Inter-war ship designs - 5 Bad Ideas

foreign [Music] sponsored by Squarespace so welcome back to our ongoing build of the paladins of chivalry website that's my 14th century reenactment group so we're going to add a section we've already added that video there and we're going to go to Gallery various options but we just want a simple Gallery so choose that and then get rid of the placeholder pictures quite quick and simple and then go to upload the ones we actually want and here they go uploading as we go in real time this is a selection of a few shots I've got plenty more to put up but these range over the past few years some combat some individual characters and there they are they have appeared we can of course go into edit the section we can put them in multiple rows we can change the format as you can see there but I quite like this format three pictures per row and they're all in portrait format if you click on them to open them up you can obviously get the ones in portrait in full portrait and there is another option of course because if you want to know what each of these pictures are you go into the gallery and you can add a title so this is John of gone so we're going to call it John of gaunt and then wait for it to upload all done scroll down double check it's all there and there our Gallery is complete it's literally that easy so if after all these little mini tutorials I've been doing you think you could build a website for maybe ideally Naval History purposes but you never know you might want to if for some other reason then head over to squarespace.com you can get a free trial and once you're ready that little link will give you 10 off your first website or domain so thanks once again to Squarespace for sponsoring the video and on with the main show so this month the wonderful people on patreon wanted to know what my five worst ships were for the interwar period now you've probably seen hopefully the naval engineering disasters video I did which is kind of I guess a little bit like a top 10 of worst design ships ever and you may recognize one or two entries from there either mentioned or gone into more detail in this video but since they specifically voted for the five worships of the interrupt period that's what we're going to be looking at today so the interwar period I've defined as a ship that was designed During the interwar period it doesn't necessarily have to have entered service because you know you can design something in 1936 but by the time it's actually constructed it might be World War II but it also means that stuff like the k-class and the M class aren't going to feature because they were both designed and built for the most part during the first World War and since just doing a you know basically worst five ships of the interwar period would let's just say rather strongly favor or disfavor depending on how you want to look at it some countries over others I decided instead we're gonna do the five ships but we're gonna do the five ships from five of the major navies of the second world war so of course that's going to be the US Navy the Royal Navy the Japanese Navy and then of course we have a little bit of a difficult decision because you've got the French German Italian and Russian navies all being relatively speaking large and taking part in the second world war but I decided that we should look at the French and German navies as our other two entries yes the Italians and the Russians both had some pretty awful ship designs but we can look at those separately because yeah there are some real Shockers in those but nonetheless also going to give a little bit of a lead in and have a look at some of the ships that could have been taking the position of worst design into a vessel for that nation's Navy but didn't make the grade for various reasons so let's start off with the US Navy there were strong contentions from USS Ranger the aircraft carrier that the US Navy never at any point even when they'd almost run out of aircraft carriers wanted to put into the Pacific Theater For a whole list of design limitations but she's not the winner of this particular honor because at the end of the day when she went out and fought in Operation Torch and various theaters in the Atlantic she acquitted herself fairly well so she's not a completely awful ship likewise we could have also looked at USS Wichita a one-off Heavy Cruiser that ended up being so overweight generally and top heavy in particular that they ended up not only having to ballast her down significantly more than they'd originally planned but she also wasn't able to initially receive her designed anti-aircraft Armament and as we all know an anti-aircraft battery was a fairly important thing for an end to worship to have especially one that was being built in the 1930s and was going to see considerable action in World War II but again in the end she didn't actually roll over they were able to make modifications and she did some pretty decent War service so she's not the winner if you like of this category either instead we're going to look at the Sims class destroyer so a little bit of background to start with during the 1930s the us as with most of the other major signatories of the naval treaties were limited in the displacement of Destroyers that they could build they could build most of their destroyers up to a 1500 ton displacement limit and a few to a slightly higher displacement limit of just over 1800 tons those larger vessels had been flotilla leaders which had been