Comments by "Vikki McDonough" (@vikkimcdonough6153) on "MN Bougainville - Guide 301" video.
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Just FYI, the post appears to not actually've become pinned.
On to my Drydock questions:
1. How effective would something along the lines of the Disney bomb have been as a dive-bomber-borne anti-warship weapon? On the face of it, the extra acceleration provided by equipping the bomb with rocket motors would seem to solve the problem that occasionally cropped up in WWII where, in order to be sure of actually hitting the target ship, dive bombers ended up having to release their bombs at heights too low for the bombs to gain enough speed to penetrate the ship's armored deck (for instance, during Operation Tungsten).
2. Pretty much all coal-fired warships used their coal bunkers as, essentially, additional armor. This seems, intuitively, like it would be a terrible idea, as coal has rather a tendency to create dust, which, one would think, would give it the exact opposite effect of armor, since an incoming shell penetrating into the coal bunkers and exploding would loft huge quantities of highly-flammable coal dust into the air, followed by a much larger explosion as the coal-bunker-sized fuel-air bomb that's just come into being ignites (like what may have happened to the Lusitania after it was torpedoed). How did coal-fired warships make it so that their coal bunkers actually helped protect the ship rather than helping to blow it up?
3. Why didn't submarines carry some sort of weapon for hitting back while submerged and under depth-charge attack, like a dispenser for releasing mines to float up for the depth-charging destroyers to run into (and, if provided with enough mines, potentially allowing the submarine to shelter in its own little minefield), or upwards-pointing torpedo tubes to fire torpedoes vertically or at a steep angle upwards at the attackers?
4. Why did the interwar U.S. Navy apparently conclude that a battleship attacked with gas shells would have to be scrapped? Chemical decontamination is a pretty-mature science, and, of the chemical agents that would've been widely used in this era, the pulmonary agents like chlorine, phosgene, and chloropicrin are gasses, which don't tend to persist for particularly long anyways and could be removed without too much trouble with enough forced-air ventilation and airing out, while, although the mustard gasses are liquids, contamination by liquid mustard gas would be essentially limited to the area where the shell actually hit and the volume within its blast radius (which would be much smaller than that of a typical HE or AP shell, given that [a] much of the shell's internal volume is occupied by some poison gas of whatever type rather than by explosive, and [b] put too much oomph into the explosion and the heat and pressure effects start to end up destroying quite a bit of the chemical agent), and evaporated mustard gas could mostly be removed in the same manner as the pulmonary agents; besides, a battleship with pretty much any warning of chemical attack would be able to quickly seal itself off both externally and internally, confining even gaseous contamination to a fairly-small area of the ship and preventing it from spreading through hatches or ducts, thereby greatly reducing the portion of the ship needing decontamination in the first place.
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