Comments by "Stephen Villano" (@spvillano) on "Oceanliner Designs" channel.

@Edax_Royeaux well, the Norden bombsight helped with that, ahem, accuracy. It was also used in Nagasaki, missing the target by two miles. About the only bombs that did reliably hit target were all delivered by dive bomber.
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@Edax_Royeaux yeah, the B-29 was an utter boondoggle, being only in use up to the 1960's and delivering two atomic bombs that could've been delivered by FedEx instead. Had we not wasted such money, Japan would've lost the war!
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@Edax_Royeaux yep, utterly disruptive, which is why Germany won the war. If only the Allies didn't foolishly depend upon such unreliable air power, why they could've sailed battleships into Berlin and won!
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@Edax_Royeaux there was no flak armor on those bombs. The uranium acted like its own armor, hell, it's used in M1 Abrams tank armor! Strip their tamper cases, they'd have not gone off. The tamper was there to allow fission to continue for long enough to not be a fizzle. Even so, only 2% of the Little Boy core fissioned and around 20% of the Fat Man core fissioned. Wouldn't have gotten that far without the reflector/tamper at all!
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@danquigg8311 which was more cost effective? Those raids and all those bombs or a fleet of sunken Hoods?
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@Edax_Royeaux and the Bizmark got sunk, the Tirpitz got laid up for the remainder of the war until sunk, leaving only uboats that eventually largely got sunk.
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@Edax_Royeaux without that case, it'd have been a ball of explosives, reflectors and fissionables, with batteries and electronics tearing loose and hence, not detonating, right? And we're talking about bombs that weighed in at 10000 pounds, so a ton and a quarter less isn't much to cut off and risk damage during handling and dropping. Of course, had they waited around 5 years, they could've used boosted fission bombs instead, as long as we're going into the realm of unreality. Personally, I never went into a combat zone counting on the enemy not shooting at me, just call me weird.
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@Edax_Royeaux so, your hatred is so great for the aircraft that your answer is a kamikaze mission? There is out of the box thinking, then there's psychotic thinking, this is rubber room land thinking. And no, drone would be out of the question, as loss of remote control of our most powerful and expensive weapon is beyond the call of out of the question. BTW, you do realize that a bomber descending to burst altitude would be bigger than the bomb, hence a much, much, much easier target? The reason accuracy of flak against the bombers was so bad was due to the bombers being at high altitude, the bombs were detonated at low altitude, where AAA accuracy was rather good. But, a bomb on a parachute wouldn't be engaged, as that would risk having the bomb drop at high speed, causing greater damage, from the defender's perspective.
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@Edax_Royeaux more false equivalence, as the B-29 wasn't created exclusively for the purpose of carrying atomic bombs. It was a long range strategic bomber that remained in service for many, many years. As an example, the B-17 was retired in the 1950's, but the B-29 stuck around until 1960. You've provided zero evidence that flak armor was even on the bombs, you keep mentioning it, while providing no evidence for it. And that the Enola Gay wasn't shot at means it couldn't be shot at? Admiral Yamamoto didn't have his airplane shot at, then it was shot down. You make fragmented chains of cherry picked pieces of facts to support a nonsensical, nonadherent to historic view of what really happened here in the real world. You might want to check out the real world, it's pretty interesting.
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@Edax_Royeaux first, are you aware of what a ballistics case is? It streamlines a bomb so that it doesn't have the glide characteristics of a leaf, fluttering all over and nowhere near its target. Second, at the mass of the bomb, precisely what would you make its case out of, silly putty? That's what mild steel would have the consistency of with 10000 pounds of weight inside of it. Caseless, one then has wires and det cord all strung about to get snagged and torn free, leaving one with a functionless device and gift of an otherwise operational nuclear warhead to Japan. Speak to what you actually have training and expertise in. I worked with nuclear weapons in the military at the beginning of my military career. I've also had EORA training, so I most certainly do know my explosive ordinance.
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@neutronalchemist3241 well, even today, unguided bombs will likely miss a warship from high altitude. Same problem then as now, as physics doesn't change over time, only technology does. But, now we've got precision guided munitions to take care of that for us.
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@MidlifeRenaissanceMan unlike some, many of us monitor all of the news that's going on, not just the top headline of the day. Why, there's all manner of things going on in the world that aren't Trump! Or a spat in Russia over losing a contract and workers to the military.
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@MidlifeRenaissanceMan I tend to track four news sources, some foreign, on a number of events and topics. Old habit from my military days. Retired from the Army now, but old habits die hard and I loathe getting blindsided.
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@thaneoffife6904 for the longest time, after the Soviet Union collapsed and the Cold War ended, the navy barely monitored the network at all. Now, it's largely monitored by navy reserves and researchers. But, when something noteworthy deserves it, they do go back and take a look. It's part of how they found the Scorpion.
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There's also a misconception of a metallurgical report that stated that the plating was subject to brittle fracture at the temperatures of the North Atlantic at the time of the sinking. A ship's strength doesn't come from its plating alone, but from the frame(s) that the ship's skeleton is made of, plus the plating. If the plating was brittle enough that beyond its normal flexing stresses during it normal journeys, yes, it could fail while the skeleton remains intact, not being as cold or suffering the same stresses by its design and the ship won't break in half, it'd leak like the proverbial sieve. If fracturing on a lager scale occurred in the framing, it still would be unlikely to suffer the later movie's version of failure on the surface - impact with the ocean bottom isn't some 1 - 2 MPH event, it's at speed and hence, high energy, torsion on its way to the bottom adding shearing stresses. Major structural failures are complex beasts, far beyond the ability of most programs and pretty much all entertainment venues could ever hope to portray. To think otherwise is to think that everything is simple and ships are decidedly not simple and never have been.
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