Hi Drach, , Just a quick question: What are the best/your favorite skives invented by sailors to get out of doing real work for a bit? Presumably in the age of sail there was a lot more scope and variety but I'm sure in the age of steam there must've been a few. What punishments might be given if caught? Enjoy the channel a lot, keep up the good work.
I have a question about shimosa - the Japanese high explosive that proved so effective at Tsushima (and possibly in the Battle of the Yellow Sea). What made it so effective? Quantity of explosive? The special chemical formula? Weak French armour on Russian ships? It is my understanding it was never really used again by IJN or any other navies. Are there any reasons why it wasn't?
In last few days i came across opinion that UK's battleships after ww1 was always underguned , Nelson using light shells , KG5 had 14 inch guns, etc. Is there any merrit to this opinion or did UK compensated for that with other things ( number of guns , shell velocity , etc ) ?
Drachisms of the Day 5:56 "I suppose if they want to name a support ship "HMS Beatty" I can allow that. It might do something useful for a change." 20:08 "Yeah when splinters are scutting around the ship that is gonna be a very bad time to be a shin." 28:46 "I mean, if your gonna spend this kind of stupid-money, you might as well throw a couple of extra billion in there. Um, for fun. If nothing else." 37:12 (on wargaming) "You're one side. You're the other side. These are your objectives. Um, basically, go out and do what you would actually do, with the exception of the whole actual 'blowing up' part." 41:43 "Admiral Tiberius asks a question that is so glorious that it really must be read in it's entirety." (the answer includes 'congressional-grizzly-bears' and a 'very big sofa') 56:27 "Oh! OK. I see what you're doing there. Good luck. Ahhm, this should be fun to watch."
Thank you for answering my question sir, I'm glad you enjoyed my framing of my question. And thank you for going into detail like you did when answering it. I'd add in that I would try and get one additional battleship every odd or even year. But your answer was fantastic all around. That question about trying to make modern armor was unexpected but really enjoyable. Its ridiculously complex but an interesting concept to look at. Lastly, I'd say one of the Royal Navy's lowest points was the political choice to scrap the HMS Vanguard. Edit- Admiral Cunningham had one of the best quotes ever. A subordinate was comparing fighting both the Italians and Luftwaffe as hitting your head into a brick wall. Cunningham replied with "What you don't realise you miserable undertaker is that you may be loosening a brick" That is absolutely British and fantastic.
Admiral Cunningham's bare-bones signal to HMS Illustrious when she rejoined the Mediterranean Fleet the morning after Taranto was a classic example of British understatement. "Manoeuvre well executed." And that was it.
Just one note: the Mig-25 is *not* made of titanium. It's made of steel. The soviets found that, at that time, the welds in those thin walls were constantly cracking, so nickel steel ended up being the primary material. Afaik, titanium makes up less than 10% of the aircraft.
Yes.. it's only NATO that thought it must be made of titanium... it turned out to be an unmaneuvarable... junk wagon with a very strong metal box... was good for recon though ... when it worked... and no real turns... no don't turn... arrrgggh
@@blogsblogs2348 don't forget it was designed for high-altitute, high-speed bomber intercepts; it's primary targets would have been the B-58 and B-70. Not much need for manouvering there.
@@jlvfr absolutely agree.. it's just NATO that soiled themselves... a bit like with that chinese stealth aircraft that they thought was a fighter.. but is actually a light bomber...
@@blogsblogs2348 The reality is a AA missile doesn't care if you're a bomber or a fighter. It'll just help them chose which stencil to use to mark the kill on their aircraft. It's a clone of the F35 or the F22 with the same enclosed missile racks like all stealth fighters. Form follows function son. If it looks a fighter, flies like a fighter and carries a fighter's weapons...it's a fighter. Maybe it's one of the new Chinese transformers that just identifies as a bomber?
@@readhistory2023 firstly.. not your son... Secondly .. it's never intended to combat fighters or anything for that matter... just keep unobserved and then stick a long range AAM or more likely several into high value aerial radar platforms... Thirdly... it's not a clone of the F35 .. it uses stolen tech but the commies wouldn't build something as rubbish as an F35
In regards to quotes for the ages, I know it’s not technically a “Royal Navy” quote, but I believe that this one by Winston Churchill fits quite well and sets a standard that the Royal Navy has by and large done a very good job of living up to. “In War, Resolution. In Defeat, Defiance. In Victory, Magnanimity. In Peace, Good Will.”
The need to correct the Magnetic Compass predates Iron or Steel Ships. Captain Flinders wrote a treatise on the subject and a bar of mild steel was place ahead of the Compass Binnacle known as the Flinders Bar. this was to compensate for any iron fittings including cannons fitted in the ship. With the introduction of Iron and then Steel ships more compensation was need to mainly compensate for the magnetism built into the ship during construction. The great inventor Lord Kelvin used two soft iron spheres at each side of the compass, generally known as Lord Kelvins Ball's with additional hard magnets within the Compass Binnacle. The ship when new at at regular intervals requires to be swung and the magnetic's adjusted.
While watching this I learned of the passing of PO1 Donald Stratton, formerly of the USS Arizona (BB-39). With his passing, there are only 2 survivors from Arizona's crew from 7 Dec 41 left. Fair winds and following seas.
To take of the Titanium discussion: its in a suitable alternative of aluminium i.r.t. weight (60% heavier), and significantly stronger. From memory titanium will be stronger than basic construction steels, but if you go into exotics hardening processes can push strength and hardness well past over titanium. However, it should be kept in mind that modern infrastructure is mostly layed out for machine components that are more in the 50 cm to 50 cm area. Larger machine frames / structures are generally made out of welded construction steel, as it way more effective to make frames or heavier, or larger instead. Even for basic aluminium, manufacturing large frames in the order of 10 x 5 meters you end up in specialty facilities, like guys that make components for CERN LHC, ITER, etc that want to have mono-block frames to reach predictable behavior on precision level.
@@whatsoperadoc7050 titanium is one of the least toxic materials out there, including titanium oxide and most of other compounds. It also has a high melting point compared to aluminium, so will hold up fairly well in a fuel fire. However, titanium is quite expensive to produce and machine, so a fully titanium battleship will be virtually inaffordable. Most current ships use aluminium or steel as basic construction material, with fiber reinforced plastics for armor.
Titanium is a good metal. It holds its strength at higher temperatures. Unlike steel which begins to soften as temperatures rise.But when it reaches certain temperature it will fail.Also titanium requires a oxygen free atmosphere to weld, if you were to weld it like normal steel. The titanium will absorb oxygen in the weld seam and it becomes brittle.
My heart was swelling with pride, love, and respect at the story of Admiral Cunningham. Not the first time I heard the story. But it still affects me the same.
Given the current situation in the US Congress, visualizing locking them in a room with several hungry grizzlies brought a broad smile to my face! And Cochrane! One of a kind, that one. Good for on bringing up Crete. That is why you are one of a kind.
With regards to the images, I'd suggest approaching someone at te history department of a university near you to put together a joint funding bid (with, for example, the AHRC) to construct a Digital Archive of this material. (I'd offer to sponsor/write it myself if I wasn't currently between jobs). This will allow the material to be made available for the future, stored in the custodianship of professional archivists who will be able to keep it for posterity, and keeping it available for research. The issue is that any 'free' image hosting service often claims some form of ownership over the material - and if they fold then it'll all be gone. Additionally, as J. Mussell (2012) has described regarding digitised newspaper images, If you force the images into an existing archival structure, you are 'slaved' to that metadata. For example, 'location' as a metadata field may expect the name of a place, which wouldn't work with a location off the coast. The issue is of course that such a bid is much more involved than simply uploading the images somewhere, though if you can work with someone, they may have (grad) students available to help with the digitisation process.
Some countries have a sort of combined online archives with all important museums, libraries, galleries and archives contributing. For example trove.nla.gov.au does that for Australia and most photos, newspaper articles, etc. that they hold can be found on the one site.If the UK has something similar, it shouldn't be hard to find a library or museum that will upload Drach's photos. Alternately if he wants a dedicated website, I run a website for historical articles called australianmountains.com and I'd be happy to set up a new ultra simple to use website for Drach's pics which would allow him to upload and easily arrange galleries of photos at no charge ever, or he could do it himself for about 100 quid annually using a website builder like Squarespace, Wix or Godaddy, etc.
