The Drydock - Episode 083

[Music] so just a little bit of channel admin to go I can can definitely confirm that every single prize for the 100k subscribers giveaway competition has long ago left this building so I know some of you have received it because you receive their prizes because I've got messages from you saying as much so if you haven't received your prize at this point please do get in contact with me and I shall furnish you with the tracking number etc so that you can determine where the heck it's gone I know there is a little bit of our people in the international postal system at the moment due to the corona virus but mostly that seems to be affecting things like Kickstarter's and such where they're all being manufactured in China so hopefully shouldn't be affecting international postage across from the UK to non Chinese countries all that much thank you goodness but you never know I say if you haven't received it by now please let me know other than that the only other thing I think that's worth mentioning at this point in admin is that I'm gonna try a slightly different format of Wednesday special for a video coming up in the next probably maybe three or four months I'm gonna do a special on the Battle of slowest and I'm going to get some of the people in my medieval reenactment group involved and we're going to try and portray it almost almost kind of like you know those the historical interviews where documentaries where they interview survivors and such like so sort of in character in full kit etc give it a little bit more of a flavour so if you think that's a good idea let me know if you think it's a terrible idea equally let me know as they it'll be an experiment and so we'll see how it goes so of course we are now into the first week of March and well it's only one month before I graced the shores of the United States of America but until then now I have to put up with me answering patreon questions this week so yes buckle in I have no idea how long this is gonna take but let's see how it goes the hand of Ray asks what is your impression of the cancelled successor to the audacious class aircraft carriers the Malter class aircraft carriers so the multi class very interesting they're effectively the British equivalent of the American Midway class now whilst obviously that means there would have been very large and theoretically their forward us - they're all neighboring better steady in terms of retention when you think about the audacious class I'll crawl and Eagle basically being the mainstay of British carrier aviation through until the 1970s these ships say theoretically slightly more capable due to their considerably greater size however I'm kind of glad that they didn't get built in the end and that's because of the design confluence between the two major carry building nations that only Western well that is the British and the Americans as we've mentioned in other videos the Americans took a look at British lessons and Joe at the end of the World War II period they came up with the Midway's and one of the major lessons that I learned was the need to protect their hangar decks and so the Midway's had armored flight decks the British meanwhile looked at the American lessons and thought that launching mass air strikes in a single go was a much better idea than the relatively smaller Strike Packages the armored carriers have been able to put up and so they went with an american-style open hangar but also an armoured hangar deck not an armored flight deck so in design principle the mortars were closer to something like the Essex's than they were to the British armored hangar on flight deck carriers now whilst the Midway was a superb carrier and the Midway Kloss showed that by their sheer longevity the Malta class I think went a little bit too far towards the mid world war two American design paradigm in as much as they had the open flight deck which is great especially the open hangar which is a good idea but moving the armor down to the armored hangar deck as opposed to the island flight deck I think was a mistake in the design I can understand why they did it I mean there's always the grass is greener on the other side approach but a Malta that was more closely aligned with a Midway style design ie not an armored hangar deck but with an armored flight deck would have given a nice balance between protection and ability to offer at large numbers of aircraft as opposed to the completely enclosed armored box that made up the majority of the British armored flight deck armored hangar carriers which was the main reason why they were so cramped and therefore restricted going into the post-war period now it's not just about protection it's also about ability to operate aircraft because aircraft as well as we know got heavier and heavier and heavier and a Midway for example with several inches of steel making up its flight deck you're gonna have to put a heck of a load on that before you break through whereas an unarmored flight deck can obviously of necessity be built lighter and therefore weaker and whilst that would have been fine for operating aircraft in the late 40s early 50s maybe pushing it into the 60s I have a feeling by the time you got around something the size and scale of the f4 phantom 2 they might well be regretting the fact that the flight deck is not as strong as it could otherwise have been so in that respect it's probably better the multi-class didn't get built because the Malta class would have well they would have effectively taken the place of Ark Royal and Eagle however many of them that got constructed and then the Royal Navy would have faced a very short sharp shock when it suddenly turned out that in the era of modern jet aircraft their giant aircraft carriers couldn't operate the biggest and heaviest of the modern fighters and bombers etc so unless they got something like CVA oh one in to replace them the that would have been quite bad whereas even with the CBO one cancellation the audacious claws were able to continue onwards now if they've made that slight tweak and put the armored deck at the flight deck levels then I would it be completely different you know it would have been yes definitely build the mortars because then you could hang on to them for as long as they hung on to Eagle and Ark Royal and that probably even longer with refit I mean you see how long the Midway stayed in service for example TC Green asks at the time of launch which ship was more powerful compared to its contemporaries hms warrior or HMS dreadnought and once - that is hms warrior by a country mile in that might come as a surprise to some but let me explain my reasoning HMS dreadnought was an iterative design step in terms of battleships armor wise sure its armor was a little bit thicker than previous pre-dreadnought designs but not all there were there was some pre dreadnoughts that were almost as well protected speed wise okay fair enough it was a bit fair bit faster I mean okay three knots doesn't sound like too much but it's a it's a fair chunk faster than the average pre-dreadnought and then guns yes it had more guns but its guns were the same as pretty much the last generation of projectiles indeed in order to finish it faster they stole the gun that were intended for the Lord Nelson class preach read notes because they were quite literally the same guns in the same turret so Jarrett Knox main advancement was putting all these new things together it was a bit faster than everyone else and it had new fire control systems and it went around with all these big guns but when you compared it to a lost generation prude riddles like say Lord Nelson or a Danton or a Connecticut etc etc those ships could still hurt a dreadnought okay one on one they'd lose but two on one okay maybe dreadnought would still beat them three on one four on one man now things are looking bad and even in a two on one or a one on one matchup the 12-inch guns that were equipped on the last generation free trade notes could sell her HMS dreadnought so it was superior but it wasn't massively like invincible whereas if you look at hms warrior when hms warrior came out he was a step change far greater than that at the time ver launched there was no ship of anything approaching warrior's scale that could catch her which in turn obviously meant warrior could run down pretty much any ship in the water her armament okay fair enough the 68 pounder in the one time that could be found on other ships but the number of them combined with the fact she had a Martin's shell Forge and well there it was a uniform um and her almond was top of the line kind of like HMS dreadnought but where it really comes into play is the armor warrior's armor was specifically configured to be basically immune to every single gun present or at the time known to be in development and play succeeded it basically couldn't be sunk by gunfire by [ __ ] other ships that were in service at the time and it was massively superior to laguardia competitor at the time now fair enough four or five years down the line there were guns that could pierce its armor and ten years down the line it was basically a second line ship but hey that's kind of the level of technological change that was going on at the time and be well if you look at 1916 Age mr. ed naught isn't looking spectacular either lined up against things like the Queen Elizabeth's the bayern and what the New Mexico's are just being laid down around at that point so Coralie hold that against warrior but yeah for the basically I'm scented that for the two or three years immediately after its launch warrior was pretty much unbeatable at sea whereas the two or three years after its launch HMS dreadnought was certainly king of the hill but could be dethroned by group action golf two four to eight asks say that project Habakkuk was actually made ignoring any logistics building it or any good arguments against it actually existing what would its impact be would it be stay assuming that it gets there without melting or sinking or where would it be session what aircraft do you think would be on it and do you think it would be effective in its role also will it keep cool and not melt so assuming they got one of these things running I think it's well the main station would be exactly where they designed it to be which would have been in the middle of the Atlantic to hope help close at the mid-atlantic gap now they're enough by the time they've actually built the thing chances are things like the b-24 etc will have closed the mid-atlantic gap to a certain extent anyway but it would allow the basing of significant numbers of smaller fast attack aircraft etcetera in the middle of that the Atlantic which would have allowed for more active prosecution of u-boats so I think that's where it probably would have been stationed you don't really need it off the northern coast of Europe because well you already have Britain there as an unsinkable aircraft carrier depending on the time it enter service I mean assuming enter service for some reasons I thought 43 ish there's not really a lot of point sending it to the Mediterranean a because well it's difficult to melt but sending it to the Mediterranean is just asking for trouble but be also I have serious concerns about the thing actually being able to clear the Straits of Gibraltar and being slow it would be subject to relentless air attack in in that area the only other area other than the Atlantic that I can see it possibly being deployed and if it's completed in late 43 or something like that would be maybe you load up with several hundred strike aircraft and go tooling off towards Norway and try and basically pull off a pearl harbor style strike off of one flight deck at the Tirpitz but that would be interesting considering it's a relatively slow speed need to think the Germans might notice it coming not what I could do a tremendous amount about it but there you go in terms of aircraft probably all the standard Royal Navy stuff you probably see like a sea mosquito or sea Beaufighter kind of thing I don't think they'd go on for full strategic bombers but certainly a lot of the twin-engined across they like the mosquito and the Beaufighter will probably see their deployment and also to be honest land-based fighters because at its size the concerns about using things like the tempest typhoon Spitfire etc that were very much real when it came to using them on normal aircraft carriers have probably gone away somewhat so possibly more capable strike aircraft in that respect would have been effective well in the mid-atlantic gap yeah probably assuming the Germans don't run wolf packet to death would have kept cool not melt well there's plenty of icebergs in the Atlantic with the appropriate systems given it took a couple of years to melt one that was smaller in in Canada without any refrigeration systems I think with refrigeration systems and such I don't think there's a tremendous risk of it melting away before the war's end Leon Wu asks how watches or shifts work on a warship how many are there how many hours are there in a watch do you get lunch in that watch how's it handled etc well the answer to this is that there is no single answer there are numerous ways of dividing up the watches aboard various ships and yeah it would take far too long to try and explain every single one in detail but broadly speaking when you're talking about watches of warships the first thing you need to work out is how many effectively crews are there because you well you can't run a ship on a single quote unquote crew because people have to sleep at some point and shockingly enough on a ship you can't just have the whole crew go to sleep overnight because then bad things tend to happen so a ship's crew will be made up of several teams and those teams will take turns at going on watch which mean turn means that you can then run the ship 24/7 so there are watched terms aboard some warships that use two teams they can be called something like gold and blue port and starboard alpha and Bravo or whatever you want to call them and in those sections obviously work is divided up between the two whereas in other navies you can also try running them in three three two watch units and at what obviously at that point then you effectively turn the ship over between three separate teams of people one thing that's relatively common across most watch systems is the idea of at least one shorter watch period depending on the system this can either be in the dead hours of the night or around about between two nine ten o'clock at night through 2:00 to 3:00 in the morning again depending on the Navy or sometimes it will be in the late afternoon where they'll might take a standard watch period and split it in half to allow everybody to eat around about the same time now one feature that's coming in most watch systems is that the watches will be divided into segments that are divisible by 24 for obvious reasons so four six and eight hour watches are found across various navies although there is also a system where you can have a set of five hour watches but then obviously that leaves you with a single for our watch and that tends to be the one that is pretty short over the middle of the night so yeah you could there's all sort of various combinations you can use in that one thing that is fairly common though across most warships is a three day cycle in in some watch systems you'll just have exactly the same duty at exactly the same time every day but that can get repetitive and boring very quickly so usually most watch systems we use a three day cycle where you will be alternating back and forth so let's take an example of say you've got a morning watch which might depending on the neighbor let's say it's running about from say seven till just before lunch at seven to eleven seven to twelve something like that you'll be on that shift one day and then the next day the other team will be on that and you'll get the morning the earlier morning or the early afternoon shift instead and that helps keep things alive and up so yes there's some examples but as I say unfortunately there is no uniform system of watches either in terms of number of teams or in number of hours so and even within an individual Navy depending on the operational needs of the ship of the watch system on an aircraft carrier might be very different to the watch system on a ballistic missile submarine do you get lunch in the watch no not usually not unless you're locked up at action stations and you've had to be there for ridiculous amounts of time almost every watch system that I've come across has a break between watches around either 12:00 or 1:00 o'clock which allows you to feed the crew that are about to go on watch off and then feed the crew that have just come up off of watch so you generally wouldn't be at meal while you are actually on watch well for obvious reasons it's very difficult to try and fire a gun or man an engine or shovel coal into a boiler or whatever else is you need to do when you're also trying to reach a decent food assuming of course that you know if he does serve decent food which depending on the errand depending on the Navy may be called into question luke Jewess asks how large would an aircraft carrier of the Second World War have had to be to operate medium bombers such as the b1 t5 Mitchell would this have served a useful purpose or just how non-practical would it have been well assuming that we're talking about a novelized version with folding wings arrest a hook etc the very very first thing you've got to work out is what exactly you defined by medium bomber now obviously if doing the example of a b-25 Mitchell but to to give a certain say level of example the b25 is certainly a medium bomber the de Havilland Mosquito is also medium bomber but when you compare the two the b25 is about eight foot longer and has least a good 13 foot on the wingspan height wise as near as makes no difference but basically the b25 is considerably larger aircraft so trying to operate something a like a b25 is going to be considerably harder logistically than operating something like a mosquito even though both are in fact medium bombers now obviously the Doolittle Raid to prove that technically you could fly b25 off of a carrier will be the necessarily the wisest of ideas they did have to be specially light and you definitely can't land one on a Yorktown but your single biggest problem is gonna be deck elevators to get them down into the hangars even folded it would be an incredibly tight squeeze to get a wings folded b25 on the elevator of an essex class and that should be the one aircraft so you'd be bringing them up onto deck wings welded and then having to basically set them up on deck so something like a Midway class elevator sighs wouldn't necessary be a problem the sheer scale of the aircraft though would mean you'd have very very few in the hangar and to be perfectly honest I don't even think a Midway is large enough to really land something like this very often now we do actually have a fairly decent metric weirdly enough for the b25 in the c2 Greyhound because it's roughly similar dimensions and weights so you can kind of look at the air aircraft carriers that can operate that and kind of take a reading so the smallest care that I could come across the successfully operates that c2 Greyhound is the French Charles de Gaulle so that kind of gives you an approximate idea of size albeit the officer is not gonna carry that many of them would it have served useful purpose probably not I mean by the time you have an aircraft carrier that can carry a meaningful number of medium bombers aircraft in general have grown to about that size some things like something like an f-14 at which point you don't need a medium bomber you just need a large fighter so yeah the only possible reason that I can think of to build a large enough aircraft carrier in the Second World War to operate a medium bomber would have been some kind of bizarre situation we're in Japan somehow magically fortified all of the various islands that it took to a point that it was Impractical to take them at which point you try and launch a strategic bombing campaign on Japan using big aircraft carriers but ya know there's not really a practical situation for launching large numbers of medium bombers from any kind of practical size aircraft carrying the Second World War Robert Henry Elston asks did any navies try to develop point defense systems against torpedoes ID by firing projectiles at them to explode or disrupt their track he has been tried at various points however they've always run into problems as can be seen here this was a rather ambitious and T torpedo torpedo system along with a combined with active sonar that was installed on US carriers but after half a decade of trying they couldn't get the blasted thing to work and they're now ripping out so there have been the occasional lucky shot that's taken out a torpedo I mean there's an account of even a merchantman where a guy with a rifle managed to blow up an incoming German torpedo by taking a blind shot with a 303 but that's very few and far between and almost certainly caused by the fact that torpedo was running shallow basically the problem is the medium the torpedo travels through water is hugely shock-absorbent I mean that's one of the reasons why torpedo explosions are so lethal because the water prevents the explosion from going in much of any direction other than into the ship where there's air which is much easier for the explosion to vent into and so if you try and shoot at it with a shell the shells either going to break up or stop moving in very shortly after entering the water and torpedos can run a lot deeper than that when with the really big guns well you don't tend to be able to depress them down to the point where you can reliably engage a torpedo at relatively close range and even if you some how could they be the explosion of a shell that detonates nearby probably what effect a torpedo all that much because in the water damping the explosion and the fact the torpedo is actually moving a ferrell clip so people forget torpedoes way well over a ton even by World War one standards and probably more than that now