the trailing ship, having the brunt of the German fire directed at it, being (depending on whether Beatty makes the "turn in succession" or "turn together" order) either New Zealand (whose divine protection probably isn't rated for quite this level of incoming fire, and which, being by far the thinnest-skinned of Beatty's surviving ships, has no capability to withstand any non-glancing hit should this protection fail) or Lion (which's already down a quarter of its main battery and lugging a magazineful of water). Given, historically, how badly even the much-tougher QEs got smashed up during this phase of the battle, it's hard to believe that Beatty's remaining battlecruisers would've survived if they'd been the ones taking the brunt of the German heavy gunfire instead; additionally, with these ships lost at this stage in the battle, they can't join up with 3rd Battlecruiser Squadron for the Windy Corner action, meaning that Hood's three twelve-inch tin cans're going to be facing Hipper's ships alone rather than as part of a force that also includes three Splendid Cats, in which case I wouldn't be surprised if all three of the Invincibles go kaboom instead of just the class's lead ship. All in all, did Beatty and Seymour's poor signalling at the end of the Run to the South actually save the Battlecruiser Fleet from destruction?
2. Why did the German hexagonal dreadnoughts slow down so badly in turns? Given that the increase in the frontal area that a ship presents to the oncoming waterflow at a given sideslip angle is relatively lower for a fat, low-aspect-ratio ship like a Nassau than it is for a ship with a higher aspect ratio, one would've thought that the early German dreads would've been less affected by turn-induced increases in drag than most other dreadnoughts. Did their low aspect ratio allow them to yaw quickly enough to cause them, when turning, to reach a sideslip angle so much higher than that of a finer-lined ship as to outweigh the lesser increase in frontal area for a given sideslip angle?
3. How much of a numerical disadvantage could the USN have been at Midway and still been willing to give battle? Historically, they were willing to give battle outnumbered four CVs to two (although they ultimately didn't have to), and may've been willing to give battle outnumbered five CVs to two, but that gap could've widened even further with some altered decision-making on the part of the Kido Butai; if the IJN'd kept their forces together whenever they possibly could, rather than splitting their forces again and again and giving the Americans the opportunity to defeat them in detail, then by the time of the Midway operation the numerical disparity could've been as large as seven CVs and three or four CVLs on the Japanese side (Akagi, Kaga, Sōryū, Hiryū, Shōkaku, Zuikaku, Jun'yō, Hōshō, Ryūjō, Zuihō, and possibly Shōhō), backed up by a powerful surface force including up to eleven battleships and battlecruisers, against just two or three CVs on the American side (Enterprise, Hornet, and hopefully Saratoga if it can get there in time) backed up by no escort meaner than a heavy cruiser (and the cruiser and destroyer force they did have still being outnumbered 2-to-2.5-to-one). Would the U.S. fleet still've accepted battle despite being outnumbered effectively 4.5-to-one in carriers (taking two CVLs as roughly equivalent to one CV) and at a grievous disadvantage in the surface department as well?
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@Cailus3542 They weren't entirely ineffective; they did take a number of carriers temporarily out of action for repairs, and managed to fatally damage the four Japanese carriers at Midway to the point where they had to be scuttled (although that was due in considerable part to a combination of lucky timing and poor Japanese damage-control doctrine) - and at Midway specifically, they were the best anti-carrier weapon the Americans had, since they had a good dive bomber to deliver them (the SBD), whereas their torpedo bomber (the TBD) was hopelessly obsolete by that point in the war and became easy prey for the Japanese defenses (and the other main torpedo-delivery-against-carrier method, submarines, was effectively taken out of the equation until long after Midway by the U.S. submarine fleet's defective torpedoes).
However, for putting carriers (or other capital ships, for that matter) down permanently, torpedoes were much more lethal than aerial bombs. (I'm working on tabulating the exact numbers at the moment.)
EDIT: By my count, out of a total of 40 bomb/kamikaze attacks (I'm lumping in kamikazes here because the damage caused is essentially the same as with plain old bombs) which scored hits on U.S. and Japanese fleet carriers in WWII, a total of 5 were fatal (a case fatality rate of 12.5%); of these, 0 of 26 (0%) successful bombings of U.S. fleet carriers were fatal, while 5 of 14 (37%) were fatal to Japanese fleet carriers (this encompassing the four carriers bombed out at Midway as well as the bombing and sinking of Amagi at anchor in 1945). In contrast, 9 of 18 successful torpedo attacks on U.S. and Japanese fleet carriers were fatal (a case fatality rate of 50%), with 3 of 9 successful torpedoings (33%) of U.S. fleet carriers being fatal and 6 of 9 successful torpedoings (67%) of Japanese fleet carriers being fatal. One additional fleet carrier was sunk by something other than bomb or torpedo attacks (Yorktown, which was finally sunk by the mass explosion of a sinking destroyer's depth charges close to the carrier's hull).
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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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0. When confronted with the problem of the Type 93 torpedo being too big for their submarine designs to use, why did the IJN develop smaller Long Lances instead of bigger submarines? They were far from averse to giant submarines as it was...
1. Why did the Porters and Somerses use single-purpose 5"/38s rather than the quick-firing version of the 5"/51, given the 5"/38's inferior long-range ballistics against surface targets and the lack of the need for a surface-action-only turret to elevate and train anywhere near as rapidly as a dual-purpose turret (thus greatly reducing the severity of the need to minimize the turret's rotational inertia by using shorter-barrelled guns)?
2. Historically, Beatty's "turn in succession" signal (rather than "turn together") at the end of the Run to the South, combined with Seymour's failure to haul the signal flags back down to actually execute this signal, sent Fifth Battle Squadron charging south at nearly the entire High Seas Fleet, resulting in heavy damage to Warspite and Malaya before Evan-Thomas doubled back on his own initiative. However, if Seymour'd promptly executed Beatty's signal, Fifth BS would've turned back while still significantly north of the surviving battlecruisers, and, thus, instead of the German battle squadrons and part of I Scouting Group concentrating their fire on the Queen Elizabeths (the toughest ships in Beatty and Evan-Thomas's combined force by a considerable margin, the only ones aside from New Zealand to not already have taken significant damage, and the ones able to deal out the heaviest return fire to the German ships to cover the British battlecruisers' retreat), Scheer and Hipper's heavy guns would've been concentrated on the remnants of the Battlecruiser Fleet, which had already been quite roughly-handled just by Hipper's ships, were less able to take hits than the QEs even in their undamaged state, had considerably less heavy firepower with which to return the German fire, and would've also, in this scenario, been slowed in their retreat by the 24-knot top speed of the QEs ahead of them, with the trailing ship, having the brunt of the German fire directed at it, being (depending on whether Beatty makes the "turn in succession" or "turn together" order) either New Zealand (whose divine protection probably isn't rated for quite this level of incoming fire, and which, being by far the thinnest-skinned of Beatty's surviving ships, has no capability to withstand any non-glancing hit should this protection fail) or Lion (which's already down a quarter of its main battery and lugging a magazineful of water). Given, historically, how badly even the much-tougher QEs got smashed up during this phase of the battle, it's hard to believe that Beatty's remaining battlecruisers would've survived if they'd been the ones taking the brunt of the German heavy gunfire instead; additionally, with these ships lost at this stage in the battle, they can't join up with 3rd Battlecruiser Squadron for the Windy Corner action, meaning that Hood's three twelve-inch tin cans're going to be facing Hipper's ships alone rather than as part of a force that also includes three Splendid Cats, in which case I wouldn't be surprised if all three of the Invincibles go kaboom instead of just the class's lead ship. All in all, did Beatty and Seymour's poor signalling at the end of the Run to the South actually save the Battlecruiser Fleet from destruction?