Support this idea, or at least, recommend you upload to multiple commercial hosts if you have to go that route. Only one has to be “pretty”, the rest are for what happens when a website inevitably shuts down. As an old Internet guy, what happened to Yahoo over the past 20 years highlights that problem. If you don’t want to go that far (in terms of establishing a collaboration with a history department or establishing an independent website), a first step might be contacting the Internet Archive - same caveats of “will they be around in 20 years” but at least they actively think of the problem as their first priority, as opposed to most places where making a buck is their first priority.
Hello drach! I totally agree on the "modern armor"isdue with you. I am a structural engineer (sort of) and to be honest: it is very hard to get and great amounts of sterl slabs that exceed 50 or 60mm thickness. We needed 80mm some years ago for 8 base plates of a steel tower and those had an awful long delivery time. Not to mention the special testing that was needed as well. And I am only talking structural steel S355 here, not armor of any type.
That answer to the last question really epitomizes why I respect and support Drach. On the both sides of the question the answer is just perfect. Yes, the sinking of HMS Victoria was an absolute low for the RN as far as my understanding of history goes, and for the exact reasons he quotes, even if it is not necessarily as well known as some other incidents. As for ABC at Crete, well, I would just like to say that he is the admiral I respect the most, even more than people like Nelson.
I'd say Nelson's accomplishments at Trafalgar were more momentous, but Cunningham's comment and all that it represented was more powerful and moving than Nelson's more famous battle order.
I'm far from an expert on naval warfare, but.... It seems to me that Churchill (spelled Narcissist) tried to micromanage naval deployment. Two ships here, four ships there. Places like Singapore, Malta, Hong Kong. If you do not enough available ships for the tasks, you need to abandon some, like the US did with Philippines and Wake. It's much better to keep your battle fleets in tact, and strike only when you are strong enough. But that's Sunday night admiraling.
The Battle of Basque Roads is a naval action where the very best of the Royal Navy is shown in Cochrane's actions and the worst in Admiral Gambiers and later the Admiralty's actions.
Damn right on HMS Cunningham - said it myself many times. A Naval genius, possibly our last great Admiral. Totally deserves a ship, and a fighting one - destroyer at least.
Your reply as to the question of making armor today, is a confirmation of something I thought for a long time. It seems that the countries with the strongest militaries, (mine), go to war about once every 10 years or so. Wouldn't want those industries to sag behind.
While it’s not quite up there with the moments you discussed, I always thought the crew of the HMS Sheffield singing “Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life” while their ship was sinking was an example of how the spirit of the Royal Navy is still alive and well in the modern era.
A three in one comment. (1) The craziest capture of an enemy warship has to be the U-505. It's a submarine so you have to blow it to the surface just right or else you sink it. Then you have to swarm aboard a vessel that you know nothing about that might self destruct or simply sink at a moment's notice. And you are doing something that nobody attempt in over a century. There is no book on how to do this. It's all improvise, adapt and overcome. Oh, and then you have to escape Admiral King's wrath. (2) Wargaming Jutland WWII style. December 9th , 1941 is an important date. If the fleet action get pushed into 1942 then you get North Carolina, maybe Washington but more important Ranger and Wasp. These two carriers may small by Pacific standards but their airwings are massive by ETO standards. That's pretty much game over for the Germans. (3) Generals and Admirals cheat in real exercise. A good example comes from a ground force exercise. George Patton cheated his way to victory in the Great 1941 Louisana War games, an exercise that involved more forces than the US Army has today. Patton looked at the road net and saw his best approach was to leave the designated exercise area and road to "victory" in 48 hours. His justification was there are no artificial boundaries in real war.
And considering how pissed the British were since capturing U-505 could have compromised Ultra if the Germans were a little more suspicious and a lot less complacent about Engima, this may have been the only time Adm King and the British were in agreement about anything, besides defeating Germany first.
@@johnshepherd8687 Very kind of you to reply John, I think it was a general discussion on wargaming and how the various naval services went about it. Your suggestion of the American carriers is quite intriguing, but it lead me to wonder what the Germans might have put up to oppose the US carrier air groups and ships, without even considering what the land based support from the UK might have been. Note to self, must listen to end German WW2 era ships doing a Jutland is the starting point 😁
35:40 so when you were talking about tank armour and Dorchester 2 I couldn't help imagining Chalenger 2 watching an 18" shell coming at it and thinking "Seriously?!" 😂
Re: Military wargames Lindybeige has a pretty good video about the wargame the British used to work out convoy escort tactics in the Atlantic (title is "The wargamers who won a real war"). Apparently it involved a room-sized map, with the paths and positions of ships being marked out in different colours, and officers viewing it through colour filters so they could only see their own vessels. He also notes that we know of at least one person who went through that training and is still alive today, and could thus supply more details: If anyone has access to Prince Charles, drop Lindy a message...
I second the motion of locking ALL of the United States Congress in a large room with MANY grizzly bears from 1875 to 2020. And they have to wear a mix of steak, pork, and lamb 3 piece suits. But to equal the odd's a bit? Each is given a switch (What you Brits call a "cane") for self-defense. (There's an old saying from the old west: "That's about as smart as takin' a switch to a grizzly bear")
What! That is an hour gone already? I was just getting comfy .. Thanks for all the hard work that goes into these (erm .. 'little') treasures. Great stuff.
5:56 "I suppose if they want to name a supportship "HMS Beatty ", I can allow that, It might do something usefull for a change." And for extra delicious irony attach it to the RN-signals school. As for the worst and best of the RN: what is your opinion of HMS Temeraire(1798)?
Odd factual tidbit. HMS Victoria is one of the few wrecks found to be standing vertically on the sea floor with the bow embedded into the mud and the stern complete with props, rudder, railing, and flag post raised up hundreds of feet above.
Large portions of the structure of the MIG 25 were made from stainless steel alloys resulting in a plane that was quite heavy for it's size. Stainless steels have high temperature strength that is similar to titanium, but weigh twice as much.
just for discussion purposes, the majority of the US armored plate steel was manufactured in the Pittsburgh Steel plants. Many of those plants are idle and shut down for the most part. and wit the technology of penetrators used in tanks. a 5 inch gun can penetrate 18 inches of armor. Limited by the length of the penetrator so a larger platform can easily carry a larger shell.
Drach, I grew up in the town where the steel component of the m1 tank armor was made even the steel is different. My brother was in melt shop when the alloy agents were added. Only 8 people in the company knew what it was.
Today's Spall Liners are far better. Titanium is best at resisting heat without deformation. Might be useful as a carrier flight deck material. Also, imagine plating a warship in the Chobham armor system. What's it for? Missiles with HEAT warheads, of course. What's it cost? Hehehe. Incidentally, one can design a ship to be practically immune to gunfire. It's called a "submarine". ;-)
As for wargaming scenarios, there is also the problem where the senior officers don't like that the outcome calls into question the current doctrine. An excellent example of this is in Millennium Challenge 2002 where a retired Marine Corps general used the US Navy's reliance on high tech equipment against it, and used his Iranian red force to cripple the US Navy taskforce, sinking 16 ships in the first two days, consisting of the carrier groups carrier, 10 major supporting warships, and 5 out of 6 amphibious assault vessels. The US Navy top brass decided to restart the scenario and stack the deck in the US favour, including putting time delays and other penalties on red force, seemingly in an effort to confirm that US Navy doctrine was sound. The Marine general in charge of red force resigned and publicly criticised the decision to reset the scenario change the rules. Eventually what was learned was that if you script a war game so blue force wins, blue force wins the war game.
DERP Squad perhaps you can then explain how the General managed to mount P-15 missles on boats that were only slightly smaller than the missles themselves (19’ missle weighing 5700 pounds, 25’ fiberglass boat weighing 5200 pounds). You might also mention that many elements of the ship defenses were turned off because of computer-imposed conditions. If you are going to tell the story, tell the WHOLE story. I don’t argue that the tactics were inventive and creative, and it does point out the assumptions that are made about technology and its abilities have real limits. But at least use realistic conditions when making the case for low-tech solutions.
In the interwar years the US Navy built a very good wargaming to fleet exercise to theoretical work feedback loop and honed itself amply. We see a lot of insight into how the USA would fight and did fight in the war based on how it learned tactics, technology and strategy from that. We might never see such honest self examination again or courageous testing of capability into the unknown.
Hi, I am really enjoying the channel! I was reading about HMS Argus (the British Carrier built-in 1918) and became curious about the bridges on Flush-Deck Carriers, and according to Wikipedia, Argus had a retractable pilot-house. Did any other Flush-Decks have a pilot house like that, and how would normal Flush Deck Bridges be arranged? Keep up the good channel.
The "practice torpedo sticking out of it's hull" incident really happened - it was a Soviet torpedo. It wasn't a Soviet submarine. They didn't know it was there, so it was doing exactly what it was supposed to be doing.
