Comments by "" (@RedXlV) on "The Drydock - Episode 028" video.

@sarjim4381 And the main outcome of the revival of ram bows was that peacetime collisions between friendly ships became a lot more dangerous.
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The reason is money. In the immediate aftermath of WW2 in particular, the UK was in a pretty dire financial situation. They'd basically been funding their war effort on credit from the US, and with the war over that credit evaporated. And with the war over, the Royal Navy was also now much bigger than what they needed it to be in peacetime. So among other things, they sold their obsolete ships for scrap in order to get some immediate cash. By the time they started thinking about preserving some WW2 vessels as museum ships in the 1960s (by which point the UK economy was fully recovered and then some), all of the battleships and wartime aircraft carriers were already gone.
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The main reason the Royal Navy took as long as it did to make the switch to exclusively oil is that the British Isles have massive coal reserves and not much oil. (The North Sea oilfields had not yet been discovered.) The dreadnoughts and their steam turbine engines that gave them superior speed to preceding battleships required at least some of the boilers to be oil-fired, but abandoning coal entirely left the RN entirely dependent on imported fuel. Ultimately, just before WW1 broke out, they were forced to accept this was necessary because oil is just that much better as a fuel than coal.
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@wb6wsn If Monitor's guns had been firing with full charge, they probably could've defeated Virginia's armor.
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Probably politics. There had been a considerable rivalry between Jellicoe and Beatty, and between the supporters of each admiral. They had both just recently died when the KGV-class were being built, and many of their supporters were still alive. As such, there'd be controversy about whether each man actually deserved to have a ship named after them. Even more if only one and not the other got that honor. Also, royal assent is required for the ships' names, so it's possible that it was King George VI who intervened to have them given "safer" names (Baron Anson died in 1762 and Earl Howe in 1799). It is known that at least twice, George VI rejected Winston Churchill's desire to name a battleship after Oliver Cromwell (not being a fan of having the Royal Navy name a ship after the guy who killed one of the previous kings), so he did actually pay attention to such things.
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The rotating turret was patented in 1859 by Cowper Coles, and first installed on a warship (HMS Trusty) in 1861. John Ericsson 's turret (as used on USS Monitor a year later) was seemingly developed completely independently of Coles', but Coles definitely did it first.
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The rotating turret already existed. What USS Monitor did was provide a combat demonstration of its value.
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That's what Italy did with their battleships. Replacing the 12" guns with 12.6" (the largest they could manage in the same turrets; in fact they did it by boring out the existing barrels to a larger caliber). But IIRC, only Italy and France were even allowed to do this. Being much smaller navies who weren't in direct competition with the US, UK, and Japan, some aspects of the Washington Naval Treaty were relaxed for them. They were also allowed to resume battleship construction earlier than the major powers, since their newest battleships at the time of the treaty signing were significantly older and weaker.
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@basembenyamin2965 If not for that lucky hit, there's a good chance that Hood and Prince of Wales would've won the battle. Each of them was individually inferior to Bismarck (Hood in terms of armor, though aside from the deck not by as much as most people think, and PoW in terms of armament), but the two of them together should've had the advantage. Though the best chance of victory would have been if Vice-Admiral Holland hadn't been in such a rush to engage, and instead had continued shadowing Bismarck until more capital ships could arrive from the south. Or even just waited until the cruisers Norfolk and Suffolk could catch up and weather could improve enough for his destroyer screen (Electra, Acates, Antelope, Anthony, Echo, and Icarus) to get involved. Sadly, Holland pulled a Beatty and screwed it all up by rushing into battle and putting his best-armored ship at the back instead of the front.
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@Vespuchian IIRC, the Montana-class pretty much copied the South Dakota armor scheme and scaled it up to account for the larger size and provide an immunity zone against more powerful guns. While Yamato's 18.1"/45 guns weren't known to the US Navy yet, neither South Dakota nor Iowa had any zone of immunity against Iowa's 16"/50 guns firing Mark 8 super-heavy shells. (Which is the source of the modern argument that the Iowa-class battleships actually should be considered battlecruisers.)
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Not even Hitler's crazed fantasies of the H-44 battleship (displacement: 131,000 tons) involved a gun that big.
