Comments by "Steve Valley" (@stevevalley7835) on "Drachinifel"
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Speaking of the WWI battlecruiser situation, some accounts I have read say that, in spite of the press of other priorities, construction of Hood proceeded as Hood, combined with the two Renowns then building, would make up the battlecruiser losses from Jutland. What if Fisher's salesman skills were just a bit better and the contracts for Agincourt and Resistance were also converted to Renown class battlecruisers? With four Renowns building, would Hood have been proceeded with, or any of the Admirals laid down at all? Then, in the late 1930s, with the KGVs and fast carriers under development, the other three Renowns receive rebuilds comparable to Renown's, because they can keep up with the new ships, while QE, Warspite and Valiant remain in their 1930 form, similar to Malaya and Barham. Would anything really change in WWII?
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@Blandge I can see a US pre-war heavy cruiser being mistaken for a "California type" BB, because of the USN's affection for "clipper" bows. I don't know about the most egregious case. How many times did the Japanese claim to have sunk Enterprise? The second Lexington, CV-16, was claimed sunk by the Japanese so many times it became nicknamed "the blue ghost", blue for the camo paint color it was painted, and ghost because if was claimed sunk so many times. When I was on the Lex, some 50 years ago, I noticed a blue ghost mascot painted on the ship's C-1. The Wiki article says sinkings were claimed following actions on Dec 4, 43, March 8, 44, June 11,44, November 5,44
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@collinwood6573 considering how elderly the TBD was by 42, it was OK. It was considerably slower than the other USN aircraft, when loaded. That low cruising speed, I put down to the drag from the unorthodox way the TBD carried it's torpedo: hanging down at an angle, rather than cinched up tight under the fuselage. The reason the TBD was slaughtered at Midway was the attack was fatally botched. At Coral Sea, the TBDs, SBDs and F4Fs, made coordinated attacks. At Coral Sea, a few SBDs and F4Fs were lost to the Japanese CAP, but not a single TBD was lost to Japanese action. The only difference between Coral Sea and Midway was the SBDs and F4Fs all went in the wrong directions, leaving the TBDs exposed.
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@brendonbewersdorf986 not quite up to the Bofors standard, but John Browning designed a 37mm AA gun for the US army. Originally clip fed, from the left side, it was modified to take chain link belts, and feed from either the right or the left. I proposed, on another page, that, given a proper water cooling system, the Browning gun could have been used in a quad mount very much like that used on the PomPom, instead of the USN trying to get he 1.1" working. Of the two, the Browning 37, and the Bofors, the Bofors is the better gun. I have my notes somewhere, but, iirc, it comes down to the Bofors having a slightly larger shell, and a higher ceiling. The US Army used the Browning gun well into 42, gradually replacing it as Bofors became available.
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wrt the alt history of no allied intervention in Greece, the Axis was working on getting access to the oil fields of Iraq and Iran. The Vichy government was increasingly accommodating to the Axis, allowing Luftwaffe units to operate in airfields in Syria. Italy and Germany had backed a coup in Iraq, April 1, 41, which removed the pro-British regime and installed a pro-Axis regime. The Iranian regime was also regarded as Axis friendly. Without Allied intervention, Greece may have been defeated sooner, enabling an amphibious operation from Greece to Syria. British troops invaded Iraq May 2, 41, closing the door on the possibility of unopposed Axis access to Iraqi oil, before the Germans could secure Greece and Crete.
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wrt to the question of Revenge being a downgrade from the QE, and other cases of following ships being less capable, another glaring example are the USN Mississippi class BB-23 and 24. The Mississippis were of smaller displacement than the preceding Connecticut class, and so short on speed and coal capacity that they were incapable of keeping up with the rest of the battle line. The Mississippis were the product of Senator Hale, the Chairman of the Senate Naval Affairs Committee, who refused to pass the Navy appropriation legislation the House had passed to the Senate floor until his two small battleships were funded. Press criticism of the Mississippis at the time was blistering and there were charges that Hale was insisting on the small ships for personal reasons. Hale retired from the Senate in 1911, making the ships expendable. The Greeks showed up, with checkbook in hand, in 1914, desperate for battleships to counter those the Ottomans had building in the UK. Even then, the US held Greece up for some $12M+, what the US had paid for the the undersized, and by 1914 obsolete, ships, when new.
