Comments by "Jim Taylor" (@jimtaylor294) on "MN Normandie (NB) - Guide 178" video.

^ The inevitable "bu~but France won so many wars!!" Not most of the wars that counted. They lost heavily in the 7 Years War, the last two Napoleonic Wars, the Franco-Prussian War, WWII & the 1st Indochina War. Performance in WWI was poor also, despite having a better prewar defence budget than Germany. Until the British Army stopped the germans on the marne, the german advance toward Paris looked unstoppable. The French are ridiculed as to war though, because of WWII, and the almost comically ungrateful and distorsionist claim by DeGaulle in 1944 that ""France has liberated herself!". Postwar french war narratives wouldn't help this either, with even more straight up lying as to the scope of the other allies contribution. The Allied troops and politicians alike would never forget that slight, and the french remain a topic of humour in CANZUK countries, as a result.
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...and tinkering ;-) .
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^ Demonstrably false, and nope, France lost WWII hard, by any credible definition. They - or to be more precise their politicians & military leaders - have only themselves to blame for the last 7 & a bit decades of ridicule. As for the US rant... borderline gibberish. It's Iraq* too, BTW :P .
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Aye. Like the Germans vs the UK in the 1930's, the French also had already lost to Germany in the numbers game, and didn't have the budget to catch up. Only the "Rich'leos" - as robovoice called them - could be said to have resolved the modernity disparity conclusively, as they were comparable with the best of the RN, Regina Marina & USN, superior to that of the Kreigsmarine, and a formidible opponent for most of the IJN's ships.
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@xlbubblehead2505 "they have the best coffee" Ethiopia would disagree; being the country which invented it. Though not mentioned; the UK - weirdly enough - has more indigenous cheese varieties, than France does :-) . Best booze depends on the type, and good Butter can be found almost anywhere.
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@marseldagistani1989 Who knows. Video Games & real life seldom tally. After all it's rather like real life vs fiction: Fiction has to make sense... real life seldom does.
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@marseldagistani1989 Aye. The "mobile floating block of steel" proposal XD. Begs the question of how any armour manufacturer could've produced such monsterous armour plates, had Congress gone "...you know what!?, screw it!. Build this thing then.", when the USN submitted the Tillman 4-2 design to them. (the USN rep's almost immediately probably would've reacted with a combo of "err what!, really?" & a muffled "oh shit!!")
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@marseldagistani1989 A bigger Yamato, but in the 1910's XD. That said Admiral Fisher had even larger guns in mind for his magnum opus.
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How many opponents you fight means little if you lose in the end. Now Israel in 1967 is a case in point of winning against highly improbable odds. As for Indochina; the USA technically didn't lose, rather got politically tired of fighting to a stalemate, as simply marching north & annexing North-Vietnam in the name of the south would've meant war with China. The US would've crushed the PLA in a straight up fight... but the political cost wasn't seen as worth it, anymore than nuking China in 1950 was. As it was China later tried to invade Vietnam from the north in the late-1970's... and lost XD.
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@cypherpunks2002 A reference to a film that laughably misrepresents greek & persian history... random XD. BTW: It wasn't just 300 spartans, that's a myth. The Athenian contingent was much larger, and their naval defeat of the Persians was the most significant strategically.
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^ That doesn't even make grammatical sense XD. @cypherpunks2002 As for Vietnam. The NVA lost every battle they fought with the US itself, and always were the ones to ask for negotiations, such as when the USN simply parked a Battleship off the N-Vietnamese coast and blasted away at them without serious interference from shore. The N-Vietnamese could only be said to have won against the US militarily, by failing upwards XD. As was said in the '70's: "Vietnam was lost in the sitting rooms of america, not in the fields of vietnam". As a Brit' we're used to making fun of our colonial offspring for it, but on in-depth analysis there's not all that much that can be said against them without the power of hindsight. Technically the ones whom lost out militarily was South-Vietnam, and the 100,000's that were permenantly displaced, forced into "re-education camps", or simply slaughtered out of hand by communist troops.
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@mangalores-x_x Not a ""myth"", rather emperically demonstrable fact. The French performed poorly in WWI. This is well known, well documented, and discussed in depth by hundreds of historians. Pure numbers of troops or subdivisions thereof is also a meaningless detail, as the French Army had numerous problems that downgraded their fighting strength, whilst British Troops at the Marne, and indeed even in latewar aspects like the Ludendorff Offensive, had to play a leading role, one larger in scope than pure force ratio would have typically required. Worth noting also that in Naval matters, none of the major battles of WWI even had a french presence. (though the inferiority and overall poor interoperabilty of the ships the MN had at the time might have had something to do with it)
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@cypherpunks2002 "Edited comment" Sure~ you did & didn't :P . Either way it was an irrelevant deviation, as well as a bit of an insult to ancient greece. (comparing them to the french... I ask you...)