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Most later-generation dreadnoughts and superdreadnoughts used geared steam turbines (the primary exception being the later U.S. ships, which tended to use turboelectric drives). Steam turbines (as with turbines in general) have a very narrow band of RPM in which they're most efficient; this is the reason for the gears in the first place, in order to step down the RPM from the turbine's optimal power band to something that's reasonable for a propeller to put into the water. However, with a single, fixed gear ratio, while the battleship can now actually make use of the turbine's high-efficiency band, it still can only do so within a fairly-narrow speed band before the required propeller RPM (multiplied by the gear ratio) takes the turbine out of its optimal power band anyways, causing efficiency to drop off sharply. (This is where turboelectric propulsion shines, as it completely decouples the propeller speed from the turbine speed, allowing the turbine to remain in its power band at any propeller speed.) In situations where an engine with a narrow power band has to drive an output over a wide range of speeds, the usual situation (if you don't go to [insert engine type]-electric propulsion in order to take advantage of electric motors' insanely-wide power bands) is to vary the gear ratio between the engine and the output, generally by using some sort of variable gearbox (like in an automobile's transmission). Did any battleships use variable-ratio gearboxes to keep their turbines spinning in their most-efficient speed bands over a wide range of propeller speeds? If not, why not?
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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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17:20 - Going by that line of reasoning, though, you'd have to exclude most if not all of the German battlecruisers (the comparison is trickier for the first few due to differences in turret layout), since they generally kept the number of main guns the same as on their battleship contemporaries, but lagged significantly behind the battleships in main-gun caliber, in the same manner as the Alaskas (the later classes by quite a bit; the last German battlecruiser class to enter service, the Derfflinger class, had 8 12-inch main guns, the same number of guns as on their battleship contemporaries, the Bayern class, but with 80% of the caliber of the latters' 15-inch main guns, while the Alaska class, with 9 12-inch guns, had the same number of main guns, but a main-gun caliber 75% that of, the Iowa class, with their 9 16-inch main guns). If you're going to put the Alaska class into the "large cruiser" bin rather than the "battlecruiser" bin based on their having the same number of main guns as their contemporary battleships but making those guns smaller in caliber (instead of keeping the main guns the same caliber as on the battleships but reducing the number of those guns carried), that net would also sweep most to all of the Kaiser's battlecruisers into the "large cruiser" bin.
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What paths would European battleship construction have likely taken in the absence of World War I? Basically, what were the various European navies studying as regarded what to build (or have built for them) to succeed the Rs, Bayerns, Lyons, Francesco Caracciolos, Imperator Nikolai I, Ersatz Monarchs, Reina Victoria Eugenias, Reşadiyes, Salamis, etc., before World War I intervened?
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1. What warship in history had armor making up the greatest percentage of its empty displacement - both overall, and for each type of armor (e.g. iron, compound, homogenous nickel steel, Harvey, Krupp non-cemented, Krupp cemented)?
2. What would an Italian-style money-is-no-object rebuild of older American or British battleships (such as the Wyomings, New Yorks, or [in a world where 1st London extends the building holiday but doesn't mandate additional scrappage] Floridas or Iron Dukes) look like and what would be the capabilities of these rebuilds?
3. A battleship's main armor belt needs to extend a considerable distance below the waterline, both to protect against diving shells and to ensure that a shell can't sneak in under the bottom of the armor even if the ship's rolled a significant angle away from the attacker.
A battleship's torpedo-defense system needs to extend some distance above the waterline to ensure that everything below the waterline is protected even if the ship's rolled a significant angle towards the attacker or sitting somewhat low in the water due to flooding. As a result, the two need to overlap for some distance. However, belt armor is a Bad Thing to have in the path of a torpedo detonation (as large rigid plates are very good at transmitting the shock of the explosion of a torpedo's relatively-humongous warhead to the battleship's primary hull structure), while a TDS has little utility against armor-piercing shellfire (as battleship shells are much too heavy to be stopped by the TDS's liquid layers and can easily punch straight through its thin plating and bulkheads). How did battleships handle the problem of overlapping their belt armor and TDS without compromizing the effectiveness of either?
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Was including the 12-inch British battlecruisers in the Battlecruiser Fleet's battleline against I Scouting Group actually a mistake? Sure, they didn't have the armor to stand up to hits by capital-ship-grade shells, but, without their firepower, the British battlecruisers'd've been in a considerably-less-advantageous position against the German battlecruisers. At Dogger Bank (the 1915 one), removing Indomitable and New Zealand from the equation would've left Beatty and Hipper at numerical parity in battlecruiser terms (and Hipper also has Blücher unengaged to play around with), rather than Beatty outnumbering Hipper 5 battlecruisers to 3, in which case it might well've been Beatty turning tail and running away to lick his wounds with one or more burning wrecks lying abandoned in his wake rather than Hipper. Likewise, at Jutland, taking away Indefatigable and New Zealand leaves Beatty outnumbered by Hipper 5:4 right from the start (and that's assuming that, with the Invincibles no longer in the battleline, the Royal Navy doesn't pull one or more of the 13.5-inch BCs up to Scapa for gunnery training in their place, in which case the odds are even worse for Beatty), in which case (considering the pounding they took even historically) the Battlecruiser Fleet quite possibly could've been completely chewed up and spat out by Hipper's ships, with the latter, in turn, taking nowhere near as much damage as they did historically, which leaves 5th Battle Squadron in a very bad place now that Hipper's entire force plus soon Scheer's leading battleships can concentrate solely on them. Given the additional firepower the I&Is brought to the Battlecruiser Fleet, was this really outweighed by the greater potential for ship loss should one of them actually be hit?
