The Japanese had the A150s, the US had the Montanas, France had the Alsaces, etc., which were all cancelled by their respective navies and rightfully so. Which of the WWII-era battleship designs that did actually get built came closest to being outright cancelled in the same way?
Many DryDocks ago someone asked “ are you looking forward to any revelations from the expiry of the 90 year rule”. What I’d like to know is, do you anticipate any Earth shattering revelations on the order of Bletchley Park and ULTRA about the period of the Second World War?
Were the Allies aware of just how bad the relations between the Japanese Army and Navy were and did they take advantage of it such as assassinating a member of the Navy and framing the Army for it to make invasions easier?
Japanese army aircraft used an upscaled browning machine gun modified into several calibers the ho-103 in 12.7mm, the ho-5 in 20mm, and the ho-155 in 30mm all on the same basic design of just scaled up or down for a caliber. If the IJN had "borrowed" this design for use as an anti aircraft weapon could it have been more effective than the type 96 25mm despite having a lower range. The browning is a known design and belt fed and fairly reliable so something based off that style of action definitely has some potential I think.
IJN: I will find a level beyond a Super Battleship. USN: So what. Like a Mega Battleship, Ultra Battleship? IJN: You're mocking me. USN: Maximum Over Battleship.
wow... you can find TFS references in the most unexpected places. Right now I wouldn't be surprised to find a pack of condoms with the phrase "I AM THE HYPE!!!"
@@liamc9998 Japanese Economy: "Put me in coach, I can still make ships." *obviously couldn't because the Yamato, Musashi and Shinano are a pain to build*
"There's one more way to kill an American battleship, but it is as intricate and precise as a well played game of chess." IJN proceeds to spray 20 inch shells across the waters of the Pacific.
*US:* Lol Japan is stupid for building battleships that they just rendered obsolete *Also US:* Let’s continue work on the Iowas (and no, the Iowas were not intended to provide AA escort roles).
@@Mr-Trox Most of that time was spent in mothballs because of their lack of usefulness and even the stuff they did weren’t really things that justified building new battleships in the 1940s for.
@@bkjeong4302 Well yes, they were incredibly useful for bombardment. There was no need to keep them active if they weren't needed for bombardment. I didn't say they were necessary, just that they served well. The Iowas were ordered in the 30s, well before the carrier proved it's worth and wartime American industry didn't require their construction stopped instead for Essexes, or to repair the BBs damaged at Pearl. Hell, the Montanas alongside two other Iowa sisters were still being built at the end of the war while churning out Fletchers and Essexes like they grew on trees and building multiple Midways at the same time. Why cancel what you can still use?
@@ssyn6626 good thing that the IJN dropped their usage of 40mm guns and their defense industry is not as good as the Allies or Germany, if not those captured British Bofors could spell disaster against Allied aircrafts.
@@paulsteaven Would depend a lot on the Japanese developing a decent director system to go along with them. The fearsome Allied AAA of the late-war was a combination of guns, directors, and the VT fuse.
@@rebeccaorman1823 Neither was Japan, since they pulled out of the treaty system to build the Yamatos and Shokakus. Which was a dumb idea since it meant the US could outbuild them by an even larger margin (though that was probably going to happen anyways), but it did make the construction legal.
It could be that Drachinifel meant that the Yamato and Super-Yamato turrets would have the same diameter at the turret ring but the Super-Yamato turrets overhung a bit more and/or had higher ceilings.
"people" 😂 Most whom use the word "obsolete", don't use it correctly. Case in point most commentary about Tanks since 1918 😅 . Dive Bombers & Torpedo Bombers were however rendered functionally redundant by WWII, as AAA advances by the allies made them useless against Capital Ships. Meanwhile, the last WWII Battleship didn't leave service until the 1990's, and was still in fleet reserve until 2011.
@@jimtaylor294 The battleship WAS strategically obsolete from WWII onwards. A battleship is a capital ship intended to seize sea control so the rest of the navy can do their job; carriers invalidated that premise because now there was a new capital ship that the battleship couldn’t attack (due to the massive range disadvantage), which no amount of defensive capability could have solved. The battleship was reduced to being a gigantic and expensive destroyer/CLAA/monitor, which is a failed investment. By your logic a main battle tank that can’t serve as a main battle tank but does work as a mobile machine gun nest isn’t useless.
@@thehandoftheking3314 Battleships just have that presence that even a Nimitz class Nuclear-powered Aircraft Carrier, or even the GRF class could even hope to match. Sure the two Carrier classes are big, but the battleship is always the one ship people will always look at.
Really. so many interesting topics. I'm even getting interested in the Age of Sail and I hadn't thought much about it other than reading about the big battles with ships of the line
So the overpressure from the 46cm guns was enough to incapacitate the ships own AA gunners, how exactly were they planning to fire a 51cm weapon and not break everything?
My brain is spinning thinking about all the mass and forces involved. All the work involved in processing raw material into a finely crafted brass handle, and you just have a handle, now make everything else from scratch.
@@Edax_Royeaux a modern ship, as large as it can be, doesn't need to worry about making massive armor plating like battleships back in the day. They made 660mm thick turret face plate for the yamato, in single piece too, that's what made it an engineering marvel. And that also seems to be the limit because they couldn't produced 780mm plate for A-150
@@greener2497 To be frank, thick armor belts were becoming obsolete in WWII. Battleships like USS South Dakota, while never having it's citadel breached, was shredded by smaller destroyer and cruiser shells that rendered her "deaf, dumb, blind, and impotent". It was more important to have an intelligent armor design that saved weight and protected against the growing threat of dive bombs.
@@Edax_Royeaux ? This has nothing to do with the fact that producing armor plating of that size were extremely complicated and battleship building process were very different from any warship type in modern day. So why the size comparison with modern supercarriers ? they are built block by block
@@greener2497 Extremely complicated plating that would be almost detrimental for the ship to have. It makes the ship heavier, more expensive and harder to repair, not to mention even dinky 5" shells would be able to penetrate the superstructure where all the critical radars, optics and fire control equipment is.
Ever since Tsushima, the Japanese were convinced that the ability to knock out an enemy with a singular, indomitably-powerful blow was the path to success.
Which everyone else was also doing because nobody figured out they were undertaking the collective worst military procurement disaster of all time (if you combine all six WWII battleship-building navies) until they’d already done it.
^ Complete nonsense. A~and nope, more than six nations had Capital Ships. Fact is, from the Tudor period until WWII the Standing Navy was the best political symbol of national power, that also gave a physical real world ability to contest world trade. The Must-Have Weapon thereof for centuries was the Battleship (different names over the years but functionally the same thing; the most expensive, best armed & protected class of ship in the fleet's Battle Line). Every country that could try to build them had to if they were to remain militarily - and thus merchantably - relevant. The French tried to flout convention in the late-1800's and got stuck in catchup mode for decades after, usually behind the relative newcomers of Germany & the USA 😆 . (even Brazil for a time had a better pair of ships than they did) Postwar the Politicians moved onto Nukes, the buckets of instant sunshine that some even claimed rendered conventional forces themselves redundant (they of course weren't), but finally lost Navies their Premier place, with the three branches of every country's military then battling for as many slices of the nuclear arms pie as possible. (Spoiler, the Army lost that race almost every time, as did most surface ships)
@@jimtaylor294Other than the six navies he's referencing, who else built a battleship after 1935? That's the point he's making, not semantics about the South American navies still having their WW1 era battleships in this period. He doesn't even have to be right for your counterargument to make no sense.
@Drachinifel you've discussed before that there's a maximum practical range of battleship main armament in that the flight time becomes long enough as to make predicting your foes evasion impossible. Does a 20"? Even gain a ship anything over an 18", especially without or with limited radar guided gun laying capabilities?
@@michaeltruett817 Which is irrelevant since the 18.1” gun could penetrate any belt (and deck, though the trajectory made this nonviable) armour ever put on a ship already.
IJN: We'll have a ship bigger than Yamato USN: And we'll have a hundred more, then another hundred behind them, and then a hundred behind them. We are legion
For everyone commenting that all battleships were obsolete at the start of the war because of aircraft, let me point out that out of 32 battleships and battlecruisers sunk in WWII, only 5 were sunk by aircraft alone while underway and able to put up a defense.
@@jeebusk On the contrary, they were designed to stand in a gunfight with other capital ships. You don't put 16" guns on something intended to be an AA platform. That the US battleships were put in that escort role was a sign of their adaptability, and the fact that there were few actions between opposing battle lines of capital ships. However, battleships were as much a threat to their opposites as aircraft. And 1 carrier was sunk by battleships without being able to put up an airborne defense.
Ya, our Battleships were so deadly to Aircraft , it was suicidal to approach them, but you only need to do a certain level of damage to be a Mission Kill?
@@F15A80 Maybe they're counting _Nevada?_ It didn't stick, and she wasn't underway the entire attack, but she did get underway before she was forced to ground herself.
A HALF TON OF POWDER??? Per gun??? That would have been 3 tons of powder used for a single broadside. Besides the fact that it would have probably needed it's own dedicated powder and shell factories, ballasting that ship with the amount of weight reduction that would have taken place with each broadside, would have been a nightmare. If memory serves, the proposed AP shell for the USN's 18 inch/47 test gun, weighed in at 3800 lbs. At a half-ton of powder for each shot, it's almost nightmarish to contemplate what the proposed 20 inch shells would have weighed - perhaps well north of 6000 lbs? I'm thinking that for once, the RN and USN were correct, when they surmised many years before, that 18 inch guns were the largest practical weapons that could be fitted on board a ship, and that past a certain size, a ship became a very expensive target, instead of an effective battle unit.
In fairness, the US and RN estimates on largest practical gun size was done on the assumption of a 35,000 to 55,000 ton ship and maybe a little bigger. Japan's study started in the 50,000 ton range and in some cases breached 100,000 tons, the RN and USN both made assumptions that ships at this scale are simply too big, too cumbersome to ever be built (It took the US till the 1970s to breach 100K tons on a warship) and thus made the assumption nobody would consider looking into bigger weapons anyways, egg before the chicken situation. If you have this level of displacement and ship beam, you can keep scaling your weapons up quite a while before it becomes truly absurd. A150 would be limited by other things long before guns, engineering is the bigger hurdle, A150 at the 100,000 ton range would need north of 300,000 horsepower to make 28 knots, more if she wanted to make 28 knots in a reasonable amount of time. The US even did the math on what the biggest practical steam plant was when powered by conventional oil boilers and hit about 310,000 to 350,000 horsepower before such a power plant is unmanageable due to square footage, propeller shaft runs, boiler feed and so on and it took decades of engineering to breach 300K horsepower with nuclear steam generation, it's in all likelihood not possible to build a ship like A-150 in the 1940s, since Japan did not even develop high pressure steam systems by the WW2 Era.