designed with a rather questionable single-use twin 5-inch 38 Mount but that's it's another subject for another day U.S general Destroyer design for the 1500 tonne margin had settled down on a pretty standard layout four single 5-inch guns two four and two aft in super firing positions and an unusually heavy torpedo Armament usually 16 torpedo launchers in four quad mounts two per side this extremely high preponderance of torpedoes was in part because of course U.S Cruisers were not built with torpedo launchers outside of the Atlanta class and the omahas and therefore the majority of the US Cruise Line could not use Torpedoes against enemy shipping and thus if you wanted to have enough Torpedoes to match your opponents in a theoretical battle well then the Destroyers just needed to carry more than everybody else however overall torpedo launchers weighed a little bit less than a gun mount system because although you had four Torpedoes in four launches and they all sat on the deck the launch itself sat slightly lower than the guns especially a super firing gun and therefore contributed slightly less to issues with stability plus of course you didn't have to have the magazine the hoists and all the associated shells stored in the ship although they were further down that did obviously add up to a fair bit of mass and once you launch those Torpedoes well that was most of the weight gone but when it came to the Sims class things had changed a little bit technically speaking the US wasn't Bound by the 1500 ton displacement limit anymore but they tried to have their cake and eat it as well it was decided to increase the main Armament from four single five-inch guns to five single five-inch guns and this newest gun and a midship's weapon would be mounted at roughly the same level as the super firing for and after turrets so there would be a fairly significant impact on stability as a result of it coming about partially to compensate for this and partially for efficiency reasons one of the quadruple torpedo launchers was eliminated and another one was moved to the center line this meant that the ship could still fire eight Torpedoes on a single broadside but when it came around the other way it could only fire another four Torpedoes on top of that as opposed to its predecessors which could fire a spread of eight and then another spread of eight the superstructure and bow of the Sims class were also significantly streamlined and slimmed down in an effort to get the ships up to as high top speed as possible now you might think for a class that's got no displacement limitations left this is a brilliant idea make them more lethal make them more efficient make them faster unfortunately the US Navy decided that they wanted all these benefits but they didn't want to have to pay any extra for them and they wanted to have as many as they possibly could and so although all these additional features were built in the displacement that was allocated to them only went up by 70 tons and bearing in mind that the ships had to be lengthened to incorporate the new gun well most of that weight and more just went into the extra length of Hull let alone the additional gun its ammunition its magazines its hoist etc etc etc but determined to try and squeeze a quart into a pint pot they pressed on and the first ship to reach sea trial stage was USS Anderson which you can see has the fifth gun unfortunately it turned out that the results of these design changes were now that the ship was hilariously unstable to the point of being an active danger to its crew in even moderate Seas let alone Heavy Seas and the Anderson had to be rapidly called back into dock to have a whole slew of changes made to it to keep it upright these changes would have to be retroactively fitted to some of the Destroyers that were in the process of fitting out and some of the others of the glass which were a bit further behind in construction would have to be completed to the new standard whatever it happened to be once they'd figured out how to make sure the ship didn't imitate Vasa in the end the design changes rolled back basically every single on paper Improvement that the Sims class theoretically possessed the fifth gun was removed as was one of the torpedo launchers now of course with one quad launcher on each wing and one on the center line if they took the center line one off they'd only have four Torpedoes per side but still have to carry eight which wasn't particularly brilliant so they took off one of the wing launchers and moved the other Wing launcher to join its remaining compatriot on the center line so now the Sims class had an eight torpedo broadside but that was it it couldn't wheel around and deliver another eight Torpedoes the way that its predecessors could as mentioned its main gun Firepower was now exactly the same although in happy news for some of the sailors the super firing aft Mount which in common with the narrow move to midship's mount had been essentially an open mounted gun did receive a half height in semi-enclosed mounting with a nice canvas screen that they could put up in really rough weather but these changes weren't enough additional ballast had to be fitted down below and a whole bunch of Splinter protection on things like the Fire Control director and the Ford superstructure also had to be removed to address the stability concerns and even with all of these changes in place there was such a low Reserve stability that unlike a number of other Destroyer classes both before and