Comments by "Vikki McDonough" (@vikkimcdonough6153) on "HSwMS Smaland - Bofors Greatest Floating Sales Brochure" video.

  1. 1. The thick, heavy steel structure of an armor-piercing shell (especially in the nose area) serves two main purposes: maximizing the shell's sectional density (its mass divided by its frontal area), which maximizes its ability to punch through armor upon impact and to retain energy during flight in the face of aerodynamic drag, and maximizing the shell's structural strength, which prevents the shell from breaking up upon impact and either splattering itself across the outside of its target (if you're very unlucky) or punching through with its nose but losing the thinner-walled rear section carrying the bursting charge (if you're slightly-less unlucky). For armor-piercing shells of the dreadnought-to-World-Wars era, was the entire thickness of the shell structure needed for avoiding shell breakup, or were they, in the pursuit of sectional density, made thicker than was strictly necessary (sacrificing bursting-charge space for improved penetration)? If the latter, could shell performance have been increased by thinning down the steel portion of the shell to just what was necessary to keep the shell intact upon impact and replacing some or all of the removed metal with a denser material (such as lead), allowing either for the same sectional density (and thus armor penetration) while leaving room for a more-powerful bursting charge, or for sectional density to be increased while still maintaining the same bursting charge - and did any navies actually try this? 2. How many expansion stages did the Casablancas' uniflow reciprocating engines use? The sources I've looked at don't seem to mention this detail. 3. Did Warrant Officer Sakio Komatsu ever receive any sort of posthumous decoration for sacrificing himself to take out one of the torpedoes heading for Taihō? He certainly deserved it, even if his efforts were ultimately in vain. 4. If someone had come up with the idea for a tuned mass damper in the 1900s-10s rather than the 1960s-70s, could this have solved the vibration problems with U.S. battleships' lattice masts?
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