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

  1. Nice! Three thematically related video of three planned battleships from three different nations. I like this concept!
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  2. LOL. I'm afraid my cat is starting to do the same...
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  3.  freebeerfordworkers  Regardless of her use, she was never formally decommissioned from the navy. Even a hulk like Warrior in later years, when she was just a misc yard craft, still counts as being in commision. It's not like ships that are decommissioned into reserve. She was still part of the active fleet.
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  4. For those who may not have seen it, there's an interesting postwar summary about the 40mm Bofors from the Bureau of Ordnance at https://www.ibiblio.org/hyperwar/USN/Admin-Hist/075-Ordnance/075-Ord6R.html. While the 2 pdr was the finalist in the USN medium AA gun along with the Bofors gun, it was the continued British use of cordite powder that caused the Bofors to be the winner. Muzzle velocity was indeed important, but the fact the 2 pdr was already using inch measurement compared to the known problems of adapting metric to inch for the Bofors was an important variable that probably would have led to the 2 pdr's adoption if not for the cordite issue. Since it was a powder no longer in use in the USN, it would have required an entirely new manufacturing and supply line for the round, or a total dependence on Britain for supply. Neither one was considered desirable and, after September, 1940, it was considered that British supply might not even be possible. All the other issues could have been worked out, but cordite powder did the pom pom in for the USN.
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  5.  @bkjeong4302  I just showed you that two light cruisers are barely, if all, equal in antiaircraft firepower to one Iowa with just plain statistics, yet now you seem to have ignored that to go back to your narrative. What does the South Dakota's record at Santa Cruz in October, 1942, when she was still armed with primitive communications and fire control compared to 1945 ships, 1.1" guns, and before VT fuses, have to do with the performance of an Iowa in the antiaircraft role? South Dakota was still an effective escort for Enterprise, shot down at least seven attacking aircraft, and protected the Enterprise from the fate of the Hornet. An Iowa would have required less stores than two Clevelands per man and gun simply because of economies of scale. Rations alone would have required less because there's less wastage on one ship that two. It's one of the reasons cruise ships have become so gigantic. The Iowas were always built as fast carrier escorts, hence their high speeds. The assumption was their main role would be antiaircraft protection and shore bombardment with antisurface being secondary by late 1943. The 40mm gun was a very effective gun, shooting down about 35% of total planes downed in the Pacific. The 20mm gun was even more effective, shooting down about 39% of all planes and 42 of all suicide planes downed when the planes were in range. Rather than continuing to debate with a person who has his own notions about what happened, I'll quote something from a postwar Navy report about the effectiveness of antiaircraft guns and fire from a report you've clearly never read. "Thus, in suicide actions, battleships appear to have shot down twice as many planes as would have been expected on the basis of their opening ranges, the amount of ammunition they fired, and the average success attained by all ships under similar conditions." http://www.ibiblio.org/hyperwar/USN/rep/Kamikaze/AAA-Summary-1045/index.html#V Read the report and others like it before you come back again.
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  6. For once I was actually in bed when this video came out. It's kind of weird watching this after I have awakened instead of trying to stay awake. The most effective nuclear naval ordnance would have undoubtedly been the nuclear depth charge. A lot of USN nuclear depth charge testing is still classified, but what's available shows a single Mark 90 nuclear depth bomb could have destroyed any submarine within a 5-7 NM radius of the ship or aircraft that dropped the bomb, and the damage radius was about 10-12 NM. There's a good film about Operation Wigwam, which included a test of a Mark 90, at https://archive.org/details/gov.doe.0800018.
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  7.  @brockpaine  Indeed. almost all navies have a couple "must haves" when it comes to ships in commision. The British Kings and Queens, US Enterprise and Constellation, Brazilian Riachuelo, and Italian Garibaldi are just a few that come to mind. Navies in general are nothing if not for tradition.
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  8. That "Specialist Athlete" referred to the Specialist A,  Athletic Instructor. This was petty officer rank that only lasted from 1942-1944, replaced by the Physical Training Instructor specialist position. In addition to these specialists keeping the crew fit and healthy. the various professional coaches for the ship's teams, like baseball and boxing, fell into this position.
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  9. As I understand it, the plane was recovered about five days after it sank and was then torn down as part of the investigation into how it was constructed.
