Krupp was at one time the oldest family owned business as they didn't start selling stock until the 1970's. Krupp originally started as a family that made kitchen utensils.
Well it very well might have been the oldest German family owned business but worldwide there are a few that were and some still are older. The Hōshi Ryukan founded in 718 AD being the oldest still operating family owned business comes to mind beating Krupp by some 800 years. Of course as an inn/hotel the Hōshi was never ever operating on an scale comparable to the industial giant Krupp became.
Regarding 1:23:26 and gunnery- Let me caveat that I never used an optical range finder during actual war; but I was trained on them (and have used fire control radars during actual war). I give it to Warspite and Washington. During my schooling in the mid 1980's as a Fire Control Technician, there were still a few ships with backup optical systems in service so we all had to at least know what they were and, if it was all you got, how to work them. And not all of us could- those things will give you eyestrain, headaches and vertigo when overused. This is why I give the shorter but optical shots the win. I've personally tried to rangefind with those things in my A-School training, and it really does take a special kind of person with the right kind of eyesight to do it. And on those two ships, they had a special person. Radars are not special. I know FC radars and the system WV had, the hit doesn't surprise me. And it just got better and more accurate from there.
@@billbrockman779 I'm about 40 years from my navy days so I don't know about current ships, but it was uncommon in my time. To be honest, I would doubt it.
even in the Army riding Bradleys, I can tell you that optical systems are not really usable by everyone. Even those of us who got good at it would get really dizzy or disoriented rather quickly. That is on a vehicle with a 3750 meter max range on weapons...but with the focus of view being stable but the vehicle turning and moving differently, it took some time and a lot of practice to keep your lunch down...LOL
You are saying that West Virginia's shooting was not as impressive because technology made it easier. If you want to grade on the curve, that may be the right answer, there is room to argue. But, in terms of the difficulty of the accomplishment, there really isn't any comparison. Hit on first salvo, at 22,800 yards, at night and hits over multiple salvos at range (which I think it unique for hits over 20,000 yards), including some salvos with multiple hits.
Jon has been pretty clear that the historical record indicates that if the US only has two carriers, the battle would have been fought from Point Luck, or close too it, rather than moving the carriers west. In which case, the battle looks far more like a drive by shooting than a pitched battle. The US carrier aircraft would have arrived much later, likely simultaneous with a 2nd strike on Midway. They would have recovered late in the afternoon, and then the carriers would have booked it either east or southeast to withdraw. Midway itself has been seriously reinforced, including the 1st Raider Battalion. So Nimitz thinks they can actually hold off an invading force for a considerable amount of time.
I was an MM in the US Navy on boilers. Boiler design is as much a contributor to power to mass as anything else. In comparison to the 24 boilers producing 75,000 SHP, a 1980s boiler producing 1200 lbs PSI, superheated steam, would produce 85,000 SHP with 4 boilers. Superheating makes a gain. Pressure increases make another gain. You can only get pressure increases like that once the materials can support them. Modern flex joints in superheated steam are a modern marvel of engineering. If I were to design a modern state-of-the-art Naval plant, I wouldn't be using steam but CO2 to drive a generator with permanent magnet technology and electric drives. That is how much technology drives power generation.
Could you maybe expand a bit on the use of CO2? I'm a total noob when it comes to this kind of technology so I wouldn't even know where to start researching this kind of stuff
@@adenkyramud5005 There is a fair bit of it out there. Search for super-saturated CO2. It has real advantages. Powerplants shrink in size fairly dramatically.
Yeah, I'm rather curious about it myself and if you can explain it better & with a little more detail maybe I could understand what your actually talking about?
It has been a couple of days without a response so I'll pitch in. Water (steam) is used to drive turbines because it is readily available and changes phase (converts from liquid to gas and back again) at a range of convenient temperatures and pressures. It takes energy to boil water, you get energy back when you condense it again. You can use a lot of other fluids to transfer heat energy in the same way. Carbon dioxide will deliver roughly 800 psi at 68°F from a liquid, so you can get pressure at a much lower temperature. This is how restaurants carbonate their drinks, so it is a pretty mature and safe technology. In order to recover the carbon dioxide back to a liquid you've got to run a compressor and dump the heat somewhere, but you need heat to vaporize your liquid carbon dioxide anyway so you can recycle it and if you have an excess your ship is sitting in a large body of water that you can use to your advantage.
How did Drachinfel get to absorb and RETAIN so much information on ships over a 500 year or more period ? ! It’s simply rather astonishing and amazing he can just rattle off the cuff bouncing between topics which are so divergent.
The question about the cruiser-Carrier 01:09:49 it´s a bit tricky. Yes, if you think in WW2 terms, you would be (generally) ditching the two triple 6 inch turrets and making an Independence light cruiser. But if you think about late 20-early 30´s, that was when this designs came around, the things are a lot less clear. The capabilities of a late 20s/early 30 aircrafts are not the same that a 1942 aircraft, and then having 6 6" guns makes a lot more sense.
Yes, the internet is full of armchair admirals with 20:20 hindsight who "can't understand" why anyone built a battleship after around 1921. These are the same people who can't understand why the RN fought through the early part of WW2 with biplanes on their carriers. It's as though history goes from 1918 straight to 1941 with no learning and development curve in between.
The Hans Lingerer book "Capital Ships of the Imperial Japanese Navy 1868-1945: The Yamato Class and Subsequent Planning" seems to be available on Kindle in four parts at $10/section for a total of $40 all told. While not an ideal format, it's at least very accessible in this way.
Re: the 5 v. 2 scenario. It really depends more on whether the Japanese bring more cruiser escorts. Because if they don't, Japanese doctrine called for using cruisers for all of the scouting, although they did supplement this with one experimental plane on one of the carriers. But the scouts they used only ever located Yorktown's task group (twice). So unless they bring more scout aircraft, the Japanese are left with 3 carriers, but have no idea where the American carriers are located to launch a counterattack. So they have to either launch their planes to hit Midway again, or launch another scout wave and wait for their reports. Meanwhile Spruance is likely withdrawing after taking out half of the Japanese carrier force and recording a great victory.
Actually, the Japanese scouts *did* spot TF 16 on a couple of occasions. The issue was that they never fully figured out that there were two separate American carrier task forces present, and they almost always spotted TF 17 *last.* So, when the Japanese attack waves went out in the afternoon, they naturally flew towards the most recently reported sighting position, which was TF 17. So in the scenario of two US carriers, the Japanese would almost certainly have sighted and attacked TF 16 similar to what happened to Yorktown historically. Ironically, when one of their scouts spotted TF 16 again later in the afternoon, the staff officers receiving the report interpreted it as sighting two separate groups of two carriers each (the scout plane had spotted TF 16, flown through a cloud bank, and then sighted TF 16 again after they came out of the clouds). By that point, though, it was too late for the Japanese to do anything about it, regardless of whether they got their scouting information correct.
wrt the KGVs being built with 15"/42s. During the design process, the Admiralty's own technical analysis branch determined that a 9-15" armament would give the best combination of firepower, protection, and speed. Someone, I think First Sea Lord Chatfield, clung to the "more smaller guns equals more hits" theory, and pressed for 14". Just as raising the height of the armor belt caused B turret to be reduced from 4-14" to 2, I would expect the same increase in armor to result in B turret being reduced from 3-15" to 2. The switch from 16" to 14" in Second London appears to have been pressed for by the UK. Without someone in the Admiralty pushing for 14", the gun size limit would probably have been left at 16". First London had extended the construction moratorium, so it would not have been possible to start the KGVs any earlier than they were historically. KGV and PoW were laid down on New Year Day in 37, the first day after the First London moratorium expired. Guns were not the only bottleneck in the construction of the KGVs. British production capacity for armor had also atrophied since the end of WWI. I have read that some of the armor for the KGVs had to be contracted out to a Czech firm. When most of the Iron Dukes, and Tiger, were scrapped in the early 30s, many of their 13.5" guns were retained. I have read that the KGV's 14" was designed to fit the same mount as the 13.5". In the back of my mind is the thought that, had there been a shortage of 14", the Admiralty had a contingency plan to mount 13.5" in their place on the KGVs.
@@stevevalley7835 I think most of the Czech armour went into the Illustrious flight decks, but my memory is a bit fuzzy there. By assuming the UK wasn't pressing for 14", I assumed a slightly more bellicose government and Admiralty, who would start building when Japan walked away from London II. 😀
@@Drachinifel one of the books I read, when I looked in to this issue, two years ago, said 12,500 tons of armor where ordered from Czechoslovakia. Where that specific armor went is probably immaterial. The point is how capacity limited British industry was. That same book says that British capacity to build mounts and fire control equipment was also limited, to the point where the armor was not necessarily the only impediment to completing the ships. I think other sources have said Anson and Howe were specifically delayed waiting on fire control systems. From what I have read, the UK was the driver of the move to 14". The decision on gun size needed to be made by the end of 35, before the conference started, to meet completion targets. It was the US indicating that it would accept 14", if Japan agreed, that was the green light for the UK to commit to 14" for the KGVs. I don't know which book that information came from. It was not Friedman, or Raven. All I have is photographs of the pages, that I took when I had the book in hand.
Mary rose. Turns to fast and capsizes. Titanic. Hits some ice and fatally sinks taking most of the crew and passengers. Great Eastern. Built by a country that didn't know what to do with her greatness, Hits a rock, starts slowly sinking and ignores it. Boiler explodes and funnel becomes worlds first experimental ship launched missile. Does nothing about it until it's convenient. A ship so well built she is practically indestructible and like most of the royal navy the only thing that can defeat it is British politics and the scrap yard.
Considering how the sails are set and filled in the "how smoke affects sails" section image, I think the smoke must be blowing out to port, rather than back past the masts.
As for the Italian 12.6" guns, I wonder about the cost effectiveness of this? All the trouble of boring out the guns, then setting up a new production line for new shells, etc. etc. All that for a pretty modest increase in hitting power. And as mentioned, the reduction in accuracy. Seems the "standard" logic of increasing BB guns size by 1.5-2" at a time makes a lot more sense. Less than that and it's not worth the trouble?
Re: the quality of Italian engineering discussion, my first thought is that the shells had a different manufacturer. For all that we group quality by country, its often actually by company (or even by plant). Did Germany produce high quality guns, or did Krupp?
00:43:11 Holland had one major competitor in the US - Simon Lake, who built four sumbarines to compete with Holland in the late 1890s-early 1900s. None of these were acepted by the Navy, and Lake designed submarines for various European navies until forming the Lake Torpedo Boat Co. in 1912, eventually building 26 submarines for the USN before closing in the mid-1920s.
55:55 "Marinefährprahm": Pretty good! 😊 "-fähr-" 'ferry' sounds pretty much like "fair" - just lean into the "ai" sound to fully convince us that you aren't trying to say "-fahr-" 'drive, sail'. 🤓
Krupp has a reputation as an arms supplier but they actually cut their teeth on railroads. They were the major supplier of railway trucks and rails. The Union Army rail based logistics road on Krupp steel.
@DuraLexSedLex They made rails and trucks long before they made cannon. The three circles trademark represented wheels not cannon. See "The Arms of Krupp."
Regarding smoke from sailing vessels with steam engines (2:41:00) : Oddly enough that photo shows the error normally seen in oil paintings of such ships... The photo is deceiving your eyes, the smoke is not flowing behind the ship, it is actually coming nearly right towards you. This is because the smoke direction is a vector of the ship's speed and the wind's speed and direction. Say the wind is 10 knots, and the ship is steam-sailing at 6 knots. In the case illustrated, the resultant vector is off the port beam. This is why steam-sailing was usually done in "pointing" situations when the wind was afore the beam when the sails were not at peak value anyway. The common error often seen in paintings, is that the wind direction showed by sails and waves and flags rarely match.
Having grown up at the US/Canada border near Niagria falls, and currently living near the gulf of Mexica I love, LOVE star fort history be it English, French, Spanish, or the states. I was hoping you would have done a series on Fort Niagara and Fort Erie when you saw the Sullivans
Regarding the answer about coal vs oil boiler sizes, I never would have guessed that a stoker's throwing range was a limit!ing factor! I'm wondering if there were other factors as well as the two you mentioned. For example, since oil is sprayed, it burns throughout the bolier volume rather than on the grate at the bottom. And oil droplets have a much higher surface area per unit mass than do chunks of coal, and so they must burn faster. Do you think those were significant?
