Dreadnought Modernisation - A tri-wire balancing act

[Music] so just before we get started a quick thanks to brilliant.org who have agreed to sponsor this video so you might be asking drak why as someone interested in naval history should i be interested in this well as many of you know i have an engineering background and that has helped me quite considerably in my study of naval history one of the key points within engineering is unfortunately maths and one of the fields of math that is most easily manipulated and quite often very misunderstood is probability and statistics but when you're trying to work out things like just how frequently did battleship spontaneously explode or where exactly is a shell going to land within a given radius if it's fired from a set of battleship guns of a certain type in a certain layout well that's where probability and statistics really comes in handy and with brilliant.org you can learn a bit more about these things interactively there's courses at various levels for various things there's other 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through the lens of time we can see where some things went right and some things went very very wrong so with that benefit of hindsight let's consider if you happen to have for whatever reason a dreadnought maybe you've been thrown back in time to the early 1930s or something and you are planning out how to modernize your fleet what factors should you consider well for a start you have to consider whose fleet are you trying to modernize because every fleet has slightly different operational requirements now some of those may be influenced by politics and budgetary considerations and are perhaps less relevant to the material and engineering side of what is the best way to modernize a dreadnought to fulfill your navy's needs but you do have to keep that kind of thing in mind to a certain extent but for the most part we're going to be looking at the purely technical aspects of the matter now of course the big elephant in the room is why exactly are you modernizing old battleships instead of just building new ones and that pretty much as you might have guessed from that time period restricts us to looking at the inter war period because you know back in the late 19th century even the first couple decades of the 20th century if a ship had gotten too old such that it was no longer useful in the battle line then it would just be scrapped or perhaps relegated to second line duties which it could still fulfill or if you were the royal navy and it was 1900 you'd just keep literally everything you'd ever built which was a bit silly and fisher stopped but nevertheless the point was that generally speaking you didn't expect a ship that had gone obsolete to be brought back up to full fighting potential on the front lines you'd simply build a new and improved ship to replace it but in the interwar period that wasn't an option and there was a battleship holiday and that holiday had been extended and even once that holiday finished a new battleship construction started there were limits to how quickly you could build ships compared to 1900s or 1910s era industry simply because everybody's industry had suffered quite considerably through lack of business the royal navy for example was faced with a situation where circa 1910 they could quite happily lay down a class of four battleships and a battle cruiser i.e five total capital ships a year plus the shipyards in question would also be building ships for foreign customers such as chile or turkey or then the ottoman empire and those shipyards would still be screaming for more work because well they had slipways going idle then fast forward to the 1930s and it was considered that perhaps you could build two battleships a year and maybe you could stretch that to three if certain industries could be boosted now granted capital ships had got somewhat larger and somewhat more complex over the years but that was largely a matter of finance as opposed to infrastructure unless you were france where you were constantly pushing the limits of your slipway sizes with every increasing class of ship the actual physical size of most reasonable capital ships wasn't the problem the problem was the industries surrounding those ships gun manufacturer armor manufacturer the shipyards themselves had been so neglected over the interwar period there just wasn't the industrial capacity left because a lot of those businesses had either shut down or massively downsized and it's not the kind of thing that you can rebuild quickly and all of this meant that if you wanted to have a battle fleet worthy of the name by say the end of the 1930s then you were going to have to make some of your older ships a bit more combat capable otherwise you were going to end up with two three or four modern capable battleships and a bunch of floating targets so now we know why on earth we're modernizing older ships let's consider the next major factor what's your base material that you're going to start with because for most navies there are a wide range of choices but broadly this is on a sliding scale from ships that are currently the least useful to ships that are currently the most useful although this does present a bit of an interesting paradox because you obviously have a ship that is the least useful for the us that might be something like uss arkansas or 12-inch gun dreadnaught or perhaps texas in new york the last non-standard battleships for the british might be something like the revenge class for the japanese the fusos and so on and so forth now as i said these ships are the least useful in your battle line so perhaps logic would dictate that modernizing them bringing them up to some kind of capable standard would increase the power of your fleet the most but on the other hand you have the most capable ships in your battle line nelson's colorados nagatos etc and modernizing them would lead to the single greatest increase in firepower after all a small vessel relatively speaking like a new york or a fuso or a revenge can only be upgraded so far it's already inferior to other older ships so you might make it slightly superior to those older ships but it's still going to have a fairly large gulf to go before it reaches anything close to parity with the new ships you've designed whereas maybe your bigger slightly newer ships maybe they can be upgraded to a point where they're actually full-on competitive to a certain degree at least with the latest and greatest that you're building in the mid 1930s so now the logic seems well we should upgrade our latest chips but then you can turn it on its head again and say well yes if but if we do that then we're taking what are currently our most powerful ships because your newly built ships haven't yet been completed offline and thus reducing the most effective units in our fleet whilst the oldest ships the ones that are the least useful will just continue their sailing off into obsolescence to the point there's not really any real reason to keep them around and that's a relatively simple chain of logic even though it involves several twists and turns that's before you get into the precise operational requirements of each individual fleet which are going to differ for obvious reasons and finally of course you have the fact that in some navies you simply don't have even that choice for france for example you have the corbeis and the brittanyas neither of which are spectacularly competitive compared to pretty much any of the battleships that the big three have kept around the italians have the dorias and the cavaurs which similarly are not exactly world beaters by the mid 1930s the russians have the gengars which are in pretty much the same boat so depending on the navy that you're looking at you simply might not have a choice there are only so many ships available to you so you're just gonna have to modernize those and make the best you can of it and to be clear in this video we are talking about the full on modernizations aka rebuilds of dreadnoughts not so much the updates and refits that were generally done to warships throughout the 1920s and 1930s to try and keep them roughly abreast of current technology so we've taken age and overall fighting capability into account when we're making our decision as to what we're going to modernize as well as just flat out what we might have available you then have to consider the traditional dichotomy of any capital ship speed protection and firepower and each of these has to be considered in terms of how it stacks up with what your navy needs in the mid 1930s as well as the aforementioned age issues now it's interesting when you look at the three big navies which are the ones we're primarily going to focus on although we will also be looking at the italians for a bit and not so much the russians or the germans because their modernizations and refits were so bound up either by treaty restrictions or extremely active interference by politics that they are more analysis of that particular paradigm rather than anything to do with engineering tactics or common sense but going back to the big three navies japan looked at its pre-existing capital ship fleet made up of fuso's isseis nagatos and congos and found that whilst they had reconstructed the fuses and he says to an extent in the late 20s and early 30s the priority was going to be the congos and nagatos this was because in a world of 35 000 ton battleships motoring around at 28 knots with at least 14-inch main armament as standard the congos and the nagatos were the only ones that offered a realistic prospect of being modernized to something approaching a competitive level the congos were already fast enough they in theory had the right size guns even if not quite as many so there was something to be made of them and the nagatos whilst a fraction slower did have a reasonable degree of protection at least by some standards but more importantly they had 16-inch main guns which gave them the firepower to compete with newer battleships the main problem with the fusos and essays wasn't so much the armament although their protection wasn't fantastic by the time of the mid-1930s it was simply that they were so much slower that any kind of modernization would struggle to bring them up to a useful combat speed as we'll see later when we consider balances in the us navy they had slightly less variety than the japanese did inasmuch as the majority of the fleet was made up of the standard type of battleship now for the us they had already concluded that they were going to be replacing their older ships with the new north carolina and then south dakota classes then under construction and so the oldest ships arkansas new york class nevada class etc were not slated for any kind of modernization they would serve until their replacements came online and that was pretty much that but they did have what were called the big five the tennessees and colorado's which were actually very very similar ships even by simple visuals appearance but also in terms of overall design the main difference being that one had 12 14-inch guns in four triple turrets and the other had eight 16-inch guns in four twin turrets even though the us navy would have preferred them all to have eight 16-inch guns in four twin turrets but the secretary of the navy at the time of their construction had stopped them from doing so nevertheless the us fleet at the time had a standard fleet speed of 21 knots so there wasn't any choice to make in terms of was this ship faster than another and so it just came down to a simple selection of firepower the armor was mostly the same for all of them so the tennessees and the colorado's the big five were the obvious choices for modernization because they had the best armament they were the newest they had the most potential and everything else would just be replaced in british order the british on the other hand had perhaps the biggest conundrum they had a split of our moon like everybody else did between 15 and 16 inch gun armed ships but they had a lot of difference in performance between the various classes they had the revenge class which like a lot of the fleet had eight 15-inch guns but they were the smallest and the slowest of all of the british capital ships you then had the queen elizabeth class which had the same guns but were a bit faster their armor scheme was not quite as well laid out as the revenge class which had actually been the immediate successors but overall their slightly increased size and definitely their somewhat higher speed were deciding factors in prioritizing them above the revenge class you then had the three battlecruisers two renowns and hood the renowns had somewhat less protection than hud did and two less guns and were somewhat older but at the same time hood was the third most modern capital ship in the royal navy fleet and it was a big status symbol it was seen as quite important and it was generally thought that maybe hood could hold its own for a few more years thus the renowned class also went on the list as possible modernization candidates and then lastly you had the nelson class which kind of sat at a midway point the battle cruisers obviously being very fast the queen liza's being somewhat fast the revenge is being slow and the nelson's as battleships sitting between the queen elizabeth and the revenges in terms of speed they were the best protected and in theory had the heaviest armament with nine 16-inch guns but like hood they were considered relatively modern and therefore the most combat capable and thus it was decided that they would be modernized somewhat later thus the royal navy decided to start modernizations with the queen elizabeth class and the renowned class if nothing else intervened which of course historically it did they would continue with hood and the nelsons but the revenges would be discarded as the king george v and lions came online and the italians were the most boxed in they had the android dorias and the conte de cavore class so if they wanted to modernize ships those were their only choices take or leave what you might have detected in the navies at least that had a choice in the matter are you the japanese and the british is that speed was a significant concern it's fairly obvious why modern battleships were going to be going at least 28 knots so if you were going to go through the trouble of modernizing an old capital ship to keep up with them well then you should either make that ship