The Drydock - Episode 096

hello everybody welcome to drydock episode 96 this is the patreon and drydock the monthly one so let's see if this month's method measures have been effective and we're not stuck all stuck here for half a day oh no it might only be about three hours or so if it's if it's got down to around about that I'll be happy anyway shall we proceed Ben from upstate New York asks watching the battle scene clip from the 1957 film the Yangtze incident the story of H must amethyst I noticed the wheelhouse below the bridge had no windows no port holes or slits for the helmsman to see forward this seems to be confirmed by looking at photographs of Black Swan class which also show that vision forward from the wheelhouse we blocked by the twin 4-inch B mount anyway how common was this arrangement on warships so this was not very common although it did crop up once or twice in a few other ship designs but the main reason for this is well due to the origins of the Black Swan class remember there sloops designed for at convoy escort work which means effectively in this time period primarily anti-submarine worked now with best will in the world you're not gonna see a submarine regardless and the wheelhouse is only one of several steering positions aboard a ship however when you're in a Black Swan class you are probably going to be encountering some pretty nasty weather and you may or may not be under air attack depending but when it comes to the orders that obviously will necessitate which way you turn assuming that the wheelhouse is where you're Manning the steering from there is obviously the bridge level one higher and then orders can be communicated either by voice pipe or just by yelling down a hatch depending on what's appropriate at the time to tell you where to go now obviously ideally you would want to be able to have your helmsman see where he's going as well but on something the size for Black Swan class putting everything one deck higher so you have an enclosed wheelhouse and bridge structure where the open bridge is on the ship itself and then having an open bridge one level higher because that is the best thing for the commanding officer and suchlike to be able to actually see near enough a full 360 for their operations escorting convoys when the weather's not completely abysmal that means that well on a ship this size that that's going to add a lot of weight high up which you don't want it might only be in the order of a few tons to a few tens of tons but on something the size of a sloop and that high up that's can cause some interesting stability issues so you have to compromise yes you could put some windows in but then it so you can't see through beam out so what you do do you delete half your forward armament and probably not do you make the ship as unstable as a Hollywood celebrity who's had one too many binge parties again probably not so you just have to settle for well having orders communicated down to you from above and as say there are alternate steering positions on the ship as well the other thing you've got to remember with black swans is that within that wheelhouse is not just the steering they also had various plotting devices both for radar and for well at the time it's a stick and we now now call it sonar and so these are kind of things you really can't afford to get wet so you can't have the thing open and to be perfectly honest in the Atlantic at least in some of the size of a a sloop having windows that lowdown in rough seas is a good invitation to get something broken so there's method to the madness although obviously ideally you would want an open wheel hell not open whereas of real house you could see out from if you had the displacement to do so Daniel Ziegler asks in World War two how did one find themselves in command of a ship say to decide the size of a destroyer or larger in the American British Japanese German etc navies especially curious how the Kriegsmarine are maintained and trained to new offices in between the wars so for all of those navies it's quite different to be honest it's in the details because well there's a reason they're different navies they all follow different systems but if you want to look for common threads then obviously you would enlist in the Navy with the aim of becoming an officer so that usually means you would become a midshipman or equivalent rank and then you begin advancing up the tree of command through obviously leftenant or lieutenant depending on the Navy you're in and so on and so forth as you go and as part of that you would obviously have your stated preference now we're presuming that your stated preferences command but you would also have assessments by the Navy to determine what a both what they needed because if they have dozens of people who want to command and only a dozen ships well sorry but someone's gonna get shifted off to another career path and then they're also going to look at how good you are from the suitable candidates so yeah let's say we're talking about a I don't know let's say we've got a Navy that's got 50 ships and there are 500 new enlistees who all want to command well they're going to sort those out and go right okay we only need a certain number of prospective future commanders so first set of aptitude tests is to determine what people are particularly good at because if people have a natural command Talent then obviously they'll go be directed up that tree first but if it turns out you're not particularly good at command but you might be good at engineering or you might be good at gunnery or anything else then you'd be directed more along those lines now that's not to say that you couldn't then become a commander there were numerous officers who in the early parts of their career focused on very specific aspects of technology Fisher for example was a gunnery nut so and so was Philippine actually and so these people obviously went on to very high rank including ship command now obviously there's also the fact that as a midshipman or a left-hander you're not going to be in command of anything other than maybe a ship's boat so you can't immediately join the commandery you will have to be looking