Comments by "Vikki McDonough" (@vikkimcdonough6153) on "The Drydock - Episode 210" video.

  1. 31:30 - Those critics actually had a very good point. All the way through WWII, carrier aircraft without torpedoes were pretty terrible when it came to killing defended, maneuvering capital ships, unless they managed to get in a very lucky hit. Barring such lucky hits, basically the only way carrier aircraft could reliably send capital ships to the bottom was with torpedoes, and even this wasn't a game-breaker, as torpedoes and torpedo defense were known quantities, and fast capital ships were very good at dodging torpedoes - for instance, look at how many Japanese torpedoes it took to land a hit on Prince of Wales. If you look at the famous engagements where carrier aircraft slaughtered enemy battleships en masse - battles like Taranto and Pearl Harbor - you'll realize, A, that those involved a defending force at anchor in confined waters (a situation that would be just as much of a massacre for the defending ships against a surface attack), and, B, the very situation that made the ships so easy to sink (being caught at anchor in harbor) also made them easy to salvage once sunk (recall that every single one of the capital ships sunk in the Taranto and Pearl Harbor attacks was refloated, with the exception of one battleship at Pearl whose magazines blew up from an extremely unlucky bomb hit, and all but two of those refloated were repaired and returned to service). I myself would argue that, at least in the WWII era, a fleet composed primarily of fast battleships with top-notch torpedo protection, with a couple carriers in the rear to provide CAP if operating within range of land-based aircraft (a considerably-greater threat than carrier aircraft, both because they can be bigger, and, thus, carry more boom, than carrier aircraft, and because airfields on land are extremely hard to permanently knock out, given that you can't really sink most land masses), would be a considerably-more-potent striking force than an equal all-carrier fleet, since WWII-era fast battleships were far better at killing capital ships than aircraft carriers of the time were, and also far more able to take hits without seriously impairing their fighting ability (a carrier that gets a hole blown in its flight deck is effectively worthless, while a battleship that gets a turret blown into the sea can still fight with its other turrets). Recall (a) that the capital ships that did get mission-killed by aerial bombing (both carrier- and land-based) in WWII were mostly other carriers, and (b) that the usual outcome of a battleship coming across an enemy aircraft carrier was a one-sided slaughter of the carrier and its escorts (as happened to Glorious, as would've happened to Taffy 3 had Kurita not lost his nerve, and as was narrowly avoided in the closing stages of both Midway and Cape Engaño when U.S. admirals came close to unknowingly sending U.S. fleet carriers straight into the teeth of Japanese battleships).
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  2.  @InLoveWithCities  Having 200 miles greater range doesn't mean anything if you can't land killing blows on your opponent (which would generally be the case for a carrier attacking a battleship whose torpedo defenses, unlike those of essentially every ship in World War II, weren't severely deficient).
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  3. (Firstly, to head off any confusion, the name's pronounced /ˈvɪ.ki mɪkˈdʌn.ə/; not intended as criticism of you or anything, I've just had my name mispronounced often enough to want to clarify this right off the bat.) Why didn't any navies try building battleships with just one main-battery turret with two or three monstrously powerful and long-range guns, instead of the more usual route of several turrets with only-run-of-the-mill-powerful big guns? Thinking about it, a battleship with (say) one main-battery turret with twin 25"/65-caliber guns seems like it would've been an immensely-powerful ship, able to one-shot any opponent from beyond the maximum range of the enemy battleship's guns, while simultaneously able to mount much thicker armor than its opponent (the portion of the weight savings from going down to a single main turret that weren't used up in superpowering the remaining main guns could be used to carry additional armor weight, while having just one turret would allow you to concentrate that increased weight of armor over a much-shorter citadel, allowing the armored citadel to be much-more-thickly armored). Additionally, I wonder if something similar could've been used to give various nations' obsolete predreadnoughts new leases on life (or, instead, if this idea is as insane as it possibly sounds): rip out the intermediate battery and replace the two main-battery twin turrets with singles carrying very-powerful-and-long-ranged guns (like, say, the aforementioned hypothetical 25"/65s) with top-quality rangefinders for accurate, deadly shooting at long range, hey presto, you've converted an obsolete ship into a dedicated dreadnought-killer. This might require completely redoing the guns' recoil mechanism to fit a predreadnought's main-battery barbette, but that shouldn't be an insurmountable problem (maybe design the replacement turrets so that, when the big gun's fired, the whole upper section of the turret recoils backwards along rails atop the lower section of the turret, like with the recoil mechanisms of a lot of heavy railway guns?); are there other engineering reasons I haven't thought of as to why this was never done?
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