Comments by "Steve Valley" (@stevevalley7835) on "The Drydock - Episode 311" video.

  1. wrt the question about Delaware's turret sighting hoods. Initially, the USN had the sighting hoods on the roof of the turret. When the USN adopted superfiring turrets, the sights were moved to a position low on the sides of the turrets, to move them away from the muzzle blast. The sight hoods are clearly visible on the pic Drac shows of the forward turrets at 21:13. They are exactly at the same level as the guns themselves, on the forward part of the turret. This change had a second benefit. The top mounted sights were connected to the guns via a complex linkage. No matter how precisely the components of the linkage were made, there was always a small amount of slop, which became more important as ranges increased. When the sights were moved to the sides of the turret, they were rigidly bracketed to the trunnions of the guns, so there was no lost motion between gun and sight. re the engines in Delaware's sister, North Dakota. ND was originally build with Curtis turbines. Besides being very inefficient, the Curtis turbines broke down, often. There was considerable discussion, reported in the newspapers in 1917, about whether ND should be scrapped, or reengined. When the US entered the war, the decision was made that it would be faster to reengine ND, than to build a replacement, so new, geared, turbines, were installed. When ND was scrapped, the new turbines were removed, and installed in Nevada, when that ship was modernized.
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  2. wrt basing battleships in the Philippines, at one time, the Mississippi and Idaho, the two undersized ships that were sold to Greece, could have been based in the Philippines, as they were small enough to be accommodated in the Dewey drydock. That would also solve the problem of those two ships lacking the speed and range to steam with the Connecticuts, as they would be steaming by themselves. Realistically, as Drac said, anything sent to the Philippines in 41, would be going to it's doom. The US could not forward deploy enough force to really be a deterrent. Drac reviewed USN pre-war battle plans some time ago. The plans seemingly imply that the Philippines would be written off if they were attacked. To get to the Philippines, from Hawaii, would have required steaming through thousands of miles of ocean, populated with islands the Japanese had held since 1918.
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  3.  @WALTERBROADDUS  The Philippines were virtually unreinforceable once the war started. The former German colonies of the Marianas, Carolines, and Marshalls, were all handed to Japan by the League of Nations after WWI. To evade Japanese bases, any US reinforcement would need to go around the south side of New Guinea, because Japanese bases were sitting astride the direct route from Hawaii. My nightmare scenario has the Japanese not attacking the fleet in Pearl, but only attacking the Philippines, in hopes political pressure would force FDR to send the fleet out into deep water, to attempt relief of the garrison, and run the gauntlet of Japanese forces.
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  4.  @WALTERBROADDUS  As the Japanese already held all the rest of the Marianas, they could take Guam without even changing their watches for a different time zone. For the US, Guam was just as unsupportable as the Philippines. Wake was on the border.between US and Japanese held areas. The US might have been able to make a stand on Wake, if it could have brought enough force to bear. Midway was well within US territory, reachable by a direct line from Hawaii.
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  5.  @WALTERBROADDUS  yes, the implication of the crack about the 26th Cavalry was the horses ended up as the main course. Trivia bit, the 26th mounted the last cavalry charge by the US Army on January 16, 1942, at the village of Morong.
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  6.  @WALTERBROADDUS  how would the US resupply the garrison after the war started? I remember reading that wags were saying the army could hold out in the Philippines as long as the 26th Cavalry had horses. We are seeing in Ukraine, now, how fast a full-on war burns through ammo and equipment.
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  7. wrt the question about early fast battleships, during his first stint as First Sea Lord, Jackie Fisher was developing concepts for new battleships and new armored cruisers, which evolved into the "Dreadnought armed cruiser", aka battlecruiser. The design process apparently yielded a fast battleship concept, in 1905, known as "HMS Fusion", which combined armament of 10-12" guns, 45,000hp turbines for a speed of 24kts, an 11" armor belt, a length of about 620 feet, and displacement of 22,500 tons. There are a couple mentions of Fusion on line, along with the battleship and armored cruiser concepts,
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