Comments by "Steve Valley" (@stevevalley7835) on "The Drydock - Episode 236 (Part 1)" video.

  1. wrt the question about casemate mounted secondaries, I noticed that the battlecruisers that Jackie Fisher had a hand in, tended to have deck mounts, rather than casemates. I found the text of a letter Jellicoe is supposed to have written when he raised his flag on Iron Duke. The letter was hilarious in it's description of the amount of water shipped by the casemate mounts. I can't help but wonder if Jellicoe had some input on the immediate post-war British designs in pushing away from casemate mounts, due to the problems he had directly experienced with them.
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  2. wrt the 1.1"/Bofors 40mm/Vickers pompom question. iirc, one major issue with the Vickers was that it did not work right using USN propellant, and no-one in the US made cordite. Another gun tested in the USN shootoff that the Bofors won, was a 37mm gun the US Army was using. The 37mm had a significant range advantage over the Vickers, though range and shell size were slightly less than the Bofors offered. In the absence of the Bofors, I would expect the 37mm to receive the mods it historically did later: metallic link belt feed, in place of clips, and feed from either right or left. With belt feed from either right or left, I envision a quad mount quite like the quad Vickers mount, with the same rate of fire as the Vickers, but significantly longer range.
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  3. wrt the question about air to surface rockets used against ships, in Ralph Barker's "Torpedo Bomber", published in the UK as "Ship Busters". the transition from torpedoes to rockets in the anti-shipping role is described. Rockets were a lot cheaper than torpedoes. They were a lot lighter, so several could be carried, vs one torpedo. Because of a rocket's higher speed, they were much easier to aim and more likely to hit, than a torpedo. So rockets became the preferred weapon.
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  4. wrt the Caribbean, I did some research into WWI debts a while back. The US had bought the Virgin Islands from Denmark in 1917. As Drac noted, the bulk of the remaining islands were UK possessions. I extrapolated the price per square mile the US had paid for the Virgin Islands to the land area of all the UK island possessions in the Caribbean, plus British Honduras, and found that a fair price for those UK possessions would be a bit over $4B US, enough to cover the entire principle of UK war debt to the US, plus part of the accrued interest. The amount other allies owed the UK, which had financed WWI, until the entry of the US in 1917, almost exactly equaled what the UK owed the US. On August 1, 1922, the UK government published a note from Arthur Balfour to the French ambassador to the UK, which was widely considered to be for US consumption. The note said that, if it was up to the UK, the UK would cancel the debts owed it by it's allies, but, as the US was pressing the UK for payment, in cash, the UK had no choice but to press it's allies for repayment, in cash. So the bottom line is, if the UK had signed over it's Caribbean possessions to the US as repayment of it's debts, then cancelled all debts owed it by it's allies, as those debts would be a wash with the debts owed to the US, the acrimony through the 20s and early 30s created by the pressures for repayment would have been greatly reduced. Such a scheme was widely discussed in the newspapers at the time. But President Harding said no. Lloyd George said no. Even the Prince of Wales weighed in, "no".
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  5.  @scott2836  are we talking about the same gun? The only 37mm M3 I know of is the single shot anti-tank gun. The Browning designed 37mm AA gun started as the M1, with the original clip feeding system. Army manual TM-9 235 gives the ranges as maximum: 6200 yards vertical, ie 18,600 feet, and horizontal range of 8875 yards. With self-destroying HE rounds the range is shortened to 3960 yards vertical, ie 11,860 feet, and 4070 yards horizontal, with a muzzle velocity of 2600fps, and an HE shell weighing 1.34lbs. The Vickers Mk VIII pompom, according to Navweaps had an altitude max, with the high velocity ammo, of 13,300 ft, and horizontal range of 5,000yds. The USN Bofors had a max ceiling of 23,500 feet and a horizontal range of 10,750 yards, with a muzzle velocity of 2890fps and am HE shell weighing 1.985lbs. The Bofors tops the Browning on every parameter, but the Browning tops the Vickers. John Browning originally designed the gun around the end of WWI. In the 30s, Colt made some improvements, and it went into production in 1939, one year after the Navy put the 1.1 into production. Given when it was designed, if development had been pressed more urgently, seems reasonable it would have gone into production years earlier. The Browning had a tendency to jam but, being an army gun, it was burdened with a clumsy cooling system. According to the manual, after every 60 rounds, you had to stop firing and pump water through the barrel to cool it. The manual says, if it jams, it's because it has overheated, due to the crew not executing the cooling cycle. Of course, a navy mount would have a proper water jacket to eliminate the cooling problems.
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