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wrt the question on relining guns, I happened to read a US Naval Academy gunnery textbook from 1915 last week that describes the process in detail. At the turn of the century, a lot of guns were initially built without liners, and had to be bored out to make room for the liner when the gun was refurbished. The feed rate for the boring operation was about 6"/hour, so boring a 12-14" gun would take 4-5 days, running continuously, per pass, and it would take several passes to bore the gun sufficiently to allow insertion of a liner. Initially, the liners were of uniform diameter, which simplified the boring operation. The liners were inserted and removed by placing the gun in an oven and heating it, to cause the metal of the gun to expand, so the unheated liner could be inserted. Removing an existing liner amounted to heating the outside of the gun, while running cold water through the bore to keep the liner cool so it would not expand with the heated gun. Then pressing out the old liner with a press. Sometimes, the uniform diameter liners did not want to come out, and had to be bored out, consuming a great deal of time and expense. So the shift was made to boring the gun and turning the OD of the liner with a slight taper, so they would separate more readily.
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wrt the question on the F2A, as Drac said, the first problem was weight. The early models were quite agile. "Pappy" Boyington praised it's handling. But the Navy wanted armor, self-sealing fuel tanks, more guns, more ammo, and weight grew. Besides a disastrous impact on performance, the increased weight lead to more landing gear failures. In Aussie hands, the planes were put on a diet: all the armor, except that directly behind the pilot, was removed. The wing 50 cal machine guns were replaced with .303s. Besides the reduced weight of the .303 guns and their ammo, putting the weight reduction out on the wins would also reduce rotational inertia, which improves roll rate. The life raft and Brewster provided radio, which did not work worth a hoot, were also removed. As modified, the Aussie Buffs apparently pretty much held their own against the early Japanese army fighters. Another problem was the engines installed on the Aussie and far east RAF Buffs. There was apparently a shortage of Wright Cyclones, so the planes built for export were fitted with worn out airline castoffs (the DC-2 used the Cyclone) that had been 'refurbished" by Wright. Whether due to the engines being refurbs, or the fundamental design of the engine, I don't know, but the Buffs in far east service also tended to overheat and blow out their oil. Given that the Cyclone was also used in the SBD and B-17, I would lean toward laying the engine's ill temper in the export Buffs on their state of wear, in spite of being "refurbished". Best moves to improve the Buff, besides the weight reduction program the Aussies gave them, would be actual, new, Cyclones, or Pratt Twin Wasps, like the earlier, Grumman-built, F4Fs had. Or, take the entire program away from Brewster and give it to someone who knew how to run an aircraft factory, and had capacity available.
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Drac, I started looking in to the Courageous class "large light cruisers" some days ago. There are two narratives about them that I see repeated over and over: 1: they were built with shallow draft to operate in the Baltic. and, 2: they were converted to carriers because of the Washington treaty. I can't find any support for either of those narratives that makes any sense. As you point out in your piece on the Courageouses, the Germans could send any capital ships into the Baltic that they wanted via the Kiel Canal. If the Courageouses were the only big gun ships the RN could get into the Baltic, they would be dead meat when the entirety of the High Seas Fleet came over the horizon. If the RN could get other capital ships into the Baltic, there is no reason to build the Courageouses. The WNT appears to not regard the Courageouses as "capital ships". The Courageouses do not appear on the capital ship disposal list, nor the capital ship retention list, nor is there any verbiage that I can find in the treaty compelling their conversion. Why were the Courageouses built? One person on another forum has offered a scenario that makes sense: the Courageouses were built as cruiser killers that were small and cheap enough, in relative terms, to build in large quantity. That scenario has the virtue of making sense. The Courageouses cost a third less than the Renowns, and used fewer of the limited inventory of twin 15" turrets per ship, allowing more of them to be built. Have you ever heard of this alternative to the generally accepted scenarios?