@@deepbludreams Also, that was in an era before the Military-Industrial Complex, where Congress was tight-fisted as Scrooge when it came to giving money to the military. They would have had a stroke, at the price tag for a ship large enough to have a useful battery of 18 inch guns, much less 20 inch - and then you would have had to spend money to create the infrastructure and drydocks big enough to handle such a beast.
If Space Battleship Yamato had her three sisters coming with her to become the Space Force Squadron in the 1st story arc. Then in the 2nd story arc, Yamato and her sisters are joined by two of A-150 BBs in the first half and then in second story half, two more of the A-150s joined in for the final battle😁
Well I do remember being 14 and reading about the 46 cm caliber guns on the Yamoto and thinking: "Why didn't they go just a few cm bigger to get half a meter?"
The problem is they based their whole strategy on a flawed premise, that is if you take out someone's fleet in one decisive battle that they will sue for peace. Hey, it worked once! And if you are dealing with a cash strapped Empire that only has limited forces to commit, that kind of thing can work great. Especially if you manage to tick off most of the other major powers while you are sending your fleet around the world. Unfortunately, when you are dealing with an empire that is already in the process of building a fleet that beats yours and is not even putting the majority of their industrial might into doing it, when you are pushing your industrial capabilities to build units to beat what you think they are building. In short you end up having to kill all of theirs, while not losing any of yours, or you are going to lose. I'm still convinced that Japan never thought they could win, the leadership just saw no difference to them personally if they tried and lost to not doing anything, so they might as well try.
Thank You for this very informative Video on the Super Yamato Class Battleships. This is the only written material I have ever read about the twenty inch guns. This would have been a very formidable Battleship. Thank You again.
Remarkably, _"not_ getting into a naval arms race with two separate nations, each of which has several times our industrial capacity" wasn't even seriously considered as an option after 1922 or so.
Cancelling the Anglo-Japanese naval alliance was one of the American conditions to the Washington Naval Treaty. So defending Japan required a strong navy. With hindsight, obliging Japan to build a powerful fleet was a big mistake, and contributed to WWII in the Pacific. Rather like the conditions laid down by France and the other allies in the treaty of Versailles that led to war in Europe.
@@tulliusexmisc2191 Both England and Japan were increasingly dissatisfied with their alliance even before the Washington conference. That pact was going to be broken regardless - and sooner rather than later. And of course Japan was no more "obliged" to build a powerful fleet in the interwar period than the USSR was "obliged" to occupy Eastern Europe for ~45 years after WW2. They did it to further their own imperial ambitions, not out of any necessity.
What ship was made for transporting the 20 inch guns? I know the 18.1 inch guns were transported by the Kashino (maru?). It's one of my friends relatives that participated in her sinking.
Amazing that the Wave Motion Drive was powerful enough not only to lift a 70,000 ton battleship out of Earth's gravity well, but also take it to warp. 🤓
@@samkornrumph8545 Ultimate Time Sweeper Mahoroba, with the Mahoroba being an A-150 battleship that was completed and hidden from the Americans, and before she reappears in the 21st century she refitted in a similar way to the Yamato, only she can also travel through time. And at the end of the series she does just that and disappears. The Mahoroba shows up again in the 26th century in Space Battleship Great Yamato to help the Great Yamato defend Earth against an unknown threat (why she time traveled from the 21st century to begin with), and her crew and the ship make cameos from time to time (the one appearance I know of was in Captain Harlock: Dimension Voyage, where she's part of the Gaia Fleet defending the world where humanity's best have gone to in disgust at the laziness of the rest of Earth's population).
@@lordMartiya Ok, cool! I remember reading about Mahoroba, but I thought that project never left the drawing board. I must be thinking of a specific anime he had planned. I know Matsumoto had his characters cameo in a bunch of his works.
Such information rich videos. Always a pleasure to watch and learn. Only 2 days ago, i visited Yamato Museum in Kure Japan and there was no mention of these next generation battleships. Such a shame none of these 1st generation Yamato battleships survive to this day.
Drach: can you please do a video about mathematics of trade off between higher potential damage output of larger caliber hit vs slower rate of fire/lower probability of hit per salvo due to fewer guns etc. Seems like above 15-16” it’s really no longer worth the extra costs/weight? Guess this applies to tank world as well I never understood why jagdtiger needed 128mm when the 88 or even long 75 was already easily punching through all allied armor.
Feel the Montana would have had a huge advantage in a one vs one scenario being able to fire twelve shots to the Super Yamatos 6, and at a much faster fire rate. With the scale of the 20 inch turrets components and the forces involved in rotating it even just landing a couple of 16 inch shell hits around the turrets vicinity probably would be enough to jolt machinery out of alignment and knock the turret out of action, at which point the Montana could just turn the Super Yamato into a fireball without needing to penentrate the armour.
@@WALTERBROADDUS For sure. Looking at HMS Prince of Wales bringing a quad turret into battle and then having severe mechanical issues with it. With a 20 inch gun everything is bigger, bearings, pins, motors, etc all moving metal plates that weigh hundreds of tonnes, a 16 inch shell may not make it into the turret but even hitting the surrounding area is likely to introduce enough chaos that something vital would break. At that point its just the same deal as the Bismarck. Disable all the main turrets and turn the superstructure into an inferno, even if the shells can't make it into the hull the heat eventually will.
@@crosskoyamayandaytugay3508 Going by actual available hard data and not Wargaming having to balance an arcade game, yes she could. Navweaps is a much better source than a video game, just saying.
Not a lot? If anything, this thing is even worse than the Yamatos because the Yamatos were at least good at being battleships (the problem being that being a battleship turned out to be a bad thing in WWII). The “super”-Yamato has somewhat bigger guns, which are irrelevant because the 18.1” already had more than enough penetration, at the expense of having fewer guns, which made it harder to hit things. So not only would this thing have been strategically obsolete upon commissioning like the rest of the WWII generation of battleships, it would have been a downgrade even if its intended role was viable.
The expense and size of the Yamato and Musashi were such that the Japanese were afraid to commit them to a meat grinder like the Solomons campaign. Too bad for them, they might have swung the battle for Guadalcanal in Japan’s favor. If you’ve ever read of “the night of the battleships” when Heie and Kirishima shelled Henderson Field, you will know that is the closest they came to shutting it down. America had only one aircraft carrier available for parts of this time period. A rotating force of battle wagons operating under enough air cover to attrit our few carrier aircraft, could effectively have obliterated the airfield and laid siege to American forces on the island. Just ask the French how hard it is to keep an airfield operating under artillery fire. That’s what they tried to do, and failed, at Dien Bien Phu a few years later.
@@bkjeong4302could you make the same argument for the 16" ? probably any 14 and 15" ships could take on a 16" ship, "quantity has a quantity of its own"
"Estimates that the new guns would weigh 36 to 37% more than the 18.1" guns." Wow, man... imagine having to be the guy to piece together an estimate like that. What do you have to do? Measure this, guess that... (20.1/18.1)^3 = 1.37 Oh. Well. I'm not saying that's how it was done, but it is suspiciously coincidental.
it's a much bigger gun, i've got both in 1/72 scale and the 20'' is miles larger, it's the gun wall thickness... which will be a massive increase in weight... hence only two barrels per turret.. pretty crazy stuff really..... it's the same size barrel as a 1/16 Heng long Leopard tank.
A larger mass projectile is of course good for penetration, but at 20” it will have more drag. So even with the same muzzle velocity as the Yamato, which was pretty good, the energy at impact could fall off much more quickly since cross sectional area increases by diameter squared. So either greater size and greater muzzle velocity (have fun with that barrel) or you need to lure a fast battleship into a knife fight.
Yes but also no. In fact totally no! As the diameter of the shell increases its mass increases by diameter cubed, deceleration = drag/mass. So heavier shells hold their velocity better over distance than lighter ones.
Agreed, that potential is there. However, the Yamato’s shells (best source I have) were 3300 lbs vs the Iowa Class Armor piercing were 2700. Just a 500 lb advantage. Perhaps the Yamato had a heavier shell available, but is there any record of it?
@@Why_ask_ You are comparing tangerines to oranges. Assume the new Japanese 20" shells are just larger versions of the Yamato's shells and they will have better penetration at all ranges due to more mass and higher retained velocity. This assumes the new guns can get these huge shells up to the same muzzle velocity as the old 18" ones. There was a whole lot of educated guesswork on what makes the optimum battleship shell and not a lot of actual trial and testing. The Americans went for maximum penetration and minimum bursting charge. Other navies wanted more boom!
@@brianallan2408 Sorta yes, and sorta no. There's a reason why gun lengths are given in calibers. In this case both were 45 calibers long. The gun isn't just proportionally wider, but also proportionally longer. So if the projectile is just the old one scaled up by the same amount, and the propellant charge also goes up by the same percentage in both length and calibre, they should come out at roughly the same velocity.
@@Pink.andahalf Yamato fired on more ships than USS Johnston at Samar: it’s just that her firing on CVEs resulted in straddles and near misses (which is still pretty accurate given the ranges) rather than hits, while Johnston actually took fatal damage from her (though it took her a while to go under).
All the more interesting ship design. While reading up on the Japanese steel industry at the time. I think they wouldn't have been able to build the ships at least until 1945 or later. Just being able to produce the Armour for the ships would have required have investment into there steel industry.
Thanks Drach In their quest for the BIGGEST gun the Japanese are almost going back to pre-Dreadnought number of main guns just without the large secondary guns to provide the 'hail of fire'
It's funny how despite all the claims about carriers killing battleships, we live in an era where simple destroyer(though size of modern destroyers makes that classification questionable) have complete firepower superiority even over those paper only battleships in all regards. Range, firepower, precision, amount of simultaneously sent to stone age targets. Though I'd have to give those old timers one thing, VLS full of Tomahawks doesn't look or sound as cool😅
@@mattteee2973The ones that are big enough to do that are old cold war missiles, which are huge by necessity and much less manoeuvrable, so will pretty much always be countered by CIWS, countermeasures and missile defence systems. We’re legitimately in an age where battleships could come back
@@comrade_commissar3794 No, because then people will just invent missiles capable of penetrating battleship armour while still having the massive range advantage.
I often wonder how important having larger caliber and thicker armor matters in a ship to ship battle? Let me explain. While the Yamatos have 18.1" shells and belt armor to match and can throw more and take hits better than any ship at the time, I'd image 14", 15" and 16" shells have no problem penetrating the superstructure where all the communication, fire control, and other censors reside. Take that out and you essentially make any warship blind and greatly diminishing their fighting capabilities. I'd like to get thoughts in the community as I'm no expert in naval warfare.
