Comments by "Steve Valley" (@stevevalley7835) on "The Drydock - Episode 103" video.

Yes, using the miniatures to lay out battles is excellent. You get no sympathy from me about the labor involved in laying them out :^) As I mentioned in the Jutland video comments, in the 60s, I had the Avalon Hill produced Jutland game. The game had cardboard tiles representing each ship in both fleets. To play out a battle, I and my opponent laid out the tiles as our fleets entered the combat area. The game included distance scales to move each ship as time passed, and gunnery range scales and hit probability tables to calculate the damage inflicted on the opponent with each salvo.
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@Matahpi sticks in my mind that the usual tactic is to use paravanes. Paravanes look somewhat like airplanes, and are towed through the water by the sweeper. The "wings" and "tail" fins of the paravanes are set so they spread out away from the minesweeper, and the tow cable between the paravane and ship cuts the mooring cables of the mines. The mines then pop to the surface where they can be detonated with gunfire.
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@DrSid42 Skoda made a lot of guns. The Italians reverse engineered a 100mm Skoda that was mounted on some Austrian DDs they received as war reparations and developed it into a rather nice AA gun. I have seen it reported that one of the reasons Germany wanted to carve up Czechoslovakia was to get it's hands on Skoda, which then, as now, is in Plzeň aka Pilsen, as in beer, in Bohemia, in western Czechoslovakia, which was one of the first places the Germans latched onto.
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@Lubyak it may be a matter of how much a gun does or doesn't irritate it's crews. The US 1.1 jammed, a lot, in several different ways. There is color combat footage of Midway, shot by the USN, that has several short looks at a couple 1.1" mounts on one of the ships. In the first couple looks, the mount in the foreground is banging away just fine and looking very potent. In the third glimpse, only the right end gun is firing. As the loading machine of the 1.1" held two clips and switched between clips automatically when one clip was empty, the three guns that are stopped are probably not stopped for a reload, but because the things jammed, again. That is probably a total, of all the glimpses, of 10 seconds of looking at that mount, and the camera caught 3 of 4 guns jammed. Any machine will engender a degree of loyalty, if it simply works as intended. Doesn't matter if the 96 has to stop to reload every few seconds. Doesn't matter if the 96 throws a light shell. Doesn't matter if the 96 has a short range. Doesn't matter if the 96 vibrates. If the thing shoots when you pull the trigger, it will be appreciated.
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@DisSabot the nightmare scenario I have floated a couple times is what if the IJN converted the Kongo class ships into carriers in 39 or 40. If they had done that, the IJN would still have had 6 large, fast, carriers, even if they lost 4 at Midway, vs the USN only having 4. Then Hornet was lost at Santa Cruze, then Wasp was torpedoed. The IJN would have pretty much had it's own way in the Pacific for the balance of 42 and 43. It took until the end of 43 for the USN to get 6 Essex class carriers in service, to allow it to meet IJN air on equal terms. Until then, it would be up to USN subs to carry the load, as anything on the surface, without air cover, dies. The US would eventually win, as the IJN could not make up it's losses like the US could, but it would have taken several years past 45.
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@tommeakin1732 there was a rocket AA system developed by the British DMWD. It wasn't the shotgun approach you describe. When fired, the rocket streamed a cable behind it. The objective was to stream the cable in front of a low flying airplane, in hopes the plane would hit it and the cable would damage a wing or engine.
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@Colin Walker that would be an interesting dilemma. If the US made obvious preparations, the Japanese would realize the US had broken their code. Churchill was in this dilemma wrt a Luftwaffe attack on Coventry. He let Coventry burn, rather than tip that they had broken the German code. The best scenario I can thing of for the US, is to establish a paper trail explaining that an air raid drill was planned, using the scheduled inbound flight of B-17s as the stand in for a theoretical attacking force. So, when the radar station picked up an inbound formation, everyone proceeds to launch ever fighter on the island to intercept what they are told are US Army bombers, but when they get there, they discover the Japanese, and the furball commences.
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@blogsblogs2348 one real problem with that idea, iirc, at that time, 1938, the FAA demanded that every aircraft have a navigator. The Hurricane, being single seat, falls down on that score. If the FAA wanted something more capable than the Skua, they could have bought SB2U Vindicators, a bit more speed, a bit more range, and a bit more payload, and was available in 38. The SBD had more of everything than the SB2U, but did not enter production until 40.
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