Comments by "Sar Jim" (@sarjim4381) on "Drachinifel" channel.

  1. One of the better puns I've seen lately, and it doesn't rely on a bunch of stupid fake dialog.
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  2.  @rahbaralhaq  Apparently the Vikrant's material condition deteriorated markedly during her time at dock from 1997 to 2012, as the Indian government expected the state of Maharashtra to be responsible for all maintenance costs. Without some private partners to keep the museum ship in decent shape, corrosion set in, and the ship had constant leaks that required 24 hour pumping. It's the same sad story that has affected so many other museum ships being run on shoestrings.
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  3.  @AtomicBabel  You're welcome. The IJN did develop some Ward-Leonard electrical power controls systems for the triple mounts late in the war. This enabled the mount to follow the much faster attack aircraft than the Japanese had encountered early in the war, but there were still problems matching up the pointers to the target before it moved out of the telescopic range finder field of view. The Ward Leonard remote power control was certainly better than manual traversing, but the lack of any kind of radar fire control meant they were still dependent on the Mark 1 eyeball looking through telescopic sights on a heavily vibrating mount while being wreathed in smoke from the gunfire. The USN found out how difficult this was while developing the much more advanced Mark 14 gunsight on the 20mm Oerlikon mount. The same vibration issues affected them until better shock mountings were devised. Once the Mark 14 was integrated into the Mark 51 director, there was a marked increase in the accuracy of 20mm fire, to the point that the 20mm was the AA gun that shot down the most Japanese planes in the last year of the war. Even if the 25mm gun had a faster rate of fire and wasn't so prone to jamming when used at elevations over 60 degrees, the whole system was hopeless without some kind of radar directed and RPC fire control. The Japanese had been working such a system but, as usual, squabbling between the Army and Navy over funding and what system was best meant no system was put in use before war's end.
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  4. A combination of extreme nationalism, racism that continues to this day, and the wrong lessons from the Russo-Japanese war. The Japanese routinely lied to their own people about what would happen when war came. An example is the continued Japanese insistence that the population of Japan in 1935 was 100 million. That number was used over and over, all the way to the end of the war. We now know, and the Japanese bureaucracy knew then, the population never exceeded about 80 million, and that number never grew, as war dead exceeded new births. That 100 million number had some kind of magical effect on Japanese war propaganda, as the "100 million shattered jewels" was the Japanese plan to resist the invasion by sacrificing the entire population if need be. The "gyokusai" (shattered jewel") concept led to the first human wave attacks of 1905, continuing up until the end of the war. The Meiji Restoration and bushido helped doom Japan as much as any external enemy.
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  5. Pretty versatile ships as well, operating everything from Fulmars to Tracklers to Skyhawks. Not bad for a design supposed to only last three years and built with scantlings made from old bully beef tins. :-)
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  6. @Charles Yuditsky Yes, the RN strapped a bunch of L1A1 LMGs to ship rails and pipe mounts during the war in an attempt to throw up some kind of fire since most RN ships had very little in the way of AA guns at the beginning. Even if some of the ships had the original Block 1 guns in 1982, they wouldn't have been very effective against the low flying Argentine attackers since the Phalanx was only optimized for sea skimming missiles at the time. The introduction of the Block 1A and particularly the Block 1B models have allowed the Phalanx to respond to everything from small fast boats, low flying aircraft not using radar, to supersonic missiles. The Dutch Goalkeeper system has many of the same abilities, and both are installed on RN ships today. Perhaps in recognition of the Falklands problems, even the most modern RN ships, like the Type 45 "destroyers", in reality the size and displacement of a light cruiser, go to sea with a pair of Oerlikon 30 mm guns, a pair of 7.62mm miniguns, and mounts for six of the ubiquitous 7.62mm GPMGs, in addition to a Block 1B Phalanx. If another shooting war develops, you can be sure RN sailors will be on deck throwing up all the lead they can, in addition to the Phalanx.
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  7. Certainly had a long a relatively useful life.
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  8.  @jballaviator  One of the reasons why my dad joined the Navy was he heard the food was good, and he loved food! The guys flying the Hump lived on K and C rations for sometimes months at a time and lost an average of 25 pounds. There weren't enough calories in the earlier rations like the C ration, and some of the food just didn't taste good, so they didn't even finish the inadequate meals they were given. Things started to improve about mid-1944 when rations started to include a greater variety of food (K rations expanded to 12 different menus, four each for breakfast, dinner and supper, the military terms for the more common lunch and dinner.) The greatest morale boost for the troops wasn't food, even the much loved hot chocolate drink. It was the four cigarettes that came with each meal. For smokers, it was a familiar way to finish off a meal. For non-smokers, it gave them something to trade for food they liked. I'm not aware of any other military that included cigarettes with each ration. Not PC today, but it was a big lift for soldiers right up until 1975, when the busybodies and pearl clutchers got them removed.