I've wondered the same. Particularly around the usual charge against KGVs being "undergunned." At what point does the comparable displacement of 5 KGVs with 50 barrels undermine the entire concept of the Yamato and Musashi in a gunnery duel?
In theory even destroyers can outright defeat a battleship this way (especially since the best-protected battleships, Yamato included, all had AoN armour layouts so the superstructure is mostly unarmoured), if they can get close enough without taking damage themselves.
The danger of very long range shooting was the rounds come down as plunging fire so unless your armour belt on the citadel can withstand that then yes smaller calibres could indeed penetrate. Softer areas of the ship usually had secondary and tertiary positions to replace those squishy compartments within the citadel. However normally the bigger the calibre, the longer the barrel (calibres) then longer the range. So in theory Yamato could throw shots at you and sail outside your range. Being Japanese though I could see them confidently wade in. The shorter the engagement range the lower the barrel elevation and increased RoF.
@@stevepirie8130 At those kinds of very long ranges reliable naval gunnery wasn’t viable even with the best WWII fire control systems (to the point that some battleships like the Yamatos and Iowas were effectively incapable of landing plunging fire in spite of having been designed for it, because their muzzle velocity was too high for plunging trajectories to be achieved at any reasonable combat ranges).
What you describe above is essentially what happened to Bismark in her final battle: her gunnery started off good, but rapidly declined due to critical hits outside the armor. For that matter, both Yamato and Musashi in their final battles lost speed and maneuverability due to flooding outside the armor belt, long before they were in danger of sinking. We also know from accounts of survivors of Yamato that even when hits didn't penetrate the armor physically, the shock wave was enough to do damage inside the ship. You can make a comparison with WW2 tank combat here if it helps: on a number of occasions land-based Allied 155mm howitzers (~6 inches) had to engage attacking German tanks over open sights. These guns couldn't penetrate the frontal armor of the newest German tanks. It didn't matter: at ranges close enough for the gunner to be using open sights, the shock of the shell impacting the tank at high velocity and then exploding was enough to incapacitate or even kill the crew inside. Human beings like linear thinking because it's simple and easy. For a linear thinker, if you can't penetrate the tanks front armor, you can't win a battle against that tank. In the real world, it was usually the case that the artillery units would stop the tank attack - the opposite result! For a linear thinker, 18" is better than 14" or 15" as a gun size. Armor designed to stop 16" automatically makes a ship superior to an opponent with 16" inch guns, regardless of any other considerations. And so forth. The real world is often highly non-linear, even chaotic - and that's especially true in warfare. There are lots of 20th century naval battles where hits did far more significant damage than a linear thinker would expect. This is probably the norm not the exception, so critical hits happen with a much higher probability than a linear thinker would expect. Also, people often do simple linear estimates and forget about non-linear real world considerations. For example, the fact that ships roll at sea, which has implications for things like angled armor and rate-of-fire! Or they forget about the interconnections of systems - you don't need a direct hit to take out the primary rangefinder if you damage the links to the guns, either through a direct hit or through shock damage or even shrapnel from a hit somewhere else! So folks that aren't well acquainted with the history tend to overestimate the capabilities and underestimate the vulnerabilities of ships like Yamato.
In Pearl Harbor they show that a flimsy aircraft can sink a battleship, three days later they prove they can sink one that is under way. (HMS Prince of Wales December 10th, 1941.) Its funny how Japanese naval thinking is replaying Jutland in 1941. Talk about the navy not talking to the air force.
Actually the Japanese paused work on Shinano (this was before they decided to turn her into a carrier) after Force Z for that reason. Yamato by then was already operational and about to be commissioned, so it was too late for her (though they frankly should have abandoned her and the near-complete Musashi and left them adrift for someone else to find and fail to use). Also, nobody else realized this lesson either, given that the western Allies and the Regia Marina still kept putting new battleships into service afterwards.
@@bkjeong4302 They already knew that land-based aircraft could beat up a small force of ships. That is why RN carriers were designed with Armoured flight decks, & Force Z was supposed to have a carrier with it.
@@chrissouthgate4554 The problem was that they didn’t bother to stop building battleships even after Force Z, since the actual lesson was that battleships lacked the OFFENSIVE capability airpower provides (due to more limited reach).
The reality is that once the three major navies were in a shooting war, only the US could continue with serious battleship construction along with the hulls all navies really needed: destroyers and aircraft carriers.
@@davidgifford8112 It's easy to forget the limitations of both destroyers and carriers in that age. During WW1 the Germans twice attacked Norwegian convoys successfully with surface warships. If memory serves, in one case, they wiped out the entire escort (destroyers and smaller vessels) and most of the merchant ships - in the other case one badly damaged destroyer barely managed to make it to a friendly port, but again most of the merchant ships were lost. In one these operations, they used two cruisers as the attacking force. There can be significant value to larger warships. In WW2, once again there was a need to operate convoys in the far North (for different reasons). There were 78 Arctic convoys. Many were operated in the winter when land based air was largely ineffective. This also meant that carrier based air was probably going to be ineffective (and if you deployed it, you could expect massive losses of aircraft and aircrew due to weather, much like in the Alaska campaign). Some of the WW2 Arctic convoys carried over a billion dollars of goods in today money in a single convoy - plus the value of the merchant ships and close escort and the cost of training their crews probably at least doubles that number. Had the Germans been willing to be as aggressive with their surface warships in WW2 as they had been in WW1, they could have done serious damage to those convoys - wiping out the close escort of destroyer-sized and smaller ships, and sinking most or all of the merchant ships, as they demonstrated was possible in WW1. The cruisers and battleships of the RN and USN helped ensure that didn't happen. They were used as 'distant cover', close enough to hopefully be able to intervene if large enemy warships sortied, not so close to risk the ships hitting mines or putting them in predictable locations in sub-infested waters. Given that a North Carolina class battleship runs about 1.5 billion dollars in today's money, having one of these around seems like a pretty good investment to me to protect convoys like that - a job that neither carriers nor destroyers can do against a capable opponent - and it's an even better investment if you think in terms of potential loss of life, and the strategic impact on the war of the Soviets not getting those convoys, not just simple dollar values. Given the difficulty of finding raiding ships at sea, using cruisers and battleships to protect troop convoys also made a lot of sense. Nobody wanted a raider to be able to sneak up on a convoy of troopships in bad weather, where they could potentially kill 4000-6000 people on every troop ship they sank and the carriers might not be able to launch aircraft due to the weather. If you read the wartime political correspondence between, for example, Australia and Britain, you'll see that the need for appropriate escorts for troop movements was a major concern and something they took very seriously. A little known fact: no less than four German surface raiders operated off Australia at various points during WW2. The conclusion follows that the Allied navies did need surface warships larger than destroyers - and at least some of the investment in these larger ships was wise.
I love hearing about Japanese battleships, because they basically never stopped to figure out that there is a diminishing return in going for the bigger boom. Like *yes*, an 18.1" or 20" gun is DEVASTATINGLY powerful. But they fire so much more slowly and put so much more wear on their barrels so much more quickly that guns of that size are far less practical than guns between 14" and 16", as guns in those calibers (in WW2) manage to strike a fair balance between RoF and weight of shot. Personally I like 15" guns, because my favorite warship (HMS Hood) had 15" guns.
Too bad the beautiful ship got a full expense paid trip to the bottom from a single shot from another battleship. Remember big guns requires big ship and with big ship comes a lot of armor. Armor the hood could have used to stop a German 15 inch shell made in the early 30s
With mechanical assistance the refire rate of a main battery gun is 30-60 seconds, pretty much regardless of shell weight. It doesnt really matter if you are handling half ton 12" shells, or 2 ton 20" whells, you need the same manner of industrial scale elevator hardware, which is gointlf to operate more or less at the same pace. You dont really see half ton industrial cranes move more quickly than 100 ton ones either. The real problem is exponentially higher construction cost for linearly higher performance, much greater wear, as you have alao said, and a massive concentration of resources in a few targets that arnt any less woulnerable to asymetric attack.
Those 20" guns proposed for the A150. Did they ever get a proper designation? Did they work? How good were they? Were they practical even as prototypes? Did any records survive the Japanese post-loss documents purge? If all you have is your own speculation Drach, what would their performance be? What is your best guess their salvo rate? The same as the 18.1 guns? So many questions...
I still cant see the logic in the Yamato and this design. Building a BB that can stay competitive with the next gen isnt a bad idea, but building it with the mindset to engage multible targets at once with such big guns is. Yamato had a rate of fire of around 1.5 shots per minute with only 9 guns. Even with a crapton of rangefinders Yamatos chance to get the range on 2 BBs faster then they do is much lower. On top she has a lower chance to actually hit those ships with her fewer guns+slow rate of fire(if she isnt facing Littorios). If she fights any modern BBs in a 1vs2 I cant see her coming out on top. I would even give it to Nelson and Rodney vs Yamato.
I think a recent Drydock (between 296 and 299) featured a question like this, maybe with Warspite as one of the Yamato's opponents. Yamato had REALLY accurate guns. I think Drach said the idea that Yamato could pound one treaty BB quickly while tanking rounds from a 2nd one was pretty reasonable. Nelson and Rodney are terribly slow, Yamato would dictate the range and that doesn't help those old warhorses.
Its hard to imagine an engagement, where Yamato comes out on top against 2 modern BBs. She either fully goes against 1 BBs with all guns trying to sink it fast or use the back turret against the 2. BB. Lets go with the first, where she just tanks 1 BBs. Yamato has to be lucky to get the range faster then the enemy, then needs the luck to hit the target, then needs even more luck to hit something important enough to make the ship unable to fight and then has to recognize nearly instantly, so she can switch fire to the 2. ship without loosing time. Then she has to be lucky enough that the 2. ship which already has the range and is happily shooting up Yamato didnt hit something remotely important. Even loosing range finders could be fatal, since she now has to get the new range on the 2. BB. Now again she needs to be lucky to get it quickly, be more lucky to hit and be more lucky to hit something important, while beeing lucky all this time, that the 2. BB doesnt cripple Yamato during all that. Then we have Yamatos slow rate of fire vs her high accuracy. Hard to decide if those balance out eachother, or influence her chances in a more positiv/negative way.
@@Noble713 Gunnery data declassified in the early 2000's demonstrated that the late war radar fitted to US fast battleships allowed superior accuracy compared to all other forms of spotting such as optical (studies printed in Warship International 2005-2006). For example, the 'fall of shot' capability of late war radar gave a capability to see what shells were doing when they actually reached the vicinity of the enemy - which was not that easy for the human eye to judge with a purely optical system at long ranges. It's not an accident that New Jersey straddled Nowaki at 35,700 yards in 1944. I believe the most up-to-date RN ships (newer ships or those with appropriate refits) would have similiar capabilities in the late war period, as the USN and RN cooperated closely on radar (like many other technologies) - though I don't know the details. So even though the main optical systems fitted to Yamato were huge (I think the biggest ever made) it's likely that serious opponents would be hitting Yamato at a much higher rate and at longer ranges if they were equipped with late war radar.
