Comments by "" (@RedXlV) on "Drachinifel" channel.

  1. You're being too generous to Plan Z by comparing it to the High Seas Fleet. The HSF consisted of ships that were comparable or in some cases superior to their closest Royal Navy counterparts. That's not really the case for Plan Z.
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  2. 7:47 Building so many "capital ships" that you run out of suitable names: only in the Royal Navy.
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  3. Such a pity that HMS Vanguard was scrapped. Imagine if she'd been permanently moored at Portsmouth as well, so that the first and the last of Britain's armored warships would be side by side.
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  4. Speaking of HMAS Sydney, can we have a video about the SMS Emden's epic raiding cruise and her end at the hands of the original HMAS Sydney in WW1?
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  5. This is one of the reasons why, regardless of his reputation, I've always held Churchill in low regard.
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  6. 6:13 I would say that the Lexington-class battlecruisers being cancelled by the Washington Naval Treaty was very much a win for the US Navy. As I've mentioned before, the Navy dodged a real bullet by not getting these ships as designed. The most amazing thing, though, is the sheer idiocy of refusing to build them as fast battleships because it would make the Standard Types obsolete. This would be like if in 1903, Germany was given the blueprints to HMS Dreadnought and her steam turbine engines, and said "Nah fam, we'll just keep building pre-dreadnoughts with triple expansion engines." Hell, even without the existence of HMS Hood, a good case could be made that Queen Elizabeth and Nagato rendered the Standard Types obsolete.
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  7. Wilhelm II was often criticized for micromanaging the Imperial German Navy, but at times he really did have the right ideas. Keeping the Seydlitz well-armored even if it was at the expense of gun size was one of those times.
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  8. Another suggestion I've seen is that the "Saints" would've been the names assigned to the N3 battleships, and that the G3 battlecruisers would've been named Invincible, Inflexible, Indomitable, and Indefatigable. At any rate, if the Washington Naval Treaty had never happened, I strongly suspect that the G3 and N3 designs would've been been revised before construction to place the third turret forward of the bridge, as was actually done with the Nelson-class. That all-forward layout was universal to the different designs considered for the Nelsons, both the O3 design that was actually adopted and the F2 and F3 treaty-compliant battlecruisers (with 3x2 or 3x3 15" guns) that were considered. Incidentally, I consider the F3 to be something of a masterpiece of capital ship design. On a displacement of only 35000 tons it would've had armor close to that of the much later 45000 ton Iowa-class battleships, and a design speed of 29 knots. And given the broad similarities to the Nelsons, I'm fairly confident it would've exceeded that design speed. Even with engines in need of an overhaul, Rodney was able to make 25 knots (design speed was only 23) in the rush to intercept Bismarck.
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  9. Now imagine if USS Pennsylvania had been razeed to create the most hilarious "frigate" in the history of the age of sail.
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  10. The USS Texas workers are doing everything they can, but I have zero confidence in the state of Texas to actually follow through with enough money to build the dry berth and move her into it.
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  11. In case anybody was wondering, the longest-serving of the Fletcher-class was ARM Cuitláhuac (ex-USS John Rodgers, DD-574), which remained in service with the Mexican Navy until 2001.
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  12. Yep, it looks like the original so long as you don't have an original F/A-18 nearby to compare. Or an F-15 Eagle nearby to see that the F/A-18E/F Super Hornet is actually bigger. Fortunately F-15 Eagles aren't common sights on aircraft carriers.
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  13. The Hippers are pretty easy since they're practically Bismarck in miniature.
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  14.  @bkjeong4302  It was also quite generous of him to take all the blame himself, and not try to get any of those other officers punished.
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  15. To the surprise of no one, this was the last ship ever to be named HMS Captain.
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  16. The closest thing to a "failed sea trials" I can think of is the German frigate Baden-Württemberg in 2017. For the first time in German naval history, an allegedly-completed warship was deemed completely unfit for service and sent back to be rebuilt.
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  17. Regarding Imperator Nikolai I as an aircraft carrier conversion, there was consideration in 1924 of converting both the incomplete battlecruiser Izmail and the damaged Gangut-class Frunze (ex-Poltava). Izmail would be very obviously the most suitable of these hulls, Nikolai is roughly the same size as Frunze (though considerably heavier given the thicker armor) and thus would've been similarly workable for a conversion. Apparently, the reason she wasn't considered for the purpose is that she'd been neglected for several years and was even more dilapidated than the fire-ravaged Frunze. Though as a Gangut, Frunze would probably be a better choice on account of being a couple of knots faster even before you consider the benefits of removing the heavy armor and possibly installing newer machinery. Bottom line, Nikolai could've been used as the basis for a solid 1st-generation aircraft carrier, but the Red Navy had better prospects they could've used.
