Comments by "Steve Valley" (@stevevalley7835) on "The Drydock - Episode 072" video.

wrt standard fleet speed: this is one of the things that really makes we want to jump into the WABAC machine to 1920 and say to the USN General Board "You guys have been banging on for years about the need for all the battleships to make the same 20 knot speed, but you are about to convert a collier that can barely make 15 into a carrier. How in the heck can the Navy develop joint air/surface tactics if the carrier can't keep up?"
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As others have noted, the Cordite propellant the Vickers used was susceptible to degradation from heat. I have also read that, in the engagement where the Prince of Wales and Repulse were sunk, the Vickers were constantly jamming, put down to deterioration of the ammunition due to the heat and humidity. With that vulnerability, the Vickers would not have been a good choice in the Solomons campaign. Then there is the short range issue, which the Brits tried to address with a "high velocity" version of the gun, but the HV version still wasn't all that high velocity. The Vickers did seem to have something of a renaissance late in the war, where range was not such an issue when shooting at kamikazes and they threw enough steel to knock down a plane in a hurry, something the Oerlikon was deficient at. One other thing was reload time. The Vickers had huge magazines, which, when they ran dry, required a crane to replace, while you could simply keep stuffing more clips into the Bofors loader.
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@jamesmckenzie9551 my hunch is, if the entire French fleet had gone to the far east, it would have gone to Indochina, which surrendered to the Japanese with almost no resistance.
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wrt the Bofors vs Vickers. I don't see it mentioned much anywhere, but Bofors also built a 25mm gun, visually and mechanically much like the 40, produced for the Swedish Navy from 1932 on. As the USN was looking for something in the neighborhood of 1" to replace the .50 M2, it is entertaining to consider if the USN had evaluated the 25mm Bofors before pressing ahead with the 1.1".
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@blogsblogs2348 I understand that the Mk II had a lot of reliability issues, some were addressed by switching to a metal link belt for the ammo. The interesting thing is I see pix of Mk IIs in single barrel, free mounts. Crosses my mind that the concept of the single barrel, free mount, with the better mechanism from the Mk VIII might have been a better "last ditch" weapon than the Oerlikon due to the much larger, more lethal, shell the Vickers fired.
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Relocating the funnels to the island of Ranger would probably not have been practical. As you note Ranger was initially designed flush-decked, which is what the airdales wanted. To avoid long ducting to carry the stack gas aft, Ranger was designed with the boilers aft of the turbines, so putting a funnel on the island partway through construction would have required long ducts to carry the stack gas forward. At the time of Ranger's design, the USN was so sold on dive bombers, to the exclusion of torpedo planes, so the ship was designed without any torpedo storage. Ranger wasn't all that slow either. Several Brit and IJN light carriers could only dream of 29kts.
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iirc, the Washington treaty said that any carrier in service or building at the time of the treaty, which would include Langley, was deemed "experimental" and not subject to the treaty's replacement schedule. Langley was probably converted to a tender to free up the tonnage to be used by Wasp, but I do not find confirmation of that readily at hand.
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Drachinifel, does your RN budget info make it possible to estimate the total running cost for, say a Revenge class battleship during the 30s, crew pay, food, clothing, benefits, fuel, ammunition, repair and maintenance? Reason I ask: some time ago, I was commenting on the fact that, while the USN had extensively modernized the New Mexico class BBs in the early 30s, they did very little work on the Tennessees and Colorados. The consensus answer, was "no money". It occurs to me that, just because the London treaty says the USN could operate a certain number of BBs, doesn't mean that it had to operate that many. I'm wondering if the Wyomings, New Yorks, Nevadas and Pennsylvanias were all laid up from 32-38, how much funding would be freed up that could be used to modernize the Tennessees and Colorados? Thanks!
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