@@bluelemming5296 Do take a look at the NavWeaps page on the 16”/50 gun, which cites accuracy figures based on a 1944 live-fire test. It’s good, but not as good as a lot of Iowa fans claim, especially when it comes to extreme long-range accuracy-meaning the popular narrative of Allied capital ships being able to land hits from much further away thanks to radar isn’t actually borne out in testing. The actual effective range difference was insignificant (during the day; at night any sort of optical system would be massively handicapped).
@@bluelemming5296that’s is if Yamato doesn’t close the gap and enters optical range. Because all Yamato needs is to pass the over the horizon threshold and it is decently faster than the British due and with its insane maneuverability for its size and ridiculously accurate guns. I believe the British are in for quite some trouble. Yamato could take 16 inch shells as light as Nelson’s how many shells do you think Yamato needs to hit simply to disable any advantages a radar capable ship has. All it needs is one
Japan: We have finally defeated the hated 5-5-3 ratio! US: Didn't like 5-3? Let's see how you like 10:1. All kidding aside, the Yamato class really did define the ragged outer edge of battleship development. They pushed possible well past the point of practical. These ships would have been even further past the point of diminishing returns.
I can't imagine if IJN always have the budget to keep building improved Yamato design, probably they will build Space Battleship Yamato sooner than later 😅
a huge amount because it isn't the diameter, it's the circumference and increase in shell length/ mass.......20.1'' would've damaged their own superstructure........ finally like Yamato easy to sink.
@@malcolmmacdougallYamato was not easy to sink by any means. It was hardest ship to sink in the war. Withstood the most amount of damage ever inflicted on any warship in history. I would say it held up pretty well for getting straddled by 400 planes built to sink ships
@@rikk319 Bit of an extreme example, as the USN bodyslamming one Capital Ship with multiple Carriers worth of aircraft was a rather absurd example of overmatch, that only became possible in the latewar as US investment in speedbuilding of assets & pilots to replace losses, swamped a Japan that'd failed in the same as they had in utilizing combined arms. Assuming an alternative history where the IJN managed to keep fighting effectively long enough for these ships to be built, one has to assume we're in a scenario where the IJN had made better R&D decisions re' AAA and Direction hardware before the war 🤔
Interesting; it makes you wonder though if switching from 9X 18,1 inch to just 6X 20 inch would even have given more broadside weight. Chance to hit a target would also have gone down by a third.
Id love to see you do a review of the World of Warships theoretical ships in the tech tree, how well they captured incomplete or paper ships. I dont have high hopes for it lol
Nah. Torpedo Bombers were rendered functionally obsolete by WWII (against anyone with AAA & Radar Direction that worked anyway), and no Battleship underway was ever sunk by unguided bombs 😂
I think Drach argued once that using big battleships like the Yamatos for EXACTLY that purpose kinda makes some sense. It's a carrier escort that soaks up enemy aviation ordnance, tanking damage, and then just gets repeatedly repaired and sent back out to be a punching bag again. Better than losing all of your flattops like at Midway.....actually Yamato and Musashi probably took more hits than ALL four of the carriers lost at Midway (anyone wanna check me on that?).
@@Noble713 There's one massive problem there; the enemy can just ignore your powerful but harmless (because it can't fire on enemy carriers) battleship and attack your far more important carriers instead. Which was actually what both the IJN and USN tended to do before the latter lost naval airstrike capability (the Japanese because they believed the carriers had to be destroyed first before the surface engagement).
Pinned post for Q&A :)
The Japanese had the A150s, the US had the Montanas, France had the Alsaces, etc., which were all cancelled by their respective navies and rightfully so. Which of the WWII-era battleship designs that did actually get built came closest to being outright cancelled in the same way?
@@bkjeong4302 Probably Vanguard.
Many DryDocks ago someone asked “ are you looking forward to any revelations from the expiry of the 90 year rule”. What I’d like to know is, do you anticipate any Earth shattering revelations on the order of Bletchley Park and ULTRA about the period of the Second World War?
Were the Allies aware of just how bad the relations between the Japanese Army and Navy were and did they take advantage of it such as assassinating a member of the Navy and framing the Army for it to make invasions easier?
Japanese army aircraft used an upscaled browning machine gun modified into several calibers the ho-103 in 12.7mm, the ho-5 in 20mm, and the ho-155 in 30mm all on the same basic design of just scaled up or down for a caliber. If the IJN had "borrowed" this design for use as an anti aircraft weapon could it have been more effective than the type 96 25mm despite having a lower range. The browning is a known design and belt fed and fairly reliable so something based off that style of action definitely has some potential I think.
IJN: I will find a level beyond a Super Battleship.
USN: So what. Like a Mega Battleship, Ultra Battleship?
IJN: You're mocking me.
USN: Maximum Over Battleship.
Super Sayajin battleship
Amusingly the USN had previously done spring styles for Maximum battleships. Look up the Tillman battleship designs.
wow... you can find TFS references in the most unexpected places. Right now I wouldn't be surprised to find a pack of condoms with the phrase "I AM THE HYPE!!!"
@@jacobdill4499
Drach has a video on those. They make almost every other battleship design look sane in comparison.
@@arthurferreira1462Ginormous battleships
Eventually the IJN would build Giga-super mega Yamato Battleship that would fire regular size Yamato ships.
5 Quintuple mounted 50 inch guns to create stars like the US.
Yes, but those would be used only for space combat!
GO BEYOND THE IMPOSSIBLE! KICK REASON TO THE CURB!
@@AnimeSunglasses
ROW ROW FIGHT THE POWAH
@@SportyMabamba LIIIIIIIIIBERAAAAAAAH ME FROM HELL...
When in doubt, make it bigger
Because more is MORE.
Oh the poor Japanese economy…
Panther,Nien Tiger, Nien König Tiger, Nien Maus ….Ja Ratte
@@liamc9998 Japanese Economy: "Put me in coach, I can still make ships." *obviously couldn't because the Yamato, Musashi and Shinano are a pain to build*
I remember a Yamato shaped manga cartoon spaceship 😂😂😂
"There's one more way to kill an American battleship, but it is as intricate and precise as a well played game of chess." IJN proceeds to spray 20 inch shells across the waters of the Pacific.
Praise the Lord and pass the Ammunition.
All those poor fish.
@@adrianjorgensen3750 Various Whales in 1982: *same* 😅
(seriously; quite a few got torpedoed by both sides)
US Carrier Group: *(One hand racking shotgun)* OUR RESIDENTS ARE TRYING TO SLEEP!!!
I mean... that would 100% work. The problem was never that this wouldn't work. The problem is that they'd never manage to do it.
*Japan:* Our airplanes will make battleships obsolete.
*Also Japan:* Let's build a super duper big battleship.
*US:* Lol Japan is stupid for building battleships that they just rendered obsolete
*Also US:* Let’s continue work on the Iowas (and no, the Iowas were not intended to provide AA escort roles).
There was a real conflict between the old school "Battleship" naval officers in Japan and the more enlightened Naval air power officers.
@@bkjeong4302 Well I mean, America got 50 years out of the Iowas, before we finally let them retire for good.
I'd say they served damn well.
@@Mr-Trox
Most of that time was spent in mothballs because of their lack of usefulness and even the stuff they did weren’t really things that justified building new battleships in the 1940s for.
@@bkjeong4302 Well yes, they were incredibly useful for bombardment. There was no need to keep them active if they weren't needed for bombardment. I didn't say they were necessary, just that they served well.
The Iowas were ordered in the 30s, well before the carrier proved it's worth and wartime American industry didn't require their construction stopped instead for Essexes, or to repair the BBs damaged at Pearl.
Hell, the Montanas alongside two other Iowa sisters were still being built at the end of the war while churning out Fletchers and Essexes like they grew on trees and building multiple Midways at the same time.
Why cancel what you can still use?
The deck on A-150 looks so uncluttered, getting rid of those mediocre 25mm AA gun forest for 100mm DP guns is *chef's kiss* nicely done.
This thing, if built, would have changed the fight against the Gamalons.
The same goes to the Yamatos before their refits in 1944.
But I like the forest, just not 25mm make like quad or octuple 40mm bofer style guns in a forest with a a couple dozen twin 100mm.
@@ssyn6626 good thing that the IJN dropped their usage of 40mm guns and their defense industry is not as good as the Allies or Germany, if not those captured British Bofors could spell disaster against Allied aircrafts.
@@paulsteaven Would depend a lot on the Japanese developing a decent director system to go along with them. The fearsome Allied AAA of the late-war was a combination of guns, directors, and the VT fuse.
"Actually, we would like to be the only people cheating please."
Yup
Technically, the US and Britain weren't cheating. The treaty system had broken down.
I say that whenever i cheat. Im the only one aloud to do it. Yall need to stop.
@@aurorajones8481 well don't worry about me, I never cheat I'd beat myself up too much. I'll bend some but not cheat.
@@rebeccaorman1823
Neither was Japan, since they pulled out of the treaty system to build the Yamatos and Shokakus.
Which was a dumb idea since it meant the US could outbuild them by an even larger margin (though that was probably going to happen anyways), but it did make the construction legal.
"As then the barbettes could be fitted with smaller 18.1 inch turrets..."
Man, that sentence really hits hard, not gonna lie!☠
It could be that Drachinifel meant that the Yamato and Super-Yamato turrets would have the same diameter at the turret ring but the Super-Yamato turrets overhung a bit more and/or had higher ceilings.
Wobbly wobbly times whimey... stuff 😅
More! More! MORE!!!
-Japanese battleship designer, probably
"How do you like it? How do you like it?"
*ahem* Zipang *ahem*
The Andrea True Doctrine
Only in the midnight hours tho…
That's what compensating looks like.
“…the smaller triple 18.1” turret…”
I feel like they'd have been better off with 3 quintuple 15" turrets. Or 4 quadruple 15's.
@@orionstrehlow6816 four triple 16’s maybe in the Yamato
I was just laughing that triple 18’s are “smaller” 😁
@@orionstrehlow6816 Five triple 15" turrets! You know, like a much bigger and wider Mogami.
15" wing turrets 😅
the anti-dreadnought
(is that just a dread? )
@marckyle5895
Tillman 1's Sextuple Turrets: *ahem*
Man look at all that deck space for activities and 25mm morale boosters!
Morale booster, nice way to put it 😀
The type 96 had its failings but late in the war just a change to the doctrine of its use made it considerably more effective.
