Comments by "Tom in Iowa" (@tominiowa2513) on "The Drydock - Episode 171" video.

  1. Loading the carronades with hard tack could clear the upper deck of an enemy ship. 😉
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  2.  @bkjeong4302  Battleships were very relevant to the Royal Navy in WW2, as they could almost guarantee enough damage to any surface raider to "mission kill" the other ship, so they made excellent merchant convoy escorts. But the leftover WW1 and treaty era ships were perfectly adequate to this task. If the Iowa class ships had been available at Midway, instead of withdrawing after sinking the 4 IJN fleet carriers to avoid a potential night surface action that Yamamoto's forces would decidedly win, Task Force 16 could have loitered around and launched attacks against the IJN surface ships that no longer had air cover until they ran out of bombs and torpedoes, then withdrawn or possibly engaged in a surface action against the now highly depleted IJN First and Second Fleets.
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  3. HMS Rodney should have been kept as a museum ship with "I sunk the Bismarck" painted on the side in huge letters, followed by "(with some help of fabric covered biplanes)".
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  4.  @bkjeong4302  The USN could have done with the IJN having fewer surface combatant ships available going into the Guadalcanal campaign, no? In a hypothetical extra day of the Battle of Midway, it would have been best for the USN to go after cruisers and destroyers and ignore the battleships.
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  5. Nope, to this day USN sailors are dropping like flies due to scurvy.
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  6.  @hernerweisenberg7052  Nuclear munitions do damage in several ways: - Overpressure due to heating of the surrounding air or water (just as a conventional explosive does); - Neutron flux; - EM radiation. Your proposed ship would be very resistant to overpressure, so it would take a near hit with a massive yield to crush or fracture the tube. Neutron flux could kill the crew and make the ship radioactive to replacement crews while leaving the tube structure intact. EM radiation in the infrared range would heat the tube, which would require a large yield in close proximity to cook the crew. High frequency radiation would convert the steel to a plasma (just a nuclear "bunker busters" work by converting soil, rock, concrete, and steel to a plasma cone) - will leave it to someone else to calculate the amount of energy required to vaporize a hole in the ship (with everyone inside being cooked microseconds later).
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  7.  @mortuideum  Danish or German pronunciation of "Schleswig-Holstein"?
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