so to kill a torpedo you'd basically have to drop a ridiculous amount of explosive somewhere nearby something like along the lines of a depth charge and you'd have to have it sink down to the right depth which is a bit of an interception problem when you talking about - Oh Peter that's moving relatively quickly underwater and the limitations on the speed of things sinking underwater all you'd have to engage it directly with something that impacts it within a force to kill it which would be yeah either another torpedo or an auntie torpedo to a pedo and as we said both of those have had problems in even working now in the 21st century so yeah various navies at various times have tried no one so far to my knowledge has actually succeeded Douglas Peck asks a couple of fairly substantial questions one of which boils down to effectively have I read the book Malta convoys by David a Thomas and how accurate is it there's personal reasons he's asking that question and secondly also related to that do you know if the Royal Navy recorded an archive service history of when the sailors were transferred to various ships and if so is there any way for someone not a citizen of the UK to look up or inquire about this the service history of a particular sailor in terms of the book Malta convoys I can't give you a straight answer right now because I actually do have the book it's sitting on my shelf but it is sitting in the queue of books to read as via various methods both by purchase and by kind donation from subscribers I seem to be acquiring new books at the rate of about two or three a week and I can only read so fast but to be honest I could probably read them all up at the time but I I don't have the time so I think I'm I'm gradually falling behind on my reading list but yes so when I actually have had a chance to read through it I will be able to give you a more accurate answer on that now in terms of the other question that much I can definitely help you with cuz I've been through this process a few times myself so yes the service records of men in the Royal Navy will always record when they served on various ships and when they transferred to new ships so as well as obviously various other bits and pieces so that kind of information if that's what you're looking for is definitely there now in terms of trying to get that information what you needed to do is go to the gov website which is where the UK government basically puts everything these days and the exact web link is very long but basically if you search UK government copy of military service records it should be the first or second result on Google and once you're there you have four options overview which you can read if you want apply for your own records which is not the case or apply for the records of someone who's deceased which is what you'll select and if you want to complain which hopefully you won't so when you're applying for the record of someone who is deceased then you bail we'll just read it from the government website it says you can apply for a copy of someone else's service records if any of the following apply if you're the immediate next of kin for example a spouse parent or locals the lone surviving child or you have consent from their immediate next of kin or you have a general research interest in this bed in that case you'll only have limited information unless the person in question died more than 25 years ago you will need to know their full name their date of birth and their service number and then you there are two forms to fill in a request form in a search form and then that you can download there's two form options one if you are next of kin or you have next of Kin's consent and the other one if you don't and you're just looking for general information and that's there Qwest form and then there's the search form which they've got a section for the wrong Navy a section for the Army section for the RAF it will cost about 30 quid plus postage and then you will end up hopefully with the records that you would like yes if you want to do some research as you've indicated in your patron question you actually do then good luck with that and hopefully that you'll get the results you want if you need any help please drop me a line via email and I'll try and guide you through the process as much as I can as I set up I've been through this process four or five times for various people in my immediate family who've been in the military my various great uncles as I've alluded to in previous videos my great grandfather and my great great grandfather although as it turned out the steps I should have taken for the latter two were to go to something like ancestry all because those records are available for free because they predate in 1920 Matt Blum asks I read in the book of the rules of the game Jutland and British naval command by Andrew Gordon the British officers paid out of their own pockets to repaint their ships how did this tradition get started and why would the Admiralty of the world superpower not pay for this well the answer is that the Royal Navy would pay for ships to be painted but there's a difference between what is militarily miss set necessary hurt for a ship to be painted and what officers might like so where this tradition got started was all the way back in the age of sail and it was pretty much the same reasons the Navy would pay for a ship to be painted where it was necessary I eat preserve its structure against weathering whether that be wood or iron or steel the Navy would allow a certain amount of weathering to take place on the paint and once it reached a certain level then the Navy would repaint it there were two issues with this officers though quite often one of which was that the Navy would provide only paint in navy colors which well if you're in the first world war period is varying shades of the color gray and back in the HSL obviously red yellow black that kind of stuff and so if you wanted the ship painted any other kind of color of any description or you just wanted to trim the ship in fancy colors especially when Victorian era when peacetime color schemes were a thing the Royal Navy wasn't gonna fork out for that or if you wanted a better quality of paint for example the Royal Navy wasn't gonna fork out for that either so you would have to pay over for that and the other thing is especially in the latter part of the 19th century and in various other phases of the Royal Navy's history there was quite the obsession with the ship being [ __ ] and span and one of the easiest ways to make a ship [ __ ] and span was to repaint it because well if any of you've heard tried to scrub coal dust out of anything you'll know it's pretty much a hiding to nothing so as much as it just oh you know it was slap another coat of paint on that and again the Royal Navy was in the business of preserving it ships against rust it was not in the business of paying to repaint the ship every five minutes because there was a speck of dirt somewhere so if the officers really wanted to keep their ships looking absolutely pristine 100% of the time that was going to require a lot of paint and the world then was time to reach into your own wallet emerald Leafeon asks what is your favorite ship that was entirely impractical I think most favourite impractical ship has to go to the tesara con Terry's I think that's how pronounced I know there's a few Greek viewers so if I've horribly butchered that my apologies please correct me but yes this was just some absolutely ugh Antron monstrous thing that was built in the immediate pre roman period in the Mediterranean and this picture doesn't necessarily entirely do it justice will be it that the size is probably about right well you can see the little trireme down there imagine one of those as you can see super-sized except now there are two of them arranged in a catamaran formation with a deck in between kind of like a weird wooden or propelled aircraft carrier it was reputedly so ridiculously impractical that they basically launched it went well we managed to do a thing we have literally no idea what we're gonna do with it now so we're going to quietly shuffle off into a harbor and forget about it because that's all a bit embarrassing I mean there's really big stuff that was built in the ancient world like the Syracuse here for example but at least that had some practical use this thing appeared to be kind of well just say that they got it into the water and then realized the ridiculous numbers of men needed to man it basically when it couldn't go anyway because he would run out of food and water long before it got to its destination so that was fun they basically building a small artificial island with a couple of RAM bells bill luster asks did Germany try using blockade runners in the Atlantic during the world wars I thought I read something about u-boats visiting America in 1917 at one point so yes blockade runners were tried in both world wars in and in both world wars these surface blockade runners eventually well actually relatively quickly came to a halt during World War one that was basically because to get in to german-held waters you had to come through the English Channel or via the North Sea and both of those were heavily blockaded by the Royal Navy so very few surface ships actually got through and the ones that did basically either got through badly damaged or with such limited cargo just wasn't worth it so that ran out pretty quickly there were a couple of merchant submarines the Deutschland and Bremen which yeah well Bremen went missing on its first voyage but Deutschland actually made a number of voyages specializing as you might imagine for a 1500 tonne odd submarine in low volume high value goods so rem materials gems money things like nickel and suchlike medication all of this kind of stuff was carried by those emotion submarines although with America entering the war its number the number of his voyages weren't too great they also did try famously resupplying their East African section with a blockade running zeppelin but that didn't work out for them quite as well as they'd hoped in the Second World War despite the advance of naval technology surface Catering has actually lost it a bit longer that was largely down to the fact that Germany managed to capture France and so could send ships out from the French Atlantic ports which of course until allied airpower and submarines etc really got going made it very hard to intercept the ships just after that left and the sea is a very big place without things like really powerful radars massive numbers of search aircraft and satellites it was very difficult then to track down surface blockade blockade runners once they'd gotten out into the Atlantic as opposed to when Germany was just confined to Germany there were obviously the natural choke points that we mentioned before still once allied airpower and shipping did really get going it was very difficult for the surface blockade runners to work so another set of cargo submarines albeit this these ones converted actual u-boats as opposed to purpose-designed cargo subs did try and go on missions obviously the u.s. entered the war significantly earlier proportional to the length of the war in World War two as compared to World War one so that was off the table but there was a limited amount of trade between Japan and Germany via various submarines and the occasional attempt by aircraft although again not really that practical in this time period Nick boy 302 asks three questions during and after the Meiji Restoration in the Imperial Japanese army base itself heavily off the Prussian or German army did the Imperial Japanese Navy base itself so heavily on other navies or was it more flexible in whom it imitated second do you think the actions of ordinary seaman Teddy Sheehan during the sinking of HMAS are mandel or deserving a Victoria Cross and third why do Stoker's have such a bad reputation well in classic reverse order Stoker's have a bad reputation effectively based on class and tradition based snobbery in the age of sail in the 19th century that is because when Stoker's first had to come aboard a ship there we were still very much in the era of the age of sail wooden warships etc etc and unfortunately they also came about in a period where at least in the Western European world there wasn't a vast amount of actual naval conflict which meant that the various navies were setting a little bit into the whole we must have everything pretty and well painted and clean otherwise our life is not worth living phase at least as far as the officers were concerned and we are still in a period when the officers were pretty much almost entirely made up of people from the aristocracy or if they were really scraping the bottom of the barrel the gentry Stoker's on the a hand tended to come from so shall we say some of the more practical classes of the various nations obviously Britain France in particular and with their fires and their certain their smoke and their coal dust they tended to make everything including themselves and all the lovely pristine sales just a little bit dirty which didn't go down very well with all the officers who obsess with everything being [ __ ] and span and nice and polished because a ship that was still entirely sail powered could make a rightful mockery of the absolute state that a sailing steamship was in by the time any kind of meaningful voyage was done never mind the fact the sailing steamship probably got there quicker and also had far less chance running aground but there you go and as a result the Stoker's will look down upon on both grounds they were dirtying up the ship and they didn't particularly care and also they were the social inferiors of the officers by and large to the point that in the Royal Navy for example although the incredibly complex skills of naval engineering were recognized to the point that entire schools were set up specifically to train such valuable artificers and Stoker's and engineering officers those officers were still excluded from the general officers mess and wardroom for quite a while and also not even technically permitted to be on the same rank structure again for quite a few decades so they were kind of viewed as a necessary evil for a lot of the time and thus they developed a bit of a reputation based on that hearsay which is a bit unfortunate really because at the end of the day without their leadership ain't going anywhere fast now for the story of Teddy Sheehan it's necessary to give a bit of a background as to what on earth he was doing and why he might be eligible for Ric Torre across so the potted history of the relevant parts at least are the Sheehan was assigned to HMAS Armidale which was a rather small Corvette locally built in Australia it was used for all sorts of purposes but direct combat with the enemy unless they were a submarine wasn't really supposed to be one of them it found itself traveling alone which it probably shouldn't have done given that its original plan was to rendezvous with another ship Boston company with a third so it should have been a three ship formation but it wasn't and they were wandering around doing their own thing they then got attacked by a baker's dozen of Japanese aircraft which did not go well for the Corvette unsurprisingly enough the Corvette was hit by torpedoes as well as bombs both with the bombs both hits and near misses and unsurprisingly when you put a couple of torpedoes into a roughly thousand ton Corvette it tends to sink relatively quickly plus of course the Japanese were strafing the thing so roller understandably the crew was evacuating out to their boat to their boats the ones that they had that had survived the attack at least and during this particular escapade into the water the ship was strafed repeatedly by a Japanese aircraft Shion who was as pop the crew helping everyone into the boats was hit by the one of these air strafing runs he was hit by two bullets but instead of deciding well I've been wounded by a being literally being shot up by a machine gun I should probably go and lie down in a boat somewhere and fairly legitimately hope to be taken to safety he instead did a very Australian thing which is he got incredibly irritated with the Japanese aircraft that had the temerity to shoot at him and so instead of as I said climbing into a lifeboat he decided that he was going to go back aboard the ship which at this point was at something had been an increasingly worrying list strap himself in to one of the 20-millimeter anti-aircraft cannons that was still functioning and decided to open fire at the Japanese who were still buzzing the sinking vessel this had quite the effect as previously the Japanese aircraft had been looking to finish off their kill by strafing the ship and boats and people who are in the water but strafing helped the sailors as one thing trying to do that whilst a very angry young Australian you're shooting at you with the 20 millimeter cannon is quite at something else and they were unable to effectively attack the rest of the survivors that in and of itself would be an incredibly brave act regardless of whether or not you've just been shot repeatedly by machine-gun but not only did he do this and actually succeed in shooting down one of the Japanese planes and probably damaging several others he decided that as the Armidale was continuing to sink he wasn't going to abandon his post and try and make it into the water would make it to a boat because he knew that the minute that he did that it was highly likely that the Japanese would recommence their attack and so he just continued to shoot at the Japanese even as his position was dragged under water with a number of survivors mentioning that they actually saw 20 millimeter tracer fire coming out from under the water briefly after the ship disappeared underneath it indicating that even as the ship carried him down to his ultimate doom she--and was still trying to protect his crew by shooting at anything that he could see now quite how he didn't get a Victoria Cross at that point he's to me a little bit odd because what is the Victoria Cross for it's for valor and as I said you would probably give some kind of medal for valor to someone who'd been shot and continued to help evacuate the ship you would give a medal for valor for someone who returned to a sinking ship and used for the remaining guns to try and protect the rest of his shipmates you would probably give some kind of medal for valor to somebody who went down with the ship in the process of defending their shipmates when they didn't have to for someone who voluntarily went back to the ship strapped himself in fire on enemy aircraft and shot some of them down and went down with the ship specifically to enable him to continue defending his crewmates for as long as possible after having been wounded and therefore having an entirely legitimate reason for and making sure he stayed on one of the lifeboats there's an awful lot of people and this isn't to diminish that with any other winners of the Victoria Cross but there's an awful lot of people who have won Victoria Crosses for things that are arguably somewhat less valorous than that particular set of circumstances so yeah I think if they do yet another review of things he almost certainly should be awarded such such a medal - slightly twist a quote from the great londo mollari of Babylon 5 and when it comes our time to die we can most most of us can only hope to pass with half as much dignity as he would have had at the end now as far as the Imperial Japanese Navy goes it modeled itself in some ways relatively like the Imperial Japanese Army buddy it wasn't so much flexible as much as it was a little bit more adaptable and that is splitting hairs I know but you'll see what I mean initially when the Japanese were still very much in the isolationist phase most of their influence and indeed the very start of what would later become the Imperial Japanese Navy was based around the Dutch who were pretty much the only people who are allowed to trade regularly with Japan before the Americans forced them to trade more openly and at the time the Dutch were albeit not first here maritime power they were still definitely a relatively major maritime power at least as far as the world was concerned outside of Western Europe and so as I said the first the first iterations of Japanese modern naval building were based on them however there was a reasonable amount of French influence but by the time the Imperial Japanese Navy as they properly going concerned got established it was decreed that they would use the British Royal Navy as their template however after building up their initials of officer corps ranking system and quite a lot of their ships dockyards etc following the Royal Navy's practices and procedures due to the size of their economy and everything else related to their naval infrastructure as compared to their nearest rivals in places like China they then went on a little bit of a diverted course and decided to adopt French tactics and practices and in some cases shipbuilding practice practice and technique as well in generating their fleet in the saw 1870s 1880s they've effectively went after the French Nicole style which meant that for a while they were a weird hybrid of a corps of Royal Navy derived traditions ranks behaviors etc but with a very French style actual fleet and tactics then they fought the Chinese and they discovered that the Unocal tactics didn't work quite as well as the French had thought they would and they began to rapidly drop that in favor of adopting a the British methods much more full-on in terms of building up a battle line etc etc to the point that by the time he got to the Battle of Tsushima not only did the [ __ ] Imperial Japanese Navy in many ways it resembled the Royal Navy in miniature but there were even quite a significant number of British observers aboard the Japanese ships during the battle and some of the most detailed english-language accounts are from those people who were basically standing there taking notes on how the Japanese Navy's mostly at this point British designed vessels performed against the mostly French derived in designed vessels of the