"In awe of the size of this lad... ABSOLUTE UNIT."
I know people call them obsolete but there's some beautiful and evocative about battleships.
Indeed sir indeed 🧐
"people" 😂
Most whom use the word "obsolete", don't use it correctly. Case in point most commentary about Tanks since 1918 😅 .
Dive Bombers & Torpedo Bombers were however rendered functionally redundant by WWII, as AAA advances by the allies made them useless against Capital Ships.
Meanwhile, the last WWII Battleship didn't leave service until the 1990's, and was still in fleet reserve until 2011.
@jimtaylor294 indeed, I was reading some lunatic prior to the Russian invasion that Artillery, trenches and tanks were all obsolete....
@@jimtaylor294
The battleship WAS strategically obsolete from WWII onwards. A battleship is a capital ship intended to seize sea control so the rest of the navy can do their job; carriers invalidated that premise because now there was a new capital ship that the battleship couldn’t attack (due to the massive range disadvantage), which no amount of defensive capability could have solved. The battleship was reduced to being a gigantic and expensive destroyer/CLAA/monitor, which is a failed investment.
By your logic a main battle tank that can’t serve as a main battle tank but does work as a mobile machine gun nest isn’t useless.
@@thehandoftheking3314 Battleships just have that presence that even a Nimitz class Nuclear-powered Aircraft Carrier, or even the GRF class could even hope to match. Sure the two Carrier classes are big, but the battleship is always the one ship people will always look at.
Half a ton of powder for EACH 20" shell?? Good Lord!! Fascinating video, Doc. Thanks for posting.
IJN designers: “ this is a Nagato. And this is a Yamato. And this, this, IS A LEVEL BEYOND!!!!”
USN designers: what are they doing?
British RN: I don't know, growing their hair maybe?
@@jcgamer892 "This is a Super Duper Yamato!!!!"
@@jcgamer892German:well say hello to Hitler dreamed battleship
H Class
Usn,Rn,Ijn:Broooooo💀💀💀
Thank you for all you give us Drach.
Really. so many interesting topics. I'm even getting interested in the Age of Sail and I hadn't thought much about it other than reading about the big battles with ships of the line
Japanese sure know how to design awesome looking battleships.
I mean just look at their space battleship
Basically Yamato hull but with bigger but 3x fewer main guns.
The US however, "give it more guns and bigger hull" mentality
Shells so big, they're nearly twice to weight of the 16" North Carolina shells. APC 4,409 lbs. vs HC Mark 14 Mod 0 - 1,900 lbs.
The late Leji Matsumoto combined the two in the Mahoroba.
A massively enlarged Yamato with no fewer than *fifteen* 51cm guns as in this class.
Presumably would have required something at least the size of a H-44 to fit that, along with all the other usual gubbings.
So the overpressure from the 46cm guns was enough to incapacitate the ships own AA gunners, how exactly were they planning to fire a 51cm weapon and not break everything?
Its just a skill issue with the 46cm guns.
Actually even cruiser-grade weapons had this issue, this is NOT a Yamato-only problem like often made out to be.
Guns are all noisy; especially the naval sort 😂
AA gunners/crew: In shielding we trust.
@@paulsteaven *the shielding gets blasted off*
Needed a Wave Motion Engine/Wave Motion Gun combo to make it truly effective.
and a bitchin sound track.
Or at least a Desslok Cannon or Magna Fame Gun.
@@michaelotoole1807the bitch’n soundtrack is the most important part
That wooshing sound when it fires.
@@michaelotoole1807 Great now I have Garmilas March playing in my head...
Japan truly outthere carrying the hopes and dreams of big gun battleship fanboys and enthusiast. The IJN really said "to go even further beyond!"
My brain is spinning thinking about all the mass and forces involved. All the work involved in processing raw material into a finely crafted brass handle, and you just have a handle, now make everything else from scratch.
The Super Yamato would still have been 30% lighter and fairly smaller than the current USS Gerald R. Ford.
@@Edax_Royeaux a modern ship, as large as it can be, doesn't need to worry about making massive armor plating like battleships back in the day. They made 660mm thick turret face plate for the yamato, in single piece too, that's what made it an engineering marvel. And that also seems to be the limit because they couldn't produced 780mm plate for A-150
@@greener2497 To be frank, thick armor belts were becoming obsolete in WWII. Battleships like USS South Dakota, while never having it's citadel breached, was shredded by smaller destroyer and cruiser shells that rendered her "deaf, dumb, blind, and impotent". It was more important to have an intelligent armor design that saved weight and protected against the growing threat of dive bombs.
@@Edax_Royeaux ? This has nothing to do with the fact that producing armor plating of that size were extremely complicated and battleship building process were very different from any warship type in modern day. So why the size comparison with modern supercarriers ? they are built block by block
@@greener2497 Extremely complicated plating that would be almost detrimental for the ship to have. It makes the ship heavier, more expensive and harder to repair, not to mention even dinky 5" shells would be able to penetrate the superstructure where all the critical radars, optics and fire control equipment is.
Thanks!
If they want to retain an ability to engage multiple targets simultaneously they're going the wrong direction here (six slow-firing huge guns).
Ever since Tsushima, the Japanese were convinced that the ability to knock out an enemy with a singular, indomitably-powerful blow was the path to success.
@@Myomer104 Kantai Kessen
It's like designing a truly magnificent crossbow to fight against rifles.
Which everyone else was also doing because nobody figured out they were undertaking the collective worst military procurement disaster of all time (if you combine all six WWII battleship-building navies) until they’d already done it.
No different than Hitlers genius with the King Tiger. Then the US trumps everyone lol Atomic Power!!!! like taking candy from a baby.
^ Complete nonsense. A~and nope, more than six nations had Capital Ships.
Fact is, from the Tudor period until WWII the Standing Navy was the best political symbol of national power, that also gave a physical real world ability to contest world trade.
The Must-Have Weapon thereof for centuries was the Battleship (different names over the years but functionally the same thing; the most expensive, best armed & protected class of ship in the fleet's Battle Line). Every country that could try to build them had to if they were to remain militarily - and thus merchantably - relevant. The French tried to flout convention in the late-1800's and got stuck in catchup mode for decades after, usually behind the relative newcomers of Germany & the USA 😆 .
(even Brazil for a time had a better pair of ships than they did)
Postwar the Politicians moved onto Nukes, the buckets of instant sunshine that some even claimed rendered conventional forces themselves redundant (they of course weren't), but finally lost Navies their Premier place, with the three branches of every country's military then battling for as many slices of the nuclear arms pie as possible.
(Spoiler, the Army lost that race almost every time, as did most surface ships)
@@bkjeong4302 You remind me of that guy who said Battleships were obsoleted by the self-propelled torpedo in 1866.
@@jimtaylor294Other than the six navies he's referencing, who else built a battleship after 1935? That's the point he's making, not semantics about the South American navies still having their WW1 era battleships in this period. He doesn't even have to be right for your counterargument to make no sense.
Man those 510mm sound in WOWS are *chef kiss* beautifully powerful
The sound used to be even more impactful on first release. It had that slight delay and everyone on the map could hear your guns.
If I recall, the 510mm sound was a glitch that the community demanded they leave in.
Ptom! P-tom! P-tom!
@Drachinifel you've discussed before that there's a maximum practical range of battleship main armament in that the flight time becomes long enough as to make predicting your foes evasion impossible. Does a 20"? Even gain a ship anything over an 18", especially without or with limited radar guided gun laying capabilities?
No, even with radar, except maybe bigger bursting charges.
You will get increased armor penetration from the bigger gun.
@@michaeltruett817
Which is irrelevant since the 18.1” gun could penetrate any belt (and deck, though the trajectory made this nonviable) armour ever put on a ship already.
Bigger is not necessarily better. You are just making it harder to handle. And slower to reload.
@@bkjeong4302 You must have missed the part where they were designing to beat the Next generation of enemy ships.
Can't wait for Space Battleship Yamato guide on april 1st 2025
Well this year is the 50th anniversary of the original series.
IJN: We'll have a ship bigger than Yamato
USN: And we'll have a hundred more, then another hundred behind them, and then a hundred behind them. We are legion
Admiral 1: "What are we going to do, we can't afford the fuel to run the Yamato."
Admiral 2: "That's easy, lets build a bigger ship!"😂😂
For everyone commenting that all battleships were obsolete at the start of the war because of aircraft, let me point out that out of 32 battleships and battlecruisers sunk in WWII, only 5 were sunk by aircraft alone while underway and able to put up a defense.
They're (mostly cruisers for speed) basically used to protect carriers because they have deckspace for AA.
@@jeebusk
On the contrary, they were designed to stand in a gunfight with other capital ships. You don't put 16" guns on something intended to be an AA platform. That the US battleships were put in that escort role was a sign of their adaptability, and the fact that there were few actions between opposing battle lines of capital ships.
However, battleships were as much a threat to their opposites as aircraft. And 1 carrier was sunk by battleships without being able to put up an airborne defense.
Ya, our Battleships were so deadly to Aircraft , it was suicidal to approach them, but you only need to do a certain level of damage to be a Mission Kill?
I'm intrigued. So that's the two Yamato Class, Prince of Wales and Repulse to make four. Which was the fifth ship on that list?
@@F15A80 Maybe they're counting _Nevada?_ It didn't stick, and she wasn't underway the entire attack, but she did get underway before she was forced to ground herself.
The misnaming of big guns is so funny. Me: Look, I'm building a new pea shooter light! Them: Hum, Looks more like Mega Badass pea shooter heavy! 😀
thats almost like the RN´s "large light cruisers". Not battlecruisers, not at all...
A HALF TON OF POWDER??? Per gun??? That would have been 3 tons of powder used for a single broadside. Besides the fact that it would have probably needed it's own dedicated powder and shell factories, ballasting that ship with the amount of weight reduction that would have taken place with each broadside, would have been a nightmare.
If memory serves, the proposed AP shell for the USN's 18 inch/47 test gun, weighed in at 3800 lbs. At a half-ton of powder for each shot, it's almost nightmarish to contemplate what the proposed 20 inch shells would have weighed - perhaps well north of 6000 lbs?
I'm thinking that for once, the RN and USN were correct, when they surmised many years before, that 18 inch guns were the largest practical weapons that could be fitted on board a ship, and that past a certain size, a ship became a very expensive target, instead of an effective battle unit.
Depends on the weight class of the AP shell. Regular size? Probably around 4500lbs. Heavy AP: 5200-5500lbs maybe. Super heavy: 6000lbs+
6 x 180 projectiles per gun +1,000 pounds of propellant for each shell equals 2,142 tonnes used in a two hour battle.
In fairness, the US and RN estimates on largest practical gun size was done on the assumption of a 35,000 to 55,000 ton ship and maybe a little bigger.