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  18. With regard to the use of the term "frigate" in the modern era, there was also that brief period post-WW2 where the US Navy used frigate (with DL or DLG hull numbers) to mean a ship intermediate between a destroyer and a cruiser. Then there was a freak-out in Congress over the Soviets supposedly having more cruisers than the US, so the Navy "solved" that "problem" in 1975 by redesignating most of the frigates as cruisers. At the same time, destroyer escorts became frigates, which brought them in line with how the rest of NATO classified such ships. Incidentally, some of the Soviet "raketny kreyser" (missile cruisers) were actually smaller than American DLGs. It was literally just that they were called cruisers that resulted in the "cruiser gap" nonsense.
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  19.  @gokbay3057  Those two lack any of the excuses, though. The USA was richer than it's ever been in the 1950s, so it's not like we couldn't have afforded to preserve Enterprise. She also wasn't nearly as beaten up as Warspite, since her battle damage had already been repaired (rather than merely patched over). And apparently there'd been a plan to hand her over to New York in 1949 that was cancelled for, apparently no particular reason. And similarly, West Germany was flush with cash when Turkey offered to sell Yavuz back to them in 1963. As the last battlecruiser and the only representative of the High Seas Fleet left, such a historically important relic should've been preserved.
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  20. Send as "reinforcements" the Baltic Fleet ships that Rozhestvensky had rejected as hopelessly obsolete. But not the (IIRC) 7 battleships of the Black Sea Fleet. And there lies the problem with having one of your fleets bottled up in an inland sea whose straits you don't control.
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  21.  @johnabuick  In other words, the blame should fall on Halsey.
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  22. Imagine how doomed Hipper's I Scouting Group would've been had HMS New Zealand been that proto-Lion design yet still carried the Maori gear.
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  23. The N3 and G3 designs' lack of a rear firing arc isn't a problem because a Royal Navy capital ship will never be fleeing from the enemy. The enemy will be fleeing from them.
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  24.  @Vespuchian  Seriously, those BuOrd assholes are lucky they weren't put on trial as saboteurs for their handling of the torpedo problems.
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  25. The problem with Warspite is that she was in bad shape at the end of WW2 (that Fritz X did a number on her). I presume it wasn't just for quick bucks that she was scrapped (since scrapping a warship nets the navy pretty minimal money, as drach mentioned in a recent Drydock), but that restoring her to any condition to be a museum ship would've been an expensive prospect for a nation that was bankrupted by the war.
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  26. Even with bad shells, Vittorio Veneto was spectacularly unlucky to not score any direct hits with all those straddles.
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  27.  @jaredrevis4594  I wonder if the Navy was inclined to ignore the lessons that that Akiyama Saneyuki left to them (despite his impeccable record of naval service as an architect of their glorious victories in the Russo-Japanese War) because of his brother, the very prominent Army general Akiyama Yoshifuru.
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  28. To be fair to Ark Royal, she absolute should have survived that torpedo hit even considering her design flaws. Captain Maund was quite rightly found guilty of negligence for his failure to leave a sufficient damage control party on board, and delaying the damage control work by nearly an hour by bringing the entire crew to the flight deck to determine who would stay behind for that role while everyone else abandoned ship. (One would think that you'd already choose designated damage control parties for such a worst-case scenario before even setting sail, rather than waiting until the ship is already at risk of sinking.)
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  29. ​ @unluckyirish2763  Warspite would've been one of the hardest to save, because at the time she was scrapped Britain's economy was a disaster. And she was seriously beat up, so who knows how expensive a restoration would've been. Vanguard was the best opportunity because she lasted the longest, into the period when Britain was once again a wealthy nation. Though the best chance of a British age of steel capital ship being saved would've been if everything had gone just right for Hood. The time of the battle is a little different so that Hood and Prince of Wales can link up with Norfolk and Suffolk, so the former can double-team Bismarck and the latter deal with Prinz Eugen. Hood doesn't blow up, and gets most of the credit in the press for sinking Bismarck. Or maybe it's just the same scenario as IRL but the luck is reversed and a shot from Hood at long range lands just right to plunge through Bismarck's deck and detonate the magazine (that being the only way a 15" shell could plausibly reach Bismarck's magazines). Her repair and refit gets finished in time for her rather than Duke of York to sink Scharnhorst in the Battle of the North Cape. She gets assigned as new flagship of the Pacific Fleet and does some shore bombardment, then leads the Royal Navy contingent into Tokyo Bay for the surrender. Now Hood is even more legendary than she was going into WW2 (sinking two much more modern battleships), and she and Vanguard make for a pretty good post-war squadron since they have the same main armament and similar speed. Meaning she might last to 1960 when Britain isn't desperately strapped for cash anymore. (With the KGVs being scrapped a little bit earlier than IRL.) At that point, maybe she'd have a chance of being preserved.