at one of these other specializations but as part of the assessments the the Navy in question is going to be looking to see right are you any good at that and almost regardless of that how do you show any other talents so if your malice assigned to an engineering team if it turns out you actually you're really good at organizing the engineering team and getting results in the other little section that you're assigned to and you naturally seem to end up in charge a lot of the time because you just have that ability but maybe you're so so actual engineer then they might identify you as a potentially a future commander or captain I guess that technically and once as you progress through these early ranks the Navy has a bit of a better handle on who wants to look for command and who they think is actually going to be good for command then they can start giving command opportunities and at that point this is where further filtering comes to you because if it turns out you're really really good if you're sort of Paragon of command oh you're exceptionally aggressive you'll probably be fast-tracked fair destroyer come on because those are the two kinds of people you'll get early destroy commands either the insanely aggressive because well that's usually what Navy's want in their destroyer commanders most navies at least and if you're just generally very good you might get put in a destroyer or similar size command early so that you've started on the definite command path and then they can get you relatively swiftly into something like a cruiser or a battleship or a carrier or whatever else so and then obviously you're gonna be assessed as you progress through there to see a if your actual life skills are matching up to what they thought they would be and then you might develop that way so if you if you are a good commander but very aggressive you might become first destroyer the you might end up being command well second in command of a destroyer command of a destroyer then command of a flotilla division then command upon flotilla then and so on and so forth up that line if they want to keep you in destroyers or whatever as far as the Kriegsmarine are maintaining and training new officers is pretty much that they did build a number of ships Indian to war period is just they didn't have it so many of them so they could only maintain a small Corps of officers and Men but for example where for the 1920s when they weren't really in the business of building destroyers they built torpedo boats instead so that makes no difference although they're mostly coastal they give the same kind of command and training opportunities as larger destroyers would be but naval cultures vary quite significantly so the exact details are going to change and exactly what level of obeying obeisance to High Command versus aggressiveness they want will also vary from Navy to Navy couse army trouble oh one asks historically the British tend to have fairly large islands on their carriers as opposed to American carriers which are generally smaller and previous assault ships being an exception can you elaborate on the design and operational philosophies that created these differences and the advantages - disadvantages of the different approaches now technically it's very it's a bit of a difficult trend to pick up on to be honest because whilst yes the Lexington and Saratoga's Islands were well let's face it mostly funnel the early British carriers weren't exactly endowed with the world's biggest Islands past the initial conversions I mean okay fair enough Hermes and Eagle do have very large islands but then courageous glorious fairly small islands furious of course doesn't have one at all arc Royals Islands is actually pretty small when you look at it compared to the funnel certainly and overall where perhaps you start to see a little bit more of this is when you're looking at something like the the Yorktown ethics class versus the illustrious implacable class classes so yeah there you can see a little bit more of a trend where the British cares tend to have slightly large islands compared to their US counterparts now with the very very earliest ships eagle and well Hermes as well a lot well good Eagle it's because it's a converted battleship they're just sticking everything on top so any carrier functionality that you need from a bridge structure has to be within eagles bridge plus of course remember there was that whole fantastic idea about having it some kind of weird mass torpedo armed heavily gun protected through deck cruiser night action demon thing for fighting enemy Cruiser squadrons the PT came up with which I'm still not entirely sure how much opium was being smoked on that particular point in time but we shall go on looking over the blueprints of the Yorktown's and Essex's versus the blueprints of the illustrious I think where you get this development of the sort of world war ii british care is generally having somewhat larger islands is actually believe it or not it comes back around the armored issue not specifically directly whether or not something is armored but what implications that has now with the armored carriers as was mentioned in my armored carrier versus unarmored well armoured versus unarmed flight deck or hangar as it should one more properly be video anyway the british carriers had to make a few sacrifices for the armor and one of those sacrifices was a lower ceiling in their hangars now if you look at the profiles for the Yorktown's and the essex is what you'll notice is there's quite a large number of rooms offices etc immediately in the vicinity of the aircraft carriers island but under the flight deck basically suspended underneath the flight deck and above the hangar deck of course when Bunker Hill was hit this would be where a loss of casualties occurred because of what being effectively hanging rooms they couldn't be especially heavily built but that's neither here nor there it's just where they were and so obviously if you've got these this functionality down there you don't need it on the island and if you don't need it on the island then you make the island smaller as simple as that the reason for this is of