as fast faster or at least somewhat close to the speed of the new ships that they'd be operating with there were also aircraft carriers to consider if you were going to escort them you would need to be moving at a fair old clip because well the carriers did where speed wasn't an option then firepower became the priority because you know bigger newer ships with more armor and heavier guns would need the biggest guns you could have to counter them but overall armor protection at least in terms of the choice of the ship that you're taking in for modernization doesn't appear to have had that much of an influence on things otherwise things like the congos and the renowns certainly wouldn't have been top of the list so now you have a rough idea how historically everybody looked at things let's look at what you can actually do with a mid-1930s dreadnought modernization assuming that you've got 1910's 1910s early 1920s stock to work with well in terms of speed the efficiency and pressures of steam plants for powering your turbines have advanced so you can replace the machinery this is probably a good idea generally anyway as ship-borne machinery tends to have approximately a 20-year service lifespan somewhat shortened if it's put to wartime use for extended periods obviously and somewhat lengthened if the ship spends some time in reserves not doing anything but by the mid-1930s pretty much all the ships that you might consider for modernization will likely either be in desperate need of machinery modernization and replacement or they'll be coming up to it anyway this was a problem that would dog hood because she had been launched at the very end of the 1910s commissioned in the very very early part of the 1920s and so by 1940-41 her machinery was pretty much on its last legs so what does this mean well it means that if you wish to replace the machinery but keep the same speed for the ship assuming you haven't changed the dimensions or displacement or hydrodynamics of the ship all that much which is something we'll come to a bit later you can get the same amount of horsepower using much less machinery so you will have a lot of spare space and less machinery also means less weight so you're saving displacement for other things alternatively you could replace the machinery alike for like using the same amount of weight the same amount of volume only of course using much more powerful more modern machinery you could make your ship go a lot lot faster or you could strike a balance in between maybe getting a small speed boost in exchange for not saving quite as much volume and weight but still saving some now there are a few other factors that might affect your overall ability to increase speed the length to beam ratio of the ship is a very crude one the italians for example would add bow extensions to their ship modernizations in order to provide for an increased level of speed hydrodynamics is another obviously adding a bow extension will also affect the overall hydrodynamic profile of the ship underwater but you've also got verging on the protection issue the issue of torpedo defenses older ships don't really have that much of the way of torpedo defense against modern 1930s world war ii era torpedoes so in some cases you might want to either alter or upgrade or add to the existing defenses usually this is done in the form of bulges which of course affect your underwater profile and so you might end up having to increase the overall horsepower output of your machinery plant just to remain at the same speed if you've made the ship wide underwater by adding bulges for example so you might not get all the weight and volume savings that you might want if you are determined to just keep at roughly the same speed as before and of course with that saved weight and saved volume you can use those areas for other things the weight for example could go on additional protection or firepower the volume could go on supplying that additional protection firepower or indeed improving your insurance which ties into speed because you could convert that spare space in to fuel bunkers into magazines into other forms of storage or whatever else you might choose to do but precisely which choice you make when it comes to the overall speed and therefore the amount of machinery you're going to be putting into your modernized ship largely depends on what you want to do with that ship for example a battleship if it's capable of something approaching an acceptable speed like say 25 knots in the case of the queen elizabeth's you might want to just maintain that speed if your ship is so slow that any increase in speed isn't really going to help its cause that much like say a colorado class well then you have two choices you can either take the italian approach of radically redesigning and rebuilding the entire ship's hull and upgrading the machinery in which case you might very well get a fairly respectable speed out of it such as the italians did succeed in doing turning their 21-ish not ships into 27-ish not ships but that's an awful lot of time and expense where you might actually want to put that time and expense into other things so it's a choice that you have to make the other one of course is ships that are already relatively quick like the renowns or the congos if it's fast enough to do what you want whether that's keep up with carriers keep up with cruisers etc then you probably just want to maintain that maybe around a knot or two up a bit whereas if you're in a slightly awkward position such as say the congos which were approximately capable by the 1930s of keeping up with existing fast battleship designs that were under construction but obviously have the disadvantage of being battle cruisers is perhaps understandable that you might want to amp the speed up just on that basis let alone if you want to operate it with carrier groups but exactly how far you take it will depend on the balance of the other two factors protection is the next one now with protection you have three main elements to consider you have the ship's belt armor protection against incoming shells you have the ships dec armor which is protection against incoming plunging shell fire but to be honest by the mid to late 1930s you're probably thinking more in terms of protection against bombs which will incidentally hopefully also protect you against shells and then you have your underwater protection against torpedoes now we've already discussed torpedo defense systems to a certain degree but due to their potential effect on speed but it is a fairly important thing to consider because oddly enough adding torpedo defense systems in the form of bulges will increase your displacement overall because you're adding weight to the ship but might actually cause your ship to ride slightly higher in the water because of course all of this is underwater and hopefully sealed apart from the liquid-filled sections and thus the buoyancy of the ship and its water line might actually go up unless you add weight that correspondingly forces the ship further down but you know that's your choice the one thing i definitely wouldn't advise is not doing anything with your torpedo defense system because the odds of being hit by a torpedo in the late 1930s in any