Ship vs Ship, 1 vs 1 - Why you don't see them here
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 27 ก.ย. 2024
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Today I list some of the reasons why you don't see X ship vs Y ship as a main feature of this channel.
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Pinned post for Q&A :)
I'm sure this has been asked and answered before but in the photo at 19:34, what are those things near the top of the mast that look like giant speakers?
The proper way to account for random variation is a Monte Carlo simulation with a large number repetitions and a distribution of outcomes.
I suspect Drachs swipe at Mk 8 FCS capabilities was aimed at me so I will reclama. If you want to be pedantic the test was run with Massachusetts and was about finding the limits of FCS ability to maintain target lock. It is the kind of testing that militaries do in peacetime when equipment is now available. They were not developing battle tactics. The US Navy already knew what the capabilty of the Mk 8 maintain lock under normal combat maneuvers. They had real combat data such the West Virginia at Surigao Strait where West Virginia acquired a targeting solution at about 30kyds and never lost it. Update: I did a little research. The Massachusetts last radar upgrade appears to be 1944. She went right from overhaul into the reserves. The test was highly likely to be a reflection of WWII capabilties.
Sooooo Iowa vs Yamato vid when??? heh I kid
What/who was the largest British shipbuilder in terms of the Pound value awarded to them between 1936-1946?
So...while you've laid out your reasons why you won't do 1v1s in your videos, that made me wonder...which 1v1 would you most like to see purely as a spectator?
Someone: asking Drach a ship vs ship question
Drach: throwing his binoculars
All good the crew brought 12 cases of binoculars for the voyage
@@jeromebirth2693 Does he see Torpedo Boats??
@@masterskrain2630 Yes! Those fishing boats are certainly disguised torpedo boats!!!
@@jeromebirth2693 Now I want a Fishing boat VS Torpedo boat comparison, but where the crew of the latter only has Xmas decorations, nick nacks and curbside sofas as ammunition.
😆😆😆😆😆
@@masterskrain2630 The Kamchatka does!
Capital ship fleet management for beginners: They're moving in herds.... they *do* move in herds.
I herd that!
It is fascinating (to me, anyway) how the variety of "modern" (by WWII at least) weapons makes it optimal to have an array of ships covering the size range from PT/motor torpedo boats up to fleet carriers and battleships and everything in between. It's never quite as simple as "bigger always beats smaller." And the size sequence gets even smaller as we include aircraft. Just about the smallest vehicle type that a human can pilot can potentially cripple or sink a capital ship, and often you need your own small vehicles to counter the enemy's small vehicles. Thus the whole "ship vs. ship" comparison becomes, effectively, contrary to the nature of modern warfare. A similar size sequence occurred in the air war over Germany in 1943-1944. Heavy Allied bombers could be defeated by cannon- and rocket-armed German heavy fighters, which were smaller than the bombers. The heavy fighters in turn became easy meat for smaller and more maneuverable Allied escort fighters, necessitating smaller and more maneuverable German escort fighters for the German heavy fighters. (The "big bugs have little bugs upon their backs to bite 'em" poem comes to mind.) But the latter didn't really work by early 1944 as the Doolittle tactics began to tell (send the Allied escorts far ahead of the Allied bombers to intercept the German fighters during their vulnerable climb to altitude and forming-up to prepare for the bombers).
Thus the notion of two opposing battleships wandering out alone to duke it out as if in some medieval jousting match, if it could ever actually happen, would probably require simultaneous failures of commands on both sides.
Suddenly I understand why his character wanted to see Montana so much in his previous film.
7-hour Drydock video:
“You did it! You crazy sonofabitch, you did it!”
@@cdfe3388 "Um, uh, are there going to be any uh, actual battleships on your battleship tour? Hello? (fogs up camera lens)
Now I want to see an April fool's video where drach does a 1v1 ignoring all of this and just treating the exercise like he's five.
Yes. This.
“But we can see Warspite has a definitive speed advantage due to the flames painted on her hull”
USS 2nd Amendment vs Kamchatka
@@gurk_the_magnificent9008 or red stripes and crewed by Orcs 😄
Through the medium of a top trumps game? Or interpretive dance?
Drach! According to all you've just said, there actually IS a perfect scenario for a fair 1 vs 1 comparison. We are proud to introduce: a ramming bout between two galleys with well fed crews!
not taking in account currents , sea state and wind of course ... where the crew came from and their tolerance to heat/cold and other weather conditions ... :-)
Warspite (any iteration, including the submarine) will win any ramming contest.
@@SennaAugustus Ah, but... what about Glowworm?
Hard factors include:
Is Warspite sailing with your convoy?
If yes, then
chances of victory go up 2000 percent
No doubt. Conversely, if you have Kamchatka sailing with your convoys, chances of victory go down 2,000%, notwithstanding all the thrown binoculars.
@@lorenrogers9269 Throw in a fishing boat or two and its 20.000% 😄😄😄
Same for New Zealand too, right? I mean she's practically invulnerable
@@DeltaV2TLI At least if the Captain decides to wear his skirt
@@DeltaV2TLI its called history plot armour 😏
Drach, I just took a sip of Coke when you said, "...until the cows come home and well after they've been turned into burgers...".
I prefer drinking Coke to shoving it up my sinuses.
I think a lot of people forget that battles in war are more like street fights than they are a sanctioned boxing match.
Yeah, were there is one guy with a single shot pistol on one side and 12 guys with bats on the other side. 😏
"But in terms of soft factors, you know, Warspite appears to be a case of actual living plot armor."
I just lost it. "Hey, Fritz! Nice try!"
Take heart Drach. Nobody on their deathbed ever wished that they had spent more time arguing with strangers on the internet so don't waste your time on haters. No matter how satisfying it might be to prove them wrong it still would not change their minds
This is a very echo chamber narrow minds approach to anything, arguing with ‘haters’ ie debating is a very important thing in…anything
To say ‘ah ignore the haters who cares if you argue with strangers’ misses the butterfly effect on it and others, just imagine if no one bothered to call out David Irving on his shit, yeah
You've both got points. There comes a point where discourse is pointless, however to not even give it a go.... let's those who are extremely vocal and willing to impose their thoughts, speech and beliefs on everyone else.
It's a fine line and I think his on to a thing or two by arguing articulately to state his point. Also while pointing out why others are 're--tarded' - yes the r word is important and the war on speech itself is abhorrent to public discourse.
Good ideas, should always be able to overpower bad ones. History has taught, time and time again that the stifling of discourse allows for the abuse of others.
I didn't articulate that very well, but I'm not that smart either. There's a good middle ground you two have hit on and I don't think humans have ever found it.
It always seems to go back and forwards. Hopefully we'll get there!
I'm afraid I will have to disagree with you. To the Hard Core Internet Troll nothing is more important than "winning" an empty argument over some trivial matter on the internet. Their only deathbed regret will be that they didn't fight hard enough to convince everyone of their obviously superior mental facilities and "logical" conclusions.
