Comments by "" (@walterkronkitesleftshoe6684) on "The Refit of HMS Hood - But what if she had survived?" video.

  1. Both suggestions are compatible. The German gunnery WAS excellent, but the killing shot WAS incredibly lucky. The statements are not mutually exclusive.
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  2. Do you think Adalbert Schneider (Bismarck's first gunnery officer) had his beady eye looking through his eyepiece with a crosshair lined up on Hood's magazine? A broadside salvo of 15 inch shells is analogous to the pellets in a shotgun scatter, but obviously on a MUCH larger scale. The CEP (circular error probability, or the radius of a circle that 50% of shells fired can be expected to land within) of Bismarck's main armament (38cm SK C/34) at the range involved in Denmark strait is approximately 330ft, so that in a perfectly aimed salvo by Bismarck's 8 guns incoming on Hood at a rough angle of 12-13 degrees, 4 shells could be expected to land within an ellipse (due to the shallow angle of the shells approach) 660ft wide and a couple of thousand feet long, that crossed 76% of Hood's length, but those 4 shells would be completely randomly distributed, so the luck aspect is that in that wide scatter one of the shells randomly penetrated a very obscure weak point in Hood's VERTICAL armour and impacted on the relatively tiny area of her 4in HA magazine. The simplified analogy is that if you prop a dartboard up 50 yards away and can consistently knock it over with a shotgun at that range then that is pretty good shooting, just as Bismarck / PE achieved during the Denmark Strait encounter. Now you can "knock the dartboard over" all day long with the shotgun and still NOT hit the dartboard's bullseye (magazine) with an individual pellet. As opposed to being a skillful shot by knocking over the dartboard, whether you hit the bullseye with an individual pellet is complete luck.
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  3. They probably thought the same as the crew of HMS Rodney and HMS King George V did before they tore Bismarck apart.
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  4.  @klasv7174  That is your free choice, I appreciate German military tech, but if you want a battleship to look like it means business, and not be bothered with having "graceful lines worthy of a ballerina" then only HMS Rodney will do, accept nothing less.
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  5. From ballistics tables its easily shown that at the approximate range of battle involved at the time of Hood's destruction, that the critical shell impacted Hood at an angle of approx 12-14 degrees (the exact range is not known for certain hence the spread of angle). As you can imagine that is nowhere NEAR the +80 degrees that would be necessary for your suggestion.
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  6. Get real. At 21 knots? Bismarck would have pissed itself laughing at the US tub as it disappeared to aft.
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  7. "(The Hood) ships were not worth their industrial cost" Great Britain had FAR greater ship building capacity than did Germany. Germany had only TWO shipyards with the requisite capacity to construct the Bismarck class, which means Bismarck took up 50% of Germany's major slipways for 5 YEARS (and Tirpitz occupied the other), and all for 7 days of active service. Compare that to Hood, who utilised only a small percentage of GB's capacity and provided over 20 years of outstanding value to her mother country. Then if you use "financial outlay" as the yardstick, then Bismarck qualifies as possibly the "worst buy" in naval history. 193,000,000rm for 7 days of active service, compared to Hood's £6,000,000 for 20 years of CEASELESS service. Thats the same as buying a Bugatti Veyron and writing it off on its first outing, against buying a Rolls Royce Silver Ghost and getting 20 years of unstinting, loyal and prestigious service from it..... before the idiot in the Veyron crashed into it.
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  8. Please expand on your hypothesis.
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  9. Still championing nazis and Japanese militarists? Luckily for you Ashwani, you never had to live under either of them.
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  10. Actually she was to have been the last of the WW1 era ships to be modernised. He major refit was scheduled for 1942.
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  11.  @SkuliBragason-xc7jl  Says who? "what ifs" are a common theme in all aspects of history. If you don't like the idea, then why come and click on a video about it? For example, I can't stand weird Japanese paedo amine shit... therefore you will NEVER see a comment of mine on any such videos.
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  12. Her mission was to commerce raid which could have seen her probing as far south as the south Atlantic as at the time the German "at sea" refuelling nework of oilers had not been devastated yet (thought that was to happen very soon afterwards). No-one can know what exactly was on the mind of Gunther Lütjens prior to Bismarck's damage received at Denmark Strait. Mullenheim-Rechberg speculates that Lütjens had been unnerved by the advances in British radar technology which was already causing him problems as Norfolk had just recently been fitted with the RN's latest radar equipment, and that he was also gravely concerned that the nazis own "B-dienst" sig-int service had given him utterly no warning of the Hood/ PoW's approach. My feelings are that Lütjens was between a rock and a hard place. on one hand he knew that Hitler had certain expectations of Bismarck's performance, and that Raeder was wanting to highlight the usefulness of the Kriegsmarine prior to Barbarossa, but I also believe that he knew that with the advent of radar / longer ranged aircraft / greater allied naval power, that the days of hit and run tactics, followed by sloping off to some quiet corner of the ocean for a few days were rapidly coming to an end.
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  13.  @folktai7070  A good question, but you have only to think of HMS Warspite which is also widely remembered within the naval community and DID survive WW2, only to be mercilessly scrapped shortly afterwards.
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  14. Hood's extensive suite of boilers (needed to get her upto 32 knots in 1920) would have been replaced by upto date lighter more powerful boilers resulting in a LARGE weight saving that would have offset the weight gain from any refit.
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  15. The generally believed train of events is Bismarck's hit enters Hood from starboard passing through her rear engine room and penetrating (or the shell's detonation perforates) the aft bulkhead between the rearmost engine room & the 4in HA magazine immediately astern of it. The initial conflagration of the 4in magazine seeks the path of least resistance, and blows out the already damaged forward bulkhead and vents into Hood's machinery spaces likely killing everyone there immediately, the continually expanding gases then vent upwards and out through the ventilation trunking out of the top of the engine rooms which exited Hood via her boat deck just forward of her main mast.... as this is all happening in a few seconds, the continually expanding conflagration in the 4in magazine finally ruptures the aft bulkhead and allows hot gases to enter the adjoining X turret magazine and shell room... the rest is history.
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  16. Even in the relatively poor fighting condition she was in at the time, she effectively single handedly stopped "Exercise Rhine" in its tracks.
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  17. She was tasked with intercepting the German battleship Bismarck, with the intention of stopping her from getting into the North Atlantic and savaging Britain's transatlantic convoy supply lines. When the two ships met on the morning of 24th May 1941, Excellent German gunnery, compounded by a huge dose of luck, caused a 15 inch shell from Bismarck to detonate Hood's aft magazines, the resultant explosion of an estimated 100 tons of cordite immediately snapped her in two, she sank within 3 minutes and took all but 3 of her 1418 crewmen with her.
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  18. Continuously bombed in St Nazaire, when in February 1942 she joins the rest of the Kriegsmarine's surface fleet in running away back to home waters before being finally put on the bottom by Bomber command like her sister Tirpitz. My "what if" is what if HMS Hood never succumbed to the million to one shot, and instead engaged Bismarck in a close in broadside knife fight along with PoW?
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  19. When you consider that if a main magazine detonates, then the related main turret's barbette effectively becomes a VERY strong walled "bazooka" which is going to funnel a colossal amount of the explosive energy upwards.
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  20. "natural 1,000,000" would be nearer the mark..... if only such dice existed.
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  21. Haven't you got some incel pokemon stuff to be getting excited over kidult?
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  22. Not forgetting Michael Hordern, Aye, all fine actors. Bless them.
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  23. Please put a video if you eventually manage that.... I'd look forward to it.Good luck !!!
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