Russian Imperial maybe no and well missed the Battle of Tsushima we all know how well that went the Japanese at that point were then beginning to develop much more strongly their own traditions and infrastructure so whereas at the Battle of Tsushima the vast majority of their important capital assets were British built by the time you got to World War one the Japanese had home built about half of their at the time modern fleet and were rapidly transitioning away towards building everything in their own shipyards which would then obviously continue through the latter part World War one and into the interwar and World War two periods so yes the Japanese Navy flirted around a little bit with various tabes but the strongest single foreign influence they modeled themselves on up until the point they decided to do their own thing completely was the Royal Navy Baili in Aurora I think um apologies cuz I'm almost certainly got that wrong asks how does the great Michael rate against the Mary Rose and other tutor ships of the time and how true is it that it was a precursor to the ships of the line now I did cover how the great Michael rated up against the Henry grass ad year the English flagship of the period and built in response to its construction in drydock episode 67 so I won't rehash that particular part of things but I mean the great Michael was eight large ship it was considerably larger than most English capital ships at the time albeit that they did depend obviously as I said go and build a Henry grass idea even bigger purely in response to it because well that's how Kings showed off at the period in terms of facing off against the mary-rose the great Michael is larger displaces more alone by the time that of Mary Rose being in the classic configuration that we think now wasn't that far off size-wise Mary Rose had actually more guns but possibly slightly fewer heavy guns and more anti-personnel guns so in a fight ironically enough the Mary Rose properly stands a reasonably decent chance mainly on the grounds that it was well at least up until the point it rolled on its side and sank reputed to be a relatively decent sailor to the point the records of the time indicate that people had a great deal of difficulty in choosing which was the superior vessel between the much larger and more powerful Henry gray serger and the Mary Rose so with the with its more considerable anti-personnel battery and the fact that well larger long-distance canons didn't fire particularly often or particularly accurately I think in a one-on-one between the two the Mary Rose has a reasonable chance of actually sailing in close enough to unleash hell with it with its numerous center personnel guns sweep the decks and try to board albeit as you might appreciate with these soft 16th century galleons and they're stupidly high castles any kind of such Enterprise would be effectively like trying to have a sword fight on the back of an elephant with somebody else who's also got a sword on the back of another slightly larger elephant so yeah not not exactly the world's most elegant of procedures but never mind in terms of it being a precursor to the ships of the line not really to be perfectly honest I mean none of the capital ships of this period can really be said to be the precursors of the ships of the line except for the fact that they were relatively large for their time wooden warships that had broadside cannon but broadside cannon were hardly an innovation particular to them or to that time period it had started a little bit earlier and it would continue to develop for a little bit further on to go the Mary Rose the Henry Graff Sergio the great Michael etc the main reason that you can't really put them into the sort of timeline of development for ships of the line outside of they had some broadside heavy guns comes down again to those ridiculous looking castles they were still very much designed for boarding actions on the great Michael the number of Marines I people who would defend the ship and boar dare to be vessels vastly outnumber the number of Gunners and there is not really any concept within either the English or Scottish fleets at the time for anything resembling a line of battle and so the real precursors are the ship of the line in terms of vessels designed to fight as a vaguely homogeneous group using primarily guns as the deciding factor of war is probably you're looking at something like the race built galleons of the mid to late Elizabethan era which is still half a century away at the point of the great Michael is constructed so yeah I mean the grapevine called Mary rose and Henry grass serger and all the with other similar ships they basically point to the kind of floating fortress dead end of capital ship design that would be if it advised in some ways and possibly in some ways slightly over much in the Spanish galleons of the Armada period with the the low-cut galleons of some of the English fleet and subsequently the Dutch fleet and others really being the sort of derivative from them which was actually the ancestor of the ship of the line nicolai flew asks when did warships and submarines gain the capability of measuring depth under their keel using sonar and not using ropes and weights the use of sound to measure depth was first pioneered by the Germans in the 1910s ironically enough in the middle of the first world war well I guess at that point there won't be had a decent used for it coming up but it wasn't made practical during that conflict the first practical devices were manufactured in the 1920s but first as experimental units and then later as production units and so the installation of board military vessels in terms of widespread use wouldn't really start until the 1930s and thereafter albeit that obviously introduction of any kind of new technology like that is a relatively slow process and so not all ships would have such capability at the same time at least until well everyone had caught up Luc's the Lynx asks what was the difference between a culverin and a regular cannon in the later age of sail effectively a culverin was in some ways kind of the precursor to trying to develop a high velocity long barrel a naval gun as opposed going for just flat-out bigger naval and that's because compared to a regular cannon a culverin had a longer barrel considerably longer in most cases but a smaller bore so it would fire a higher velocity but lower weight shot at will to see relatively high speeds and therefore on a flatter trajectory than the average cannon in this particular case these are two guns required recovered sorry from the mary-rose the one in the front is a culverin and the one at the back is a wrought iron cannon and although this case the cannon is almost as long as the court friend it's not quite but you can also see that hopefully even in this picture that the bore diameter of the bronze cauldron at the front is actually significantly smaller than that of the slightly shorter cannon at the back which kind of makes the point so the coverin was designed with the idea of trying not so much to get penetration because against most wooden ships that wasn't really so much of a problem it was more about trying to get range and also accuracy at range because the lower velocity higher shot weight cannons a wouldn't shoot as far and be when they did there was a fair amount of drop whereas using something like a culverin you could achieve a longer range which in theory would allow you to hit targets arranged at a Canon II that couldn't reach or couldn't hit accurately act and whilst this did start to drop off fairly rapidly in shipping due to the fact that most culverin shot weights were still relatively low and the sides of wooden warships especially the ships of the line could get to a point where they could protect themselves from Culver and wate shot at long distance but not so much from something like a 24 or 32 pounder cannon on land where targets were considerably squishier and less well built than a ship-of-the-line culver uns did hang around a lot longer because the range advantage was still there and quite useful without the necessity of having to worry about damage done because let's face at the end of the day if you get hit by 32 pound cannon shot traveling at several hundred meters per second you're probably about as dead as you are if you get hit by a 10 pound call for an shot that was traveling 30% faster about the only difference it might make is just quite how far the various bits of you go Daniel Ziegler asks what is your most hated conspiracy theory myth urban legend etc concerning naval history or one that's done the most harm well I'm picking a top one is going to be very difficult so I'll give you a small selection of the ones that really make my blood boil when I see them too that come from the Battle of Jutland is the idea that the Royal Navy couldn't shoot straight and that the Royal Navy's ships especially the battle cruisers were poorly armored in both cases easy tropes and memes to make but actually not true in the slightest British battle cruisers gunnery as I've mentioned in previous Drydocks was awful but actually fifth battle squadron and grand fleet gunnery was superior to the gunnery of the high seas fleet and the battle cruiser fleet and that's provable by any decent analysis of Jutland and likewise with the battle cruiser armoring know the british battle cruisers at least that the lying class and its derivatives were not poorly armored their armor scheme actually stood up pretty well in many cases the actual armor scheme stood up significantly better than the German battlecruisers because of the disparity between firepower and armor protection that was present in the two separate design lineages the one sets that were poor poorly armored were the invincible class in derivatives that much is true uh-hum albeit that only contributed to the loss of one of them the main contributing factor to the loss of invincible and Queen Mary as well as a number of other ships was poor ammunition handling and slightly less than optimal choices of propellant this latter one especially does get on my nerves because it then gets brought up as some kind of continuation factor somehow lessons weren't learned with the destruction of the hood because again hoods destruction was as far as I can tell and as far as will be covered in an upcoming video at some point later this year not really anything to do with its main belt armor or its deck armor but both of which are usually the pop-culture go twos as to why the hood exploded other ones that really get on my nerves are oh the American government knew about and allowed the Pearl Harbor attacks to to be done by the Japanese just to get into the war there are a lot of easier where he said getting into evolved in a world war two and quite frankly if your idea of let's get involved in world war two by letting somebody blow up a significant part of what at the time we believed to be our primary striking power um yeah that doesn't work it's just flatter I mean never mind that well not even effectively the literally treasonous nature of that kind of thing if you were going to allow Pearl Harbor to attack if you had previous knowledge of it it's just it's a thoroughly stupid stupid way of going about things and people who were that stupid would have also managed to somehow lose the war despite being in charge of America and the fact that America didn't lose a home when it fought Japan rather speak to the fact that well the people weren't mouth-breathing morons and the other one that gets me quite a lot is the fact that well at least as far as the general Internet is concerned the German ships particularly particularly those the Kriegsmarine a-- appear to be one of two extremes if you believe the most common postings they're either sort of complete uber ships that could only be taken down by cheating and mass numbers or else their basic tier trash that got lucky neither of which is true and if you if you read like any decent naval research book or historical book published by a good naval historian I mean the battleship Bismarck book recently published by by three very prominent naval historians here's a good example that any geese decent naval book will point out the like pretty much everybody else the German ships had their strengths they had their weaknesses and some of those weaknesses were ones of the the Allies and even the Japanese didn't actually have neither do the Italians because of their greater experience with continuous ship design so yeah they make mistakes there were problems that doesn't mean the ships sucked it just means they weren't as good as they could have been but you can apply that equally across the board to all sorts of designs shockingly enough it turns out that as with everybody else the Germans designed ships that at the end of the day I had a degree of balance to them yes the Bismarck class was incredibly inefficient for its size and displacement that doesn't mean it was a terrible warship it just means it could have been better the Scharnhorst class were pretty nice designs but suffered from being extremely wet and had a rather anemic armament albeit they were planned to be upgraded and so on and so on and so forth down the line but at the same time you can point all sorts of similar things out with other nations designs that for example say the north carolina's nicely armed for the first couple of years they couldn't move particularly quickly and there are mosquitoes of fisk good armour scheme can actually move at a decent clip would have probably been much better with the three triple 15-inch turrets that were originally considered and also actually having anti-aircraft fire control systems and ammunition that worked in the tropical environment for the first few years of the war his lordship asks what is the story of the last successful opposed boarding action of a warship at sea not counting the occasional occupation of a forced to surface u-boat and when did Navy stop training their regular ship crewmen to undertake boarding actions as opposed to ships hosting specialist Marines or seal types so if you're excluding u-boats and we're talking about opposed boarding actions ie where the crew actually fights back to try and retain their ship and we're also talking about warships or ships in the service of a navy then it's probably a toss-up between various small boarding actions that were fought in the English Channel and the North Sea between the German and British coastal flotilla things like a boat's or s boats doing on how you like to pronounce them and the MT B's and mgp's of the Royal Navy for larger ships you're probably looking at something that might be the altmark incident since the German crew of the altmark did try to resist the boarding parties of HMS Cossack but beyond that there's there's very little in terms of opposed boarding actions the don't involve u-boats from that period and precious little still thereafter and that kind of relates to when Navy stopped training their crewmen to undertake or indeed resist boarding actions there basically comes about due to the increasing prevalence of automatic weapons crewman was still being drilled in Cutlass and bayonet drill into the early 1900's indeed there are many well not many but there are some pictures of various ship's crews undergoing Cutlass bayonet or rifle drill on the decks of their ships in the time period of the run-up to and even in some cases during World War one but this kind of drill seems to have died off during and shortly after World War one so in different navies it was stopped at different times but generally speaking by the time you get sort of the mid interwar period and into World War two although ships crew would still be expected to fight there wasn't a tremendous amount of dedicated training for boarding actions and they're like hence why you get some of the rather more comical melee actions that occasionally pop up in World War two where everyone is willing to help but not everybody has what you would otherwise classify as a proper weapon in order to do so Nathan Huey asks alternative history question how might the Pacific Theater have unfolded if say in 1936 the USA had stolen plans for the type 93 long Lance whilst the Imperial Japanese Navy had some taneous Lee managed to acquire plans for the 20-millimeter Oerlikon and 40-millimeter Bofors this particular trade favors the Japanese Navy a little bit more than the US Navy and they might think on the face of it that seems a bit absurd considering that well the Japanese already had some form of anti-aircraft defense whereas the US Navy might as well have not had a torpedo for the first couple of years of the war but the long Lance type 93 in particular is a 24 inch torpedo now even assuming that Buell realizes what it's got in terms of the propulsion mechanism and fuel plans the simple fact of the matter is the US Navy doesn't have at this point 24 inch torpedo tubes on its submarines or on its destroyers and you're not carrying a 24 inch torpedo on a aircraft anytime soon which makes it somewhat less useful now if we're talking about a situation where you're actually does its job for a change and they are willing to produce a Americanized version of something that they've captured plans for a much better thing for them to catch will be the type 95 torpedo and that was effectively a 21 inch derivative of the type 93 long lance which was then used in Japanese submarines now that would give the u.s. a huge advantage because now they have not only a working torpedo but also working torpedo that's significantly longer range and quite a bit quicker than a Mach 14 even on its good days so yeah the slight modification there but would be incredibly useful if it was a type 95 less surface a type 93 with the Imperial Japanese Navy their main problem with the plans for the Oerlikon and Bofors would be production now they've they were able to churn out a fairly scary number of 25 millimeter guns but the getting the production up with enough numbers in what five or so years from plans to building testing development installation mass production it's gonna take him it's going to be a little bit of a while to get that sorted once if they do get it sorted if they're able to produce them in the kind of numbers they did produce the 25 build a meter and then that makes life a lot lot harder for the US Navy particularly the Bofors with the 20-millimeter Oerlikons ill increase casualties but it's less likely to increase to decrease sorry the Japanese Navy's losses and this was one of the reasons why the all can start to be supplanted by the Bofors during the war it's because it was found that the ol Atkins general effective engagement range turned out to be roughly contemporaneous with when various aircraft were releasing their weapons and not before that whereas the Bofors could reach out to past where the aircraft was dropping its bomb or torpedo and shoot them down before the weapons release occurred so it depends which of the two they adopt say the a mass deployment of all Atkins the US Navy will lose a lot more aircraft but the Japanese are probably still going to lose roughly the same amount of ships in given engagements whereas if they manage to if they go with the Bofors then things get a lot lot nastier but that said at the end of the day we are looking at a situation where at that point both sides have the orluk ins and the Bofors and the US Navy can produce a lot more aircraft and train a lot more pilots so in the end the head probably going to come out on top as they historically did and if they do have copies of the type 95 sitting in their torpedo tubes come December 7th 1941 well let's just say a lot of those all look-ins and polkas might end up on the ocean floor before they get the chance to so much to send a single shell downrange at an American aircraft Cicero asks do you think the Atlantic loss was a good investment of resources for the US Navy since it never really functioned that well in its intended role but did work role wet work well as an anti-air craft Cruiser and if you don't think they should have been built what would you replace them with so the Atlantic loss as originally designed was very much in the mold of the Omaha cross cruisers from just after the end of the first world war in as much as they were supposed to be Scouts and flotilla leaders for destroys that didn't really work out so well the only time the US Navy tried to use that lanters in surface combat they ended up getting sunk because it turns out something that it has not that much more protection than a destroyer but is a much bigger target tends to get chewed up very easily now they did serve relatively well as anti-aircraft cruisers but even in that role with the advancing of technology they had a lot of problems with top weight to the point that later versions sometimes called the Oakland sub class the hatch actually removed to the 5-inch 38 mounts just to stop and rolling over now such I don't think they were the world's best investment of resources for the US Navy personally they could have done better now in terms of what they could have done better it depends entirely on what it is they are aiming for if they want to try and replace it with another form of light cruiser I don't think there's that much that would reasonably be said to be a good replacement because the existing classes of like cruise the US Navy a building at that point are all much larger than the Atlanta so I don't think that's really on the cards because it's just gonna be more expensive and you're getting just another light cruiser the US Navy has a fair number of them in terms of what I personally think they should should have replace them with or built instead of if you're looking for something that's a flotilla leader but also has relatively decent anti-aircraft capability I actually think that some marginally enlarged and modified version of the Sommers class destroyers would actually be a good bet because the Sommers class originally come with for the dual purpose twin 5-inch 38 mounts which gives them an almond exactly half that of an original Atlanta except that if you get two of them all their guns on the centerline so you actually get an