course the higher up in the ship you go the more given amount of weight affects the ship's stability so when you are building your carrier ideally speaking you actually want a light as light weight and small an island as you can get away with unless there's a very very good reason to have a large one and obviously with the armored carriers if you don't have that height in your hangar deck to be able to fit rooms above the aircraft then those rooms have to go in the island because you're on the other option is to put them much lower in the ship and these kinds of rooms we talk about command and control for the ship command and control for the air groups places to store your pilots etc all of this kind of stuff you need close to the flight deck or ideally above it if you can but some of the stuff that can go further down below can be stored in American carriers but not so much in the British ones so that makes the British islands a bit larger the other thing is the due to the British being in the 30s slightly ahead of the US Navy when it came to radar and of course the illustrious is being slightly later on the order books as compared to the Yorktown's it meant that the need for a considerable mast to support these of the new radio and radar etc based communications and sensor systems was something that could be built in or anticipated a little bit better on the illustrious as compared to the Yorktown's and so that also having a sort of a bigger base for your for a large amass does appear on compare ibly and obviously when implacable and essex are being built which are roughly contemporaneous this is where you see both sets of ships islands expanding to accommodate that but implacable obviously has to still account for fact it can't have under flight deck rooms and it needs um it needs so have that space the other thing as well one final bit is aircrew because remember the in the Fleet Air Arm up until well actually even whilst implacable is being designed the fighter is a to an aircraft so for twelve aircraft you have twenty-four people and on a u.s. ship you don't miss us so that means that the individual rooms you use both to store your aircrew ready to go and to brief your aircrew etcetera have to be much larger so you might only be carrying in well north sea conditions 3648 aircraft in specific conditions fifty sixty plus as opposed to the 70 to 100 you might find on various sizes of American carrier but you've got remember one the number of aircraft carried on an American carrier doesn't necessarily equate to serve as a player craft and therefore doesn't necessarily equate to pilot numbers and two it's in the way you'd when you take into account serviceable aircraft it's not double so even with say sixty seventy percent of the aircraft you're going to end up with more men on a Royal Navy carrier because all of your fighters obviously basically doubling up and numbers until later on when you get things like the sea fire and the Martlet - wildcat etc John McCarthy says I've seen statements online that Bismarck had critical communications cables such as control ones above the armored deck and therefore vulnerable to damage is this true I'm skeptical because it seems like such a serious error even for inexperienced German designers I've searched my reference books as well and found no mention of this floor so this is one of the more contentious things that you do find online and not helped by a course the fact that there is usually shall we say some very entrenched camps when it comes to whether or not this muck was good or not and both sides have raised some rather extreme views shall we say nevertheless when it comes to general communications cables that much I couldn't say for certain in part because well pretty much every plan and blueprint that I've managed to find for this part no matter how detailed don't appear to include these details so yeah I suppose there's probably a document out there somewhere in German that says something about it but it's not something I've come across translated into English so well there you go there's been a few arguments about some rather annoyingly vaguely named corridors and such but whatever when it comes to fire control specifically no they do not appear to have run them all above the armored deck but where the whole thing about an armored fire control cables comes from I think I've managed to track down what it means there are three primary fire control positions for Bismarck there's obviously the big one which is up on the top of the main mast just forward of the funnels it's probably what a tower really but nevermind and then you have a forward and an aft fire control systems which you can see bit sort of just aft of the bridge and forward and forward of the third turret Caesar turret now these ones the the secondary command stations definitely have a armored tube that runs from them down to below the armored turtle back deck the main fire control station however doesn't and I think this is where a lot of this comes from because on American and British ship design there was still an armored tube running from the primary fire control all the way down to below the armored deck to carry the cables now granted none of these tubes are the world's thickest tubes but they'll still protect you from blast and splinter damage basically you'd have to land a direct hit or very very close near miss with something fairly powerful to sever the cables whereas on [ __ ] markers say that how it does not appear to have enjoyed that particular benefit which is a bit of an order mission to be honest and this is then coupled with that whilst the the feeds from the primary from the to secondary control stations are armored because the turtle back deck is much low down in the ship it means that those tubes are much longer than they would have otherwise be if it had a more conventional all-or-nothing armor approach with a higher level main armor deck so what that means is the feeds from the secondary control stations are more vulnerable to being hit or shells hitting the body of the ship to take them out well in the event the fire control station themselves just got physically removed from