Don't play chess with pigeons.
1. They knock over the pieces.
2. They shit on the board.
3. Then they strut around as if they had actually won.
@@looinrimstigi uhvhc 6 u v
I’m sure this has been mentioned elsewhere, but I would personally opine that there is exactly one scenario where a 1v1 comparison makes sense: Comparing prospective designs a navy was considering building or buying. It would be rather interesting to see why navies chose what they chose and what your thoughts on their choice.
This is of course comes with the caveat that there’s still plenty of other matters like build time and location, cost, and geopolitical relations.
Even then, it should be a comparison of the various candidate designs against a defined, hypothetical enemy force, while supported by a friendly fleet, rather than a 1v1 against each other.
Even then, this exercise should allow for a weaker, cheaper battleship with a correspondingly stronger escort fleet.
The French, Italian, German, and Japanese navies weren't able to keep up with shipbuilding deep into WWII, for various reasons. The USA expanded its shipbuilding steadily and was able to build new ship designs in response to the wartime results of its pre-war ship design decisions. For example, the Montana-class battleships were canceled and the resources were redirected to other ship types, such as aircraft carriers. Thus the USN decided there was no need to build a battleship that could rival Japan's Yamato-class in a direct engagement. And both Yamato-class battleships were indeed sunk by USN aircraft, although Yamato did manage to get within gun range of some USN surface units in the battle off Samar thanks to Halsey (in)famously taking the bait of the Japanese decoy fleet.
The submarine and aircraft carrier effectively rendered surface warship gunnery duels obsolete, although they did happen with decreasing frequency to the end of 1944. It is remarkable how infrequently opposing battleships got a chance to shoot at each other in the Pacific War, given the large size of fleets at the outset and the subsequent growth of at least the Allied fleet. The fact that nobody built another battleship after WWII is telling.
@@danielmocsny5066
The USN still really should have gone further with cancelling battleships and cancelled the Iowas. Yes, I know they got used as AA escorts for carriers, but that’s a more appropriate role for CLAAs.
@@bkjeong4302 That decision would have required a crystal ball that was providing accurate field assessments from a war that hadn't even started yet. Which suddenly gives me an idea for a story line in a book I'm writing. Someone DOES have said crystal ball, but it's predictions are so insane that nobody believes them.
designs were chosen for how they'd fit into the existing line of battle, not which was "better" than the other designs in a 1v1 engagement.
E.g. a ship might have a higher rate of fire, but be so slow it couldn't keep up with the battle force so it's rejected.
Or it has much better speed but is so unstable a gun platform it can't hit anything. Again, rejected.
Those theoretical 1v1 comparisons don't cover any of that.
Some ships operated better than others for things you'd never see in those internet comparisons, things like having air conditioning to keep the crew from collapsing from hyperthermia and the optics fogging up in the tropics.
Hey Drac, if the _Vasa_ hadn't sank within half an hour of being launched and instead had been outfitted with antigravity engines and a fusion-powered plasma cannon, could it have sunk the _Bismarck?_ (Of course not, cuz the _Bismarck_ was the BEST SHIP EVAR.)
Yes, but was it Vasa or Wasa? Or maybe it should have been Eriksson, as Gustav Eriksson was his real name? The Vasa was one of the biggest military failures of all time anyhow. 😱 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasa_(ship)
A few centuries later, an other Swedish Eriksson, John Ericsson, made a significantly larger impact of naval warfare with the construction of the USS Monitor in 1862. He also decided, that the translation between inches and centimeters was exactly 2,54 cm! 😁
Hey! The Yamato blew up entire space fleets after she had sunk. The Vasa could do that too with the right refit!
Spaceship Yamato has a leg up on anybody in that comparison.
@@bjornnordstrom It was not Vasa or Wasa.
It was Fasa.
I think a great example is HMS Shannon who actually had a 1v1 fight in 1812, her armament and the performance of her sister ship HMS Guerriere, would show she should lose to Chesapeake, but not just did she win, she won so decisively, you'd need 4 chessapeake's too have the same number of cannon balls hitting Shannon as hit Chessapeake. This doesn't even go into the tactics and the way the Shannon had a cannon at the bow specifically placed their to act like a giant sniper rifle taking out the cheesapeakes helmsmen and wheel, this wasn't a particularly normal tactic, but won them the battle.
Another example is HMS Speedy Vs El Gamo 14 guns vs 32 guns of bigger calibre, yet Speedy won.
The idea of doing a 1v1 based on specs does not show training or how ships are set up differently, the accuracy or preferred tactics, it doesn't examine the captains. Or as you said when, where and why they are fighting which create 100s of different results.
And we stall have bits of one and a sister to the other still available to see.
@@andrewfanner2245 yes Unicorn in Dundee and Trincomalee in Hartlepool, which can also be used in this as both of them were made 18 and 11 years after HMS Shannon making their firepower relatively weaker for the time period.
A prime example of why picking a fight with the Royal Navy in the 19th century was a dumb fucking idea.
I'm sorry, but you could hardly find a more even fight between ships alone in the War of 1812 as Shannon and Chesapeke. Chesapeke was 4" longer on the gun deck, measured more tonnage because on depth in hold, but both were 18pdr frigates with the same 28 guns on the gun deck and a similar number of 32pdr carronades aboard both ships. There was little to chose as far as performance under sail or gun power. Too say the Chesapeake should have won on ship's data is a gross exaggeration. In the end it was ship's crew quality that counted, Chesapeake's crew being new to the ship and Shannon's in the ship for years under a n excellent captain in Brooke.
@@Jaxck77 Tell that to the HMS Guerriere, Macedonian, Java, Levant, Cyane, Boxer, Penguin, etc. One of the largest collection of Royal Navy battle flags in the world is in the museum at the US Naval Academy.
Drach, we both know that if admiral Lee is in command of your BB, no 1v1 can be a fair fight.
Also if your ship mascot is unsinkable Sam your ship is doomed.
What if both?
Essentially an hour of Drachinifel ranting, I love it 🙂
Yes it's almost on par with a certain Gray cartoon squirrel that you can also find on TH-cam!!! 🤠👍
Been waiting for this. Personally, I would much rather learn about naval history than some time and space defying what if scenarios. 👍
I agree. I enjoy what ifs but I prefer to learn actual history. Nice distraction now and then but not too often
Reason 7. It's essentially irrelevant. As you've said, ships are rarely alone but a lot of ships, whilst ostensibly the same type, aren't actually that comparable. British battleships of WW1 and the inter-war period were not built for single-ship combat but were built to patrol and control an empire and in most circumstances if they did get into a skirmish, would not be fighting ships of an equivalent class.