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@jetdriver by "fully modernized" members of the Big 5, I presume you are referring to California and West Virginia. Those ships had been sunk, and were going to be in the yard a long time anyway. As long as a lot of reconstruction was being done anyway, may as well build them to 1942 standard. Colorado received next to nothing in reconstruction, just added AAA. Once the war was on, as long as ships were not severely damaged, I can understand the Brits not wanting to take a ship offline for a year or two for major work. As for wearing out the QEs and Rs, the ships were over 20 years old and obsolete. With Italy out of the war in 43, the German capital ships mostly sunk, and the KGVs in commission, the old tubs were not worth more than what could be described as palliative care as they all had a date with the breakers on V-E day.
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wrt the question about models vs drawings, in some applications, the model was built first, because of the difficulty of rendering 3-dimentional objects on 2-dimension drawings. When I worked in fluid handling in the 70s, it was routine to build a model of a refinery or chemical plant first, to work out all the pipe routing, then make up drawings from the model. It was routine to build full scale mockups of new aircraft for the same reason, to work out all the hydraulic and electrical conduits and possible interference with bulkheads. The Boeing 777 was the first aircraft to be designed entirely in computer, in the early 90s, because, 3D computer modeling had finally advanced enough.
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USN procurement choices in 1936. That is a "target rich environment", especially BuOrd. It wasn't just the ineffective Mk 14 detonators. The air launched Mk 13 torp suffered multiple failure modes including the motor not starting, sinking, running too deep and running erratically. In a live fire exercise in the summer of 41, of 10 Mk 13s fired, only 1 ran hot, straight and normal. Once BuOrd was convinced the failures were not all pilot error and went to work, the faults were corrected and the Mk 13 was an excellent weapon, by late 44. Then there was the 1.1" AA gun. Looked good on paper, liquid cooling and an automatic ammo feed system so it could fire continuously, with a larger shell and greater range than the 25mm AA guns then available. But the 1.1" had multiple jam modes, plus the human factors issue of not having adequate room for the loaders to do their job. The Navy produced a color newsreel film about Midway that has several short looks at a couple 1.1s, firing. In the first 3 looks, the 1.1" in the foreground is blasting away with all 4 guns and looking very formidable. In the 4th glimpse, only the gun on the right end is firing, the other three are all stopped. The 1.1's faults were never corrected. If BuOrd was not going to conduct adequate development programs and deliver reliable weapons, they should have overcome their "not invented here" bias and bought weapons from other services. so we would have gone into the war with Brit Mk VIIIs in subs, Brit Mk XIIs in aircraft, and Bofors AA guns.
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@sharlin648 in short, yes, the Pom-Pom was hindered by a low muzzle velocity, which limited range. Keep in mind how old the Pom-Pom design was by WWII. The early, smaller bore version, dated from the Boer War. I have heard wartime Pom-Pom gunners say their objective was not so much to shoot down enemy aircraft, as it was to provide deterrence: throw so much flack in the aircraft's path that the pilot decides to go look for an easier target. The Pom-Pom had something of a renaissance when the RN returned to the Pacific late in the war. While the Pom-Pom lacked the range to effectively engage attacking aircraft before they dropped their payload, in the case of a kamikaze, where the aircraft does it's damage at zero range, the range limitation of the gun was not a factor. When a kamikaze closed to effective range, a Pom-Pom could shoot it to bits much more effectively than an Oerlikon.
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wrt the question about the 14" guns on the KGVs, British cordite seems to be considerably less dense than USN smokeless powder. While the weight of the charge in the British guns is less, the chamber size of the British guns is significantly larger. This is also true of the 16"/45 used on the Nelsons vs the 16"/45 used on the US Colorado class. The muzzle velocity of the British guns is a bit lower, but a lower muzzle velocity results in a higher trajectory and steeper angle of fall, which is better able to penetrate deck armor.