theoretical conflict are significantly higher than the chances of being hit by a torpedo in world war one so you do need some extra protection against that especially considering that torpedoes have become significantly more dangerous in terms of their explosive payload as well as things like range and frequency now as already mentioned you could do this by simply adding bulges to enhance the existing torpedo defense systems or you could take the italian approach of developing an entirely new torpedo defense system and ripping out the old one and installing the new one now at some point you begin to cross the line from modernization to complete rebuild but ship of theseus arguments aside staying just this side of you know physically rebuilding the entire ship it is just about possible to do but you also have to consider that within the confines of the ships you're working with bearing in mind that they are going to be for the most part at least somewhat smaller than a modern 35 000 ton capital ship there is only a limited amount of volume that you can occupy with a torpedo defense system and volume and depth are really the single biggest factors when it comes to torpedo defense as experience even by that point had already shown so whilst improving your torpedo defense is definitely a thing to do exactly how you do that it's kind of down to just how much money you want to spend a lot of ships would just receive bulges or some variation thereof then you've got your belt armor now depending on the ship that you're modernizing you may have a slightly easier or slightly harder time of things if your ship has already been built to the all or nothing paradigm then great you don't have to do too much because the ship's main belt is pretty much the entirety of the major armor on the strip side and that's what you want on the other hand it can also be a bit of a negative because there isn't really a lot to remove whereas with a distributed armor scheme you can make a fairly good argument for removing or replacing sections of mid-grade armor that are no longer necessary and of course if you do that you will end up with spare displacement which you can use to improve other things which is good now the big elephant in the room do you improve the main belt armor the armor that's protecting your ship's citadel this is a big question to ask because that is going to be difficult and expensive you can't just slap say a two to three inch plate of armor steel over the top of your existing belt arm and hope to have anything close to the effectiveness that your on paper thickness would actually give you this is for a number of reasons one laminated armor doesn't work anywhere near as effectively as sheer single blocks of armor when it comes to resisting heavy grade naval gunfire when you're using steel but secondly because as you will have seen hopefully from the armor video by this point armor steel is face hardened with a gradated face going down towards a softer back simply slapping an additional layer of steel over the top of that pretty much ruins the gradation that you're going for even if you use an external plate of incredibly hard steel to mimic the external face so if you're going to be upgrading your main belt armor this is probably either going to be in the shape of removing an upper strike of thinner armor as was proposed in one of the ideas for hoods refit and replacing it with a similar thickness of armor to the main strike thus you have the same armor thickness as your maximum only over a wider area or if you absolutely have to just removing the armor entirely and replacing it with much thicker plating now this was actually done in a few cases in cruisers and such like and of course much earlier with the renowned class where they originally had six-inch belt armor and it was replaced with nine-inch belt armor but it is a fairly big undertaking it's going to involve a relatively substantial increase in weight it will slightly alter the underwater profile of the ship because some of that belt on will be underwater so you are going to have to consider that into your design equation and of course you have to also assess the effectiveness of the effort versus the cost involved so for example if you are upgrading a queen elizabeth or a standard type battleship with 13 to 13 and a half inches of main armor thickness well 13 inches it's not the most armor that you might find on a modern battleship it's maybe not the most armor that you might find on a modern battleship if you consider the effectiveness of the scheme because early dreadnoughts the kind of things you'll be upgrading are probably going to have slab-sided armor some of the newer ships might be launching with theoretically slightly thinner armor plate but it might be angled to increase its overall effectiveness certainly at any kind of appreciable range but on the other hand a lot of the ships that you might be modernizing will have been designed with the idea of facing off against 14 15 or 16 inch guns and whilst somewhat modernized most of the treaty designs that you will probably be facing off against will also have 14 15 or 16 inch guns depending on whether their escalator clause chips or if they're perhaps flatting the treaty somewhat but the calipers are still roughly the same now as we said penetration figures may have improved because you might be looking at higher velocity weapons but if you've designed a ship with armor against say a 15-inch gun and you're now facing a slightly more powerful 15-inch gun well you'll probably still have a degree of protection albeit just slightly longer ranges but then the combat's probably going to happen at slightly longer ranges anyway so whilst there may be a margin wherein your armor doesn't afford protection against the enemy shells but their armor might afford protection against your shells if that margin is perhaps in a relatively inconvenient range that neither side particularly wants to fight at and it is a relatively narrow one then the chances of you potentially running into that particular action versus the time cost and expense of removing the ship's entire side protection system and replacing it with a thicker one which you're going to then obviously have to manufacture at great expense that trade-off may not necessarily be the best especially when you have other ships to armor and of course you know you that is designing against the worst case scenario because there's a lot of either unmodernized or potentially just about being modernized capital ships out there whose guns will not necessarily be as powerful as a modern high velocity or super heavy shell firing weapon which therefore is going to be in the minority of potential scenarios you might face the other factor you have to consider in this respect is whether or not it's feasible to increase the armature point that it actually matters so say 13 to 13.5 inches of armor increasing that to 14 or maybe even 15 inches of armor it has a benefit but it might be marginal whereas if you increase say 9-inch armor to 10 or 11 inches of armor the overall increase in weight might be about the same but to be perfectly honest facing off against a modern battleship gun or a world war one vintage 14 15 or 16 inch weapon that thickness