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Historically, Beatty's "turn in succession" signal (rather than "turn together") at the end of the Run to the South, combined with Seymour's failure to haul the signal flags back down to actually execute this signal, sent Fifth Battle Squadron charging south at nearly the entire High Seas Fleet, resulting in heavy damage to Warspite and Malaya before Evan-Thomas doubled back on his own initiative. However, if Seymour'd promptly executed Beatty's signal, Fifth BS would've turned back while still significantly north of the surviving battlecruisers, and, thus, instead of the German battle squadrons and part of I Scouting Group concentrating their fire on the Queen Elizabeths (the toughest ships in Beatty and Evan-Thomas's combined force by a considerable margin, the only ones aside from New Zealand to not already have taken significant damage, and the ones able to deal out the heaviest return fire to the German ships to cover the British battlecruisers' retreat), Scheer and Hipper's heavy guns would've been concentrated on the remnants of the Battlecruiser Fleet, which had already been quite roughly-handled just by Hipper's ships, were less able to take hits than the QEs even in their undamaged state, had considerably less heavy firepower with which to return the German fire, and would've also, in this scenario, been slowed in their retreat by the 24-knot top speed of the QEs ahead of them, with the trailing ship, having the brunt of the German fire directed at it, being (depending on whether Beatty makes the "turn in succession" or "turn together" order) either New Zealand (whose divine protection probably isn't rated for quite this level of incoming fire, and which, being by far the thinnest-skinned of Beatty's surviving ships, has no capability to withstand any non-glancing hit should this protection fail) or Lion (which's already down a quarter of its main battery and lugging a magazineful of water). Given, historically, how badly even the much-tougher QEs got smashed up during this phase of the battle, it's hard to believe that Beatty's remaining battlecruisers would've survived if they'd been the ones taking the brunt of the German heavy gunfire instead; additionally, with these ships lost at this stage in the battle, they can't join up with 3rd Battlecruiser Squadron for the Windy Corner action, meaning that Hood's three twelve-inch tin cans're going to be facing Hipper's ships alone rather than as part of a force that also includes three Splendid Cats, in which case I wouldn't be surprised if all three of the Invincibles go kaboom instead of just the class's lead ship. All in all, did Beatty and Seymour's poor signalling at the end of the Run to the South actually save the Battlecruiser Fleet from destruction?
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A handful of questions:
1. Admiral Kurita's penchant for making some almost-inexplicably-bad command decisions has led you to joke, from time to time, that he must've been an American agent who was deliberately trying to lose. Is it possible that the U.S. actually was bribing Kurita to throw important battles?
2. The Washington Naval Treaty placed a 16-inch cap on the caliber of capital-ship guns. However, given that the caliber of a gun with a complex bore shape can be measured in several different ways, how, exactly, was this limitation applied? Could one make an 18-or-20-or-whatever-inch gun Washington-legal by screwing a 16-inch squeeze-bore adapter onto the end (thus making the caliber at the muzzle only 16 inches) and firing special ammunition designed to swage down to 16 inches in the adapter, thereby both giving a considerable performance boost over a conventional 16-inch gun and allowing one, once the naval-treaty system fell apart, to instantly have an 18-inch or 20-inch or even bigger gun simply by taking off the squeeze-bore adapter? Could one make even a really huge gun Washington-legal by using saboted ammunition and making sure to keep the shells themselves no more than 16 inches in diameter? Given that the caliber of a gun can be measured either groove-to-groove (taking the diameter of the circle circumscribing the bore) or land-to-land (taking the diameter of the circle inscribed in the bore), could one Washington-legally make a gun with, say, a triangular or star-shaped bore in order to get the most shell possible out of a 16-inch land-to-land caliber (a gun with an equilateral-triangular bore and a 16-inch land-to-land caliber, or a regular-five-pointed-star-shaped bore and a 16-inch land-to-land caliber, would certainly violate the spirit of the Washington Naval Treaty, given that they would have a 32-inch and a 41.9-inch groove-to-groove caliber, respectively, but would they still technically comply with the letter of the treaty, due to having a caliber of only 16 inches measured land-to-land)?
3. Did the U.S. Navy get to the point of design studies for a follow-on battleship class to the Montanas? If so, what were they planning? Something with the armament of a Montana but the speed of an Iowa? A Montana with various improvements under the hood but the same speed and armament, taking the Montanas as the first class of Standards 2: Electric Boogaloo? A battleship with four quad-16 turrets? Something packing 18-inch or even 20-inch guns, or, alternatively, a really-long-barrel high-velocity 16-incher able to send even a Super Heavy shell at truly-high speeds? Or something else?
4. Why didn't any navies develop gliding aerial torpedoes to allow their torpedo bombers to attack from much greater altitudes, ranges, and airspeeds, as opposed to having to (at least in the early part of World War II) come in at basically wavetop height, close to stall speed, and almost suicidally close to an enemy ship in order to have any hope of launching a successfully attack?
5. Why did no major navy, at least in the period covered by this channel, at least experiment with rocket-boosted battleship-main-gun shells? These would seem to have a number of advantages; as a rocket-boosted shell is continuously being accelerated (or, at least, kept up to speed) by its rocket motor, it could be launched with a lower muzzle velocity (allowing a lighter gun and reducing wear and tear) without sacrificing impact velocity (and, thus, destructiveness); alternatively, if launched with the same muzzle velocity from the same gun as a standard shell, a rocket-boosted shell would reach a much higher speed, which would (a) allow for the use of a much-flatter trajectory without sacrificing range (which would, then, have the additional side effect of reducing the effect of errors in ranging, as these, unless very large, would simply cause the shell to hit the side of the ship somewhat higher or lower than intended, rather than plunging into the sea short of or beyond the ship, as would be the case for relatively-slow conventional shells on their high, arcing trajectories), (b) dramatically reduce the enemy's time to react at long range (in turn considerably extending the range at which one can hit one's opponent without them being able to jink out of the way in time, allowing a battleship equipped with rocket-boosted shells to pick apart one equipped only with conventional shells from long range while seeing all the enemy ship's shots in time to change course and leave the enemy shots falling into empty sea), (c) greatly increase impact velocity, which, as impact damage is proportional to kinetic energy is proportional to the square of speed, would produce a truly-staggering increase in armor and ship penetration, even before taking into account the effects of the shell's explosive filler, and (d) produce a much-greater range for a given elevation angle (which, although not of that much use against ships, due to the greatly-increased time-of-flight giving the enemy plenty of time to see you firing and get out of the way, would be very useful for things like shore bombardment, either to bombard the shore from far beyond the reach of enemy shore defenses or to bombard targets much-further-inland than would otherwise be possible); alternatively alternatively, one could use the additional acceleration from the rocket to allow a battleship to launch a considerably-heavier shell (containing a correspondingly-greater quantity of explosive), at reduced muzzle velocity, without nearly as much of a decrease in range and impact velocity as would occur for a conventional shell.
5 1/2. For that matter, why not go all the way and have battleships armed with large-diameter, long-range rockets, rather than conventional guns? A big, high-velocity rocket tipped with a big armor-piercing warhead could potentially do horrific damage to an enemy battleship, given that big rockets are far easier to launch from a fairly-lightweight launcher than conventional shells carrying the same payload (since rocket launchers mostly don't have to deal with "how much pressure can I use to shoot this out of a metal tube without the tube exploding"), while one with a similarly-sized HE warhead would be excellent at things like obliterating enemy destroyers or raining down wholesale destruction on land-based targets?
