Comments by "Steve Valley" (@stevevalley7835) on "The Drydock - Episode 133" video.

wrt the question about ships being repaired in a neutral US, there were two cases of German ships coming to the US for fuel and repairs in WWI, which both turned into a preview of the Graf Spee's situation. The commerce raider Prinz Eitel Friedrich steamed into Newport News Virginia on March 10, 1915 for fuel and repairs. It became quite an event as, in a hot second, there were British and French warships barely outside the US' 3 mile limit waiting for the Friedrich to attempt a breakout. US shore batteries were put on alert and a USN battleship patrolled to enforce US neutrality in case the Brits or French tried to attack the Friedrich in US waters. Ultimately, the Friedrich's captain opted for internment, rather than try to elude the British squadron. Then, on April 12th, the Kronprinz Wilhelm steamed into Newport News, also for fuel and repair, and the dance was repeated, until the Wilhelm's captain also chose internment. I would say the difference between the two incidents in Newport News, and the Graf Spee's, and British ships refitting in the US, is, in the case of the British ships, the Germans did not have the naval force to try and trap the ship as it left the US.
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@lloydknighten5071 to expand on Walter's reply, sighting was done at the turret. In the pic of Barham undergoing refit that Drac used, you can see the three sighting periscopes on the top of A turret: one between the guns for the man traversing the turret and one on each side for the men operating the elevation of the corresponding gun. At the turn of the century, there were armored hoods in those locations, where the gunners stood, sighting through small telescopes. The telescopes were connected to the guns by a complex linkage so they would elevate in unison. Slop could never be entirely eliminated from the linkage connecting the gun to the scope, so, with the South Carolina class, the USN changed to a new model turret that had the scope rigidly bracketed to, and concentric, with the gun trunnion, so there was no slop. This resulted in the scopes being mounted low on the side of the turret, instead of the top, which also had the advantage, as the South Carolinas were the first USN battleships with superfiring turrets, that the sights were out of direct muzzle blast of the superfiring guns. While the RN persisted with the turret top mounted sights when they shifted to superfiring turrets, I have read that the gunners were directed to not fire the superfiring guns within 20 degrees either way of dead ahead, to prevent the sighs in the lower turret suffering from the muzzle blast.
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@WALTERBROADDUS in the cases of Averoff and the Aetos class DDs, Greece did very well for itself, gaining some very powerful ships. The Ellie was another "distressed stock" proposition, but that ship wasn't that great of a prize. I don't know how Greece missed out on an unfinished cruiser sitting at Ansaldo, which was eventually seized by the Italian government and completed for the RM. Greece's purchase of the Mississippi and Idaho is an entirely different matter. The Greeks were severely used by the US. Newspaper accounts in the summer of 1914 say the $12+M paid by Greece for those old, obsolete, ships, was what the USN had paid for them new. The only thing the Mississippis had going for them was they could fit in the drydock at Piraeus.
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@lloydknighten5071 iirc, USN gunnery in the Spanish American War was pretty terrible, but the Spanish were worse. William Sims, when only a Lieutenant, started agitating for better gunnery training at the turn of the century. He ended up writing directly to President Roosevelt. Roosevelt was sufficiently impressed that he appointed Sims Inspector of Naval Gunnery in 1902.
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@joejolliffe I would like to hear more about the Greek navy too. They seemed to have had a talent for picking up "distressed inventory", as both the Averof and the Aetos class destroyers were bought after the original purchaser defaulted. Can't help but wonder if Basil Zaharoff put them on to those opportunities.
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@Ralph-yn3gr the Brits probably would have put them in inventory as spares for the QEs and Renown, or installed them as shore batteries. When the Averof was working with the RN during WWII, all of the RN ships which had mounted the same model of 9.2" gun had gone to the breakers, but their guns had been remounted as shore batteries, so the 9.2" ammo was still in production.
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@lloydknighten5071 Drac did a piece on fire control some time back. It was shortly after the turn of the century that the USN started retrofitting coincidence rangefinders and the tall lattice masts that became a trademark of USN battleships.
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@BraydenPotter if you define dreadnought as all big guns, with nothing else but 12 pounders for plinking torpedo boats, dreadnoughts could have been built in the 1890s. The largest obstacle was probably the slow rate of fire of the big guns, which made smaller, more rapid firing guns, necessary. When commissioned, the 13" guns on the Indiana class ships of the 1890s had a rate of fire of about 1 shot per five minutes vs about 1 round per 2 minutes for the 8" secondaries. The shift to smokeless powder reduced the amount of propellant that had to be loaded, and the navy discovered that paying attention to ergonomics and doing some training did wonders for reload time. The reload time on the Indianas was cut from 5 minutes to 1 minute for the 13", while the reload time on the 8" secondaries was cut to 30 seconds. The 12" guns on the last USN pre-dreadnoughts had a rate of fire of 2 rounds/minute, the same as the 8" secondaries, which rendered the 8" secondaries a waste of space, vs mounting more 12". That's my take on the question.
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