extra turret or mount facing the enemy which is always good and there's two targets which means you can lose one and you've still got the other one afloat cost-wise a summers even allowing for a bit of inflation and modification comes in at under 50% the cost of an Atlanta so you can get two summers plus change or two modified summers plus change for the price of a single Atlanta you also save about 75 to 80 personnel in terms of crew so you're not actually increasing your crew but you're actually decreasing your crew budget and as destroyers they're not that much shorter than Atlanta they're obviously much better able to operate destroyers that kind of um is going to be pretty nasty to face off against so they work very well as flotilla leaders and well it's the 538 so it's going to make a decent anti-aircraft mounting as well this is one of the main modifications you'd make because the porters and some has built only had surface action at twin mounts so the main modification will be making sure you use the dual purpose mount so yeah going with that going with one of those probably get a couple of dozen bill and relative that's the other thing relatively quickly you can turn those out faster than you can turn out Atlanta's so you'd end up with more destroyers with heavy arm so in surface actions if they can throw down more shells they're harder to hit and they also have torpedoes and probably can send out even if you eliminate at like one of the mounts you're still going to be sending out more torpedoes than an outlander can per side it costs less to lose it cost you less in personnel and it costs you less in money so folks of class building scale you can even afford to get more than a two to one exchange rate of a modified Sanders for Atlanta's Oh Alexander lucky asks what would be the results if the for iowa-class battleships as upgraded in the 1980s were sent back to 1941 with two in the Pacific and the other two in the Atlantic well assuming that they get sent back with the crews who know how to man them and use their weapon systems etc they're not that much heavily modified compared to their 1941 farad's will fair enough so it's still being built in 1941 but you get the idea they've got more modern radar yes great but the US Navy back in that in 1940's had a radar advantage anyway the main thing is gonna be well they're gonna be a spit easier to defend from air attack thanks to having CIWS systems aboard but they're also going to primarily be useful through the fact they're carrying the harpoon and tomahawk missiles now if they're carrying the naval tomahawk missiles it just gets silly so we're going to assume that they're carrying the land attack versions which they historically most likely were given that they were also fitted with harpoons now between their UAVs and the harpoons that does make taking out some ships a bit easier because they can use either reports from aerial spotting or the UAVs themselves to find Japanese ships beyond anyone's gun range and send a harpoon or two downrange to [ __ ] or destroy it and then follow it up with guns so that'll increase their kilrush ratios a little bit but the main thing is the tomahawks because if they can target the tomahawks well even assuming they're not carrying any reloads you're still talking about 128 precision attack munitions which are relatively unlikely to fail and also very unlikely to be shot down so in the Pacific they're probably be used against point targets during the advance through various parts of the japanese-held islands might be used against something like say a major Factory in Japan or maybe the Anchorage's that say something I like truck if they know that a particular ship is in a particular location obeah is going to be a little bit less precise sense obviously GPS doesn't exist in 1941 again after rely on an inertial guidance only but the two in the Atlantic it can be far far far more useful because there's a lot of of a very very very nice juicy point targets in that form of certain key German factories oil refineries in places like Romania and really important targets like say something like Tirpitz where the location is fairly well known and I have a feeling that that would be where the modernized iowa's would see their most critical use it would be basically using their tomahawks to snipe off key targets and then once they run out well it's an iowa-class battleship with slightly better with somewhat better radar and some harpoons so they're gonna just be even deadlier surface combatants than they already were léa ops 1984 asks your thoughts on Admiral Kimmel at Pearl Harbor was he unfairly blamed for systemic errors or did he make Inc incorrect decisions of that were blame worthy I think a troll Kimmel generally got a little bit of the short end of the stick when it came to his treatment post Pearl Harbor I mean ultimately owned today he was the commanding officer and the attack on Pearl Harbor happened on his watch and the buck does stop with the commanding officer so in that in as much as that respect is concerned it was right that he was put under scrutiny for his preparations or lack thereof at Pearl Harbor however the extent to which he was made the scapegoat and the fact that he was charged with everything up to an including dereliction of duty is I think far far too harsh he did what he could given the circumstances funding and willingness to act from on high that were available to him in most respects so he's I think that that shows that he was trying to do his best and he was actually planning counter strikes and suchlike during the immediate aftermath of Pearl Harbor they got pulled back by a slightly more conservative Admirals who came in to replace him shortly after the attacks had concluded but I think when you look at the various sources that deride him and the others that defend him the pattern that I've noticed is that the officers who knew him best the officers who served with him or the officers who worked had worked with him or otherwise had a reasonably good relationship with him tended to be the ones who are defending him and the further and further away you get from the actual man and the more you get into it all the rarefied aspects of academia where you don't actually ever meet the person or even the people who worked with him particularly you just look at documentation and such like which obviously is in both very nature somewhat fragmentary that's where you start to see more and more people to riding him and also in the political circles because of course politicians can't possibly be responsible for anything that goes wrong ever now with that said did he make mistakes yes he did the three main things that you could hold against him was the one he didn't work particularly well with the army who was supposed to be looking after Pearl Harbor itself the actual fleet and port aspect of things that's a professional failing if he had a better working relationship then perhaps things might have changed then you've also got the fact that when in US intelligence lost track of the US carriers grants you didn't have that many yet recon assets to hand but he probably should have focused any and all available naval and airborne assets to try and find out where the heck they'd gone which might have found them you might not it might still result in the same attack but the the Fed simple fact of actually looking would have been a better course of action than the one that he did take and then finally there's the the probably the most tenuous of them which is that when he was ordered to put their fleet on a defensive deployment he for some reason thought that the main threat was Japanese sabotage in Hawaii um I guess people really did think there was a 5th column of Japanese Americans around at the time but never mind he so yes he could have had the fleet on slightly higher alert he could have trapped he could have looked a little bit harder for the Japanese carriers and putting those two together if he had had a better working relationship with the army then if he was looking for the carriers and they couldn't find them and the fleet was on the defensive he might have say asked the army to have a bunch of US Army Air Force fighters patrolling in and around the area which might have a spotted and be intercepted the Japanese attacks which might have again reduced their effectiveness however the flipside to all of that one of the things that probably bears mentioning in all of this is that a lot was made about the fact that the US carriers weren't present and that was very fortunate yes it was but it wasn't a matter of pure luck that was actually down to Kimmel albeit not intentionally he didn't send them away knowing that there was going to be an attack what he did do was he was trying to reinforce forward American positions of places like Wake Island and Midway the carriers were on their way to deploy further reinforcements in terms of supplies and aircraft to those places when the Japanese showed up if Kimmel had been completely lacks at a circle and just sort of sat pretty in Pearl Harbor he wouldn't have initiated those reinforcement measures which would have meant that at least enterprise and Lexington would have been tied up in port right alongside one not literally alongside but you get the idea the battleships and can you imagine the utter disaster that would have been that would have been visited upon the US Navy if two of its main fleet carriers had been blown out the water at Pearl Harbor as well as all the battleships so yeah as I say he made mistakes and some of them brightly could be pulled up as failings but he didn't he didn't mess up quite as badly as some people would like to have you believe Tom Harper 1997 asks what's the shortest range gunfight between two enemy warships post-world War one after line tactics we utilized less and how rare were very close range by modern standards encounters post-world War one surprisingly close range encounters weren't actually that rare during World War two some of some capital ship battles didn't get down to what for capital ships wished you pretty close range albeit that in both of the most obvious cases it wasn't so much as slugging matches more of her one-sided execution that being Rodney versus Bismarck because Rodney probably close to about the closest to capital ship closer on another one in combat during the Second World War getting down to about 3,000 yards away from Bismarck which is in battleship terms effectively resting your gun barrel against the head of the enemy captain and Washington versus Kirishima was about five thousand yards which is maybe a finger for the equivalent of a fingers breadth away from the temple of the enemy captain um but in in both of those cases the other side wasn't really in a position to fire back Bismarck because it already been battered into a blazing wreck and Kirishima because it was looking at South Dakota which incidentally it had also engaged at roughly down to the range of about 5,000 yards so yeah you you and of course you got things like battle Cape Matapan again very close range fight then you've got beyond that a whole series of fights that will get even closer so for capital ship engagements you're probably looking at those two the last battle of Hiroshima and the last battle of Bismarck for shortest range gunfight between warships assuming we take a warship or something that's destroy sized and up there'll be any number of encounters in the eastern Atlantic North Sea English Channel as well as in the Pacific places like Tsavo Island Guadalcanal etc where ships were either deliberately or accidentally almost ramming each other and the action would get right up in very very close and personal to the point that the anti-aircraft weaponry of ships down to machine guns could become a factor in what they were shooting at the enemy so short range gunfight impossible to tell really because how close is close when you're shaving paint off your enemy with machine-gun fire you're about as close as it's going to get and that happened on multiple occasions so yeah that the most common circumstance where that happened other surprisingly enough it was a night battles daytime battles tended generally to take place at slightly longer ranges because everybody tried to shoot each other when they could see each other which shockingly enough during the daytime is significantly further away Brett McDowell asks what is your opinion of Admiral Nimitz in your ranking of world war ii admirals he says I might have missed it but I've never heard you mention him when you list off Admirals as either good or bad when asked previously well in terms of how effective or not Nimitz was there's a good reason that the there's a dead tired Clause of a nuclear-powered supercarriers aimed after him the reason I've not particularly mentioned him when listing Admirals in the good or bad category before is not so much because he wasn't a good Admiral he DD definitely was but because he falls into that rather interesting rank of very highly placed Admirals who made some of the toughest and perhaps most critical decisions of the war but also are much harder to gauge on a sort of basic ranking of who's best from who's worst because due to their high rank they're not actually out there on the frontlines so you can look at Admirals like Fletcher Halsey Spruance cutting him Somerville Taavi etc in the Allied side and many obviously others on the access side as well and these Admirals were actually on ships they were commanding their ships in battle and so it's relatively easy to point to this gavel in command of this ship or formation made these mistakes or did these things correctly etc but when you get up to the level of Nimitz they're not out doing that then they're making the decisions that are sending those other Admirals out into those conflicts so for example if you look at say the conduct of American ships at the battles of Coral Sea and Midway it's much easier to focus on the actions of the Admirals in command of the u.s. ships actually present at the battle and how they directed their ships in the battle itself because at the end of the day that is how the battles are decided but at the same time the hand of Admiral Nimitz was behind both of those battles because through a combination of strategic decision-making and obviously having access to these signals intelligence he was one who directed the US forces to be there in the first place so to look at someone like Admiral Raider appleton its admiral pound and had my limits and even to an extent abroad yammamoto it's a lot more of a complex situation because the Admirals on the on the front lines they generally have a set not just of a set criteria of information with which to work going into the battle plus whatever they find out during the battle whereas these high-ranking Admirals have so many more lines of inquiry and information that they have to work with that to try and work out whether or not they used them all well and properly whether they missed something etc is a vastly more complicated task but there's a very long way of saying that my general opinion of Apple Nimitz is that he he probably in terms of the upper ranking strategic admirals he definitely merits a place in the top three I don't know exactly what the top there is but he's definitely in there apart from anything else he was either lucky or skillful enough to have made relatively speaking the fewest mistakes for example his approximate counterpart Admiral Pound in the Royal Navy made a number of good decisions also made a number of fairly significant errors Admiral Raiden is obviously Admiral Doenitz as well well they vated lose um not not they could have done an awful lot about it but again they did make a number of fairly significant mistakes and well Admiral Yamamoto that that's a whole other saga but apart from anything else not quite realizing after a quite number of clues were in place that your code signals were being read and then getting yourself shot down that's so that's a fairly significant mark against that none of the others quite managed to equal NCC 8472 asks what kind of food or meals did the sailors in the various major navies in World War two eat whilst there were at sea were there cultural differences was there some kind of universal ration standard and were meals served during extended periods of combat so way way back in drydock episode 36 I talked a bit about the meals that you might expect to find a border royal navy ship but this is more about the general Navy case so generally speaking aboard ships you could expect a slightly better quality of food than if you were serving in something like say the army because at the end of the day if you were board a ship the ship had for the facilities to cook food in some way shape or form obviously aboard a submarine or a destroyer the facilities would be someone more limited than aboard a carrier or a battleship but there would always be some form of food cooking facility and if there wasn't that usually meant that your ship had sunk and you had more important things to worry about the way your next hot meal was coming from now with that said the rations or the meals that were served basically had to fulfill a number of criteria so they had to give you as many calories as they possibly could because you well you need a lot of calories for the kind of high intensity high energy activities we'll be taking part in they also need to be stored as efficiently as possible because there is a limited amount of space aboard a ship of any size and if you're going to be operating away from port for weeks or months a time and there's a lot of people to feed you can't go with inefficiently stored food so powdered food and more great grained food was a very popular or stuff that just gave me a big solid masses with minimal Toula and to no throw away you also had to have make sure the food would last as long as possible a ship is not necessarily the healthiest of environments to store food in I mean if you're serving in the Arctic then the whole place is probably gonna be as freezing which is great as far as preserving food goes but anywhere else you're there is going to be damp there's going to be moisture there's going to be especially if you're serving the Pacific regions around the equator or in the Mediterranean there's going to be a lot of heat there's going to be temperature fluctuations and changes none of this is good for storing food there will be some limited refrigeration of course but the you're not on a refrigeration ship you're on a warship and space and energy are at a premium and then of course you have a fact that in most navies there's also the lowest price denominator which you may not appreciate as much as the bean counters back at home do as a result Navy was different there there wasn't a kind of standard ration apart from anything else there's the culinary tastes of each individual ship so in the cruise from different countries to take account for but there would be some commonality to the type if not necessarily the exact nature of the food so storing food in as head in grain form stuff like rice or flour which is obviously a ground grain was quite popular because it it's very compact very easy to store minimal wasted space relatively easy to preserve from the various elements that we described earlier as compared to something like bread and can then be prepared fresh which is again always a perk fresh bread being considerably nicer than something that's sat in a damp corner somewhere for two or three weeks you've also got stuff that can be reconstituted powdered milk for example again stores relatively compact might not taste brilliant but you can extract water from the ocean will use existing water supplies to constitute it back up into something that's a little bit more palatable biscuits meat if it was either salted and dried or if it was in the limited amount of frozen and cold storage and vegetables even in the World War two period the fresh ones would be exhausted pretty quickly after you left port so if you were going to have vegetables they would be more of these or freeze-dried or otherwise preserved variety which again not the most appetizing of things and as we said cultural values as well so if you were on a British ship you could expect food suppliers to tend towards things that could be roasted boiled or have gravy poured over them American supplies tended to trend a little bit more towards stuff that could be fried Japanese supplies tended to consist in vast quantities of rice above all else and that's not a racial stereotype that is literally pretty much the vast bulk of their diets when it came to ship-borne rations germans shockingly enough would find significant amounts of cabbage and sausage in their diet as opposed to other possible options and then of course it also there was also culture and how much food your home nation actually had so between the various allied efforts to interdict Japan's food supply the Japanese rations which weren't particularly generous to start with dropped quite significantly in calorific value and also actual size during the war the German rations took a bit of a hit but at the end of the day they do try and everyone tries to keep their military up and running during a war as best as possible the Americans who suffered not from much in the way of food shortages could afford to go a little bit more esoteric with some of their luxuries such as ice cream with as some of you may well be aware entire ships dedicated to making ice cream wandering around the Pacific and on in the Royal Navy whereas ice cream might be viewed as an absolutely hideous waste of time and in far too much of a luxury you couldn't possibly do her way with the rum ration that that that way lies mutiny and madness O'Hara's on American ships whilst a significant amount of alcohol that was not fulfilling his patriotic duty stored away in warehouses was liberated and aboard ships it was very much a covert operation and strictly not to regulation and as I mentioned in other droid oxen that did kind of lead to when allied warships would meet up there would be certain shall we say cultural exchanges in the form of rum and beer and ice cream and if