6. Why weren't mine or torpedo shells for battleship main guns a thing? Mine shells would allow your battleships to use their main guns to seed the water ahead of and around the enemy ships with lots of mines, forcing the enemy to either drastically slow down or stop entirely, thus making them easy prey for your ships' guns, or try to run through the newly-formed minefield, taking potentially-quite-severe losses in the process; torpedo shells would allow your battleships to launch a massive torpedo attack even at long range, breaking up and distracting the enemy battleline by forcing them to jink and weave to dodge those torpedoes at the same time as they're also having to deal with your battleships' more-conventional shells.
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Imagine for a moment that some mad genius sees Turbinia in 1897 and realizes that, if you built the turbine to withstand somewhat-higher temperatures and you make sure to use oil (or another fuel which doesn't produce nasty ash residue when burnt), you can use the combustion gasses to drive the turbine directly, cutting out the whole "boiler" business entirely and freeing up a huge amount of weight for things like more gun, more armor, or more speed.
Our mad genius then gets to work, and, a decade and a half later, they've successfully produced a gas turbine suitable for powering a large warship. Admiral Fisher takes notice, and, realizing this will be perfect for making ship go fast, designs the Queen Elizabeths to use GT power.
What happens?
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1. For a battleship, is having a citadel too small to keep the ship afloat on its own really a disadvantage? Minimizing the size of the citadel does allow for the thickest-possible belt and deck armor (or, alternatively, for armor weight to be minimized while maintaining thickness, thus freeing up displacement for more machinery or more gun, as seen with the London-era designs for Kongō replacements); while a larger citadel might technically allow a ship to remain afloat even if its ends are riddled and flooded, this sort of damage'll still massively slow the ship and leave it a sitting duck to be coup-de-graced at leisure, and making the citadel larger requires either thinner armor (increasing the risk of critical hits to the citadel) or a sacrifice of machinery or armament (making the ship offensively weaker and giving its opponents more opportunity to pound it into submission). Does losing the (theoretical, as mentioned above) ability to survive with the rest of the ship completely riddled and flooded really outweigh the increase in your ability to take down your opponents while no-selling would-be critical hits?
2. Why did the German hexagonal dreadnoughts slow down so badly in turns? Given that the increase in the frontal area that a ship presents to the oncoming waterflow at a given sideslip angle is relatively lower for a fat, low-aspect-ratio ship like a Nassau than it is for a ship with a higher aspect ratio, one would've thought that the early German dreads would've been less affected by turn-induced increases in drag than most other dreadnoughts. Did their low aspect ratio allow them to yaw quickly enough to cause them, when turning, to reach a sideslip angle so much higher than that of a finer-lined ship as to outweigh the lesser increase in frontal area for a given sideslip angle?
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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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1. Starting with one of the aircraft-carrying Fletchers, how much of the remaining armament would have to be sacrificed to free up enough weight to give that floatplane a proper hangar?
2. Why were 6ish-inch heavy-AA guns so successful on land but so unsuccessful at sea?
3. What're your favorite "So anyway, I started blasting" moments in naval warfare, other than Friday the 13th?
4. Given that WWII-era fire-control computers were sophisticated enough to take into account the couple-of-percent latitudinal variation in the strength of the Earth's gravitational pull, why didn't they? It seems like one of the simplest possible corrections to implement, given that it produces a straightforward range offset varying only with latitude (unlike, say, the corrections necessary to account for the Coriolis effect, which produces an azimuth offset that depends on both latitude and range, or those necessary to account for crosswinds, which produce offsets in both range and azimuth that depend on the wind speed and the density and rotation rate of the shell).
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(Firstly, to head off any confusion, the name's pronounced /ˈvɪ.ki mɪkˈdʌn.ə/; not intended as criticism of you or anything, I've just had my name mispronounced often enough to want to clarify this right off the bat.)
Why didn't any navies try building battleships with just one main-battery turret with two or three monstrously powerful and long-range guns, instead of the more usual route of several turrets with only-run-of-the-mill-powerful big guns? Thinking about it, a battleship with (say) one main-battery turret with twin 25"/65-caliber guns seems like it would've been an immensely-powerful ship, able to one-shot any opponent from beyond the maximum range of the enemy battleship's guns, while simultaneously able to mount much thicker armor than its opponent (the portion of the weight savings from going down to a single main turret that weren't used up in superpowering the remaining main guns could be used to carry additional armor weight, while having just one turret would allow you to concentrate that increased weight of armor over a much-shorter citadel, allowing the armored citadel to be much-more-thickly armored).
Additionally, I wonder if something similar could've been used to give various nations' obsolete predreadnoughts new leases on life (or, instead, if this idea is as insane as it possibly sounds): rip out the intermediate battery and replace the two main-battery twin turrets with singles carrying very-powerful-and-long-ranged guns (like, say, the aforementioned hypothetical 25"/65s) with top-quality rangefinders for accurate, deadly shooting at long range, hey presto, you've converted an obsolete ship into a dedicated dreadnought-killer. This might require completely redoing the guns' recoil mechanism to fit a predreadnought's main-battery barbette, but that shouldn't be an insurmountable problem (maybe design the replacement turrets so that, when the big gun's fired, the whole upper section of the turret recoils backwards along rails atop the lower section of the turret, like with the recoil mechanisms of a lot of heavy railway guns?); are there other engineering reasons I haven't thought of as to why this was never done?
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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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1. Why did the German Hilfskreuzers with steam turbines have so much more problems with their engines (with the notable exception of the little thunder god that could) than those that used diesel engines? I was under the impression that marine diesels were still considerably less reliable than steam turbines all the way through the WWII period (hence the use of steam rather than diesel on essentially all capital ships of this era, although a number of navies had looked at, and rejected, the idea of building diesel-engined battleships).
2. Why did Russia sent their Baltic fleet to the Far East in 1905 when their Black Sea fleet was in much better shape (and wouldn't've had to sail as far)?
2 1/2. Once they had sent the Second Pacific Squadron, neé Baltic fleet, why did they then reinforce them with the Sink-By-Themselves Squadron rather than (as Admiral Rozhestvensky had recommended) some of the almost-new South American cruisers flooding the market at the time?
3. You've often said that a battleship needs at least four main guns for accurate salvo fire. Why? Doesn't accuracy depend on the quality of the guns and rangefinders, not on the sheer number of guns?
4. How does a torpedo explosion go far enough into a capital ship's hull to detonate the main magazines, like with SMS Pommern in the First World War or USS Wasp in the Second? It's easy to see how a torpedo could be fatal to a capital ship, by blowing open more watertight compartments than the ship can tolerate being flooded at once or severing enough structural elements of the hull to catastrophically reduce its structural integrity, but it seems, at first glance, that, given how deeply capital-ship magazines are generally buried in the hull, the explosion would have to rip and blast through nearly to the centerline of the ship to trigger a main-magazine explosion. Admittedly, this may well explain why it's so rare for a torpedo hit on a capital ship to directly touch off the main magazines, but I'm still having trouble conceiving how it's possible at all!