existence so that doesn't really help matters but it also meant that specifically with a main fire control system the hit that appears to have disabled it actually appears to have been a hit to the bridge if I recall correctly and it's the blast shell shock wave and splinters the riddle the primary fire control body open immediately below the primary fire control position although it that also gets totalled short in shortly thereafter but anyway and that would have taken out the connection to from primary fire control to the turrets so there's potentially a few minutes within Bismarck's engagement between the hit to the bridge and the hit that actually totals the fire control systems directly where if those systems had been armored from the main fire control position that might have actually retained the ability to correct its fire effectively for a little bit longer so yes there were unarmored fire control cables and there were fire control cables that whilst armored were more vulnerable than they otherwise should have been but I think that gets conflated with the deck position and the fact that the German plans and blueprints at least is available in the english-speaking world are not particularly clear and half the German ones don't appear to be either and so you get this sort of translated into unarmored therefore must mean running above the armored deck and I say there were some cables that ordinarily you would find below an armored deck that were off the armor deck because of lack of space but as far as I can tell they're not the fire control cables specifically and as I've said before on a couple of dry docks and such when I've talked to one of the Bismarck's survivors as well he did mention that in his conversations with the the turret crews and fire control crews in the forward part of the ship obviously before everything went to bits they were having issues with information transmitted from the primary fire control position even when they weren't being here trous from the shock of their own guns and of course we know the shock of the guns knocked out the radar which is a whole separate issue which I have to do a video on at some point but that does seem to bear out that not having these cables protected at all actually was putting the putting the ship's fire control system at risk from its own battery let alone any enemy action wings of Wrath asks what would have been the duties of a Royal Navy Midshipmen on a destroyer circa 1910 and would these duties have changed with the start of war so midshipman well generally but especially in a world war one world war two time period have three primary duties one learn to keep your journals and three dogs body work and yeah if actually in that in that descending order they would be assigned to various watches under more senior officers and their primary duty as Midshipmen given how young a lot of them still are were you know probably still are relative to what we expect socially these days but anyway definitely at the time their primary objective was to learn their ship and to learn the duties of the officers that they were effectively shadowing because they ruled the best weather in the world they've gone to various training colleges and such but nothing compares between a theory and actual practice so yeah keep keeping an eye on whichever officer you've been assigned to learning what they do learning why they do it learning how to do it more efficiently than perhaps your books and papers told you also said maintaining your journals and this is because if you wanted to become a left tenant then you would need to sit your left hands examination and as part of that they would ask you show us your journals and the journals were basically evidence of the factory that's been doing a job evidence of what you'd learned evidence of what you'd observed perhaps there was maybe direct outside of the direct learnings you needed to do and then you've also got other things you might have seen some maps you might draw sketches etc and not only was this evidence of you actually doing something other than just lying about and hiding in a corner but it also would clue in the examination board as to where you might be suited career-wise which actually flips back to an earlier question because if it turns out that wow these these drawings of Harper's and such you've visited are really good then that might perhaps hoc and towards a career in navigation or charting and blotting and whereas if there's a lot of detailed observations and accurate ones about the status of the men and who could improve in what then perhaps this is suggestive of command whereas if there's lots of stuff about well this mechanism didn't work I fixed that mechanism here's a drawing of a gear train and how I think it could be bettered maybe engineering is your forte and so on and as it then I said the dog's body worked because there's never a dull moment aboard a warship it might feel like it but there's always something to do and if you don't believe me then find an officer and they'll find you something to do though they will have a whole list of things that you never knew you had to do a board a ship until you had the good fortune to ask one of them and so this could be well to be honest on on a British ship you would probably be making tea or making cocoa depending on the ship and the area that you're in in question keeping logs marking charts well if the navigation officer would let you anywhere near the precious charts and such like so yeah it was a very steep learning curve where you had to record evidence if you're learning and make yourself generally useful until you could actually be useful once the war starts then things get a little bit different you're still supposed to keep records and help out generally because that's how you advanced but obviously with a direct war going on you're your roller especially at sea is going to be configured much more towards the the keeping the ship alive part so where is a whole gaggle of Midshipmen might be all over the place various stations in peacetime in wartime you generally find bid Shipman levying up the gun crews and helping out with the watch it with