Graff_Zitel the main issue with the US air groups at Midway was that outside of Yorktown’s air group they were all inexperienced and were attacking piecemeal which allowed the Japanese CAP to effectively deal with them. Until Yorktown and Enterprise’s dive bombers made a coordinated, mass attack by accident while the Japanese CAP was down low after mopping up the last torpedo attack.
kiloalphasierra the IJN carriers also dodged extremely well. No hits up to that point is pretty astounding. Unfortunately Japanese reconnaissance is terrible, did them in on multiple occasions and this one also
Going from $140 million to $1.4 billion is what happens when the US Congress decides to slightly reduce it's normal kickbacks and pork barrel spending for a year.
Being an engineer, I'm wondering how long a "5 Minute Guide" would be if Drach addressed degaussing (permanent vs. "wiping"), deperming of subs, effects on equipment such as compasses, etc.. My guess is at least 45 glorious minutes.
I think we need an engineer's sub-section. I'd like to know just how many man-hours it took just to DRAW an entire battleship, its components and specifications. It's not as if they had CAD stations.
@@stevewyckoff6904 It not only took a number of hours but a corps of trained draftsmen. That was one of the problems every navy ran into after W W I. The existing experienced corps of draftsmen from the trenches.
@@stevewyckoff6904 it was an insane amount of effort. Now the ship design is a virtual solid model with meta data that shows the maintenance envelopes, power draw, part number weight.... e.t.c of each component. You can virtually walk thru the ship and operate each component. From the model, flat drawings are generated for production. The slavery of pencil and ink drawing tables required a huge staff, not much improved by 2D cad. I once spent 2 years on a drawing for one large component for CVNs
36:26!! I know the guy that painted those miniatures. His name is danAussie on the Axis and Allies War at Sea forumini. He is an amazing painter. I got him to paint my Tribal Class and V Class destroyers for me. The game is so much fun to play to. We got about every famous ship, plane and submarine in-game. The miniatures are 1/1800 for ships and submarines while planes are 1/900
I work at a Naval shipyard and there is a chance I can get in touch with our public records department and get you a large Number of photos From like pre-1950s stuff.
adam alton the technical knowledge is kind of there, we do still have some large hydraulic presses and lathes from the period, I worked with one factory which had a 30m long fun lathe and that’s even here in Australia! They used it for making wind turbine shafts, and the hydraulic forge press in the factory dated from 1908. These are the items you need. But of course you also have to remember we design things very differently, and we remedy problems differently. If something was off, the guys who built it back in the day just knew what to tweak and where, these days we engineer a permanent solution. Take the Saturn V engines, we can’t make them anymore, we lost the know how! But, we designed a newer and better engine in its place.
while we don't know too much about modern composite armour, i suppose a very rough estimate could be made like this: 70 tonne tiger 2 has ~8in effective frontal armour, 70 tonne M1 has armour roughly equivalent to 20-40in RHA. this is a 2.5-5x increase in armour protection. we also know RHA is roughly comparable to face hardened, for example the face hardened front of early panzers and RHA sides of panthers provide roughly the same protection. does this mean a modern battleship can have roughly 2x the protection of a ww2 battleship?
In the Grand Fleet v. the Home Fleet match-up, don't the Brits just keep enough ships at home that when the Germans go to sea, the Brits don't say, "oh goody, we can bag them all?" I think that we have to recognize that the Bismark was fairly lucky to have survived the initial engagement with Prince of Wales and Hood; and, even the minimal damage Bismark did suffer was enough to ultimately lead to her destruction. The Germans would be outmatched ship for ship, up and down the line, and outnumbered on top of that.
Paul Peterson well, lets think about likely fleet compositions; all of the KGV, Hood, Nelsons and Queen Elizabeth ships that have survived for this time would be present along with whatever London and Town class cruisers they can muster. The R’s and Revenge ships would probably be in the other theatres, and the RN would also have their carriers, even just a couple of Invincibles, so pretty much a one sided Roflstomp no matter which way you look at it.
" Fairly lucky" is the understatement of the year. Hood was better armed and armoured than Bismark. If she had received her planned refit and lost the torpedoes and poorly protected secondary magazines, she would have been more than a match for 'Bismark. And if Prince of Wales was fully worked up ... Well, King George V demonstrated an unquestioned ability to penetrate the conning tower of Bismark - which had the heaviest armour on the ship - at will.
If it is still possible, would like to make a request (if they aren't yet on the list), Hr.Ms. De Zeven Provinciën (1910) also known as the Dutch Potemkin and in that sense also The Kniaz Potyomkin Tavricheskiy.
Titanium armour. The Soviets built the alpha class submarine from titanium. It could dive very deep, and was designed with a liquid lead cooled nuclear reactor for very high top speed. It did have the minor issue of becoming brittle in the Baltic sea, or after soaking up significant amounts of neutrons from the poorly shielded reactor.
My Mom use to say that Atlanta, GA was a main layover airport. That so many flights had a layover in Atlanta for such a long time that jokingly people would say "You can't get to heaven without a layover in Atlanta." I remember hearing that as a child. Back in 2007 I flew to Pensacola, FL from Dulless Int near DC. And wouldn't you know it, I had a 5 hour layover in Atlanta.
38:30 you mention Admirals complaining the rules are unfair and the test invalid. In the movie the Japanese admiral has this reaction to the junior officer staging the us fleet basically where they actually were and arguing they should consider the possibility the Americans know they’re coming
1:10:30 Cunningham's quote also brings to mind the loss of Force Z, specifically something Samuel Eliot Morison wrote that has stuck with me: "Those who make the decisions in war are constantly weighing certain risks against possible gains. . . . Should [Adm. Phillips] steam into the Gulf of Siam and expose his ships to air attack from Indochina in the hope of breaking enemy communications with their landing force? He decided to take the chance. With the Royal Air Force and the British Army fighting for their lives, the Royal Navy could not be true to its tradition by remaining idly at anchor."
26:14 I think you should define what you mean by really exotic? In my opinion composite armours aren't that exotic and in some forms are even quite crude, such as fibreglass enforced face hardened rolled steel, or even something like a sandwich plate of harder to softer explosively welded(that's a thing) metals. Really exotic in my ears are something printed graphene on bricks of boron carbide or something sci-fi like that.
Were Prince of Wales and Duke of York original names when the ships were ordered? I have seen suggestion PoW was to be King Edward VIII and DoY Anson prior to the abdication but never seen a source.
You listed that Defence White Paper as one of the worst moments for the RN. I’d add when on 1 April 1918 the excellent Royal Navy Air Service, which at this time had 67,000 officers and men, 2,949 aircraft, 103 airships and 126 coastal stations, merged with the Army Royal Flying Corp to form the Royal Air Force. During the inter-war years, the RAF gave priority to strategic bombers, and then, as the war clouds loomed over Europe, to accelerating development of modern single-seat fighters, like the notable Spitfire. Carrier aircraft received lowest priority. On 24 May 1939 the Fleet Air Arm (FAA) was returned to Admiralty control. When WW II started three months later, the FAA lacked an effective single-seat fighter, had no dive bombers, and its torpedo bombers were slow obsolescent biplanes. The slow biplane torpedo bombers, flown by intrepid airmen, performed well in the early days in European waters, but only when they were unopposed by enemy aircraft.
In regards to the modern armor question: Even if we managed to get the infrastructure and quality up to standard, would it even be worth it? In the race between arms and armor, arms always win eventually.
Titanium is known for toughness, not hardness. Try buying titanium knife. Modern UK and US tanks are said to have armor equivalent to nearly three feet of homogeneous armor steel in resisting projectiles, and much more than that in resisting shaped charges.
Unrelated to Drydock, I educated my warship-loving friend tonight on the info in Drach's Mark 14 video. He is an American and was sipping his pints too slowly I thought, after explaining the mark 14 and its effect on the early war in the Pacific, he caught up.
Yeah, we can't have a Battleship these days. A battleship needs to be able to go toe-to-toe with other ships, and no ship can withstand a hit from a SS-N-19 'Shipwreck' missile and continue the fight.
oh correction on the MiG-25 IS mostly STEEL! only the leading edges and the few parts of the engine are made of Ti! the 25 was only made to go fast its gee limits are pretty low iirc like +5 -4 its not a dog-fighter its an interceptor
Another take on titanium: 1, Soviets made nuclear submarines from titanium (or titanium alloy). I think this contributed the economic collapse of the USSR. ;) 2, Last time I checked snubbies (short barrel "holdout" revolvers) were made out of titanium, to make concealed carry more comfortable, but not the barrel itself, because titanium is flexible and this obviously ruins the point of rifled barrels. This seems to make titanium less than ideal for face hardened armor - at least for the hardened part. But I am not an expert and this piece of information is over a decade old, so if someone knows better, feel free to correct me.