of armor is probably not going to provide any real additional protection over the nine-inch armor i mean sure it'll provide a little bit but you have to compare the effective battle ranges and where this additional protection is coming from because if let's say your 9-inch armor against a theoretical threat will only protect you if you're beyond 35 000 yards and increasing it to 11 inches will protect you down to 32 000 yards well great considering that you're probably not going to hit anything much beyond the high 20s of thousands of yards and your battle ranges are considerably less than that you're basically adding weight for no purpose and adding weight for no purpose in your armor is going to detract from weight you could be putting elsewhere that might help you not be in that situation such as maybe increasing your speed so you can get away or increasing your deck armor protection for the occasional long range hit or being bombed or so on and so forth so it's not just a case of can you allocate some displacement to increasing your armor it's also is it actually worth doing but consolidating armor from previous distributed schemes in order to both free up displacement and potentially beef up the overall coverage of your main belt thickness that's definitely a thing to do then you have your deck armor well considering that you're working with world war one era stock the chances are that your deck is not spectacularly thick it could be hilariously thin it could be all right but considering the risks you're going to be facing in the late 1930s or world war ii era environment you are going to want to address this quite substantially and this is going to be in two ways now fortunately most deck armor doesn't have face hardening so you can stack additional thicknesses of armor on top of your previous deck armor if you want to again grant it's not going to be necessarily as effective as a single thickness piece because of the lamination effect but it's a lot closer than it is going to be if you're trying to improve your belt armor now working with your existing main armor deck the one that was designed for world war one era gunfire that will increase your protection against plunging shell fire which may well be a concern given the ranges of combat you will now be expecting but the other thing that it's going to do is provide a substantially greater protection against bombs now you have to consider that there are obviously numerous kinds of bombs that might be dropped on you but broadly speaking you've got the high explosive your general purpose types and then the armor piercing types now for the armor piercing types you just want as thick as deck as possible and the kind of five inch plus thickness of deck that you're probably going to want to withstand plunging shell fire is probably just as good against armor-piercing bombs anyway but you have to also consider the fact there may be some pretty substantial armor-piercing bombs out there you know 2 200 pounder ones for example and even a 5-inch deck might not stop them and where the armor deck is positioned on most older ships and to be honest even on a lot of the newer ships is part way down through the hull now that's because that armor deck has to cap off the belt and the belt doesn't go all the way up to the upper decks but what that does mean is that you might end up with a fairly substantial bomb quite a way into your ship before it detonates even if it detonates on the armor deck and if it either forces spalling from the armor deck or if it goes through there's not a lot of distance relatively speaking between that point of detonation or penetration and the vital stuff you're trying to protect like magazines and engines you also have to consider that you're going to have less well-protected parts of your ship like your anti-aircraft battery possibly some forms of cabling your secondary battery which may very well be part of your anti-aircraft battery if it's got dual purpose guns and all sorts of other somewhat important sections of the ship if not necessarily vital to a surface surface gunnery action all of these things might well be above this armored deck and so even a general purpose or high explosive bomb that can penetrate relatively unopposed down to this level even if it stands basically no chance of getting through your armored deck could still cause quite a lot of havoc and a degradation of your overall fighting capability and so you also if you don't already have one need to invest in what would be called a bomb deck from the most part or if you have one you might want to improve it now this is a thinner section of deck armor higher up possibly even as high up as the upper deck of the ship itself the purpose of this is not really to stop anything although a one and a half inch maybe pushing two inch thick bomb deck might stop a small general purpose one like a 500 pounder or 250 pounder but as i said broadly speaking it's not intended to stop a lot of bombs except for as we said the contact detonation types what is intended to do however is to initiate the fusing on those bombs because a heavy say base fused high explosive shell or high explosive or general purpose bomb might just about get through that and a bigger one say a thousand pounder 750 pound or greater might go through anyway but with the fuse initiated that means it's going to detonate higher in the ship if it detonates higher in the ship it therefore can do less damage to you than something that's gotten deeper that's fairly obvious and when it comes to armor-piercing weapons especially the heavier bombs again it's not going to stop them but what it will do is initiate the fuse because it's a substantial enough chunk of metal to do that which means that in the absolute worst case at least that fuse is going to run out again higher in the ship ideally not in your machinery spaces or magazines but it's also going to slow down the incoming bomb somewhat so its armor penetration capability is going to be lessened by the time it gets to your main armor deck and thus improves your main armadex chance of rejecting the bomb entirely and on top of that of course even though bombs are fairly substantial and fairly durable weapons plunging through an inch and a half to two inches of steel is probably still going to do some damage to it so it's also going to degrade its armor penetration capability in that respect so the bomb deck is an incredibly useful bit of kit the other thing of course is with plunging shellfire it might have a similar effect on incoming shells albeit that shells actually hitting the upper deck of the ship is a slightly reduced chance as opposed to shells just hitting the main armor deck generally where they might come in through the upper parts of the ship's side as well that's a secondary bonus though but you will want both so if you have a thin shell deck on your upper deck or you don't have much beyond just standard deck plating invest in your bomb deck or upgrade it and also upgrade your main deck armor on your main armor deck but this is going to be where a lot of weight goes sometimes it's not quite appreciated that when you're increasing your deck armor you will end up using a lot more weight than you will for your belt even