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  30. Regarding overly long names? That leaves me thinking of the Italian light cruiser Luigi di Savoia Duca degli Abruzzi. Or just Abruzzi.
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  31. Congress passed a resolution over a decade ago calling for the next US Navy carrier to be USS Eugene Ely. Instead, the President at the time decided that the next carrier should be named after his own father.
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  32.  @WALTERBROADDUS  Many powerful politicians back in DC loved Halsey, and thus he was shielded from any consequences. In particular, Rep. Carl Vinson (chairman of the Armed Services Committee) was a huge fan of Halsey and apparently hated Spruance, and made sure that Halsey would get the fourth and final 5-star slot by repeatedly blocking nominations of Spruance for the promotion. And continued to block Spruance from getting the promotion even after Halsey's retirement in 1947.
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  33. 31:18 "destroyers that more closely identify as U-boats" LOL
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  34.  @richardm3023  The 1957 Asian flu pandemic killed an estimated 116,000 Americans, and the 1968 Hong Kong flu killed about 100,000. COVID is well on pace to kill more Americans than both of them combined. (Actually, there's a good chance that it already has. Unlike with past epidemics or even the seasonal flu, the CDC has yet to make any estimate of the total COVID deaths. The number verified deaths for every pandemic has always been lower than the estimated total, because the estimate's purpose is to include those people who died without ever being diagnosed.) And the "Spanish flu" almost certainly came from Kansas. The China hypothesis is a much worse fit with the known evidence for its origin.
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  35. They were demonstrating why Rodney had all of her main guns forward. A Royal Navy battleship's job was not to flee from the enemy, but to pursue and destroy them. it's the enemy that's meant to flee, and thus needs guns that can point backward.
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  36. IIRC, the Littorio-class battleships could turn their aft turret a whopping 70° forward (ie firing at a 20° angle off the bow). Unfortunately, a certain game that many of us play doesn't give them firing angles anywhere near that good.
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  37. In the end it didn't matter much, on account of Chile not fighting any wars during the 20th century. But it strikes me that they really should've just bought back Almirante Cochrane and kept her as an aircraft carrier. That would've given them the prestige of fielding a type of warship that their rivals lacked, after all. Oh, and IIRC the main reason that Fore River was able to give a lower bid than any of the British shipyards for the Argentine dreadnoughts was that steel prices in America were much lower than in Britain at the time.
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  38. Regarding Tiger vs Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, the reason for Admiral Lütjens refusing to engage Convoy HX 106 because it was escorted by Ramilles wasn't that he doubted his ships' ability to take Ramilles. It was that he was under very strict orders from Hitler not to engage capital ships at all. The same would've applied to Tiger. Had Lütjens defied those orders and tried to fight Ramilles, even given the inferior guns on his ships I suspect that he would've won that engagement. He did after all outnumber Ramilles 2 to 1, and his ships were 11 knots faster and also better armored. Thus, I disagree with the assessment that Tiger would've had less utility than an R-class early in the war. Even if she had a very limited refit, her speed would've allowed her to be used in duties other than just convoy escort. And Revenge herself did little of any importance during WW2, so discarding her to keep Tiger (or keeping her as the training ship instead of Iron Duke) would've been no big loss. And in terms of the logistics of keeping the BL 13.5-inch Mk V gun in service for a single ship? That would be somewhat of an issue, but remember that those guns were still in use as land-based artillery in railway mounts as well. Three of them were brought to Dover as part of the battery of cross-channel guns. So it's not as if Britain discarded their stores of shells and charges for guns of that caliber. And if Tiger's refit came in the late 1930s, it's possible that she could've had her 13.5-inch guns replaced with the same BL 14-inch Mk VII used on King George V. IIRC, those guns were designed so that they could work with the turrets, cradles, and shell hoists of the 13.5-inch Mk V, because initially there was consideration of using Iron Duke's remaining turrets to test-fire the new gun design.