5. What would've happened in the rest of the Pacific War if Shōkaku had foundered on her way back from the Coral Sea (as she almost did historically, due to the combination of her severe battle damage and heavy seas en route)?
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Why did the K-class submarines' steam engines make them take so long to dive? In theory, it should take well under a minute to cut off fuel to the boilers (and, with a near-stoichiometric mixture of air and oil mist or vapor actively burning, the fuel already in the boilers should burn itself out quite rapidly due to not having to burn to the center of big lumps of solid fuel), and "shut off the fuel supply" is something that has to be done when diving any submarine that burns fuel, whether that fuel be burned in a boiler for a steam engine or directly in an internal-combustion engine. On the steam side of things, since naval steam engines are almost always closed-cycle, condensing types (fresh water being somewhat harder to come by at sea), there isn't anything there that has to be released to atmosphere, and the remaining steam pressure could - conceptually - actually help in diving, as it could be used to drive the turbines and spin the propellers, thus accelerating the sub's descent when submerging below the surface using the sub's diving planes. Concerning the Ks' funnels, it seems, at least conceptually, that it should be possible to quickly slam shut a damper in the exhaust system (once the residual exhaust itself has been blown out of the system) and then submerge, with the actual folding down of the funnels not necessarily having to be required for the submarine to be watertight (meaning that it would then be possible to fold down the funnels at one's leisure, without having to wait for this to happen before submerging). What am I missing?
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18:10 - "So, well, if you had something that could destroy enemy torpedo boats, and could deliver torpedo attack itself, why would you continue building the smaller, more vulnerable torpedo boats that could only do one of those things?" Potentially because the torpedo boats, being smaller and lighter than the destroyers, are cheaper and faster to build, meaning you can have a lot more of them a lot quicker, and a boat that can destroy enemy torpedo boats can also run interference for friendly torpedo boats, so a whole bunch of torpedo boats escorted by a number of destroyers would, potentially, be able to deliver a much more devastating torpedo punch than an equal-cost all-destroyer fleet. (Especially since your enemy's destroyer screen has to be spread out over their entire fleet, so, if you concentrate your destroyers to spearhead the attack, a relatively-small number of your destroyers can punch through their screen and clear the way for your horde of torpedo boats to wreak havok on the enemy battleline.) Additionally, very small boats, like torpedo boats, are easier to design with a very high power-to-mass ratio than even destroyer-sized boats, making things like planing hulls or hydrofoils, which allow small boats to reach very high speeds, much more viable for torpedo boats than for destroyers, allowing you to build lots of superfast torpedo boats that can simply run around enemy destroyers (or simply run the gauntlet through the spaces in the destroyer screen, using their sheer speed to keep the time spent in the danger zone to a minimum, and, thereby, avoid taking excessive losses to the enemy destroyers) before inundating the enemy battlefleet with torpedoes.
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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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@ROBERTN-ut2il Actually, London, Paris, and Rome would've had no reason to do these studies historically, as modernizing their legacy ACRs was already firmly off the table for various reasons; the British'd already disposed of all their legacy ACRs by the time Washington rolled around, and the French and Italians were too broke following WWI to modernize any of their legacy ACRs unless they wanted to forego building new heavy cruisers.
That leaves the U.S. and Japan as the only countries that could potentially modernize their ACRs, and these also happen to have been the countries whose ACRs were the worst candidates (by quite a margin!) for modernization.
You see, the last generation of armored cruisers fell into two distinct design lineages. One, exemplified by the American and Japanese ACRs, kept the classic layout of a few big guns and a relatively-small-caliber secondary battery, and increased their firepower over that of previous designs by making the big guns even bigger (hence the twin 10-inchers on the Tennessees and the twin 12-inchers on the Tsukubas); the other, which can be termed the "semidreadnought" approach to the armored cruiser and which was exemplified by the British, French, and Italian ACRs, kept the main battery the same as previously, at least caliberwise (except for the Italians, who also increased the caliber of their last-generation ACRs' main battery, with the result that the Pisas and San Giorgios ended up being essentially second-class semidreadnought battleships) and replaced the secondary battery with a heavy intermediate battery (the French went the furthest along this line of design, merging the main and intermediate batteries into a large uniform 7.6-inch main battery in the Edgar Quinets). The semidreadnought ACRs could've been modernized to have very large uniform heavy batteries by replacing their heaviest guns with more intermediate-battery-caliber guns, while the American-Japanese style would always have underwhelming main batteries even if modernized.
Comparing a modernized Tennessee with a modernized Minotaur illustrates just how much of a better candidate the semidreadnought ACR is for modernization: compared to the contemporary new-build 8-inch treaty cruisers, the modernized Tennessee has slightly-above-average belt armor (5 inches max) and a bottom-of-the-line main-battery broadside (6 8-inch guns in a pair of triple turrets, each replacing one of the two original 10-inch twin turrets), whereas the modernized Minotaur has top-of-the-line belt armor (6 inches max) and a top-of-the-line main-battery broadside (11 7.5-inch guns in two triple and five single turrets, with each triple turret replacing one of the two original 9.2-inch twin turrets and the five single turrets being those that formerly made up the intermediate battery), and is also faster than the modernized Tennessee (assuming the two ships' machinery refreshes increase each ship's available horsepower by the same proportion).
It's certainly true that a rebuilt and modernized Tennessee would've been a slow, weakly-armed, not-particularly-thickly-skinned deathtrap. But that's because, of the last-generation armored cruisers, the Tennessees were probably the worst possible candidates for modernization. Had the Royal Navy not scrapped their entire ACR fleet between the Armistice and Washington, the surviving Minotaurs would've been far, far superior ships to modernize in the 1920s - but, sadly, they both went to the breakers before this could happen.
Finally, "my naval-design staff are competent" isn't always a safe thing to assume, given some of the just-plain-awful designs people were cranking out around this time (Lexington, Pensacola, Duquesne, I'm looking at you...).
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@dougjb7848 So? The treaty cruisers were just as bad, if not worse, in terms of torpedo protection (it was flat-out impossible to work in better protection within a 10,000-ton limit), especially since a Minotaur refit would be able to take advantage of the extra 2,000-ton allowance provided in the Washington treaty for adding underwater protection to legacy warships, plus the (probably-considerable) weight savings from the engine and main-armament refits, and gain some pretty-extensive anti-torpedo bulging.
With their maximum belt thickness of 6 inches, they also would've been considerably better protected against incoming shellfire than most treaty heavy cruisers (which generally had side belts topping out in the 3.75-to-5-inch thickness range).
And finally, given the large numbers of ships from various navies that were successfully given large speed boosts by upgrading their machinery, I'm confident the Royal Navy would've been able to do the same with a hypothetical 1920s Minotaur refit without facing any unsurmountable problems.