though your belt might be 12 13 14 inches thick or however much if you're a battleship if your deck armor is three four inches thick and you want to upgrade it to five or six inches thick there's an awful lot of weight going into that and the reason for that is surface area because yes a belt may be very thick comparatively and it might be very long but the deck is going to have to cover roughly the same amount of length because you know it's for protecting the citadel but the belt might only be 10 12 15 foot high maybe a bit more maybe a bit less it depends on how well put your ship was in the first place but therefore once you add up the area so width by height and then multiply through by thickness for volume there's a fair amount there but compared to the deck where if your ship is say 90 foot plus uh on the beam at the widest point you're now talking about the same length but instead of 10 15 20 foot you're talking 90 to 100 feet so about five times or more the total width now if your armor belt is as we said before maybe let's say 13 inches thick and you want to make your armor deck five or six inches thick well it's about roughly speaking around about 40 as thick so if you turn that around that's about two and a half times thickness so the armor belt is two and a half times thicker than your deck but if your deck is five times wider and they're the same length you're actually going to have a lot more weight in your deck armor and because of that greater surface area as you increase the thickness of that deck an awful lot of weight is added so this is where you see an awful lot of increase in weight in pretty much all the modernizations and it's something you're going to have to take an incredibly detailed account of because you might be saving weight on machinery you might be saving weight on redistributing your main up belt armor but you are going to gain a lot of weight improving your dare carver and there are a few other things which we're going to cover in a minute which also require additional weight then you get firepower this can broadly be divided in to four categories your main armament your secondary armament your anti-aircraft armament and then the systems that allow you to utilize that armament now in terms of the main armament itself there's usually not all that much you can do to increase the firepower of the ship when you're modernizing it in theory yes you could swap the guns for something larger but let's face it it's world war one era technology which means that for the most part you're probably working with ships with twin turrets anyway unless you're the us you have triples but the cost of ripping out the barbette the turrets the shell handling systems etc and replacing them with twin 16s in the case of your standards it's probably really not worth it what you can do and the reason why it's not worth it in a lot of cases is because you can do a number of other changes that might improve the overall firepower of your ship one of them is increase the elevation ranges back in world war one were not considered to be as long so the guns could only elevate so far they're perfectly capable of firing shells further if they're given a little bit more elevation and this is what you see quite a lot japanese brief it's on the congos the refits to war spite renown queen elizabeth and valiant etc etc all of these involve increasing the elevation so you cut crudely speaking cut slightly larger gaps in your turret face so the guns can go up further you might need to increase the depth of the gun pit as well where the um recoil is going to take the gun when you fire it but that gives you an increase in range which is an effective increase in firepower because you couldn't hit ships at that distance in the first place before so now you can so well and good yes in theory you can bore out the guns if your analysis reckons it'll take it to slightly increase the caliber which is what the italians did with their 12-inch guns but that is very much a move of desperation because you have no other choice and the gun that you have already really doesn't stack up ideally if you have any choice at all you wouldn't have chosen a ship without armament in the first place but as we said before the italians didn't have a choice the other things you can do is you can introduce new shell types uh perhaps new propellants so your shells may be hit harder or hit more efficiently more effectively and combine that with increased elevation you can improve the overall lethality of your shells but that's your main argument indeed like with the italians if you want to save enough weight to do other things perhaps even some volume you might have to sacrifice some of your main armament in order to allow you to introduce some of the other upgrades so with the main guns you can improve their effectiveness but you're probably not going to improve substantially anything like caliber or number of guns then you have the secondary battery now a lot of this depends on what kind of secondary battery you've got if you're lucky you might have some kind of turreted armament already in the case of maybe some of the italian ships or indeed if you're doing a later period ship like if you're trying to modernize something like nelson but generally speaking you've probably got a ship that's got casements now you will want to get rid of those because casement guns especially at higher speeds tend to be unworkable um they're a bit low in the ship so they don't have the greatest range and it's also very difficult to increase their overall range because they have vertical limits due to their positioning within the hull or possibly if you're a us ship within the superstructure plus the guns themselves may be somewhat old ideally if at all possible you want dual purpose secondary armor which is another reason to replace the old stuff because the old stuff is very much single use you're not getting any anti-aircraft like elevations out of a casement battery let me assure you well you might do if the ship's already halfway on its side but then you have bigger problems to worry about now when you're replacing casement guns with dual purpose guns you do have a bit of a trade-off the dual purpose deck mounted guns whether they be in turrets or in mounts will usually cost you a little bit more weight and a little bit more impact on your stability they're higher up they've got a whole mounting system to go with them instead of just a gun shield and pivot mounting which a casement mounted gun would do but because they have a much greater field of fire you actually can bring roughly the same number of guns to bear on any given angle with fewer guns so it kind of balances out and you look at some of the casement batteries on world war one area ships you'll quite easily see that some of the foremost and rear most guns cannot possibly hope to bear much if at all in the opposite direction so on a broadside sure you might get all of them but the minute the angle changes at all you're going to be start to lose some of those case mounted guns fields of fire not so much the case with a turret or mounted weapon on the deck where absolute work kept worse comes to worst as long as the blast effects aren't too bad you can fire over other