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  9. I first read about this in an old Popular Mechanics when I was maybe 10 years old, ao that would have been about 1956. Even then, I thought this had to be the most unworkable and improbable idea I had ever seen.
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  10. Q&A Why did Germany continue with twin turrets when it was clear that triple turrets could have reduced the overall length and increased armor protection over the shorter area? Triple turrets for 16" guns goes all the way back to 1927 with the Nelsons. Why did the Germans persist with the 5.9" single purpose guns? The mix of SP and DP 4.1" guns again increased length and decreased armor protection. DP armament featured on US cruisers from the 1929 Pensacola class onwards, plus the Washington/South Dakota battleships, all completed or under construction by the time of the H class designs. Did the Germans not have the capability build large caliber triple turrets? Did they tactically not understand the value of DP armament?
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  11.  @Raptor747  That really wasn't the issue. The Japanese were able to produce good reverse engineered copies of the 40mm. They just couldn't do it without a lot of hand work, didn't have the kinds of steels needed, and weren't able to produce them in numbers that would have made any difference. Remember that US, with a complete set of working drawings, several examples of the 40mm gun, and the vast industrial ability of the country in early 1940, still took almost two years to produce the first twin mount in January, 1942, and over two years to produce the first quad mount in April, 1942. The Japanese just didn't have the industrial capacity to produce the 40mm gun in any numbers regardless of the ROF or muzzle velocity.
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  12. I think you meant four 5"/25 caliber guns rather than 4" guns. She received an additional four 5"/25 guns in early 1941 in gun tubs surrounding the bridge, thus bringing her secondary armament into line with the other US Heavy cruisers of the time.
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  13.  @Alpostpone  Oops. you're right. I'm not good at keeping Finnish ship names straight. I've edited my comment to get it straight now.
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  14. If the Germans had developed the "Kurier" radio system earlier in the war they would have been able to communicate with their subs and not be detected. It was able to send coded messages at 600 words per minute while using a form of single sideband radio. The first radios on subs weren't installed until late 1944 and only about 20 boats were so equipped by the end of the war. The USN admitted after the war ended that a Kurier transmission was never DF'd. They never even knew the system existed until it was found on some surrendered boats,
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  15.  @micnorton9487  Sorry, Mic, you happened to be the third guy in the last three comments telling me something I wrote that I never did write, so you got nailed. I apologize. The Coast Guard in now part of Homeland Security, so they cooperate more with agencies like the DEA and local jurisdictions more than the Navy. Their primary work with the Navy is for search and rescue after a ship casualty or downed aircraft. In the course of an average month, I doubt there's another federal agency that works with such a wide variety of other federal and non-federal agencies as the Coasties.
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  16.  @ObviusRetard  Warrior was decommissioned on 1978 before being donated for preservation, so she was 117 years in service. Caroline was in commission until 2011, so she became the second oldest ship after Warrior was decommissioned, although she was "only" in commission for 97 years.
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  17.  @sharlin648  Do you realize that Miyazaki (note correct spelling) thinks this whole steampunk obsession with weird early 20th ships and guns is otaku? He can't stand most of today's anime and manga, especially this whole thing with military anime. He thinks it's all a fetish, and I tend to agree. If you're over 21 and still continue to be fascinated with this, don't invoke Miyazaki's name to justify it.
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  18. Holy cow! Three in a row. What an embarrassment of riches today. Thanks, Drach.
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  19. The U Boat attacks were generally confined to the waters of the Gulf of St Lawrence, the only part of the St Lawrence riverway wide enough and deep enough to allow U Boats to have the operational space they needed. As it turned out. the attacks on allied shipping in the Gulf turned out to be an advantage to Canada and the allies. Rather than convoys having to all assemble at Sydney NS, some of which were taking many days to navigate up the St Lawrence, shipping was diverted to the Canadian National Railway lines to Halifax, and convoys formed up there. The harbor was better, as were the defenses, and the removal of most of the convoy traffic from the St Lawrence decreased the U Boat targets and caused German to abandoned operations in the St Lawrence by mid-1943. U Boats did try to insert spies and pick up escaped POWs from the region, but none of those operations ever succeeded.