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@spartan5157 In the UK? HMS Belfast. Which wasn't actually planned for preservation either. There were a few Town and Crown Colony-class cruisers being put into reserve at the time, and the Imperial War Museum decided they wanted to preserve one of their fairly distinctive triple turrets. They were originally looking to harvest a turret from HMS Gambia, when somebody pointed out that they could preserve an entire ship rather than just a turret. Gambia's hull was in pretty bad shape, and Belfast was in much better condition, so they decided that was the ship they wanted. But in 1971 the government refused to pay for the preservation, and thus private fundraising had save the ship.
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@Drachinifel But at the time, nothing smaller than a 3" shell was capable of fitting a VT fuse. Which is why US Navy was looking to replace the 40mm Bofors with the 3"/50 Mark 22 at the end of the war.
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@iancarr8682 They were not. The original KGV designs had either 3x4 14" or 3x3 15" guns. The former layout was adopted for largely political reasons. Parliament pushed hard for it because of the 2nd London Naval Treaty, and revising the caliber upward after the escalator clause kicked in would've resulted in delaying the ships' construction (as happened with the US North Carolina class, which were also originally to have 3x4 14"). The argument was also made that 3x4 14" provides a heavier broadside than 3x3 15", regardless of whether the individual shells are less powerful. The reason for the final revision from 3x4 to 2x4 + 1x2 14" was that KGV was estimated to be IIRC over a thousand tons above the 35,000 ton limit. The Royal Navy was by far the most scrupulous in obeying treaty limits, so they had to drop some weight. Either by reducing the armor or reducing the armament. Since KGV would have the smallest guns of any modern BB regardless, it was considered essential that the armor not be sacrificed. The armor would be needed to allow safely pushing in to closer range where the reduced penetration of the main guns would become irrelevant. And since weight savings was the entire point of replacing one of the quad turrets with a twin, reducing the diameter of the barbette had to happen. That provides a significant weight reduction, probably more reduction than removing two of the barrels did. Thus, reverting to 3x4 14" was not a plausible option after the ships were built, even with the expiration of the treaties meaning that weight limits no longer applied.
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@Fiddling_while_Rome_burns Vanguard reverted to twin turrets entirely for economic and time considerations, not tactical ones. She was a compromise design, an attempt to build a ship comparable to the Lion-class design but get it into service faster by using surplus material. Building large-caliber guns and the turrets to mount them are the most time and resource-intensive parts of building a battleship. But Britain had IIRC over a dozen 15"/42 guns in storage (and little need to use them as spares for existing ships, because the Revenge-class had already exceeded their useful lifetime and the Queen Elizabeth-class were approaching that as well), and four existing twin turrets for those guns (removed from Courageous and Glorious for their conversions into aircraft carriers). Those turrets were altered with significantly increased front and roof armor, but this was still much cheaper than building new turrets from scratch. It was hoped that this would allow Vanguard to be completed in time to participate in WW2, but the shortage of skilled labor meant she wasn't ready for service until 1946.
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@The_New_IKB German warship design in general was pretty inefficient in the 1930s and 40s, so all of their ships ended up being larger than the ships of similar capability in other navies.
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@Starwarsgeek-98 Honestly, that really was quite short-sighted to toss the Des Moines-class cruisers aside. Given their smaller size, they would've been cheaper and less manpower-intensive to bring back into service in the 1980s than the Iowa-class battleships were, and given the high rate of fire of their guns they'd be almost as useful for the shore bombardment role.
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@brzsombi HMS Rodney is believed to have scored a hit against Bismarck with her 24.5-inch torpedoes (having fired them a dozen times over the course of the battle). This is the only known instance of a battleship ever so much as firing torpedoes at another battleship, let alone scoring a hit.
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Marcelo Henrique Soares da Silva An armored cruiser was any cruiser with belt armor. They were essentially the cruiser versions of pre-dreadnought battleships. Protected cruisers dispensed with belt armor in order to save weight and money, and the only protection of their vital spaces was an angled armored deck (something that armored cruisers usually also had behind their belt armor).
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@basembenyamin2965 Destroyers have torpedoes. While more often than not, ship-launched torpedoes missed their targets, the fact that they're in the water means the targeted ship has to maneuver to dodge. Which is disruptive to whatever battle plans the targeted ship had.
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