It's a bit like the idea of tank vs. tank combat. People get very hung up on the idea of an M4 Sherman facing down a Tiger but it was incredibly rare and the vast majority of the time, the tanks are being used as armoured field artillery and infantry support. In those circumstances any tank is better than no tank - so M4 Shermans weren't really built and optimised for tank vs. tank combat and even when the Tiger was in service (however small the numbers) it didn't play into the heads of tank designers that this would even be a particularly important consideration.
Battle of Cape Matapan ...
The best comparison for the M4 IMO is the Panzer IV Sturmgeschutz.
The US response to a Pz 6 would likely be a coordinated air infantry and artillery attack, that would likely just leave it in a gunfight with a knife, and reroute the Shermans and TDs around it.
@@phinhager6509 - Yes, by the time American forces were in France they generally enjoyed a 10:1 advantage in artillery shells over their German opponents. The best use for M4s when Tigers were about was probably as forward artillery observers. The key to reaching old age as an M4 driver was probably never to range farther than your Long Toms behind you could reach. For longer trips try to do them when the weather is fine for friendly aircraft to fly.
However, the Americans did respond to the shock of encountering the odd Tiger tank by building their own Pershing tanks to level the field somewhat. Even though the Pershing wasn't at all necessary to defeat Germany (it barely got into combat near the end when the outcome was well beyond doubt), still it's bad for morale to send your boys into combat knowing they might find themselves in a situation outclassed on a one-for-one basis.
The same situation applied to aircraft. When the first German jets appeared, there was no question but that the Allied forces had to have their own jets on the next procurement cycle, even though the German jets were too late and too few to change the outcome.
The late-war German technological advantages (in those areas where the Germans had advantages) are easy to overblow in retrospect because it's hard to remember just how short WWII actually was. The American Army wasn't even fighting on the ground in France and Germany for a whole year. Some Internet debates last longer than that. Had the war gone on longer and had the M4 Shermans encountered more Tigers then of course the Americans would have fielded heavier tanks. But when the Allies have commanding advantages in artillery and air power there's little need for tanks that can win in 1v1 duels. Although I'm sure the Sherman crews might have wished for some thicker metal in front of them.
@@danielmocsny5066 funny part of the Sherman was it had the same effective frontal armor as the tiger. the 88 was just a damn monster but the Sherman with the 76 was equal in all things but optics.
Consider the Tiger fear and the actual historical evidence: Shermans and Tigers I fought against each other 3 times, in the entire Western Front campaign
An issue I feel causes problems is misapplied scientific thinking. I think the assumption is that if you get ships in a 1 vs 1 you will eliminate all random variables and somehow work out their true, factual superiority/inferiority. The idea is more like a lab experiment seeking to eliminate all outside factors with the dependent and independent variables being singularly focus on.
That can't happen. Warships are not variables within something (unless the focus would be upon the strategic aspect of a war and their place in it), they are systems more like living beings. You take them out of their natural habitat and you won't get their true behaviour, you'll get their behavior reacting to artificial conditons.
I've heard many species of spider don't actually eat their mates after reproducing, that behavior is only observed in lab conditions because the females are stressed by the different conditons and do it similar to how mothers animals will kill and eat their babies as well. I don't know how accurate that is, but as an applicable example here it will do.
Oh, and for a warship: you cannot seriously have covered the French hotel battleships and still not have done Hoche yet!? Really? Get on it!
It is true sexual cannibalism in spiders and mantids is more common in captivity than in the wild, but this is more because the male has nowhere to escape to and less because the female is stressed.
Please don’t give up on the “what ifs” scenarios. You briefly touched on one of my great curiosities, what if Tirpitz had actually sortied during Operation Rosselsprung. Tirpitz, Hipper, Lutzow, Scheer, and escorts opposed by Duke of York and Washington, plus escorting cruisers and destroyers. Would Victorious have been in the battle line? How would have the cruisers like Wichita and Tuscaloosa as well as the British cruisers have done?
Then you get Drach's 'soft' factors. The RN had 3 centuries of 'do or die' behind them, plus the knowledge that landing even a few hits would count if it slowed the enemy or left them vulnerable to aircraft or the rest of the navy (Graf Spee, Bismarck). German admirals were always conscious that they were all spearhead, no shaft. They tried to live to fight another day - they were not in for long slug-fests.
You can add USS Ranger - for all her faults, she carried 2 squadrons each of Wildcats and SBD's (40 of each) and the USS South Dakota, which was declared operational in mid July 1942, just in time for Rosselsprung.
Speaking for myself, I come here to see and hear your presentation because I am generally interested in military history, and you know far more about naval development and history than I do. I am not interested in what commenters who have limited contact with reality have to say, and think you shouldn't bother yourself with them, i.e. don't feed the trolls.
Love the carousel of Big Gun ships! I served on one of the last pure gun ships built years ago, a Forest Sherman Class Destroyer and I have often speculated in my imagination on how it would have fared 1v1 against a peer.
A night action where the British and Japanese have the advantage over everyone ... Except Admiral Lee. That got me laughing as I just rewatched the video you did on Admiral Lee.
Ranty Drach is entertaining Drach. Most I've laughed at one of your videos since the 2nd Pacific Squadron. Absolute gold 👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻
As far as low-probability events ... that actually happened. I write naval survivability modeling software for a living. It comes up all the time when the navy in question (we work with several) wants to recreate a h(y|i)sterical scenario. We keep having to tell them: there is no f#$&!ng way software could have predicted that.
For the George Washington fire there were several parallel issues that all contributed to the disaster. Hydraulic fluids were improperly stored in a void space, which was ignited by flicked cigarettes raining down from careless sailors who were lighting up in an unsanctioned area.
For the Samuel B. Roberts (FFG-58), what ultimately saved the ship was a sailor disregarding safety protocols. The Hazard class frigates had 3 gas turbines to produce power. Two were destroyed by the mine strike and/or subsequent flooding and fire. The third was actually tagged out as not-working while the ship was under way. An enterprising sailor, realizing the gravity of the situation, climbed into the tagged out generator. He manually operated it for hours, physically taking the role as a defunct control component. But without that generator there would have been no fire pumps, and no auxiliary propulsion.
How would our software have modeled that improvised fix? It's literally not in the control manuals we would have used to build the expert system.
Interesting. Thanks for sharing!
Dang, how many medals did that guy get? Seriously, that's the sort of heroism that deserves to be remembered.
I wonder who would win a 'rant off' between Drach and Dr Clarke. I used to think it would be Dr Clarke but Drach seems to have an untapped reserve of 'rant' just ready to be unleashed.
See HMS Indefatigable...the rant-kraken that is Drach is ready!
We all have our breaking points.
@hourlardnsaver Beatty wouldn't stand a chance; put Seymour in there with him to even things out a bit.
@@billbolton That wouldn't help at all...maybe giving Beatty some Sturdee support?
Love a Drach rant. Especially the voice going up an octave at certain moments, 😁
A great & comprehensive "why I don't..." video. Chapeau!