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  39. No, it was only 2 of the 3 battlecruisers lost at Jutland that were doomed by unsafe ammo handling practices. Invincible was in the 3rd Battlecruiser Squadron, which had been detached to the Grand Fleet and thus participated in the Grand Fleet's regular gunnery exercises at Scapa Flow. As such, her crew didn't try to make up for inability to practice long-range gunnery via the "throw enough shit at the wall" tactic the way Beatty's fleet did, and instead actually used the flash doors on their magazines. (Unlike the 1st and 2nd Battlecruiser Squadrons under Beatty, Invincible and her sisters also showed excellent gunnery when they arrived at Jutland. It's quite unfortunate that all 3 battlecruiser squadrons weren't at least rotated through Scapa flow periodically, so that everybody would get at least some proper gunnery training of the sort that wasn't possible at Rosyth.) Invincible was doomed because she was fighting above her weight class, and her 6" armor was simply insufficient to stop Lützow's 12" AP shells.
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  40.  @mtumeumrani376  The reason they lacked meaningful function is that by the time they were launched, there was a serious shortage of cruisers for them to kill. There were plenty of other things they were capable of doing, but other ships could do those same roles more efficiently.
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  41.  @mikebrown1926  Certainly a better choice than most instances of warships named after politicians. Though it seems like it was premature to name a carrier after him while he was still alive. It used to be that the US Navy didn't name ships after living people.
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  42. It's also a pity that King didn't live long enough to see BuOrd abolished entirely.
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  43.  @Colonel_Overkill  The fact that no Royal Navy battleships or battlecruisers were ever preserved is insane.
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  44.  @t.bunker2511  USS Olympia desperately needs to be taken out of the water and restored. And I really wish Wargaming would do a fundraiser for her like they've done a few times for USS Texas. Preferably by implementing her as a premium ship and donating the proceeds.
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  45. Quite a few carriers built in WW2 ended up named for battles in WW2. The US was building so many CVs and CVEs that they needed a ton of names.
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  46. With regard to Enterprise (CVN-65) not being suitable for a museum because the sheer amount of the ship that had to be gutted to remove the reactors, it'd be nice if the Navy would at least remove that distinctive box-shaped island and set it up on land somewhere.
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  47.  @scottdrone-silvers5179  Having an empire also did that. The UK needed a fleet that could patrol all of the world's oceans. That's no longer the case, since the former colonies and dominions are now independent and responsible for their own defense. That, and they're no longer a source of funding for the Royal Navy.
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  48. I've seen it claimed that she's not actually afloat anymore, and actually is sitting on the mud at the bottom of the Delaware River. Not sure if that's actually true, though.
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  49. Many of the British destroyer classes were so closely related that it's a matter of interpretation how many classes they actually had. For example, are the J/K/Ns three classes of 8 ships each or just one class of 24 ships, given that they were for all practical purposes identical? At any rate, Britain's desperate need for more destroyers resulted in the 112 ships of the War Emergency Programme, which were smaller and less capable than the Tribals, J/K/Ns, and L/Ms. They could be considered anywhere from one to 14 classes depending on how you define it, since they all used the same basic hull design but were constantly improved during construction. It wasn't until the Battle-class (only one of which was completed in time to actually fight in WW2; an additional 25 were built and 18 were cancelled and scrapped partially built) that Britain went back to full-sized fleet destroyers. The US, on the other hand, had the industrial capacity to meet its needs by just spamming out Fletchers, followed by Sumners and Gearings rather than reverting smaller designs. The British "emergency" scaled-down destroyers, like I said, added up to 112 ships. The Fletcher-class? 175 ships.
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  50. When you mention the return to smoothbore for (most) modern tank guns, the reason for this isn't just that modern smoothbores can achieve a better seal than was possible in the past. It's because of the types of ammo that modern tanks use. APFSDS darts are so long relative to their diameter that they can't be spin-stabilized, hence the use of fin stabilization. And for HEAT rounds, having the projectile spin is actively detrimental to the effectiveness of the shaped charge. So to maximize penetration when fired out of a rifled barrel, HEAT ammo actually needs to cancel the spin imparted by the rifling while using fin stabilization. That's a big part of why modern HEAT ammo is drastically more effective than what was used in WW2. So at best, a rifled barrel is redundant for such rounds.
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