Comments by "Jim Taylor" (@jimtaylor294) on "HMS Colossus - Guide 186" video.

  1.  @harripursiainen5420  Yes. History sadly never gave us a Battleship with forty-two guns, in seven Sextuple Turrets :-( .
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  2.  @AtomicBabel  Not to mention a partial return of the Tumblehome Hull Form.
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  3.  @llllib  Or 42 ;-)
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  4. To paraphrase Lord Drach: I'd rather have a Battleship for the money :P .
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  5. Better to have armour, and not need the protection thereof, than to not have armour and need it ;-) . The cruiser KMS Admiral Graf Spee in WWII was after all mission killed in a battle with foes of ostensibly inferior armament, because her armour had been reduced during her R&D, to duck under treaty limits.
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  6. Not really, as there's a great difference between "obsolete", and less useful. Post WWI the gun caliber had jumped to 15"/42, with 16" & 18.0" having already made some appearance. Fleet speed was also rising from 21 knots, to 24. As such would happen after WWII, the RN set the minimum new gun standard (in this case 15"/42), and planned to phase out all other ships, in order of oldest to newest. The change in standard was unpopular with some though, as export countries with British 12", 13.5" & 14" guns feared an ammunition shortage. Australia gave up their namesake Battlecruiser, partially because of this concern, as their politicians didn't want to have to spend the cash needed to produce the shells domestically. In this the Colossus class were directly behind the Orions, Iron Dukes & KGV's.
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  7. Not really, when considering that the first successful air attacks on shore installations by naval aircraft - such as the Cuxhaven Raid - and the first sinking of an enemy ship with a ship based Torpedo Bomber, transpired in WWI. If anything the RN was ahead of the curve.
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  8. Journalists have always been biased / outright dishonest*, but at least in this period they were also patriotic. *In the 1800's you could get basically anything printed if you had the money, even claiming your electoral rival had died (in marginal constutuences where it was too difficult to check).
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  9. >ahem< the USN did the same with their aft sighting tops up until the 1930's >ahem< Pearl Harbour at least gave good reason for the brasshats to finally think "hmm, you know... this was a terrible idea, let's strip them out whilst were're repairing the whole ship", with those vessels still sporting said design flaw. And don't even mention Cage Masts :P .
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  10.  @AtomicBabel  Ideally so, but repeat offenders should be named & shamed ;-) .
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  11. Compared to the Nassaus' and the S-Carolina's - we do not speak of the engineering monsterousities the french had in this period - and other contemporaries, the Colossus's were quite good :P .
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  12. Boo~. I preferred the louder intro, partially as mobile devices have limited volume. (same problem in listening to Drach' videos whilst doing anything remotely noisy, like washing up)
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  13. Thank god that we "failed" at that, for suceeding would have produced ships too ugly to behold :P .
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  14.  @1977Yakko  One thing of note there though, is that's all postwar hardware. The lack of any wars between first world countries since 1945, and general political apathy toward [serious] conventional weapons investment, are but two of many factors why.
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  15. Actually it was being qualiatively and quantitively better than the Kaiserlichemarine, that won the RN the Battleship race, and WWI. RN Capital ships after all always had a firepower and range advantage, over their German rivals. Operational Range was also no contest, as the need to be deployable almost anywhere on earth, was required of all RN vessels. Armour protection as such was often thinner, but as demonstrated in WWI - mostly by Warspite - was more than enough to surrvive sustained bombardment by determined German opposition. The Germans knew much of this, which is why they did their best to avoid a battle where the RN had even 1 to 1 parity in numbers. (though that said; conventional wisdom on Force Ratio demands a 3 to 1 advantage where attainable)
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  16.  @stewy62  I would argue that it was only a mix of human error (from tactical errors to munitions handling) and faulty ammunition, that spared the HSF from total destruction at Jutland. Dumb luck also meant that the Kaiserlichemarine narrowly avoided both having the wrong sort of coal to get best speed out of their ships, as well as having not still been making a near identical ammunition handling error to that of Beatty's squadron. In short: far from Kaiser Wilhelm II's bluster to the contrary after Jutland, the germans only narrowly avoided a war deciding humiliation (like the Russians at Tsushima), getting a severe mauling instead.
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  17. Nice. One should always compromise upwards :D .
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  18. At this point the double concern that had persisted since Dreadnought was still in partial effect, that: . The Sighting Hoods weren't fully enclosed, making turrets in close formation vunerable to blast. . The belief that having the turrets too close together would mean losing as much as 40% of the main battery to a single shell. It is of note also that one of Dreadnought's design layouts had proposed an all centerline superfiring arrangement, making the RN one of the first to seriously consider it, but also the first to chose otherwise, for the aforementioned two reasons.
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