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  20. Ya know, my eyes are kinda tired. I could swear this Drydock said it was almost 6 hours long? Holy crap, that is what it said. It's almost midnight here. I don't think there's enough coiffee in the house to get through this video in one sitting.
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  21.  @micnorton9487  It's ok, very few people outside the Coast Guard know anything more about it other than it has ships and vaguely naval uniforms.It started out as part of the Lighthouse Serves. It was then put under the Treasury Department Revenue Service since it was enforcing tariffs and tariff smugglers. It was put incharge of immigrants and quarantines, piracy spression, regulating the slave trade, stopping general smuggling and then liquor smuggling during prohibition, safety inspections of ships and cargoes, rescuing ships and sailors in peril...almost any task the Navy wouldn't or couldn't do. It was under the Department of Transportation from 1967 to 2003, when it became part of Homeland Security.
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  22. The USN development of the 1.1" antiaircraft guns and quadruple mounts began in 1928. The Swedish development work on the 40 mm Bofors, Swiss, Oerlikon 20 mm, and the British 2 pounder single and then octuple mount guns all began work or even prototype testing in the mid to late 20's. You could certainly argue the interwar years saw feverish development of various rapid fire antiaircraft weapons as navies reached the slow realization that four hand loaded 3" guns wouldn't be quite enough for the next war.
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  23. Nova Topaz  I don't know where you came up with the idea the 8"/55 guns on the Des Moines class were ever claimed to be dual purpose guns. They were built to be rapid firing guns for surface action and shore bombardment and succeeded admirably. The rate of fire was 10 rounds a minute, at least twice as fast as any other 8" gun ever used, and it could fire at this rate for hours. Contrary to the failed 6"/47 guns on the Worcester, their automated shell loading worked almost perfectly for the entire time they were in service. The problem with the Worcester guns was the automatic loading didn't work properly. The need for a dual projectile hoist system to cater for AA and AP shells was a constant source of jamming. The design rate of fire was 20-25 rounds per minute in an attempt to best the 5"/38's ROF of 15-22 a minute. Instead, the poor performance of the dual lifts and constant jamming meant the real ROF never got above 12 rounds per minute. The jamming was partly due to the requirement for all elevation loading, something not actually achieved in automatic mode until the 5"/54 Mod 1 in 1980. Even then, the ROF was still only about 20 rounds per minute, but that was offset by the drastic reduction in manpower for these all automatic guns. 20 rounds per minute has continued to be a barrier for even modern automatic loading systems on medium caliber dual purpose guns
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  24. To my knowledge, the current crop of Littoral Combat Ships are the only major US vessels to have aluminum hulls. All other major USN ships have steel hulls. Some use aluminum in the superstructure, but none below the waterline. The current crop of aluminum hull LCS shows we still don't know how to control galvanic corrosion when aluminum is in contact underwater with dissimilar metals. It's something of myth that aluminum in the superstructure is a fire hazard. The RN did extensive studies after the Falklands War regarding the use of aluminum as contribution to fires. Their conclusion was that the use of aluminum contributed little to nothing in shipboard fires.
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  25. Ya know, one of the ways I know I've passed into geezerhood is when half the comments about the Naval Battle of Guadalcanal refer to a video game, some kind of anime, movies, and weird Japanese comic books, none of which I know anything about. I guess it happens to us all.
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  26. There was Project Hulu, the transfer of 149 vessels to the Soviet Union from Cold Bay, Alaska in 1945. The Soviet crews under training were under the command of the USN base commander, an arrangement made clear by Admiral Kuznetsov. Hew told all the Soviet sailors they were under the command of the Americans, and their orders were to be obeyed instantly. USN and Soviet sailors made up mixed crews of most of the transferred vessels before the formal transfer, and several of the first large ships, like the 34 patrol frigates, had mixed crews all the way to Kamchatka to make sure the Soviets really understood how to operate the ships. The transferred ships were then convoyed part of the way by USN ships, and some Soviet officers were transferred from the escorting ships back to the new Soviet ships by highline transfer. So, while this wasn't really a formal mixed crew ship, many of these ships in effect were mixed crews, at least for part of their service. It was certainly the largest transfer of vessels from one navy to another in WWII.
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  27.  @Drachinifel  Or top weight. :-) Sheffield was kind of an experimental ship in terms of radar. She usually had the latest British (and later American) radars and gunfire control systems. She was a good example of ship that massively increased her lethality over her time of service.
