Comments by "" (@RedXlV) on "Dreadnought: The Battleship that Changed Everything" video.

@tisFrancesfault The problem is that the idea of using unsafe ammunition handling to increase rate of fire was a stop-gap solution to the lack of accuracy. More shots fired means greater chances of a hit. Had there been more thorough gunnery training before the war, instead of foolish captains prioritizing how pretty their ships looked over combat effectiveness, it's unlikely that anyone would've even thought of opening the blast doors. Also, before Britain actually entered WW1 but after everyone could tell it was increasingly likely they'd get drawn in, Fisher advocated that the Royal Navy should launch a preemptive strike on the German fleet while it was still in port at Kiel, citing the example of Royal Navy having done the same thing in 1807 to the Danish fleet at Copenhagen.
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Regarding the steam turbines, Satsuma's sister ship Aki did have turbines, and as such was 2 knots faster than Satsuma. So while not as quick to adopt that innovation as Britain, the IJN were certainly on it before the US Navy.
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Going first gave Britain a huge head start on dreadnoughts. By the time anybody else got their first dreadnought (when Germany completed Nassau on October 1, 1909), Britain had 4 of them (Dreadnought, Bellerophon, Temeraire, and Superb). And the third nation after Britain and Germany to bring a dreadnought into service actually wasn't any of the other naval powers like the US, Japan, France, Italy, or Russia. It was Brazil, with a dreadnought built for them in Britain. That's right, Britain was out-building everybody else even while some of their shipyards were building export dreadnoughts rather than building them for the Royal Navy.
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Admiral Tirpitz planned the German naval expansion the premise that Britain would need to enter the Helgioland Bight to effect a blockade of German ports, and that German minefields could thus make the battle favorable to Germany even if they were outnumbered. He also thought that Britain would go to great lengths to avoid war with a powerful German navy, because Britain would risk losing enough ships to no longer be the world's most powerful navy. The latter was built on the premise that Britain wouldn't be able to bring their entire battleship fleet to bear, since some of those ships would be needed to protect their colonial possessions around the world. And if Britain could be forced to keep out of European wars, the German army would be able to become the dominant force on the continent. But Tirpitz got it wrong on both counts. The geography of the North Sea made it entirely possible for Britain to blockade them from much further away from the German coast, and that's exactly what they did. And Britain's alliances with France and Japan allowed them to pull their battleships out of the Pacific and Mediterranean, and leave only cruisers (and eventually some obsolete pre-dreadnought battleships) to protect those colonies. If not for the threat at home from Germany, Britain never would've been that trusting of her allies. But Tirpitz's naval expansion had turned Germany into Britain's greatest threat, and thus Britain went to great lengths to counter that threat.
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The British were aware of this. They figured that it wasn't a problem, because they'd still be able to out-build their potential rivals like they'd been doing for the last 200 years. Whereas if they didn't build Dreadnought, somebody else would do it first and still render all of Britain's existing battleships obsolete. Vittorio Cuniberti in Italy and Washington Capps in the US both designed all-big-gun battleships in 1903, but due to Italy's limited resources and the US"s stingy Congress, Cuniberti's design was never built and Capps' wasn't laid down until after Dreadnought was built. And I don't know who designed Satsuma for the Japanese, but that was also originally intended as an all-big-gun ship. These ships lacked the steam turbines that gave Dreadnought her superior speed (though given that Cuniberti was looking for 23 knot top speed in his battleship, achieving that would've required such engines), but combining turbines with battleships was also an inevitable development with or without Dreadnought.
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The Royal Navy took heavier losses at Jutland, but they also drove the High Seas Fleet from the field of battle. It was far from the decisive battle that Britain had wanted, but Germany failed to accomplish its objective of breaking Britain's naval superiority in the North Sea.
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Sadly, the World of Warships developers have deemed Mikasa a failure. And don't think pre-dreadnoughts (which would only exist at a single tier) are important enough to make the changes needed so that Mikasa will no longer be a failure. Personally I think it would be pretty easy to do. This year's Halloween event involved submarines where the player could switch between different types of torpedoes fired from different tubes. That pretty well proves the game engine would also be able to handle a ship that toggles between different types of guns. So for Mikasa and any other pre-dreadnoughts, they could easily just make it so the player can toggle between controlling the 305mm main guns and the 152mm secondary guns (or whatever calibers other ships have), and whichever set the player isn't controlling would simply be inactive until they toggle back to them. And the same thing could be done with the pre-WW1 armored cruisers that also had mixed-caliber gun batteries.
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@dogukan127 That's true, Britain is no longer and empire and can't afford to "rule the waves" anymore. But it's still an island and still needs a powerful enough fleet to protect its own shipping.
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What Germany should've done, is when Austria-Hungary ended up in a war with Russia, just said "sorry bud, you're on your own."
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@Exodon2020 Germany chose the wrong allies. Rather than pointlessly antagonizing Britain, Wilhelm II should've aligned with them from the start.
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@nottoday3817 The WNT did temporarily ban battleship construction for 10 years, with exemptions for Mutsu, Colorado, and West Virginia, and for allowing Britain to build 2 treaty-compliant 16-inch gun BBs of their own (Britain was never going to accept the US and Japan getting to have 16-inch guns while they had none of their own). Also, the Nelsons' armor was wasn't bad at all. Until the Yamato-class was built, they had the thickest armor of any ships in the world. The problem was that their 16"/45 guns had some very poor design choices. Particularly a shell that was too light and thus was barely an improvement over the 15"/42 guns of the preceding classes when it came to penetrating the side armor of enemy ships, and was actually inferior in terms of penetrating deck armor.
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