Comments by "Steve Valley" (@stevevalley7835) on "The Zeebrugge Raid - A Vindictive Operation" video.

  1.  @Aelxi  the title for a piece on the Marshal class would probably be "diesels, not ready for prime time". I have read there were cases when those two had to be towed to their missions. The shame is they were provided with brand new twin 15"/42 turrets, surplus from the cancelled Revenge class battleships. The ship's performance was so bad that the turret was removed from Ney and reinstalled on Terror, while Ney was rearmed with a mix of 6" and 4" guns and spent the rest of the war as a guard ship.
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  2.  @davidlow8104  Drac has commented in the past that the IJN's building program was unsustainable due to the projected budget consuming so much of government revenue, so the IJN program would collapse of it's own weight. The US was demanding repayment, in full, of it's ally's war debt. When the depression hit, France immediately defaulted. The UK and Italy made partial payments as best they could, until Congress passed legislation that defined partial payment as a default, punishable by the same sanctions. With nothing to lose, the UK and Italy stopped making payments entirely. From that, I take that the five powers that were parties to the treaty were all under significant financial stress in 1930. Converting an existing battlecruiser to a carrier is very expensive. Converting Courageous to a carrier cost some 2M GBP, about the same as the cost to originally build her as a "large light cruiser". Building Ark Royal, from the keel up, cost 3M GBP, for a more capable ship with a larger air group. Converting an old battlecruiser to a carrier would have the same capacity restrictions as the Courageouses and Lexingtons, as well as the cost of an entire new powerplant: replacing direct drive turbines with geared turbines, replacing coal fired boilers with oil fired, converting coal bunkers to oil tanks, adding torpedo protection. The four G3s would barely be enough to replace the coal fired battlecruisers that survived the war, so I would expect the Renowns and Hood to be retained as they were. Likewise, the four N3s would barely replace the 12" armed dreadnoughts, let alone the 13.5" armed Orions, KGVs, and Iron Dukes The fleet size drawdown motivated by the state of the economy and the hypothetical 1930 treaty would probably see the last of the coal fired ships scrapped, rather than see any of them converted to carriers.
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  3.  @davidlow8104  the 1922 treaty intent was to stop spending. If everyone was fine with having another arms race, building all the ships planned at the time, there would probably not be a treaty until 1930, when the depression forced a cut in spending. The 1930 treaty would probably look a lot like the historical First London treaty: suspension of shipbuilding, with the fleet size drawdowns of the WNT. If 1920s building programs had been pursued, I would suspect strategy to be much more battleship-centric, as that is what the fleets have to work with. Without the WNT, Akagi, Kaga, Lex and Sara would have been completed as originally designed, rather than converted to carriers. That would postpone development of naval air by close to a decade.
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