The debate about whether to stay with 16", or having more guns by downscaling to 14", was a long standing debate. The USN had had exactly the same debate 20 years earlier. The head of BuOrd insisted that engagements would always be fought at 12,000 yards or less, a 14" could penetrate well enough, and, being smaller, more 14" could be carried. The USN General Board looked at the engagement ranges at Jutland, overruled the head of BuOrd, and made long range gunnery the priority. As Drac said, the choice for the KGVs was dependent on the same condition that the head of BuOrd had specified in 1915: engaging at short range.
I have another theory about the move to 14" guns. UK industry's capacity to make large guns had atrophied since WWI. The guns for the KGVs had to be ordered by late 35, before the change to 14" was specified by the Second London Treaty, to meet the construction schedule for the ships. I have read that the new 14" was designed to fit in the same cradle as the earlier 13.5"/45. When Tiger and most of the Iron Dukes were scrapped in the early 30s, the Admiralty retained many of the 13.5" guns. Navweaps says 54 of those guns were in inventory in 1939. It may be possible that the Admiralty designed the KGV gun mounts for backward compatibility. If there was a development or production problem with the new 14"/45, I think it is possible the Admiralty was looking at completing some or all of the KGVs with the 13.5" as a stopgap.
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@ernestcline2868 the first thoughts that come to mind: cruisers and battleships could take the extra top weight of cat, hangar, and aircraft better than a destroyer, and fleet auxiliaries could not keep up with the battlefleet, often plodding along at a maximum of 15kts. I suppose they could try the treaty work around the Japanese tried, by building aircraft carriers under 10,000 tons, to carry a dozen, or fewer scouts. But it was probably cheaper to mount the cats on the battleships and cruisers, than build new, dedicated, ships. Full on aircraft carriers were limited by the treaty in number, and expensive.
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On that 1936 question, I'll give the USN General Board and C&R a thumping too. 36 is too early to prevent resources being wasted on the Alaska class cruisers, but it's just about right to have the Tennessee and Colorado class BBs updated into something useful in a mid 30s threat environment. As Drach's boiler video went into, boilers were much more capable in the mid 30s, than 20 years earlier, when the Tennessees and Colorados were designed. Use the space freed up by eliminating the motor-generator sets to install larger turbines to use the greater boiler output and they could produce a decent turn of speed. Being short and fat, they will not be efficient at speed, but then the length/width ratio was actually slightly higher than the also short and fat 27kt South Dakotas. Then a new superstructure and AA suite like West Virginia had after it's rebuild. If the budget was not available for the work, then i would lay up the Wyomings, New Yorks, Nevadas and Pennsylvanias to reduce running costs to make the funds available to C&R for the rebuilds. Just because the treaties allowed those old hulks to be run, doesn't mean they need to be run at the expense of improving newer, more capable, ships.
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wrt the question about the RN pushing for the reduction to 14" guns in Second London. Nothing prevented the Brits using 14" guns in the earlier treaties, if they wanted to do that to provide, what in their assessment, was a better balanced ship. The French had built the Dunkerques well below treaty maximums in both guns and displacement. Seems it's more a matter of the RN trying to use the treaty to force everyone else to build what the RN wants, rather than everyone else working their own design within the original parameters. This was done again wrt carriers. Seems the Brits did a survey of their repair facilities around the empire and found that some facilities could only handle a carrier of 23,000 tons, not the 27,000 tons the earlier treaties had allowed. So, Ark Royal was built to 22,000 and the Illustrious class built to 23,000. And, Second London cut the carrier tonnage limit to what the Brits wanted to build, not what any other party was capable of building. The "escalator clause" of Second London only covered the gun size increase from 14" to 16". It did not include the displacement increase. The displacement increase was negotiated between the US and UK in early 38, and, again, the Brits tried to limit the increase to the 41-42,000 ton range, the largest British facilities could handle. The US held out for 45,000, which they finally got in mid 38, enabling the Iowas. Without so much time wasted due to British obstruction wrt the tonnage increase, the US could have skipped the slow, cramped, South Dakotas and gone straight to the Iowas that they really wanted.
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