Japan's study started in the 50,000 ton range and in some cases breached 100,000 tons, the RN and USN both made assumptions that ships at this scale are simply too big, too cumbersome to ever be built (It took the US till the 1970s to breach 100K tons on a warship) and thus made the assumption nobody would consider looking into bigger weapons anyways, egg before the chicken situation.
If you have this level of displacement and ship beam, you can keep scaling your weapons up quite a while before it becomes truly absurd.
A150 would be limited by other things long before guns, engineering is the bigger hurdle, A150 at the 100,000 ton range would need north of 300,000 horsepower to make 28 knots, more if she wanted to make 28 knots in a reasonable amount of time.
The US even did the math on what the biggest practical steam plant was when powered by conventional oil boilers and hit about 310,000 to 350,000 horsepower before such a power plant is unmanageable due to square footage, propeller shaft runs, boiler feed and so on and it took decades of engineering to breach 300K horsepower with nuclear steam generation, it's in all likelihood not possible to build a ship like A-150 in the 1940s, since Japan did not even develop high pressure steam systems by the WW2 Era.
@@deepbludreams Also, that was in an era before the Military-Industrial Complex, where Congress was tight-fisted as Scrooge when it came to giving money to the military. They would have had a stroke, at the price tag for a ship large enough to have a useful battery of 18 inch guns, much less 20 inch - and then you would have had to spend money to create the infrastructure and drydocks big enough to handle such a beast.
Quick napkin math gives 4250lbs of shell weight if scaled quadratically off the 3klb 18" shell.
If Space Battleship Yamato had her three sisters coming with her to become the Space Force Squadron in the 1st story arc. Then in the 2nd story arc, Yamato and her sisters are joined by two of A-150 BBs in the first half and then in second story half, two more of the A-150s joined in for the final battle😁
I came here for the SBY references - not disappointed.
Well I do remember being 14 and reading about the 46 cm caliber guns on the Yamoto and thinking: "Why didn't they go just a few cm bigger to get half a meter?"
Japan really represent the phrace "Go BIG or go home."
Or? Why not both?
Turns out they went home, and then their home got nuked.
instead, they've opted going to hell...)
The problem is they based their whole strategy on a flawed premise, that is if you take out someone's fleet in one decisive battle that they will sue for peace. Hey, it worked once!
And if you are dealing with a cash strapped Empire that only has limited forces to commit, that kind of thing can work great. Especially if you manage to tick off most of the other major powers while you are sending your fleet around the world.
Unfortunately, when you are dealing with an empire that is already in the process of building a fleet that beats yours and is not even putting the majority of their industrial might into doing it, when you are pushing your industrial capabilities to build units to beat what you think they are building. In short you end up having to kill all of theirs, while not losing any of yours, or you are going to lose.
I'm still convinced that Japan never thought they could win, the leadership just saw no difference to them personally if they tried and lost to not doing anything, so they might as well try.
Actually it was more "Go big and CAN'T go home" because the only places with enough fuel to operate them were overseas where the oil wells were...
Thank You for this very informative Video on the Super Yamato Class Battleships. This is the only written material I have ever read
about the twenty inch guns. This would have been a very formidable Battleship. Thank You again.
Remarkably, _"not_ getting into a naval arms race with two separate nations, each of which has several times our industrial capacity" wasn't even seriously considered as an option after 1922 or so.
Cancelling the Anglo-Japanese naval alliance was one of the American conditions to the Washington Naval Treaty. So defending Japan required a strong navy.
With hindsight, obliging Japan to build a powerful fleet was a big mistake, and contributed to WWII in the Pacific. Rather like the conditions laid down by France and the other allies in the treaty of Versailles that led to war in Europe.
@@tulliusexmisc2191 Both England and Japan were increasingly dissatisfied with their alliance even before the Washington conference. That pact was going to be broken regardless - and sooner rather than later.
And of course Japan was no more "obliged" to build a powerful fleet in the interwar period than the USSR was "obliged" to occupy Eastern Europe for ~45 years after WW2. They did it to further their own imperial ambitions, not out of any necessity.
Every time you post something even remotely Yamato related, I get the "Star Blazers" theme song running through my head for the rest of the day...
6 x 20 inch guns, 1000 feet long, where have I heard that before?
IJN: We are proposing to build a battleship with 20 inch guns.
USN: That’s ok. We’re building the Midway class carriers.
IJN: Hey …… Wait a minute!
Call them what they were, 'Through deck Iowas'. /snark
@@marckyle5895are you the thundercat 😅
@@jeebusk I don't know the person you're referencing
"Concentrate all fire on that Super Star Destroyer."
What ship was made for transporting the 20 inch guns? I know the 18.1 inch guns were transported by the Kashino (maru?).
It's one of my friends relatives that participated in her sinking.
Not all the 18.1” guns were transported by Kashino; only Musashi’s were. Yamato’s guns were just built in the same facilities as her hull.
Amazing that the Wave Motion Drive was powerful enough not only to lift a 70,000 ton battleship out of Earth's gravity well, but also take it to warp. 🤓
the porcupine arrangement of Yamato's AA guns never ceases to amaze me
Leiji Matsumoto used this in one of his series
Which one? I’m not really all that familiar with Matsumoto’s works other than Space Battleship Yamato and some of the Captain Harlock stuff.
@@samkornrumph8545 Ultimate Time Sweeper Mahoroba, with the Mahoroba being an A-150 battleship that was completed and hidden from the Americans, and before she reappears in the 21st century she refitted in a similar way to the Yamato, only she can also travel through time. And at the end of the series she does just that and disappears.
The Mahoroba shows up again in the 26th century in Space Battleship Great Yamato to help the Great Yamato defend Earth against an unknown threat (why she time traveled from the 21st century to begin with), and her crew and the ship make cameos from time to time (the one appearance I know of was in Captain Harlock: Dimension Voyage, where she's part of the Gaia Fleet defending the world where humanity's best have gone to in disgust at the laziness of the rest of Earth's population).
@@lordMartiya Ok, cool! I remember reading about Mahoroba, but I thought that project never left the drawing board. I must be thinking of a specific anime he had planned. I know Matsumoto had his characters cameo in a bunch of his works.
Leaning smoke stack is a nice touch
Such information rich videos. Always a pleasure to watch and learn. Only 2 days ago, i visited Yamato Museum in Kure Japan and there was no mention of these next generation battleships. Such a shame none of these 1st generation Yamato battleships survive to this day.
Well known to the World of Warships gang as the Shikishima and Satsuma. I personally find the Satsuma design impressive
“Ha! Now we can beat any battleship
the Americans can possibly field!”
…
“Do you hear airplanes?”
"Do you see torpedo boats?" Wait, wrong war...
"Don't be silly, there are no American submarines operating in this a..." *BOOM*
Drach: can you please do a video about mathematics of trade off between higher potential damage output of larger caliber hit vs slower rate of fire/lower probability of hit per salvo due to fewer guns etc. Seems like above 15-16” it’s really no longer worth the extra costs/weight? Guess this applies to tank world as well I never understood why jagdtiger needed 128mm when the 88 or even long 75 was already easily punching through all allied armor.
Feel the Montana would have had a huge advantage in a one vs one scenario being able to fire twelve shots to the Super Yamatos 6, and at a much faster fire rate. With the scale of the 20 inch turrets components and the forces involved in rotating it even just landing a couple of 16 inch shell hits around the turrets vicinity probably would be enough to jolt machinery out of alignment and knock the turret out of action, at which point the Montana could just turn the Super Yamato into a fireball without needing to penentrate the armour.
That's a lot of, "what if?"
Frankly, even a Yamato or an Iowa could do that. A Montana is overkill.
@@WALTERBROADDUS For sure. Looking at HMS Prince of Wales bringing a quad turret into battle and then having severe mechanical issues with it. With a 20 inch gun everything is bigger, bearings, pins, motors, etc all moving metal plates that weigh hundreds of tonnes, a 16 inch shell may not make it into the turret but even hitting the surrounding area is likely to introduce enough chaos that something vital would break. At that point its just the same deal as the Bismarck. Disable all the main turrets and turn the superstructure into an inferno, even if the shells can't make it into the hull the heat eventually will.
Montana cannot penetrate Shikishima.
@@crosskoyamayandaytugay3508 Going by actual available hard data and not Wargaming having to balance an arcade game, yes she could.
Navweaps is a much better source than a video game, just saying.
What American battleship is that at 1:04? I can't quite make outthe hull number.
One of the South Dakota class, the ending number is either 7 or 9
The number is 57
USS South Dakota
😢 Good Grief. Those are nightmare ships. Just imagine what damage you can do with something like this coming down the slot of the Solomons?
Not a lot? If anything, this thing is even worse than the Yamatos because the Yamatos were at least good at being battleships (the problem being that being a battleship turned out to be a bad thing in WWII). The “super”-Yamato has somewhat bigger guns, which are irrelevant because the 18.1” already had more than enough penetration, at the expense of having fewer guns, which made it harder to hit things.
So not only would this thing have been strategically obsolete upon commissioning like the rest of the WWII generation of battleships, it would have been a downgrade even if its intended role was viable.
The expense and size of the Yamato and Musashi were such that the Japanese were afraid to commit them to a meat grinder like the Solomons campaign. Too bad for them, they might have swung the battle for Guadalcanal in Japan’s favor. If you’ve ever read of “the night of the battleships” when Heie and Kirishima shelled Henderson Field, you will know that is the closest they came to shutting it down. America had only one aircraft carrier available for parts of this time period. A rotating force of battle wagons operating under enough air cover to attrit our few carrier aircraft, could effectively have obliterated the airfield and laid siege to American forces on the island. Just ask the French how hard it is to keep an airfield operating under artillery fire. That’s what they tried to do, and failed, at Dien Bien Phu a few years later.
@@bkjeong4302could you make the same argument for the 16" ?
probably any 14 and 15" ships could take on a 16" ship,
"quantity has a quantity of its own"
@@bkjeong4302 Not to mention the theoretically slower rate of fire.
100mm dual purpose?
we need a video about that gun!
Next came the Super Super Yamato design fitted with a Wave Motion Gun.
Basically, the Blue Noah (not the submarine)
It would be nice to see this great ship on full display today?
"Estimates that the new guns would weigh 36 to 37% more than the 18.1" guns." Wow, man... imagine having to be the guy to piece together an estimate like that. What do you have to do? Measure this, guess that...
(20.1/18.1)^3 = 1.37
Oh. Well. I'm not saying that's how it was done, but it is suspiciously coincidental.
Yeah I think you are onto something there.
it's a much bigger gun, i've got both in 1/72 scale and the 20'' is miles larger, it's the gun wall thickness... which will be a massive increase in weight... hence only two barrels per turret.. pretty crazy stuff really..... it's the same size barrel as a 1/16 Heng long Leopard tank.
