Comments by "Steve Valley" (@stevevalley7835) on "Guadalcanal Campaign - Santa Cruz (IJN 2 : 2 USN)" video.

@and15re1 In 1914, Japan was busy rolling up German colonies in the Pacific, including the Marianas, Marshalls and Carolines, so the IJN was pretty busy. That is how Japan got it's hands on Truk Lagoon. The Aussies were rolling up some German colonies too. After the war, the ex-German colonies south of the equator were handed to Australia and everything north of the equator was officially handed to Japan.
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@georgedavidson957 "late war", iirc, the Oerlikon was not very effective either, due to short range and small shell. For something to be widely deployed in 44, it would probably need to exist in some form in 1940. The first thing that comes to mind is the John Browning designed 37mm, used by the Army as the M1. It was adopted by the Army in 1938, so, in a Bofors-deprived world, it would probably have shown up everywhere on land and sea.
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@andrewcross1469 I can't totally eliminate the future knowledge from my mind that Z was doomed. Even if they had a carrier, the location of the battle was within range of Zeros from southern Indochina, where the bombers were based, so Fulmars or Sea Hurricanes would probably have been shredded and the carrier sunk too, unless supply of Zeros was so tight that the only thing available in Indochina was the A5M Claude that a Sea Hurricane could stand up to. My first impulse would be to send Queen Elizabeth and Valiant from Alexandria and hurry up Hermes' refit in South Africa and sent it. Somewhere along the line, Hermes would meet up with a crate of tail hooks from Brewster, to be installed in the Buffalos that were deployed in the far east with the RAF, RAAF and Dutch, and embark those planes as air defense. Sink all three, and the RN doesn't lose that much. QE and Valiant were badly damaged by Italian frogmen in Alexandria later in December and Hermes was sunk a few months later anyway.
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@michelangelobuonarroti4958 Caracciolo had a lot of obstacles to overcome. First, it was a pre-Jutland design. I have seen drawings of a proposal to add armor on the weather deck, which just looks wrong to me. Interestingly, I have seen a photo taken in December 1915, shortly before work was suspended, where they appear to be installing the weather deck. The odd thing about that photo is there are no compartment bulkheads visible below the unfinished part of the deck, only what appear to be a temporary, wood, support structure, which implies the deck being installed is only intended to be temporary, to keep the weather out. Caracciolo's armor turtleback was only one deck below the weather deck, so what I see below the temporary deck would be that armor deck. If that is the case, than the horizontal armor could quite easily be improved when the temporary deck is removed. Second protection issue is the lack of a torpedo defense system. However, Caracciolo appears to have boiler rooms along each side, with more boilers in centerline boiler rooms, so the boiler rooms along each side would tend to provide some protection. Additionally, torpedo bulges could be added. The guns are another problem. The guns were sourced from three different vendors, with each vendor building to a different design. The guns were supposed to have similar ballistic performance, but I would want all eight guns to be of the same design, just to be sure. Three of the guns were a Vickers design, built by Terni. Two of those were installed in a shore battery near Venice. Nine of the guns were a monobloc design by Schneider, built by Ansaldo. Of those nine, two were installed in the monitor Faà di Bruno and the other seven were turned over to the Army. The Army installed four of those seven on railroad carriages and sent them to the front to shell Austrian troops. Twelve were built to an Armstrong design by Pozzuoli. Two of those were installed on a monitor that foundered in a storm, four were installed in shore batteries at Brindisi, two were installed on improvised monitors that were on the firing line late in the war, and the last four were installed in monitors after the end of the war. Saving eight unused guns, of the same design, for the ship, would require prior planning to shuffle the other guns among the recipients. As for the budget issue, the RM was building destroyers all through the 1920s. The RM laid down 29 destroyers from 1919 through 1925. As a rule of thumb, I use 100,000 GPB for the price of a destroyer, and Caracciolo probably would have cost 3M GPB or more, so, considering how far advanced work was on Caracciolo, enough could have been saved by cancelling some of that destroyer building program to cover the cost of the battleship. The most interesting thing about Caracciolo being completed is it would have required far less modernization in the 30s than the older battleships, which would free resources to work on Roma and Impero. But then, I have wondered over the years, if the modernization were not done at all, would that have freed enough resources to complete Roma and Impero when they could have been useful?
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@joshthomas-moore2656 my first thought to run BuOrd in the 20s would be Admiral Sims, based on his long standing advocacy of improving gunnery, and experience in WWI, but Sims reached mandatory retirement age in 1922.
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