Comments by "Steve Valley" (@stevevalley7835) on "The Drydock - Episode 098" video.
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On the question about having wing turrets, and Drac's note that Fisher liked the idea of more armament being able to fire forward: I have read that on the Dunkerque and Richelieu class ships, all the main guns were placed forward so they could all be used to fire at Italian ships as they ran away. Now, I have only read that in one place, have no idea if that was the author's attempt at humor, and freely acknowledge that some Italian forced acquitted themselves well. I will further note that ships with 3 main, centerline, turrets usually have 2 forward and 1 aft, except for the French Normanie class, that had one quad turret forward and two quads aft. Of course, the Normandies look to me like the designers were expecting a drydock 100' longer to be available for construction, and, when such a facility was not built, simply erased A turret and cut the bow off the thing.
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@kemarisite wrt to the 1.1" jamming issue: there is a color film about Midway that was produced by the Navy. In that film are 2, maybe 3, good shots of a pair of 1.1s firing. In the first shot or two, the guns look very formidable. In the last shot, on the mount in the foreground, only the right side gun is firing. As you said, the loading machine was designed so that the guns could be reloaded while firing, so 3 out 4 guns on that mount have stoppages for something other than a reload. So, in maybe 5 seconds total, of those two mounts, a total of 8 guns, firing, the camera caught 3 stoppages. The early 1.1 mounts were made by Ford Electric. While faster than the 96 mount, they were also unreliable. Later 1.1 mounts made by GE were reliable, and retained for use with Bofors guns when the 1.1s were discarded. It's a hard choice between the two, because of the 1.1's unreliability. A couple drydocks back, someone asked Drac what he would do if he was in charge of USN procurement in 1935. I added to his response that, as BuOrd had already been working on the 1.1 for a few years, and it still wasn't satisfactory, and the 40mm Bofors was in production in 35, I would be sending a cablegram to Sweden, inviting Bofors to send a demonstration team over, pronto, followed by production orders for mass numbers of Bofors to be installed on everything from DEs on up. iirc, The Navy finally did have a shootoff, between the 1.1, Bofors, the 37mm the Army was using and the Vickers, which the Bofors won, but valuable time had been lost.
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@stephenbond1990 The 1922 treaty specifies that, if a non-contracting power contracted with a contracting power to build a new ship, the new ship was subject to the treaty tonnage and armament limits. Contracting powers were not allowed to commandeer ships being built in their jurisdiction for any other power. Contracting powers were not allowed to gift or sell warships to other powers. So, nope, the Brits would not be able to build a G3 for Brazil, even if Brazil could pay for it and the US would not be able to build a South Dakota or Lexington for Argentina, because those ships exceed treaty limits. However, Washington was about 75% complete, and was within treaty limits. I don't know how selling it to Brazil would have worked out. It would meet condition 1: within treaty limits, but how would the decision fall wrt the prohibition on selling existing warships? Washington was incomplete, so not a functioning warship, but it's construction was not under foreign contract from the moment the keel was laid.
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@kemarisite Thing is, Italy had it's own war with Turkey in 1911-12, the spoils being possession of Libya and some islands off the Turkish coast. I doubt Turkey would be happy allied with Italy only a couple years after that war. I haven't studied WWI enough to understand how Turkey came to be allied with Germany and Austria. Would Turkey be neutral, if Italy aligned with Germany? A neutral Turkey means not only would the Dardanelles campaign not have happened, the entire "Lawrence in Arabia" thing would not have happened. Austrian troops that opposed the Italian army would be available on the western front, as well as the Italian army, but the Brits would not be fighting in the middle east either. Without losing in WWI, Atatürk would not have been a national hero, and the Ottoman Empire might survive intact. We could even flip the WWI Turkey/Italy thing around. If Italy was allied with Germany, would Turkey align itself with the UK and France, to recover Libya after defeating Germany/Austria/Italy?
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@alt7488 Italy's territorial ambitions in WWI were not the only area the country was shortchanged. Have you looked at the provisions of the Washington treaty? Italy and France were supposed to have parity. The ships France was allowed to keep were 3 semi-dreadnoughts and 7 dreadnoughts. Italy's retention list amounted to 5 dreadnoughts, 4 small pre-dreadnoughts and the da Vinci, a dreadnought that had suffered a magazine explosion and sank in 1916, that the Italians were trying to salvage. Even including ships that were hopelessly obsolete, and wrecked, Italy's retention list was still 40,000 tons short of France's, yet Italy was given the same replacement schedule as France. If Italy had still been entertaining thoughts of battleships, instead of the swarms of destroyers that it continued to build all through the 20s, that naval treaty would have been an insult, as it effectively locked Italy into a battle line half the size of France's for over a decade.
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