Another debate to add to the armour debate. Look at tank protection development. It is now looking at an active defence. Kill the incoming round before it hits the tank. A modern "Battleship" would be better protected than a WW2 counterpart but this would be because anyone who builds such a ship would have more active defences on it than a US battleship has guns (so only a few hundred). Interceptors (both Cannon and Missiles), Drones, CIWS, ERA, lasers etc all could be fitted to a Battleship. Then once you have a ship with this would you then look at the armour. Probs only have composite Citadel armour. No real belt armour would be useful. Then again modern torpedoes are rather nasty and could still crack the whole thing in half so why bother. Just build 6-10 more Destroyers. Unless... you could introduce some either soft or hard-kill torpedo defences... Guess we need more swarm drones.
In addition to light weight Titanium has another advantage over steel - it has better corrosion resistance than most, perhaps even all, Stainless Steels. Which could be pretty helpful in a salt water environment. I believe Titanium gets brittle when hardened, so for a Steel/Titanium composite you'd probably want a hardened steel face bonded to a lighter Titanium backing. Though if you're going composite, Aluminum might be a viable light weight option for the backing, and you might as well start adding ceramics as well (like the modern tank armour). Optimizing composite armour for naval scale would no doubt be a significant, and expensive, R&D effort. Bonding multiple layers of armour together is probably something we could do much better today than in WWII. We have more options for welding and adhesives that might be strong enough to do the job effectively.
I use Smugmug for my online photo portfolio. With Smugmug one can have full content management, and set up specific galleries, say for Pre-Dreadnoughts, Dreadnoughts, Cruisers, Destroyers, etc. You can establish download sharing protection for each gallery. There are other similar asset management services such as ZenFolio which is an e-commerce site. Adobe with its subscription service provide a portfolio service which includes the capability to build a portfolio web site. Then you have the option of using any of the many web site building applications to host your own photo archive. To that end TH-camr Ian McCollum at "Forgotten Weapons" with his 1.5M subscribers is engaged in a similar photo collection via his forgottenweapons.com blog.
The Med campaign, particularly in the early years, was an absolute horror story. Cunningham did a fantastic job just keeping the fleet afloat, let alone winning the fights. No thanks to the Admiralty, either.
For worst moment in the Royal Navy's history, I'm surprised you didn't select the shooting of Admiral John Byng. Made a scapegoat by the government for poor ship handling that wasn't his fault.
Most like the armor would be a composite to mimic the onld battleships. But most modern ships have much different set of requirements to adhere to. As for rail guns... yea... that's some of the good stuff. But you need to be LOS to get the most bang. Good luck trying to get THAT close to any ship.
"Transwarp drive engaged in five, four, three, two, one" and then the Excelsior makes the sound of a starship dropping the equivalent of its transmission and grinds to a halt. Grand Theft Enterprise!
Wouldn't you say the lowest point of the Royal Navy would be the Raid on the Medway, not just did the Dutch destroy 13 ships, they towed away the flagship of the English fleet, HMS Royal Charles, humiliating the English. In a more overarching look, this was at a time when England was suffering from huge amounts of debt and now someone's just burnt our navy and nicked the flagship.
Reading Pepys, gives an unmatched view of this debacle. The other side of the medal, Trafalgar, a hundred years of utter dominance of the worlds oceans, and gaining an empire to loot, with “splendid isolation” as the high point of British imperialism.
@@Graham-ce2yk So we are talking about the royal navy not the French. Also I would say describing that incident as you have is tantamount to a fairytale. The true story is more one of luck and it requires the admittance of how large east Indiaman where and the almost identical nature of merchant and war ships lines back then.
Realy interesting question and answer regarding the armour. The no longer existing infrastructure is an important point. This whole thing off course begs the question as to what armour protection modern warships DO have. As to the idea of titanium armour - the question of the price tag aside -, could you explosion-weld it to the hull? What I don't think is a good place to look for inspiration for modern ship armour is MBTs. Yes, you can armour a tank to the point where it can resist the impact of a 120mm APFSDS round. But that armour is usually restricted to the turret front and maybe the upper glacis. Everywhere else, that round will punch through. That's only a small portion of the tanks entire surface area. And that tank still clocks in at 60-70 tons. Now imagine rising the armour protection of a battleship (turrets, barbettes, belt, deck) to that level... There is off course the question of modern amunition. Shaped charges and HESH were mentioned. HESH can be defeated by the use of spaced armour. And the effect of shaped charges can be mitigated with spall liners and compartementalisation. However, there is something I wonder: I have heard/read that much of the damage caused to british ships during the falkland war by argentinian anti-ship missiles actually came from the unburnt fuel aboard those missiles starting fires, and not from the warhead. So, how about letting the armour be armour and replacing that 1-ton shaped charge warhead mentioned in the answer with say, a ton of triethylaluminium, essentially turning the anti-ship missile in an oversized M202 - and the target into a similarly oversized dutch oven? Ok, I can see one issue with this idea: Who want's several tons of that stuff sitting in their ship's magazines...
when it comes to armor...The MASS of the armor is often underappreciated. Just being heavy is a form of protection. (particularly applies to your middle ages reenactment armor) but I'd wager it applies to ships as well.
Pinned post for Q&A :)
Hi Drach, , Just a quick question: What are the best/your favorite skives invented by sailors to get out of doing real work for a bit? Presumably in the age of sail there was a lot more scope and variety but I'm sure in the age of steam there must've been a few. What punishments might be given if caught? Enjoy the channel a lot, keep up the good work.
I have a question about shimosa - the Japanese high explosive that proved so effective at Tsushima (and possibly in the Battle of the Yellow Sea). What made it so effective? Quantity of explosive? The special chemical formula? Weak French armour on Russian ships? It is my understanding it was never really used again by IJN or any other navies. Are there any reasons why it wasn't?
In last few days i came across opinion that UK's battleships after ww1 was always underguned , Nelson using light shells , KG5 had 14 inch guns, etc.
Is there any merrit to this opinion or did UK compensated for that with other things ( number of guns , shell velocity , etc ) ?
Top Ten Admirals and/or officers who were underrated and/or wrongly over looked
Favourite dreadnought class?
Drachisms of the Day
5:56 "I suppose if they want to name a support ship "HMS Beatty" I can allow that.
It might do something useful for a change."
20:08 "Yeah when splinters are scutting around the ship
that is gonna be a very bad time to be a shin."
28:46 "I mean, if your gonna spend this kind of stupid-money,
you might as well throw a couple of extra billion in there.
Um, for fun. If nothing else."
37:12 (on wargaming) "You're one side. You're the other side. These are your objectives.
Um, basically, go out and do what you would actually do, with the exception
of the whole actual 'blowing up' part."
41:43 "Admiral Tiberius asks a question that is so glorious that it really must be read in it's entirety."
(the answer includes 'congressional-grizzly-bears' and a 'very big sofa')
56:27 "Oh! OK. I see what you're doing there. Good luck. Ahhm, this should be fun to watch."
Kevin Kennelly Beatty*
I find the idea of grizzly bears and Congress in the same as most enjoyable.
@@deeznoots6241 Corrected. Thank you.
I suggest that "Beatty" be the name of a ship in the German navy, in recognition of all he did for that fighting force.
@@admiraltiberius1989 Grizzly bears locked in a room with Congress. That would be quite entertaining to watch.
Beatty: There seems to be something wrong with our bloody ships today.
Officer: Yeah, you are in command of them!
Thank you for answering my question sir, I'm glad you enjoyed my framing of my question.
And thank you for going into detail like you did when answering it.
I'd add in that I would try and get one additional battleship every odd or even year. But your answer was fantastic all around.
That question about trying to make modern armor was unexpected but really enjoyable. Its ridiculously complex but an interesting concept to look at.
Lastly, I'd say one of the Royal Navy's lowest points was the political choice to scrap the HMS Vanguard.
Edit- Admiral Cunningham had one of the best quotes ever. A subordinate was comparing fighting both the Italians and Luftwaffe as hitting your head into a brick wall. Cunningham replied with "What you don't realise you miserable undertaker is that you may be loosening a brick"
That is absolutely British and fantastic.
I heard of that quote asswell do you have source of that quote?
@@sovietdominion I wish I did, but I'll look and see what I can find
The grizzly addition to your question was sublime.