after it the Sims received a relatively small upgrade in its light and medium anti-aircraft Weaponry during World War II and indeed the scale of armament that had been envisaged for The Sims class wouldn't actually be seen in full fruition in a design the US Navy was actually happy with until the Fletcher class which displaced about a third more so as far as U.S Navy interwar designs go The Sims class gets the medal for trying to be more ambitious than the previous classes and actually ending up being slightly less capable through being terribly designed and next we're going to look at the French navy now once again we had some contenders we have of course the French aircraft carrier Bayern which could have got the award simply for the crime of being bare we could also have looked at the mogador class or any number of the very late era design contractor Billiards for being destroyers that were capable of absolutely ridiculous speeds but completely incapable of actually fighting at those speeds but since Ben could actually you know carry and launch aircraft which is the main purpose of an aircraft carrier even if he couldn't do it particularly well and mogador was still a reasonably decent Destroyer even if she had to slow down a bit to two speeds that were merely very fast rather than lightning then neither of them will get the top billing as it were instead we're going to give the prize to The Duquesne class heavy Cruisers as a product of the early 1920s the duques were of course France's first attempt at what would later be called a Heavy Cruiser although in the 1920s that designation didn't exist it was introduced by the 1913 London Naval treaty nonetheless it was an eight inch armed Cruiser that displaced at least in theory ten thousand tons and of course she was built in an era where there was an artificial holiday on capital ship construction and so the large 10 000 ton Cruiser was the newest and largest warship that anybody could build that wasn't an aircraft carrier now unlike the Germans who were merely proceeding away with the Deutschland class and praying to whichever deities they happen to believe in that week that well Hood renowned and repulse would magically poof out of existence should there ever be hostilities the French were aware of the existence of hood Renown and repulse and wanted nothing to do with them and therefore contrived to have their ship attain a speed that would allow them to outrun said battle cruisers at least in theory thanks to the relative size and displacement differences if you were actually in Heavy Seas it was relatively likely the battle Cruisers would overhaul you anyway but hey medium to calm seas is still better than nothing so aiming for an Armament of eight eight inch guns which is fairly standard and a speed of at least 33 knots as it turned out maybe even closer to the 34 which was pretty good and with a secondary Dash anti-aircraft almond of after a lot of wrangling and a little bit of size reduction to try and save weight eight single three inch dual purpose guns along with eight 37 millimeter anti-aircraft guns in Twin mounts plus some machine guns which was actually a pretty decent anti-aircraft battery for a 1920s design ship along with a pair of triple torpedo launchers which gave her some much needed anti-capital ship punch the ducanes seemed like they were shaping up to be pretty nice Cruisers unfortunately it was essentially at this stage that displacement ran out and you might be thinking well hang on a minute where's the protection well good question where was the protection exactly now some of this was a little bit beyond their control they wanted to achieve a speed that was reasonably in excess of the British battle Cruisers but thanks to the privations deprivations and Industrial Devastation that had hit France as a result of World War One France's steel technology which had actually been if you remember World leading in the 1870s and 1880s was now actually well behind the curve of everybody else this meant that their Machinery plants were somewhat heavier than others to generate the same power output and perhaps more importantly the strength of the steel that they used in ship construction which at the stage was essentially what we would today call a mild steel was somewhat less than what everybody else was using and what this meant was that if you were going to put a certain amount of stress on a let's say steel girder if you're using French ship construction steel you had to make that steel girder thicker and thus heavier as compared to other nations girders for it to sustain the same amount of weight or stress or strain or whatever other kind of load you were putting on it now reducing the Firepower was out of the question which meant that if you wanted to have any serious protection you would have to reduce the speed and they weren't willing to do that either and so with a somewhat less efficient Machinery plant than everyone else and a somewhat overweight compared to everybody else's standards Hull they were left putting a 30 millimeter or 1.2 inch side protection system on the magazines but outside of the deck and turrets which are the same thickness that was it there was essentially no protection over the machinery and well 30 mil 1.2 inch when that kind of level of armor is put on Japanese Cruiser turrets it's described is as essentially Splinter proof and not much else and that was basically the case with the duques its armor system for the magazines you know of a bit that would