mountings at least for longer ranges plus of course dual purpose armament gives you an increased anti-aircraft battery indeed a heavy anti-aircraft battery which is going to be effective at the longest range that you can manage when it comes to taking out all those pesky new aircraft and if you're ultra lucky advances in gun making technology might mean that the guns you're installing are somewhat lighter or indeed you might be using lighter guns period so for example if you're in the us you might have a fairly long barrel 5 inch gun which is your anti-surface secondary in a standard battleship but you're replacing with a 5 inch 38 which is a much shorter barreled weapon so the gun itself weighs a bit less which helps offset some of the weight gains from other issues if you're refitting well all of the british refits except for war spite you're using 4.5 inch guns instead of six inch guns which again four point five inch gun weighs less it's therefore going to save you a bit of weight offsetting the fact that you're putting turrets on which are going to increase the weight warsaw is kind of a halfway house where you get some open mounted four inch a but retains some of the casement mounted six inch it's not the best solution but war spike was the earliest full modernization that the royal navy tried in the mid 1930s so it's kind of a learning curve anyway now it does help here if you actually have an effective dual-purpose anti-aircraft mount like the 4.5 inch or the 5-inch 38 um if you're the japanese well sorry but given the threat of aircraft in the mid to late 1930s and of course going into world war ii you're definitely going to want a lot of anti-aircraft weapons so once you've replaced your secondary battery you now have to think about your dedicated anti-aircraft battery now again you're probably working with a world war one error ship if you're lucky you might have had a scattering of three inch guns on its original form and maybe through various upgrades in the 1920s you've picked up a few more of some description but you're going to want to effectively remove them all and replace them outright with lightweight and medium weight anti-aircraft weapons so you're talking roughly 20 millimeter guns although if it's the mid-1930s that might also be 50 cal machine guns and then heavier medium weight gun said a 37 or 40 millimeter weapon it's pretty good bet for that now granted from mid to maybe late 1930s modernization the full scale of the kind of air threat you'd face in world war ii is not necessarily going to be appreciated so you're not going to be slapping 60 80 120 barrels onto the ship the way some of the world war ii era modernizations as was done to many of the u.s standards after pearl harbor would do but you are still going to have to have some of this and of course you can then make a choice of do you want numerous single or twin mountings or do you want fewer quad or if you're the british you have pom poms even octuple mountings there's a sliding scale of effectiveness weight and locational availability but definitely make sure you do so now of course because your ship is probably going to come with minimal to no light to medium anti-aircraft battery all of this is going to be additional weight and it's all going to affect your stability as well because it's somewhat high up in the ship you've also got to consider that all those guns need crews so they need places to stay they need food etc so all of this is going to impact on your internal volume where you're going to store the supplies where you're going to put the crew are you going to make everyone tighten up are you going to install new mess decks etc and this may factor into what you're doing with some of the space you might have saved from say reducing your machinery space and then you get the delightful factor of all the fire control systems that go with it because the fire control systems for your main guns have probably improved dramatically you might have a 10 or 15 foot rangefinder as a relic from your world war one era days but now 25 30 foot or even larger rangefinders are available so of course again more weight and stability somewhat offset by removing the old stuff but it is an increase you might also want to install some fire control systems for your secondary batteries now you might have had those originally but again better longer range capable versions are available of course again at a weight and stability penalty and if they're dual purpose weapons as they should be then you also need an anti-aircraft control facility or several because you need to engage multiple threats from multiple angles again more weight more effect on stability and if you're being really generous you might even want to include some form of fire control system for your light to medium anti-aircraft weaponry beyond there's plane point at plane pull trigger now with all of that in mind hopefully you're beginning to see why the most obvious thing as it might seem increasing your ship's speed perhaps wasn't done as much if at all in the various historical modernizations because saving weight and volume by reducing the overall amount of machinery whilst retaining the same speed is pretty much the only major weight saving you're going to get when it comes to modernizations indeed a lot of those spaces that were created in historical refits were turned into magazines for your new anti-aircraft guns amongst other things with protection you might gain a little bit of stability and a little bit of buoyancy if you bulge the ship but broadly between increasing your deck armor potentially increasing the coverage of your citadel belt and reducing extraneous armor your protection levels are going to have a net neutral approximately speaking effect on your overall displacement there may be a slight reduction there may be a slight increase more than likely a slight increase but overall the effect is not as massive firepower though as we've just considered is pretty much just going to have a significant increase in your overall displacement from the weight of all the guns and all the additional crew you're adding and it's also going to affect your stability because a lot of this weight is going to be quite high up and thus unless you want your ship to be now sitting really really low in the water and not really able to go anywhere you're not going to be having massive ambitions towards breaking speed limits compared to what you could do before because all that space and volume is going to be needed to counteract all the additions you've just made hence why the queen elizabeth refits for example could make about the same speed maybe just a fraction more than they could originally so 24 and a half 25 knots the standards pretty much stayed at 21 knots the nagatos to be honest didn't really see a massive change in their speed some modernisations even slightly dropped speed the only ones that really substantially increased their speed were the italians the dorias and cavores and the congos with the doris and the cavours they're almost a special case because as we mentioned you know they really didn't have much choice of what to work with and they also underwent the most substantial transformations with the entire new bow sections being