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  28. Thanks a lot of for answering my questions about the Vanguard. As a Yank, I don't always understand British thinking about what ships were built and what weren't. All your reponses make sense. It's unfortunate that the British government never saw the possibility of the Vanguard being more than the world's largest and most heavily armed royal yacht, her main use until she was placed in reserve in 1955. It's unfortunate that she never participated in the Korean Conflict. The RN might have gained a new appreciation for the need for shore bombardment even without another world war After a fairly comprehensive and expensive refit, and being placed into reserve in 1955 , Mountbatten and Anthony Eden came to power and seemed to be bent on disposing of half the RN fleet. After just four years in reserve, the decision was made to scrap the Vanguard and, by 1960, she was gone. The USN/US government maintained many ships in reserve postwar, some of which were war weary and completely obsolete, like the USS Wichita, for fifteen or more years before the mass scraping program set in from 1960 to 1962. I guess the end of empire, in some people's minds, also meant the end of the need for the RN beyond nuclear submarines, and that the USN would become the protector of the UK itself. It was a decision that would come back to haunt the British in 1982.
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  29. Modernized Fletchers also had two dual 3"/50 mounts, and those could have joined in if the Fletcher could have closed to within the effective range of all her guns. Very few modernized Fletchers kept all five 5", but a combination of the 5" and 3" would have been devastating to an Independence LCS. Even with just four 5" guns, each mount could maintain a ROF of 20 RPM, so that's 80 rounds per minute. Each 3" mount could maintain a ROF of 50 RPM. That adds another 100 rounds per minute, for a total of 180 RPM compared to the much smaller 57 mm gun's ROF of 200 RPM. We have good evidence of a Fletcher's ability to withstand battle damage by having had a lot of them tested to destruction. We really have no idea of the survivability of an Independence class. My guess in the end result would have the Fletcher sustaining a fair amount of non-fatal damage while the Independence class vessel would have been sinking or sunk.
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  30. The British fleet in the Med was there to fight surface actions with the Italian fleet. Let's face it, compared to Germany, Italy was always considered a second rate navy, and the RN was confident it could fight in the Med with some of its older but still powerful ships. What the RN didn't appreciate initially was the role of air power and how poorly equipped the fleet was to fight off air attacks. The found to their consternation that a couple of 3" guns and some quad Vickers machine guns just weren't a sufficient AA armament by 1940.
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  31. I was never concerned about it. As you say, it has been long enough now that being on the wreck for 45 minutes is less than the radiation I picked up flying there. Radiation is just one of those scary things ot a lot of people, so any radiation is bad to them. I don't know that I'd like to spend a couple days on the wreck but it's not a possibility we need to worry about. I did notice the wreck is festooned in marine growths., and there are thousands of marine creatures that do spend a good portion of their lives on the wreck I didn't notice any three eyed fish.
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  32. If it had been a few decades later, the Turks could have saved more money by issuing a painted KFC bucket instead of a fez.
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  33.  @russg1801  Yes, when I was there, a lot of work was being done below decks to stabilize the structure and generally paint and clean things up so visitors can see the lower three decks. There was also a lot of cosmetic restoration being done to the engines.
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  34. The USN had about 600 PT boats as well as all those Fletchers, Sumners, and Gearings, plus a crapload of DE's. The Japanese never developed the kinds of sonars and radars that could have made large numbers of coastal patrol craft useful. By 1944, Japanese ships were being sunk at a rate between two and three times the capacity of Japanese shipyards to replace them. The Japanese Navy was pretty well doomed by 1943 no matter what they did.