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@bkjeong4302 Two possibilities: a night attack (remember, the USN didn't have night-carrier-strike capability at the time of Midway), or just charging the carriers down and taking advantage of the U.S. essentially lacking a useable torpedo bomber at this stage in the war (with the TBD being both hopelessly obsolete by Midway and equipped with torpedoes that rarely worked) and mid-1942 carrier-based dive bombers being almost completely ineffective at disabling fast, maneuvering capital ships (out of all the [relatively-few] instances in WWII of a battleship or battlecruiser being sunk or crippled by aerial attack without the use of torpedoes, every single one involved either a ship that was at anchor [Marat, Oktyabrskaya Revolutsiya, Arizona, Tirpitz, Haruna, Ise, Hyūga], a ship that was already unmaneuverable due to prior battle damage [Hiei], or a ship being hit by a Fritz X guided bomb [Roma, Warspite], and none of these circumstances would've been applicable at Midway).
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Why weren't New York and Texas included in the Standards? The New York class have almost exactly the same dimensions as the Nevada class, they have the same top speed, and they have the same 14"/45 main guns as the early Standards (rather than the 12"/45 or 12"/50 guns used on the earlier American dreadnoughts). Granted, they only had 10 guns rather than 12... but so did the Nevadas. Granted, they used triple-expansion engines rather than turbines... but so did Oklahoma. Granted, they were built with coal-fired boilers... but they could easily be converted to oil-burners (and were in the 1920s). Granted, I'm not sure if their turning radius was wider or narrower than the standard Standard turning radius... but, given that both their dimensions and their top speed were essentially the same as those on the first Standards, it should've been fairly simple to adjust the New Yorks' turning radii to those of the Standards with some relatively-minor adjustments of/modifications to their rudders and steering gear. Are New York and Texas excluded from the list of Standards, despite their broad similarities to same, simply because they have five main-battery turrets rather than four?
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You've often said that you prefer to group pre-treaty dreadnought battleships into four groups: first-generation dreadnoughts, second-generation dreadnoughts, first-generation superdreadnoughts, and second-generation superdreadnoughts. Do you consider 12-inch ships with cross-deck-capable en-echelon wing turrets (the Neptune, Colossus, Kaiser, and Rivadavia classes) to be first-generation dreadnoughts or second-generation dreadnoughts? In your video on the Colossus class, you state that the British en-echelon ships (Neptune and the Colossi) were the Royal Navy's first second-generation dreadnoughts; however, in your more-recent video on the German König class, you state that the Königs were the Kaiserliche Marine's first second-generation dreadnoughts, thus implying that the preceding class, the en-echelon Kaisers, were first-generation dreadnoughts.
Some other questions on where various battleships fit in this classification scheme:
Are Dante Alighieri and the Russian dreadnoughts first- or second-generation dreadnoughts? They have all-centerline main batteries and use triple rather than twin turrets, but the turrets aren't superfiring (compromising end-on fire). Conversely, the South Carolinas have an all-centerline superfiring main battery, but it's only eight guns in twin turrets, and they don't even have turbine engines; are the South Carolinas the American first-generation dreadnoughts, or was the USN building second-generation dreadnoughts right from the start?
Do superdreadnoughts with a main battery of lots of 13.4-14-inch guns (such as the Normandies, with twelve 13.4s; the Lyons, with sixteen 13.4s; or the middle tranche of Standards, the Fusōs, and the Ises, each with twelve 14s) still count as first-generation superdreads due to their smaller main-battery caliber as compared to 15-16-inch ships like the Queen Elizabeths or Colorados, or does the greater weight of fire from their sheer number of 13.4-14-inch guns push these ships up into the realm of the second-generation superdreads?
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Could/would semidreadnoughts have been made more useful by converting them into dreadnoughts, where possible (AFAICT, this would've been possible for four classes: the Lord Nelsons, Radetzkys, Dantons, and Satsumas, giving broadsides of six, six, seven, and eight 12" guns, respectively), or else into second-class dreadnoughts (replacing a mixed battery of twelves and eight-to-nineishes with a uniform 10-inch battery)? For instance, would a Lord Nelson be more useful with a broadside of six 12" guns (replacing the twin 9.2s with single twelves) or eleven 10" guns (replacing the 9.2s one-for-one with tens and swapping out the twin twelves for triple tens), or a Danton more useful with a broadside of seven 12-inchers (replacing the twin 9.4s with single twelves), or a Connecticut more useful with a broadside of eight 10-inchers (replacing the twin twelves with triple tens and the twin eights with single tens), than in their original forms? All of these conversions would've exchanged a mixed-caliber broadside (with its attendant shell-spotting, etc., difficulties) for a uniform all-big-gun main battery, and any decrease in broadside weight would've been (a) slight, and (b) easily-countered by using slightly-heavier shells (in none of the cases I've examined would the shells've had to've been even as much as 10% heavier).
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Why didn't the various navies in the World Wars hire privateers to help raid enemy commerce? Given the success that the German merchant raiders (which were essentially the same thing, just with naval rather than private crews) had in preying on Entente/Allied shipping in both wars (in at least the second one, they were even more effective one-for-one than the U-boats were, as you pointed out in your video on armed merchant ships of the World Wars), it'd seem like hiring lots of privateers and turning them loose on oceanic shipping would be a highly-cost-effective commerce-warfare strategy, especially for Germany in both wars and the U.S. in World War II (both of who fought against island nations that could be brought to their knees by cutting off maritime trade, and both of whose navies were, with the exception of their respective submarine forces, not in a position to prey on commerce, due to being bottled up / too small to be much use / driven half an ocean away). While this would admittedly violate the Paris Declaration which repudiated privateering, no one involved in either World War showed any significant compunction about discarding previously-agreed international law to gain a tactical or strategic advantage (for instance, the mass use of chemical warfare in WWI and unrestricted submarine warfare in both wars), and I don't see any reason this'd've been an exception in that regard.
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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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@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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I don't know if adverse yaw in airplanes is actually related to the ship phenomenon, as adverse yaw is due to the differential drag produced by deflecting the ailerons (which are something ships usually don't have, as they generally turn just by using the rudder to - eventually - yaw the ship into the turn, whereas airplanes almost always turn by rolling, with the rudder mainly being used for things like countering the thrust differential from an engine failure, aligning the plane with the runway after touching down in a crosswind landing, or dodging unexpected obstacles during your takeoff and landing roll), but it's actually worse in airplanes, as it actually limits your maximum control authority rather than just causing a delay in control response, and, for some airplanes under some circumstances, can completely negate your ability to turn the plane in the normal manner (necessitating various interesting alternative methods of control to get around this problem).
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1. Why did the short flight decks and low top speeds of many early aircraft carriers so seriously limit the types of aircraft they could carry by the late 1930s and through World War II? Couldn't the low speed of, and shorter takeoff run available on, these carriers have been compensated for by using a suitable catapult system to get the aircraft up to flying speed before reaching the end of the flight deck?