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  10. Victor, you're welcome. I've always like the peripheral events that swirled around the main and better known battles. In this case, I think this is the only German aircraft to effectively change hands to the Norwegians and then from the Norwegians to the British. It's also a good indicator that the Norwegian armed forces were not rolling over and playing dead, as some of their larger and better equipped counterparts in Europe did. When they had the equipment and, most importantly, any kind of air cover, the fought bravely and effectively. As an example, the Dutch only lasted four days with an armed forces of 280,000 men while the Norwegians lasted a little over a month with forces of about 60,000 troops. The Norwegians were also the only Allied force other than the British to sink a major German surface ship.
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  11. How would one judge history except in hindsight? What exactly do you object to about Drach's conclusions? A comment like yours is so free of any details it borders on trolling.
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  12. They are anti-torpedo nets. Made of material resembling very heavy chain link fence, they were deployed when a battle developed or when there was a submarine risk. There's a good article about them along with some pictures of the nets deployed at http://www.gwpda.org/naval/nets.htm.
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  13. You've got the FRAM upgrades a bit wrong. The FRAM I upgrade was the most comprehensive and involved stripping most of the superstructure down to the main deck level, completely rebuilding the engines, adding all the modern radars and sonars, mostly removing the "B" forward 5" mount, although some kept two mounts forward and none aft, and then rebuilding the superstructure with a new and roomier bridge, an ASROC deck and launcher, and the DASH hanger and landing deck. Automation helped reduce crew size, habitability was improved, and they were given full air conditioning and NBC protection. This upgrade was performed exclusively to Gearing class ships. The FRAM II was a more austere upgrade, with the original superstructure forward of the stacks kept, engines rebuilt but only to the extent need to extend service life by seven years, no ASROC, although deck space was reserved for a later installation, and some ships having te B mount replaced by a pair of trainable Hedgehogs. Not all ships received full NBC protection. Some kept all three 5" mounts while some had one fore and aft like the FRAM I ships. Almost all the FRAM II ships were Sumner class, but sixteen were Gearing class deemed to have less service life available than other Gearings. Four Fletcher class ships were involved with FRAM II upgrades, but only three were part of the official program. One, USS Hazelwood, had the DASH landing deck and hanger added in 1957, and she served as a trials ship for the DASH program. She never received any other FRAM upgrades but had the largest DASH landing deck of all the FRAM type destroyers. She was decommissioned in 1965. The bottom line is every FRAM ship got a DASH deck and hanger. Other than that, there was wide variability in retained guns, superstructure, ASROC, torpedo tubes, and Hedgehogs.
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  14. Thanks for this video. I had only a superficial understanding of the voyage of the Russian fleets and knew it was terrible but your video really illustrated just how terrible it was. Just the fact the fleet made it all the way around the world under such appalling conditions mostly intact is pretty amazing. I really shouldn't be laughing at the inhumane conditions on the Russian fleet, but I just couldn't help it. :-) EDIT: The laughing part got more prolonged as the video proceeded. Given that I was eating a sausage biscuit for breakfast while watching this, the hilarity led to several choking incidents and near death moments, one caused by the thought of crocodiles and venomous serpents roaming the decks at will. From now on, please include a trigger warning about choking hazards when you do another one like this.
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  15. To be fair, one of the reason why almost all scouting and scout bomber aircraft were two place is so the observer could use a pretty good set of optics to give them more details than the Mark I Eyeball. As Drach pointed out, in less than ideal conditions, accuracy of identification deteriorated rapidly. The RN not only recognized this problem earlier than other major navies, they treated finding a solution as an emergency. Consequently, they used Identification, Friend or Foe (IFF) systems on their ship and aircraft earlier than other countries. As usual, you can identify the pioneers by the arrows in their back. The original IFF system depended on a passive system using a vertical dipole, and the only receiver sensitive and wide banded enough was a superregenerative type. I won't get into all the technical detail since I'm sure most you don't really care about them, but the super regen receiver was extremely difficult to tune sitting at a desk on dry land. Doing so in a Swordfish, while being buffeted by rough air and rapid changes in altitude, required an observer that was both skilled and lucky. The passive dipole system was unreliable even if the receiver was working correctly. Yet another British invention allowed the radar signal itself to actively interrogate a receiver on a ship or another aircraft. The IFF was then transmitted as a coded part of the radar return. That meant no fiddling with receivers on an aircraft, and it was also more difficult for the enemy to compromise the system. By the second half of 1944, about 75% of RN ship and aircraft and nearly 100% of US ships and aircraft were equipped with IFF. The extremely time consuming teaching of ship and aircraft recognition from models, photos, and drawings became much less important. A pilot merely had to interrogate the IFF receiver on a ship. If it was one of ours, a spike on the radar screen would show a positive return. In later iterations, the return could even tell a pilot the name and type of a ship or the type of aircraft being interrogated. While this greatly reduced blue on blue attacks for a time, it didn't eliminate them. Imagine seeing an unidentified ship, interrogating on the correct IFF channel, and getting no return. Enemy ship, attack away...except what happens if the IFF on the ship was broken and not working? With pilots given less recognition training and early electronics subject to frequent failures, the number of mistaken attacks on friendly ships actually increased for a short period of time in late 1944. A crash program to make IFF more reliable and getting pilots trained in better visual recognition reduced the blue on blue attacks to much lower levels by early 1945 than those seen earlier in the war. IFF systems in use today, although much more sophisticated and reliable, are still based on the same principles as used in the late WWII systems.