Admiral Cunningham's bare-bones signal to HMS Illustrious when she rejoined the Mediterranean Fleet the morning after Taranto was a classic example of British understatement.
"Manoeuvre well executed."
And that was it.
That Cunningham quote legitimately made me tear up. What an Admiral!
I do wonder. If one of the KGV's was named Beatty, would it have randomly exploded at first contact with an enemy?
DaniëlWW2 “Sir, we have detected the enemy on radar, 15 miles out!”
*ship completely explodes*
No ships occupied by Beatty ever blew up, only those where the Admiralty loading proceedures were ignored to increase rates of (inaccurate) fire.
Alec Blunden Which was Beatty’s responsibility. He decided rate of fire was the thing to emphasize after Dogger Bank and not safety regulations.
No, HMS Beatty would be fine, but in any battle we’re it’s a flagship half the ships under said admiral’s command will randomly explode
And to the beautiful grizzly bear idea "2020 called - we'd like to borrow your grizzly bears for a short time.".
Just one note: the Mig-25 is *not* made of titanium. It's made of steel. The soviets found that, at that time, the welds in those thin walls were constantly cracking, so nickel steel ended up being the primary material. Afaik, titanium makes up less than 10% of the aircraft.
Yes.. it's only NATO that thought it must be made of titanium... it turned out to be an unmaneuvarable... junk wagon with a very strong metal box... was good for recon though ... when it worked... and no real turns... no don't turn... arrrgggh
@@blogsblogs2348 don't forget it was designed for high-altitute, high-speed bomber intercepts; it's primary targets would have been the B-58 and B-70. Not much need for manouvering there.
@@jlvfr absolutely agree.. it's just NATO that soiled themselves... a bit like with that chinese stealth aircraft that they thought was a fighter.. but is actually a light bomber...
@@blogsblogs2348 The reality is a AA missile doesn't care if you're a bomber or a fighter. It'll just help them chose which stencil to use to mark the kill on their aircraft. It's a clone of the F35 or the F22 with the same enclosed missile racks like all stealth fighters. Form follows function son. If it looks a fighter, flies like a fighter and carries a fighter's weapons...it's a fighter. Maybe it's one of the new Chinese transformers that just identifies as a bomber?
@@readhistory2023
firstly.. not your son...
Secondly .. it's never intended to combat fighters or anything for that matter... just keep unobserved and then stick a long range AAM or more likely several into high value aerial radar platforms...
Thirdly... it's not a clone of the F35 .. it uses stolen tech but the commies wouldn't build something as rubbish as an F35
I remember reading that Adm. Cunningham quote years ago, and since it's become one of my favourite historical quotes to this day.
In regards to quotes for the ages, I know it’s not technically a “Royal Navy” quote, but I believe that this one by Winston Churchill fits quite well and sets a standard that the Royal Navy has by and large done a very good job of living up to. “In War, Resolution. In Defeat, Defiance. In Victory, Magnanimity. In Peace, Good Will.”
The need to correct the Magnetic Compass predates Iron or Steel Ships. Captain Flinders wrote a treatise on the subject and a bar of mild steel was place ahead of the Compass Binnacle known as the Flinders Bar. this was to compensate for any iron fittings including cannons fitted in the ship. With the introduction of Iron and then Steel ships more compensation was need to mainly compensate for the magnetism built into the ship during construction. The great inventor Lord Kelvin used two soft iron spheres at each side of the compass, generally known as Lord Kelvins Ball's with additional hard magnets within the Compass Binnacle. The ship when new at at regular intervals requires to be swung and the magnetic's adjusted.
In the U.S. Navy they are called the Navigator's Ball.
Navigator's Balls.
Now I'm thinking of Secret Policemen's Balls.
@CipiRipi00 You can buy a chart of the world showing magnetic variation and its rate of change.
While watching this I learned of the passing of PO1 Donald Stratton, formerly of the USS Arizona (BB-39). With his passing, there are only 2 survivors from Arizona's crew from 7 Dec 41 left. Fair winds and following seas.
To take of the Titanium discussion: its in a suitable alternative of aluminium i.r.t. weight (60% heavier), and significantly stronger. From memory titanium will be stronger than basic construction steels, but if you go into exotics hardening processes can push strength and hardness well past over titanium.
However, it should be kept in mind that modern infrastructure is mostly layed out for machine components that are more in the 50 cm to 50 cm area. Larger machine frames / structures are generally made out of welded construction steel, as it way more effective to make frames or heavier, or larger instead. Even for basic aluminium, manufacturing large frames in the order of 10 x 5 meters you end up in specialty facilities, like guys that make components for CERN LHC, ITER, etc that want to have mono-block frames to reach predictable behavior on precision level.
Also, titanium is incredibly toxic when it burns.
@@whatsoperadoc7050 titanium is one of the least toxic materials out there, including titanium oxide and most of other compounds. It also has a high melting point compared to aluminium, so will hold up fairly well in a fuel fire.
However, titanium is quite expensive to produce and machine, so a fully titanium battleship will be virtually inaffordable. Most current ships use aluminium or steel as basic construction material, with fiber reinforced plastics for armor.
Titanium is a good metal. It holds its strength at higher temperatures. Unlike steel which begins to soften as temperatures rise.But when it reaches certain temperature it will fail.Also titanium requires a oxygen free atmosphere to weld, if you were to weld it like normal steel. The titanium will absorb oxygen in the weld seam and it becomes brittle.
your better off with ceramics then Ti at that point too
Deep
My heart was swelling with pride, love, and respect at the story of Admiral Cunningham. Not the first time I heard the story. But it still affects me the same.
Given the current situation in the US Congress, visualizing locking them in a room with several hungry grizzlies brought a broad smile to my face!
And Cochrane! One of a kind, that one.
Good for on bringing up Crete. That is why you are one of a kind.
42:26 Now there is a Presidential ticket I can get behind! Grizzly/Grizzly 2020
Sweet Meteor Of Death (SMOD) 2020!
Hindsight 2020
With regards to the images, I'd suggest approaching someone at te history department of a university near you to put together a joint funding bid (with, for example, the AHRC) to construct a Digital Archive of this material. (I'd offer to sponsor/write it myself if I wasn't currently between jobs). This will allow the material to be made available for the future, stored in the custodianship of professional archivists who will be able to keep it for posterity, and keeping it available for research. The issue is that any 'free' image hosting service often claims some form of ownership over the material - and if they fold then it'll all be gone. Additionally, as J. Mussell (2012) has described regarding digitised newspaper images, If you force the images into an existing archival structure, you are 'slaved' to that metadata. For example, 'location' as a metadata field may expect the name of a place, which wouldn't work with a location off the coast.
The issue is of course that such a bid is much more involved than simply uploading the images somewhere, though if you can work with someone, they may have (grad) students available to help with the digitisation process.
Some countries have a sort of combined online archives with all important museums, libraries, galleries and archives contributing. For example trove.nla.gov.au does that for Australia and most photos, newspaper articles, etc. that they hold can be found on the one site.If the UK has something similar, it shouldn't be hard to find a library or museum that will upload Drach's photos. Alternately if he wants a dedicated website, I run a website for historical articles called australianmountains.com and I'd be happy to set up a new ultra simple to use website for Drach's pics which would allow him to upload and easily arrange galleries of photos at no charge ever, or he could do it himself for about 100 quid annually using a website builder like Squarespace, Wix or Godaddy, etc.
Support this idea, or at least, recommend you upload to multiple commercial hosts if you have to go that route. Only one has to be “pretty”, the rest are for what happens when a website inevitably shuts down. As an old Internet guy, what happened to Yahoo over the past 20 years highlights that problem. If you don’t want to go that far (in terms of establishing a collaboration with a history department or establishing an independent website), a first step might be contacting the Internet Archive - same caveats of “will they be around in 20 years” but at least they actively think of the problem as their first priority, as opposed to most places where making a buck is their first priority.
And Wikimedia Commons, under some Creative Commons License, like BY-SA-NC?
Hello drach!
I totally agree on the "modern armor"isdue with you.
I am a structural engineer (sort of) and to be honest: it is very hard to get and great amounts of sterl slabs that exceed 50 or 60mm thickness. We needed 80mm some years ago for 8 base plates of a steel tower and those had an awful long delivery time.
Not to mention the special testing that was needed as well. And I am only talking structural steel S355 here, not armor of any type.