the French were involved wine because of course and finally of course it everything did it to a certain degree depend on the skill of the ship's cooks if you didn't have a particularly skilled ship's cook it would be it's what it says on the tin it goes in that corner of your plate have fun whereas if you had someone who was either skilled or inventive or possibly both you could end up with some fairly complex and interesting dishes being served to the point that you you might actually end up thinking not only is the calorific intake better than what I'm going at home but possibly from the prep food preparation and quality is better than what I get at home obviously for a given value of home but some Navy chefs are pretty good at what they do with especially given the ingredients they're usually given George armed artists asks I was reading the entry on Wikipedia for operations citronella that's the bombardment of Spitsbergen when I came across this excerpt a leading the German leading seaman from a destroyer was court-martialed and sentenced to death for cowardice as he had hidden on his ship rather than accompanying troops to the shore and was executed on the quarterdeck of Shon Horst this episode along with the dispute over medal allocation when the crew of Sean Horst received only 160 iron crosses against 400 for the crew of Tirpitz exacerbated an already bad relationship between the crews so why do the cruisers of Scharnhorst and Tirpitz have bad relations before this event so this took a little bit of digging as I unfortunately don't have the book that that particular quote is extracted from but I did do some reading around other bits and pieces and it's not the easiest of things to look for I'd certainly not heard of this before but I did manage to put together a few and can perhaps link that together with some speculation so obviously as mentioned there is the incident instance of the fact that that Shawn host who felt shortchanged compared to Tirpitz his crew but the the seaman being executed this was a poorly received thing on behalf of the Shawn horse crew for a number of reasons firstly was the fact that Tirpitz was the flagship of the Spitsbergen operation and so if someone was going to be executed for failing their part on in fulfilling their duties during that operation then by all rights they should be executed on the flagship and Shawn horse was simply just told well you're gonna do it there because reasons and that crew felt that executing somebody on their own ship might bring them a significant amount of bad luck and they're also kind of felt that they were being forced to do Tirpitz his one quote dirty work I either the Tirpitz could rent a knits it's whatever luck it had it could remain the nice clean flagship but it was just getting it's a smaller cousin to do all the nasty stuff that by any rights it should have taken as its role as the flagship of the fleet there's also some indication in other sources that part this resentment may have arisen simply from the combat histories of the ships versus their current roles so Shawn Aust obviously being the smaller and less heavily armed with the ships was subordinate to Tirpitz in the German kriegsmarine a fleet up in Norway but this appears to have led at least some of the Turkish crew to assume that just because their ship was bigger and in charge that they therefore were better where as Shawn horse crew albeit that they largely weren't the same crews that had gone out on the various Atlantic and Norwegian expeditions in the early path more since most of them had been distributed to other parts of the creeks marina during Shawn horsing for stay in Brest the Shawn wolf who still felt that their ship was by far the more experienced by father more much more of a combat veteran and therefore had been a lot more useful to the fatherland and was generally therefore a better ship then effectively what they viewed as a green vessel that hadn't really accomplished much but was now trying to lord it over them simply because it had bigger guns than they did and when you get this on sort of close confined quarters in a cup and we can fueled the slightest slight or hint of a slight or perceived slight can end up exacerbating this on a fairly large scale so that's as far as I've been able to find potential little long-term causes of a bad relationship between the two ships crews if anybody else knows more please feel free to share below because I have a feeling that this kind of detail is probably available in much greater concentrations in some German documents or books that probably haven't seen an English translation yet Paul from Chicago asks did the hallway behind the casements on armored cruisers also exist on pre dreadnaughts and how much did this design defect contribute to the loss by flash or flood of the three armored cruisers at Jutland so the supply passageway in question yes it existed on parade notes it existed on armored cruisers it existed in dreadnaughts as well although in most navies the individual casement guns were in their own little gun bays the simple fact of the matter was that behind and below them were usually the ship's engines which was not somewhere you particularly wanted to store ammunition even if there was the space for it and so in most ships of this period with a casement batteries you would have usually two magazines possibly occasionally more and they'd be positioned relatively near the main magazines now that's all well and good if you're in a casement gun that's adjacent to or just nearby one of the main battery guns but it's not so good if you all say completely amidships you're about far away from those magazines as possible to get and no one's going to set up some kind of labyrinthine ammunition supply system running below the decks and so this ammunition passage behind the gun bays was implemented the idea being that you would hoist up the shells and charges if necessary from the magazines and then these would be transported down the hallways to the various guns whereupon Morrissey they loaded and fired which was in theory a properly working pro policy the problem was that as you might imagine if you've got a battery of half a dozen or more casement guns and you've got a single hoist just gently sculling shells down the corridor that is going to rather complicate your ability to fire shells rapidly because that one hoist and line system has to serve every gun on that side of the ship and so people would stack ammunition within the gun base more than just the ready use ammunition that they were supposed to it's a design defect in a way but it's not one that's really that easy to get around the only other solution would be to as mentioned basically have individual magazines and individual hoists for every single casement gun which is wildly impractical in terms of weight and space usage and so it was a it was an existing weakness the gun bays themselves were generally armoured use of one to two inch bulkheads so the explosion of some ammunition in any given gun bay if it takes a direct hit shouldn't compromise the whole ship the problem was as we said because of the supply issues if you have a lot more ammunition than you're supposed to in the casement then that explosive pressure will obviously be significantly greater which will blow out four gun Bay and then you have a passage that leads directly to an ammunition hoist and down to a magazine of lots of explosives which is is not a good thing the armored Cruiser Jutland yes they had their ammunition handling problems because of the the slow rate of fire in those case mats but to be perfectly honest much like the indefatigable they just didn't have the armor to stand up to the weapons that were being pointed at them on the day at which point he didn't make all that much difference whether they had ammunition in the casements in the passageways are in the magazines because the shells were gonna find the men find those piles of explosives at some point albeit they're having a large high explosive firecracker trail all the way to the magazine certainly helped the German objective of sinking them Dave Coulier asks if I could tell everyone a bit about the life and achievements of Mary Lacey well okay well there's a I'll give a very short potted history the biography of Mary Lacey and a number of other women who served some what's surreptitiously in the Navy is available online in couple of different books in particular there's one called the lady tars the autobiographies of Hannah Snell Mary Lacy and Mary Ann Talbots definitely worth a read as long as you can stand early 18th century prose but there you go anyway Mary Lacy in particular she was a young woman who was from a poor family but was educated in a charity school and turned out to be fairly intelligent adopting the ability to read and learning it but another of crafts fairly quickly but apparently with something of a mischievous streak she decided at the ripe old age of 19 that she was going to wander off down to Chatham and seek employment somewhere as it turned out when she arrived at Chatham shockingly enough being a Royal Navy Dockyard there were a few postings available for ships at sea and she went aboard first as a Gunner's Mate aboard the new ship the sandwich while she was aboard it turned out that the gunner had agreed to take on an additional servant and so he she well she - he because she was Mary Lacey but she was going by the name William Chandler and she was transferred over to work for the ship's carpenter and in that guise she fit in with all the other ships servants in midshipman I'm serving aboard the sandwich and then lastly aboard HMS Royal Sovereign for quite a while during one of the various conflicts with France however after almost half a decade spent at sea she managed to end up with an illness that appears to be rheumatism which forced her ashore and I'm in that guise she continued to as William Chandler don't present herself as a carpenter and she would become an apprentice at the dockyards for a considerable time beyond that and working her way up through the ranks she was almost discovered but a couple of shipwrights took pity on her based on the quality of her work and covered for her at which point um she managed to get herself qualified as a fully certificated ship right and I want to see therefore she could design and supervise the construction of sailing warships unfortunately she would fall ill shortly thereafter and was unable to work but as a fully qualified ship right and having obviously therefore contributed to the Navy she was entitled to an aunt multi pension well William Chandra was entitled to an admiralty pension but it was at this point that she decided that it was time to drop the disguise and so adopting her actual name of Mary Lacey she applied for a pension a factory telling guarantee her life story the Admiralty was somewhat incredulous at the idea that a woman could have passed for more than a decade within the Navy without ever being discovered but after checking with various people who had known him - they agreed that she should be paid a pension and she went off and got herself married and began writing her autobiography called the female ship right unfortunately it's not entirely completed and we don't exactly know what happened to her after 1773 but yes that's a short potted history of Mary Lacey one of the one of the women who Spanish to serve aboard his Majesty's warships and then become a skilled ship right of reasonable repute unfortunately before illness forced her to retire Manami wanderer asks did any other navies have their own cam trackers and if so could you elaborate on which one has the most entertaining story well much as this reputation is a little bit over exaggerated and see the five minute guide on the ship in question for a bit more coverage on that the William D Porter of the u.s. Navy would probably come as close as any US Navy ship to being the American version of the kamchatka what with nearly are blowing the president out of the water amongst our various other incidents for a brief period HMS Canopus was probably the cam checker of the Royal Navy albeit that it would redeem itself a few weeks later but in the initial run-up to the Battle of Coronel Canopus was a real albatross around the Royal Navy's neck what with being physically capable of keeping up with Craddock squadron but not actually doing so on the grounds that the chief engineer was undergoing a complete mental breakdown and was about two seconds away from being completely convinced that gremlins were over running the engine room and that the sea shells were spoke German so yeah as a result Canopus went a lot slower than it was actually capable of and well battle Coronel we all know what happened her pal credits courtrand logy as a result in of Kobus and not being there so yeah a little bit embarrassing for the Royal Navy thanks to that particular mess-up and for the Japanese I think you've got to go with the cruiser Mogami it was involved in multiple collisions at various points including a couple that probably had fairly serious consequences in its very last battle when it was being savaged by American ships ended up colliding with another Japanese ship and the resulting in the loss of that now the Battle of Midway ended up colliding with the mikuma which resulted in both of them having to break or break off mikuma was then sung by American bombers Megami was heavily damaged and of course neither ship nor the escorts were available to try and defend the carrier's from the incoming air attacks that sealed the Japanese fleets fate at Midway humphhh the list goes on is also responsible for the single worst friendly fire incident in naval history when it launched a spread of torpedoes and managed to destroy five of its own fleets transport ships it pretty much came home battered damaged and near enough rekt almost every time it went out on a major mission so it cost a fortune to maintain I have a feeling the Americans property of the Japanese a favor by sinking us or a gal straight I ship you not asks was there a potential way of exploiting the Washington Naval Treaty without breaking it when it came to carriers as in the treaty Argus furious Langley and hosho were declared experimental and didn't count towards any countries displacement why didn't anyone consider this as a potential loophole to pack in as much punch as possible within the given limits I was there anything preventing the signatories from going full ship of theseus I completely rebuilt with their respective vessels as long as the ship in question didn't exceed 27,000 tons I realize this would have cost cost as much as or more than a completely new carrier but since overall displacement of these was limited to my mind a rebuild like this might make more sense what are your thoughts it was a potential loophole but to be honest the scope for it was relatively limited for most of the ships so for something like argus langley even hermes host show etc their size just wasn't anywhere close enough for any conceivably decent rebuild to bring them up to reasonable spec and there was a certain amount of allowance for upgrades and such but the the sheer cost of effectively building a new ship that includes a few plates of the old it was just purely prohibitive now with something slightly larger like say furious that may very well have been possible so something like furious or Eagle they have the physical size that a few clever extensions here and there some changes of machinery etc and you might have been able to engineer those into significantly more capable carriers again at a significant amount of cost and at the end of the day whilst you might have been it technically correct in that's not a treaty violation people would have cottoned on pretty quickly to what you're doing and then modified subsequent treaties to factor that in a for example the picture that's been showing as we've been going along discussing this is a Rio show over you show the chapman one of the Japanese cares and this was a carrier explicitly built to try and take advantage of a loophole in the initial Washington Naval Treaty which was that aircraft carriers were only classified as vessels of 10,000 tons or more so the Japanese immediately went haha well if we can build something approximating a small fleet carrier for just a fraction under ten thousand tons it doesn't count as a carrier and then we can build a ton of them which will allow our air fleet to grow massively compared to everybody else's but what one it turned out wasn't actually possible to build a semi-decent small fleet carrier on ten thousand tons Andrew Joe ended up a vastly overweight and to everyone saw exactly what they were doing and so by the time the London Naval Treaty rolled around that loophole was well I'm truly shut ragin kassian asks I was thinking about ways to get around treaty limitations did anyone ever stretch a ship by cutting it in half and then adding a section also how feasible would it be to build a battleship with room for four turrets and just leave one of them out save displacement dropping it in if you end up going to war would see keeping - structural rigidity be affected by having a giant hole in the ship so stretching a ship by cutting in half and adding a section theoretically you could try that but the displacement that was left for him allowed for foreign improvements which could technically stretch that out if you fancied not having a particularly brilliant underwater protection system was about 3000 tons so he probably wouldn't get all that much out of it especially considering that burning all your extra displacement on that you would end up with a ship that was less maneuverable will be it possibly slightly faster and more heavily armed but with virtually no underwater protection comparative to into war and World War two period ships in terms of building a ship and then just leaving a part out again theoretically it's possible but more practically will a everyone's gonna realize what you're doing which similar to the last problem last question at which point where they'll just turn around it forbid it in the next naval treaty the other problem is weight distribution because turrets weigh a fair bit I mean you're looking at the maybe 800 up to 1,500 tonnes going on more than that once you get into the last pot of the 1930s even on a 35,000 ton ship that is a fair chunk of displacement it's a different percentage it's a percentage and that's just the turret that's not including the barbed air the magazines all the equipment etc which you would necessarily have to leave out in order to make it not entirely obvious you'd basically have a skeletal frame structure inside and that's going to affect your ships distribution of weight and in turn its balance and then you have a problem of either you don't compensate for the weight because you're relying on the weight being compensated for by the turret and it's equipment once you need to install it at which point the ship is either going to look somewhat like a speedboat or somewhat like a submarine trying to dive depending which end of the ship your empty turret is on or empty turret space I should say which is a gonna give the gaming away a bit and be also look completely stupid and make you very unpopular whereas if you add compensator II wait in order to balance everything out well you've just put in the necessary weight that you would have had with the turret anyway I wish point you haven't actually saved anything because your ship still displaces as much as just slightly less heavily armed until such time as you decide to arm it about the only way you might get away with it would be if you were to have a ship that was designed with a Q turret somewhat like the 13.5 inch gun British ships or the Italian ultra one dreadnoughts or possibly the American World War one riddles of that Texas - New York class at which point if you didn't have that and maybe some other no stuck a rudimentary aircraft catapult system on top as a disguise your ships still going to be riding relatively high which is gonna be something of a problem but I suppose at that point you could probably flood save the torpedo protection spaces to weigh it back down again there's an awful lot of effort to go through for not a tremendous amount of result especially considering the sheer amount of time it would take to add all those bits of equipment you basically have to pull off something like what Japan did with the EA and store everything carefully in a warehouse then withdrawal from the treaties in preparation for war and spend a year or two be equipping all your ships now in terms of getting around the treaties and certain ways apart from flat-out lying and there were a number of ways that could be done the Nelson class for example having carefully excluded certain types of water aboard the ships from accounting to withstand displacement the nelsons then promptly went and used one of those types as armed a form of armour protection within the overall protective system thus allowing it to theoretically have much greater protection it's displacement otherwise suggested you also had the county class which of which you can see one here and although H miss London's reef it didn't work out particularly well that was more because of her thirst London subclass was designed with an extreme view towards weight saving but some of the earlier London's although designed with box magazine protection rather than a full armored belt they seem to rather suspiciously take a full length armor belt relatively well once they would decided to equip them with it so take that as you will um then of course you've got the the Japanese albeit they did live out the Megami Colossus displacement in the first place but putting in the triple six inch guns with the full intention for dual eights at some point in the future which of course they then went and head and it did and so on and so on and so forth now one of the other favorite tricks was to design a magazine to hold significantly more ammunition and then just load it out with relatively minimal ammunition and to save a few hundred tons here and there but yeah there's lots of little ways of getting around the