Oh boy, this gets insanely complex. So at the core simplest point the burny bit needs to be applying heat to the wet bit. Solid fuel needs to be either scattered or fed in via some roller or walking floor type mechanism. Air then needs to get to the fuel. The best method to get air in is to blow in from the bottom of the fuel. This means that controlling burning requires controlling air flow and fuel load. Minion with shovel can throw more fuel where its needed, but that doesnt actually control the heat effectively. Adding fuel makes the fire colder to start, the hotter once the burn starts. You also get ash buildup, limiting running time. Walking floors require better control of the airflow flat out or the burning becomes uneven and cold spots form, as each lane burns at different rates The next complex part after getting the fuel to burn, is to have the heat concentrating in the tubes for the water. If you have too much burning in the wrong place, that hot air is going out of the stack without heating the water effectively. So you want the hot bit under the tubes and fuel igniting (colder fire while starting to burn) from the edges, and the remains of the burn on another edge (so walking floor instead of minion with shovel) You need airflow control and temperature measurements to achieve this effectively, which implies a computer. Oil burning requires flow control and nozzle placement. Consistent airflow allows this to be mostly calculated and fine adjust can be done by an experianced minion with some valves. This allows you to predict where heat concentrations are, and design the concentration of heat to suit the tubes. Oil tends to behave more consistently than solid fuel (size of lumps, impurities etc change the fuel value of a shovel full) Oil is easier to design optimised boilers without advanced computer control and sensors, and easier for a minion to learn to adjust properly. So oil beats solid fuel in performance.
I love turboelecrtic drives for my ww2 capital ships in UA Dreadnoughts, as they give ridiculous maneuverability boost to the point that torpedoing my ships is close to impossible apart from point blank range. Also really helps in close night actions.
Regarding the Victoria-Camperdown collision, none of the accounts I've read have suggested that Tryon intended the two columns to merge into one, or that anyone at the enquiry suggested such a thing. It was suggested that Tryon may have intended one column to pass outside the other, but in that case I would expect him to have specified which of the columns was to make the wider turn.
As a Canadian, I really wish we helped invest in a battleship. Imagine if that 6th Queen Elizabeth had returned home as a museum ship? No offense to the great HMCS Haida but that would have been amazing.
i was wondering what the ramifications of this naval bill would be if these Queen Elizabeth battleships go to the Royal Navy. Canada was still starting out its navy then with some old cruisers to somewhat new cruisers and destroyers. Canada didn’t really have or invested much money unlike the Australians getting top of the line cruisers and destroyers pre-WWII (also only had HMAS Australia). Odd to have 3 Battleships but barely any supporting elements, but then has ramifications for army funding for WW1.
@@TheRandCrews I think it would have more been an expression of trust from us to the British. "We'll sacrifice deeply economically, but we really need your protection."
If a Canadian QE had been built and then preserved, why did I get the image of Drach and Dr Clarke being part of a cabal to somehow "borrow" it and get it to the UK as a museum ship there. It wasn't us, Honest! 😆
Where are VB-3, VF-3, VS-5 and VT-3 in this alternate Midway scenario? Three of these squadrons were in Hawaii (the fighters, dive bombers and torpedo bombers Saratoga had flown off before returning to the coast for repairs) during the Battle of the Coral Sea...do they sit at an Oahu NAS, or join VT-8's TBFs on Midway's Eastern Island, considering the Dauntless had a greater ferry range than the Avenger? Six VT-8 TBFs arrived on Oahu from the Mainland one day after Hornet sailed with TF16 to Point Luck, so the detachment flew to Midway Island instead. If Yorktown had not been able to participate in the June 1942 battle, would VB-3 and VS-5 really sit idle instead of joining VT-8 on Eastern Island? VF-3 and VT-3 probably could have flown to Midway as well, because despite not having a published ferry range the TBD could fly 900 nm with a 1000-lb bomb, and Barking Sands on the west end of Kauai (which had been operating as a US Army airfield since 1940) is less than 1050 nm from Midway and the F4F could carry drop tanks. With Yorktown out of commission, the strike by VB-3, VF-3 and VT-3 would probably have set two Japanese carriers on fire because Midway launched everything when Tomonaga's strike was detected...meaning VS-5 would have been launched and joined the Saratoga orphans, likely leaving Hiryu open to VS-5 as the Japanese CAP dealt with VT-3 and got mauled by John Thach's VF-3. Moreover, VB-3 and VS-5 likely would have hit the Kido Butai again that afternoon. VB-3 got away scot free from destroying Soryu, only taking losses from fuel exhaustion when Yorktown came under attack from Hiryu. Nevertheless at least 14 VB-3 SBDs recovered aboard Enterprise, as 14 VB-3 Dauntlesses formed the core of the unescorted strike of 24 from Enterprise that blasted and burned Hiryu that afternoon. In a scenario where VB-3 and VS-5 had to operate from Midway Island, they would also have been joined by the vast majority of VB-8 and VS-8, which recovered to Midway after the flight to nowhere. Even Zuikaku's plot armor probably couldn't stand up to four angry Navy Dauntless squadrons... In reality, the Japanese were greatly outnumbered off Midway, as Eastern Island's air force brought the tally of American aircraft to in excess of 350 compared to a Kido Butai that could not embark even 250 aircraft. If Yorktown had been unavailable, in addition to her historical air group almost certainly flying out to Midway itself the survivors in VB-5, VT-5, VF-42 and the remnants of Carrier Air Group 2 from Lexington might have been sent to beef up the air force on the island. Even sending just the pilots and aircrew would have made a massive difference--Lofton Henderson must have known he was embarking on a suicide mission with VMSB-241's green crews and the 'glide bombing' attack profile the Marine CO was forced to use. Now imagine he is instead surrounded by grizzled veterans of the Coral Sea, champing at the bit to drop on the Japanese in textbook 70-degree dives...
IMO the most underrated feature of the TE-drive is it's instant response to change the revolution speed of the propellers, thus being able to make very tight maneuvers. If I'm not mistaken, this aspect saved USS Maryland from being hit by a japanese aerial torpedo. Why this wasn't used more frequently in evasive actions is something I don't understand.
The West Virginia's blind shot at 22kyds is more a demonstration of technical prowess than skilled gunnery. Once you mastered the technology then accuracy is strictly a mechanical problem. West Virginia first obtained a fire control solution at 30kyds but because the 7th fleet battleships' ammunition loadout was heavily weighted towards HE Kincaid ordered the ships to wait until the Japanese ships had closed to the low 20kyds before opening fire.
It's a bit more involved than you might suspect. A sniper with a rifle has to adjust their sights from time to time, and uses practice at the range to tell them when the sights are not quite right. A similiar process applies to WW2 naval weapons. The systems are all analog, not digital, so it's not just a matter of inputting a number and pressing a button. Analog systems will have motors (actuators) to move the guns in rotation and elevation (angle) and dials (sensors) and these can and will differ from one gun to another on the same ship in small ways - one motor will be a little stronger, one a little weaker, and so forth. Just as the sights on a sniper rifle can get out-of-whack and need to be adjusted, these analog systems will have calibration inputs and they will need to be calibrated to work properly together - and the calibration might drift over time or with temperature or extended exposure to the sea environment or usage or other factors. Even digital systems typically need calibration, for that matter, but it's typically a lot more complex for analog systems. Most people don't see this process, because for consumer goods like cell phones it happens at the factory and modern systems are good enough that the calibration won't drift enough to worry about over the expected life of the product. On the other hand, even today for high end non-consumer goods like advanced test and measurement equipment, the equipment will have to be calibrated multiple times over the life of the product to keep both accuracy and precision. I don't know how often they calibrated the systems on WW2 warships, but I suspect it was a lot more often than anything most folks would be used to today. So just as a sniper needs to learn to get a feel for when something is wrong with the sights on his or her rifle - and no two sniper rifles are exactly the same - so too does the crew of the WW2 warship need to be able to get a feel for when and where the calibration is wrong 'somewhere in the system' on their ship and needs to be adjusted. It's actually a lot easier for the sniper with the rifle in some ways, because there are a much more limited set of options for things to tweak - though they might need to have different settings for different ranges which adds some complexity. With WW2 warships, both the guns and the radar probably both have their own calibration for multiple components or sub-systems, plus the systems used to get the guns to fire at the right time in the ship's roll and fire together to create a salvo (or fire slightly offset in time as appropriate, such as when gun barrels are too close and need to be fired at slightly different times) will likely need calibration of their own. It's pretty complex and not static over time, and there is a human element in determining whether things are right or not and where they are going astray and where corrections should be made - so not strictly a mechanical problem. The firing results in the papers in Warship International 2005/2006 show that crew experience - and thus the human element - makes a big difference in outcomes. Another good example of the important role played by human element is found in the account of the sinking the Haguro - where one radar operator on one RN destroyer could see the target well before anybody else, and recognized that it was a valid target even though it was visible far beyond the normal range of the radar (due to very unusual atmospheric conditions). Other operators - all experienced - would sit down at the same equipment, adjust the settings, and the blip would disappear. The original operator sat back down, adjusted it again, and the blip re-appeared - and eventually everybody had to agree that he was right.
@bluelemming5296 What you describe is still an engineering process. It takes skilled personnel but it is a different set of skills than optical rangefinding and gunlaying. The sailor maintaining equipment don't necessarily operate it.
@bluelemming5296 Coming from the range I have an imperfect analogy to explain why West Virhinia's advantage is based on technology and less so skill. Iron sights versus red dots on pistols. Iron sights are the equivalent of optical fire control. Accuracy wirh Iron sights is very dependent on the skill of shooter. Red Dot sights are the equivalent of the Mark 8 FCS. You have to zero (calibrate) the sights and check your zero periodically. They require training but once mastered give the shooter the accuracy of an expert.
@@johnshepherd9676 One thing that may be confusing here is that the departmental organization of ships can be different from place to place, and over time. In WW2, what I described in not an engineering process: the ship's engineering department has it's hands full with the propulsion and internal communications and power generation/distribution systems within the ship. Outside their areas of primary responsibility, their responsibility ends when they deliver power to the locations that need it. Think of them as the ship's 'power utility company': they aren't going to configure the systems within your workplace or your house. The gunnery department and the radar team (probably part of the navigation department) handle all the calibration of the systems involved in gunnery. As a general rule, the engineering department doesn't understand these systems and doesn't have time to learn. The experts who actually use the systems are the ones that 'own' the setup. In practice, for navies like the USN or the RN, this means senior enlisted and chiefs in the gunnery department, sometimes with the officers for the gunnery department getting involved. There's another potential point of confusion, in that the shipyard engineering department is probably involved in some initial setup of systems, possibly with some vendor tech reps. But for some strange reason shipyards frown on people firing enormous weapons in the shipyard, so the crew of the ship has to do the final setup at the firing range. Even here there may be some vendor tech reps and shipyard engineers present for a short while as mentors, but they aren't going to be on the ship long term and the gunnery department needs to know how to do everything related to long term operations, including correcting the calibration as needed. Navies get very sticky about this. The expectation is that the ships will be at sea or remote outposts for months or even years without any civilian presence on board. Hence the sniper analogy, and adjusting the sights on a rifle. A sniper may use the services of a machinist or woodworker to help tune the rifle, but they won't be bringing those people into the field with them. A pistol analogy is not as good as a sniper rifle analogy, because the range of pistols is considerably more limited. As the saying goes, _A pistol is what you use when you are going to get your rifle_ . A red dot sight on a rifle is not going to let you perform like a professional sniper at long range. It's better than iron sights, but long range shooting is an entirely different animal. Gunnery on WW2 warships involves lots of different equipment, all of which needs to be coordinated with relatively precise timing, in order for long range fire to be accurate and precise. It's like coordinating all the different muscles in a sniper's body to get the perfect shot. Setting up that coordination - and keeping it over time - is the responsibility of the gunnery department and the radar team (if radar is in use). That ultimately comes down to maintenance, training, and calibration. You can see this clearly in the gunnery results reported in Warship International 2005-2006: various ships crews all using essentially the same equipment and the same training had very different results at long ranges. It was not at all a pushbutton process. As the crews gained experience with their equipment, they were able to get more out of it. Just as with a sniper, gunnery was a strong function of experience.