otherwise go boom in a very dramatic manner was described as probably safe as long as it was being shot at by a destroyer and as long as that Destroyer shell detonated on the outer hole plating well then maybe the it the armor plate that was on the magazines might actually catch the splinters and stop the magazines going off if the Destroyer was using a slightly larger than average gun had a semi-harmon piercing shell aboard or heaven forbid the cruiser Duquesne or torvill at sister ship came up against another Cruiser whether it be wielding six or eight inch guns well that armor wasn't gonna stop the shells in the slightest in fact the only thing a 30 millimeter plate would do at that point would probably be to confirm that the fuse on an armor-piercing or semi armor-piercing shell was properly armed right before it detonated in the magazines and these were ships where 25 of the horizontal length of the ship of the water line was magazines it would also mean the inner fight with a cruiser if it got to medium or close range the enemy Cruiser's secondary battery which on most contemporary cruises was of a caliber somewhere between four and five inches would be perfectly capable of Perforating every part of the French Cruiser except for maybe the Box magazines assuming the gun wasn't particularly powerful and or didn't have some kind of semi armor-piercing shell available now as we've mentioned there were reasons for this mostly due to the state of French industry but a reason is not an excuse and it also doesn't take away the fact that the duques were hilariously poorly protected it's all well and good saying ah yes but look we are able to do 34 knots we can stay ahead of everybody well I had to break it to you but a Cruiser's job is not to just run away from everything it sees and when a particularly angry and virulent Destroyer is capable of ripping you to pieces if it happens to get close enough and this was a period when a considerable number of Destroyers were being built that could exceed 34 knots by quite a considerable margin I'm afraid I have to condemn the ducanes as fundamentally incapable of doing anything other than acting as an overly glorified large Scout which the French contract opeliers were much much more capable of doing although as luck would have it both Duquesne and torvill would be in the Mediterranean specifically Alexandria during the fall of France and thus unlike a good chunk of their successes they would actually survive World War II and spend a considerable amount of time in service with the free French naval forces and now we move on to the Royal Navy contenders for this particular spot could be awarded to say the carrier Arc Royal which whilst being a decent carrier had a number of serious design issues lower down which would eventually lead to her loss as the result of a single torpedo hit which is not brilliant the arith user class for well being budget versions of the budget version and then having the argentinians come along and Order what was essentially a much better version of them but despite both these limitations Arc Royal had a relatively decent service career until said unfortunate torpedo and actually proved herself to be one of the most capable and useful carriers of the early War period and the areth user class whilst not exactly blessed with a huge amount of Firepower did certainly punch well above their weight in the Mediterranean and Pacific Theaters and so my ward for the overall worst chip design of the royal Navy in the interval period goes to the York class like the arith users the Yorks were designed on a budget specifically a budget That was supposed to A reduced the overall costs of ships that the Royal Navy was producing because the treasury was being rarely tight fisted but also in theory it would allow the Royal Navy to have more cruisers for the same displacement that it was allocated within the treaty system but whilst this was technically true in that you could build six York class for the same displacement cost as Five County class with six York class coming in at 49 500 tons and six and five County class coming in at fifty thousand tons you'd actually end up paying out more so you could build Five County class and a couple of contemporary destroyers for the price of six York class at which point you'd actually have seven ships for the same amount of money if you were building the larger Cruisers and that's not all compared to a late model County class the York class was no faster it was not really any better protected and once the county has had their refits then the counties were actually better protected and of course the counties carried an extra twin eight inch gun compared to the York class and when you looked closer at Firepower The Late Model counties especially once they replaced their single four inch with twin four inch had a heavy anti-aircraft battery and in terms of number of 8-inch guns floating around five County class bought four additional eight inch guns to the table as compared to six York class and the same went for Manpower if you wanted that sixth Hull you'd have to recruit an additional 370 men into the Navy as compared to the numbers that you needed to crew your five counties so in the end the only thing that having your six your class in theory would give you over five counties was that you would in theory have an additional Hull which could be in an additional place at the same time everything else was more expensive but then of course if you did have your additional