I loved how you brought up the "soft factors", (crew) when comparing ships. This is something that very rarely thought of. Mostly, as you so correctly state, folks choose a single ship vs single ship without specifying time periods or any of the other excellent points that you brought up. Wonderful episode to an excellent series. Thanks.
Yeah a ship is nothing if its crew is useless. As proved again and again in battles where smaller & weaker forces have outfought more more powerful enemies through training, experience, clever tactics and/or courage
@@dorn0531 ooh.. that reminds me of something that wasn't found until the wrecks of Sydney was photographed. Sydney's X turret is the one that disabled the engines on Kormoran. Well... people noticed that the access hatch was propped open when using a submersible to examine the wreck. Apparently, the gunners in X turret were manually targeting and not using the ship fire control... which by this point had already been blown to hell anyways.
@@marhawkman303 Manual aim while under fire like that is pretty impressive
This really seems to boil down to how many people like to look at history vs how history is actually studied. For a lot of people it is a continuation of a fascination with one specific weapon (system) and the boyish desire to want to know which is the biggest-mostest (as a certain bearded gentleman from Carolina might say). You see it in just about any hobby and it really boils down to wanting to dive into a narrow nice to find the coolest guy/thing/fight or the most awesome guy/thing/fight from the part they particularly like. Having to put reasons why implements of war were designed in a certain way together from the perspective of naval requirements and strategy is also a lot more involved and layered, which is something that only a very limited amount of people have time and interest for.
I can't believe that, after mentioning Admiral Lee, you didn't include the command factor. Swap ship or fleet commanders and MANY historical battles would have come out differently.
Battle of Lissa was probably one the battles where commander had the biggest influence. Trafalgar too. If the admirals in those battles had been less daring/talented/crazy they would not have had the same result
Even on small ships it made a difference, vetran destoyer commanders v. someone who had only been in the navy for a couple of years and found themself in charge of a ship. Then there's the motivation to be fierce. The British executed Admiral Byng for cowardice nearly 200 years before the Second World War and while that sort of punishment was no longer applied, it still motivated ship captains like the famous case of the captain of the destroyer HMS Gloworm when he rammed a much bigger German cruiser.
@@Dave_Sisson Very true. Individual commanders varied hugely. Look at Admiral Benbow. His subordinates were worthless compared to his incredible courage.
I mean, if we're going to put future weapons into play, Yamato vs Iowa, the Iowa is gonna have a hard time dealing with Yamato's Wave Motion Gun which its going to be equipped with sometime at the end of the next century
I dunno about that one... when you've replaced over 90% of the ship... is it REALLY the same ship anymore?
@@marhawkman303 Your comparison of the 2 Yamatos is akin to saying the Enterprise NCC1701 and NCC1701-A actually have shared components at some point when the fact is they only share the name and no actual physical components!!! 🤠👍
@@worldtraveler930 didn't the anime imply the Yamato at least had the metal frame left?
@@marhawkman303 The version that I watched bragged that it's Only bit of antiquity to have survived was the bronze name plaque alone.
@@worldtraveler930 ah,, yes, well then, yeah... not really the same ship then.
"Warspite is the real world embodiment of plot armour".
*happy British noises*
:)
As a 40+ year veteran Mechanical Engineer, If you get into an argument with physics, you will lose 100% of the time, and it usually hurts.
If someone says the Iowa uses missiles against Yamato just tell them she replies with her wave motion gun
38:57 - "...Italian shells..." - My first thought on hearing that was about pasta shells with a nice Italian sauce. The ship's gunnery may have been deficient but I imagine before she goes down the galley will feature some fine cuisine. Royal Navy ships did tend to beat up on French and Italian ships during WWII in actual gunfights but who would have won in a cook-off? That's a ship-vs.-ship I'd like to see (and taste). Best of all it could be done repeatedly as most ships tended to survive their own cooking.
A soft factor often overlooked. Is your crew well fed? The USN was at pains to ensure this knowing its effect on morale. Consider an American crew that has not tasted ice cream for two weeks due to a paperwork foulup. Will they be despondent and sluggish? Or irritable and ready to kick any ass offered?
Adjacent to point 1, a hypothetical battleship that goes without AA or secondary batteries and puts the displacement savings in the usual triangle could have an on-paper advantage in a 1v1 against another battleship of comparable tech and size. But it's a worse ship in an actual war.
Though if things have gotten to the point airpower is a serious problem, should you even have a battleship at all (discounting battleships you’ve built a long time ago), since you’d probably be using it entirely in supporting roles anyways (and almost all of those roles are already covered by other warships)?
Drach, you are awesome! Do not let them get you down!!!
“Assuming both ships are perfect spheres of uniform density, who would win in a fight between HMS Captain and EAS Agamemnon (before its 2261 refit)?”
“Night fighting techniques (…) will have a leg up over anyone who is not Admiral Lee”. Love it!!
similar to arguments on tanks whose was better,tanks were most effective with troop support,battle outcomes depending on weather light fog,
Radar seems to have a significant influence on sea power during WW2.
I would like to see a discussion of all the variations...
I second that motion!!! 🤠👍
Definitely
Using Seakrieg rules , we did a Bismarck vs Warspite and Renown. Both British ships were mailed and moved to escape . When Warspite scored a non penetrating critical hit that blew up the magazine and Bismarck was gone. To explain this we came up with a member of the Bismarck’s crew opened a hatch for fresh air right as the shell passed into the ship. Randomness spoils everything
But, US battleships did have did have something extra.
Willis Augustus Lee
Sitting here laughing about an Iowa launching Tomahawks and Harpoons vs Yamato.....then he said it!!! Roaring with laughter.
God, how many times have I had "conversations" like that one!?
"Fun Fridays... Something to do with ships, honest!"
Drach always generates laughs
I love how the things done in the square space ad are also just the things you did on that page. (yes watch the ad again)
Moreover, if you did extended videos on individual matchups, how would we get away with asking you six slightly different questions about the same four naval engagements every month?
I work in applied mathematical modelling of risk assessment and management - Bayesian Belief Nets and @ Risk (the tools I use - but there are many many others) - completely different area but very similar principles and issues arise to those raised here in particular the poor appreciation of point 6. randomness/chance which makes a mockery of those who believe faithfully in linear cause and effect sequences and determinism. Three things that support Drach's scepticism about war gaming:
1. Stochastic timeseries modelling shows how often and how the 'average' cause > effect sequence of events can be very different from the individual timecourses. People should have heard of 'the Butterfly Effect'. Today perhaps a better metaphor is the coronavirus effect - plausibly a tiny mutation somewhere in Covid19's ancestors (termed a top event) led to an event tree of humoungous proportions we are still living through.
2. Bayes nets programming are especially suited to modelling complex cause > effect networks and doing what-if probablistic modelling (you can input real numerical data or 'expert opinion'). These highlight how inherently variable outcomes of 'fault trees' are. The node of most interest is termed the top event - like the Hood exploding. These trees allow the likelihood not just of a battle but other random events which might cause a sinking to be estimated for different what-if scenarios. Ideally the numbers tell you where your vulnerabilities mainly lie. The trick though is to have plausible input data and that turns out to be really really hard and this is arguably the whole point of Drach's offering here and objection to spinning naive narartives.
