Comments by "Steve Valley" (@stevevalley7835) on "The Drydock - Episode 241 (Part 2)" video.

wrt the question about stripping the turrets off of the Nelsons for the Lions, I looked at a variation of that, using the debugged Nelson turret design for new construction turrets, and found another problem: the rate of fire of the Nelsons was slow, on the order of 1.5 rounds per minute, vs 2 rounds per minute on the 15"/42 and 14"/45. This was apparently an effect of how the systems in the turret worked, even after the reliability problems had been addressed. Bottom line is it seems the Nelson turret's best contribution was informing the designers how not to design the systems.
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@bluemarlin8138 The US and UK did overcome national pride to use the Bofors and Orlikon, and the hedgehog. The RN also used the F4F, F4U and TBF, along with a variety of other US designed and built aircraft. You hit on one major problem: logistics. The US guns were designed to use USN smokeless. The British gun was designed for cordite. USN smokeless appears to be more energy dense than cordite. The chamber volume of the British gun is 34,000cuin, while the chamber of the US gun is only 23,000 cuin. When the British were running the Abercrombie class monitors, with US 14" guns in WWI, they had to import US smokeless powder for them. When they tried cordite in the US guns, they suffered significant loss of range. We see the same difference in chamber volume with 14" guns. The US built guns on the Abercrombie had a 15,332cuin chamber. The 14" guns on HMS Canada had 23,500cuin chambers and the 14" on the WWII KGVs had 22,000cuin chambers.
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@ROBERTN-ut2il everything you say is true. I don't recall where I read about the difference in range in the US built 14" with smokeless vs cordite. It might have been in "Big Gun Monitors", might have been Friedman on WWI weapons, but seems the RN could not get enough cordite into the guns to duplicate their performance with US smokeless.
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