2. Many different types of ships were converted, or planned to be converted, to aircraft carriers: battleships (Eagle, Kaga, Béarn, and Shinano), battlecruisers (the Lexingtons and Akagi), large light cruisers (Furious and the Courageousses), heavy cruisers (Seydlitz and Ibuki), light cruisers (the Independences), submarine tenders (the Zuihōs and Ryūhō), seaplane tenders (the Chitoses), ocean liners (Argus, the Hiyōs, the Jades, Kaiyō, Shin'yō, and Aquila), cargo liners (the Taiyōs), tankers (the Yamashio Marus), a freighter (Kumano Maru), and a collier (Langley). In general, how did the characteristics of carriers converted from different types of ships compare (for instance, how did carriers converted from ocean liners, as a category, compare with those converted from battleships or large light cruisers)?
3. In one of the Fleet Problem videos, you mentioned that a crafty admiral was able to overtake (and then ambush) a theoretically-faster opponent by having his fastest ships tow his slowest ones to allow the fleet as a whole to attain a higher speed; would this be a practical method, outside an exercise, of increasing the speed of a fleet whose top speed is limited by a relatively-small number of slow ships (looking at you, predreadnoughts of II Battle Squadron)?
4. In the video on the Brandenburgs, you state that, despite having three main-gun turrets totalling six big guns of the same caliber (as opposed to the predreadnought standard of four big guns in two turrets), they don't count as dreadnoughts-before-Dreadnought because the amidships turret has guns of a different length (and, thus, different ballistics) compared to the fore and aft turrets. Yet, in the video on the Kawachis, you accept them as dreadnoughts despite them having the same sort of problem (the four guns in the fore and aft pair of turrets are longer than the ones in the other main-battery turrets). Where to draw the line?
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Historically, Beatty's "turn in succession" signal (rather than "turn together") at the end of the Run to the South, combined with Seymour's failure to haul the signal flags back down to actually execute this signal, sent Fifth Battle Squadron charging south at nearly the entire High Seas Fleet, resulting in heavy damage to Warspite and Malaya before Evan-Thomas doubled back on his own initiative. However, if Seymour'd promptly executed Beatty's signal, Fifth BS would've turned back while still significantly north of the surviving battlecruisers, and, thus, instead of the German battle squadrons and part of I Scouting Group concentrating their fire on the Queen Elizabeths (the toughest ships in Beatty and Evan-Thomas's combined force by a considerable margin, the only ones aside from New Zealand to not already have taken significant damage, and the ones able to deal out the heaviest return fire to the German ships to cover the British battlecruisers' retreat), Scheer and Hipper's heavy guns would've been concentrated on the remnants of the Battlecruiser Fleet, which had already been quite roughly-handled just by Hipper's ships, were less able to take hits than the QEs even in their undamaged state, had considerably less heavy firepower with which to return the German fire, and would've also, in this scenario, been slowed in their retreat by the 24-knot top speed of the QEs ahead of them, with the trailing ship, having the brunt of the German fire directed at it, being (depending on whether Beatty makes the "turn in succession" or "turn together" order) either New Zealand (whose divine protection probably isn't rated for quite this level of incoming fire, and which, being by far the thinnest-skinned of Beatty's surviving ships, has no capability to withstand any non-glancing hit should this protection fail) or Lion (which's already down a quarter of its main battery and lugging a magazineful of water). Given, historically, how badly even the much-tougher QEs got smashed up during this phase of the battle, it's hard to believe that Beatty's remaining battlecruisers would've survived if they'd been the ones taking the brunt of the German heavy gunfire instead; additionally, with these ships lost at this stage in the battle, they can't join up with 3rd Battlecruiser Squadron for the Windy Corner action, meaning that Hood's three twelve-inch tin cans're going to be facing Hipper's ships alone rather than as part of a force that also includes three Splendid Cats, in which case I wouldn't be surprised if all three of the Invincibles go kaboom instead of just the class's lead ship. All in all, did Beatty and Seymour's poor signalling at the end of the Run to the South actually save the Battlecruiser Fleet from destruction?
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In the January 2023 livestream, as part of your answer to my question regarding the utility in WWII of giant cruisers with all the 6-or-8-inch guns, you stated that, if you tried to use a cruiser with thirty-two 6-inch guns as essentially an "anti-destroyer machine gun" (incidentally, I quite like that turn of phrase, and would like to borrow it if you don't mind), it would have to close to within torpedo range of the enemy destroyers in order to bring its 6-inch battery to bear.
That got me thinking, because one of the main jobs of a large warship's secondary armament is to pick off, or at least drive away, enemy destroyers and torpedo boats before they can get close enough to launch their torpedoes, and the secondary guns of these heavy ships are usually only 4-to-5.25-inchers; even on ships with a split secondary battery, with lighter guns for AA work and heavier ones for fighting light surface forces, the anti-surface secondaries still only go up to the 5.5-to-6-inch range of calibers. None of these guns have a significantly longer range than light-cruiser main guns to (and most are considerably shorter in range), so, if enemy destroyer torpedoes outrange the main battery of the aforementioned 32-gun light cruiser, they should easily outrange the secondary guns of whatever ship they want to attack.
Wouldn't that make these secondary guns near-useless in the anti-surface role (which, again, is one of their primary roles, and their only role in ships with a split secondary battery) against anything armed with torpedoes, requiring a switch to even-heavier secondaries (say, a battery of 8-inch guns) to keep enemy ships out of torpedo range (and thereby also rendering dual-purpose secondaries obsolete, due to the inability of guns with a caliber beyond about 5.5 inches to effectively serve as heavy AA in the absence of technical advances that only became available postwar)? Why did navies stick with relatively-light secondaries even though these could no longer stop enemy vessels from closing to torpedo range?
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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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1. Effectiveness of meltabomb shells, if they'd been available in the World Wars?
2. Why did the IJN, in the 1930s and 1940s, find the use of compressed oxygen as an oxidizer for high-speed underwater engines an easier engineering problem than the use of high-test peroxide for the same purpose (bringing the oxygen-powered Long Lance torpedo series into operational service in the 1930s and the derivative Type 1 kaiten later in the 1940s, while the HTP-powered Type 2 kaiten ran into insurmountable oxidizer-storage problems that prevented it from ever entering service), while for the Kriegsmarine it was the other way around (managing to bring a number of Walter U-boats close to entering service during the war years, while rejecting oxygen-powered engines outright because they realized they'd've had even more problems with that than they had with the HTP boats, only being able to finally start work on an oxygen design partway through the war as a result of a decade of additional technical advances)?
3. What was the burning (and ultimately exploding) ship that HMS Spitfire's crew saw during the night at Jutland? At the time, it was thought to be HMS Black Prince, but German records examined after the war showed that Black Prince's demise happened in a completely different manner from how Spitfire's crew described the final end of the ship they saw in the night, and none of the other ships lost at Jutland went down in a manner consistent with what Spitfire saw. Was the destroyer's entire crew subject to some sort of mass hallucination?