welded on and the entire main battery turret and all this ancillary systems being removed etc etc which kind of leaves the only one that had an opportunity for a balanced upgrade being the congos and the congos you know they ramped their speed up they increased their overall firepower levels and they didn't do all that much with their armor now there were reasons for that they wanted them to be able to keep up with the carriers they wanted them to be able to keep up to a certain degree with the cruisers and destroyers the additional mobility granted by the speed was useful but then on the other hand apart from kiroshima because let's face it nothing was going to save her when you consider the fates of the other congos well i think you can make pretty decent argument that spending some of that displacement and volume on improving the ship's protection systems a bit more substantially probably would have benefited them a lot more than being able to travel three or four knots faster than they had previously and then of course you have other equipment because radios are definitely a thing so they're gonna add more weight because radio technology is advanced there's a lot more of them and then as time goes on depending on exactly when you're doing your refit in 1935 radar not really a concern in 1940 very much concerned so new radar and further fire control systems are going to be added which again is going to have a stability impact and a weight impact you might also look at aircraft facilities again this is a bit of a sliding scale there's a little bit of exchange going on because in 1935 as we said you're not really thinking about radar but you will be thinking about installing aircraft whereas by perhaps 1940 or 1942 you won't be installing aircraft or you might even be removing aircraft in exchange for putting in radar it's not that likely you'll have a substantial aircraft complement and a substantial radar installation although it is possible but either way you're adding weight and because of its location in the ship you're also affecting your stability once more and that's just some of the headline systems so what exactly is the right balance when it comes to modernizing your dreadnought well the answer is that there is no one answer again looking back at the most well-known refits and modernizations you can see the different priorities coming through we won't go over the congos again because we've just done so but when you look at the refits of the colorado's the tennessees and even the new mexicos and other standards that the us was forced to modernize in world war ii having already planned to modernize the big five as we mentioned they just wanted to keep speed up they weren't even necessarily that concerned if speed dropped off just a fraction because a 21 knot ship or 20 and a half not ship much of a muchness when compared to the mobility of 28 to 30 or 33 not ships like the new battleships or aircraft carriers but what they did want to do was improve their protection against incoming torpedoes having well learned that lesson quite painfully at pearl harbor and thus installing quite significant bulges and then improving the ship's ability to fight with its guns so elevation on the main guns was increased deck armor was increased anti-aircraft batteries just went completely crazy and all the fire control and radar systems necessary to operate them all went in so in that case if you look at the speed protection firepower triangle you could say firepower became the single greatest priority followed by protection and then speed in a distant third that made sense in order to create durable platforms that could go out and be used in the island-hopping assaults shore bombardment and guarding fleets against incoming incursions rather than going out and hunting down the enemy in open battle then you look at the modernizations of something like the queen elizabeth's all the renowns in that case again firepower pretty much took a front row seat although it was much more closely matched in terms of armor protection increases albeit some of that was making up for the fact that unlike these standards the british ships had not been designed with the all or nothing scheme in mind in the first place but they were looking to eke out maybe just a fraction more speed than they had before as well whereas as we said the americans didn't necessarily care too much if they dropped a half a knot or so and that's because they were starting with slightly faster ships the theoretical 25 not queen elizabeth will be more like 24 before refit and of course 30 plus knots on the renowns and thus keeping that speed and thus keeping the operational flexibility or maybe just bumping up a fraction was of somewhat greater importance and this emphasis makes sense when you consider what those ships were used for they were used in active frontline roles in the mediterranean in the north sea later on in the pacific so if you are seeking battle it makes more sense to be mobile so you can actually force the battle or at least somewhat keep up with the enemy battleline units and then of course you have the italian special case where they absolutely have to prioritize speed because they want ships capable of keeping up with at least somewhat the rest of their battlefleet and it's the only things they have their existing ships are slow and so they have to put a huge amount into increasing the ship's speed as a result of which the ship's armor and otherwise other elements of their protection are not substantially increased and their firepower in terms of barrel count actually drops and they have to resort to boring out the guns to try and bring that up just a fraction now as we said granted it give it did give them 27 not battleships albeit ones that even the italians acknowledged were still very much second line they were just second line ships that could keep up with the rest of the fleet so with all that said hopefully you can understand the pitfalls the restrictions and the reasons for why so many navies modernized their battleships from world war one vintage to something that could serve in world war ii in so many different ways and maybe if you take that away factor in your own balances and preferences and what ships you might be starting with whether you want to think about a fully modernized new york or a fully modernized nelson or something else entirely maybe you can even make the core base front line combatants well i won't be holding my breath on that one maybe this can help guide you in coming up with your own ideas on either how you might refit a ship to serve in world war two one that wasn't refitted or maybe how you would have done a refit or modernization differently for one that was in any case i hope you enjoyed the video that's it for this video thanks for watching if you have a comment or suggestion for a ship to review let us know in the comments below don't forget to comment on the pinned post for dry dock questions

Channel: Drachinifel

Views: 312,926

Keywords: wows, world of warships, dreadnought, WW1, WW2, refit, modernisation, Warspite, Colorado, West Virginia, Nagato, Renown, Kongo

Id: V8k-78j_slw

Length: 63min 20sec (3800 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 22 2021