Comments by "Vikki McDonough" (@vikkimcdonough6153) on "The Fate of the Tug Forceful - The Real Story" video.
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1. When attacking moving ships with high-altitude level bombers (as the USAAF and RAF were both so fond of doing against enemy capital ships), wouldn't it be more effective to drop aerial mines in the enemy ships' paths rather than try to hit them with conventional bombs? With conventional bombs, all the targeted ship has to do is change course so that the bombs hit the sea instead of the ship (and don't hit the sea too close to the ship) and then you're good to go (as demonstrated by the almost-nonexistent success rate of these attacks), whereas with aerial mines not only does the targeted ship have to dodge the falling mine, but they and everyone else in their fleet now have to continue to avoid the spot where it came down, theoretically allowing high-altitude bombers to force the enemy fleet to choose between steaming in a disadvantageous formation and direction or hitting mines.
2. Effectiveness of meltabomb shells, if they'd been available in the World Wars?
3. Why did the IJN, in the 1930s and 1940s, find the use of compressed oxygen as an oxidizer for high-speed underwater engines an easier engineering problem than the use of high-test peroxide for the same purpose (bringing the oxygen-powered Long Lance torpedo series into operational service in the 1930s and the derivative Type 1 kaiten later in the 1940s, while the HTP-powered Type 2 kaiten ran into insurmountable oxidizer-storage problems that prevented it from ever entering service), while for the Kriegsmarine it was the other way around (managing to bring a number of Walter U-boats close to entering service during the war years, while rejecting oxygen-powered engines outright because they realized they'd've had even more problems with that than they had with the HTP boats, only being able to finally start work on an oxygen design partway through the war as a result of a decade of additional technical advances)?
4. What was the burning (and ultimately exploding) ship that HMS Spitfire's crew saw during the night at Jutland? At the time, it was thought to be HMS Black Prince, but German records examined after the war showed that Black Prince's demise happened in a completely different manner from how Spitfire's crew described the final end of the ship they saw in the night, and none of the other ships lost at Jutland went down in a manner consistent with what Spitfire saw. Was the destroyer's entire crew subject to some sort of mass hallucination?
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