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  16. Thanks, Drach. The Battle class were very pleasant looking ships, and I liked them at first sight when I first saw them as a kid. Of course, this was long before the internet, and ship pictures were only found after many a Saturday afternoon poring through every book with pictures I could find. I assumed that, much like the USN Allen M Sumner class, these had another twin turret aft, and all the pictures were of such poor quality they just didn't show the aft turret, hidden among the top hamper of all the Bofors guns. I must have been about 15 before I found a really good book about WWII British destroyers, something not easy to find in small town Ohio in what must have been 1959-1960. It was then I found out this class really didn't have any aft main battery turrets, but it had a single open 4" mount instead. Since the Sumner and Battle classes were of roughly equal size and displacement, it really didn't make much sense to limit the heavy DP guns to forward mountings only. To this day, I'm still somewhat baffled by that design decision on the part of the Admiralty. Maybe someone who knows more about British destroyers than I do can explain it for me. Admiral Cunningham hated these ships. He rather famously said, after his first voyage on HMS Solebay that the ship was too big and "had every damned weapon and gadget except guns". Cunningham was an old-time destroyerman and believed newer destroyers should match the "Greyhound of the Seas" design philosophy of older destroyers. Cunningham, as great an admiral that he was, just didn't have much appreciation for the need to accommodate all the new electronics and weapons of modern naval warfare. He wasn't wrong about the Hazemeyer mounts though. At six tons for a twin mount, and even heavier as more on-mount radars were added, they really were the first of what we now call a close in weapons system. The design and requirements were just too advanced for the times they were built. They were excellent mounts when they worked but, with the vacuum tube technology of the day, that wasn't very often. Combined with the mass of gears and valves needed to maintain the triaxial stabilization, it would have been a good mount if it was introduced in 1950 instead of 1940. Unfortunately, the RN decided the way forward was the STAAG mount, an even heavier and more unreliable mount, but that's a story for another day.
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  17.  @mongolike513  The story would make a good episode for him. Didn't he once say he had relative in the Coast Guard?
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  18.  @micnorton9487  That's unfortunate. The Coast Guard is one of the few uniformed services that has civilian law enforcement authority, and it enforces laws in any state or territory. They are kind of the federal police on the ocean but also ashore.
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  19. The Clemson class were not only very uncomfortable due to constant rolling in any kind of sea, but they were also unsafe for her crews. The very finely pointed stern made the depth charge racks hang perilously over the stern, and the four props that were completely exposed killed a number sailors lost overboard while engaged in depth charge operations. This was in spite of the massive prop guards clearly visible in any stern photo of a Clemson . The design was chosen in a bid for the highest speed on the least possible displacement because, as usual, our Congress refused to provide the funds for a larger design with higher output engines on about a thousand tons more displacement.
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  20. The USN was is a somewhat similar situation with the South Carolina class. When placed in service in 1910, it was the first dreadnought with all the 12" guns in super firing service on the centerline. If the building pace for the class wasn't quite so leisurely. the class would have been in the role now given to Dreadnought . Like Dreadnought , the South Carolina didn't see much action in WWI and had only a little over ten years useful service before falling victim to the Washington treaty.
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  21.  @willrogers3793  Thanks. This is one of those excursions into "What If" land that I enjoy doing and at least some people (like yourself) like to read, but it's kind of a narrow subject, and pretty wordy (sorry about that). Some people just don't have an interest in this kind of thing and others don't like wading through a lot of words. I understand both points of view, but I am glad you enjoyed it.