That answer to the last question really epitomizes why I respect and support Drach. On the both sides of the question the answer is just perfect. Yes, the sinking of HMS Victoria was an absolute low for the RN as far as my understanding of history goes, and for the exact reasons he quotes, even if it is not necessarily as well known as some other incidents. As for ABC at Crete, well, I would just like to say that he is the admiral I respect the most, even more than people like Nelson.
I'd say Nelson's accomplishments at Trafalgar were more momentous, but Cunningham's comment and all that it represented was more powerful and moving than Nelson's more famous battle order.
I'm far from an expert on naval warfare, but.... It seems to me that Churchill (spelled Narcissist) tried to micromanage naval deployment. Two ships here, four ships there. Places like Singapore, Malta, Hong Kong. If you do not enough available ships for the tasks, you need to abandon some, like the US did with Philippines and Wake. It's much better to keep your battle fleets in tact, and strike only when you are strong enough. But that's Sunday night admiraling.
The Battle of Basque Roads is a naval action where the very best of the Royal Navy is shown in Cochrane's actions and the worst in Admiral Gambiers and later the Admiralty's actions.
Damn right on HMS Cunningham - said it myself many times. A Naval genius, possibly our last great Admiral. Totally deserves a ship, and a fighting one - destroyer at least.
Your reply as to the question of making armor today, is a confirmation of something I thought for a long time. It seems that the countries with the strongest militaries, (mine), go to war about once every 10 years or so. Wouldn't want those industries to sag behind.
While it’s not quite up there with the moments you discussed, I always thought the crew of the HMS Sheffield singing “Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life” while their ship was sinking was an example of how the spirit of the Royal Navy is still alive and well in the modern era.
I absolutely knew you were going to bring up Admiral Cunningham and the evacuation of Crete, and I wholeheartedly agree.
A three in one comment.
(1) The craziest capture of an enemy warship has to be the U-505. It's a submarine so you have to blow it to the surface just right or else you sink it. Then you have to swarm aboard a vessel that you know nothing about that might self destruct or simply sink at a moment's notice. And you are doing something that nobody attempt in over a century. There is no book on how to do this. It's all improvise, adapt and overcome. Oh, and then you have to escape Admiral King's wrath.
(2) Wargaming Jutland WWII style. December 9th , 1941 is an important date. If the fleet action get pushed into 1942 then you get North Carolina, maybe Washington but more important Ranger and Wasp. These two carriers may small by Pacific standards but their airwings are massive by ETO standards. That's pretty much game over for the Germans.
(3) Generals and Admirals cheat in real exercise. A good example comes from a ground force exercise. George Patton cheated his way to victory in the Great 1941 Louisana War games, an exercise that involved more forces than the US Army has today. Patton looked at the road net and saw his best approach was to leave the designated exercise area and road to "victory" in 48 hours. His justification was there are no artificial boundaries in real war.
For number 1, I think the last bit might be the most difficult (escaping Adm. King's wrath)
And considering how pissed the British were since capturing U-505 could have compromised Ultra if the Germans were a little more suspicious and a lot less complacent about Engima, this may have been the only time Adm King and the British were in agreement about anything, besides defeating Germany first.
Does your scenario 2 take into account Luftflottes 3 and 5?
@@marktuffield6519 it has been so long ago I don't remember the question.
@@johnshepherd8687 Very kind of you to reply John, I think it was a general discussion on wargaming and how the various naval services went about it. Your suggestion of the American carriers is quite intriguing, but it lead me to wonder what the Germans might have put up to oppose the US carrier air groups and ships, without even considering what the land based support from the UK might have been. Note to self, must listen to end German WW2 era ships doing a Jutland is the starting point 😁
35:40 so when you were talking about tank armour and Dorchester 2 I couldn't help imagining Chalenger 2 watching an 18" shell coming at it and thinking "Seriously?!" 😂
Re: Military wargames
Lindybeige has a pretty good video about the wargame the British used to work out convoy escort tactics in the Atlantic (title is "The wargamers who won a real war"). Apparently it involved a room-sized map, with the paths and positions of ships being marked out in different colours, and officers viewing it through colour filters so they could only see their own vessels.
He also notes that we know of at least one person who went through that training and is still alive today, and could thus supply more details: If anyone has access to Prince Charles, drop Lindy a message...
Could not agree more with you on Admiral Cunningham, he is criminally underappreciated
I second the motion of locking ALL of the United States Congress in a large room with MANY grizzly bears from 1875 to 2020. And they have to wear a mix of steak, pork, and lamb 3 piece suits. But to equal the odd's a bit? Each is given a switch (What you Brits call a "cane") for self-defense. (There's an old saying from the old west: "That's about as smart as takin' a switch to a grizzly bear")
What! That is an hour gone already? I was just getting comfy .. Thanks for all the hard work that goes into these (erm .. 'little') treasures. Great stuff.
I yield the floor to Senator Bearington. (Retreats behind improvised barricade)
Exit floor left, pursued by bear?
5:56 "I suppose if they want to name a supportship "HMS Beatty ", I can allow that, It might do something usefull for a change."
And for extra delicious irony attach it to the RN-signals school.
As for the worst and best of the RN: what is your opinion of HMS Temeraire(1798)?
Odd factual tidbit. HMS Victoria is one of the few wrecks found to be standing vertically on the sea floor with the bow embedded into the mud and the stern complete with props, rudder, railing, and flag post raised up hundreds of feet above.
Large portions of the structure of the MIG 25 were made from stainless steel alloys resulting in a plane that was quite heavy for it's size. Stainless steels have high temperature strength that is similar to titanium, but weigh twice as much.
just for discussion purposes, the majority of the US armored plate steel was manufactured in the Pittsburgh Steel plants. Many of those plants are idle and shut down for the most part. and wit the technology of penetrators used in tanks. a 5 inch gun can penetrate 18 inches of armor. Limited by the length of the penetrator so a larger platform can easily carry a larger shell.
The more of your videos I watch, the more I come to realize that Beatty was just a mad lad.
Drach, I grew up in the town where the steel component of the m1 tank armor was made even the steel is different. My brother was in melt shop when the alloy agents were added. Only 8 people in the company knew what it was.
I think that Marine Compass stand is called a "Binnacle".
Today's Spall Liners are far better. Titanium is best at resisting heat without deformation. Might be useful as a carrier flight deck material. Also, imagine plating a warship in the Chobham armor system. What's it for? Missiles with HEAT warheads, of course. What's it cost? Hehehe.
Incidentally, one can design a ship to be practically immune to gunfire. It's called a "submarine". ;-)
As for wargaming scenarios, there is also the problem where the senior officers don't like that the outcome calls into question the current doctrine. An excellent example of this is in Millennium Challenge 2002 where a retired Marine Corps general used the US Navy's reliance on high tech equipment against it, and used his Iranian red force to cripple the US Navy taskforce, sinking 16 ships in the first two days, consisting of the carrier groups carrier, 10 major supporting warships, and 5 out of 6 amphibious assault vessels. The US Navy top brass decided to restart the scenario and stack the deck in the US favour, including putting time delays and other penalties on red force, seemingly in an effort to confirm that US Navy doctrine was sound. The Marine general in charge of red force resigned and publicly criticised the decision to reset the scenario change the rules. Eventually what was learned was that if you script a war game so blue force wins, blue force wins the war game.
DERP Squad perhaps you can then explain how the General managed to mount P-15 missles on boats that were only slightly smaller than the missles themselves (19’ missle weighing 5700 pounds, 25’ fiberglass boat weighing 5200 pounds). You might also mention that many elements of the ship defenses were turned off because of computer-imposed conditions. If you are going to tell the story, tell the WHOLE story.
I don’t argue that the tactics were inventive and creative, and it does point out the assumptions that are made about technology and its abilities have real limits. But at least use realistic conditions when making the case for low-tech solutions.
In the interwar years the US Navy built a very good wargaming to fleet exercise to theoretical work feedback loop and honed itself amply. We see a lot of insight into how the USA would fight and did fight in the war based on how it learned tactics, technology and strategy from that. We might never see such honest self examination again or courageous testing of capability into the unknown.
Hi, I am really enjoying the channel! I was reading about HMS Argus (the British Carrier built-in 1918) and became curious about the bridges on Flush-Deck Carriers, and according to Wikipedia, Argus had a retractable pilot-house. Did any other Flush-Decks have a pilot house like that, and how would normal Flush Deck Bridges be arranged? Keep up the good channel.
The "practice torpedo sticking out of it's hull" incident really happened - it was a Soviet torpedo. It wasn't a Soviet submarine. They didn't know it was there, so it was doing exactly what it was supposed to be doing.
As per Midway wargaming, some accounts indicate that the Japanese judges reversed some of the results to show less losses.
