Comments by "r baxter" (@rbaxter286) on "Naval Gunnery - Why do battleships miss after they get their first hit?" video.

  1. They miss before that first hit, so why not after?! The Uncertainty Budget on the process must be horrendous at range, any idea if anyone ever quantified it for any 'classic' system (with validation by experiment)?
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  2. That's actually 4 things, as in that "and" conjunction, and THAT makes 5 things, as in "5. You don't know how to count."
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  3. “War is progressive because all instruments of war are progressive.” US Grant I remember getting involved with this when first finding Sumida's book on RN pioneering fire control and the Pollen myth of superiority (funny, it was a pre-'clickbait' scholarly book that started and fueled a controversy suitably answered in return salvos like similar controversies surrounding things I remember like variable geometry fighter, fighter bomber, and bomber airfoils, the Phoenix missile system, the F-100 engine that 'doomed' the F-15 and later F-16 (allegedly), the the new-release turbine power unit for the Abrams tank, cruise missiles in strategic and then tactical roles, the M-16 gun, etc). Went back to WWI era USN gunnery manuals and inter-war enlisted 'ratings' manuals as well as the various reference works on interior and exterior ballistics; hoovered up followup books to Sumida along with Jutland histories (from both sides of the battle line), and into the various sensationalist tripe on the Iowa turret blast and the rebuttals by actual technical experts. Also, found the INRO/Warship International volumes and back issues crammed full of things like actual salvo spread diagrams for US and 'other' ships along with the subsequent Fighting Instructions to US captains (boy, were they gonna be surprised when they closed into the EXTREMELY vulnerable zone for the IJN 20" gun instead of moving to a much-more invulnerable zone based on the wrong assumptions, like 16" guns on the Yamato series). Really wish I'd paid more attention to the appropriate calculus physics in my 1st semester Mechanics classes. In the end, it was GLARINGLY obvious to me why big guns got the bums rush they did once military tech emerged from the Dark Ages of mechanical tech and into the electrical and electronics ages. Fortunately, things like the US government investing in aviation in general helped spur the development of tech that made the big gun battle line obsolete for both sides at about the same time, without the USN ending up a generation behind. That need to never be behind has fueled so much USN research, and outright theft of ideas like angel-deck carriers, since that day; some wasted money, some tacitly wasted but still supported (e.g., early Aegis house of cards), and some well invested. The passing of the big gun was a paradigm shift for the navies as big as relativity and 'billions and billions of galaxies!!' was to astrophysics. It just never has had a Thomas Kuhn treatment of it, as far as I remember reading (but, that's not much of a reach, nowadays).
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