Comments by "doveton sturdee" (@dovetonsturdee7033) on "British Cruiser Development Between WW1 & WW2 - Honestly not raiders 'guv!" video.

There wouldn't have been much point spending money on Iron Duke. The result would have been a slow, obsolete, battleship, and the Royal Navy had enough of them already, in the R class. Centurion had been a remote controlled target battleship for years, and was far too far gone to make a comeback, other, of course, than as a dummy battleship.
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Looks like Vittorio Veneto and Littorio.
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The actual HMS Surprise was a corvette (Unité) captured from the French in 1796, and sold out of service in 1802. In British service she carried 24 x 32 pounder carronades, with a further 10 x 18 pounder carronades on her quarterdeck, and two six pounder 'chase guns' in her bows. I believe this would have made her a sixth rate frigate, the smallest which would have had a Post Captain in command. Oddly, despite her combination of guns, she was classed as a 'Twenty-Eight.')
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Here is an interesting thought. At the time the Royal Navy and the Army were struggling without serious air support in the Mediterranean, i.e., May, 1941, the British Air Ministry had 56 squadrons of fighters and fighter-bombers carrying out sweeps over Northern France. I leave you to determine whose side the British Air Ministry was on in World War II.
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@niclasjohansson4333 More than that. Howard of Effingham commanded the English Navy at the time of the armada.
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@niclasjohansson4333 No, Drake was second in command. He wasn't as aristocratic as Howard. Howard was a much less experienced sailor, but was wise enough to take advice from those. like Drake, who were. After the Armada campaign, when many of the sailors were destitute and starving, and Elizabeth refused to provide aid, both he, and Drake, paid for supplies from their own funds.
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Tell the vast number of German civilians who died of starvation or hypothermia during the Turnip Winter that the blockade didn't really work. The comments on WW1 battleship and battlecruiser design are best taken with a pinch of salt. The battlecruisers were lost because of the foolishness of their Admiral, leading to unsafe handling practices, and the 'fundamentally flawed' battleships emerged from Jutland more or less unscathed. Even the most damaged of them, Warspite, survived some 27 hits and remained in action until late in the day. It is difficult to express any further views, because, despite the blockade, Scheer kept the High Seas Fleet well away from the flawed battleships of the Grand Fleet for the rest of the war.
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@richardcutts196 Indeed they did, and look at what they saddled themselves with! 27 knots, but 12 inch or 12.6 inch guns, 9.8 inch belts and 3.1 inch deck armour. The British already had 15 capital ships, of which 5 were obsolete, and Iron Duke had been stripped of her armour and two turrets since 1930. Centurion had been totally stripped of her armament and most of her upperworks since 1927 for use as a target ship. In March, 1939, the British did briefly investigate restoring Iron Duke. The work would have involved fitting a new 11 inch main belt, bulges, 4 inch deck armour, two replacement turrets, and new secondary armament of 4.5 or 5,25 inch guns. Boilers & machinery would require complete replacement. The result would have been something inferior to the R class, fit only for second line duties. Wisely, the Admiralty concluded that the cost, time, and dockyard facilities required would have been better used elsewhere. With five new battleships in the process of construction, the RN, in 1939, did not need to waste resources restoring a museum piece.
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@BrianSmith-ow9gy Illustrious had her full air group aboard on 10 January, 1941. I believe that 5 Fulmar fighters were flying CAPs, and a further 4 launched as the attack developed. As the Royal Navy was committed to supporting the Army, and re-supplying Malta, I don't see what alternatives were available to Cunningham and the Admiralty. Abandon Malta? Abandon the army on Crete? Neither was an option. Indeed, Cunningham wrote in his memoirs that a few RAF squadrons could have saved Crete. He did, indeed, make this view known at the time, but was ignored.
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@BrianSmith-ow9gy Part of the problem with Fleet Air Arm aircraft was that, until April, 1918, the Admiralty had control of naval aviation, and had a Royal Naval Air Service which operated 2949 aircraft and 103 airships. An attack by torpedo bombers (Sopwith Cuckoos) was being planned on the German fleet in the Jade estuary, from aircraft carriers. Sadly, on that date, the RAF was formed, and the Admiralty did not regain control of Naval Aviation until 24 May, 1939. On that date, as a result of the care and attention lavished on it by the Air Ministry (which was fixated on the bomber which, of course 'would always get through' and latterly, unwillingly, on fighters) the Fleet Air Arm operated 232 frontline aircraft, of which most were obsolete. It is no wonder the Admiralty built armoured deck carriers, and desperately tried to buy superior American designs. The surprising thing is that, having been betrayed by the Air Ministry, the Fleet Air Arm achieved as much as it did in the early war years.
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@BrianSmith-ow9gy Even more alarmingly, naval aviation is once more in the hands of the Royal Air Force, and with defence spending sure to be reduced significantly as a result of Covid 19, there have been rumours that the RAF have been 'discreetly' suggesting to the Ministry of Defence that orders for further F35C aircraft should be drastically reduced, in favour of the cheaper alternative which cannot operate from carriers. If this makes progress, then we may find that the two carriers have access to a tiny number of aircraft between them. The decision to build two aircraft carriers which are only capable of operating one type of fixed wing aircraft always seemed perverse, and now this foolishness on the part of more than one British government might be coming home to roost.
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@BrianSmith-ow9gy As design of the Queen Elizabeths began in 1994, I suspect that what we have is what we will keep. In October 2010 the government stated that the carriers were to be fitted with an electro-magnetic catapult, and placed orders for F35cs. Incidentally, I referred in an earlier post to the F35cs when I meant F35b,. It is the F35b which is the STOL version and which the RAF are supposedly lobbying against. In December, 2011, the government ordered a catapult system from General Atomics of San Diego. By May, 2012, the cost had doubled, and the supply date had been put back to 2023. The Government then cancelled the order, and reverted to the ski-jump and the STOL aircraft. The catapult has been installed in the new US carrier, the Gerald R Ford, but a proposal to retrofit it into their Nimitz class has been rejected. It seems that such an operation would be vastly complex, time-consuming, and costly. In the 1930s, there was considerable disquiet about the estimate of four years to build a King George V class battleship. Don't times change?
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