Hull the simple fact was that six eight inch guns was woefully inadequate for the era of the modern Heavy Cruiser which is the era that your class was entering into eight guns was kind of a minimum price of entry and a fair number of heavy Cruisers had nine or in case of the Japanese even 10 8-inch guns so a York class with just six going up against something would be at a significant disadvantage the more compact hole also meant less ability to absorb damage and this showed in how they were lost although three County class were lost during the war two of them were lost to overwhelming airstrikes from Japanese carriers during the Indian Ocean rate that being Cornwall and dorsiture and of course hmas Canberra was sunk at close range by the mass gunfire an entire Japanese Cruiser division as compared to York and Exeter where York was sunk following little bitty air attacks here and there plus an attack by Italian Mars boats that were fitted as essentially Kamikaze weapons but with the option for the pilot to eject first and Exeter although it managed to scrape through its engagement with Graf spey was then sunk in a long-range surface action by considerably less Firepower than was directed at the Canberra this of course being while she was assigned to abda command whereas a decent argument could be made that most treaty compliant 10 000 ton heavy Cruisers would have fared significantly better against the graph pay than extra did although that's obviously not to reduce the accomplishments of exeter's crew in that particular engagement and of course since only York and Exeter ended up being built the British never got that additional sixth Hull anyway so in the end the Yorks are simply a less capable platform in every way except for a slight increase in presence with the caveat that that increase in presence is significantly less capable of actually doing anything when it gets to actual combat and even this notional marginal questionable Advantage wasn't realized with their being constructed and so the York class pretty much has to take the biscuit for me for the Royal Navy because they're a completely unnecessary group of ships and to be perfectly Frank if the British had built York and extra as another pair of counties they probably would have gotten a lot more use out of them and that brings us on to Z Germans now I know what some of you might be expecting are we going to see Bismarck no but Bismarck was in my top three uh contenders for this particular spot so yeah best Mark not exactly the world's most efficient design in the slightest definitely a somewhat compromised secondary battery and well the arguments over her armor scheme go back and forth between various people as you probably know if you've watched this channel for any particular length of time I'm not a particular fan of it and it is as I mentioned here horrendously inefficient and overweight but for all that it could still reasonably go Toe to Toe with 35 000 untreated battleships so it's not an awful design it's just a bad one then you might be thinking oh well Drac then I know what you're going to go for next the koenigsbergs The tinfoil wrappers of the creek Arena well they would be the other one in the uh selection list but whilst yes the koenigsbergs are not the world's best designs they are very fragile and they end up getting sunk at a feral rate they're not actually the worst of the clicks Arena designs at least in my opinion in my opinion the worst into war German ship design because the koenigsbergs at least have the excuse of trying to comply to the Versailles treaty limits is the type 1934 Destroyer now that isn't to say that some of the other German Destroyer designs weren't pretty bad because they were but the type 1934 really takes the biscuit because it was designed by the critics arena in a period when the critics Marina had decided we are not going to abide by any kind of treaty limits or restrictions so you remember the Sims class from earlier on where they couldn't make five five-inch guns and 12 Torpedoes work on 1500 tons or 1570 tons shockingly enough they did manage to get five five inch guns and 10 Torpedoes working on about 2 100 tons with a Fletcher class and the Fletch class as I've said before has loads of stability left it was an excellent design and Incredibly adaptable for the rest of World War II now we come to the type 1934s so let's run a comparison shall we standard displacement for an as built type 1934 was just over 2 200 tons compared to the 2050 2100 tons of a Fletcher class so the type 1934 is 100 to 150 tons heavier at standard displacement as compared to a Fletcher okay so you'd expect the type 1934 therefore to be maybe a slightly more capable well is it faster although in Practical service both classes do somewhere between 34 and 36 knots on Trials both classes proved capable of up to about 38 knots so that extra 150 tons hasn't bought you any more speed is it better protected no the Fletcher is actually better protected because it has quite extensive splint-proof plating down its sides which the German Destroyer does not is it better armed well they've both managed to have five five inch guns so I suppose that's good except the Fletcher glass has the 5 inch 38 which is a dual purpose weapon which allows it to use it in anti-aircraft defense and the German 127 millimeter skc-34 is not it's surface action only what about the anti-aircraft Armament well they both start out life with 10 barrels a mixture of 20 millimeter in the case of the Fletcher