Comments by "Steve Valley" (@stevevalley7835) on "IJN Kii - Guide 260 (NB)" video.

  1. There are drawings around of the early iterations of the design. Bizarre things with boilers on two decks, seven funnels, and 14" guns in twin turrets with the superfiring turrets being triples. They were ordered as part of the 1916 Navy Act, but promptly suspended, then redesigned to the configuration Drac showed after Navy Department officials got a look at Hood in early 1919. The 14"/50 guns of the original design had been put into production however, so the USN ended up with spare 14" guns coming out of it's ears.
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  2. I think you are referring to "angle of fall". It varies depending on both velocity and range. for example a USN 16"/45 Mk 1,. fired with a full charge and a muzzle velocity of 2600fps will show an angle of fall at 10,000 yards of 5 degrees, 55 minutes, while the same shell at 20,000 yards will fall at 17 degrees, 4 minutes. At 25,000 yards, firing that 16"/45 with a full charge will produce an angle of fall of 24 degrees, 54 minutes, but firing the same gun with a reduced charge and muzzle velocity of 2000fps will produce an angle of fall 48 degrees, 35 minutes.
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  3.  @redrust3  the original Lexingtons had the same number of boilers as Hood, 24, but the design also had turbo-electric drive, which requires a lot more space than Hood's geared turbines, and the original Lexington design was about 13 feet narrower than Hood, because USN scouting group doctrine dictated 35kts, rather than the 32kts of Hood. All added up to an excruciatingly cramped hull, which, combined with the TE drive, necessitated an extremely unorthodox boiler arrangement, which played havoc with the boiler uptake arrangement. It's something, how Vickers could come up with a functional design for Kongo, the Brits could design Hood, and with those ships showing the way, the USN created that mess.
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  4.  @alex57633  He may have covered that in his video on the conference. The US Congress was highly unlikely to have continued to fund the building program that was in place. The Japanese economy could not support their building program. France and Italy were broke, abandoned the capital ships they had been working on at the start of the war. The UK, if it had the will, could have built, but the UK had a massive debt from the war, so it's a matter of how fast the UK would want to pay off the debts, vs make money available to the Admiralty. The US was clearly more interested in paying off it's debts. Through the 1920s, with a budget of about $3B/year, the government was running surpluses of $700M-$1.1B per year. A decade if that penny pinching still left the US government with some $15.6B of debt from the war.
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  5.  @TwinHuginHelmet  I would think the IJN would go with Tosa or Kaga, as their construction was more advanced than the Amagis, having gotten to the point of launching. For the USN, none of the 40,000 ton ships was all that great. The South Dakotas were too slow and the Lexingtons were vulnerable. The USN was in a spot. It laid down so many ships in 1919-20 because Congress had passed a Naval appropriation bill on July 1, 1918, which compelled the Navy to begin construction of all the ships that were authorized in the 1916 act, but not yet begun, to be begun by July 1 of 1919. That was some 48 ships, including three Colorados, all the South Dakotas, all the Lexingtons and all the Omahas. Were I in SecNav Daniels' shoes, I would have tried to reason with Congress that the Colorados were a waste of money, because the South Dakotas, in breaking with the "standard battleship" template, made the Colorados obsolete. Failing that, I would step into Secretary Hughes' shoes at the Washington conference. Understanding that Congress in 1922 will not fund much of anything, I would look at the US being the only one of the big three navies stuck with ships mounting 12" guns, and demand licenses for future construction the same way France and Italy had licenses due to their obsolete, 12" gunned ships.
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  6. ​ @jakemillar649  I'm thinking Akagi, in battlecruiser form, had the most potential. I'm not sure the G3s and N3s were really a serious proposal. The G3s were 856 feet long, displaced over 48,000 tons. When the US and UK were arguing about the tonnage escalator in 38, the UK wanted to set the limit at 42,000, because that was the most their facilities could handle, so I suspect the G3 and N3 were a bluff. Most of the other BBs that were cancelled were really too slow to be relevant in the 40s. The Tosas and Nagatos would make a nice division of 26kt, 16" armed BBs, but the IJN did not make much use of it's BBs. The IJN heavily used the Kongos however. I bet they would have made good use of Akagi too. Amagi, would not have been completed due to the earthquake damage that prevented her being completed as a carrier. The most useless cancelled ship? I'm thinking either Washington or any of the 1920 South Dakotas, due to their low speed. The Lexingtons, as battlecruisers, could at least keep up with the carriers, and add some AA fire. They might have mixed it up with the Kongos if they had been in the right place at the right time, like heavyweight boxers with glass jaws squaring off against each-other.
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  7.  @bkjeong4302  OK, let's hear your candidate for most useful ship that was cancelled.
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  8.  @Ralph-yn3gr  I doubt it. The problem was having a rapid fire gun that could do damage before the torpedo boat got close enough to launch a torpedo. The RN was using 12 Pounders (3") guns for plinking torpedo boats up to the beginning of WWI, but soon figured out they were too small. A shrapnel shell, if it could be timed accurately to burst right over the torpedo boat could mow down anyone on deck, which would probably include the captain as TBs tended to have completely open bridges, but it wouldn't stop the boat.
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  9.  @bkjeong4302  I think the other Admirals had already been broken up by the time the conference started. You know my opinion of the Lexingtons as carriers: horribly inefficient at carrying aircraft and wasteful of the one resource in limited supply: aircraft carrier tonnage. Yes, I have noticed your opinion of big gun ships before. As posted above, I would have favored the US being granted licenses for future capital ship construction, rather than finish anything on the slipway in 22, but, considering the Admiralty still considered 23kts as a perfectly acceptable speed for a battleship in 1930, I suspect anything built in the early 30s would have been as irrelevant as any WWI holdover, except, with future knowledge, I know Coolidge would not build anything, nor Hoover, so FDR could have gotten the North Carolinas started a year or two sooner.
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  10.  @rambling_reiver  the turret layout is the same as the Amagis, while the Tosas had #3 turret at main deck level. I'm thinking the Amagis and Kiis carried #3 turret higher, to make room below for the extra machinery needed to drive the ship at that higher speed.
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