Comments by "Steve Valley" (@stevevalley7835) on "The Drydock - Episode 148" video.

  1.  @janwitts2688  iirc, the US paid Spain some $20M to give up it's claims on the Philippines and Guam. The balance of the Marianas and Carolines were also Spanish colonies, but, with the crown jewel, the Philippines, gone, Spain had little interest in the rest of it's Pacific holdings, so sold the island groups to Germany the next year, for some $4M. Japan, being allied with the UK, overran the German held islands in 1914, and continued to occupy the former German colonies north of the equator, after the war, under a League of Nations mandate. As for the US forcing the citizens of the Philippines to submit by force of arms, that was what imperial powers did at the time. Kipling wrote "White Man's Burden" around the turn of the century to try and make a moral case for imperial conquests.
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  2. wrt the US looking at acquiring Almirante Latorre, that idea sounds utterly daft. Latorre was British built, that means British replacement parts for everything and British cordite for the guns. The Rivadavias were US built, that means US sourced replacement parts and US smokeless powder for the guns. Did the US have a moment of rationality and approach Argentina about the Rivadavias, or was the US so size obsessed that Latorre's 14" guns, vs the Rivadavia's 12", was the only thing that mattered?
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  3.  @kemarisite  would Halsey consider the force a decoy, or easy pickings so he can run up a big score?
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  4. wrt the question about all the Rs being built as Renown class battlecruisers, consider the alternative: in addition to Renown and Repulse, the other two cancelled ships; the R class Resistance and QE class Agincourt are also reordered as Renowns making use of the 15" guns and Mk 1 turrets that were in process for the cancelled ships. It is written that the Admiralty proceeded with construction of Hood as it, in conjunction with the two Renowns, were seen as replacements for the three battlecruisers lost at Jutland. If the Admiralty had four Renowns building at the time of Jutland, would the Admiralty see any need to build Hood? Would any of the Admirals been laid down at all, considering the wartime press of other priorities, and the number of Renowns building? Impact on the WNT? The 525,000 ton limit, as I read the treaty, was only a factor when building replacements for ships currently in commission. The original retention list for the RN, with Tiger, the three surviving KGVs and Thunderer was some 580,000 tons. When the Nelsons were built, the drawdown toward the limit started, with four dreadnoughts scrapped and the RN's tonnage reduced to just under 559,000T. Without Hood, but with two additional Renowns, the RN's treaty retention list would have probably looked very much the same, with the possible elimination of Thunderer.
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  5. Almirante Latorre and the USN, revisited. Two concerns I had; ammo and spares supplies for a British built ship in USN service. If the Elswick and USN 14" guns had precisely the same bore, it may have been possible to use USN shells. The Elswick chamber is significantly larger than the chamber in the USN gun, so plenty of room to load a charge of USN smokeless to provide equivalent performance to cordite. That leaves the problem of the USN trying to source replacement parts for all the UK built systems in the ship. Hence, Plan Steve: The UK buys Almirante Latorre into service (again), or, if lacking cash, the US buys her and lend-leases her to the U.K. There is a significant probability that the shells and charges from the 14" mounted on the KGVs would work in the Elswick guns, and spares would, from RN perspective, be locally sourced. With an additional obsolete BB available for convoy duty, the Latorre (HMS Canada, again?) could relieve one of the New Yorks, so the New York could be redeployed to the US west coast, without creating the logistics problems deploying a foreign built ship would.
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  6.  @timengineman2nd714  the start of celestial navigation? Ancient Egypt? The Arab cultures of the Middle East and North Africa were heavily engaged in astronomy. Some contend Vikings used instruments for celestial navigation. Cheating and looking on-line, Claudius Ptolemy cataloged Polaris in 169AD. That star's usefulness in navigation was first described in the 5th century. The same source says that, due to the Earth's slowing changing it's direction, Polaris was not a true "north star" until the 12th century, but, I would suspect that, without precise instruments, navigators found it to be close enough before then.
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