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  35. I remember reading a series of letters to the editors to the London Times from an "anonymous" Royal Navy officer during the Spanish-American war expressing surprise that Oregon successfully made it around the Horn , that the ship was able to survive the storm Drach mentioned, and was then made ready for battle relatively quickly once she arrived on scene. He had expected her low freeboard to sink her in any kind of weather, the quality of American seamanship so bad he was surprised Oregon didn't end up in Australia, and the quality of her construction was so poor that drydocking would show a fractured keel. The RN had very little respect for the upstart USN in those days. :-)
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  36.  @bkjeong4302  I don't know that facts would agree with your premise. Two Cleveland class light cruisers combined had 24 5" barrels compared to 20 on an Iowa. That's a slight win for the Cleveland's but only about the same number of combined barrels could be unmasked for either combination when used for antiaircraft fire. The combined Clevelands don't even come close when it's light fire being counted. Two Cleveland's by the end of the war were carrying 56 40mm barrels while an Iowa had at least 80 and, in a few ships, 96. Conomed 20mm guns on the Cleveland's was between 20 and 30 barrels compared the 49 carried by an Iowa, rising to 62 when twin mounts were added. Combined crews for the pair of Clevelands was 2510 while it was around 2700 for a single Iowa. That relatively small difference was pretty much negated when you look at the extra manpower and shipping needed to replenish two smaller vessels at sea compared to one large one. One Iowa was able to concentrate a truly horrifying stream of fire toward aerial attackers. When escorting a carrier, and there are many stories about a single Iowa breaking up an attack by 20-30 Japanese planes on a carrier. I think it was Admiral Nimitz who said the only ship he wanted ot see next to his carriers was an Iowa.
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  37.  @nath9091  The USN is paying docking and port fees so It makes sense for Singapore to build docks that can handle the largest ships the USN has. However, the USN didn't pay for the facilities. It was constructed by Singapore. The fees paid by the USN helps offset part of the cost of the base construction and expansion, but that still doesn't make the facilities cost neutral.
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  38. Only true until about Summer, 1943. By then. most Mark 15's were ether retrofitted or newly manufactured to correct the early war problems. The Battle of Vella Gulf in August, 1943 showed the problem days were mostly over.
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  39.  @HighlanderNorth1  That sums it up. I don't think the war in the Pacific would have gone so well without Admiral Robinson in charge. When it comes to fishing, that worked on ships with relatively low freeboard and ones that spent a lot of time dead in the water. It was hard to catch much from a cruiser making way at 25 knots. :-) PT boats were ideal for fishermen since they had the freeboard of a cabin cruiser and spent a lot of time at idle waiting to jump Japanese resupply barges. My dad said they even fish on moonlit nights when they could see their lines and the fish swimming by made luminescent wakes. The skipper was an inveterate fisherman. He'd spend time at the stern tending a couple lines while the XO kept an eye on the radar and yelled for him if there were any hits. By late 1943, there were only the occasional Japanese floatplane around so they didn't much have to worry about air attack. The old man was a motor machinist mate, so he spent a lot of his time with the engines. The heat was suffocating in the engine room so he'd come up on deck to spell gunner's mates so they could get some chow. He was manning the stern 20mm one time when one of those floatplanes came right up over the hill at them with no radar warning. He just happned to be watching that part of the sky when it happened, and he had it in his sights in a heartbeat. He opened up on it and tracked it right across the boat, the safety rails saving him from shooting up the bridge. The plane burst into flames and splashed a couple hundred feet off the bow. One of the other guys had to light his cigarette afterwards because he was shaking too much to hold the match. It was the one and only time he ever fired a weapon in anger during the war. It was also one of two planes the boat was credited with during the war. I still have the picture of him standing behind a piece of the vertical stabilizer they had fished out to make sure they got credit for the kill.
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  40. Without getting into blue vs red states, four states (Kentucky, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Virginia) call themselves commonwealths. It's just what the politicians in those states called themselves when their constitutions were written. It was a popular term in 1780 to show some anti-monarchical sentiment rather than any particular form of government. It has nothing to do with with their laws, relationship to the federal government, or any difference in being a state of the union.
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  41.  @WALTERBROADDUS  No, not at all. Rolls Royce designed the best engines of the first ten years of jet flight. My objection was the Soviet sympathizing Labour government of the time just passing on the family jewels to the Soviets for a pittance.