treaties but nothing massively major without flat-out lying about something which was as basically with Japan and Germany or was an option merciless NAB asks before the Royal Navy was the predominant in superpower what civilizations would you consider to be the naval superpowers of the ancient and medieval times well that title has waxed and waned over the centuries for considerable periods I mean the the loose collection of people's that you could vaguely described as the Phoenicians would probably have been the earliest single dominant naval superpower the Minoans by any account properly dominant at sea before gigantic volcanic eruption ten just so what went okay I think your civilization is just going to end the Carthaginians who were an offshoot of the Phoenicians were for a fair amount of time the naval superpower of the western and central Mediterranean to the point that they were pretty much the one and only power that had a chance of challenging Rome although that didn't end so well for them did it so Rome then became the naval superpower by dint of being well the only power because they dock you pied all the ports in between that you had the Persians again through sheer size before before the Romans and the Carthaginians the Greeks for a while were a fairly powerful naval force will be at the fact that they were scattered into their city-states didn't help their case too much but when they came together they proved capable of fending off the Persian fleets on occasion we things like the Battle of Salamis and so forth Athens in particular taking a bit of a biscuit there then once you move past the the truly ancient times and I'm very mad this is a little bit Eurocentric because well China is China and Japan is Japan they had their various moments in the spotlight over that way but things didn't change quite as much over in the world walk for the West nor this the Far East largely on the basis of the fact that the countries were if not the rulers but the countries themselves were relatively continuous so I mean China was generally China and Japan was generally Japan so there was not a tremendous amount of back and forth as to who was the overall dominant there as compared to somewhere like the Mediterranean or Western Europe where people were constantly challenging every five to ten years for that for the privilege but once you got out of that period into the medieval period there were a number of powers that briefly could be considered naval superpowers you have places like Venice for example which had a fairly large for its size and elite Navy but was because of their relatively small territorial holdings somewhat vulnerable to a single large defeats kind of knocking them back quite a bit which is why you had to end up with alliances such as the one that was put together for the Battle of Lepanto obviously the Ottoman Navy again by sheer size became a naval superpower the Spanish Navy for a long period especially once it absorbed the Portuguese as well was the preeminent naval superpower in the later medieval period and the French had got in the act as well at various points albeit they did intend to have tremendous amounts of luck in sustaining that effort long term the Spanish were a lot more consistent on that particular note and then once you start to pull out of these or classical medieval period into that sort of intermediate period between cogs and massive castles and but before the age of sail proper when you're talking about things like galleons and such the Portuguese have their moment in the Sun the Dutch of course make a fairly good and serious challenge for being a predominant naval power the French pop up every now and then and have periods of dominance before they end up losing some massive battle or other and having to start over from scratch again and that was a more global level in local areas they were certain police you didn't want to cross hurt the Danish fleet for example is very stronger points I don't think you can necessarily say the Viking fleet because there wasn't really for most of the period a Viking flee there were lots of different Viking fleets under different commanders but by the end of the migration period you did start to see tool fairly large areas dominated by single kings for example King Canute and his ancestors even though he himself eventually fetched up in England and later on in the sort of the beginnings of the proper age of sail you have the Swedish Navy pop up basically out of nowhere dominate the Baltic Sea and hopefully going that right this time and then you have Peter the Great built a Russian fleet so these kind of things swing back and forth white a fair bid the main reason why these things swing back and forth so much as compared to the Royal Navy once it gets up a head of steam and then remains dominant for several hundred years is largely down to strategic necessities virtually every other power we've listed was happy to be the dominant naval power Spain needed it for shipments back from their colonies in South America and the like but the countries themselves would generally be okay if somewhat poorer without being the dominant naval power as long as they were a naval power whereas for England and then later Britain a United Kingdom being an island it kind of was necessary to be the dominant naval power once mass fleets got underway otherwise you ended up getting invaded or having evasion threatened at you like into the Armada so yeah strategic necessity plus the fact obviously being an island you can afford have a slightly smaller army because you don't have a land border with a particularly aggressive and angry neighbor at least not after the Act of Union once that took care of the Scots for however long that's going to last Fritz drama asks what was the long-term effect of the experience of the USS Robin for Royal Navy carrier operations especially when the British Pacific Fleet was formed so the experiences of USS Robin aka HMS victorious were many and varied and both sides learned a fair bit from each other in terms of the direct answer the question long-term effects of the experience on the Royal Navy the main one was experience in mass flight operations especially utilizing newer aircraft like the Avenger as opposed to the albacore and swordfish that she'd sailed with so that was quite handy there also a number of changes made to victorious various upgrades here and there but particularly the aerodynamic rounded Stern on the flight deck that had been provided and a bit of features since the first Royal Navy carriers was replaced with a slightly less aerodynamic but considerably larger rear extension which allowed for a deck park to be used so in terms of the British specifically the experience of the initial Royal Navy operations of Avenger torpedo bombers the ability to practice operating with a deck park and particularly the experience operation with the Americans of launching large-scale mass strikes as opposed to pinpoint precision strikes which had previously British practice all stood victorious and her crew and the other Royal Navy personnel in relatively good stead for when the British Pacific Fleet was formed there were a number of other lessons that were learned in terms of things like crew morale provision of ice cream sentence of cooking and fleet refueling and other such methods that although they were observed were not immediately implemented but would when they were eventually implemented be implemented somewhat faster thanks to the knowledge that had been gathered by the victorious federico bazi asks what were the main designing efficiencies of the Latorre o class besides the torpedo protection system and do you think it would have been possible and if so worthwhile to increase the number of heavy anti-aircraft turrets well ironically the two questions are tied together in as much as one of the biggest design inefficiency is at least in my opinion was the inclusion of the secondary battery on the Latorre O's of 12 6-inch guns in four triple turrets because that's just silly it it takes up far too much weight in space for a secondary battery that to be perfectly honest never accomplished all that much of note and wasn't really ever going to it's it's just a little bit pointers is it's huge I mean you're talking about more firepower than most light cruisers as your secondary battery but a raid in such a way as to mean you've only can ever bring half of it to bear at least with the Yamato so in the Japanese did a similar trick at least they had the good grace to stick at least one of them on a central mounting so that it good far in both directions and given that the given the layout Villa Torres they certainly would have been space or room to have at least one centerline firing triple six so that in and of itself is a design inefficiency and ties into your second question about the anti-aircraft battery now whilst the Dene three and a half inch or 19 mil anti-aircraft battery is a little bit delicate and has been described as possibly a little bit too good for the technology level of the time it certainly would be far more useful than the the six inch guns and okay so it's a little bit small for anti destroy work by world war two standards but if you can get a ton of them quantity has a quality all of its own and I suppose so yes I think if you want to increase the heavy anti-aircraft secondary battery and that's probably a reasonable a reasonable thing to go for and you know that might even have saved the Roma we can't ever can't say wouldn't have unlikely but it might have done I would say actually strip out the the secondary battery entirely or take out those four triple six-inch turrets and use the space and wait save two significant increase of the number of nineteen millimeter mounts you get a lot more happy AAA which is good primary threat you then have ridiculous and hunts of three and a half inch or 19 mil rent mounts which you can just smother incoming destroyers in albeit and okay fair enough you don't have quite the same range but hey that's what your 15 inch guns before and II am a it might say it might have it saved the Roma in terms of other design in efficiencies well not that the Italians could have necessarily foreseen it at the time but obviously with the advent of proper radar if they do manage to get that working then they could have saved a bunch of weight by not having the extensive aircraft facility that she had historically on the stern and they could also have possibly lowered the ar-15 inch gun somewhat now if you take out the two triple six inch guns take out the aircraft facilities put radar on instead and maybe move the triple 15 just a fraction further aft you retain the good firing angles but you save an awful lot of weight on having the extra raised bar bet so that would be a little bit of a design inefficiency that could be saved albeit that obviously so they didn't necessarily know that radar was going to be good enough to replace aircraft spotting so that's a little bit of a 50-50 there the single biggest inefficiency I think was actually the armor scheme there were some defects in its testing you see the claim made that oh it was designed to resist 15 inch shell fire down to 16,000 yards or something approximating that depending on which source you're reading and the site they usually cite these gunnery tests but the gunnery tests which I've gone over in various other videos that they were done using a smaller gun and whilst using a smaller gun with a variant charge and a modified shell to simulate the performance of a larger gun is a valid way of doing things if somewhat clunky when you're assessing straight-up penetration through a monolithic block of Steel when it comes to decapping which is what the this particular armor scheme was designed to do to it was supposed to have an actual T capping layer and then a thinner main belt to actually detonate the shell as opposed to just a single single massively thick belt the at that point the actual geometry of the shell itself becomes important a large shell needs to have a large space to decap and the space in between was thoroughly inadequate for that now that is reasonable case to be made depending on again which source you read but the there is a fairly comprehensive book by bass Cano on the Latorre class which claims that the claims that the gap in between was filled with a concrete phone called cellulite and that this foam provided a equivalent of a much larger gap via density this engineer in me is somewhat questioning on that because he whilst yes the density would strip the cap off the fact that the foam surrounding the shell on either side where the shell isn't burrowing through it would tend to actually keep the cap vaguely in place makes me suspect that that particular calculation may or may not be entirely accurate but I haven't run the details myself so although I have my suspicions I wouldn't necessarily say that for definitive but even if we assume the best-case scenario that the satellite did what it's a what is claimed to do and provides the equivalent of a much larger gap and therefore the decapping layer possibly works as intended and the 11 inch belt on the inside can there resister D cap shell in order for that to happen when you add up the necessary density of the cellulite and the density of the outer the way of the outer plate which was just under three inches and then you've got the inner plate the amount of volume that's taken up by this ridiculously complicated system and the amount of weight that it adds up to is hilariously inefficient it's one of these things it's a good idea but you really really let it run away from you I mean if you just take the 2.8 inch plate and slap it onto the 11 inch belt you've got thirteen point eight inches I near enough 14 inches which would make it one of the more heavily protected battleships of the period which and it's got inclined armor as well so I mean people come on on and on on all about the Iowas system that's twelve inch incline belt well now you're nearly 14 inch incline belt and you're not using the massive amounts of space that this gap and decapping belt layer all used and then you've got to take into account the weight of the cellulite and okay it's not as dense as steel but running the basic calculations would reveal that you could probably add a hook in the hook inch inch or two of armor to the Latorre owes in exchange for that cellulite at which point you're looking at something in the order of between 15 and 16 inches of inclined belt armor which given the quality of Italian tourney armor as opposed to the Japanese I'm old and she make the Latorre owes approximately equivalent in protection protection to a Yamato with just by having sort of 15 to 16 inch thick inclined belt for roughly the same displacement and I don't think you'll find anyone on the planet who'll argue that a 15 to 16 inch incline belt of Italian tourney steel is gonna be in any way funner Abal to it well practically anything other than a point-blank supercharged 15 inch 42 round or 16 inch 50 round or something along those lines will be a mento shell but the protective abilities of that kind of thing but that kind of belt would be vastly in excess of even what the Italians claim the Latour iou's layout would have been capable of doing and being falsely less complex would have been much easier to maintain much easier to repair and taking it far less volume would have allowed to the internal volume of the ships to be significantly greater which in turn allows for more storage capacity which you can use all sorts of things possibly greater range possibly better torpedo defenses possibly all sorts of things so yeah the hideously complex and overly inefficient armor scheme is probably the single biggest thing that you can hold up against the Latorre owes and funny thing is the Italian naval designers pretty much agreed with that statement because when you look at the preliminary designs they came up with for the LaToya successors they ditched the whole thing and went with a monolithic belt which is pretty much what I spent the last few minutes describing so yeah even even the Italians realized that that was a bad idea in the end mem Mori asks what do you think is the best way for a smaller Navy to challenge a larger one around one in World War two the Jew Nicole failed unrestricted warfare submarine warfare tended to annoy everybody and powerful Raiders really stay particularly effective for long it seems to me it's nearly impossible for a small and ap to challenge a larger one without overwhelming economic superiority especially since pawn ships don't really have the blind spots for major sale one where smaller ships can maneuver stay in that area and fire with impunity so due to the changes in technology it does become a little bit different depending on what whether in a world one or World War two in World War one I would say that the Imperial German Navy actually under the leadership of Admiral von Tirpitz got things almost precisely right in theory and almost precisely wrong in execution admiral Tirpitz his theory was the so called risk theory which was that if you built up a fleet that was of a reason to release a substantial portion size wise of the Royal Navy then the Royal Navy wouldn't want to fight you because even though it could beat you he then it would lose enough ships that other rival powers would be able to pile in and then defeat it and so in order to keep everybody at bay it would choose not fight you broadly speaking in a World War one context it's not a bad plan unfortunately there's a very delicate balance point to make it work and unfortunate isn't war some politics and this is where Germany tripped itself up because I mean there's there's larger issues as to why the German policy failed because there was the whole land contingent and the British not wanting a European hegemon and all of that which is an entirely separate line of military thinking but in terms of the purely in naval side of things Britain could accept Germany having a modern Navy and brynn could accept America having a modern Navy or France or Russia whoever what they couldn't accept was a navy that came close enough break there to power standard and that's what Germany was doing and Germany of all the powers probably had the least justification in the eyes of the British to be building up a modern Navy the Japanese were another island nation so the British could understand that the Russians well they just had their fleet trashed by the Japanese so rebuilding there was relatively understandable France had been historical rival of Britain and with its Atlantic coast had relatively substantial maritime interests and colonial interests America albeit one massive part of the North American continent obviously to reach anything meaningful beyond Canada had to sail the seas so a maybe there was reasonable Germany however had little to no colonial possessions and was slap-bang in the middle of Europe and therefore by any measure should have had much more important things to worry about than building the world's second largest fleet at which point the British Ursula - I went I have a suspicion you're gonna use that and the only reason you'd need a fleet that large would be to come after us and then the angler Germans are arms race commenced so partially it's to do with position as a German Britain would tolerate somewhere like Japan building a significantly larger Navy before they start to get worried than somewhere like Germany where the use of such a fleet is seems to be almost mono task likewise with America especially before the Panama Canal was open the British weren't too worried about an American naval buildup because of America had to cover two entire oceans and so even if their fleet was say seventy eighty percent the size of the Royal Navy the individual fleet that they could bring to bear without massively telegraphing their intentions would be significantly smaller and therefore the Royal Navy could defeat it in detail so part part of beating a smaller Navy is going to depend very much around who's Navy you are and then comes the fine balancing act because if you build your Navy too small your jacket rolled over you won't perform a deterrent but if you build your Navy too large Britain takes a look at you and goes no don't think so so you've you've got to strike a very fine balance there and I say this is why the sort of the to power standard it comes into play if you can supplant one or the other nations that Brent is currently measuring itself against with the to power standard but only just then Britain is likely to either want to make an ally of you to counter the other two or it'll just say okay well there now this or that one and whoever else is left is now our to power standard and they don't got to worry overly much and this is where Germany kind of fell down it Britain was rating itself against France and Russia was thinking about maybe switching over to dropping America into place of Russia and then Germany just came bulldozing through the pack with a massive fleet murmurs like right you're the main threat then whereas if they'd kept their fleet that's somewhere around the realms or maybe slightly somewhere between the American and French battleship and Cruiser building projects Britain probably would have been fine with it and I'm saying Britain a lot but in World War one period that's basically what this question is about um when it comes to challenging a larger Navy because it to be fair when you talk about dreadnoughts almost everybody else by that point had built so few dreadnoughts that just having dreadnoughts meant that you were pretty much determine every buddy else what would the French and the Russians and the Americans only churning out maybe half a dozen or so before the war actually properly broke out obviously each not collectively so yeah if you're gonna go for battlefleet we should pretty much do need then it's you've got to strike that fine balance of numbers and be good with location and then the final part of it is when it comes to deterrence is politics unfortunately if you're gonna build a fleet of that scale try and identify somebody who's maybe a couple of dreadnaughts down the