Comments by "Steve Valley" (@stevevalley7835) on "HMS Erin - Guide 268" video.

  1. I was pondering Erin a week ago. Seems that it would have made a good substitute for Almirante Cochrane when Chile was looking to repurchase it's battleships after the war. It should have been feasible to regun Almirante Latorre with 13.5" guns from RN inventory, so that Latorre would share both main battery and 6"/50 secondary battery with Erin to ease logistics. The three destroyers Chile bought instead, appear to have been nearly worn out at the time.
    20
  2. As sales agent for Vickers, Basil Zaharoff really got around. If you ever come upon a DVD set of the early 80s production of "Reilly Ace Of Spies", Zaharoff is played well by Leo McKern.
    14
  3.  @3vimages471  "superfiring" means the gun is mounted above, and fires over, another gun.
    5
  4.  @solutionless123  the arms trade in general has always been a bit shady. Basil Zaharoff, an agent for Vickers, had a tendency to oversell their products. An incident relayed in "Reilly Ace Of Spies", pitted Riley, a British spy, against Zaharoff, for contracts for new ships for Russia. Riley maneuvered himself into position as the representative in Russia for Blohm und Voss. Reilly then advised British Intelligence, that, if B&V won the contract, he would forward full sets of drawings of the ships to the British government, giving the British government an incentive to hobble Zaharoff's efforts, cost Vickers a fortune in profits, cost thousands of British shipyard workers their jobs, to gain intelligence about German ship design. meanwhile, Reilly would pocket a massive sales commission from B&V. The US government made sizeable trade concessions to Argentina to aid US yards in winning the contracts for the Rivadavias, even though the Curtis turbines the ships were equipped with were considerably inferior to British Parsons turbines. The Admiralty bought some 14" guns that Bethlehem Steel had built for the Greek battleship that was building in Germany. The Brits discovered the gun design was defective, the guns tended to droop. I have not seen specific numbers, but I have read that the price Chile paid for Latorre and the destroyers was at a significant discount to their original contract price. Latorre was no longer a new ship, and was becoming obsolete by 1920. The destroyers were from an order for six Chile had placed before the war. Chile received two destroyers just before the war started, but the other four were requisitioned by the Admiralty. One of the four was sunk at Jutland. The other three were very active during the war, with HMS Broke being involved in two particularly lurid brawls. The two ships that Chile had received new from the builders in 1914 lasted until 1945, but the three that had been with the RN during the war went to the breakers in 1933. I wonder how serviceable those three had been for several years before they were scrapped, as Chile rang up Thornycroft in 1928 and ordered six more destroyers.
    4
  5.  @igooooorrrrr  the Wiki entry for Dreadnought says she cost 1,785,683 GB Pounds to build. That converts to about 8,598,849 US Dollars. When Dreadnought was sold for scrap in 1921, US newspapers reported the selling price as $176,000, so scrap price was about 2% of the build price. These days, it seems the USN nearly has to pay to get breakers to take old ships off it's hands. The USN sold Kitty Hawk to the breakers for 1 cent, vs a build cost of $264M in 1961, which equates to $2.5B now.
    2
  6.  @michaelmacleod7051  yes, the WNT specifically prohibited sale of condemned ships. If the UK had sold Erin to Chile, in place of Almirante Cochrane, which was in mid-morph to HMS Eagle, that would have happened in April 1920, coincident with the sale of HMS Canada to Chile, and prior to the treaty. It crossed my mind that Italy's battleship force after the treaty, which included four pre-dreadnoughts and the salvaged hulk of Da Vinci, listed as front line battleships, was insulting enough to justify Erin or one of the condemned Orions or KGVs to be offered at scrap price, to replace Da Vinci, but that didn't happen.
    2
  7.  @genericpersonx333  there are really several factors in a ship's life, including how rapidly it becomes obsolete, and the country's ability to pay for a replacement. Chile had Latorre, the former HMS Canada, in service until she was disabled by an engine room fire in 1951, but, her usefulness as a front line battleship would have ended at the end of the 30s, when ships like the KGVs, North Carolinas and Littorios started entering service. The only reason the USN still had ships like the New Yorks and Wyomings in service in 41 was the treaty imposed "battleship holiday" that prevented their replacement.
    2
  8.  @genericpersonx333  what you say is true, everything is relative. Latorre was fine, as long as it only faced the Rivadavias, one at a time. If Argentina had a sudden improvement in it's economy, and bought a couple Scharnhorsts from Germany, the calculus would be different.
    2
  9.  @Selim1939  from what I read, raising the midships turret one level made it dryer, that is, less seawater around and entering the turret.
    1