having the ulican and in the case of the Germans having their standard 20 millimeter cannon and in the Fletcher's case starting off with a quad 1.1 inch or 28 millimeter mounting whilst the Germans have for 37 millimeter guns well okay the Chicago piano the 1.1 inch is not exactly the world's best anti-aircraft gun by a long shot but if you've seen the video I did on anti-aircraft guns and their comparisons you'll know that one of the few guns that can claim to be even worse is the German 37 mil at least the one that was installed on the type 1934s that being the 37 millimeter SKC 30 which was a single shot weapon well what about Torpedoes the Fletcher manages to carry two quintuple tubes the type 94 34 has two quadruple tubes so the Fletcher carries two additional Torpedoes compared to the German ship I suppose you could point out that the German surface-launched Torpedoes tended to work a little bit better than the American ones at least in the early part of the war but that's a problem with the torpedo itself not to do with the number that are being carried oh and assuming that both ships can use all of their fuel the Fletcher can go further as well so you're spending an additional 100 250 tons and thus far we've got a ship that doesn't go as far can only go as fast has worse and less overall Armament and is inferior in protection oh but it it doesn't stop there you see the type 1934 is hilariously top heavy much like the Sims class except the Germans just kind of leaned into it rather than taking bits off parts of these measures meant that about a third of its fuel had to be retained as ballast to stop it flipping over and looking at the U-boats which cut its range even further and it was also a very front heavy design which meant to get plunging into the sea and taking water over the bow and so trying to join the U-Boat flotillas that way instead and then of course you've got the Machinery the Fletcher glass are pretty reliable ships they'll go happily steaming around the Pacific and unless you drop a Kamikaze on them they'll probably make it home without any major breakdowns the type 1934s you basically hacked had to be an octopus on Panzer shock alert trying to play the pipe organ in order to keep everything working and even then you'd probably end up as calamari the single biggest threat to the full progress of a type 1934 Destroyer when it wasn't in combat was usually its own machine plant it's therefore probably something of a mercy that of the four ships constructed three of them were in Davy Jones locker before the first six months of real fighting had actually finished the one remaining type 1934 the Z4 Richard bidesan somehow managed to survive the war with its high point being an ancillary escort during the channel Dash but somewhat set off by also being one of the Destroyers presence of the battle the baron sea aka the battle the kriegs marina did so poorly in the Hitler tried to scrap the entire service contingent of the kriegs marina it then managed to run aground twice get bombed and when it was eventually divvied up was a war prize the Allies couldn't even bring themselves to use it as an atomic bomb test unit the British got her as War spoils and basically just stared at her for a bit before deciding to scrap her so yeah the type 1934 destroyers how not to build a large Destroyer and now we come to our last Nation the Japanese well we had contenders here let me tell you we had the rugio the sole aircraft carrier which was on the list for attempting to be a loophole aircraft carrier that could you know sneak in under 10 000 tons and then failed on account of firstly getting the loophole closed secondly coming in at over 10 000 tons anyway after design changes were made then found to be far too lightly constructed as were a number of other Japanese ships and dangerously top heavy before finally getting to fight in World War II discovering that she could carry very very very few aircraft compared to what she was actually supposed to be able to do mostly thanks to having a lift that was far too small and they're again then getting rather ignominiously sunk by a relative handful of U.S Navy aircraft but hey she was still a carrier much like burn that functioned as a carrier was able to launch one strike aircraft even if there weren't that many of them so she didn't make the top spot then you've got the Megami class which is one of very very few classes of ships in all of Naval History to actually score a negative kill ratio when it comes to active combat I.E in active combat with enemy warships in the vicinity the magamies collectively managed to sink more of their own side than they did of the enemy that includes Megami being directly responsible for the loss of her sister ship makuma during the Battle of Midway but no the prize doesn't go to either of these the prize goes to the hatsuharu class Destroyers now again a little bit of background is required back in the late 1920s the Japanese had launched the fabuki class destroyers which came in at about 1750 tons standard displacement and they are in many circles regarded as the first modern destroyers of the interwar period they're one of the first if not the first to break with the four single guns idea as a primary Armament they're also considerably larger than most of their predecessors and they have a very heavy torpedo battery so you have six five inch guns in three twin mountings you have nine Torpedoes in three triple mountings plus they can carry a set of reloads for each torpedo