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  22. The 5.25" gun was easily the longest ranged AA gun of the war. Where they fell down was cramped turrets, too much shell handling, especially having to do fuze setting before loading, and generally cramped turrets. These shortcomings were all overcome with the guns and turrets used on HMS Vanguard , but she never fired he gins in anger, and really rarely fired her guns at all. A case of getting everything done right just when it was no longer needed.
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  23. Acronym for Spanish navy ship.
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  24.  @themadhammer3305  Yeah, I've seen those pictures. They are mostly on tankers at least one generation earlier than current ships, and they were huge because the crew had no other way to be able to monitor tanks and the hull for leakage without them. They caused a lot of problems for ship designers and sailors. The overhanging wings caused excessive vibration in the superstructure. I can only imagine how much fun it was standing a watch on the extremities of the wings in heavy weather. New tankers have color CCTV cameras that have taken over the monitoring and made those huge bridge wings a thing of the past. Even some of the older tankers are being updated with cameras and getting the wings removed.
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  25. It's always seemed odd to me that mast positions compared to stack locations was a constant problem from the start of the age of steam until (in some cases) right up to WWII. Naval architects and engineers knew how air moved across the decks and which way smoke would go. They also know that fire control and lookout positions too near a stack could not only make both positions less effective, the great clouds of smoke under a full head of steam could actually asphyxiate crew members in those position. Regardless, ships kept coming out that would be partly crippled in battle due to the issue. It's like using square wheels on cars long after it was apparent that square wheels didn't work. :-)
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  26. OLDCONTEMPTABLE  As with so many things in Japan, the navy got a lot of their ship design and training through Britain, and a lot of British doctrine was in use. One of those was main battery barrage firing. I'm just going from memory here but there was at least one time a US torpedo bomber attack was broken up by barrage firing from three battleship all firing together. They weren't aiming at the planes but aiming at the water in front of them. At least one plane was destroyed by the shell splashes and the others broke off the attack. I t as to have been frightening to fly directly into 14" and 16" shell splashes let alone form an 18'1" splash. The problem with barrage firing was it took practice to get good at it, and battleship size ammunition wasn't cheap.
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  27.  @Johnnycdrums  No, the Blues went from Panthers to Cougars to the F-11 Tiger. There were only two Cutlass aircraft with the Blues and they were only flow as demonstration aircraft before they were dismantled. The F-11 was a fairly large slightly supersonic aircraft with pleasant flight characteristics and ability to perform almost any aerobatic maneuver without tearing the wings off it. It was much too slow and the engine had too many teething problems to make it into long term squadron service, but all the characteristics I mentioned made it an ideal Blue Angels plane. The Blues flew the Tiger until 1969, long after it had been otherwise withdrawn from other naval service. uch of the technology from the Tiger was used in the hugely successful McDonnell Douglas F-4J Phantom II, the Blue's next mount.
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  28.  @TEHSTONEDPUMPKIN  Good heavens. Judging a real battleship by if it appears in any Japanese anime/busty school girl games. I've never understood the kawaii thing among Westerners.
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  29.  @kemarisite  Indeed, and eventually the Seafire finally gave the RN a modern fighter capable of taking on the Zero and most later fighters. It took quite a while to build up Seafire strength, only finally being speeded up to equip the British Pacific fleet to intercept the expected hordes of kamikaze attackers during the invasion of the Home Islands. Even with its unreinforced narrow track undercarriage, it performed surprisingly well as a naval fighter, only being topped by the excellent Sea Fury, developed just too late for the war. The Corsair was an even better naval fighter, and the Avenger, a better torpedo attack plane than the venerable String Bag, which had very little chance of survival against the better Japanese fighters. Ironically, it was mostly the British demonstration of using the Corsair on even their smaller carriers that finally convinced the USN that the Corsair might also be the war winner that it eventually turned out to be.
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  30.  @jamestheotherone742  No, he's not correct. There weren't "many" men who refused orders from a drill sergeant, presumably during basic. Those that did ended up in the brig and in penal units, but they were a very small percentage of those drafted. The percentage of those that were malingerers was always small, varying from 1% to 5%, depending on types of units, type of service, and what war was being studied. Most of the real behavior problems were weeded out during basic and given dishonorable or less than honorable discharges, many after some time at Leavenworth. There's a good study about this subject at https://academic.oup.com/milmed/article/178/1/50/4210902. It makes a lot more sense to learn actual facts about this rather than repeat garbage from people who have an axe to grind and essentially make things up.