The authors of Shaterd Sword called the midway wargames pretty much a farce.
@@Bird_Dog00 "Four days of scripted silliness" was one way they referred to the affair.
The Japanese were shocked at the ineffectiveness of the Midway air group.
Graff_Zitel the main issue with the US air groups at Midway was that outside of Yorktown’s air group they were all inexperienced and were attacking piecemeal which allowed the Japanese CAP to effectively deal with them. Until Yorktown and Enterprise’s dive bombers made a coordinated, mass attack by accident while the Japanese CAP was down low after mopping up the last torpedo attack.
kiloalphasierra the IJN carriers also dodged extremely well. No hits up to that point is pretty astounding.
Unfortunately Japanese reconnaissance is terrible, did them in on multiple occasions and this one also
Bacon and Egg Sandwich, coffee and The Drydock a perfect start to a very soggy British Sunday.
Going from $140 million to $1.4 billion is what happens when the US Congress decides to slightly reduce it's normal kickbacks and pork barrel spending for a year.
Being an engineer, I'm wondering how long a "5 Minute Guide" would be if Drach addressed degaussing (permanent vs. "wiping"), deperming of subs, effects on equipment such as compasses, etc.. My guess is at least 45 glorious minutes.
I think we need an engineer's sub-section. I'd like to know just how many man-hours it took just to DRAW an entire battleship, its components and specifications. It's not as if they had CAD stations.
@@stevewyckoff6904 It not only took a number of hours but a corps of trained draftsmen. That was one of the problems every navy ran into after W W I. The existing experienced corps of draftsmen from the trenches.
@@stevewyckoff6904 it was an insane amount of effort. Now the ship design is a virtual solid model with meta data that shows the maintenance envelopes, power draw, part number weight.... e.t.c of each component. You can virtually walk thru the ship and operate each component. From the model, flat drawings are generated for production. The slavery of pencil and ink drawing tables required a huge staff, not much improved by 2D cad. I once spent 2 years on a drawing for one large component for CVNs
36:26!! I know the guy that painted those miniatures. His name is danAussie on the Axis and Allies War at Sea forumini. He is an amazing painter. I got him to paint my Tribal Class and V Class destroyers for me.
The game is so much fun to play to. We got about every famous ship, plane and submarine in-game.
The miniatures are 1/1800 for ships and submarines while planes are 1/900
I work at a Naval shipyard and there is a chance I can get in touch with our public records department and get you a large Number of photos From like pre-1950s stuff.
Dang, never realized how much technology has been lost regarding armor since World War Two.
Armor along with the ability to make those big guns as well. sm
adam alton the technical knowledge is kind of there, we do still have some large hydraulic presses and lathes from the period, I worked with one factory which had a 30m long fun lathe and that’s even here in Australia! They used it for making wind turbine shafts, and the hydraulic forge press in the factory dated from 1908. These are the items you need.
But of course you also have to remember we design things very differently, and we remedy problems differently. If something was off, the guys who built it back in the day just knew what to tweak and where, these days we engineer a permanent solution. Take the Saturn V engines, we can’t make them anymore, we lost the know how! But, we designed a newer and better engine in its place.
James McKenzie true, and lest we forget this type of armor/weapons manufacturing went out of favor for a reason.
Another great episode. Can you please do a special on the Crete evacuation at some point?
Someone, somewhere is doodling the plans for a battleship made of graphene.
It sounds like Admiral Jellicoe has earned having a battleship or given today's fleet reality carrier named after him.
Thanks for the answer Drach :) - I wasn’t aware of the French ship in the expedition cheers :)
YESSSSSSSSSSS he talked about cochrane! Cochrane is my absolute favourite naval captain. a true lad!
I find myself writing out questions just to have them answered before I’m done typing them 😅😂 love this channel hat tip to you drachinifel
while we don't know too much about modern composite armour, i suppose a very rough estimate could be made like this:
70 tonne tiger 2 has ~8in effective frontal armour, 70 tonne M1 has armour roughly equivalent to 20-40in RHA. this is a 2.5-5x increase in armour protection. we also know RHA is roughly comparable to face hardened, for example the face hardened front of early panzers and RHA sides of panthers provide roughly the same protection. does this mean a modern battleship can have roughly 2x the protection of a ww2 battleship?
Battleship Beatty...oh heavens no! Does the Royal Navy have a garbage hauler it could name Beatty?
In the Grand Fleet v. the Home Fleet match-up, don't the Brits just keep enough ships at home that when the Germans go to sea, the Brits don't say, "oh goody, we can bag them all?" I think that we have to recognize that the Bismark was fairly lucky to have survived the initial engagement with Prince of Wales and Hood; and, even the minimal damage Bismark did suffer was enough to ultimately lead to her destruction. The Germans would be outmatched ship for ship, up and down the line, and outnumbered on top of that.
Paul Peterson well, lets think about likely fleet compositions; all of the KGV, Hood, Nelsons and Queen Elizabeth ships that have survived for this time would be present along with whatever London and Town class cruisers they can muster. The R’s and Revenge ships would probably be in the other theatres, and the RN would also have their carriers, even just a couple of Invincibles, so pretty much a one sided Roflstomp no matter which way you look at it.
" Fairly lucky" is the understatement of the year. Hood was better armed and armoured than Bismark. If she had received her planned refit and lost the torpedoes and poorly protected secondary magazines, she would have been more than a match for 'Bismark. And if Prince of Wales was fully worked up ... Well, King George V demonstrated an unquestioned ability to penetrate the conning tower of Bismark - which had the heaviest armour on the ship - at will.
1:14 the purpose of archive.org is to store images like yours.
Last time I was this early on a Sunday, Saburo Sakai had binocular vision.
If it is still possible, would like to make a request (if they aren't yet on the list), Hr.Ms. De Zeven Provinciën (1910) also known as the Dutch Potemkin and in that sense also The Kniaz Potyomkin Tavricheskiy.
Cleanliness before battle readiness. Was the motto of the USS Carl Vinson for awhile.
Titanium armour.
The Soviets built the alpha class submarine from titanium. It could dive very deep, and was designed with a liquid lead cooled nuclear reactor for very high top speed.
It did have the minor issue of becoming brittle in the Baltic sea, or after soaking up significant amounts of neutrons from the poorly shielded reactor.
For another interesting capture of a ship look to the surrender of a Dutch fleet to French cavalry at Den Helder.
My Mom use to say that Atlanta, GA was a main layover airport. That so many flights had a layover in Atlanta for such a long time that jokingly people would say "You can't get to heaven without a layover in Atlanta." I remember hearing that as a child. Back in 2007 I flew to Pensacola, FL from Dulless Int near DC. And wouldn't you know it, I had a 5 hour layover in Atlanta.
38:30 you mention Admirals complaining the rules are unfair and the test invalid. In the movie the Japanese admiral has this reaction to the junior officer staging the us fleet basically where they actually were and arguing they should consider the possibility the Americans know they’re coming
1:10:30 Cunningham's quote also brings to mind the loss of Force Z, specifically something Samuel Eliot Morison wrote that has stuck with me:
"Those who make the decisions in war are constantly weighing certain risks against possible gains. . . . Should [Adm. Phillips] steam into the Gulf of Siam and expose his ships to air attack from Indochina in the hope of breaking enemy communications with their landing force? He decided to take the chance. With the Royal Air Force and the British Army fighting for their lives, the Royal Navy could not be true to its tradition by remaining idly at anchor."
The last time I was this early.. I've never been this early..
The last time you where this early, I was pre-occupied.
Thanks for the prize, wasn’t sure if I said thank you earlier. I’ll check my post office on Tuesday to see if I have received it.
Perhaps naming a cemetery after Beatty would be more appropriate
26:14 I think you should define what you mean by really exotic? In my opinion composite armours aren't that exotic and in some forms are even quite crude, such as fibreglass enforced face hardened rolled steel, or even something like a sandwich plate of harder to softer explosively welded(that's a thing) metals. Really exotic in my ears are something printed graphene on bricks of boron carbide or something sci-fi like that.
Were Prince of Wales and Duke of York original names when the ships were ordered? I have seen suggestion PoW was to be King Edward VIII and DoY Anson prior to the abdication but never seen a source.
You listed that Defence White Paper as one of the worst moments for the RN. I’d add when on 1 April 1918 the excellent Royal Navy Air Service, which at this time had 67,000 officers and men, 2,949 aircraft, 103 airships and 126 coastal stations, merged with the Army Royal Flying Corp to form the Royal Air Force.