3. A few years ago I was at a Bayes Net conference where some defence related people described their own use of these computer systems when designing a patrol boat. The problem was this. In a complex machine that is a boat of any kind, its functioning is dependent on all sorts of interaction mechanical and communications systems and a degree of redundancy still operating when under attack. How do you identify its greatest vulnerabilities given this complexity. To understand what might happen they first created a stochastic model of the boat in 3-D, ran it and recorde what would happen if say a small shell landed in different random locations. This created a massive number of what-if scenario outputs with different impact event magnitudes impacting on different boat systems. The output from this model was then analysed using a Bayes Net which could identify where the greatest vulnerability lay.
IRT the latter.
a. I am not giving away any great secret here. This quantitative risk modelling is what professionals do routinely when they are trying to assess ANY complex system...e.g. dam safety, flooding and so forth and each situation. The best developed area is probably in business where big profits are there to be made from identifying marginal but robust opportunities.
b. The bigger message here is that playing genuinely credible what-if games is far more complex than making up a new story about say the battle of Gettysburg and playing with toy soldiers. You can believe of course whatever you want to believe. But you really will be kidding yourself - hence Drach's partial allergy - unless you do what professional people do.
c. This said I am not disparaging scenario exploration which is a great way to think about many problems. I am just saying there are good ways and bad ways and the good ways are damn hard.
Hey Drach, love the channel,
How would the Millennium Falcon do against the Bismarck?
🙂
I think Binkov Battlegrounds did a Millennium Falcon vs F16’s a few years back.
You know, I reckon if it was pouring with rain and snowing heavily on a bright sunny day in the middle of the night, Bismarck might have the advantage there....
It depends ... can the Bismarck do the Kessel run in less than eight parsecs?
Entirely dependent on which one breaks down first.
Han's Falcon or Rey"s Falcon ?
I will never know how a Flower Class Corvette versus Roman Quadrireme fight would go now.
It’s too bad people get so butthurt about these 1v1 comparisons, I think they are fun as long as you take it all with a grain of salt. It can also be a good framing device to talk about advances in naval technology, differences between tactics or training in different navies, etc. I understand the issues that will come about on the internet having these discussions though.
This video is what I needed to start my week. You can hear Drach's face sliding further and further into his palm when he talks about some of the hypotheticals he gets asked.
Soft factors can include:
- Plot armor
- Maori blessings
- Ralph Bloody Seymour
This used to come up on the sci.military.naval USENET board when I would post and lurk there, back a few years.
One of the big ones was "German WW2 Raider vs. Convoy Escorting heavy ship." Say, Scharnhorst vs. USS Arkansas, or USS Pennsylvania, or HMS Malaya, etc.*
The big problem here is, maybe the German heavy raider has some support ships, but moreover, the escorting heavy ship has Destroyers and other escorts with the convoy as well. So, instead of Panzerschiffe vs. USS Arkansas or Scharnhorst vs. USS Pennsylvania or HMS Malaya, or Tirpitz vs. same, you end up with the convoy commander turning his heavy ship to fight, while sending the other escort ships to do torpedo runs.
Thus, one on one fighting between heavy ships would have been unlikely.
*Notwithstanding the usual German orders to raiders telling their commanders to avoid combat with heavy naval units, which were often breached. See: Graf Spee, Bismarck and Prinz Eugen, etc.
Fun Friday are cool as it gives us time to recover from our Wednesday rum ration... Or maybe I should not use a gallon as ration measurement tool😇
You used to do them, and I was wondering why that stopped a few years ago. Thanks for the explanation.
Also, besides the Bismarck hit on the Hood, what are examples of extremely improbably hits on a BB?
Noting that pretty much all hits are improbable. It's less aiming to hit a specific place and more aiming to hit in general.
The Swordfish torpedo into Bismarck's rudder and props. The USS Arizona's catapult charge magazine (added after the ship was built, not especially well protected and adjacent to the forward main battery magazine) taking a direct hit from an armor piercing bomb. Combat proved that using heavy bombers against ships was vastly overrated pre-WW2, and yet...Gneisnau become a Constructive Total Loss from RAF heavy bombers at altitude - at night, no less. " On the night of 26 February, the British launched an air attack on the ship; one bomb penetrated her armored deck and exploded in the forward ammunition magazine, causing serious damage and many casualties. The repairs necessitated by the damage were so time-consuming that it was determined to rebuild the ship to replace the nine 28 cm guns with six 38 cm guns in double turrets."
You're spot on, on all your points. I've often thought the same about them as I listen to Drydocks when you hav't to answer those ship vs ship questions. I often think they're pointless and a waste of time. Keep on with your good works👍
About random chances during Bismarck's voyage: PoW also got some hits, that could have altered a lot if the projectiles exploded. One was a shell from Bismarck that ended up inside the torpedo defense system and it would definitely be bad for PoW to have an explosion inside the protected area, not outside. And the other was a shell from Prinz Eugen (agreed, smaller, but it wouldn't matter in that case), which ended up in the propellant charge/round manipulation chamber underneath a secondary aft turret. It exploding would have also resulted in some damage to PoW. And either one could have delayed PoW retreating, which would have allowed Bismarck and Prinz Eugen to score possibly even more hits, maybe even crucial (considering every hit could be a crucial one). And considering when PoW was leaving, the guys in Prinz Eugen were preparing the torpedo launcher, that would also open up more possibilities, if PoW was forced to stay a bit longer.
Tl;dr: Yes, you absolutely can't plan in random chance, so you can't know, how it would turn out in the end
Excellent points. On the other hand, what if all Prince of Wales’ guns had worked perfectly for the entire battle? There’s no way to account for all those extra shells. Even if nothing else changed, one of them COULD have hit Bismarck’s bridge & wiped out the command crew in the first five minues. Impossible to say exactly what would have happened if that one factor had changed
@@dorn0531 yes, but I stayed to the stuff that actually happened and only changed that one or two shells go off as well and what that could result in
@@Hendricus56 Fair enough. I was simply adding a small detail that could just as easily have happened since there were engineers onboard fixing the guns in real time. I was agreeing with your point that small, random events could change everything
@@dorn0531 Yes, it is just easier to speculate with stuff that did happen (the shells still hit PoW after all) than discussing which gun might have been fixed and how it would affect the performance from then on and something like that
@@Hendricus56 Good point.
Hi Drach. Please , please, please do a myth busting video on common naval misconceptions. Partly because I'm interested in finding out how many I share, but mostly because we love it when you do your nut.