Were the 20" guns ever test fired? What happened to the two test guns and their test mounting after the war?
A larger mass projectile is of course good for penetration, but at 20” it will have more drag. So even with the same muzzle velocity as the Yamato, which was pretty good, the energy at impact could fall off much more quickly since cross sectional area increases by diameter squared. So either greater size and greater muzzle velocity (have fun with that barrel) or you need to lure a fast battleship into a knife fight.
Yes but also no. In fact totally no! As the diameter of the shell increases its mass increases by diameter cubed, deceleration = drag/mass. So heavier shells hold their velocity better over distance than lighter ones.
Agreed, that potential is there. However, the Yamato’s shells (best source I have) were 3300 lbs vs the Iowa Class Armor piercing were 2700. Just a 500 lb advantage. Perhaps the Yamato had a heavier shell available, but is there any record of it?
@@Why_ask_ You are comparing tangerines to oranges. Assume the new Japanese 20" shells are just larger versions of the Yamato's shells and they will have better penetration at all ranges due to more mass and higher retained velocity. This assumes the new guns can get these huge shells up to the same muzzle velocity as the old 18" ones.
There was a whole lot of educated guesswork on what makes the optimum battleship shell and not a lot of actual trial and testing. The Americans went for maximum penetration and minimum bursting charge. Other navies wanted more boom!
@@brianallan2408 Sorta yes, and sorta no. There's a reason why gun lengths are given in calibers. In this case both were 45 calibers long. The gun isn't just proportionally wider, but also proportionally longer. So if the projectile is just the old one scaled up by the same amount, and the propellant charge also goes up by the same percentage in both length and calibre, they should come out at roughly the same velocity.
@@brianallan2408 The New Yamato. Armed with 10,000 .17 HMRs. Or maybe the Ackley Bee. It isn't as good looking, but it's more fun to say.
Can you please do a video about the German O class battlecruiser and maybe other ships that were part of German Plan Z.
The US would have had to counter with Super Fletchers.
...yeah...! 😁 👍
...but there's a buzzword... 🤔
...PANAMA-CANAL...! 😱😱😱
@@Packless1The Fletchers are a destroyer class, and one of them is actually the only ship ever fired at by the Yamato. That's the joke.
@@Pink.andahalf
Yamato fired on more ships than USS Johnston at Samar: it’s just that her firing on CVEs resulted in straddles and near misses (which is still pretty accurate given the ranges) rather than hits, while Johnston actually took fatal damage from her (though it took her a while to go under).
@@Pink.andahalf ...i know...! ;-)
first time seeing one of Tzoli's drawings in a video
All the more interesting ship design. While reading up on the Japanese steel industry at the time. I think they wouldn't have been able to build the ships at least until 1945 or later. Just being able to produce the Armour for the ships would have required have investment into there steel industry.
Thanks Drach
In their quest for the BIGGEST gun the Japanese are almost going back to pre-Dreadnought number of main guns just without the large secondary guns to provide the 'hail of fire'
wing turret 18" 😅
It's funny how despite all the claims about carriers killing battleships, we live in an era where simple destroyer(though size of modern destroyers makes that classification questionable) have complete firepower superiority even over those paper only battleships in all regards. Range, firepower, precision, amount of simultaneously sent to stone age targets. Though I'd have to give those old timers one thing, VLS full of Tomahawks doesn't look or sound as cool😅
Because DDGs have the same decisive advantage carriers had over battleships; a massive range advantage over big guns.
Of all the missiles carried by modern navies, how many carry a warhead big enough to deal with this level of armour +torpedo protection?
@@mattteee2973The ones that are big enough to do that are old cold war missiles, which are huge by necessity and much less manoeuvrable, so will pretty much always be countered by CIWS, countermeasures and missile defence systems.
We’re legitimately in an age where battleships could come back
@@comrade_commissar3794
No, because then people will just invent missiles capable of penetrating battleship armour while still having the massive range advantage.
@@bkjeong4302 so you're saying that cruiser submarines made carriers obsolete?
Drach is back!
I often wonder how important having larger caliber and thicker armor matters in a ship to ship battle? Let me explain. While the Yamatos have 18.1" shells and belt armor to match and can throw more and take hits better than any ship at the time, I'd image 14", 15" and 16" shells have no problem penetrating the superstructure where all the communication, fire control, and other censors reside. Take that out and you essentially make any warship blind and greatly diminishing their fighting capabilities.
I'd like to get thoughts in the community as I'm no expert in naval warfare.
I've wondered the same. Particularly around the usual charge against KGVs being "undergunned." At what point does the comparable displacement of 5 KGVs with 50 barrels undermine the entire concept of the Yamato and Musashi in a gunnery duel?
In theory even destroyers can outright defeat a battleship this way (especially since the best-protected battleships, Yamato included, all had AoN armour layouts so the superstructure is mostly unarmoured), if they can get close enough without taking damage themselves.
The danger of very long range shooting was the rounds come down as plunging fire so unless your armour belt on the citadel can withstand that then yes smaller calibres could indeed penetrate. Softer areas of the ship usually had secondary and tertiary positions to replace those squishy compartments within the citadel.
However normally the bigger the calibre, the longer the barrel (calibres) then longer the range. So in theory Yamato could throw shots at you and sail outside your range. Being Japanese though I could see them confidently wade in. The shorter the engagement range the lower the barrel elevation and increased RoF.
@@stevepirie8130
At those kinds of very long ranges reliable naval gunnery wasn’t viable even with the best WWII fire control systems (to the point that some battleships like the Yamatos and Iowas were effectively incapable of landing plunging fire in spite of having been designed for it, because their muzzle velocity was too high for plunging trajectories to be achieved at any reasonable combat ranges).
What you describe above is essentially what happened to Bismark in her final battle: her gunnery started off good, but rapidly declined due to critical hits outside the armor.
For that matter, both Yamato and Musashi in their final battles lost speed and maneuverability due to flooding outside the armor belt, long before they were in danger of sinking. We also know from accounts of survivors of Yamato that even when hits didn't penetrate the armor physically, the shock wave was enough to do damage inside the ship.
You can make a comparison with WW2 tank combat here if it helps: on a number of occasions land-based Allied 155mm howitzers (~6 inches) had to engage attacking German tanks over open sights. These guns couldn't penetrate the frontal armor of the newest German tanks. It didn't matter: at ranges close enough for the gunner to be using open sights, the shock of the shell impacting the tank at high velocity and then exploding was enough to incapacitate or even kill the crew inside.
Human beings like linear thinking because it's simple and easy. For a linear thinker, if you can't penetrate the tanks front armor, you can't win a battle against that tank. In the real world, it was usually the case that the artillery units would stop the tank attack - the opposite result!
For a linear thinker, 18" is better than 14" or 15" as a gun size. Armor designed to stop 16" automatically makes a ship superior to an opponent with 16" inch guns, regardless of any other considerations. And so forth.
The real world is often highly non-linear, even chaotic - and that's especially true in warfare. There are lots of 20th century naval battles where hits did far more significant damage than a linear thinker would expect. This is probably the norm not the exception, so critical hits happen with a much higher probability than a linear thinker would expect.
Also, people often do simple linear estimates and forget about non-linear real world considerations. For example, the fact that ships roll at sea, which has implications for things like angled armor and rate-of-fire! Or they forget about the interconnections of systems - you don't need a direct hit to take out the primary rangefinder if you damage the links to the guns, either through a direct hit or through shock damage or even shrapnel from a hit somewhere else!
So folks that aren't well acquainted with the history tend to overestimate the capabilities and underestimate the vulnerabilities of ships like Yamato.
I'm more curious also about IJN 100mm automatic canons. They're 100mm version of pompom?
In Pearl Harbor they show that a flimsy aircraft can sink a battleship, three days later they prove they can sink one that is under way. (HMS Prince of Wales December 10th, 1941.) Its funny how Japanese naval thinking is replaying Jutland in 1941. Talk about the navy not talking to the air force.
Actually the Japanese paused work on Shinano (this was before they decided to turn her into a carrier) after Force Z for that reason. Yamato by then was already operational and about to be commissioned, so it was too late for her (though they frankly should have abandoned her and the near-complete Musashi and left them adrift for someone else to find and fail to use).
Also, nobody else realized this lesson either, given that the western Allies and the Regia Marina still kept putting new battleships into service afterwards.
@@bkjeong4302 They already knew that land-based aircraft could beat up a small force of ships. That is why RN carriers were designed with Armoured flight decks, & Force Z was supposed to have a carrier with it.
@@chrissouthgate4554
The problem was that they didn’t bother to stop building battleships even after Force Z, since the actual lesson was that battleships lacked the OFFENSIVE capability airpower provides (due to more limited reach).
The reality is that once the three major navies were in a shooting war, only the US could continue with serious battleship construction along with the hulls all navies really needed: destroyers and aircraft carriers.
@@davidgifford8112 It's easy to forget the limitations of both destroyers and carriers in that age. During WW1 the Germans twice attacked Norwegian convoys successfully with surface warships. If memory serves, in one case, they wiped out the entire escort (destroyers and smaller vessels) and most of the merchant ships - in the other case one badly damaged destroyer barely managed to make it to a friendly port, but again most of the merchant ships were lost. In one these operations, they used two cruisers as the attacking force. There can be significant value to larger warships.
In WW2, once again there was a need to operate convoys in the far North (for different reasons). There were 78 Arctic convoys. Many were operated in the winter when land based air was largely ineffective. This also meant that carrier based air was probably going to be ineffective (and if you deployed it, you could expect massive losses of aircraft and aircrew due to weather, much like in the Alaska campaign).
Some of the WW2 Arctic convoys carried over a billion dollars of goods in today money in a single convoy - plus the value of the merchant ships and close escort and the cost of training their crews probably at least doubles that number. Had the Germans been willing to be as aggressive with their surface warships in WW2 as they had been in WW1, they could have done serious damage to those convoys - wiping out the close escort of destroyer-sized and smaller ships, and sinking most or all of the merchant ships, as they demonstrated was possible in WW1. The cruisers and battleships of the RN and USN helped ensure that didn't happen. They were used as 'distant cover', close enough to hopefully be able to intervene if large enemy warships sortied, not so close to risk the ships hitting mines or putting them in predictable locations in sub-infested waters.
Given that a North Carolina class battleship runs about 1.5 billion dollars in today's money, having one of these around seems like a pretty good investment to me to protect convoys like that - a job that neither carriers nor destroyers can do against a capable opponent - and it's an even better investment if you think in terms of potential loss of life, and the strategic impact on the war of the Soviets not getting those convoys, not just simple dollar values.