pecking order and form a decent alliance with them this so if Britain's maintaining its to power standard so around about the 1910s you've talking about at this this point therefore for you if you're say Germany you're moderating your build policy you've got Germany America France and Russia as you're kind of candidates at which point make an alliance with one then individually if fleets not large enough to make Britain worried but if you have a relatively decent if somewhat loose alliance collectively you then have the naval power that if Britain messes unnecessarily with one of you the other one hopefully will back them up and then you have actually enough power to pull in the put pull the British fleet in and go right you can challenge us and then Terp it's this version of risk theory comes into play because Britain won't want to challenge both of you at once unless it goes and gets its own alloys and then politic since you some shenanigans etc so yeah world will one go for a go for a battle fleet there is a proud belt the scale of the nearby powers that are currently the rated on the to power standard Commerce ratings just not worth it Britain can out build you Britain can just saturate the oceans and once the back of cruises invented sending cruisers out isn't gonna help much either the classic Foley of fact you can look at something like a port on space quadrant perfectly trounced kradic's quadrant Coronel then the British can help a couple of battle cruisers and that was basically that merchants raiders again as you mentioned commerce rating doesn't tend to work out very very well it annoys people but you either go unrestricted in which case own always everyone and turns everyone against you or you're just pin pricking away without a massive submarine fleet and well if you're gonna build a massive submarine fleet you are then again a rather obvious threat which means someone's going to crack down on a new very hard it's this very fine balance of being just enough of a threat they don't go don't annoy you but not making yourself such an obvious threat they feel they have to crack down on you the world war 2 is basically the similar kind of concept except that you can [Music] let's tend to shy away a little bit from the shipping so you look at something like say Sweden's Navy actually managed exactly this smaller Navy well didn't challenge but did deter the larger Navy of the creeks marina well we have the Chris Mary did have some rather larger rivals to work at the time but so in World War two the main things are the advances in submarine technology and the advances in aircraft now as a smaller naval power you're very unlikely to be able to build a carrier and even if you can it's probably a bad idea because the power that you're challenging will just show up with many and a small power you're unlikely to have the colonial holdings necessary less acetate of a mobile airfield that you can take all over the world so what you want to do at that point I would estimate would be to still have a small deterrent fleet made up of good quality cruisers and some heavy coastal defence ships again don't bother with a commerce rating but designing some kind of small small to medium-sized fast submarines optimized for close-in operations it's probably a good idea because at this point submarine strikes can actually be very annoying and invest heavily in aircraft for the world war ii period i mean I know in choirs it means a bit of foreknowledge because in the early 1930s investing in aircraft is your anti-shipping know if it's not not gonna happen but in the late 1930s certainly a possibility aircraft are much cheaper than ships and even if you might be a small power you will still have plenty of space on your country's home turf to build lots of airfields so effectively what you want to try and do as long as you don't share a land border or a very close sea crossing with the big pal that you're trying to deter or challenge you effectively want to try and spend the kind of money that your bigger power might spend on a battleship or an aircraft care spending doesn't if not hundreds of aircraft because kind of like what the British enlarge with the armored carriers you fight close enough to an enemy shore line where the enemy has a decent size therefore at the end and you will get through and if you've got a decent enough strike package then certainly at the beginning of World War two before the Americans start rolling out stupidly large numbers of Essex's chances are the most someone can come at you with is a couple of hundred aircraft and if you've got an air force that's land-based therefore has heavier strike aircraft and you have four or five six hundred plus and you can concentrate them on coastal airfields a their carriage strikes unlikely to be able to do much to you and be your return strike is going to be pretty devastating especially given the state of early World War two anti-aircraft in general so that would be my recommendation for a World War two period the thing is at the end of the day if you have a smaller Navy and you can't build up to challenge the large Navy you have a smaller economy so you don't want to be directly challenging the larger fleet because they will just end up bearing you in ships um see what happened to Japan for example but you can deter with the right measures providing you don't do anything costly stupid like oh I don't know try and blow up most of the enemy battle fleet in its homeport without telling them you've declared war first um it's um as a genious as much about political action as it is about building up a fleet because you can build up the world's most perfect deterrent Li but if you sting or slap a bigger power enough times that they get really properly ticked off with you they're just gonna come and stomp you flat and regardless of how perfectly formed your fleet was Clayton go des asks he says I'm very curious about the brains of a warship what was the typical command staff - structure like on a world war ii vessel what roles and responsibilities it did each member have and as a follow up during combat engagement how much micromanagement did a battleship captain do and then he mentions it might be a special video and in indeed it probably will be at some point so yeah the whole command and control structure element of warships in world war ii is a massively complex topic and it will eventually at some point have to be covered by Wednesday's special video so I'm not going to go on for too long in this particular answer but I'll give you some idea of the reason it has to be in that kind of video is the command softened and command structure on a world war ii ship are varied immensely depending on the kind of ship it was on the size of ship it was so for a destroyer obviously you can't fit too many people on the bridge in the first place and well on most destroyers a lot of the armament and such was literally within yelling range so the command staff would be a lot less numerous and the command structure would be a lot more fluid on a destroyer as compared to something like a heavy cruiser or a battleship where you'd would have significantly more men on the present honor in and around the bridge and in various other centers like fire control systems etc and where because of sheer size every command has to be relayed by some form of external communication system not screaming at the top of your lungs now that changes again when you get into more specialist vessels like aircraft carriers where you've had got someone who has to command the ship itself and possibly direct things like air-defense and hopefully not but if necessary surface defense versus the people who are trying to conduct the air operations and then again when you go into submarines it's a very enclosed environment very small command staff but you don't have to worry about certain things but you do have to worry about think other things that a surface ship doesn't have to worry about which complicates things a lot more so for example unless you are surfaced you don't have to worry about gunnery but you do have to worry about torpedoes and calculating angles but that will usually be done by the captain whereas on a surface ship something like the gunnery fire control solutions would not be done by a captain so there's an awful lot of variation and therefore roles and responsibilities for any given crewman will will vary immensely from the captain on down so look forward to that at some point I don't know whether it be this year or next year but at some point in the future now as regards micromanagement during a combat engagement we're the battleship captain again it somewhat does to vary in situation because if you are the captain of a ship that's leading a battleship that's leading a squadron or a small unit you have to worry about giving orders to relay to those other ships as well to a certain degree whereas if you are solo in command of a battleship then you've got you can just focus on your ship either if you're on your own completely or if you're part of the squadron you just have to receive orders and deal with what the squadron or flotilla or whatever unit leader is telling you to do now the main goal of a captain the strides it might sound is to command the ship but that effectively involves being in the hover nexus of an awful lot of information and then making the decisions the put those various bits of information together so for example engineering will be telling you how fast you're going your helmsman will be able to tell you what heading you're at you're spotting crew whether that be people physically up there with range finders from binoculars or later on supplemented by radar operators will be telling you what is around you assuming that you can't see that yourself which again you're high up on the bridge but you're not necessarily gonna see the same things or in the same detail as someone who's got a dedicated bit of equipment for that so you might see a battleship but the person on the main rangefinder might then be able to tell you what kind of battleship it was or perhaps that you've misidentified a heavy cruiser as a battleship or vice versa and obviously what it's doing if there's any aircraft coming in you'll have someone in charge of the anti-aircraft defense and so on as hone these people will be giving you feedback as the captain and then you take into account the strategic situation have to make the decisions that broadly dictate what's going to happen but your micromanagement is not going to be right down to the nitty-gritty details unless you're actually probably a fairly bad captain on the battleship at that point so the example given in the question would be was it simply something like see that enemy battleship to port I don't want to or would it be steer 20 degrees to port set main battery target enemy battleship to port load a peak and salvo firing etc etc somewhere in between so course changes the captain would generally order or if it's a general instruction that might require a lot of finesse and on-the-spot decision making if he's got a good helmsman he might just order a general concept to be followed so captain might say yes I want to steer 20 degrees to port and then in two minutes dear 15 degrees to starboard or he might just order his helmsman chase the enemy splashes and then he doesn't have to tell him anything else because the helmsman will do that steer the ship towards the last South though that landed which similar to what HMS Rodney did depending on the captain's expertise he might take over a certain role if he has a lot prior experience with that so let's say he had prior career experience as a fairly good helmsman he might then take over the helm position if he wanted to although that requires a certain degree of confidence on the cap in the captain spot both in his own skills and also a lot of trust in the skills of other members of his crew because by taking over a specific role like that he is of necessity going to be limiting the amount of time he can spend dealing with all the other stuff so when it came when it comes to things like targeting an enemy surface warship he would choose the target but it would be a case of so let's say we're talking about something such as the Battle of the Denmark Strait you've got to try to ship to choose from so it might be target lead ship but that would be as far as it goes you wouldn't order load ap because you're fighting a battleship of course the government has got a load AP you trust them to do their job and once you've said target ly the the lead ship unless there is a specific reason to switch ammunition load from the default you wouldn't say anything else you might give the order to commence firing and you might give the order for the kind of firing initially speaking but again kind of like with saying chase the enemy's flashes to your helmsman you would probably give a more general set of instructions and then allow your officers to interpret that so you might say target lead ship range on half salvos prett fire when the range has been established and that would set in to train a whole sequence of events so they'd be firing in getting the bat of them out straight as an example let's say we're a bought hood they'd be flying for gun salvos trying to establish the range waiting for the full full of shot before firing the next salvo etc with the intention that once the range has been established they would then enter a rapid fire phase where they're just far as quickly as possible to try and do as much damage as possible and the next thing you're gonna reoffer is probably going to report back is when you the range is established just to double-check that the captain wants to stay with the rapid fire order because the situation might have changed by then so that is how a good captain with a good crew that he trusts will tend to operate now obviously that doesn't necessarily mean that is how everybody operated there may be crew that are inexperienced that might need a bit more of a helping hand the situation might be very fluid or very complicated that might require further instructions from the captain or the captain might be very lackadaisical all incredibly OCD about making sure everything goes perfectly but that's that's a general feel for how a a gun battle engagement would tend to go obviously varying as in complexity is more and more factors are piled on board in fact one of the better ways of experiencing that if you happen to be in the UK and I guess I'll find out if there's anything like this in the States would be if you happen to be in London go aboard HMS Belfast because they have a kind of looping recording of the sounds of the bridge during the engagement with Sean horse at the Battle of the North Cape and that gives you a fairly decent idea of what was a fairly complex situation but how the bridge crew and especially the captain handled that and you'd be surprised given the various complexity of maneuvers all the Verrill present and the danger that they were in just how few commands are actually being spoken most of it is feedback that the captain is just taking on board Gabriel any Hawkins asks a trio of related questions a bit like a Neapolitan ice cream except inquiry based would HMS Vanguard have been more effect with King Joseph s 14-inch guns instead of the 15-inch World War one air guns that were given to her - would it have really been that much more expensive to install the new 14-inch guns and three if you could add five thousand tons of displacement to Vanguard to improve an already amazing ship where would you place the allotted new tonnage now the reason Vanguard was built the way she was was specifically because they thought they could get battleship out quicker than the lag time that would have been involved in ordering yet another king george v with fourteen inch guns I had to be honest they were right if they'd actually kept on schedule with building Vanguard she probably would have been in service before at least before how probably before Hansen despite being laid down later than both I don't think she would have quite beaten Duke of York in service but it might have been a close-run thing now that kind of precludes her having full 14-inch guns because would she be more effective well if she was supposed to have been built with 14-inch guns she probably would have arrived in service even later than she historically did at which point well there wasn't any more battleship fights to have now in terms of being designed with the 14-inch guns and let's say those supply bits are unblocked all we're just talking about sheer firepower probably actually not as effective I would say the 14-inch gun on the king jewel to fifth was a relatively decent gun but it was still only a fourteen inch gun and whilst the 15 inch gun was much older weapon it was a damn good older weapon and with the various modifications that were made to the turret fire control systems etc and the latest and greatest Cardinal shells and the ability to fire super charges now Vanguard had a fair bit of a punch home and given that the 15-inch gun turrets issues had been worked out considerably better than the King short of his 14-inch gun turrets for most of the Second World War overall I'd say that the the 15-inch guns probably when operating at full capacity made the Vanguard a bit more effective than the King josephus 14-inch guns when you're just looking the guns and the their effectiveness in and of themselves would it be more expensive to install new 14-inch guns well if actually at that point you're building a kind of a halfway house between a lion and a king george v because you're you're the effect I mean bang God's not quite the lion hull but it's closer to the lion Holden is the king george v hull so you're kind of taking a near lion hull with a king george v armament would have been more expensive yes because the british had the 15-inch guns and the turrets there was no cost associated with building them there was a minor cost associated in pulling them out storage modernizing them gang him up to spec and installing them but there wasn't the cost either in time or money of actually building them in the first place so if you wanted to build the ship with 14-inch guns you'd have to order a whole bunch of new 14-inch guns at the cost of a couple of million pounds which is not necessarily cheap and if I could add five thousand tons of displacement to Vanguard to try and improve it where would I put the alot of new tonnage um well that's a bit of a question isn't it historically when it was absolutely rammed the gunnels with absolutely everything plus acting as a royal yacht it was a bit top-heavy so some of that displacement would probably have to go into addressing that making the hull a little bit larger therefore little bit more stable and able to support the needs that it was put to albeit that again is exercising a little bit of future knowledge there's only one anticipating Bhangarh being converted into a royal yacht at the time they were constructing her to say the least if I was looking at it from a pure combat capacity and I was starting early enough given that it's gonna get again he through the problems with the future knowledge if I knew it was gonna get delayed I'd probably insist on continuing development on the 16-inch guns that the Lions were supposed to have or even the the new or 15-inch guns that were originally consider for the king george v to be honest at the time of a God's being considered probably the 16-inch guns for the Lions and then just slightly enlarging the hull and obviously the bar bets and everything so that instead of getting a ship with eight good but old 15-inch guns you end up with a ship that's mounting say four twin sixteen modern 16-inch guns or to be perfectly honest you're adding five thousand tons and and spending the money for that you might as well just build a lion oh boy which would be quite amusing a one-off one a flying fast the alternatives to that would be probably eliminating five point two five inch armament I mean the 4.25 inch on Vanguard was as far far cry from the 4.25 Incheon and King George the fifth and Prince of Wales at the beginning of the war and it did have a role as a very fairly long range kind of sniper I a gun but given the evolving threats at the time it might be tempted to eliminate the five point 2 5 inch secondary battery and instead install the four point five the latest four point five inch guns you can get more of them and there are a lot more rapid-fire I'd really like to put the 3 inch rapid fire but that's pushing a bit too far because that wasn't ready till the 50s so yeah I'm a more numerous 4.5 inch AAA battery over the 25 inch will probably be the other alternative I mean with 5,000 tons there's an awful lot of displacement to add to a ship the armors fine so yeah I think if I had my dream list it would be make the ship a little bit bigger to be able to receive the lion classes 16-inch guns in well let's let's say that four twin turrets because that's how that in general was laid out and replaced the 5.25 s with instead of having eight of the maybe have ten or maybe even twelve 4.5 inch turrets or mounts depending what you want to call them on either side or possibly if we're going to get really get into it maybe even look at with five thousand extra tons having some of them on down the sides and lengthening the ship or reconfiguring the superstructure so I can have maybe one for one aft behind the super firing main gun that main gun turrets that'll probably increase this basement up to that kind of level Matt kid asks I was watching Master and Commander far side of the world the other day and one of the most striking shots was when Acheron and surprise were right next to one another with the Acheron completely dwarfing the surprise so 28 guns in 198 souls surprise is something like an enterprise-class 6th right frigate right yes that would be correct and with more than twice our guns more than twice our numbers Acheron is effectively USS Constitution kind of it's loosely based on the tenth novel in the series which is actually a u.s. super frigate specifically the USS Norfolk but that's a fictional ship but you might as well say it's the