@@bluelemming5296 What you described is an engineering process. Not all things that qualify as engineering take place in the engineering department. Maintenance of any mechanical or electrical device is an engineering process. What do you think electrical engineering is? I gave you an example of two fire control systems that are roughly analogous to optical and radar directed fire on ship. The analog to the Mk 8 turns your average shooter into an expert.
IMO the only thing that goes against WV’s gunnery at Surigao being the best battleship gunnery ever is the fact Yamashiro was hemmed in by the terrain and unable to maneuver. I think an earlier drydock pointed out that the crew are the big unknown factor in fire control, with improvements in hardware (including FC radar) being unable to compensate for poor crew quality in some cases. So even with WV having up-to-date equipment her level of accuracy is still pretty impressive.
What is the natural hull form speed of a QE? They never did get up to design speed, and the refits were no great shakes in terms of speed either. Was there a problem with the hull shape or length to beam ratio? Put differently, would the small tube boilers actually get them above 25.5 knots?
Re: Updating 15" RN ships between wars. Installation of geared turbines would drastically change the pressure and volume of steam required so changing the boilers would also be needed Wouldn't that put ships with the best engineering plants at the back of the queue? Why rip out your best plants?
Regarding 15-inch KGVs it's known that Vanguard was based on the Lion Hull could they have made a proto-Vanguard based on a KGV hull in the mid-1930s, it would be smaller and thus almost certainly slower so maybe only 27-28 knots, not 30 knots and may have had to sacrifice part of the secondary battery as well as range and maybe a little bit of belt armour, in reality, the KGV had 14.7 - inch belt while Vanguard had a 14-inch belt maybe this ship would only have a 13-inch belt while not as good as IRL KGV it would still be pretty good being better than QE and equivalent to an R in thickness but benefitting from advances in armour scheme and metallurgy so still offering pretty good protection from 15 and 16-inch shells (it's protection would be superior to Bismarck and Scharnhorst but not quite as good as IRL KGV, while still having 8 15-inch gins in 4 twin turrets as they would have benefited from not needing a new turret or gun design thus getting rid of one of the big bottlenecks allowing for a much more accelerated construction, how effective could this budget Vanguard be? I'm sure the mid-1930s treasury would be interested in such a proposal maybe instead of the actual KGV class if these Hulls are all ordered in 1936 with a policy of when they are built an R gets scrapped and its turrets go to one of these on a one in one out fashion. Maybe you would spend the money that was spent on the QE refits on accelerating this class so in late 1939 you have Hood, Renown, Repulse, 5 of these 27-28 knot Budget Vanguards, and 5 relatively unmodified (roughly equivalent to IRL Barham or Malaya) QE's capable of say 22-23 knots. The unmodified QEs would be more than capable of conducting the roles that were carried out by the R class and could maybe get modest refits during the war when possible (i.e a few more light AA guns partial along with Radar and a better fire control system), Whilst 5 27+ knot Battleships armed with 8 15 Inch guns would be a pretty deadly force and would also take a bit of pressure off Hood, Renown and Repulse as they would have more reletavily fast ships.
What happens to all the excess power on a turbo electric ship when it's running at lower speeds? Is it converted to heat, as on a modern diesel electric locomotive?
If the Canadian QE's had been built with small tube boilers this would have given the British builders experience with them, so would it be possible that Renown and Repulse (if built) would have them or perhaps Hood equipped with small tube boilers? And would the ships have just been lighter or the weight saved used for more armour or speed? Regarding gunnery, while WV's shooting was excellent, that was on a calm pacific sea. Though the range was closer I'd consider Duke of York's shooting more impressive as that was in the middle of a howling gale in the Arctic. And Iron Duke's shooting at Jutland was incredible. In the failing light, massive amounts of funnel/gun smoke, conflicting shell splashes and far less developed fire control, her achievement in the number of hits she scored cannot be under estimated.
If Hood had been equipped with small tube boilers I'd venture a guess that the weight saved would have probably been put into thicker armor belt. Which may have saved it from going down with all hands in the Denmark Strait! Unfortunately 😢 Hood went down. And Bismark was doomed because of it. HMS Rodney seen to that. I love how Drach describes Rodney's 16" guns "snarling" a reply to the guns of Bismark! AND with the all forward armament no need to turn to unmask a rear turret. That's why I think that was truly a much better design for a battleship!
So if the Canadian QEs and Agincourt *had* been built, would the Royal Navy keep the Rs when scrapping ships for the treaty? That means they'd theoretically keep nine QEs, Renown, Repulse, and Hood right?
Historically “late” aircraft were flown directly to Midway. There were four avenger torpedo aircraft slated for Hornet’s torpedo eight that flew as part of the Midway attack on the Japanese.
Every steam loco is force draft. I'd have thought the forced air would have been feed directly to each boiler. The heat of a boiler room is bad enough as it is. So separate forced air cooling for the Stoker's would have been normal.
Thanks for answering my question, Drach. Incidentally, I really enjoyed your naval report card, though your end of term comments lead me to suspect that you'd be, wbat we used to call at my school, a hard marker.
Yeah, giving individual Navies a grade is really not easy & really not fair for each Navy UNLESS you grade said Navy yearly. And you also have to look at how much funding EACH Navy is getting from their nation & how well they used that funding to accomplish the goals that they needed to meet.
Hi drach, have a question about 1st gen British Dreadnoughts and battlecruisers. Why were there no casemates and turrets chosen and only open mounts for the 3 and 4 inch secondaries?
6 and a half hours?! Also 1:13:05 Achilles and Ajax have entered the chat, yeah I know they had Exeter to take the brunt of Spee's fire, but still, that's 2 CLs engaging a Panzerschiff
In the discussion about the Battle of Midway, I always have a problem with all the discussions of "what ifs," that there is not one mention of Nimitz not trying to get USS Saratoga out to Midway in time for the battle. She arrived on May 25 in San Diego after her repair work in Puget Sound Navy Yard was finished. Had Nimitz ordered her to sail on May 26, she could have made it to Pearl Harbor late on May 30. Refueling and reprovisioning overnight, she could have sailed on May 31with the addition of VF-5 (18 F4Fs,) VF-72 (20 F4Fs,) and the VT-8 detachment (20 New TBF Avengers) to the 14 F4Fs and 23 SBDs she had sailed with from San Diego to give a fighter heavy air group that would have allowed more fighter escorts on the attack on the Japanese carrier force.
If she was available, she would be sent historically. But she wasn't. Sure repairs were finished but what about everything else? Crew? Supplies? Escort for her from San Diego to Pearl? Were available squadrons in any position to deployed to actual combat?
@@ReichLife Where is your proof to say she wasn't available? Escort? She had to have escort from Seattle to San Diego. Plus, USS San Diego (CL-53) was at San Diego and did escort the Sara when she did leave for Pearl Harbor on June 1.
@@robertdendooven7258 Mate, Saratoga didn't join Battle of Midway. If anyone is to provide proof, it's you that she was available but wasn't called for different reasons.
@@ReichLife If you read Harold L Buell's book Dauntlesses Helldivers he stated that Saratoga (where he was stationed at the time) was kept in Hawaiian waters during the battle as an emergency reserve on the off chance that all of the carriers at Midway were put out of action
“Boy have I got the manuscript book for you!” - Drach carrying on about why the drums and instruments on Mary Rose were used. Fl. Always ca. 308 let’s make it rum ration…
I just now realized that you had "The ORIGINAL OPENING" song/ diddy back!!! CONGRATS!!! I had thought it rather annoying that some idiot was trying to claim the rights to it! The things @$$holes do to try to get money. IMHO whoever the people are that were doing that crap to you I hope God looks down on them in an angry manner & decides to make their lives so difficult & complicated that they never even have time to think about doing anything like that to anyone else ever again! We can only hope & pray. Or is that pray & hope?
These are analog systems, which implies they don't have discrete steps or quantization. In other words, it's arbitrary within the limits of the controls, which can only be described approximately - and probably differ from motor to motor, and barrel to barrel, ship to ship, maybe even other variables, possibly in non-linear ways - there's probably some calibration procedure used to get things reasonably close and to get the dials (showing the system state, i.e. the gun angle) somewhat accurately reflecting reality. You might not be able to reach any arbitrary position in a single operation, since it would take a certain amount of force to overcome friction, in order to start moving, at which point all the momentum generated might take some time to kill - depending upon friction and whatever else is being used to slow the thing down. In other words, if a destination position (i.e. angle or 'end state') is sufficiently close to the start position (or 'start state') you might not be able to get there in a single operation, you might not be able to just move from one position to the other then stop. But you could move past the desired position a certain amount, and if you went far enough then you could reverse and come back to a more-or-less arbitrary position - so you use two operations to get to the destination. Note that the friction that needs to be overcome to start moving and the friction that helps the system to stop are usually different in real systems - with the initial friction being much larger. There might be an electronic control system that automates this process, with some sort of inputs used to calibrate it. In any case, the correction for range wouldn't be measured in feet, since adjustments are likely to be in angle, so it would be measured in degrees or radians or some other suitable measure for angle. You could convert that to feet only at a specific distance (using the arc length formula). In other words, it wouldn't make sense to say 'the minimum correction is 100ft', but it might make sense to say 'the minimum correction is 100ft at 10k yards' - I'm making up the numbers here, just trying to illustrate the point. If you wanted more specific information for a specific ship, then you might be able to find it in the manuals for the systems on that ship. At least for US ships in WW2, there generally were such manuals - and some of the museum ships make some of these publicly available in pdf format on their web site. They use the manuals to help maintain the ship - though there's probably a lot of 'tribal knowledge' as well, knowledge that's passed down from person to person about things not adequately covered in the manuals.
Depends on how you count them...there could be as many as 8. There where 5 aircraft carriers with the Combined Fleet: HOSHO with the Main Body and the Carrier Striking Force with AKAGI, KAGA, HIRYU, and SORYU. The Northern Area Force which conducted the attack in the Aleutian Islands had the Second Mobile Force with RYUJO and JUNYO. And finally the Midway Occupation Force Covering Group had ZUIHO. See Appendix II of MIDWAY by William Ward Smith.
wrt the question about the USN's superimposed turrets, these were the brainchild of a young officer at BuOrd named Joseph Strauss. Strauss was the same bright spark who, years later, as head of BuOrd, decreed that the 14" was the perfect gun, because combat at ranges greater than 12,000 yards would never happen. As Drac said, improvements in rate of fire of the main guns rendered the superimposed turrets redundant. Someone else in the Navy Department figured out that, what was needed in the large turrets, was paying a little attention to ergonomics, and training the crews better. The Navweaps article on the 12"/40, the gun mounted on the Virginias, shows the rate of fire improving from 0.66 round per minute when the ships were first commissioned, to 2 rounds per minute after the modifications to turret ergonomics and training had been implemented in 1906.
The way I hear about the Admiral Trian being rammef I think that his subordinate was fed up having to think for himself and did it deliberately. Something like Fragging.
Surely a turbo electric installation is less efficient than a conventional turbine drive. Power from the turbines direct to the props has to be more efficient at power transfer.
@@Andy_Ross1962 yes, if a geared turbine and TE drive are running at the turbines optimal speed the geared turbine is more efficient. But if the geared turbine ship slows to less optimal speed then the TE drive becomes more efficient as the loss of efficiency in the geared turbines is greater than the loss of energy in the various steps of the TE drive.
I'd rate the RN as a C at the start of the war. As a deep water navy it needed a strong air arm, and did not have one thanks to the interference of the RAF, from which it had only wrestled back control of the Fleet Air Arm in 1939. Ironically, it had built the carriers but the aircraft it possessed were largely obsolete.
@@johnculver2519 I think the aircraft were rubbish, but the pilots that flew them were superb. Although, even there, I believe HMS Sheffield might have had some reservations.
@@AndyM_323YYY The raid on Taranto used the worlds only night capable carrier launched attack force. If the swordfish is rubbish, then I don't know what description can be applied to all other naval attack aircraft, but it would not be kind. Bismarck was found and crippled at night by ASV radar equipped swordfish. I don't know of another radar equipped carrier aircraft at the time. The swordfish then carried on effectively as a centimetric radar equipped submarine hunter. Most of this effectiveness comes about because the swordfish is a slow and stable biplane. It was good because it was built to fit the real oppurtunities of naval warfare, not 'faster must be better'. Sometimes high capability aircraft don't go fast.
