Comments by "Steve Valley" (@stevevalley7835) on "The Drydock - Episode 178" video.

  1. Something I have been playing with over the last few days: the fleet tonnage quotas of the WNT seems to have ended with Second London, as the RN laid down four new treaty max carriers in 1937, which would put the RN far over their quota, if it was still in force. If the US had delayed ordering Wasp until after the Second London conference, and the end of the fleet quotas, the ship could have been redesigned as a 23,000 ton treatymax ship. With that new 23,000 ton design in hand, when Congress authorized two more carriers in 38, that new design would have been used for Hornet, rather than the obsolescent Yorktown design. That matters because, after the Yorktowns, the USN went to staggered boiler and engine rooms, for better survivability. What doomed Hornet was total loss of power. If Hornet had been built to a design with staggered boiler and engine rooms, she may have still had partial power for damage control and propulsion.
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  2. wrt the USN rebuilding ships during the interwar period, the USN spent a surprising amount of money modernizing obsolete ships in the 20s, starting with the oldest. Some $18.3M was budgeted for modernizing the six coal burners. $6.6M was spent on Florida and Utah alone, in 1926-28. only a few years before they were scrapped/demilitarized. The budget for modernizing the two Nevadas was over $13M. $30M went into the three New Mexicos. This at a time when a new battleship cost $30-$35M. For a long time, the USN did not build up to treaty limits, so, in the 30s, a lot of what money was available went to replacing other obsolete types. The USN had not built any new destroyers since the WWI types. The Vinson-Trammell Act of 1934 mentions that ships that Congress had authorized in 1929 still had not been started. So, at the end of the day, there wasn't any money to modernize the Tennessees and Colorados.
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  3. Frank, I entered a reply here an hour or so ago, which has since vanished. The Cliff Notes version is the people writing the Wiki articles are only as good as their sources. There are plenty of "sources" with bogus information.
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  4. How common is it for people's comments to vanish in this site? I had two or three vanish on last Wednesday's video, and a reply to another person's comment today has vanished.
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