Comments by "Steve Valley" (@stevevalley7835) on "The Drydock - Episode 104" video.

@Ranari's Brawling Channel oh, goody! Another alternate history question. OK, so the US goes to the Washington treaty committee and snivels that the Japanese have 4 battle cruisers and the Brits have 4 battle cruisers, but the US doesn't have any. After much discussion, the committee settles on breaking out BCs as a separate class of capital ships, with a quota of, say 120,000 tons total, with that tonnage deducted from the allotment for BBs. Lets further say that the same mechanism used for carriers is used for BCs, so that 2 currently under construction that exceed the 35,000 ton limit can be completed. That gets the US two Lexingtons built as BCs, and two built as carriers. So, what would the USN do with them prior to the war? Occurs to me that with crazy fast CVs and BCs, the USN could develop tactics for a fast raiding force: planes find and assess the target, maybe soften it up, then the BCs finish them off. They could influence USN tactics to favor speed to the point where the North Carolinas and South Dakotas aren't built, unless they are lightened and lengthened enough to top 30kts. How would the Lexingtons be updated? I have seen models built by people speculating on that question, and they came out looking very much like Iowas. How would that work out? USN architects look at the speed and armor requirements, and the 35,000 ton limit, in the mid 30s and declare it "impossible", so nothing is laid down, while they wait. Japan gave notice they would no longer abide by the naval treaties on Dec 19, 1934, so the USN architects pull out a clean sheet and start working on a design assuming the collapse of the treaties. With the conclusion of negotiations with the Brits on June 30 of 38, setting the displacement limit at 45,000 tons, which is what the US wanted, contracts for the Iowas are issued on July 1, 38, one year sooner than historical. Iowa and New Jersey laid down Nov 1, 38, because North Carolina and South Dakota are not clogging up the ways. Both launch in June 40 and commission in April/May 41. Two more Iowas are laid down in 39 and commission in 42, because the South Dakotas aren't clogging up the ways at Newport News and Fore River. Then the last pair of Iowas is laid down in Brooklyn and Philly the day after Iowa and New Jersey launch, commissioning in 43. The question then is are the Montanas laid down, or is all the capital ship material used for the Essex swarm?
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@deadzone4155 Company greed? There was so much corrupt thinking in US companies during WWII, Harry Truman, then a Senator, headed up an investigation of corporate activities. One of the larger scandals involved a Curtiss-Wright engine plant near Cincinnati: company officials were paying off Air Corps inspectors to look the other way, while the plant shipped known substandard aircraft engines. Brewster Aeronautical was a total dumpster fire: notorious for late deliveries and substandard build quality. Brewster was so bad the Navy took over the company in the spring of 42, and showed CEO Jimmy Work the door.
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@carlcarlton764 "Wind Indicator"? You mean the "Vibrator"?
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Re warships being designed as merchant ships, a couple cases come to mind. In the 30s, Italy built 4 banana boats that were designed from the outset for easy conversion to merchant cruisers. Guns and military equipment for them were pre-positioned in Naples and Massawa. When the war started, three of the ships were stranded in the Red Sea. One was converted to a hospital ship, while Ramb1 and Ramb2 were armed as planned. The IJN designed ships to be easily converted to carriers to game the tonnage limits of the naval treaties. The Chitose class seaplane tenders and Zuihō class sub tenders were designed for this transformation, as well as the passenger liners that were converted to Hiyō class carriers.
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@Dave_Sisson "Escape of the Red Sea Flotilla: RAMB I, RAMB II and Eritrea" by The History Guy.posted 10 days ago. I found that by investigating Italian ops in the Red Sea as half a dozen Italian DDs became stranded there when the war started. The thought crossed my mind that, as the Italians were losing Ethiopia, the ships were doomed. What if the Italians steamed them all up the Gulf of Suez, stuffed them all into the Canal and scuttled them? Then the Brits would need to move supplies overland from Suez City, rather than using the vastly more extensive port and transportation facilities in Alexandria, or run the gauntlet between Tunisia and Sicily.
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@Tuning3434 The thought crossed my mind, if the Courageous class turrets had been installed as shore batteries, instead of sitting, invitingly, in storage, would Vanguard have been built at all?