@@PalleRasmussen The IJN's AA capabilities were generally regarded by a certain Drachinifel as not the best. The USNs night action performance at the Battle of Savo Island should suggest that the USN would not perform well against a night air torpedo attack. Imagine being able to do a succesful carrier launched strike on your enemies main fleet port (Taranto) that contains several modern battleships, and much shore based AA. Sinking enemy battleships in the middle of a war, not at peace. Not by surprise, not by luck, but by skill, technology and high capability aircraft. Additionally, the swordfish delivered a heavy blow against the Bismark, a modern warship, without loss. Do you think the then current US torpedo bombers could have done the same thing? They normally have huge losses, partly due to their limited operational envelope. It's rather like the stealth capabilities of the F-117, you operate where the enemy cannot effectively counter you. Just because the swordfish is not a fast all metal monoplane aircraft does not mean that is not a superb design for actual war.
4:10 what makes you say 16th century and not, say, late 15th century? as a non-expert I always thought the age of sail started at the point when transatlantic return voyages became possible/survivable, which is a few decades before the mary rose was laid down as far as I understand.
I tend to go with the period where large standing navies as the instruments of state policy became widespread, as opposed to random collections of mainly private shipping with a few Royal ships mixed in for fun. :)
At 00:43:11 you answer the question "- Are there other types of submarines other than the Holland type? If so, how do they differ?". I believe that you significantly overstate the importance of Holland Type vessels in submarine development, especially by WWI. In this case, John Holland's shameless self-promotion (and the EBC's continuing lobbying) still seems to hang on. Realistically, the Russian vessels you allude to and all German, Austrian, and US types by the beginning of WWI were Lake Type boats. Indeed, when I was involved in the US Dry Combat Submersible (DCS) downselect, many people were shocked to find that Lake's ARGONAUT I (1898) met almost all DCS specification requirements, 2 years before the founding of the USN Submarine Service, with a 1200 NM range to boot! While I could go on about the original differences between Holland and Lake type submarines (bow planes, external ballast tanks, etc) and what came from each to make up a 20th century "combat" submarine; I would suggest that whoever is interested pick up a copy of Argonaut: The Submarine Legacy of Simon Lake by John J. Poluhowich
18:48 thanks a lot Drach. Wow. Great job. I was still reading the book. Spoiler indeed. I read the news today oh boy, the English army had just won the war…
I always thought the boring out from 12-inch to 12.6 was stupid. The difference in shell size is negligable it would have been better to just keep them at 12 inch and maybe create a new 12 inch shell. I do not see a single benifit of the boring out that is a: worth the downsides or b: can't be achieved by a new shell at a fraction of the cost.
As an American I truly don't understand WHY I get such a kick out of hearing about HMS Newport sneaking in front of the French and being the first ship to transit the Suez Canal. But I truly find it hilarious that although the French had it built the English were the first ones to use it! Just a way to 🖕 the French! Screw politics were going for it!! And btw, it's not the first time I've heard you tell that story. But it's still just as funny as the first time you told it!
Jutland battlecruisers and Yamato’s takedown of USS Johnston are among the best battleship accuracy in my opinion. Scoring multiple hits on the first salvo at long range is basically another level. West Virginia is overrated, she scored three hits on Yamashiro on her first, second, and sixth salvo. I don’t even see how her gunnery was significantly better than California and Tennessee.
Although the range was much closer, Duke of York hit Scharnhorst at night in the middle of a howling gale in the Arctic while WV was blessed with a calm Pacific night. Iron Duke's shooting at Jutland was very impressive given the very poor light, gun/funnel smoke, conflicting shell splashes and far less capable fire control technokogy.
@Drachinifel Re: Russsso-Japanese war. How would the Russian 1st Pacific Squadron likely have fared against the Japanese Forces had it not been trapped in Port Arthur? (Say instead of getting trapped there, they tried to run for a neutral port.)
Omg. We’re not even two minutes and already I have to slam a vodka. I think he’s just saying square cube law just so I have fun. Everyone knows you have to drink when Drach mentions square cube law. It’s the law…
00:17:30 How do you grade the German and italian navies they were both tested before their matriculation date, it is like giving n 8 year old an 11 plus exam
@@Ranzoe813 The Japanese tried a 18.9 inch 48 cm gun in 1919, 45 caliber 5 Year Type 36 cm Gun (cover designation) evidently fully tested and split it was judged fixable if the 2nd and 3rd bands were thicken, but already the gun manufacturers felt the thing was too difficult to manufacture and not worth the effort compared to the 16 inch guns they had for Nagato. The design was resurrected in 1934 along with the paper design 46 cm/50 (18.1") 5th Year Type probably for work on the the 40cm (cover name) 45 caliber Type 94 for Yamato. and for the 45 caliber Type 98 51 cm (20.1 inch) Gun for the Super Yamato The 18.9 in ch gun was found at Kamegakubi Proving Grounds in 1945. All seems fairly pointless, a case of designing something because you can.
Two things on Midway. The Yorktown was attacked twice by Hiryo. First attack was by dive bombers. She was quickly patched and was able to get underway. The second attack was by torpedo planes which killed the boilers. She was being towed by a small tug when the submarine torpedoed her. A fleet tug was on its way to take over. The second thing is what would happen had there been 3 more carriers? Would the US have left after Yorktown was hit? Would she have been sunk? Would Nagomo have used all carriers against Midway? As a side note, my friend was on the USS North Carolina through the war. He said they were at Midway with other battleships in case the carriers had been lost. I don't know why the North Carolina wasn't placed with the carriers for AA protection. Of course, she could only do 27 knots and the carriers could do 32. The other thing, if they knew there was going to be additional carriers at Coral Sea, would they have sent Enterprise and Hornet to Japan?
I don't mean to be rude, but you or your friend are likely misremembering. North Carolina wasn't "at Midway with other battleships," as she was in the Atlantic at the time -- only going through the Panama Canal with USS Wasp some days after the battle (10 June). I think that best answers the question of why she wasn't placed with the carrier for AA protection -- since her AA was not capable of striking Japanese fighters attacking Yorktown whilst N Carolina was... in the Atlantic on her way to the Caribbean.
@@princedetenebres I don't know. He may have been on a different battleship when he said he was at Midway. He didn't tell me too much. We got into an argument over US battleships firing on other battleships. I know that he's in the North Carolina service book. I know he lied about his age and he enlisted after Pearl Harbor. He told me that he became the signalman shortly after coming onto the North Carolina when the signalman was killed in action. He never talked about anything that he went through during the war. All he said is that the North Carolina entered Tokyo Harbor before the Missouri. As far as battleships at Midway. I think it's very possible. I have read other sources as to this. The US should have had Colorado, Maryland, Tennessee, and Pennsylvania available by then.
@@michaelpiatkowskijr1045 Again, I don't mean to be rude but no, it is not possible as the US did not bring any battleships to midway. Period. The battleships were still under Pye's command at this point and were based off of the west coast. There was a critical lack of fleet oilers at the time and the older standards were on the west coast as a consequence of this as I understand it. Regardless of the reason, the US had ZERO battleships at or around Midway at the time of the battle, before or after it. The location of the battleships at the time is something that is known and easily looked up; the slower ones of pre-war vintage that were in the Pacific were either still undergoing repair and refit from Pearl or with Admiral Pye off the west coast in TF1. The newer vessels, SoDak, Washington & North Carolina were in the Atlantic, the latter of which making its way to Panama, as I said, only entering the Pacific about a week after Midway. SoDak had replaced her in Newfoundland, and Washington was over in Europe. Tldr: all the battleships can be accounted for in that timeframe and none of them were in the vicinity.
@@michaelpiatkowskijr1045 Here's from the entry on Admiral Pye, who commanded the battleships of the Pacific Fleet at the time, so you don't need to take my word for it: "On 31 December, Pye relinquished command of the Pacific Fleet to Admiral Chester W. Nimitz. Pye became commander of Task Force One (TF 1), comprising the remaining operational battleships of the Pacific Fleet augmented by three battleships from the Atlantic Fleet, now based in San Francisco. During the Battle of Midway, Pye received orders for the seven old battleships (Colorado, Idaho, Maryland, Mississippi, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, and Tennessee), the escort carrier USS Long Island, and eight destroyers of TF 1 to sortie to patrol off of the West Coast against possible Japanese attack there should the carrier forces at Midway be defeated. Such fears proved unfounded, and TF 1 then remained on training and patrol duties between Hawaii and the West Coast until Pye was relieved in October 1942 at the age of 62."
@@princedetenebres that's interesting. I've never heard that. It could have been apart of the confusion. If you're on one of those ships knowing that you could fight the Japanese fleet if the carriers are turned back, you could possibly think you're off Midway. I didn't think they would be that close to Midway. A good question is what would the orders be if the carriers have fallen? Would the battleships move to protect Hawaii or would they stay by the west coast? If Hawaii had fallen afterwards, the US would have been in serious trouble.
If Brunell had the semi blank cheque. Then HMS Isle of White would be in the offing. Yes, fitting engines, armour and guns. If it had been a true money no object. Wih Brunell's affection for all things "Great". It would be HMS Great Britain, instead of the Isle of White. being engined, armoured and guns. The entire landmass, with the flag staff of every castle on the island flying a White Ensign. Britannia certainly would have rules the waves! As Queen Victoria was on the throne at this time. The figurehead would likely be a massive Prince Albert carved into the White Cliffs.
I think that The Goodies did that in their Pirate Radio Station episode when Graeme towed the entire UK outside the five mile limit. He wasn't mad. He was a genius.
@@notshapedforsportivetricks2912 I remember that episode. Goodies, goodie, goodie yum yum. Way to show me my age 😜 Just remember, Ecky Thump!!, and watch out for the black puddings You couldn't make that show these days as too many groups have no sense of humor.
1:35:00 For treaties' sake they could've just keep a 8.01" gun somewhere and call them capital ships if they weren't going to build replacements anyway.
So if the barrel of a gun is called a barrel because on early iron guns it was manufactured in the manner of a barrel, with staves and bands, what was it called in the age when all guns were cast bronze?
Ah, a drydock long enough to cover my ENTIRE flixbus drive today. Thank you drach.
That's part 1 😅
Yes. Well, i need something to listen to next week while fitting the bilstein kit to the 1999 v70 T5 too...
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Hi I 👋 👋 o9i
@@AndreasGlad-rq7vxi hope the ikea gods have mercy and the swedish brick doesn't cause trouble while you install that 😂
A day at the beach filled with history! Aloha!
Krupp was at one time the oldest family owned business as they didn't start selling stock until the 1970's. Krupp originally started as a family that made kitchen utensils.
Well it very well might have been the oldest German family owned business but worldwide there are a few that were and some still are older. The Hōshi Ryukan founded in 718 AD being the oldest still operating family owned business comes to mind beating Krupp by some 800 years. Of course as an inn/hotel the Hōshi was never ever operating on an scale comparable to the industial giant Krupp became.
So you're telling me there's an alternate universe where they make Krupperware?
Regarding 1:23:26 and gunnery- Let me caveat that I never used an optical range finder during actual war; but I was trained on them (and have used fire control radars during actual war). I give it to Warspite and Washington. During my schooling in the mid 1980's as a Fire Control Technician, there were still a few ships with backup optical systems in service so we all had to at least know what they were and, if it was all you got, how to work them. And not all of us could- those things will give you eyestrain, headaches and vertigo when overused. This is why I give the shorter but optical shots the win. I've personally tried to rangefind with those things in my A-School training, and it really does take a special kind of person with the right kind of eyesight to do it. And on those two ships, they had a special person. Radars are not special. I know FC radars and the system WV had, the hit doesn't surprise me. And it just got better and more accurate from there.
So, do current ships not have any optical backup for fire control?
@@billbrockman779 I'm about 40 years from my navy days so I don't know about current ships, but it was uncommon in my time. To be honest, I would doubt it.
even in the Army riding Bradleys, I can tell you that optical systems are not really usable by everyone. Even those of us who got good at it would get really dizzy or disoriented rather quickly. That is on a vehicle with a 3750 meter max range on weapons...but with the focus of view being stable but the vehicle turning and moving differently, it took some time and a lot of practice to keep your lunch down...LOL
You are saying that West Virginia's shooting was not as impressive because technology made it easier. If you want to grade on the curve, that may be the right answer, there is room to argue. But, in terms of the difficulty of the accomplishment, there really isn't any comparison. Hit on first salvo, at 22,800 yards, at night and hits over multiple salvos at range (which I think it unique for hits over 20,000 yards), including some salvos with multiple hits.