Given the difficulty of finding raiding ships at sea, using cruisers and battleships to protect troop convoys also made a lot of sense. Nobody wanted a raider to be able to sneak up on a convoy of troopships in bad weather, where they could potentially kill 4000-6000 people on every troop ship they sank and the carriers might not be able to launch aircraft due to the weather. If you read the wartime political correspondence between, for example, Australia and Britain, you'll see that the need for appropriate escorts for troop movements was a major concern and something they took very seriously. A little known fact: no less than four German surface raiders operated off Australia at various points during WW2.
The conclusion follows that the Allied navies did need surface warships larger than destroyers - and at least some of the investment in these larger ships was wise.
Wasn't this in Strike Witches?
I love hearing about Japanese battleships, because they basically never stopped to figure out that there is a diminishing return in going for the bigger boom. Like *yes*, an 18.1" or 20" gun is DEVASTATINGLY powerful. But they fire so much more slowly and put so much more wear on their barrels so much more quickly that guns of that size are far less practical than guns between 14" and 16", as guns in those calibers (in WW2) manage to strike a fair balance between RoF and weight of shot. Personally I like 15" guns, because my favorite warship (HMS Hood) had 15" guns.
Too bad the beautiful ship got a full expense paid trip to the bottom from a single shot from another battleship. Remember big guns requires big ship and with big ship comes a lot of armor. Armor the hood could have used to stop a German 15 inch shell made in the early 30s
With mechanical assistance the refire rate of a main battery gun is 30-60 seconds, pretty much regardless of shell weight.
It doesnt really matter if you are handling half ton 12" shells, or 2 ton 20" whells, you need the same manner of industrial scale elevator hardware, which is gointlf to operate more or less at the same pace. You dont really see half ton industrial cranes move more quickly than 100 ton ones either.
The real problem is exponentially higher construction cost for linearly higher performance, much greater wear, as you have alao said, and a massive concentration of resources in a few targets that arnt any less woulnerable to asymetric attack.
Those 20" guns proposed for the A150. Did they ever get a proper designation? Did they work? How good were they? Were they practical even as prototypes? Did any records survive the Japanese post-loss documents purge? If all you have is your own speculation Drach, what would their performance be? What is your best guess their salvo rate? The same as the 18.1 guns? So many questions...
At some point you just need to go ahead and install the Wave Motion Gun and be done with it.
You wouldn’t even need to worry about accuracy all that much, because everything in front of the ship would be vaporized.
Since I've been playing drach catch up, whatever happened to pt3 of the development of destroyers?
Imagine if all spare resources had been been allocated instead to fast freighters, improved long range submarines, and bigger aircraft carriers...
Japan’s problem with subs was entirely doctrinal rather than design and they couldn’t have built bigger carriers anyways due to limited dock space.
Are there pictures of the 20 inch guns that were built?
Bigger is better, until it isn`t....
All ships are unsinkable, until they sink...
It has been attempted, look up Blackness Castle (Scotland) or Fort Drum (Philippines)
@@chrissouthgate4554technically not a ship
Took a long time to get to this beast of a ship
I still cant see the logic in the Yamato and this design.
Building a BB that can stay competitive with the next gen isnt a bad idea, but building it with the mindset to engage multible targets at once with such big guns is.
Yamato had a rate of fire of around 1.5 shots per minute with only 9 guns. Even with a crapton of rangefinders Yamatos chance to get the range on 2 BBs faster then they do is much lower. On top she has a lower chance to actually hit those ships with her fewer guns+slow rate of fire(if she isnt facing Littorios). If she fights any modern BBs in a 1vs2 I cant see her coming out on top.
I would even give it to Nelson and Rodney vs Yamato.
I think a recent Drydock (between 296 and 299) featured a question like this, maybe with Warspite as one of the Yamato's opponents. Yamato had REALLY accurate guns. I think Drach said the idea that Yamato could pound one treaty BB quickly while tanking rounds from a 2nd one was pretty reasonable. Nelson and Rodney are terribly slow, Yamato would dictate the range and that doesn't help those old warhorses.
Its hard to imagine an engagement, where Yamato comes out on top against 2 modern BBs. She either fully goes against 1 BBs with all guns trying to sink it fast or use the back turret against the 2. BB. Lets go with the first, where she just tanks 1 BBs. Yamato has to be lucky to get the range faster then the enemy, then needs the luck to hit the target, then needs even more luck to hit something important enough to make the ship unable to fight and then has to recognize nearly instantly, so she can switch fire to the 2. ship without loosing time. Then she has to be lucky enough that the 2. ship which already has the range and is happily shooting up Yamato didnt hit something remotely important. Even loosing range finders could be fatal, since she now has to get the new range on the 2. BB. Now again she needs to be lucky to get it quickly, be more lucky to hit and be more lucky to hit something important, while beeing lucky all this time, that the 2. BB doesnt cripple Yamato during all that. Then we have Yamatos slow rate of fire vs her high accuracy. Hard to decide if those balance out eachother, or influence her chances in a more positiv/negative way.
@@Noble713 Gunnery data declassified in the early 2000's demonstrated that the late war radar fitted to US fast battleships allowed superior accuracy compared to all other forms of spotting such as optical (studies printed in Warship International 2005-2006).
For example, the 'fall of shot' capability of late war radar gave a capability to see what shells were doing when they actually reached the vicinity of the enemy - which was not that easy for the human eye to judge with a purely optical system at long ranges.
It's not an accident that New Jersey straddled Nowaki at 35,700 yards in 1944.
I believe the most up-to-date RN ships (newer ships or those with appropriate refits) would have similiar capabilities in the late war period, as the USN and RN cooperated closely on radar (like many other technologies) - though I don't know the details.
So even though the main optical systems fitted to Yamato were huge (I think the biggest ever made) it's likely that serious opponents would be hitting Yamato at a much higher rate and at longer ranges if they were equipped with late war radar.
@@bluelemming5296
Do take a look at the NavWeaps page on the 16”/50 gun, which cites accuracy figures based on a 1944 live-fire test.
It’s good, but not as good as a lot of Iowa fans claim, especially when it comes to extreme long-range accuracy-meaning the popular narrative of Allied capital ships being able to land hits from much further away thanks to radar isn’t actually borne out in testing. The actual effective range difference was insignificant (during the day; at night any sort of optical system would be massively handicapped).
@@bluelemming5296that’s is if Yamato doesn’t close the gap and enters optical range. Because all Yamato needs is to pass the over the horizon threshold and it is decently faster than the British due and with its insane maneuverability for its size and ridiculously accurate guns. I believe the British are in for quite some trouble. Yamato could take 16 inch shells as light as Nelson’s how many shells do you think Yamato needs to hit simply to disable any advantages a radar capable ship has. All it needs is one
Oh, I had to watch this one. OMG, A-150; never knew. What a fantastic beast.
Japan: We have finally defeated the hated 5-5-3 ratio! US: Didn't like 5-3? Let's see how you like 10:1.
All kidding aside, the Yamato class really did define the ragged outer edge of battleship development. They pushed possible well past the point of practical. These ships would have been even further past the point of diminishing returns.
I can't imagine if IJN always have the budget to keep building improved Yamato design, probably they will build Space Battleship Yamato sooner than later 😅
Yayyy... finally in the first one thousand viewers
The blast pressure from 457mm was already insane, but how much of a difference could an extra 53mm make?
a huge amount because it isn't the diameter, it's the circumference and increase in shell length/ mass.......20.1'' would've damaged their own superstructure........ finally like Yamato easy to sink.
@@malcolmmacdougallYamato was not easy to sink by any means. It was hardest ship to sink in the war. Withstood the most amount of damage ever inflicted on any warship in history. I would say it held up pretty well for getting straddled by 400 planes built to sink ships
@@aviral3464 and in two attacks waves
And then when it was commissioned, a crew said, “do you see torpedo bombers?”
The other rating replies: "Nah mate; our AAA can shoot straight at last" 😂
@@jimtaylor294 "Against 300+ planes?"
@@rikk319 Bit of an extreme example, as the USN bodyslamming one Capital Ship with multiple Carriers worth of aircraft was a rather absurd example of overmatch, that only became possible in the latewar as US investment in speedbuilding of assets & pilots to replace losses, swamped a Japan that'd failed in the same as they had in utilizing combined arms.
Assuming an alternative history where the IJN managed to keep fighting effectively long enough for these ships to be built, one has to assume we're in a scenario where the IJN had made better R&D decisions re' AAA and Direction hardware before the war 🤔
Interesting; it makes you wonder though if switching from 9X 18,1 inch to just 6X 20 inch would even have given more broadside weight. Chance to hit a target would also have gone down by a third.
Bigger!
Bigger!!
@@EN_Z0 No, even *BIGGER!*
@@tremedar More Sake!
Solid!
Top KEK!
Peace be with you.
would have added more iron to the bottom of the Pacific Ocean 😢
Id love to see you do a review of the World of Warships theoretical ships in the tech tree, how well they captured incomplete or paper ships. I dont have high hopes for it lol
"The smaller 18.1 inch guns..." Yeah let's be conservative and have the 46 cm diameter shells as the reasonable fallback level.
Am I right devising that a 20 inch 45 caliber barrel would be 75 feet long?
Good luck finding ports that will handle them.
Yeah, stayin up late in Sydney, on a Saturday night, waiting for the new Drach to drop…
(‘late’ = c. 9pm)
Me too…in Sydney!🤣
Me too…in Sydney.🤣
Same lol
Here in Colorado, a new Drach video is the treat every Saturday morning!
@@comrade_commissar3794 👍
31 inch face 😮😮😮 omg that’s thick
I'm like... maybe an exfoliant would help?
The fact that the Japanese actually built some 20 inch guns is astounding!
A larger aerial torpedo and bomb magnet.
Nah. Torpedo Bombers were rendered functionally obsolete by WWII (against anyone with AAA & Radar Direction that worked anyway), and no Battleship underway was ever sunk by unguided bombs 😂
I think Drach argued once that using big battleships like the Yamatos for EXACTLY that purpose kinda makes some sense. It's a carrier escort that soaks up enemy aviation ordnance, tanking damage, and then just gets repeatedly repaired and sent back out to be a punching bag again. Better than losing all of your flattops like at Midway.....actually Yamato and Musashi probably took more hits than ALL four of the carriers lost at Midway (anyone wanna check me on that?).
@@Noble713 There's one massive problem there; the enemy can just ignore your powerful but harmless (because it can't fire on enemy carriers) battleship and attack your far more important carriers instead. Which was actually what both the IJN and USN tended to do before the latter lost naval airstrike capability (the Japanese because they believed the carriers had to be destroyed first before the surface engagement).
So how many fully equiped fleet carriers could you make instead of the Super Yamato?