Comments by "" (@VersusARCH) on "The Drydock - Episode 046" video.

  1.  @Drachinifel  Hey, thanks for the response. Btw I believe I was a bit stingy on praises in my comments on your videos thus far since I commented almost exclusively about the things I disagreed with you about, but I should say: whatever I did not comment about I either mostly agreed with or simply learned from :) So kudos, a great effort! (I've been a subscriber for a while) The reasoning in my comment above is based on the following historical examples: 1) Polish pilots: they trained extensively on their PZL fighters in the 30s expecting to face the Soviets sooner or later, but once the Germans attacked with more numerous and technologically superior aircraft and mostly rush-trained pilots (there weren't all that many Spanish Civil War veterans), they won. Sure the Poles proved elusive targets and shot down some planes but it was futile. But once the survivors got up-to date Hurricanes in the Battle of Britain - they shone. You may check the "Bloody Foreigners" - The Untold Story of The Battle of Britain (available on youtube) 17:59-18:37 the testimony of one of the Polish fighters from the RAF 303 Squadron (Polish) who fought both at home and in Britain about how easy it all was in a Hurricane vs the old PZL-11 2) The Soviets. They got massacred in the beginning although they had veterans as well as the Germans - from Spain, Finland and Khalhin Gol. They also had the numbers. But most of the aircraft were outdated (I-15, I-16) sub-par (LaGG-3) or poorly suited for the battle ahead (Mig-3). So by late 1942. the rookies held the line and the training was the most basic. But then they got Yak-9s, and La-5s which were a match for the German fighters in Eastern Front battle conditions. And by mid-1943. they turned the tide. 3) The Japanese vs US historically, mid 1943. Just watch Dogfights: Zero killer (available here on youtube) from 12:00 to 15:00 - how a US rookie in a new Hellcat easily killed a Japanese 9 kill ace in an A6M3 Zero in a 1:1 dogfight just thanks to the superiority of his aircraft. Sure there were accounts of skillful Japanese pilots being a headache to hit for the green Americans, notably the Japanese ace Saburo Sakai, blind in one eye by this point in the war, in an A6M5 Zero evading an attack of 15 green Hellcats in late 1944. off Iwo Jima, but one needs to hurt the enemy badly enough too in addition to surviving in order to win a war.
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  2.  @mytube001  No, due to speed requirement for the destroyers which dictated slender hulls and maximum diameter of the turret ring that could be fitted. You had such guns in twin mounts on just slightly larger displacement on some of the slow monitors and coastal defense ships, though (they could be made stubby). Viability of the design philosophy you are talking about could be seen in the failures of the Furious, Glorious and Corageous heavily armed light cruisers which were all re-built as aircraft carriers.
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  3. Wrong about what would make the most difference for the Japanese in WW2 of those three. Had they kept pace in aircraft design, it would in their case, before anything else, mean that they have AIRCRAFT ENGINES OF THE SAME POWER AS THE ALLIES. A6M2 Zero engine: 950 hp, Wildcat engine: 1350hp, and it only gets worse mid-war. If Zero had the engine as powerful it would have been designed very differently. The design would have been able afford sturdier construction, self-sealing fuel tanks, boosted controls, some armor etc. The plane would have been far less perishable. The same goes for dive and torpedo bombers. BOOM - casualty rates go down compared to history. I doubt it would have saved the Japanese carriers sunk at Coral Sea, Midway or Eastern Solomons in itself, though - it would take at least radar for that - but it would have made the battles of Eastern Solomons and Santa Cruz more damaging for the USA - Enterprise would have been sunk. With that and fewer losses in the air - Shokaku and Zuikaku remain in the field, drive away USN from Guadalcanal, together with Rabaul (or if brains prevail faster-built Munda) based aircraft neutralize the Henderson field and 1st marine division gets captured. Furthermore, it is not the experienced prewar pilots that won WW2, it was the wartime-trained rookies/regulars. With up-to date machines the Japanese would have had some chance to keep beating the batches of Essexes as they got sent to the Pacific until the war across such a distance became too expensive even for the USA to prosecute and it agreed to some kind of compromise. But it is true that keeping their carriers would have made the least difference (It would have made a difference at Guadalcanal though - an overwhelming air attack on Enterprise and Hornet by four-carrier (not 6 due to air losses) Kido Butai would have driven the USN away, knocked out the Henderson field and won the campaign. But they'd lose 2 more carrier's worth of aircraft so they'd be out of breath for the upcoming major USN counteroffensives.
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  4.  @bkjeong4302  Many of those had reliability issues (Nakajima Homare on the Ki-84). They also got blueprints for the German DB-601 (Bf-109e engine) in 1943 only around which they designed the Ki-61 and D4Y1 dive bomber and had a lot of porblems with tight tolerances (so much so that they never developed better inline engine, reverting instead to more powerful radial engines they managed to develop for both aircrafts' further developments - the Ki-100 and D4Y2. And even then they lagged behind in horsepower compared to the US. They could not replace the A6M5 Zero on the carriers until the end. Zero was on par in 1941-2, even superior in quite a few respects to US best. It was as good since it was optimized to the extreme for performance and range around the best engine they had at the time which was as powerful as the one on the comparatively crappy Brewster Buffalo. But that superiority came at a cost of poor upgrade potential and by 1943. it showed.
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