Comments by "Vikki McDonough" (@vikkimcdonough6153) on "HMS Spartan - Guide 300" video.

  1. A handful of questions: 1. Admiral Kurita's penchant for making some almost-inexplicably-bad command decisions has led you to joke, from time to time, that he must've been an American agent who was deliberately trying to lose. Is it possible that the U.S. actually was bribing Kurita to throw important battles? 2. The Washington Naval Treaty placed a 16-inch cap on the caliber of capital-ship guns. However, given that the caliber of a gun with a complex bore shape can be measured in several different ways, how, exactly, was this limitation applied? Could one make an 18-or-20-or-whatever-inch gun Washington-legal by screwing a 16-inch squeeze-bore adapter onto the end (thus making the caliber at the muzzle only 16 inches) and firing special ammunition designed to swage down to 16 inches in the adapter, thereby both giving a considerable performance boost over a conventional 16-inch gun and allowing one, once the naval-treaty system fell apart, to instantly have an 18-inch or 20-inch or even bigger gun simply by taking off the squeeze-bore adapter? Could one make even a really huge gun Washington-legal by using saboted ammunition and making sure to keep the shells themselves no more than 16 inches in diameter? Given that the caliber of a gun can be measured either groove-to-groove (taking the diameter of the circle circumscribing the bore) or land-to-land (taking the diameter of the circle inscribed in the bore), could one Washington-legally make a gun with, say, a triangular or star-shaped bore in order to get the most shell possible out of a 16-inch land-to-land caliber (a gun with an equilateral-triangular bore and a 16-inch land-to-land caliber, or a regular-five-pointed-star-shaped bore and a 16-inch land-to-land caliber, would certainly violate the spirit of the Washington Naval Treaty, given that they would have a 32-inch and a 41.9-inch groove-to-groove caliber, respectively, but would they still technically comply with the letter of the treaty, due to having a caliber of only 16 inches measured land-to-land)? 3. Did the U.S. Navy get to the point of design studies for a follow-on battleship class to the Montanas? If so, what were they planning? Something with the armament of a Montana but the speed of an Iowa? A Montana with various improvements under the hood but the same speed and armament, taking the Montanas as the first class of Standards 2: Electric Boogaloo? A battleship with four quad-16 turrets? Something packing 18-inch or even 20-inch guns, or, alternatively, a really-long-barrel high-velocity 16-incher able to send even a Super Heavy shell at truly-high speeds? Or something else? 4. Why didn't any navies develop gliding aerial torpedoes to allow their torpedo bombers to attack from much greater altitudes, ranges, and airspeeds, as opposed to having to (at least in the early part of World War II) come in at basically wavetop height, close to stall speed, and almost suicidally close to an enemy ship in order to have any hope of launching a successfully attack? 5. Why did no major navy, at least in the period covered by this channel, at least experiment with rocket-boosted battleship-main-gun shells? These would seem to have a number of advantages; as a rocket-boosted shell is continuously being accelerated (or, at least, kept up to speed) by its rocket motor, it could be launched with a lower muzzle velocity (allowing a lighter gun and reducing wear and tear) without sacrificing impact velocity (and, thus, destructiveness); alternatively, if launched with the same muzzle velocity from the same gun as a standard shell, a rocket-boosted shell would reach a much higher speed, which would (a) allow for the use of a much-flatter trajectory without sacrificing range (which would, then, have the additional side effect of reducing the effect of errors in ranging, as these, unless very large, would simply cause the shell to hit the side of the ship somewhat higher or lower than intended, rather than plunging into the sea short of or beyond the ship, as would be the case for relatively-slow conventional shells on their high, arcing trajectories), (b) dramatically reduce the enemy's time to react at long range (in turn considerably extending the range at which one can hit one's opponent without them being able to jink out of the way in time, allowing a battleship equipped with rocket-boosted shells to pick apart one equipped only with conventional shells from long range while seeing all the enemy ship's shots in time to change course and leave the enemy shots falling into empty sea), (c) greatly increase impact velocity, which, as impact damage is proportional to kinetic energy is proportional to the square of speed, would produce a truly-staggering increase in armor and ship penetration, even before taking into account the effects of the shell's explosive filler, and (d) produce a much-greater range for a given elevation angle (which, although not of that much use against ships, due to the greatly-increased time-of-flight giving the enemy plenty of time to see you firing and get out of the way, would be very useful for things like shore bombardment, either to bombard the shore from far beyond the reach of enemy shore defenses or to bombard targets much-further-inland than would otherwise be possible); alternatively alternatively, one could use the additional acceleration from the rocket to allow a battleship to launch a considerably-heavier shell (containing a correspondingly-greater quantity of explosive), at reduced muzzle velocity, without nearly as much of a decrease in range and impact velocity as would occur for a conventional shell. 5 1/2. For that matter, why not go all the way and have battleships armed with large-diameter, long-range rockets, rather than conventional guns? A big, high-velocity rocket tipped with a big armor-piercing warhead could potentially do horrific damage to an enemy battleship, given that big rockets are far easier to launch from a fairly-lightweight launcher than conventional shells carrying the same payload (since rocket launchers mostly don't have to deal with "how much pressure can I use to shoot this out of a metal tube without the tube exploding"), while one with a similarly-sized HE warhead would be excellent at things like obliterating enemy destroyers or raining down wholesale destruction on land-based targets? 6. Why weren't mine or torpedo shells for battleship main guns a thing? Mine shells would allow your battleships to use their main guns to seed the water ahead of and around the enemy ships with lots of mines, forcing the enemy to either drastically slow down or stop entirely, thus making them easy prey for your ships' guns, or try to run through the newly-formed minefield, taking potentially-quite-severe losses in the process; torpedo shells would allow your battleships to launch a massive torpedo attack even at long range, breaking up and distracting the enemy battleline by forcing them to jink and weave to dodge those torpedoes at the same time as they're also having to deal with your battleships' more-conventional shells.
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