Comments by "Bk Jeong" (@bkjeong4302) on "The Drydock - Episode 078" video.

  1. Odin029 Just cancel the five Charles Martels. Worst battleships ever built in terms of design, and their service record is bad too (about as bad as battleships that got built after they became obsolete)
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  2. Weeb Extraordinaire I actually have to agree with you on this: there are far better candidates for cancelling than Hood.
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  3. Michael Blaszkiewicz This. Vanguard made no sense.
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  4. alganhar1 The Admirals were already fast battleships to start with (only called battlecruisers due to speed), and Denmark Strait was a case of very bad luck rather than design issues.
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  5. I definitely agree that the WWII-era battleships (regardless of nationality) were idiotic and should never have existed, but to get rid of the carriers? Submarines are very good at commerce raiding and attacking supply lines, but you need carriers for sea control (submarines have far worse mobility and their weapons have far worse range).
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  6. Thanks for answering my question! You got my last name correct. Though I really do disagree with cancelling Hood. Even with her flaws she was the deadliest thing on the waves when she was launched. And Vanguard (pointless and taught nothing), Courageous (just an awful idea), Massena and Shinano didn’t make the list?
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  7.  @polygondwanaland8390  Yeah. They really were awful in pretty much every way.
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  8. Murderous Kitten Battleships and battlecruisers only became unnecessary for power projection in the late 1930s (with the rise of the carrier). Which is two decades after Hood.
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  9. Brent Paulus Those three classes plus all the other WWII “obsolete due to carriers before they even saw service” capital ships definitely were idiotic strategically, but that’s over two dozen capital ships in 12 different classes, which is way too many for my question. .....it’s a sad testament to the inertia of naval doctrine that everyone on both sides of WWII ended up building such a large number of pointless capital ships. Largest procurement disaster ever, probably.
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  10. PaulfromChicago more that because the actual (as opposed to perceived) value of battleships was so low in WWII, it wouldn’t matter either way, and that battleships are awful secondary units.
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  11. If we’re cancelling the Yamatos we have to be fair and cancel their counterparts in all the other navies, since the reason for the Yamatos being bad ideas was the entire battleship concept being obsolete at that point, which is something that applies to every BB built around that time. Which makes the list way too big.
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  12. GaldirEonai It really wasn’t-it was better than most other options, but it could have been improved significantly, though even that improved version would have long odds of success.
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  13. AtomicBabel This-the ships were insanely top-heavy and overarmed despite breaking treaty limits.
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  14. Insignificant Gnat Well, it was self-contradictory for one.
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  15. Drachinifel Fair enough.
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  16. in WWII, even fast capital ships were not that useful outside Second Guadalcanal and North Cape; carriers dominate the waves and the AA role is more cost-effectively filled by smaller warships.
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  17. tommaso balconi This.
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  18. AtomicBabel Yes, submarine loss rates were very high (even the shitty IJN ASW historically claimed 20% of the American sub force). They still had a far better track record than all the newly built battleships of every WWII navy combined. So getting rid of the new battleships and replacing them with their tonnage in submarines is indeed a good trade. Getting rid of the carriers, cruisers, destroyers, etc, however, is indeed idiotic.
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  19. AtomicBabel You don’t need battleships for shore bombardment, though (plenty of cases of cruisers and destroyers doing as good or better at this role), and a carrier is a far better counter against enemy surface units (unless at night, but even then the carrier force can stay out of gunnery range until daybreak). So even for the USN building the fast battleships was a bad deal and they should have spent those resources elsewhere.
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  20. Battleships are strategically incompatible as carrier support anyways, since the nature carrier operations render the big guns pointless and at that point you no longer need a big ship.
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  21. TheSleepingMeerkat Glorious was a freak event caused by incompetence, and is not a good case study. It’s irrelevant that a carrier takes less hits to sink than a BB because the carrier isn’t in a place to get hit in the first place. A carrier is never supposed to remain in gun range of enemy surface units, and no battleship can actually fire on a properly handled fleet carrier because it’s simply out of range. A slower CVE might be at risk, but not a fleet carrier. AA fire is something better supplied by cruisers and destroyers, which are much cheaper and have more AA firepower per ton of displacement. Battleships are strategically awful units for secondary roles. So yes, the carrier DID eclipse the battleship in WWII.
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  22. TheSleepingMeerkat It was done not because there was an actual, valid concern of a properly handled fleet carrier being caught by enemy surface units, but because people wrongly assumed it was a concern. Just because people thought something doesn’t make them correct. And again, battleships didn’t have good AA capability for their cost and displacement: in absolute terms they had a lot of AA, but a larger number of smaller warships would have provided the same amount of AA at less cost and displacement.
