Comments by "Bk Jeong" (@bkjeong4302) on "Range-finding and Fire Control - Plotting Your Demise" video.
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@grizwoldphantasia5005 Re: straddle vs. hit at long range, this is why the whole idea of “Iowas blow every other battleship out of the water because they can use their speed, radar fire control, 16”/50 guns and superheavy shells to rain down plunging fire on enemy battleships from 30,000+ yards away, beyond the effective range of enemy battleships” is a meme rather than actual fact.
Testing in the 40s with Iowa revealed that despite being designed and equipped for such long-range engagements, the Iowas actually DIDN’T have a better effective range than pretty much any other contemporary battleship class (their actual effective range was 20,000-25,000 yards like everyone else, albeit radar allowed them to have this same effective range even at night), even with radar. At 30,000 yards, hit percentages on an Iowa-sized stationary target were dismal-under 3% for a target showing its broadside, under 2% for a target facing you head-on. They’d straddle the targets, but rarely actually score a hit. Such low percentages meant you were going to run out of shells before actually doing significant damage. To make matters worse, the 16”/50 gun was only capable of getting steep enough trajectories for plunging fire at ranges above 30,000 yards....meaning that the superheavy shell, when used on the Iowas, literally couldn’t carry out its main design purpose.
This isn’t to say the Iowas were bad battleships, far from it (do note that while they only had an effective range of up to 25,000 yards, so did everyone else). Even with its intended main benefit effectively useless, the 16” superheavy shell could (at least on paper) still punch through any belt armour ever put on a ship at closer ranges/shallow trajectories via sheer brute force (the extra weight giving it more momentum), similar to the Japanese 18” gun (again, on paper), making the Iowas very formidable at mid-range gunnery. It’s just that this narrative that Iowas would utterly dominate other nations' battleships because they would land hits at very long range without fear of being hit is false; unless it was night, an Iowa would actually have to get close enough to be effectively fired upon by a contemporary foreign battleship in order to be able to hit said foreign battleship.
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@grizwoldphantasia5005
It’s actually a lot more farcial than that.
What happened was that the carriers had sunk most of the Japanese ships present, but there was the old training cruiser Katori (yes, a training vessel, pressed into service out of desperation) and two destroyers (Maikaze and Nowaki) afloat, with varying levels of bombing damage.
Adm. Spruance apparently had the bright (/s) idea that he would detach Iowa and New Jersey to sink the Japanese ships, never mind that a) using battleships against two damaged destroyers and a damaged training vessel is extremely wasteful and pointless overkill, and b) there were already aircraft going in that would have sunk, or at least rendered useless, all three Japanese ships before the Iowas could get there. Spruance decided to use the Iowas anyways and called off the air attack....allowing the Japanese vessels breathing room in the process.
Iowa and New Jersey do manage to get Katori and Maikaze, respectively, but it would have been much faster to just have allowed the carriers to end them. For that matter, the cruisers that were sent in alongside the Iowas could have ended both Japanese ships at much lower expense. Nowaki, meanwhile, actually manages to get going and runs, and it’s at this point New Jersey pursued Nowaki, and in the process got that extreme long-range straddle-but no hits (a damaging near miss did happen). Nowaki escapes. Now, remember that Nowaki would probably have been sunk alongside the other two Japanese ships if that last air attack went in. In other words, the Iowas actually REDUCED enemy losses by participating in this engagement.
It’s arguably the American equivalent of the Battle off Samar, except MORE one-sided. At Samar, the “underdogs" of Taffy 3 at least enjoyed air supremacy (and they did actually have heavier bombs and air-dropped torpedoes-they just didn’t have them on the aircraft when the battle began, but later strikes were often actual air attack rather than bluff attack runs), had further air support from Taffy 1 and 2, were not already damaged by bombs prior to being fired upon, and were all actual warships (not very powerful ones, but still) rather than having training vessels in their ranks. The Japanese at Truk had absolutely none of those basic advantages.
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