@@MrTScolaro My thought as well.
Jon has been pretty clear that the historical record indicates that if the US only has two carriers, the battle would have been fought from Point Luck, or close too it, rather than moving the carriers west. In which case, the battle looks far more like a drive by shooting than a pitched battle. The US carrier aircraft would have arrived much later, likely simultaneous with a 2nd strike on Midway. They would have recovered late in the afternoon, and then the carriers would have booked it either east or southeast to withdraw.
Midway itself has been seriously reinforced, including the 1st Raider Battalion. So Nimitz thinks they can actually hold off an invading force for a considerable amount of time.
I was an MM in the US Navy on boilers. Boiler design is as much a contributor to power to mass as anything else. In comparison to the 24 boilers producing 75,000 SHP, a 1980s boiler producing 1200 lbs PSI, superheated steam, would produce 85,000 SHP with 4 boilers. Superheating makes a gain. Pressure increases make another gain. You can only get pressure increases like that once the materials can support them. Modern flex joints in superheated steam are a modern marvel of engineering. If I were to design a modern state-of-the-art Naval plant, I wouldn't be using steam but CO2 to drive a generator with permanent magnet technology and electric drives. That is how much technology drives power generation.
Could you maybe expand a bit on the use of CO2? I'm a total noob when it comes to this kind of technology so I wouldn't even know where to start researching this kind of stuff
@@adenkyramud5005 There is a fair bit of it out there. Search for super-saturated CO2. It has real advantages. Powerplants shrink in size fairly dramatically.
Yeah, I'm rather curious about it myself and if you can explain it better & with a little more detail maybe I could understand what your actually talking about?
It has been a couple of days without a response so I'll pitch in. Water (steam) is used to drive turbines because it is readily available and changes phase (converts from liquid to gas and back again) at a range of convenient temperatures and pressures. It takes energy to boil water, you get energy back when you condense it again. You can use a lot of other fluids to transfer heat energy in the same way. Carbon dioxide will deliver roughly 800 psi at 68°F from a liquid, so you can get pressure at a much lower temperature. This is how restaurants carbonate their drinks, so it is a pretty mature and safe technology. In order to recover the carbon dioxide back to a liquid you've got to run a compressor and dump the heat somewhere, but you need heat to vaporize your liquid carbon dioxide anyway so you can recycle it and if you have an excess your ship is sitting in a large body of water that you can use to your advantage.
How did Drachinfel get to absorb and RETAIN so much information on ships over a 500 year or more period ? ! It’s simply rather astonishing and amazing he can just rattle off the cuff bouncing between topics which are so divergent.
Love the whole "Report Card" idea. definitely should do that!
I like the idea of a year by year report card of all the major Navies
The question about the cruiser-Carrier 01:09:49 it´s a bit tricky. Yes, if you think in WW2 terms, you would be (generally) ditching the two triple 6 inch turrets and making an Independence light cruiser. But if you think about late 20-early 30´s, that was when this designs came around, the things are a lot less clear. The capabilities of a late 20s/early 30 aircrafts are not the same that a 1942 aircraft, and then having 6 6" guns makes a lot more sense.
Yes, the internet is full of armchair admirals with 20:20 hindsight who "can't understand" why anyone built a battleship after around 1921. These are the same people who can't understand why the RN fought through the early part of WW2 with biplanes on their carriers. It's as though history goes from 1918 straight to 1941 with no learning and development curve in between.
The Hans Lingerer book "Capital Ships of the Imperial Japanese Navy 1868-1945: The Yamato Class and Subsequent Planning" seems to be available on Kindle in four parts at $10/section for a total of $40 all told. While not an ideal format, it's at least very accessible in this way.
17:33 Naval Report Cards of WW2 nations - per year would be interesting...
I've said it before and I'll say it again - Drach runs the only free naval war college I know of.
Re: the 5 v. 2 scenario. It really depends more on whether the Japanese bring more cruiser escorts. Because if they don't, Japanese doctrine called for using cruisers for all of the scouting, although they did supplement this with one experimental plane on one of the carriers. But the scouts they used only ever located Yorktown's task group (twice). So unless they bring more scout aircraft, the Japanese are left with 3 carriers, but have no idea where the American carriers are located to launch a counterattack. So they have to either launch their planes to hit Midway again, or launch another scout wave and wait for their reports. Meanwhile Spruance is likely withdrawing after taking out half of the Japanese carrier force and recording a great victory.
Actually, the Japanese scouts *did* spot TF 16 on a couple of occasions. The issue was that they never fully figured out that there were two separate American carrier task forces present, and they almost always spotted TF 17 *last.* So, when the Japanese attack waves went out in the afternoon, they naturally flew towards the most recently reported sighting position, which was TF 17. So in the scenario of two US carriers, the Japanese would almost certainly have sighted and attacked TF 16 similar to what happened to Yorktown historically.
Ironically, when one of their scouts spotted TF 16 again later in the afternoon, the staff officers receiving the report interpreted it as sighting two separate groups of two carriers each (the scout plane had spotted TF 16, flown through a cloud bank, and then sighted TF 16 again after they came out of the clouds). By that point, though, it was too late for the Japanese to do anything about it, regardless of whether they got their scouting information correct.
I don't have 3hrs right now. But, non the less, it's top of the line content.
Thanks for always being the best.
wrt the KGVs being built with 15"/42s. During the design process, the Admiralty's own technical analysis branch determined that a 9-15" armament would give the best combination of firepower, protection, and speed. Someone, I think First Sea Lord Chatfield, clung to the "more smaller guns equals more hits" theory, and pressed for 14". Just as raising the height of the armor belt caused B turret to be reduced from 4-14" to 2, I would expect the same increase in armor to result in B turret being reduced from 3-15" to 2.
The switch from 16" to 14" in Second London appears to have been pressed for by the UK. Without someone in the Admiralty pushing for 14", the gun size limit would probably have been left at 16".
First London had extended the construction moratorium, so it would not have been possible to start the KGVs any earlier than they were historically. KGV and PoW were laid down on New Year Day in 37, the first day after the First London moratorium expired.
Guns were not the only bottleneck in the construction of the KGVs. British production capacity for armor had also atrophied since the end of WWI. I have read that some of the armor for the KGVs had to be contracted out to a Czech firm.
When most of the Iron Dukes, and Tiger, were scrapped in the early 30s, many of their 13.5" guns were retained. I have read that the KGV's 14" was designed to fit the same mount as the 13.5". In the back of my mind is the thought that, had there been a shortage of 14", the Admiralty had a contingency plan to mount 13.5" in their place on the KGVs.
@@stevevalley7835 I think most of the Czech armour went into the Illustrious flight decks, but my memory is a bit fuzzy there.
By assuming the UK wasn't pressing for 14", I assumed a slightly more bellicose government and Admiralty, who would start building when Japan walked away from London II. 😀
@@Drachinifel one of the books I read, when I looked in to this issue, two years ago, said 12,500 tons of armor where ordered from Czechoslovakia. Where that specific armor went is probably immaterial. The point is how capacity limited British industry was. That same book says that British capacity to build mounts and fire control equipment was also limited, to the point where the armor was not necessarily the only impediment to completing the ships. I think other sources have said Anson and Howe were specifically delayed waiting on fire control systems.
From what I have read, the UK was the driver of the move to 14". The decision on gun size needed to be made by the end of 35, before the conference started, to meet completion targets. It was the US indicating that it would accept 14", if Japan agreed, that was the green light for the UK to commit to 14" for the KGVs. I don't know which book that information came from. It was not Friedman, or Raven. All I have is photographs of the pages, that I took when I had the book in hand.
Another session of interesting questions and fabulous answers. Thank you Drach!
The "Great Eastern" was truly _the_ Titan of the Seas.
Mary rose. Turns to fast and capsizes.
Titanic. Hits some ice and fatally sinks taking most of the crew and passengers.
Great Eastern. Built by a country that didn't know what to do with her greatness, Hits a rock, starts slowly sinking and ignores it. Boiler explodes and funnel becomes worlds first experimental ship launched missile. Does nothing about it until it's convenient.
A ship so well built she is practically indestructible and like most of the royal navy the only thing that can defeat it is British politics and the scrap yard.
Good lord!! 6 and a 1/2 hours of drydock! This will take me all week.😂
Considering how the sails are set and filled in the "how smoke affects sails" section image, I think the smoke must be blowing out to port, rather than back past the masts.
The Suez Canal thing was a master Nelson stroke! Nice 😂
As for the Italian 12.6" guns, I wonder about the cost effectiveness of this? All the trouble of boring out the guns, then setting up a new production line for new shells, etc. etc. All that for a pretty modest increase in hitting power. And as mentioned, the reduction in accuracy. Seems the "standard" logic of increasing BB guns size by 1.5-2" at a time makes a lot more sense. Less than that and it's not worth the trouble?
Re: the quality of Italian engineering discussion, my first thought is that the shells had a different manufacturer. For all that we group quality by country, its often actually by company (or even by plant). Did Germany produce high quality guns, or did Krupp?
00:43:11 Holland had one major competitor in the US - Simon Lake, who built four sumbarines to compete with Holland in the late 1890s-early 1900s. None of these were acepted by the Navy, and Lake designed submarines for various European navies until forming the Lake Torpedo Boat Co. in 1912, eventually building 26 submarines for the USN before closing in the mid-1920s.
55:55 "Marinefährprahm": Pretty good! 😊 "-fähr-" 'ferry' sounds pretty much like "fair" - just lean into the "ai" sound to fully convince us that you aren't trying to say "-fahr-" 'drive, sail'. 🤓
Best opening song and greatest intro on all of media….
Krupp has a reputation as an arms supplier but they actually cut their teeth on railroads. They were the major supplier of railway trucks and rails. The Union Army rail based logistics road on Krupp steel.
They were a steelworks and made cannons before supplying union rails.
@DuraLexSedLex They made rails and trucks long before they made cannon. The three circles trademark represented wheels not cannon. See "The Arms of Krupp."
Regarding smoke from sailing vessels with steam engines (2:41:00) : Oddly enough that photo shows the error normally seen in oil paintings of such ships... The photo is deceiving your eyes, the smoke is not flowing behind the ship, it is actually coming nearly right towards you. This is because the smoke direction is a vector of the ship's speed and the wind's speed and direction. Say the wind is 10 knots, and the ship is steam-sailing at 6 knots. In the case illustrated, the resultant vector is off the port beam. This is why steam-sailing was usually done in "pointing" situations when the wind was afore the beam when the sails were not at peak value anyway. The common error often seen in paintings, is that the wind direction showed by sails and waves and flags rarely match.
Having grown up at the US/Canada border near Niagria falls, and currently living near the gulf of Mexica I love, LOVE star fort history be it English, French, Spanish, or the states. I was hoping you would have done a series on Fort Niagara and Fort Erie when you saw the Sullivans
What did a certain french knight think was the best way to construct and destroy star forts?
Drach, would you make a biographical video on jellico?
Regarding the answer about coal vs oil boiler sizes, I never would have guessed that a stoker's throwing range was a limit!ing factor! I'm wondering if there were other factors as well as the two you mentioned. For example, since oil is sprayed, it burns throughout the bolier volume rather than on the grate at the bottom. And oil droplets have a much higher surface area per unit mass than do chunks of coal, and so they must burn faster. Do you think those were significant?
Oh boy, this gets insanely complex.
So at the core simplest point the burny bit needs to be applying heat to the wet bit.
Solid fuel needs to be either scattered or fed in via some roller or walking floor type mechanism. Air then needs to get to the fuel. The best method to get air in is to blow in from the bottom of the fuel.
This means that controlling burning requires controlling air flow and fuel load.
Minion with shovel can throw more fuel where its needed, but that doesnt actually control the heat effectively. Adding fuel makes the fire colder to start, the hotter once the burn starts. You also get ash buildup, limiting running time.
Walking floors require better control of the airflow flat out or the burning becomes uneven and cold spots form, as each lane burns at different rates
The next complex part after getting the fuel to burn, is to have the heat concentrating in the tubes for the water. If you have too much burning in the wrong place, that hot air is going out of the stack without heating the water effectively.