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  31. Back in the days where there really were a multiplicity of guns on USN ships. the Marines provided gun crews for at least two 5"/38 mounts and a couple of quad 40mm mounts. They not only provided the crews, they became the experts on repair and and maintenance on their mounts. They'd assist Navy ordinance men at those tasks when asked, and they provided a far bit of training for the FNGs that were assigned to gunnery roles. With far fewer guns on Navy ships now, Marines still man some of the free swinging light weapons like.50 caliber M2 machine gun and 25mm Bushmaster cannons. They are the landing force in being if a small target needs to be attacked and secured, and they provide ship security for nuclear weapons compartments and various top secret areas of the ship. Marines are responsible, along with the Navy Master At Arms, for the overall protection and security of the ship while in port and at sea, with Marine NCOs often acting as the Officer of the Deck. They were generally in charge of the brig, and moving prisoners between the Captain's Mast and place like sick bay. What Marines really practice for is an attack of the ship while it is in port. If the SHTF and the ships is under fire from attackers attempting to seize the vessel, the Marines are the ones that turn out with weapons locked and loaded, ready to fight off the threat or die trying. In between such feats of derring do, Marines also swab the decks and do KP, so it's not all fun and games.
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  32. Once the US Mark 14 torpedo's problems were worked out, it became as reliable and effective as any other unguided torpedo. They continued in USN service until 1980, in part because there were 13,000 in inventory at the end of the war, and in part because they had become a well understood weapon that generally went where it was aimed and sunk almost any ship it hit. The RN's Mk VIII torpedo had a similar but even longer service life, first being used in 1937 and finally being declared obsolete in 1985. Enough time has passed that guided torpedoes have become the norm in most navies, but smaller navies used the British and US WWII torpedoes well into the 1990's. The latest I know of for the Mark 14 was on the last Gearing class destroyers of the Mexican Navy. They carried Mark 14's until their retirement in 2003 and 2009. I believe the last use of the RN Mk VIII was with India on their
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  33.  @colinwhaley244  Right, but that's not the sole purpose of the bridge. Visibility for side maneuvering by the captain or XO is important, and someone needs enough aide and forward visibility to pass orders to the helmsman. Keeping track of aircraft executing a bow on attack, or a surface ship crossing your "T" is also kind of important. There were many reason why good visibility from the bridge was important other than just steering the ship.
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  34. Dang! Just about to hit the power switch and head off for bed at 0316 CDT and a notification for the Drydock pops up. So much for the sleep plan!
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  35. Thanks for answering my casemate question. An additional issue with casemates was the risk of flooding as ship speeds increased. Many navies had to move casemates up to main deck or even superstructure level to obviated flooding. I think it was the increasing use of heavy dual purpose batteries like the USN 5" and RN 5.25" guns that finally put an end to the casemate.
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  36. Illustrious started life as one of the most heavily armed British aircraft carriers, long before there was any American influence. Increases in AA armament up until early 1945 primarily consistent of replacing existing single mount 20mm guns with twins. Even for Pacific service, only one of the six octuple pom poms was replaced with a twin Bofors mount. It wasn't until 1946, when the RN in general was rearming with Bofors guns, that more of the pom poms were removed, and it wasn't until 1948 that the last pom poms were removed and replaced with Bofors guns. This is one ship that wasn't a Second Amendment version of a British vessel.
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  37. Holy crap! Five hours today? Time to get out some extra coffee and a couple fresh chair cushions. Great combination of Christmas, Boxing Day, and New year's presents for all of us naval fans. Thanks, Drach!
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  38. How about a t-shirt with a drawing of the fully rebuilt Hood? I'd buy one of those, if only just to get other warship aware friends to ask "What's that?"
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  39.  @gunther_hermann  I don't think the disguises made much difference in this battle. It was unlikely anything as large as the Cap Trafalgar would have had any innocent reason to be lying in the small harbor of Trindade Island alongside two colliers. The Carmania had been sent to the archipelago specifically because the Admiralty suspected the Germans had set up a base there, and it was known the Brazilian Navy had no ships in the area. It was quite a furious battle between the two former liners, and one that went on for hours. Considering how outmatched Cap Trafalgar was, it's amazing that she nearly sunk Carmania, with only two 4.1" guns compared to the eight 4.7" guns of her British opponent. It was a battle at close quarters not seen in the age of steam before or after. It would make, as the British would say, a cracking good tale of two passenger liners fighting each other to the death, and a great episode for Drach to present.