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  42. They were also lacking in good quality anti aircraft batteries. The original C/30 20 mm guns were very poor guns with a small magazine of just 20 rounds. That made them have a practical rate of fire of only about 120 rounds a minute. The C/38 models was a much improved gun, especially when used with the sophisticated quad mounting. It had a 40 round magazine and doubled the rate of fire per barrel compared to the C/30. Allied airmen soon learned to give German vessels used to escort submarines in and out of the Bay of Biscay a wide berth to avoid the fire of these guns. However, it was only when the German Navy started manufacturing Oerlikon 20 mm guns reverse engineered from army models that they had a truly effective single barrel hand swung model. It had a rate of fire of 450 rounds a minute, twice as fast as any German designed gun. As usual,, there were too few produced too late to make much difference. The 37 mm SK C/30 guns were hand loaded with very slow rates of fire and a poor mounting with a failed triaxial mount. The later KM 42 and KM 43 37 mm FLAK versions were much improved but came very late in the war when most of the surface fleet had been lost or decommissioned. The 105 mm guns had the potential to be excellent antiaircraft gun but, once again, they were in a triaxial mount that was too difficult to manufacture and just didn't work well in practice. The gun housing was poorly designed, being open at one end and allowing water to get in and ruin the electrical systems. Too few were manufactured to replace war losses as the war wound down for improvements in the 105 mm gun housing and fire control system to make any difference. In addition to luck, the Prinz Eugen survived as the only large surface vessel of the German navy by continuing improvements in her anti aircraft batteries. All the 37 mm guns were replaced with the German version of the Bofors 40 mm gun and the earlier C/30 and C/38 20 mm with the FLAK 28 and 29 models covering any empty spaces on the deck. While operating in the Baltic in the closing moths of the war, she was able to do impressive shore bombardment missions against the advancing Russian army while fighting off hordes of Russian aircraft due to her much improved anti aircraft batteries and radars.
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  43.  @knutdergroe9757  Thanks. He was a great dad. God bless your father as well. From everything my dad told me and from what I've read, that sounds like that was a pretty good description of Bulkeley. No one can doubt the man's bravery, but some people use that as currency.
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  44.  Erik Heath  No, U-Boats almost never transmitted unless it was short range coordination of a wolf pack. They were never required to submit sinking reports unless something very much out of the ordinary happened. U-Boat headquarters transmitted many messages to U-Boat but the boats only listened so there was nothing to DF. They believed that Enigma still make those message secure from decryption. The Germans used DF to establish the location of convoys so they were well aware of the dangers of transmitting while at sea. They developed the answer by a system called Kurier in 1944. It broadcast in a high speed burst mode that lasted less than ten seconds, and it used far off frequency sidebands. No allied vessel was ever able to DF a Kurier transmission.
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  45. Randy, her material condition was so poor, and the financial position of Britain was even worse postwar, that preserving her wasn't a realistic option. Unfortunate, since she was one of the best examples of an attempt to have the greatest firepower while still not cheating the Washington Naval Treaty.
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  46. Drach, you're welcome. I was really excited to see the PE come up in the list. I would have liked to have seen her in all her glory after she was surrendered to the British in 1946, but that was the year I was born, so the wreck will have to be second best. Oh, I forgot to mention that, for anyone who's nervous around sharks and barracudas, this is a dive to skip. I counted six oceanic whitetips that obviously called the wreck home and more barracuda than I cared to count. They never really bothered us, but the whitetips did give us a close inspection. Since most of the wreck is sitting hull up, you can see the sharks from quite a distance, and then just swim to other side of the hull to get away from them. I can see how it would freak out divers anxious about swimming with sharks though.
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  47.  @bcoop1701  And that wasn't anywhere near close to the maximum range of 43,000 yards. It would have still been traveling at 48 knots. That speed alone would have been enough to hole most hulls, not to mention the 1080 pound high explosive warhead of the Type 93. There are been very few weapons of war that remained an almost complete secret from the enemy, but it was an almost complete shock to the USN when an intact example was recovered at Guadalcanal in 1943. In fact, the Type 93 was a touchy weapon that would sink Japanese warships when they were caught in a bombing attack before the could jettison the torpedoes. Nevertheless, the type 93 remained a dangerous weapon for the USN, sinking its last ship in December, 1944, and that only because very few submarines and surface ships capable of handling the Type 93 remained afloat.
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  48. Since my dad served on the PT-171 in the Pacific, I'll put in a vote for a closer look at these valiant little vessels.
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  49.  @paulhinds4840  You're thinking of the US 28mm (1.1") guns. The Japanese has a 25mm gun. They did gain a rudimentary form of fire control toward the end of the war. In addition to the training being too slow, the laying was equally slow since it was all done by hand. The 25mm round was too small for any kind of explosive flak type charge, and it had the same issues as the US 28mm guin - the charge was just too small to reliably bring down an aircraft, even after multiple hits. The other major problem was the poor effective AA ceiling. It was less than 10,000 feet compared to the US 1.1" ceiling of 19,000 feet. One of the reasons why our aircraft attacks against Japanese ships were so effective was dive and torpedo bombers could orbit around five miles out at 15,000 feet until they saw an opportune time to attack and be out of range of Japanese light AA.
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  50. "15 days to flatten the curve...err, 15 weeks....err, 15 months...err, 15......"
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