Comments by "Steve Valley" (@stevevalley7835) on "Guadalcanal Campaign - 1st Savo Island (IJN 1 : 0 USN)" video.

  1.  @dejangabrovsek6534  The ships with low quarterdecks tended to be wet aft when steaming at high speed. Hood always had a reputation for being wet aft. Must be something about how the water flows around the hull at high speed. I was reading about the German Mackensen class battlecruisers and the article said they were designed flush decked to make them dryer aft.
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  2.  @leshalles9282  I read a book about that battle decades ago. It said the Japanese force was coming down the slot and saw Blue. According to the book, Blue had air search radar, so it did not show surface ships. The Japanese lookouts watched Blue, ready to pounce if Blue gave any sign on seeing them. But Blue went on it's way without a twitch, apparently not seeing them.
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  3.  @michelangelobuonarroti4958  The RM considered converting Caracciolo to a carrier. Where would the money come from? The RM was building DDs steadily through the 1920s. They had lost 9 in the war, but received 10 DDs from Austria and Germany as war reparations and used most of them into the 1930s, so their war losses were more than made up. Shortly after the war 17 obsolete DDs were scrapped, but they had built 35 new DDs during the war, so the RM was not short of DDs vs before the war. Never the less, the RM built 28 more DDs by the mid 1920s. A 1,000 ton Destroyer cost about 100,000 GB Pounds. To put that in perspective, a QE class BB cost about 3M GBP and an R-class cost about 2M GBP. So, by my figures. if the RM had put a moratorium on DD construction through 1925, that would have freed up the equivalent of 2.8M GBP. Then it's a matter of figuring the cost to convert Caracciolo. The hull had been built up to the weather deck and launched, but I don't know if the engines and boilers had been installed, or paid for. Courageous and Glorious were complete, serving, ships when converted, and their conversions cost about 2M GBP each. Bearn, which was somewhat smaller, had been launched to clear the slipway before the decision to convert to a carrier was made. The budget for the conversion was 66.33M Francs, in 1923, which works out to about 883,000 GBP. I have read that Bearn was selected for conversion as less progress had been made in building her as a battleship, so there was less battleship material to remove to make the conversion. The budget to convert Lexington was $22.4M US, which works out to 4.89M GBP. Lexington was quite a bit larger than Caracciolo, the hull being on the ways about 25% complete, with no machinery installed. So, it really comes down to how much more work Caracciolo would need. Was it an empty shell, or was a large portion of the machinery already in place? There probably was the money to convert Caracciolo, but the RM decided it's strategy would be built around torpedo boats and subs, so that is where the money went.
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  4.  @BillWilsonBG  At the end of WWI, Italy received several former Austrian and German destroyers as war reparations. The guns were changed out for Italian models, and most of the ships were used by the Italian navy into the 1930s.
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  5.  @michelangelobuonarroti4958  I could see retaining the Elenas while the debate raged about the direction the RM would take, to retain the experienced personnel. Probably, once the decision was made to cut the capital ship force, the Elenas, and their senior crewmen, because expendable. They scrapped Alighieri around 1928 too, to reduce running costs. The Destroyer building program started in 1919, with 3 laid down late that year, 4 laid down in 20, 5 in 21, 2 in 22, 3 in 23, 4 in 24 and 8 laid down in 25. That is where all the money was going. At the end of the day, the expenditure to convert Caracciolo to a carrier would be a lot to invest in something as experimental as a carrier for the RM, considering the state of the battleship force, but completing Caracciolo as a battleship had it's hurdles too.
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