A neat video and I agree that one on one fights for capital ships is fruitless, though it did happen at least three times during the French Revolutionary and the Napoleonic Wars when single French and British 74s matched up to each other. On the other hand, I'm not sure about the tech comment. Yes, the North Carolina and Washington in 1941 did NOT have an SG and only had Mk.1(FA) fire control radar (basically a Mk.3 with antennas stacked on top of each other like a Mk.4). However, they had the complete fire control system that was aboard every US fast battleship. This doesn't just come from Friedman's Naval Gunnery but from the USN's manuals on fire control and from articles on US battleship gunnery from Jurens and others. The Mk.38 fire control director fed the Mk.8 rangekeeper, one in each protected fire control compartment. The Mk.8 was linked to a Stable Vertical Mk.41 (IIRC), which was a gyroscope system that maintained an artificial horizon. All the other nation's capital ship fire control systems required a cross-level telescope on the director to maintain the visual horizon. The combination of rangekeeper and stable vertical DEMONSTRATED in numerous tests before and during the war, the ability to maintain a firing solution on an enemy ship that was maneuvering (not violently) at 20 kts while the US BB did the same. No figure eights at full speed. Ac power allowed synchros to feed data from the FCD and other sources directly into the rangekeeper, where DC powered ships had to substitute manual input to their fire control computers. It should be pointed out here that the Germans were the only other navy that adopted AC power. Even RN MAGSLIPS had to transmit data in steps. Finally, the firing solution was not fed by follow the pointer or visual signals (counters) or verbally, but through remote power control which allowed what essentially continuous aim. All of this in 1941, not post-war. Finally, the AC power system allowed the massive switchboard to link turrets and secondary mounts to main, alternate (CT and turret no.2) and secondary directors almost w/o delay, compared to a DC powered ship that could take an hour to bring all turrets and directors fore and aft, re-calibrate the transmission system and re-set the fire control computer before switching between the fore and aft main gun directors. After some e-mail exchanges with the USS North Carolina Museum, it is possible the RPC was not installed or active when launched but was certainly so before Sep 41. And by mid-1942, both ships did have RPC and SG when operating with the Home Fleet against Tirpitz as did some of the South Dakota class, who also had 10cm Mk.8 FCR when Tirpitz still had 80cm FuMo 27 (Seetakt). This was the result of BuOrd using seed money and cooperating with GE and RCA and other US electronic firms, just as they did with Edison and GE for high temp/high pressure boilers and turbines and with the locomotive industry, where the diesel-electric system was tried and proved and then moved onto the fleet subs.
This was the most bizarre comment in the video. You could practically hear Drach gritting his teeth in anger about "misinformation" while at the same time telling a lie, or at least saying something extremely misleading. I don't know about the exact provenance of his "figure 8" story, but it was certainly a fact that during WW2, US ships were able to maneuver while maintaining target lock while their opponents simply couldn't. Shame on Drach here.
Your point about rarity of similar ship v ship engagement is valid... however note the nearly universal design approach to armor and guns was an assumption of fighting a similar vessel
From the first roughly half of this I watched I've run into similar debate for Hearts of Iron IV. Whenever someone mentions the ridiculous air warfare system that allows 2000 aircraft to be airborne over northern France in 1940 invariably someone mentions the British 1000 bomber raids. Which if you look into them there were only like three or four of them ever executed and they were barely able to put enough aircraft up to achieve those figures.
To make up the numbers for the 1000 bomber raid on Cologne in 1941, the RAF really scraped the bottom if the barrel by using aircraft from Coastal command and the Operational Training Command.
And it was not only heavy bombers, they also used light bombers.
Raids in 500 bomber range was much more common than the 1000, for various reasons of practicality.
@@kimleechristensen2679 Exactly, and the more aircraft you have flying in a formation/train the more of a nightmare command and control/coordination becomes.
@@catloverjerrygarcia5086 Have you read the book, "Before the Storm" it tells the story of the RAF bomber command in the early years of WW2 1939-42, and how they gradually developed the formular of bombing raids that proved so devastating in 1943-45.
Insightful read but also chilling.
@@kimleechristensen2679 I have not but will note it down.
Some amazing stuff on this channel. 300+ individual ships in 5min summaries...... longer reviews of ships that featured during a certain time period.... Wednesday specials and Friday Fun DAYS.... So much to choose from and there is always something new to find. Not formatted as well as it could be (library style) but if you know what you want you can search for it.Amazed at the depth of ships featured..
Drach taking them to task for blatant Yankee bias!!!!
The Iowa’s were good enough as is. They were not unsinkable as many would like to believe. Every ship had trade offs in the design
Most 1v1 of any type of fight seems to make the assumption that they happen in a well lit covered colosseum and that the combatants, or at least one of them, is in perfect condition making no errors in either technique or judgement.
I feel that it’s to make it as close to a computer simulation as possible so it’s easier to understand or explain.
Drach: "I do (...) in "The Dry Dock", but then "The Dry Dock is a much shorter format"
Me: yeah, about that....
Drach: "..for each individuaal question..."
Me: oh
24:30 this caught me totally off guard. I even go so far that USS Constitution would have defeated USS Iowa in 1941!
If someone was asking about a simple ship vs ship, I'd probably assume the following conditions if not given any: The crew of one ship is the clone of another created by transporter incidents similar to Thomas Riker's creation -however, right after the split, both teams spent a year training on their particular battleship with the same hours, conditions and food quality -while also being brought out of the transporter speaking whatever language is needed to understand how to operate their ships. Both ships are given the same radar equipment as the ship with the worse setup. They unknowingly have been placed in a one vs one situation by bored gods who are curious about how this sort of thing could play out. Both crews are somehow overcome with a rabid hatred for the other ship. The gods start taking bets and set odds for certain things to happen. I assume that's what these people probably want to know, more or less. Its more about the raw design of the ship on paper. I'd say beyond radar, range finding equipment, I'd expect, would be a fair thing to keep in comparison etc. Also, aside from the radar, I'd assume the ships are both in their structural and mechanical prime. On that note, I am personally well aware that in real life -you can expect for flukish things to occur. Exploding objects on large complex machines floating in the sea -controlled by human beings, tend to cause strange and unpredictable things to happen, like Bismarck sinking Hood so quickly and Kirishima being in position to sink South Dakota (if Washington wasn't there) etc. I am designing my own ship combat board game and I am trying to make it to where the "real life" situations are taken into account. This should make a lot of people who play it angry... Good.
Ok, but what would happen if Monitor v Kongo. Don't worry about how the engagement occurred, let's just say Monitor entered Tokyo Bay via orbital drop from a Cessna 172 skyhawk.
Do you mean Monitor vs the country Kongo?
@@535phobos Kongo the IJN class battlecrusier
@@jeromebirth2693 I am aware. But wouldnt my scenario be more fun?