So you want the hot bit under the tubes and fuel igniting (colder fire while starting to burn) from the edges, and the remains of the burn on another edge (so walking floor instead of minion with shovel)
You need airflow control and temperature measurements to achieve this effectively, which implies a computer.
Oil burning requires flow control and nozzle placement. Consistent airflow allows this to be mostly calculated and fine adjust can be done by an experianced minion with some valves. This allows you to predict where heat concentrations are, and design the concentration of heat to suit the tubes.
Oil tends to behave more consistently than solid fuel (size of lumps, impurities etc change the fuel value of a shovel full)
Oil is easier to design optimised boilers without advanced computer control and sensors, and easier for a minion to learn to adjust properly.
So oil beats solid fuel in performance.
I love turboelecrtic drives for my ww2 capital ships in UA Dreadnoughts, as they give ridiculous maneuverability boost to the point that torpedoing my ships is close to impossible apart from point blank range. Also really helps in close night actions.
Regarding the Victoria-Camperdown collision, none of the accounts I've read have suggested that Tryon intended the two columns to merge into one, or that anyone at the enquiry suggested such a thing. It was suggested that Tryon may have intended one column to pass outside the other, but in that case I would expect him to have specified which of the columns was to make the wider turn.
As a Canadian, I really wish we helped invest in a battleship. Imagine if that 6th Queen Elizabeth had returned home as a museum ship? No offense to the great HMCS Haida but that would have been amazing.
i was wondering what the ramifications of this naval bill would be if these Queen Elizabeth battleships go to the Royal Navy. Canada was still starting out its navy then with some old cruisers to somewhat new cruisers and destroyers. Canada didn’t really have or invested much money unlike the Australians getting top of the line cruisers and destroyers pre-WWII (also only had HMAS Australia). Odd to have 3 Battleships but barely any supporting elements, but then has ramifications for army funding for WW1.
@@TheRandCrews I think it would have more been an expression of trust from us to the British. "We'll sacrifice deeply economically, but we really need your protection."
If a Canadian QE had been built and then preserved, why did I get the image of Drach and Dr Clarke being part of a cabal to somehow "borrow" it and get it to the UK as a museum ship there. It wasn't us, Honest! 😆
Thank you, Drachinifel.
Where are VB-3, VF-3, VS-5 and VT-3 in this alternate Midway scenario? Three of these squadrons were in Hawaii (the fighters, dive bombers and torpedo bombers Saratoga had flown off before returning to the coast for repairs) during the Battle of the Coral Sea...do they sit at an Oahu NAS, or join VT-8's TBFs on Midway's Eastern Island, considering the Dauntless had a greater ferry range than the Avenger?
Six VT-8 TBFs arrived on Oahu from the Mainland one day after Hornet sailed with TF16 to Point Luck, so the detachment flew to Midway Island instead. If Yorktown had not been able to participate in the June 1942 battle, would VB-3 and VS-5 really sit idle instead of joining VT-8 on Eastern Island? VF-3 and VT-3 probably could have flown to Midway as well, because despite not having a published ferry range the TBD could fly 900 nm with a 1000-lb bomb, and Barking Sands on the west end of Kauai (which had been operating as a US Army airfield since 1940) is less than 1050 nm from Midway and the F4F could carry drop tanks.
With Yorktown out of commission, the strike by VB-3, VF-3 and VT-3 would probably have set two Japanese carriers on fire because Midway launched everything when Tomonaga's strike was detected...meaning VS-5 would have been launched and joined the Saratoga orphans, likely leaving Hiryu open to VS-5 as the Japanese CAP dealt with VT-3 and got mauled by John Thach's VF-3.
Moreover, VB-3 and VS-5 likely would have hit the Kido Butai again that afternoon. VB-3 got away scot free from destroying Soryu, only taking losses from fuel exhaustion when Yorktown came under attack from Hiryu. Nevertheless at least 14 VB-3 SBDs recovered aboard Enterprise, as 14 VB-3 Dauntlesses formed the core of the unescorted strike of 24 from Enterprise that blasted and burned Hiryu that afternoon. In a scenario where VB-3 and VS-5 had to operate from Midway Island, they would also have been joined by the vast majority of VB-8 and VS-8, which recovered to Midway after the flight to nowhere. Even Zuikaku's plot armor probably couldn't stand up to four angry Navy Dauntless squadrons...
In reality, the Japanese were greatly outnumbered off Midway, as Eastern Island's air force brought the tally of American aircraft to in excess of 350 compared to a Kido Butai that could not embark even 250 aircraft. If Yorktown had been unavailable, in addition to her historical air group almost certainly flying out to Midway itself the survivors in VB-5, VT-5, VF-42 and the remnants of Carrier Air Group 2 from Lexington might have been sent to beef up the air force on the island. Even sending just the pilots and aircrew would have made a massive difference--Lofton Henderson must have known he was embarking on a suicide mission with VMSB-241's green crews and the 'glide bombing' attack profile the Marine CO was forced to use. Now imagine he is instead surrounded by grizzled veterans of the Coral Sea, champing at the bit to drop on the Japanese in textbook 70-degree dives...
How comparable is HMS Incomparable to a Tillman Battleship?
Hardly?
nothing is comparable to Incomparable. Just like Invincible and Indefatigable could not be defeated in any language ... um ...
Hilarious you want to compare a ship specifically named Incomparable. Makes me wonder why they called it that. Hindsight probably.
Thanks!
3 hours! I'm excited!
IMO the most underrated feature of the TE-drive is it's instant response to change the revolution speed of the propellers, thus being able to make very tight maneuvers. If I'm not mistaken, this aspect saved USS Maryland from being hit by a japanese aerial torpedo.
Why this wasn't used more frequently in evasive actions is something I don't understand.
Oh man! It's that time of the month! Patreon Drydock! I look forward to these.
Same here... Nice glass of naval warm to sip as I listen to it
ditto😅
The West Virginia's blind shot at 22kyds is more a demonstration of technical prowess than skilled gunnery. Once you mastered the technology then accuracy is strictly a mechanical problem. West Virginia first obtained a fire control solution at 30kyds but because the 7th fleet battleships' ammunition loadout was heavily weighted towards HE Kincaid ordered the ships to wait until the Japanese ships had closed to the low 20kyds before opening fire.
It's a bit more involved than you might suspect. A sniper with a rifle has to adjust their sights from time to time, and uses practice at the range to tell them when the sights are not quite right. A similiar process applies to WW2 naval weapons. The systems are all analog, not digital, so it's not just a matter of inputting a number and pressing a button.
Analog systems will have motors (actuators) to move the guns in rotation and elevation (angle) and dials (sensors) and these can and will differ from one gun to another on the same ship in small ways - one motor will be a little stronger, one a little weaker, and so forth. Just as the sights on a sniper rifle can get out-of-whack and need to be adjusted, these analog systems will have calibration inputs and they will need to be calibrated to work properly together - and the calibration might drift over time or with temperature or extended exposure to the sea environment or usage or other factors.
Even digital systems typically need calibration, for that matter, but it's typically a lot more complex for analog systems. Most people don't see this process, because for consumer goods like cell phones it happens at the factory and modern systems are good enough that the calibration won't drift enough to worry about over the expected life of the product. On the other hand, even today for high end non-consumer goods like advanced test and measurement equipment, the equipment will have to be calibrated multiple times over the life of the product to keep both accuracy and precision.
I don't know how often they calibrated the systems on WW2 warships, but I suspect it was a lot more often than anything most folks would be used to today.
So just as a sniper needs to learn to get a feel for when something is wrong with the sights on his or her rifle - and no two sniper rifles are exactly the same - so too does the crew of the WW2 warship need to be able to get a feel for when and where the calibration is wrong 'somewhere in the system' on their ship and needs to be adjusted. It's actually a lot easier for the sniper with the rifle in some ways, because there are a much more limited set of options for things to tweak - though they might need to have different settings for different ranges which adds some complexity. With WW2 warships, both the guns and the radar probably both have their own calibration for multiple components or sub-systems, plus the systems used to get the guns to fire at the right time in the ship's roll and fire together to create a salvo (or fire slightly offset in time as appropriate, such as when gun barrels are too close and need to be fired at slightly different times) will likely need calibration of their own.
It's pretty complex and not static over time, and there is a human element in determining whether things are right or not and where they are going astray and where corrections should be made - so not strictly a mechanical problem. The firing results in the papers in Warship International 2005/2006 show that crew experience - and thus the human element - makes a big difference in outcomes.
Another good example of the important role played by human element is found in the account of the sinking the Haguro - where one radar operator on one RN destroyer could see the target well before anybody else, and recognized that it was a valid target even though it was visible far beyond the normal range of the radar (due to very unusual atmospheric conditions). Other operators - all experienced - would sit down at the same equipment, adjust the settings, and the blip would disappear. The original operator sat back down, adjusted it again, and the blip re-appeared - and eventually everybody had to agree that he was right.
@bluelemming5296 What you describe is still an engineering process. It takes skilled personnel but it is a different set of skills than optical rangefinding and gunlaying. The sailor maintaining equipment don't necessarily operate it.
@bluelemming5296 Coming from the range I have an imperfect analogy to explain why West Virhinia's advantage is based on technology and less so skill.
Iron sights versus red dots on pistols. Iron sights are the equivalent of optical fire control. Accuracy wirh Iron sights is very dependent on the skill of shooter. Red Dot sights are the equivalent of the Mark 8 FCS. You have to zero (calibrate) the sights and check your zero periodically. They require training but once mastered give the shooter the accuracy of an expert.
@@johnshepherd9676 One thing that may be confusing here is that the departmental organization of ships can be different from place to place, and over time.
In WW2, what I described in not an engineering process: the ship's engineering department has it's hands full with the propulsion and internal communications and power generation/distribution systems within the ship. Outside their areas of primary responsibility, their responsibility ends when they deliver power to the locations that need it. Think of them as the ship's 'power utility company': they aren't going to configure the systems within your workplace or your house.
The gunnery department and the radar team (probably part of the navigation department) handle all the calibration of the systems involved in gunnery. As a general rule, the engineering department doesn't understand these systems and doesn't have time to learn. The experts who actually use the systems are the ones that 'own' the setup. In practice, for navies like the USN or the RN, this means senior enlisted and chiefs in the gunnery department, sometimes with the officers for the gunnery department getting involved.
There's another potential point of confusion, in that the shipyard engineering department is probably involved in some initial setup of systems, possibly with some vendor tech reps. But for some strange reason shipyards frown on people firing enormous weapons in the shipyard, so the crew of the ship has to do the final setup at the firing range. Even here there may be some vendor tech reps and shipyard engineers present for a short while as mentors, but they aren't going to be on the ship long term and the gunnery department needs to know how to do everything related to long term operations, including correcting the calibration as needed. Navies get very sticky about this. The expectation is that the ships will be at sea or remote outposts for months or even years without any civilian presence on board.
Hence the sniper analogy, and adjusting the sights on a rifle. A sniper may use the services of a machinist or woodworker to help tune the rifle, but they won't be bringing those people into the field with them.
A pistol analogy is not as good as a sniper rifle analogy, because the range of pistols is considerably more limited. As the saying goes, _A pistol is what you use when you are going to get your rifle_ .
A red dot sight on a rifle is not going to let you perform like a professional sniper at long range. It's better than iron sights, but long range shooting is an entirely different animal.
Gunnery on WW2 warships involves lots of different equipment, all of which needs to be coordinated with relatively precise timing, in order for long range fire to be accurate and precise. It's like coordinating all the different muscles in a sniper's body to get the perfect shot. Setting up that coordination - and keeping it over time - is the responsibility of the gunnery department and the radar team (if radar is in use). That ultimately comes down to maintenance, training, and calibration.
You can see this clearly in the gunnery results reported in Warship International 2005-2006: various ships crews all using essentially the same equipment and the same training had very different results at long ranges. It was not at all a pushbutton process. As the crews gained experience with their equipment, they were able to get more out of it. Just as with a sniper, gunnery was a strong function of experience.
@@bluelemming5296 What you described is an engineering process. Not all things that qualify as engineering take place in the engineering department. Maintenance of any mechanical or electrical device is an engineering process. What do you think electrical engineering is?
I gave you an example of two fire control systems that are roughly analogous to optical and radar directed fire on ship. The analog to the Mk 8 turns your average shooter into an expert.
IMO the only thing that goes against WV’s gunnery at Surigao being the best battleship gunnery ever is the fact Yamashiro was hemmed in by the terrain and unable to maneuver.
