Comments by "Steve Valley" (@stevevalley7835) on "The Drydock - Episode 135" video.

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 WNT and ships with 16" guns, I addressed that in the Q&A section of yesterday's post about the Maine. The entire uproar over Mutsu reminds me of guys with a severe case of size envy. Nagato and Mutsu, were only two ships. The other ten capital ships in IJN inventory had 14". The RN had 13 capital ships with 15" guns, so the bulk of the RN already had larger guns than the bulk of the IJN.. As for the IJN trying to stretch a point about the state of Mutsu's completion, the time span from it's being laid down to commissioning in October 1921, a couple weeks before the conference started, is very similar to the time to completion of Nagato, so I doubt it was a matter of Mutsu being incomplete to the point of no guns or armor or engines. My take is trying to force the Japanese to scrap Mutsu created a lot of acrimony over something that really did not make much of a difference.
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I was going to mention Calypso myself, then saw your comment.
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@WALTERBROADDUS actually V specifies fixed wing aircraft....don't ask me how they came up with that. A ship that carries helos has an H in the designation somewhere, like an LPH or LHD. The V for fixed wing carries over to squadron designations as well. Remember the baseball cap that "TC" wore on the original "Magnum PI"? VMO2 = fixed wing, Marine, observation squadron 2. A member of the board of the aviation museum near my home drove P3s, in VP-45 (fixed wing, patrol)
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@WALTERBROADDUS Yes, I did forget Z. I don't think Z was included in my training 50 years ago. I'm not sure there were any blimps in service at that time.
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@brianpanco8325 to add to Walter's reply, Mare Island is quite small. They built a number of destroyers there, but when California was being built, while the stern was hanging over the water, the bow nearly reached to a public street outside of the yard. Then, when California was launched it got away from them and hit the opposite bank. They tried to build one of the South Dakotas at Mare Island, which was even larger. They had to extend the slipway out into the water farther, and move a retaining wall on one side of the slipway to make room. My grandfather spent WWI building sub chasers at Bremerton. USS Nebraska was built at the privately owned Moran yard in Seattle. I suspect the greatest obstacles to shipbuilding on the west coast were 1: the steel mills were clustered around the great lakes, due to the supplies of iron and coal in the area and 2: east coast yards had been in existence longer. It was just simpler to build on the east cost and redeploy as needed, especially after the canal was built.
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@WALTERBROADDUS very neat film. Ford did for aircraft building what Kaiser did for shipbuilding. Ford won a contract to build B-24s. A delegation, including Ford's manufacturing guy, Charles Sorensen visited the Consolidated plant in San Diego. Sorensen decided it would be impossible to build enough planes building them the way Consolidated did, and designed what became the Willow Run plant in his hotel room that night. I have read that, at the beginning of 42 or 43, FDR gave a speech laying out how many ships and aircraft and trucks would be built over that year. Hitler heard those numbers and laffed, surely it was impossible for anyone to build that much equipment. By the end of that year, FDR's production targets had been exceeded.
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