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@mikolajgrotowski North Atlantic weather. Lufthansa flew Dornier Wal flying boats to South America in the 1930s with a fueling stop at a tender in mid ocean, but the weather was not as bad as in the North Atlantic.
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@Thecrownswill Greatest success by the French Navy over the Brits? From my perspective as a citizen of the US, the French under deGrasse at the Battle of the Chesapeake in September 1781. deGrasse defeated and drove off the British fleet, stranding Cornwallis' army at Yorktown, resulting in Cornwallis' surrender to the American Continental Army.
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@magnusredin6991 the one about French ships covered pre-dreadnoughts and was subtitled "when hotels go to war". When i plugged the "when hotels go to war" phrase into the search thing on Drach's page, it pulled the post up.
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In the thread about battleship hull design, there is a photo of a hull under construction that has large, horizontal cylinders along the sides of the hull. A search confirmed my suspicion those cylinders were the Pugliese torpedo protection system in a Littorio. How wide was that system? It appears to consume an enormous amount of hull space. In the ongoing "save the Caracciolo" project, reboilering in the 30s with Littorio style boilers in the forward and after centerline boiler rooms will free up the space originally occupied by the 7 boilers in each side boilerroom, to allow installation of the Pugliese system midships, but A and D turrets are placed so far toward the bow and stern that width may be inadequate to allow the Pugliese system without compromising the size of the cylinder.
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@kingquackie7284 lets see. Akagi at 36K standard load and 66+25 spare aircraft (numbers plucked from Wiki), Kaga 38Kt standard for 72+18 spare vs Shokaku at 26Kt standard, for 72+12 spares. This is the same sort of question as with the Lexington conversions vs purpose built carriers. Shokaku has a roughly equal size air group on 10K tons less displacement, so if Akagi and Kaga has not been built, the IJN could have built, with a bit of fibbing, three Shokakus instead, for a net gain of 1 hull and an extra 72 plane air group available. The difference would really only matter when Japan was still pretending to abide by the treaty, so the correct comparison would be Agaki and Kaga, vs more Sōryūs at 16KT standard and 63+9 spares. Foregoing Akagi and Kaga would enable 4 more Sōryūs, with a net gain in deployable air group of 114 planes and a net loss of 7 spares. On the US side, foregoing Lexington and Saratoga would have freed up enough tonnage to allow construction of 3 Yorktowns, with enough tonnage left over to build Wasp as a 20,000 ton improved Yorktown.
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re UK FAA aircraft in 1939. Prior to the SBD, the USN had the SB2U Vindicator, first deployed on Saratoga in December of 37, so by 40, with the SBD, the USN was into it's second generation of monoplane dive bombers. The original F4F proposal was a biplane, and soundly trounced in trials by the Brewster F2A monoplane with retractable landing gear. First deployment of the Buffalo was on Saratoga in December 39. Add the TBD, first deployed in 37, and the USN is deploying all retracting gear/monoplanes by the start of 40.
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There was a third monoplane USN bomber in the late 30s, the SBA. With a smaller payload than the SBD, and lacking folding wings, it wasn't really in the hunt.
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@carlcarlton764 The SBA took forever to get into production because Brewster was already running at capacity building Buffalos, so SBA production was handed off to the Naval Aircraft Factory in Sept 38. NAF had it's hands full too, and with the SBD in the pipeline, the NAF didn't give the SBA, now the SBN high priority, so they only built a handful by 42, when the SBN was obsolete, so the project was dropped. Brewster was a dumpster fire of a company, notorious for late delivery and terrible build quality. The only people who were bigger crooks than Jimmy Work, who owned Brewster, were Brewster's export agents, long time independent arms dealers, the Miranda brothers, dba Brewster Export Company, who, when not doing time in the federal pen for violating the US arms embargo on Bolivia, were embezzling from Brewster. The Royal Navy did have the Skua for a fighter in 39. If Force Z had had a carrier, it probably would have had Skuas embarked. Only problem is the Mitsu Nell bombers that attacked Force Z were faster than a Skua.
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