Comments by "Sar Jim" (@sarjim4381) on "MN Richelieu - Guide 039 (Human Voice)" video.

  1. The French gave it the old college try with dual purpose armament, weighing down this class with nine six inch guns that were designed to be dual purpose. The weight saved by removing these and replacing them with either more 100 mm guns or, as the Americans proposed, the standard 5"/38 guns in twin mounts, would be an obvious benefit to the Richelieu class. The British understood that value and proposed replacing the Nelson class mixed armament with ether six or eight such twin mounts, although the limited availability of such guns saw WWII run out before this could happen. The French, however, still wanted their supposed dual purpose 6" guns, even though they never worked as intended before the war. They would spend even more money after the war trying to make these guns work in the AA role without any more success. The French wanted French weapons, working or not. The USN, not learning from the French example, went ahead and built the Worcesters, the heaviest class of "light" cruisers in any navy, armed with 12 of the supposed 6"/47 DP guns, and expended large amounts of scarce resources trying to make these work in the AA and surface roles, having little more success than the French. The class lasted only ten years in service and had guns that were not effective in the surface or AA role compared to the reliable 5"/38. The only two times she fired her 6" guns in anger in the AA role were both off Korea. The first was at an unidentified aircraft headed toward the ship. After three rounds of 6" fire that missed, the target was identified as a British Short Sunderland flying boat, and fire was checked. The second was the "Battle of the Geese", when Worcester, Helena and four destroyers opened up on an unidentified radar target that was later determined to be two large flocks of geese. It's unknown the number of geese casualties, but more than 300 rounds of 5" and 6" were fired at the poor creatures.
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  2. 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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  3. 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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  4. Nova Topaz  I think the part where the guns were used against the aircraft must have been some type of barrage fire. Large caliber guns using HC ammunition have been used in that role before. The RN were actually great believers in using barrage fire for their battleships to break up torpedo plane attacks. As a concept, it worked, but it almost never did in real life. Because of the rapid fire of the 8"/55, they may have had a better chance than most other cruisers but there were never any antiaircraft rounds produced for that gun, so my guess is that segment was for propaganda values rather than showing any real use for a gun that big against aircraft. What was a waste of money was the postwar idea of the navy that next war would be fought with high level bombers using nuclear weapons against the fleet. In order to engage them further from the fleet so they couldn't get close enough that a blast from an atomic bomb would sidable or sink ships, they wanted a larger caliber gun that could reach out to 15 miles at 30,000 feet. If the 6" guns of the Worcester class could have reached their planned ROF of 25 rounds a minute, the 12 guns of the ship may have been able to put up a sufficient volume of fire to accomplish the task. Close in aircraft would have been dealt with by the 24 barrels of the semi-automatic 3"/50 guns firing at 50 rounds per minute per barrel. By the time the navy realized the 6"/47 was never going to be a reliable weapon, they realized that missiles fired from other ships were the main menace, not high flying bombers. I'd argue the dual hoist system was a complete dead end and was a total waste of money, except possibly to show what didn't work. It was only when the single hoist system with ammunition changed out before it got the hoist that we developed the superb 5"/54 in all its marks. Then we started down the road of extended range ammunition to make the destroyer into a battleship, but that's another whole story of failure.
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