@@535phobos absolutely
You make a good point about the Iowa not existing when the Bismarck was sunk. The best the USN could have done at that stage were the USS North Carolina and the USS Washington, which had both just been commissioned but had severe problems with their propellors. More likely adversaries would have been the New Mexico class, at least a couple of which were present in the Atlantic. These had 12 14 inch guns and a top speed of 22 knots after modernisation. They had about the same speed and size as the Rodney, but with smaller calibre armament.
Annoying yes, severe no. I sympathize with Drach’s feelings about these comparisons: too many adjectives, too little knowledge, too much repetition of others’ dubious conclusions. Look at it this way: you just forked over a BIG chunk of your personal budget for a McClaran and the thing has an annoying rattle above a certain speed when you test drive it. You’re not going to accept delivery until it is fixed! Battleships are really more akin to high performance sports cars than Toyota Corollas being stamped out en masse for the budget market. If you can afford a McClaran, you can afford to be a Karen about it…and the U.S. Congress is and always was the biggest bunch of Karens…
U.S.NAVY Advance Boiler Technician BT3 Bryant(the last of the boiler technicians)checking in my friend. U.S.S. Gridley CG-21 10-17-84.
Boiler tech on the last Gearing...U.S.S. Meredith DD-890
Drach rants are amazing, plus, logic! Love it
Drach isn't doing ship 1v1s? But how will I know now how an engagement between Santissima Trinidad and Yamato would shake out?
Drach, I'd like to learn more about torpedoes. Given the video, I'll make my question a hypothetical.
Assume all relevant navies in WWII have sufficient experience with 7-inch torpedoes, please speculate on the impact they may have had if submarines were typically equipped with a pair of 7-inch launchers. I picture this as an additional pair, but maybe you can think of a reason to replace a pair instead.
This question stems from the knowledge that 21-inch torpedoes are quite expensive and there are situations where a submarine captain might want to use a torpedo, but the target just isn't worth it.
The choice of 7-inch is somewhat arbitrary. I chose it because the math seems straightforward, it gives a torpedo small enough to represent a noticeable cost savings while still having a warhead large enough to do something. I could easily be wrong in my assumptions and would consider telling me what a less ignorant person would ask as an equally valid response to the question.
What target are you thinking of - fishing boats? A military vessel wants to carry the most powerful weapon it can fit for it's intended target. Hunting merchantmen was not in the original plan, but one hit from a 21-incher usually did the job. When a sub had a minor target that was not worth a torpedo she often surfaced and used the deck gun. It would have been more precise than a 7-inch torpedo (could they fit the engine and control system in there?).
A 7" torpedo would be unlikely to do more than scratch the paint of anything larger than a light cruiser. Moving from a 21" torpedo, which typically had a warhead around 700lbs to 18" dropped the warhead size by over half (excepting a couple air-launched 18" torpedoes with 400+lb warheads but comparatively short ranges).
The smallest torpedo's to see active use were the American Mk 43 ASW torpedoes, which had a 54lb or 60lb warhead and 10" diameter. They were enough to damage a sub of that era via a localized overload of the pressure hull when the sub was submerged, but were fairly quickly replaced by a 12.75" Mark 44 with a larger warhead.
@@gregorywright4918 I was thinking destroyers on down. There are fairly small vessels that can cause trouble for a submarine. Think of them as secondary weapons.
HMS New Zealand with Jutland rig vs 1980's Iowa: After expending all of it's ammunition without a single punishing hit, the Iowa withdraws to have the entire gunnery department and marine compliment drug tested. Engineers of McDonnell-Douglas (Harpoon), Raytheon (Phalanx) and General Dynamics (Tomahawk) are held for questioning by very humorless Alphabet Agency types. Iowa's cooks proudly announce they hit New Zealand with at least four tons of potatoes out of the six tons thrown.
People with spreadsheets quietly crawl off to have a drunken nervous breakdown. The rather exhausted Piupiu and Hei-tiki are given a toast by the entire crew and returned to their place of honor.
This reminds me of the 1v1s in the Pirates of the Caribbean.
* In the first movie, the Interceptor, a brig, was facing against a cursed skeleton crew whose Indiaman had oars for extra propulsion.
* In the second, Black Pearl was against a cursed flyut/Vasa/submarine hybrid in calm seas. The Dutchman had its submarine ability plus a bigger broadside and tri-barrel rapid fire chaser guns. Oh wait, the Pearl is literally the fastest ship in the Caribbean and had the the wind on her side. So the Dutchman had to "cheat" via Kraken to do any real damage and sink her.
* In the third it took A LITERAL goddess and a malestrom to force a fight against the Pearl and Dutchman where only broadside weight mattered and the wild card (Captain Jack Sparrow notwithstanding) was the fact that the immortality of the Dutchman's captain was at stake.
Not speaking for the realism (or lack thereof otherwise) in the movies, I'm just pointing out that even there, there are hardly any preconditions that lead to a "fair fight". There's always a supernatural force or the weather in play.
Which does beg the question of WASHINGTON vs BISMARCK. Both ships were pretty much contemporaries, and in 1942, the WASHINGTON was loaned to the British Navy, and so she could have (granted, this is a far distant possibility) been loaned to the British back earlier in 1941, when the BISMARCK was still afloat, and so therefore could possibly have ended up exchanging gunfire with the BISMARCK.
What with WASHINGTON facing, and possibly taking a part in defeating at least three enemy battleships (BISMARCK, Guadacanal, and Leyte Gulf), making her a record setter among modern Battleships.
Well clearly in New Jersey VS Yamato, New Jersey would win because she'd be spotting with her drone well plastering Yamato with W23 shells. /s
And this is why the Americans have a “Carrier TASK GROUP” it’s a carrier surrounded by IDK 20-30 other ships and at minimum a submarine as well and they are all spread out so you would have to be VERY lucky or VERY GOOD to get through all of that to even get close enough to the carrier to do anything with it if you could!
Some of the questions I dislike most are "If this ship from 2022 goes back in time, can it sink that battleship?"
"If we take this modern ship and send it back 70+ years could it-"
"Yes."
I remember watching a few of the "could the modern XYZ force beat the entire [Arm of a WW2 power]" and realizing the question is basically "will this force run out of ammo or targets first?"
Don't hate on poor Binkov
Well, that's at least semi-plausible on occasion, for example when a ship from the 1930s (e.g. the General Belgrano) goes forward in time to battle a modern submarine. Where "to battle" means "to absorb homing torpedoes from."
Perhaps more annoying are entirely fictitious match-ups between vessels from science-fiction franchises set in the far future.
I’ve seen some ridiculous questions on that vein.
- Dreadnought (the dreadnought) vs. The Spanish Armada (I’m pretty sure Dreadnought displaced more than the entire Spanish Armada, even leaving aside the fact she has every single advantage in this matchup and by a ridiculous margin)
- Bismarck vs. Wooden ships of the line (good luck even catching up to her…)
- Both Yamatos vs. The Spanish Armada (yes, *someone actually thought this would be remotely a fair fight.*)
- the modern Greek frigate Hydra vs. The Ottoman fleet at Lepanto (probably the most extreme example I’ve seen)
- Yamato and 20 Japanese interwar/WWII destroyers as escorts (a mix of Fubukis and Kageros) vs. The Second Pacific Squadron (they barely tied with unarmed, stationary, neutral fishing vessels, how the hell would they deal with a battleship from three and a half decades in the future and a destroyer squadron armed with invisible torpedoes that have the same effective range as the main guns on the predreadnoughts?)