Constitution so my question is like is lucky Jack actually insane a jack for trying to fight Acheron which as his office point out is completely out of surprises class and would lucky Jack actually have had a chance at all against an American super frigate in a sixth right it seems dubious as British v rates were handily defeated by the Constitution are there any historical examples of mismatches in this extreme being won by the underdog in the age of sail so yes and frequent viewers of this series of videos will probably be sick and tired of me talking about Lord Cochran stealing a or while capturing a very large Spanish frigate using and ship that was probably around about the same size if not possibly slightly smaller than the surprise so yeah yes I won't recount that again but that is a classic example of yes there were quite a few examples of very extreme mismatches being won by the underdog now in terms of this particular engagement we're like a better term you have an American super frigate the Akron was turned into a friendship that was suspiciously based on on American super frigate designs in the film basically because while the film was produced by Americans and they didn't fancy alienating their home audience by making an American ship the bad guy so they basically just took down the Stars and Stripes and stuck up the tricolor but anyway on paper Akron is completely of surprises class and in the film this is acknowledged they cannot hope to beat the Akron in a straight-up gunfight so they decide they needed to get in right up close by using disguise and then engaging a short range firefights along with a boarding action now that is not quite as insane as it sounds if you can close the range and also is a relatively nice nod to HMS surprises actual armament now the thing is most cannons although you do get an F in sort of the nickname of Constitution as Old Ironsides and the reputation of other American super frigates being also very tough and to a certain extent that is legitimately earned they were tough they weren't as tough as sort of pop history tries to make them out Constitution and other American super gets DD regularly withdraw from combat once they had overall one in order to effect repairs both their masts and rigging and to their hulls their holes were penetrable by things like 18-pounder long guns but you had to get a bit closer than normal to do so because their hulls were in over all protective terms a little bit more like engaging a small ship of the line than a frigate and a 24 pound oak of lost straight through to see the engagement between Endymion and HMS president so they okay yeah they're they're tough they're not invincible to frigate caliber guns the the main thing is that if the American super frigate is carrying along twenty fours they can punch through the whole of a fifth-rate frigate at a considerably longer distance that a fifth-rate frigate carrying long 18s can punch through their hull in return and that that kind of what what would later be called in dreadnought era terms a zone of immunity that is where their reputation for extreme toughness comes from but surprise as we were mentioning although very small and although armed very lightly with eight pounders and four pounders when it was French as the unit a which is there it's a country of origin it was inducted into the Royal Navy and surprised under the Royal Navy's command was armed almost inside of many ways a bit like the USS Essex was with a massive load of 32 pounder Carinae and some 18-pounder Karen hates and a few chase guns so to get right up close it's pretty much the only thing they can do at that point because they're carrying AIT's a short range but then if they actually succeed in getting close enough well they've got a broadside of a dozen 32 pounder Karen aides almost off a dozen 18 pounders that'll do a hell of a lot of damage to whatever you end up fighting so and also with that with its eyes if the Acheron in this case is using double gun decks you can at very close range pull off a kind of Lord Cochran style trick of actually getting in below the firing arc of their upper guns at which point you're going lower gundeck to main gun deck and if you've got a bunch of 32 pounders and they've got a bunch of say 24 pounds of long guns which is very likely you've reduced their numerical advantage to rough parity by eliminating the ability of the upper gun deck to really do all that much damage to you and then you have 32 pounders and they have 24 pounds which means ironically you actually have more firepower and at close range the lower velocity of the Karen aid is not so much of an issue in fact it's a benefit because along 24 fired through the side of a six rate like surprise is basically going to punch straight through and out the other side and leaving a relatively neat hole in whatever it pass through where is a larger 32 pounder cannonball fired from a Karen aid at low velocity will still quite happily punch through the side of something like a net the Acheron but it will do so causing a lot more damage and leaving a much larger hole because of the the slightly lower impact velocity and spraying splinters everywhere so actually in a very very very close range fight like that the surprise has an advantage in fact that's literally the only scenario in which the surprise has an advantage so in a circumstance where you are having to engage such a ship in like the Akron in a ship like surprise disguising yourself to get in literally touch up to touching distance and then blasting away with every gun you've gotten a surprise attack is actually albeit something of a maneuver of desperation but in and of itself a remarkably sound strategy and one that may very well win you the day assuming that you actually get to the point where you can open fire first and that's there's a lot of things that can go wrong in the lead-up to the Hat so yeah it's not something that you would just try if you were just any captain but if you're someone who's a skilled as lucky Jack Aubrey sure go for it you've got a good a chance as anything else I've working Christopher Whitmer asks he says I'm an aspiring writer so I'd like your advice on writing about real and fictional ships although to be honest on world-building a fantasy world so more interesting the fictional ships soft so often fictional writers get these things wrong so I'm aiming to make my story feel as real as possible even if there is magic and fantasy creatures etc because the more real it feels the more immersive it will be and he also suggests it might be a little / sort of Wednesday's special video which indeed yeah trying to give writing advice on how to get the context of warships right yeah that that'll be a long video but I'll do my best to do a summary in this case so again trying to do things relatively briefly and only covering at the higher levels of detail there are certain fictional books like the aforementioned Master and Commander series or the Hornblower series that offer good examples of how to do ships well in fiction so that's certainly something that can be looked into all the obviously they are works efficient their fiction they are there are exaggerations and sort of authoritarians for the purposes of the story so bear that in mind but they do give you an idea of how to how ships can be written well in a fictional setting so that's always a good idea now in terms of the there's four points that you raised as the basis for the longer video so but I'll trying to cover them very briefly the most common mistakes when creating fictional ships are writing about ships in general the single biggest mistake that I think I've seen most that will break the suspension of disbelief or anyone who knows much about shipping is speed of response I mean even in modern ships but especially in older ships world war ii world war 1 back the age of sail if a captain gives an order to do something an awful lot of books it just happens like you're driving a car so if the cab says right turn 90 degrees just to port the ship just almost immediately starts turning a hum and ya say like like you're in a car come up to a junction you just pull the wheel left ships don't react that quickly so even these days they tend not to react that quickly I mean Hector even just take a narrow boat or small boat out and put the wheel hard over and see there is actually a delay in response and make that much much larger for a capital ship and yeah you get you get the general idea and then you get to something like an age of sail ship where to make some kind of major course correction like that will probably require a significant amount of work to be done to the ship's rigging and sails and it can be a matter of several minutes before a ship starts to respond likewise the ship's don't sail around with their guns primed and ready so when a captain let's say in an emergency situations there are fire at that ship in a lot of historic is vaguely historical fiction the guns speak almost immediately where is more realistically if they're in a surprised situation the guns will have to be at the very minimum loaded run out aimed and then fired and in any kind of large vessel again that's gonna be the work of at best 30 seconds probably several minutes again the the pace of naval combat up to the era of missiles is actually remarkably slow in anything other than destroyers and such like although gun he battleship guns can be said it's what people say oh well this gun has a fire rate of like once every 20 seconds once every 25 or once every 30 seconds yeah that's theoretical maximum fire rate I challenge you to point me to any kind of engagement where that was sustained for any considerable period of if at all the most common average rate of fire is around a salvo a minute or so with the big guns so it takes a while for combat to occur I mean once things start exploding things happen very quickly but yeah the the general feel of the speed of action is something that I would say is a clear marker of someone who understands what they're doing when it's done properly now where to begin when creating fictional ships well it depends entirely on how far off the deep end of fantasy you want to go kind of like with the spring shop video where I suggested trying to roughly approximate a existing vessel and then extrapolate down from there for your preferred choice I mean I have written - I'm in the process of writing a in my off time and I have been for a few years a sort of fictional steampunk magic esque novel that's based on airships and bat War ironclad warships and everything but that's my personal hobby but when it came to designing the boat the airships and the naval ships before that universe I started with historical designs early Zeppelin's sent a battery ironclads that kind of thing went right this is what real ships looked like then taking into account any ease of slightly reality bending elements that you might have in your university oh right well how could I change this to a form that I want or form that serves the purposes of the story within the scope of how much I'm I'm changing reality so it could be simple that something simple something so it's something as simple as changing the screw propellers for say Archimedes screw propellers or introducing a like full-on downward sloping massive Ram bow or whatever you want to do or making out of mithril I suppose if you're going to do some kind of steampunk Lord of the Rings thing to try and create a fictional ship if you're not going completely off off the deep end of fantasy fine try and find a ship that at least vaguely approximates what you're trying to get to in real life and then extrapolate from there because you usually would hopefully should be able to tell where you might be going completely overboard and unrealistic at that point based on what you have to start with how to capture the feel of life on a ship nothing beats reading first-hand accounts so if you're going for an age of sail style feel look for accounts from there if your iron clads will see late the 19th century dreadnought era golden one world war two there are plenty of decent books out there the an even online resources to be honest that have transcribed either diaries or accounts or even in the latter cases recordings of people describing how life was so read or listen to or watch those because nothing beats some someone actually telling you this is how it was I mean if you're going for a more modern setting and you happen to know someone who either wars or currently is in the Navy then obviously ask them and see what they say but always try and get a wide range of sources because an account from a gunner is going to be very different to an account of an engineer was going to be very different to the account of someone who was mainly in charge of maintaining the catwalk for the ship's aircraft and also try and look for a ship that roughly matches the capabilities that you want because a again in the account of say the engineering crew of a Destroyer is gonna be very different you can't be an engineering crew of a battleship and on a battleship you're gonna have people who were maybe working down in the magazines for massive fourteen fifteen or sixteen inch guns whereas on an aircraft carrier you can have a lot of people working and hanged at hangar decks nothing beats at this just listening to real-life accounts both of general day-to-day activities and inaction and that pretty much addresses the other part of how to accurately portray relationships between crews and officers and captain's you can you can look at some sort of secondary sources people people who have written about it albeit that you do have to be a little bit careful because when it comes to that kind of thing especially when you get back to your sales sometimes the politics of certain authors can bleed through very much and you either get this thing about Marxist class struggle as expressed in the 18th century Royal Navy or some other similar nonsense or going right off the the other end of things how like the prize system is somehow an exemplar of capitalism or and democracy as expressed by 17th century piracy or some other weird and wonderful ideas so yeah view those with a little bit of a pinch of salt try and stick to more established naval historians in that respect but again certainly memoirs and accounts of sailors the the sort of good lengthy ones are again your best source for those so yeah that's there's a little bit of a ramble on about that but hopefully that covers a something of what you're looking for and at some point maybe I'll do a longer video on that with some sort of case study examples are thrown in Christopher Dent asks in the Fubuki video you mentioned that later examples of the class have three rather than four boilers due to higher efficiency connected to two shafts how is it possible to connect an odd number of boilers to an even number of shafts so yes at first that might seem to be a little bit self contradictory however this is accomplished by the intervening turbines because remember boilers are there to generate pressure through steam and you don't just off well bathe the propeller shafts in hot steam and hope that something happens I know that says a little bit facetious sorry no but as part of the powertrain the boilers generate the steam the steam goes through the turbines the turbines provide the rotational energy by this point through gearing that is that the cogs and spokes in teeth not the small American destroyer but yeah so if you have three boilers it's entirely possible to run two shafts off of it because what you would do is you would take the steam from steam from one of the boilers the third one I guess and you could feed that either equally or if one or the other of the boilers was at lesser or greater pressure at a slight just slightly off-kilter distribution into the two turbines that would be powering the propeller shafts in question so you'd have so today if everything's working absolutely perfectly 100% output from boiler one goes into one shaft let's say 100% boiler output from boiler 3 goes into into the other turbine sorry not shaft so boilers one and three are supplying turbines one two and then you'd just have a splitter from boiler two that would go right 50 percent steam into there 50 percent steam into there and so you have one hundred fifty percent or four boilers capacity of steam going to each turbine and then each turbine drives its own propeller shaft so hopefully that makes certain amount of sense at least that's how it works in ships that are using turbine drive in that manner in American ships using turbo electric drive there's a whole leg extra resistance which gets even more entertaining and Aaron Davis asks another oddball one to have fun with well seems appropriate include this this video on there was a question previously about how a world war 1 or 2 battleship would do at the Battle of Trafalgar shockingly the answer was very well however will be the smallest or least combat effective world 1 a world war ii ship that you feel could take the place of the british fleet and win the battle a couple of ideas that occur to aaron are a flower class Corvette motor gun boat with some extra machine gun ammo a liberty ship with a 4-inch gun and punch troops with small arms or maybe a fully unarmed merchant vessel that was just big enough to ram everything now the large ship that's completely unarmed but it's just a sort of rolling on going move get out the way etc with all that stupid nonsense that could possibly we'll do it I mean there's pretty hefty yeah ships around by that point that would fall into that category large liners and such and well the biggest and heaviest ships present at Trafalgar probably only way four or five thousand tons at most so that could definitely be a thing the only reservation that I would have there is one maneuverability and two merchant ships are probably some of the few steel ships around the whose hulls could be made into Swiss cheese by mass cannon fire and also well their bowels are not particularly built for ramming so they might crush a few ships but their own vows be so smashed in they'd probably end up sinking themselves at some point now in terms of ship that might be able to pull it off a little bit better and not die whilst also not being particularly armed if at all you'd probably actually want if there were any especially talk about world war 1 maybe some of the older iron merchant ships now Great Eastern unfortunately have been broken up at that point because well the idea of a Great Eastern going around like some gargantuan powered trireme taking apart everyone at the battleship out was just hilarious but something of that ilk sat a large early iron ship because their bowels were strengthened in many cases for some form of not necessarily ramming but impact that might be able to do it or certainly do enough damage that the the French Spanish Frank especially retreats when you talk about merchant ships and other small ships like that again their hulls are some vulnerable so you could rely on just sheer size so Liberty Ship maybe with the single gun properties gonna run out of ammunition before it gets to do anything but maybe an armed merchant cruiser something in the twenty thousand-plus ton range armed with half a dozen of war 44.7 6-inch guns that kind of thing could probably do a real number at the battle travel go travel go cuz yeah it's big enough to take a bunch of cannon hits there's gonna be so few crew compared to its volume that no one's probably really going to notice all that much and yeah point-blank range you can barely miss and those kind of guns would deal a lot of damage l especially if they're using a chi the motor gun boat no the most numbers weren't the ones I definitely wouldn't want to be on because even if you do have a few burnt cases of extra MGM oh all it takes us on some sensible person to load to sort of a false or fifty gun broadside of grape shots and well it was nice knowing you flower class Corvette was similar to the our merchant Cruiser the only restriction with the flower class Corvette would be well it's got a lot less room to take damage it's not got armor so I I'd be hesitant with that one just because if it did get caught up in close-range action there's a fairly high chance there might actually incapacitate it and at longer ranges it runs again into the same issue of the Liberty Ship would of I don't necessarily know if it's got enough ammunition so yeah I mean a destroyer could probably do the job because the destroyer with multiple guns decent ammunition stockpiles torpedoes and the speed would be able to stay at range and just shell everything with impunity so yeah something along the lines of a destroyer something with basically you need something with multiple guns to ensure enough ammunition is your main restriction and well destroyers have a decent fire control system by world war ii at least so they'll give you the range you need to stay out of cannon range basically so yeah if you're going down to smallest warship probably a destroyer maybe a destroyer escort just as long as it's got the plenty of eight G around and if you're going with something that's not a classical warship yes large-ish armed merchant Cruiser will probably have a fair bit of fun and to be honest at that point in even even an armed merchant Cruiser that's mostly kitted out for anti-aircraft work with bogus' 40 mils and such would probably do relatively well considering just how much damage you could do with us at court Bofors mount and that brings us to the end of this video so thank you very very much for listening this is the nock the second-to-last patreon special before I head out to America the next patreon special will go live or when I'm actually in Boston so her there's that look forward to and it means I've got a lot of recording to do before I head away but there you go such is life so yep thank you very much for listening and see you again in another video

Channel: Drachinifel

Views: 514,325

Rating: 4.6811595 out of 5

Keywords: The Drydock, Drachinifel, Q&A

Id: 3mf8wENbVnc

Length: 206min 34sec (12394 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 01 2020