Comments by "Vikki McDonough" (@vikkimcdonough6153) on "Kormoran - Guide 342" video.

  1. Also: why were the Hilfskreuzere with diesel engines considerably more reliable, on average, than those with steam turbines? With purpose-built warships, it was exactly the other way around, so why was it so different for the merchant raiders?
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  2. And yes, it does share a root word with Styrofoam.
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  3.  @enscroggs  That was Komet; Pinguin was the one that played around in the Antarctic.
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  4. Why didn't the various navies in the World Wars hire privateers to help raid enemy commerce? Given the success that the German merchant raiders (which were essentially the same thing, just with naval rather than private crews) had in preying on Entente/Allied shipping in both wars (in at least the second one, they were even more effective one-for-one than the U-boats were, as you pointed out in your video on armed merchant ships of the World Wars), it'd seem like hiring lots of privateers and turning them loose on oceanic shipping would be a highly-cost-effective commerce-warfare strategy, especially for Germany in both wars and the U.S. in World War II (both of who fought against island nations that could be brought to their knees by cutting off maritime trade, and both of whose navies were, with the exception of their respective submarine forces, not in a position to prey on commerce, due to being bottled up / too small to be much use / driven half an ocean away). While this would admittedly violate the Paris Declaration which repudiated privateering, no one involved in either World War showed any significant compunction about discarding previously-agreed international law to gain a tactical or strategic advantage (for instance, the mass use of chemical warfare in WWI and unrestricted submarine warfare in both wars), and I don't see any reason this'd've been an exception in that regard.
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