I think an earlier drydock pointed out that the crew are the big unknown factor in fire control, with improvements in hardware (including FC radar) being unable to compensate for poor crew quality in some cases. So even with WV having up-to-date equipment her level of accuracy is still pretty impressive.
"lamping you" ... I don't know why that tickled me 😂🤦
What is the natural hull form speed of a QE? They never did get up to design speed, and the refits were no great shakes in terms of speed either. Was there a problem with the hull shape or length to beam ratio?
Put differently, would the small tube boilers actually get them above 25.5 knots?
Re: Updating 15" RN ships between wars. Installation of geared turbines would drastically change the pressure and volume of steam required so changing the boilers would also be needed Wouldn't that put ships with the best engineering plants at the back of the queue? Why rip out your best plants?
Regarding 15-inch KGVs it's known that Vanguard was based on the Lion Hull could they have made a proto-Vanguard based on a KGV hull in the mid-1930s, it would be smaller and thus almost certainly slower so maybe only 27-28 knots, not 30 knots and may have had to sacrifice part of the secondary battery as well as range and maybe a little bit of belt armour, in reality, the KGV had 14.7 - inch belt while Vanguard had a 14-inch belt maybe this ship would only have a 13-inch belt while not as good as IRL KGV it would still be pretty good being better than QE and equivalent to an R in thickness but benefitting from advances in armour scheme and metallurgy so still offering pretty good protection from 15 and 16-inch shells (it's protection would be superior to Bismarck and Scharnhorst but not quite as good as IRL KGV, while still having 8 15-inch gins in 4 twin turrets as they would have benefited from not needing a new turret or gun design thus getting rid of one of the big bottlenecks allowing for a much more accelerated construction, how effective could this budget Vanguard be? I'm sure the mid-1930s treasury would be interested in such a proposal maybe instead of the actual KGV class if these Hulls are all ordered in 1936 with a policy of when they are built an R gets scrapped and its turrets go to one of these on a one in one out fashion. Maybe you would spend the money that was spent on the QE refits on accelerating this class so in late 1939 you have Hood, Renown, Repulse, 5 of these 27-28 knot Budget Vanguards, and 5 relatively unmodified (roughly equivalent to IRL Barham or Malaya) QE's capable of say 22-23 knots. The unmodified QEs would be more than capable of conducting the roles that were carried out by the R class and could maybe get modest refits during the war when possible (i.e a few more light AA guns partial along with Radar and a better fire control system), Whilst 5 27+ knot Battleships armed with 8 15 Inch guns would be a pretty deadly force and would also take a bit of pressure off Hood, Renown and Repulse as they would have more reletavily fast ships.
What happens to all the excess power on a turbo electric ship when it's running at lower speeds? Is it converted to heat, as on a modern diesel electric locomotive?
If the Canadian QE's had been built with small tube boilers this would have given the British builders experience with them, so would it be possible that Renown and Repulse (if built) would have them or perhaps Hood equipped with small tube boilers? And would the ships have just been lighter or the weight saved used for more armour or speed?
Regarding gunnery, while WV's shooting was excellent, that was on a calm pacific sea.
Though the range was closer I'd consider Duke of York's shooting more impressive as that was in the middle of a howling gale in the Arctic.
And Iron Duke's shooting at Jutland was incredible. In the failing light, massive amounts of funnel/gun smoke, conflicting shell splashes and far less developed fire control, her achievement in the number of hits she scored cannot be under estimated.
If Hood had been equipped with small tube boilers I'd venture a guess that the weight saved would have probably been put into thicker armor belt. Which may have saved it from going down with all hands in the Denmark Strait! Unfortunately 😢 Hood went down. And Bismark was doomed because of it. HMS Rodney seen to that. I love how Drach describes Rodney's 16" guns "snarling" a reply to the guns of Bismark! AND with the all forward armament no need to turn to unmask a rear turret. That's why I think that was truly a much better design for a battleship!
Can't resist a giant slinky. 😂
Japan -D let neighbors copy their work and didn’t check work or multitask to maximize homework and study sessions😊
Could you make a vid on Overgunned ships of ww2 and ww1-ish? Including that USN 8in DD and 15in recoilless equipped Soviet DD?
So if the Canadian QEs and Agincourt *had* been built, would the Royal Navy keep the Rs when scrapping ships for the treaty? That means they'd theoretically keep nine QEs, Renown, Repulse, and Hood right?
Historically “late” aircraft were flown directly to Midway. There were four avenger torpedo aircraft slated for Hornet’s torpedo eight that flew as part of the Midway attack on the Japanese.
Every steam loco is force draft. I'd have thought the forced air would have been feed directly to each boiler. The heat of a boiler room is bad enough as it is. So separate forced air cooling for the Stoker's would have been normal.
Thanks for answering my question, Drach.
Incidentally, I really enjoyed your naval report card, though your end of term comments lead me to suspect that you'd be, wbat we used to call at my school, a hard marker.
Could a company such as Skoda come to replace Krupp?
Yeah, giving individual Navies a grade is really not easy & really not fair for each Navy UNLESS you grade said Navy yearly. And you also have to look at how much funding EACH Navy is getting from their nation & how well they used that funding to accomplish the goals that they needed to meet.
Hi drach, have a question about 1st gen British Dreadnoughts and battlecruisers.
Why were there no casemates and turrets chosen and only open mounts for the 3 and 4 inch secondaries?
6 and a half hours?!
Also 1:13:05 Achilles and Ajax have entered the chat, yeah I know they had Exeter to take the brunt of Spee's fire, but still, that's 2 CLs engaging a Panzerschiff
In the discussion about the Battle of Midway, I always have a problem with all the discussions of "what ifs," that there is not one mention of Nimitz not trying to get USS Saratoga out to Midway in time for the battle. She arrived on May 25 in San Diego after her repair work in Puget Sound Navy Yard was finished. Had Nimitz ordered her to sail on May 26, she could have made it to Pearl Harbor late on May 30. Refueling and reprovisioning overnight, she could have sailed on May 31with the addition of VF-5 (18 F4Fs,) VF-72 (20 F4Fs,) and the VT-8 detachment (20 New TBF Avengers) to the 14 F4Fs and 23 SBDs she had sailed with from San Diego to give a fighter heavy air group that would have allowed more fighter escorts on the attack on the Japanese carrier force.
If she was available, she would be sent historically. But she wasn't. Sure repairs were finished but what about everything else? Crew? Supplies? Escort for her from San Diego to Pearl? Were available squadrons in any position to deployed to actual combat?
@@ReichLife Where is your proof to say she wasn't available? Escort? She had to have escort from Seattle to San Diego. Plus, USS San Diego (CL-53) was at San Diego and did escort the Sara when she did leave for Pearl Harbor on June 1.
@@robertdendooven7258 Mate, Saratoga didn't join Battle of Midway. If anyone is to provide proof, it's you that she was available but wasn't called for different reasons.
@@ReichLife If you read Harold L Buell's book Dauntlesses Helldivers he stated that Saratoga (where he was stationed at the time) was kept in Hawaiian waters during the battle as an emergency reserve on the off chance that all of the carriers at Midway were put out of action
The US "frigates" were the Deutschland class "pocket battleships" of their day.
In between rates of the RN.
If the Yorktown couldn't come, what about placing them at Midway? Was there any thought about that?
Midway was already overloaded with aircraft.
“Boy have I got the manuscript book for you!” - Drach carrying on about why the drums and instruments on Mary Rose were used. Fl. Always ca. 308 let’s make it rum ration…
I just now realized that you had "The ORIGINAL OPENING" song/ diddy back!!! CONGRATS!!! I had thought it rather annoying that some idiot was trying to claim the rights to it! The things @$$holes do to try to get money. IMHO whoever the people are that were doing that crap to you I hope God looks down on them in an angry manner & decides to make their lives so difficult & complicated that they never even have time to think about doing anything like that to anyone else ever again! We can only hope & pray. Or is that pray & hope?
re gunnery in battleships? what was the minimum correction for range possible ? 100feet? more / less, and what was the minimum change of elevation?
These are analog systems, which implies they don't have discrete steps or quantization. In other words, it's arbitrary within the limits of the controls, which can only be described approximately - and probably differ from motor to motor, and barrel to barrel, ship to ship, maybe even other variables, possibly in non-linear ways - there's probably some calibration procedure used to get things reasonably close and to get the dials (showing the system state, i.e. the gun angle) somewhat accurately reflecting reality.
You might not be able to reach any arbitrary position in a single operation, since it would take a certain amount of force to overcome friction, in order to start moving, at which point all the momentum generated might take some time to kill - depending upon friction and whatever else is being used to slow the thing down.
In other words, if a destination position (i.e. angle or 'end state') is sufficiently close to the start position (or 'start state') you might not be able to get there in a single operation, you might not be able to just move from one position to the other then stop. But you could move past the desired position a certain amount, and if you went far enough then you could reverse and come back to a more-or-less arbitrary position - so you use two operations to get to the destination.
Note that the friction that needs to be overcome to start moving and the friction that helps the system to stop are usually different in real systems - with the initial friction being much larger.
There might be an electronic control system that automates this process, with some sort of inputs used to calibrate it.
In any case, the correction for range wouldn't be measured in feet, since adjustments are likely to be in angle, so it would be measured in degrees or radians or some other suitable measure for angle. You could convert that to feet only at a specific distance (using the arc length formula). In other words, it wouldn't make sense to say 'the minimum correction is 100ft', but it might make sense to say 'the minimum correction is 100ft at 10k yards' - I'm making up the numbers here, just trying to illustrate the point.
If you wanted more specific information for a specific ship, then you might be able to find it in the manuals for the systems on that ship. At least for US ships in WW2, there generally were such manuals - and some of the museum ships make some of these publicly available in pdf format on their web site. They use the manuals to help maintain the ship - though there's probably a lot of 'tribal knowledge' as well, knowledge that's passed down from person to person about things not adequately covered in the manuals.
Didn't Duke Of York hit Scharnhorst with her first salvo, also at night?
Regarding the Battle of Midway, you keep mentioning the IJN having 5 carriers, but I thought they only had 4 (Akagi, Kaga, Soryu, and Hiryu).
Depends on how you count them...there could be as many as 8. There where 5 aircraft carriers with the Combined Fleet: HOSHO with the Main Body and the Carrier Striking Force with AKAGI, KAGA, HIRYU, and SORYU. The Northern Area Force which conducted the attack in the Aleutian Islands had the Second Mobile Force with RYUJO and JUNYO. And finally the Midway Occupation Force Covering Group had ZUIHO. See Appendix II of MIDWAY by William Ward Smith.
wrt the question about the USN's superimposed turrets, these were the brainchild of a young officer at BuOrd named Joseph Strauss. Strauss was the same bright spark who, years later, as head of BuOrd, decreed that the 14" was the perfect gun, because combat at ranges greater than 12,000 yards would never happen.
As Drac said, improvements in rate of fire of the main guns rendered the superimposed turrets redundant. Someone else in the Navy Department figured out that, what was needed in the large turrets, was paying a little attention to ergonomics, and training the crews better. The Navweaps article on the 12"/40, the gun mounted on the Virginias, shows the rate of fire improving from 0.66 round per minute when the ships were first commissioned, to 2 rounds per minute after the modifications to turret ergonomics and training had been implemented in 1906.
Is it possible to get the bell in the opener dampened a little bit? It is a bit on the painful side, to put it mildly, especially through headphones.
Another thing with West Virginia. She had just come out of the yard as a rebuilt battleship.
The way I hear about the Admiral Trian being rammef I think that his subordinate was fed up having to think for himself and did it deliberately.
Something like Fragging.
Did they thin the liner up, or, out?
Thanks Drach.
Surely a turbo electric installation is less efficient than a conventional turbine drive.
Power from the turbines direct to the props has to be more efficient at power transfer.
@@Andy_Ross1962 yes, if a geared turbine and TE drive are running at the turbines optimal speed the geared turbine is more efficient. But if the geared turbine ship slows to less optimal speed then the TE drive becomes more efficient as the loss of efficiency in the geared turbines is greater than the loss of energy in the various steps of the TE drive.
I'd rate the RN as a C at the start of the war. As a deep water navy it needed a strong air arm, and did not have one thanks to the interference of the RAF, from which it had only wrestled back control of the Fleet Air Arm in 1939. Ironically, it had built the carriers but the aircraft it possessed were largely obsolete.