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  23. TheSleepingMeerkat Battleships couldn’t harm a lone carrier when the carrier stayed a few hundred miles away from it, which is the whole point of a carrier (outranging the enemy). It was this relative lack of OFFENSIVE capability that rendered battleships obsolete, not vulnerability. And having a carrier stay out of enemy gun range isn’t hard at all. You’re making it sound as if this was something that was hard to pull off in reality, when in reality it was quite easy-you’d have to be intentionally suicidal, very incompetent or have the carrier be a slow CVE for it to even happen. BTW, Samar really isn’t an example of major incompetence (at least for the Japanese)-Kurita made some mistakes, but he never had the chance to achieve his objectives anyways (for several reasons, the most important being the landings were already over and there were few if any transports left for him to shoot at) so his decision to retreat was the correct one.
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  24.  @Colonel_Blimp  North Cape is an exception, not the rule, even for the Atlantic. In fact, North Cape is literally the only WWII Atlantic battleship engagement where carriers couldn't have done a better job (because it was the only one that happened in conditions where carriers couldn't operate) Second Guadalcanal and North Cape were the only two times in WWII where a newly built battleship actually did anything to truly justify her existence. That's two out of over two dozen big-gun capital ships built in the timeframe we're discussing. Not a strong argument in favour of battleships then.
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  25. Me Two Japan only gets two more carriers by cancelling the Yamatos, not four, due to limited number of construction space. And they would lose anyways. While the Yamatos were definitely terrible investments, so were pretty much all the other battleship classes built around that time (even the ones that had more active careers never remotely justified their costs, with the exceptions of Washington and DoY). So by your logic we would have to cancel every single one of them, which amounts to over two dozen warships, which is way too many for my question.
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  26. Aubury Yep Vanguard definitely needed to be cancelled.
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  27. Jon Rolfson Really, any big-gun combatant built in WWII. Vanguard is an even more egregious example.
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  28. Admiral Sir Rusty The Dutch capital ships would have met the same fate as everyone else’s newly built big-gun units: obsolete on launch and a waste of resources and manpower.
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  29. Thunder1177 Weekly Shinano at least.
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  30. John Fisher Do remember that the reason for Japanese cruisers being overweight had largely to do with them being way too heavily armed for their displacement, requiring them to be rebuilt which put them over treaty limits (and even after that, many of their cruisers were insanely top-heavy). I’ve seen you criticize Japanese cruisers for inefficiency due to being overweight, in the same vein as German cruisers. That’s a false equivalency. The Japanese at least ended up with vessels with firepower fitting for their displacement even accounting for them breaking treaty limits, the Germans not only broke the treaty but ended up with ships no better than treaty designs for it.
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  31. Murderous Kitten - Vasa - Kamchatka - any battleship built in WWII other than Washington and Duke of York THOSE are actual massive failures in terms of achievements (the battleships because they were unnecessary and thus wasteful, Vasa because she couldn’t even sail out of harbour, and Kamchatka due to sheer incompetence). Hood wasn’t unnecessary when built, her crew wasn’t incompetent and she was quite seaworthy. Nowhere near as bad as those three.
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  32. kiloalphasierra Glorious was caused by human incompetence and Samar involved CVEs (which are much slower so don’t need fast escorts anyways), and in the case of Samar naval aviation played a critical role in the American victory anyways, so neither are good evidence that you need fast battleships to defend a fast carrier task force.
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  33. kiloalphasierra Except that even at night there was nothing preventing carriers from just staying away from enemy surface units (without launching aircraft), meaning that battleships were still pointless as carrier escorts.
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  34. Tomi Tuominen The guy I was responding to was talking about achievements, not design.
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  35. Carl Carlton Why not just keep the carrier away from enemy surface units and bring a larger number of smaller ships for AA?
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  36.  @PaulfromChicago  Except that using capital ships as raiders is in itself a stupid idea (the Germans only did it because they ran out of things their capital ships could do, due to France capitulating without any naval engagement), so the idea of using battleships to defend co envoys from enemy battleships relies on the enemy being stupid or desperate enough to use battleships as raiders.
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  37. Nathan Brown The Iowas and Vanguard (plus most if not all of the KGVs, all four French capital ships and arguably the remaining two American fast battleship classes) were cases of “built despite being pointless”, same as the Axis battleships. By the late 1930s carriers could meaningfully outrange battleships meaning they had rendered battleships obsolete.
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