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^ A salty frog with nothing but name-calling for a retort... like I haven't seen that before XD.
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@sarjim4381 I'll have to disagree on the all main turrets forward aspect, and would assert that the Gasgoine was a step backwards for the class that made little sense. After all the only use having main turrets at both ends has is if the ship is expected to be firing at something behind it... which isn't much use in practical terms unless whilst running away from an enemy. The main reason to have all turrets forward and in quads was to make yhe ship's citadel as short & as thick as possible. The British and Japanese had flirted with the idea first though (interwar treaties slowing down / halting results though). The effectiveness of their armour is rather unclear, but seems to have had flaws. I'm no expert on french 15" guns, but the MK.1 15"/42 gun of the RN performed well in joint exercise with the US's 16"/50, despite being much older.
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@sarjim4381 Then we entirely disagree. I need not refute the motive for all main turrets forward as someone else already has, but as for effectiveness in battle see HMS Rodney vs the Bismarck. The latter was thoroughly demolished as a fighting ship, with all some 16"/45 rounds going straight through the ship and skipping off across the ocean. This was despite Rodney taking evasive action, and turning once to unmask her torpedo projector on the opposite side (that on the beam she'd opened fire on having jammed). Just like a MBT - anacronistic comparison but never mind - is designed to engage targets head on, where her armour is thickest, and thus the T/C & his crew are trained to never expose their rear to the foe; so did the RN see the preferred placement for their main armament to be forward, as chasing or being side on to the enemy was the only likely outcome for RN warships. For any C/O to command their ship so poorly that the enemy was up his arse would mean something - of ineptitude surpassing even Beatty's worst - had gone seriously wrong.
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@marseldagistani1989 Hmm... stretching the definition of superfiring a wee bit there XD. Suffice it to say Vertically Stacking turrets - even non-unitary ones - was the worst concept of all, and genuinely would mean that a huge chunk of the ship's guns could be taken out with one good shot.
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@marseldagistani1989 Ah; a man of Sextuple Turret culture I see ;-) .
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@marseldagistani1989 six 20" guns (can't recall the barrel length) in three double turrets. Think of a "Super Renown" class, over 1,000ft long, boilers producing over 180,000SHP and a top speed of about 35knots... and this was proposed in 1915. Fisher was seldom a modest man XD. Like the Tillmanns the engineering impracticalities of such a ship, let alone the inevitable need to then do a Battleship version with eight or ten of those guns, put the Admiralty off. Instead the comparatively modest Admiral, G3 & N3 Classes would be approved... though then scuppered by postear treaties.
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@marseldagistani1989 Essentially. Same with the Montana's really, albeit decades later. Is worth noting that the Nelson twins got a very heavy AA armament during WWII, thus the N3 would most certainly have if built. The G3 class however was arguably the most inherently balanced of the designs, and as the ships where ordered and started before the 1922 treaty are interesting to think about. The Churchill government opted not to keep the Nelsons postwar after all, due to their speed being deemed too low. The G3's had they been built likely would have had a lengthy career, though likely would've meant others would've produced much tougher ships. (no Bismarck class as we know it for instance)
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@marseldagistani1989 Kind of. I agree with Drach' that H-44 was a hitlerian fantasy, as Germany had no dockyard big enough to produce nor fit such a thing. Some of the less absurd 16" gunned Plan Z ships however, were more attainable. Weirdly Germany had developed a 16.5" gun during WWI, yet didn't even try to resume work on it in the '30's, despite the gun having passed tests when designed, and had been created as an overmatch counter to the 15"/42 and then expected 16" guns, which remained in use during the '30's.
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@GaldirEonai Basically the same faulty reasoning of ""If it's noot scottish it's'a Crap!!" As a gaelic Brit' I can confirm the latter is just cliche bluster.
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@bry7x7x7 Sort of. The Russians & the USA considered them, at different points in the 1900's.
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@marseldagistani1989 Technically one of HMS Dreadnought's design layouts had forward & rear superfiring, but this was rejected due to two engineering concerns. (the then open Sighting Hoods being more vunerable to blast, and the notion of 40% of the ship's guns being taken out in one shot. The UK was still one of the first to build a superfiring-dreadnought though, with the Minas Geraes class for Brazil. The Orions represented the surmounting of said issues, and were the class that coined the term "Super-Dreadnought"
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@marseldagistani1989 Aye. Said designs probably would have been qualiatively better though, if built into a G3 blessed world.
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