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  40.  @fastmongrel  My comment had nothing to do with which class launched first, only that both type of ships had the same kind of utility to their respective navies.
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  41. I agree on the issue of battleships. Too big and too expensive. However, the problem with ships like Burke class when it comes to shore bombardment is the single 5" gun will have a limited barrel life if there's a small war (but bigger than the Falklands) that requires guns rather than missiles. Having some vessel with multiple turrets with multiple guns seems like it would make sense. Traditional 8" guns able to use rocket assisted rounds makes a near ideal shore bombardment gun with ranges out to 100 miles. I suspect the single gun main battery will be found to be a mistake at some time in the future.
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  42.  @AdamMGTF  You're quite welcome. First time I've seen this thread in a bit. As usual, there are always a few folks in these threads that have their own axe to grind. I just try to tell stories based on 50+ years of studying naval history. I like the small details and interesting stories of the periphery of the big battles we always hear about. I'm 73 so I have a few years on you, and Youtube is it when it comes to social media for me as well. I started watching Drach's videos way back when it was the robot voice and really was five minute histories. He has developed his channel into what o consider to be one of the best naval history channels on Youtube, or really anywhere. I don't know that I've watched all his videos but it's a large percentage of them, and his conversion of many of the early videos into his own narrations make them just that much better. Thankfully, you and he are much younger men than me, so I expect you to start doing that legwork and digging up some of these interesting small stories. I know Drach enjoys them because he kindly gave me a shoutout a few videos back saying so. You can be doing the same thing long after I've shuffled off this mortal coil.
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  43. Except for the commie sailors at the end, at least the Slava went down as a good fighting ship, unlike so many other Russian capital ships.
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  44.  @Hardcase_Kara  The death tolls from the Arizona and Oklahoma were massive compared to the Utah. The 1,177 men that died on the Arizona was nearly half the total death toll at Pearl Harbor with the 429 men killed in the Oklahoma coming in second. Then we have the iconic film of the Arizona's huge magazine explosion, something that has become emblematic of the entire attack. As much as I want all those that died during the attack to be remembered, ships like the Utah just didn't enter the public consciousness like the Arizona. I've heard the story about the supposed urn of a child of one of the sailors aboard the Utah at the time of the attack. All my attempts to verify this story have landed at dead ends. I'm not saying it couldn't be true, only that the story, along with several others about some aspect of the attack, appears to be apocryphal.
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  45. Thanks for this series. Now. my "what if" question - What if Germany had completed and put into service the Electroboat submarines a year before they actually did?
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  46. Thanks, Drach, and entertaining and informative story of one of the few campaigns where luck on both sides were the major operational factors. Churchill must have been ready to bite the head off a tenpenny nail over that one. I wonder if there was any chance of engaging Norway in some kind of secret alliance where they would at least share more information? I know Norway had always been a neutral nation, but my reading of a couple of Norwegian diplomat's biographies indicated they knew the peril they were in after the German invasion of Poland and didn't believe Germany or England would permit them to stay neutral. Maybe a couple of English diplomats with Norwegian connections could have convinced Norway to accept an RN shield against German attack, thereby leading to less RN sneaking around and into Norwegian waters and the attendant diplomatic flurry each time it happened. Norway wouldn't have to join Britain in war in September, 1939, just look the other way as the RN kept an eye on German operations.
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  47.  @comandercarnis  They did the reverse engineering in 1942. The problem wasn't that it was too late, it was they didn't have the machine tools to manufacture parts to the tolerances demanded by the gun. They made something like 25 guns a year in 1943 and 1944 as test guns, but they mostly stopped trying by 1945 because they couldn't get them to run reliably. If they had, Japanese vessels would have had Bofors guns by late 1943.
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  48.  @rogerhwerner6997  Yes, just like the "dynamite" gun, it has looked far better on paper than it has as an experimental weapon. There are laws of physics that are against the rail gun, and the chances of it ever becoming an operational weapon is becoming less and less likely. As you say, there are other less costly and less risky weapons that will probably go into service long before the rail gun.
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  49. I can only imagine the effect on German morale seeing these weird looking airplanes coming into cities and blowing up with no idea where the heck these things were coming from or what they were. Goring would have been in trouble with Hitler a lot sooner.
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  50. ​ Don White  Agreed, Don. I am constantly gratified at the well informed and articulate naval history buffs Drach consistently attracts. Well, except for one here, but there always has to be "that guy", it seems.
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