Comments by "Steve Valley" (@stevevalley7835) on "The Battle of Cape Matapan - +100 to Battleship Stealth" video.

  1.  @cha0sr1pper  as it happens, I have been trying to research the history of the USN 12"/40 and have been reading a lot of BuOrd annual reports. The early reports 1900-1905 are very helpful, but after that lost a significant amount of content, shrinking from some 95 pages to 35. By the early 20s, the annual reports were nearly content free, only numbering about a dozen pages. In the 1911 report, Admiral Twining said he was omitting information he judged "tedious and uninstructive". Information that vanished from the reports included listings of individual shop orders for guns, with the gun numbers, and incident reports, such as an exploded 12" gun on USS Georgia that was well covered by newspapers, but completely unmentioned in the BuOrd annual report. So, if I were head of BuOrd in 1919, I would restore that "tedious and uninstructive" information, so that future historians can find the information they are looking for.
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  2.  @F-41927  Some time ago, I was reading about the French Navy considering how much it would cost to lengthen and upengine the incomplete Normandie class ships to approach the 28kt speed of the Caracciolo class, found the cost was exorbitant and sold them all for scrap. I considered whether it would be productive for the French to claim the three incomplete Mackensen class battlecruisers, which were designed for a 28kt speed, tow them back to France and finish them, using the guns built for the Normandies. The bottom line was that the Mackensens still had an obsolete armor scheme, inadequate torpedo protection, the French 13.4" guns were obsolete and, if France had completed those three ships, they would have lost the two battleship constriction windows allocated to them by the Washington Treaty, which they used to build the two Dunkerque class ships, which had a more modern armor layout, better torpedo defense, and higher performance guns. So, in the long run, France was better off letting all the German ships go to scrap.
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