tube and they're pretty darn quick they're very very capable vessels Unfortunately they like rugeo provoked a change to the naval treaty system so once the changes were made as a result of these new Super Destroyers showing up that's why you end up with the Sims class having to obey a 1500 ton weight restriction because everyone looked at the fabuki's and went I'm not sure we want this trend to continue the Japanese signed up to the London Naval treaty because they were still trying to stick by that kind of by that point and well somebody looked at the fabookies I went yes this is a very very capable vessel however the treaty now restricts most of our destroyers to 1500 tons I know we shall demand that somebody builds us a ship that has just as much speed just as much Firepower just as much protection just as much everything as a fabuki but you shall now fit it on a destroyer that is 250 tons lighter and bear in mind we are talking about destroyers where compared to a total 1500 tonne standard displacement uh 250 tons is one sick of that entire displacement or roughly speaking the difference in displacement proportionally between an actual treaty compliant Battleship and Bismarck except of course in this case we're going the other way now this pushed Japanese Naval Architects passed even their limits and bear in mind these are the same architects who came up with various Cruisers which when their official displacements were given caused one very experienced UK Naval engineered to say they're either building their ships out of cardboard or they're lying and it turns out they were pretty much doing a bit of both oh and did I mention that the Hat saharos were supposed to incorporate two significant advances that had been made during the construction of the fabuki class which is why sometimes the fabuki class is divided up into three subclasses namely the Dual Purpose anti-aircraft capable main batteries and the shielded torpedo mounts as opposed to the open torpedo mounts and single-use Main batteries that characterize the first few fabuki's because yeah they're expecting to fit those on as well as a result much like the Sims class when they were launched the hatsuharos proved to be hilariously unstable and also in this case rather structurally weak after the notorious 4 Fleet incident they had to be called back into Dock and a whole slew of changes had to be made now as I mentioned earlier this design even pushed the Japanese designers past their limits so they were actually built with two twin gun mounts and a single gun mount for the main battery so they had were already down one gun compared to the fabuki's but once the problems became very clear they had to relocate that single gun mount and very soon after war was declared in the second world war they ended up taking it away completely significant parts of the superstructure were cut down or lowered the Splinter proof armor that was a feature of the Ford superstructure had to be removed one of the triple torpedo launchers had to be removed the hull had to be reinforced various bits of heavy machinery had to be lowered down either one deck or in the case of the funnels just be shortened and so by the time they'd finished with them they pretty much resembled at least in terms of paper stats if not necessary in terms of appearance and weapons layout pretty much what the Sims class had become four or five inch guns as the main battery with dual purpose use albeit that the hatsuharos used two twins rather than four singles and although the six torpedo tubes might seem a slight downgrade compared to the eight that you could find on the Sims you do have to remember that these were six 24 inch long Lance not 8 21 inch Mark 15s oh and some of the changes they had to make to the underwater hole form and the Rudders meant that speed dropped a bit as well indeed once all the changes were made there wasn't a huge amount of improvement in the hatsuharus compared to the mutsukis which were a couple of hundred tons lighter still which were the predecessors to the fabuki class okay admittedly the hatsuharu's guns were seven millimeters larger and could be used in an anti-aircraft role which the mutsukis couldn't but that's a fair amount to pay for 150 to 200 tons more displacement oh and the entire class was lost during the second world war although I'm not necessarily sure you can hold that against the hatsuharos in particular there were a fair number of Japanese glasses that ended up as complete write-offs during the second world war so maybe that bit isn't quite the strike against them that everything else is and so there you have it ladies and gentlemen my picks for five of the worst ship designs of the interwar period as seen through the lenses of picking one for the British American Japanese German and French navies if you have other nominations from those navies or perhaps you'd like to put forward ideas for the Russian Navy or the Italian Navy or one of the other smaller navies then please feel free to do so in the comments below but I hope you found this interesting and if you think there's some kind of redeeming feature about my five picked nominations please also let us know because of course opinion will always vary thanks very much for listening and bye

Channel: Drachinifel

Views: 316,014

Keywords: wows, world of warships, Duqeusne, Type 1934, York class, Sims class, Hatsuharu class, WW2, World War 2

Id: iALPvNQXIp8

Length: 41min 31sec (2491 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 14 2023