- one that I came up with and Drach answered: every WWII-generation big-gun capital ship vs. The entire Grand Fleet and High Seas Fleet capital forces present at Jutland (in my defence, I pretty much figured the uptimers would win and the only question was if they’d have enough ammunition to kill absolutely everything in the WWI fleets).
Edit: while not really an anachronism, there was one matchup that had the combined Axis force at Matapan vs. The combined American and Japanese forces at Midway. Yes, that was a matchup where one side had 3.5 times as many AIRCRAFT CARRIERS as the other side had INDIVIDUAL AIRCRAFT. The Italians couldn’t do anything to Formidable so how the hell do you expect them to deal with all three Yorktowns plus 2/3 of the Kido Butai?
I totally agree with you about the difference in time comparisons! Showing my age by saying the Avalon Hill board game Bismark! has a scenario where the N Carolina and Augusta take on Bismark and Prinze Eugen. It seems fairly realistic since it was made before many of the latter USA Iowa class BB upgrades. Have you seen or have Siegfried Bayer's Battleships and Battle Cruisers 1901 to 1970. It seems like a good reference book regarding how the ship was laid out, armor, guns and speed plus a brief life of said ship. I enjoy your videos even if I mostly listen to them while traveling. Thanks for the good work.
1V1 ME BRO!!! Is not a normal act of war. Fair fights are for losers.
Most people really underestimate the impact of random chance on the outcome of many things. The odds of a *specific* unlikely event happening is low, but the odds of *any* unlikely event happening is surprisingly high. Take the Birthday Paradox. It's not intuitive because the odds of someone sharing for example *your* birthday are about 1 in 365, but in a group of 23 the odds that two people share *a* birthday are about 1 in 2. There are any number of fluky things that can meaningfully affect the outcome of a 1v1 battle and there's a good chance that at least one will occur. The problem is you can't know which one it is and what impact it will have. That's a good reason to avoid a fair fight if you can help it, because you can never count on chance being on your side.
Shame on you! You claim to be a real historian and then you confess straight up that you use fact based analysis, relevant technical expertise, and common sense? How dare you!
This seems like a really full video, thank you for the time and energy to put this across in a pretty even handed manner. I've fallen foul of the fallacies you highlight in this video, and there's no machine that makes the issue that it doesn't matter how advanced a vehicle is it matters how it is to fight from the vehicle that matters clearer than ships. Tankies, infantry, and airpeople have the same issues but often it gets blamed on those people rather than analysing 'Why is the performance the way it is' because they got stuck on 'Who to blame for this performance' - a great parallel being the American WW2 magnetic torpedo ("Failure is like onions") where the designer did everything to blame the crew rather than examine the machine and it's usage
Ryan has done covered each ship! Lol
Keep up the excellent work! I recommend you often!
Good example of different levels of refit to similar ships
Renown had rather advanced radar, Repulse had no radar until it was sent as part of force Zed and then had rather basic non gunnery radar. They are on completely different levels.
Two ships TOTALLY different from each other, Repulse had a modified WWI fire control system using the Dreyer table and an Admiralty clock and still had the useless triple 4" mounts. Renown had been totally mod'd in 1939, had the latest Admiralty Fire Control Table and directors, DP 4.5" guns and 30 deg elevation on her guns, where Repulse had 20 deg.
this is a great video. I subscribed to this channel in 2017 when most videos are still robotic voice, and I was working on my PhD in a different field. always like the neutral and facts based videos.
this video explained a lot of frustrations I faced after I finished my degree. there are more 'wanna be' people or people 'without knowing the details' or 'thinking they are correct based on partial information' I encountered than I ever thought when I was in grad school
It's odd that just 10 hours ago i was complaining in one of BrotherMunro's videos that Scharnhorst would never rush Kongo at full speed in real life because of the danger destroyers or submarines would pose. 1v1 are fun but they disregard whole chapters of tactical considerations.
Drac really called out 90% of his audience with this one
Alas I could not find the exact quote that I was looking for. But Clausewitz in "On War" when he is discussing chance in war compares war to playing a game of cards as a way of trying to come to grips with how chance can affect the outcome of a situation.
Added in edit:
Eureka! :-)
Clausewitz, "On War", Book 1, Chapter 1, section 21, final paragraph:
"In short, absolute, so-called mathematical, factors never find a firm basis in military calculations. From the very start there is an interplay of possibilities, probabilities, good luck and bad that weaves its way throughout the length and breadth of the tapestry. In the whole range of human activities, war most closely resembles a game of cards."
I would actually love to hear Drach analysis of last voyage of Bismark ignoring what actually happened and trying to look at it from the "What would be the most likely scenario over a 1000 simulations".
Well, the most likely result is easy:
1 ---- Hood doesn't blow up
2 --- Both German ships go down in the Denmark Strait, probably with serious damage to one or two RN ships, possibly one RN ship either sinking or written off
3 --- Ever afterwards, Kriegsmarine fanbois vehemently argue that neither German ship was sunk by enemy action, they both scuttled themselves
Well, the short answer to why you don't see ship 1-v-1s is that pretty much all of the navies have figured out that fair fights are for losers, and that if you end up in one, you've made a serious error of judgment somewhere.
Drach always find a way to HMS Warspite a fight chance!
I'm always more interested in actual battles than speculative battles. Along those lines, I'm sure there are a number of lesser known 1 vs. 1 battles between non-capital ships (e.g. commerce raider vs. escort ship). I would find those far more interesting than a speculative battle between well known ships.
I agree. One of the reasons I play campaign games, using a separate tactical game or mechanic, is that it gives context and direction to the tactic game. No battle exists in a vacuum. I wonder if the "1v1 boxing match" idea is an outgrowth of games like World of Warships, and that being a daughter of games as Mortal Kombat. I can hear it now "Sunday, Sunday, Sunday!! A true Cage Fighting event featuring the overly pessimistic, occupier of the Norwegian Fjiord, TTTTTTTRRRRRIIPPITZ".
Am I wrong? Probably. I've been wrong before, then I thought I was right, but I was wrong. Seems to be a pattern.
I love the intro
In the words of a famous Rear Admiral: Fair fights are for suckers.
So! 1v1, Hood vs Bismarck, but Bismarck is actually made of gold.
(joke on the term Golden BB. Or is it bb, when talking about air riffles, can't recall.)
1v1s are fun thought experiments but in a solid historical sense they are just memes. I miss the alt history vids being somewhat common but they are more fun content than the professional videos that are normally here.