During the inter-war years, the RAF gave priority to strategic bombers, and then, as the war clouds loomed over Europe, to accelerating development of modern single-seat fighters, like the notable Spitfire. Carrier aircraft received lowest priority. On 24 May 1939 the Fleet Air Arm (FAA) was returned to Admiralty control. When WW II started three months later, the FAA lacked an effective single-seat fighter, had no dive bombers, and its torpedo bombers were slow obsolescent biplanes. The slow biplane torpedo bombers, flown by intrepid airmen, performed well in the early days in European waters, but only when they were unopposed by enemy aircraft.
In regards to the modern armor question: Even if we managed to get the infrastructure and quality up to standard, would it even be worth it? In the race between arms and armor, arms always win eventually.
Halinspark yeah it’s pointless.
Titanium is known for toughness, not hardness. Try buying titanium knife.
Modern UK and US tanks are said to have armor equivalent to nearly three feet of homogeneous armor steel in resisting projectiles, and much more than that in resisting shaped charges.
Regarding wargames and changing the rules...did you ever see "Down Periscope"? Hilarious movie and it covers that pretty well.
Unrelated to Drydock, I educated my warship-loving friend tonight on the info in Drach's Mark 14 video. He is an American and was sipping his pints too slowly I thought, after explaining the mark 14 and its effect on the early war in the Pacific, he caught up.
Yeah, we can't have a Battleship these days. A battleship needs to be able to go toe-to-toe with other ships, and no ship can withstand a hit from a SS-N-19 'Shipwreck' missile and continue the fight.
oh correction on the MiG-25 IS mostly STEEL! only the leading edges and the few parts of the engine are made of Ti! the 25 was only made to go fast its gee limits are pretty low iirc like +5 -4 its not a dog-fighter its an interceptor
Hey. Drachnifel. Imgur has a pretty decent album section. It’s also very friendly for Reddit use
Now I long for a War Gaming special.
Another take on titanium:
1, Soviets made nuclear submarines from titanium (or titanium alloy). I think this contributed the economic collapse of the USSR. ;)
2, Last time I checked snubbies (short barrel "holdout" revolvers) were made out of titanium, to make concealed carry more comfortable, but not the barrel itself, because titanium is flexible and this obviously ruins the point of rifled barrels. This seems to make titanium less than ideal for face hardened armor - at least for the hardened part. But I am not an expert and this piece of information is over a decade old, so if someone knows better, feel free to correct me.
The marine compass looks like the inspiration for the minion Stuart.
That arrangement with the compass was in use in ships until the 70s.
Another debate to add to the armour debate. Look at tank protection development. It is now looking at an active defence. Kill the incoming round before it hits the tank. A modern "Battleship" would be better protected than a WW2 counterpart but this would be because anyone who builds such a ship would have more active defences on it than a US battleship has guns (so only a few hundred). Interceptors (both Cannon and Missiles), Drones, CIWS, ERA, lasers etc all could be fitted to a Battleship. Then once you have a ship with this would you then look at the armour. Probs only have composite Citadel armour. No real belt armour would be useful. Then again modern torpedoes are rather nasty and could still crack the whole thing in half so why bother. Just build 6-10 more Destroyers. Unless... you could introduce some either soft or hard-kill torpedo defences... Guess we need more swarm drones.
I fear an HMS Beatty would be the next Kamchatka.
We could only hope.
David Beatty, a bounder.
In addition to light weight Titanium has another advantage over steel - it has better corrosion resistance than most, perhaps even all, Stainless Steels. Which could be pretty helpful in a salt water environment.
I believe Titanium gets brittle when hardened, so for a Steel/Titanium composite you'd probably want a hardened steel face bonded to a lighter Titanium backing. Though if you're going composite, Aluminum might be a viable light weight option for the backing, and you might as well start adding ceramics as well (like the modern tank armour). Optimizing composite armour for naval scale would no doubt be a significant, and expensive, R&D effort.
Bonding multiple layers of armour together is probably something we could do much better today than in WWII. We have more options for welding and adhesives that might be strong enough to do the job effectively.
Titanium is corrosion resistant to sea water in most conditions, but not all. It has been known to corrode badly when used for balls in ball valves.
I use Smugmug for my online photo portfolio. With Smugmug one can have full content management, and set up specific galleries, say for Pre-Dreadnoughts, Dreadnoughts, Cruisers, Destroyers, etc. You can establish download sharing protection for each gallery.
There are other similar asset management services such as ZenFolio which is an e-commerce site. Adobe with its subscription service provide a portfolio service which includes the capability to build a portfolio web site.
Then you have the option of using any of the many web site building applications to host your own photo archive. To that end TH-camr Ian McCollum at "Forgotten Weapons" with his 1.5M subscribers is engaged in a similar photo collection via his forgottenweapons.com blog.
I've heard that the US Naval Academy's games for the early tactics classes are extremely biased for the US side.
You are surprised?
The Med campaign, particularly in the early years, was an absolute horror story. Cunningham did a fantastic job just keeping the fleet afloat, let alone winning the fights. No thanks to the Admiralty, either.
For worst moment in the Royal Navy's history, I'm surprised you didn't select the shooting of Admiral John Byng. Made a scapegoat by the government for poor ship handling that wasn't his fault.
Most like the armor would be a composite to mimic the onld battleships. But most modern ships have much different set of requirements to adhere to.
As for rail guns... yea... that's some of the good stuff. But you need to be LOS to get the most bang. Good luck trying to get THAT close to any ship.
Listening to the story about Lord Cochrane, all I can hear in my head is James Horner's score from Star Trek III. "Space doors are closed."
"Transwarp drive engaged in five, four, three, two, one" and then the Excelsior makes the sound of a starship dropping the equivalent of its transmission and grinds to a halt. Grand Theft Enterprise!
I'd say the most ridiculous capture of a warship, or warships, would be the capture of the Dutch fleet at Den Helder.
Wouldn't you say the lowest point of the Royal Navy would be the Raid on the Medway, not just did the Dutch destroy 13 ships, they towed away the flagship of the English fleet, HMS Royal Charles, humiliating the English. In a more overarching look, this was at a time when England was suffering from huge amounts of debt and now someone's just burnt our navy and nicked the flagship.
Reading Pepys, gives an unmatched view of this debacle. The other side of the medal, Trafalgar, a hundred years of utter dominance of the worlds oceans, and gaining an empire to loot, with “splendid isolation” as the high point of British imperialism.
Actually the French managed to top that when one of their frigates surrendered to a merchant ship... en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Action_of_4_August_1800
The execution of Admiral Byng and the political machinations that led to it, has to be one of the low points.
@@Graham-ce2yk So we are talking about the royal navy not the French. Also I would say describing that incident as you have is tantamount to a fairytale. The true story is more one of luck and it requires the admittance of how large east Indiaman where and the almost identical nature of merchant and war ships lines back then.
Realy interesting question and answer regarding the armour.
The no longer existing infrastructure is an important point.
This whole thing off course begs the question as to what armour protection modern warships DO have.
As to the idea of titanium armour - the question of the price tag aside -, could you explosion-weld it to the hull?
What I don't think is a good place to look for inspiration for modern ship armour is MBTs.
Yes, you can armour a tank to the point where it can resist the impact of a 120mm APFSDS round. But that armour is usually restricted to the turret front and maybe the upper glacis. Everywhere else, that round will punch through. That's only a small portion of the tanks entire surface area. And that tank still clocks in at 60-70 tons.
Now imagine rising the armour protection of a battleship (turrets, barbettes, belt, deck) to that level...
There is off course the question of modern amunition. Shaped charges and HESH were mentioned. HESH can be defeated by the use of spaced armour. And the effect of shaped charges can be mitigated with spall liners and compartementalisation.
However, there is something I wonder: I have heard/read that much of the damage caused to british ships during the falkland war by argentinian anti-ship missiles actually came from the unburnt fuel aboard those missiles starting fires, and not from the warhead.
So, how about letting the armour be armour and replacing that 1-ton shaped charge warhead mentioned in the answer with say, a ton of triethylaluminium, essentially turning the anti-ship missile in an oversized M202 - and the target into a similarly oversized dutch oven?
Ok, I can see one issue with this idea: Who want's several tons of that stuff sitting in their ship's magazines...
The warhead of the first Exocet missile which struck USS Stark failed to detonate, but unexpended rocket fuel started a fire which burned for hours.
when it comes to armor...The MASS of the armor is often underappreciated. Just being heavy is a form of protection. (particularly applies to your middle ages reenactment armor) but I'd wager it applies to ships as well.
Have you considered Wikimedia commons for the photos?
How would you feel about an HMS Seymour?