4. Was there ever any consideration of making the Iowas' A turret a twin rather than a triple in order to avoid impinging on the ships' TDS?
5. Why are the Iowas' 16" powder magazines vastly larger than their 16" shell magazines? On the ships' plans, the ratio between the sizes of the two types of magazine seems far larger than the ratio between the size of the propellant load used to fire a 16" shell and the size of said 16" shell.
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The naval treaties of the 1920s and 1930s had several special exemptions written in to allow the retention of specific ships (for instance, the Washington Treaty exempting Erebus and Terror and the First London Treaty exempting Surcouf). However, there're a few odd cases of ships not getting exempted despite it making a lot of sense:
- Australia and New Zealand at Washington. Australia really wanted to keep their battlecruiser around (ending up with considerable feelings of betrayal when the mother country they'd relied on to represent them at the conference let it fall on the scrap heap), and New Zealand was both quite proud of the ship they'd bought for the Royal Navy and would've likely wanted it to formally be theirs before too long; also, to put it bluntly, two slightly-improved Indefatigables (even if their fore and aft armor was a bit thicker than on Indefatigable herself) would've posed exactly zero threat to any other capital ship being retained by any of the parties to the treaty (probably the only capital ships to survive the scrappage waves of Washington and Versailles that the Antipodean sisters would actually've had much chance of beating, even if the pair teamed up, were the predreadnoughts the Germans'd been allowed to keep [and even then the predreads'd've still probably had the advantage if all of them stuck together] and the ship formerly known as Goeben, and neither Germany nor the Ottoman Empire/Turkey had a say at Washington), so letting them hang around wouldn't've posed significant problems for anyone.
- K26 at First London. I mean, c'mon, they gave Surcouf an exemption; surely it would've made even more sense to exempt K26, given that she was a preexisting ship that could be grandfathered in, she was a one-of-a-kind (for the Royal Navy) ship that the RN had no plans to make more of, she didn't have any weird-for-submarines features like large-caliber guns, and she was only slightly above the submarine-displacement limit anyway.
- Ryujō at First London. The IJN wasn't going to scrap her no matter what everyone else thought, and her construction had been legal when it began, so it'd've made sense to formalize this situation with a specific exemption in the treaty to further underline the point of "OK, Japan, we'll let you get away with it this once, but don't do it again."
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After seeing what happened to 1920s-edition Amagi in the Great Kanto Earthquake, what measures did various countries take to earthquake-proof their drydocks and slipways, given that quite a lot of naval bases and shipyards were (and are) located in major seismic zones (for instance, the U.S. naval facilities in California and the Pacific Northwest, the Soviet naval facilities in the Russian Far East, or pretty much any naval facility anywhere in Japan, Italy, Turkey, or Chile)?
Also, could you do a video looking at submarine powerplants and their evolution in the up-to-1950 era, like the one you did on marine steam engines?
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0. A battleship's main armor belt needs to extend a considerable distance below the waterline, both to protect against diving shells and to ensure that a shell can't sneak in under the bottom of the armor even if the ship's rolled a significant angle away from the attacker.
A battleship's torpedo-defense system needs to extend some distance above the waterline to ensure that everything below the waterline is protected even if the ship's rolled a significant angle towards the attacker or sitting somewhat low in the water due to flooding. As a result, the two need to overlap for some distance. However, belt armor is a Bad Thing to have in the path of a torpedo detonation (as large rigid plates are very good at transmitting the shock of the explosion of a torpedo's relatively-humongous warhead to the battleship's primary hull structure), while a TDS has little utility against armor-piercing shellfire (as battleship shells are much too heavy to be stopped by the TDS's liquid layers and can easily punch straight through its thin plating and bulkheads). How did battleships handle the problem of overlapping their belt armor and TDS without compromizing the effectiveness of either?
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. Which of the Ises' rear turrets couldn't be upgraded to 43-degree elevation due to a lack of available space for deepening their gun wells - was it just Y turret (as most sources seem to indicate) or both X and Y turrets (as Navweaps claims)? Why didn't the Ises' P and Q turrets (which're at about the same height as their X and Y turrets) run into the same issues as X and Y turrets? And why didn't the Fusōs' rear turrets, which're, again, at about the same height as those on the Ises, have any issues with upgrading them to 43-degree elevation?
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1. What warship in history had armor making up the greatest percentage of its empty displacement - both overall, and for each type of armor (e.g. iron, compound, homogenous nickel steel, Harvey, Krupp non-cemented, Krupp cemented)?
2. What would an Italian-style money-is-no-object rebuild of older American or British battleships (such as the Wyomings, New Yorks, or [in a world where 1st London extends the building holiday but doesn't mandate additional scrappage] Floridas or Iron Dukes) look like and what would be the capabilities of these rebuilds?
3. A battleship's main armor belt needs to extend a considerable distance below the waterline, both to protect against diving shells and to ensure that a shell can't sneak in under the bottom of the armor even if the ship's rolled a significant angle away from the attacker.
A battleship's torpedo-defense system needs to extend some distance above the waterline to ensure that everything below the waterline is protected even if the ship's rolled a significant angle towards the attacker or sitting somewhat low in the water due to flooding. As a result, the two need to overlap for some distance. However, belt armor is a Bad Thing to have in the path of a torpedo detonation (as large rigid plates are very good at transmitting the shock of the explosion of a torpedo's relatively-humongous warhead to the battleship's primary hull structure), while a TDS has little utility against armor-piercing shellfire (as battleship shells are much too heavy to be stopped by the TDS's liquid layers and can easily punch straight through its thin plating and bulkheads). How did battleships handle the problem of overlapping their belt armor and TDS without compromizing the effectiveness of either?
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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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Given the impossibility of squaring the circle of giving a treaty-era cruiser high speed and a powerful main armament and enough armor to actually be useful (and, in the 30s and 40s, enough AA firepower to survive enemy air attack) without sending displacement way over the 10,000-ton limit, why didn't any navies settle for a smaller number of main guns in exchange for good speed and armor capable of tanking fire from enemy cruisers? Say, a 10,000-ton CA with six 8" guns (so something like a York, except up-armored enough to bring it up to the treaty limit, or possibly something with two triple 8s in a superfiring stack forwards and even more armor, like an Astoria or Wichita with the aft turret replaced by more armor), or a 10,000-ton CL with eight or nine 6" guns (like a version of one of the previously-mentioned six-gun CAs, except with triple or quad 6s replacing the twin or triple 8s, or maybe something like a Leander up-armored to 10,000 tons, or a Brooklyn with just the three forward turrets and with the weight that would otherwise go into the two aft turrets instead being used for thicker armor). After all, if you can no-sell the enemy's fire at a range where they can't do the same to you (and you've got the speed to keep the range in this band), it doesn't matter that it'll take you longer to knock them out with your fewer main guns.
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