Comments by "Steve Valley" (@stevevalley7835) on "The Drydock - Episode 216" video.

Decades ago, I read about a USN ship at the breakers. It must have been the Edward H. Allen, a Butler class DE, When the wrecking crew opened a storage locker, they found it full of life jackets from the Andrea Doria.
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Agree. I have found things in authoritative books that either don't make sense, or are completely wrong, when I compare to documents published at the time the decisions were made. How many times have you read that the Washington Treaty forced Courageous and Glorious to be converted to carriers? The treaty does not list those ships as capital ships. Lexington and Saratoga are listed as capital ships, and required to be disposed of.. My take is the treaty respected the Courageouse's definition by the Admiralty as cruisers, and they were converted to carriers because the Admiralty wanted them to be carriers, rather than cruisers. I wish I could find on-line access to source documents for the RN, like I have found for the USN.
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Didn't Drac do a piece about fire control a while back? I think the title was "plotting your destruction" or some such thing.
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With regard to the 13.5 superseding the 12"/50, there was a very loud and public debate in the USN regarding the 16" superseding the 14"/50, with Admiral Strauss of BuOrd leading the "more smaller guns equals more hits" school. Was there a similar debate in the RN during the move to 13.5", then 15"? In a related question, the "more smaller guns equals more hits" school seems to have returned in the design of the KGVs, as no other explanation for the retrenchment to 14" makes sense, and that school of thought driving the decision is implied in the Garzke/Dulin book on allied battleships. Was that gun size retrenchment driven by Lord Chatfield, who was First Sea Lord during the design of the KGVs. or, if not him, who?
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I'm presently reading a book about allied battleships of WWII, and it talks about the development of the KGVs and Lions, with the constraints on draft imposed by Suez and on beam by two drydocks. The Admiralty jumped the shark with Vanguard, as it was too wide for two docks, iirc Portsmouth and Rosyth, but they were satisfied with the number of civilian owned docks around the UK that could accommodate it, if needed.
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@lukedogwalker there are things I read that simply don't make any sense. I have been looking in to the choice of 14" for the KGVs. One narrative says the British were forced to go 14" by Second London, but it was the British that pushed for 14" in the treaty, and their decision to go 14" was made before the conference started. Another narrative says the 14" armament was chosen for lower cost. Drac's piece on the KGVs shows the estimated weight for the 12-14" originally planned was higher than that of the 9-15" alternative, and the 14", having more guns, means more parts to be forged, fabricated, and machined. I don't see how it is possible for the 14" set to cost less with more material and a higher part count than the 15" alternative. I picked up the Garzke/Dulin book at the library last week. They talk about the "more smaller guns means more hits" school of thought driving the decision. That has the ring of truth to it, because the USN had the same argument in 1915-16. I read about the debate in the USN from the annual reports of the Secretary of the Navy, and newspaper reports, written at the time. I have visions of someone at the top, or above the top, of the Admiralty, clinging to that obsolete theory, ignoring that the French and Italians were both building 15", ignoring that the US made it's support for 14" contingent on Japanese support, ignoring that the Japanese were not going to support it because they already said they were dropping out of the treaty, and forcing the 14" gun. There was no need to write 14" into the treaty, as there was nothing in the treaty prohibiting building under treaty limits. The French had built 13", then 15", and the Italians were building 15", when the treaty limit was 16". My take is, whoever it was that forced the 14" gun on the RN, had it written into the treaty, and the fake narratives about treaty compliance and cost created and disseminated for political cover. It may sound bizarre, but no more bizarre than Admiral Strauss' antics at BuOrd, pushing 14".
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@gregorywright4918 the only preceding 14" guns in the UK were export only, wire wound, designs circa WWI, produced by Elswick and Vickers. Logic would dictate that, when they started working on the Lions, they would have used three of the quad 14" turrets that Vickers already had in production to expedite the ships, but no, they started with a clean sheet triple 16" design. The French, Italian, and German battleships that were building in 39, were the same ones that had been building in 36, but the 14" guns that were deemed competitive in 36, were seen as uncompetitive in 39? That is another aspect of the 14" gun KGV that doesn't make any sense.
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@gregorywright4918 I was reading the section of the Garzke/Dulin book on the Dunkerques a couple days ago. Not only did the quad turrets result in the least amount of weight per gun for the turret, they based the design on the quads that had been designed for the Normandies, which saved significant time and money in design. The Normandie turrents had originally been designed for only 15 degrees of elevation, so increasing elevation was one of the modifications that had to be made. Then, when they designed the Richelieus, they scaled up the same turret design. The KGV turrets were designed for 40 degrees of elevation and had the powder magazines below the shell rooms, the opposite of the WWI RN BBs. The Nelson turrets were designed for 40 degrees of elevation and had the powder magazines below the shell rooms, the first RN turrets meeting the new specifications. The Nelson turrets could have been used on the KGVs with only sleeving the mounts down for a 15" gun, saving even more time and money than the French saved by recycling the Normandie design, and they also benefited from 15 years of debugging, but no, the Admiralty wanted a clean sheet quad.
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@gregorywright4918 what I have not seen in the book was any mention of dispersion problems with the French guns. The guns were mounted in pairs, in a common sleeve, hence very close together, and had a high muzzle velocity. both of which seem to be associated with excessive dispersion. The Brits might have wanted to avoid the French design for that reason. In any event, the US auto industry is not the only industry that suffers "Not Invented Here" syndrome.
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@gregorywright4918 I haven't heard that one. I have read that the RN developed it's own magnetic pistol. Found it very unreliable. iirc, the Brits found the earth's magnetic field changed so much the pistols would always need to be fine tuned to exactly where they were on the earth to work. I read that the RN told BuOrd about this, but BuOrd persisted. Given the size of the explosion that disabled the Richelieu at Dakar, the thinking is the torp, with magnetic pistol, went under the ship, blissfully unaware of it's presence, and hit the depth charges that had been dumped near by, by the British, in an earlier failed attempt to disable Richelieu.
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@WALTERBROADDUS iirc, the Italians did that with their older BBs: pull the midships turret, and install a power plant of more than twice the horsepower. Navweaps indicates the Fusos and Ises used the same turrets and guns. It would not have been a bad thing, from the IJN's perspective, if they had a couple spare turrets in the warehouse. Hyūga suffered battle damage to turret #5, and #6 had a mechanical fault that limited it's elevation. With spares in the warehouse, after the up-engining project, the two damaged turrets could have been easily replaced.
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@colbeausabre8842 why did they keep trying the high velocity approach? E=M(V squared). The Germans went the light shell/high velocity route too. Bismark fired a light shell, for a 15", at higher velocity, than the maligned rifles on the Nelsons.2690fps for Bismark, vs 2614fps for Nelson, while Bismark fired a 15" shell that weighed only 1764lbs vs 1938 for the 15"/42. The Littorio class 15", notorious for dispersion, fired 1951lb AP at 2789fps. The USN 16"/50 developed during WWI, for the later cancelled South Dakota and Lexington classes fired a 2110lb shell at 2800fps. When the USN figured out that the theory was not born out in practice, the 16"/50 used on the Iowas fired a 2700lb shell at 2500fps.
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@gregorywright4918 yes, that is what the Wiki article on that ship says, training accident on May 5, 42. The part of the Wiki article I read only said "an explosion", which I misremembered.
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