Regarding aircraft, I think the italian and german navies may beg to differ.
@@johnculver2519 I think the aircraft were rubbish, but the pilots that flew them were superb. Although, even there, I believe HMS Sheffield might have had some reservations.
@@johnculver2519no. The Swordfish was obsolete. Imagine it trying to bomb a navy with AA capabilities, such as the IJN or US Navy.
@@AndyM_323YYY The raid on Taranto used the worlds only night capable carrier launched attack force. If the swordfish is rubbish, then I don't know what description can be applied to all other naval attack aircraft, but it would not be kind.
Bismarck was found and crippled at night by ASV radar equipped swordfish. I don't know of another radar equipped carrier aircraft at the time.
The swordfish then carried on effectively as a centimetric radar equipped submarine hunter.
Most of this effectiveness comes about because the swordfish is a slow and stable biplane. It was good because it was built to fit the real oppurtunities of naval warfare, not 'faster must be better'. Sometimes high capability aircraft don't go fast.
@@PalleRasmussen The IJN's AA capabilities were generally regarded by a certain Drachinifel as not the best. The USNs night action performance at the Battle of Savo Island should suggest that the USN would not perform well against a night air torpedo attack.
Imagine being able to do a succesful carrier launched strike on your enemies main fleet port (Taranto) that contains several modern battleships, and much shore based AA. Sinking enemy battleships in the middle of a war, not at peace. Not by surprise, not by luck, but by skill, technology and high capability aircraft.
Additionally, the swordfish delivered a heavy blow against the Bismark, a modern warship, without loss. Do you think the then current US torpedo bombers could have done the same thing? They normally have huge losses, partly due to their limited operational envelope.
It's rather like the stealth capabilities of the F-117, you operate where the enemy cannot effectively counter you. Just because the swordfish is not a fast all metal monoplane aircraft does not mean that is not a superb design for actual war.
4:10 what makes you say 16th century and not, say, late 15th century? as a non-expert I always thought the age of sail started at the point when transatlantic return voyages became possible/survivable, which is a few decades before the mary rose was laid down as far as I understand.
I tend to go with the period where large standing navies as the instruments of state policy became widespread, as opposed to random collections of mainly private shipping with a few Royal ships mixed in for fun. :)
@@Drachinifel fair enough!
Now I want to know about this knights starfort siege plan
At 00:43:11 you answer the question "- Are there other types of submarines other than the Holland type? If so, how do they differ?". I believe that you significantly overstate the importance of Holland Type vessels in submarine development, especially by WWI. In this case, John Holland's shameless self-promotion (and the EBC's continuing lobbying) still seems to hang on. Realistically, the Russian vessels you allude to and all German, Austrian, and US types by the beginning of WWI were Lake Type boats. Indeed, when I was involved in the US Dry Combat Submersible (DCS) downselect, many people were shocked to find that Lake's ARGONAUT I (1898) met almost all DCS specification requirements, 2 years before the founding of the USN Submarine Service, with a 1200 NM range to boot! While I could go on about the original differences between Holland and Lake type submarines (bow planes, external ballast tanks, etc) and what came from each to make up a 20th century "combat" submarine; I would suggest that whoever is interested pick up a copy of Argonaut: The Submarine Legacy of Simon Lake by John J. Poluhowich
Could the Royal Navy fit a third 14" gun on B turret if not for the Royal Navy's britishness?
A 50 calibre 20-inch gun would have a 25.4 metres / 25,400 mm / 83.3 feet / 1,000 inches long barrel!
18:48 thanks a lot Drach. Wow. Great job. I was still reading the book. Spoiler indeed. I read the news today oh boy, the English army had just won the war…
I always thought the boring out from 12-inch to 12.6 was stupid. The difference in shell size is negligable it would have been better to just keep them at 12 inch and maybe create a new 12 inch shell. I do not see a single benifit of the boring out that is a: worth the downsides or b: can't be achieved by a new shell at a fraction of the cost.
Krupp started out making dinner forks.
HONEY...! WAKE UP!
Drach released Part 1 of the patreon drydock
As an American I truly don't understand WHY I get such a kick out of hearing about HMS Newport sneaking in front of the French and being the first ship to transit the Suez Canal. But I truly find it hilarious that although the French had it built the English were the first ones to use it! Just a way to 🖕 the French! Screw politics were going for it!!
And btw, it's not the first time I've heard you tell that story. But it's still just as funny as the first time you told it!
01:18:00 everyone who played Empires Total War, has tried that tactic.
Jutland battlecruisers and Yamato’s takedown of USS Johnston are among the best battleship accuracy in my opinion. Scoring multiple hits on the first salvo at long range is basically another level. West Virginia is overrated, she scored three hits on Yamashiro on her first, second, and sixth salvo. I don’t even see how her gunnery was significantly better than California and Tennessee.
Although the range was much closer, Duke of York hit Scharnhorst at night in the middle of a howling gale in the Arctic while WV was blessed with a calm Pacific night.
Iron Duke's shooting at Jutland was very impressive given the very poor light, gun/funnel smoke, conflicting shell splashes and far less capable fire control technokogy.
For the USA's grade, all you really needed to say to justify the grade was "mark 14 torpedo"
1:49:00 What would have happened if Brunell had been able to design the Suez Canal?
Had ships passing through it to broad gauge I expect
Would be bigger and lined with steel.
@@PalleRasmussen - yup. This. Brunel to a T.
47:02 - "Yes, they wouldn't've been laid down in time to _begin_ World War I" - but, then again, _neither was_ Queen Elizabeth _herself!_
@Drachinifel Re: Russsso-Japanese war. How would the Russian 1st Pacific Squadron likely have fared against the Japanese Forces had it not been trapped in Port Arthur? (Say instead of getting trapped there, they tried to run for a neutral port.)
Krupp i havent herd that name sense 1975 i used to have some of there product
Saturday night and July Patreon Drydock and a 5 minute guide. Perfection.
Omg. We’re not even two minutes and already I have to slam a vodka. I think he’s just saying square cube law just so I have fun. Everyone knows you have to drink when Drach mentions square cube law. It’s the law…
It’s gonna be a wonky morning. I may miss mass. Just kidding. If you square cube it it’s exponentially great
00:17:30 How do you grade the German and italian navies they were both tested before their matriculation date, it is like giving n 8 year old an 11 plus exam
1:57:30
@@Ranzoe813 The Japanese tried a 18.9 inch 48 cm gun in 1919, 45 caliber 5 Year Type 36 cm Gun (cover designation)
evidently fully tested and split it was judged fixable if the 2nd and 3rd bands were thicken, but already the gun manufacturers felt the thing was too difficult to manufacture and not worth the effort compared to the 16 inch guns they had for Nagato. The design was resurrected in 1934 along with the paper design 46 cm/50 (18.1") 5th Year Type probably for work on the the 40cm (cover name) 45 caliber Type 94 for Yamato. and for the 45 caliber Type 98 51 cm (20.1 inch) Gun for the Super Yamato The 18.9 in ch gun was found at Kamegakubi Proving Grounds in 1945.
All seems fairly pointless, a case of designing something because you can.
Two things on Midway. The Yorktown was attacked twice by Hiryo. First attack was by dive bombers. She was quickly patched and was able to get underway. The second attack was by torpedo planes which killed the boilers. She was being towed by a small tug when the submarine torpedoed her. A fleet tug was on its way to take over.
The second thing is what would happen had there been 3 more carriers? Would the US have left after Yorktown was hit? Would she have been sunk? Would Nagomo have used all carriers against Midway?
As a side note, my friend was on the USS North Carolina through the war. He said they were at Midway with other battleships in case the carriers had been lost. I don't know why the North Carolina wasn't placed with the carriers for AA protection. Of course, she could only do 27 knots and the carriers could do 32.
The other thing, if they knew there was going to be additional carriers at Coral Sea, would they have sent Enterprise and Hornet to Japan?
I don't mean to be rude, but you or your friend are likely misremembering.
North Carolina wasn't "at Midway with other battleships," as she was in the Atlantic at the time -- only going through the Panama Canal with USS Wasp some days after the battle (10 June).
I think that best answers the question of why she wasn't placed with the carrier for AA protection -- since her AA was not capable of striking Japanese fighters attacking Yorktown whilst N Carolina was... in the Atlantic on her way to the Caribbean.
@@princedetenebres I don't know. He may have been on a different battleship when he said he was at Midway. He didn't tell me too much. We got into an argument over US battleships firing on other battleships.
I know that he's in the North Carolina service book. I know he lied about his age and he enlisted after Pearl Harbor. He told me that he became the signalman shortly after coming onto the North Carolina when the signalman was killed in action. He never talked about anything that he went through during the war. All he said is that the North Carolina entered Tokyo Harbor before the Missouri.
As far as battleships at Midway. I think it's very possible. I have read other sources as to this. The US should have had Colorado, Maryland, Tennessee, and Pennsylvania available by then.
@@michaelpiatkowskijr1045
Again, I don't mean to be rude but no, it is not possible as the US did not bring any battleships to midway. Period.
The battleships were still under Pye's command at this point and were based off of the west coast.
There was a critical lack of fleet oilers at the time and the older standards were on the west coast as a consequence of this as I understand it.
Regardless of the reason, the US had ZERO battleships at or around Midway at the time of the battle, before or after it.
The location of the battleships at the time is something that is known and easily looked up; the slower ones of pre-war vintage that were in the Pacific were either still undergoing repair and refit from Pearl or with Admiral Pye off the west coast in TF1.
The newer vessels, SoDak, Washington & North Carolina were in the Atlantic, the latter of which making its way to Panama, as I said, only entering the Pacific about a week after Midway. SoDak had replaced her in Newfoundland, and Washington was over in Europe.
Tldr: all the battleships can be accounted for in that timeframe and none of them were in the vicinity.
@@michaelpiatkowskijr1045
Here's from the entry on Admiral Pye, who commanded the battleships of the Pacific Fleet at the time, so you don't need to take my word for it:
"On 31 December, Pye relinquished command of the Pacific Fleet to Admiral Chester W. Nimitz. Pye became commander of Task Force One (TF 1), comprising the remaining operational battleships of the Pacific Fleet augmented by three battleships from the Atlantic Fleet, now based in San Francisco. During the Battle of Midway, Pye received orders for the seven old battleships (Colorado, Idaho, Maryland, Mississippi, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, and Tennessee), the escort carrier USS Long Island, and eight destroyers of TF 1 to sortie to patrol off of the West Coast against possible Japanese attack there should the carrier forces at Midway be defeated. Such fears proved unfounded, and TF 1 then remained on training and patrol duties between Hawaii and the West Coast until Pye was relieved in October 1942 at the age of 62."
@@princedetenebres that's interesting. I've never heard that. It could have been apart of the confusion. If you're on one of those ships knowing that you could fight the Japanese fleet if the carriers are turned back, you could possibly think you're off Midway. I didn't think they would be that close to Midway. A good question is what would the orders be if the carriers have fallen? Would the battleships move to protect Hawaii or would they stay by the west coast? If Hawaii had fallen afterwards, the US would have been in serious trouble.
If Brunell had the semi blank cheque. Then HMS Isle of White would be in the offing. Yes, fitting engines, armour and guns. If it had been a true money no object. Wih Brunell's affection for all things "Great". It would be HMS Great Britain, instead of the Isle of White. being engined, armoured and guns. The entire landmass, with the flag staff of every castle on the island flying a White Ensign. Britannia certainly would have rules the waves!
As Queen Victoria was on the throne at this time. The figurehead would likely be a massive Prince Albert carved into the White Cliffs.
I think that The Goodies did that in their Pirate Radio Station episode when Graeme towed the entire UK outside the five mile limit.
He wasn't mad. He was a genius.
@@notshapedforsportivetricks2912 I remember that episode. Goodies, goodie, goodie yum yum. Way to show me my age 😜
Just remember, Ecky Thump!!, and watch out for the black puddings
You couldn't make that show these days as too many groups have no sense of humor.
1:35:00 For treaties' sake they could've just keep a 8.01" gun somewhere and call them capital ships if they weren't going to build replacements anyway.
So if the barrel of a gun is called a barrel because on early iron guns it was manufactured in the manner of a barrel, with staves and bands, what was it called in the age when all guns were cast bronze?