literally the watch officers are you the ones were looking out for the ship looking out out and around to look for enemy contacts because more eyes are better and of course gun crews are going to take casualties so you need more more hands they're too work for guns fast to get the ammunition up faster and when casualty start to come make sure that the gun crew stays operational for as long as possible so more active work would take precedence over the more general work although obviously even in wartime action is relatively rare so the sort of the general dogs pocket body work would still continue but perhaps the more detailed and shall we say bureaucratic parts of keeping track of exactly what you were and weren't doing would take a little bit of a distant place in wartime as compared to in peace ally Arthur asks rudder damage is one of the more critical things that can happen to a ship however to my laypersons I there appears to be little difference between a warship and a merchantman all their damage protections built into military rudders and if it does get damaged what can a captain do about it there are some differences between military and merchant rudders generally speaking you'll find a warship tends to have more rudder area for a given tonnage than a merchant ship because obviously agility is slightly more valuable you know warship than it is in a merchant ship and because and also because warships tend to run at somewhat higher speeds than most merchant ships you'll tend to find that the rudders have considerably more powerful motors and mechanisms because well you can see the size of this person next to the Iowas rudders here and yeah if if you try and turn something that size against a flow of water that's passing over it when you're motoring along north of 30 knots but the waters gonna have something to say about that and we'll try and keep the rudder basically in this kind of position so you need some pretty powerful pretty powerful motors to be able to turn the rudder against that force and then of course turn it back and make sure the thing just doesn't get flipped around broadside or something like that so yeah military rudders tend to be somewhat sturdier because of the operational constraints laid upon them obviously the ship itself the hull is divided into more watertight sections and that will include specifically around weak spots such as the rudders because yeah it's it's one of the few areas where you voluntarily have to have a hole poked through the hull of your ship so make sure there's plenty of water like compartments up there but in terms of damage protection things like armoring and such there's not tremendous amount you can do to be perfectly honest because the whole way that rudders work is by affecting the water flow past the ship if you enclose your rudders they can't do that if you put baffles and suchlike screening your others will a verse we're going to slow your ship down B it's going to reduce their effectiveness because again you're preventing as certain about the water flow coming through and also given that remember the rudders are deflecting a flow of water if you had a baffle hanging down to maybe capture to incoming torpedo the minute you turn your rudder in that direction so from this point of view in the picture if we turn if the doors were turn hard to starboard the deflected flow of water will probably just tear that screen clean off without a moment's thought unless that screen was well this thing if the screens light enough to just bend out the way it's light enough to bend out the way the torpedo and if it's heavy enough to resist it's going to put massive strain in the hull and weigh a massive amount of displacement and then again negatively affect the ability of your rudder to operate it's a perennial weak spot on any kind of warship and there's a limited amount you can do but there were things small things and medium scale things that could be done to protect them if they do get damaged it's largely a matter of how old the ship was built with something like this mark where it's difficult to steer with the engines if the rudders jammed there's not tremors paint you can do with something along the lines of an Iowa or any other more traditional treaty error and post treaty at battleships we four screws it's easier to steer with your propellers and also as you can see in this case there are in fact two parallel rudders so if one of them gets broken you hopefully should be able to use the other one at least somewhat to counter it Kent W featherly asks how many and which navies maintain ships on the Yangtze River well it depends the exact time period you talk about in terms of the larger navies there were quite a number that had patrol boats on the Yangtze River so obviously the Americans and the British were there for quite a while with reasonably large numbers of ships boats mmm done and quite well you want to call him but also the French the austro-hungarians the Germans the Russians the Japanese the Portuguese and believe it not even the Chinese did show up with patrol boats on the Yangtze River at various points most of these latter navies tended to be around at the mid part of the 19th century in the period just after the opium wars and then again in the sort of build up to and especially the aftermath of the boxer uprising in the latter part of the colonial period and of course when the sino-japanese Wars plural were ongoing obviously the Japanese would find magically suddenly a very good reason to operate lots of gunboats on the Yangtze and other Chinese rivers in terms of how many anything up to 12 was probably about the largest individual flotilla outside of direct wartime situations but on average the the larger navies present would usually have around about half a dozen also present at the in the average deployment period and as I say this could trend up or down depending on what those Navy's obligations elsewhere were and quite how tense the situation in China was at the time Swee 420 den asks how important will lend-lease aircraft to the Fleet Air Arm they were very important in two particular roles in the fighter - fighter bomber role supplies of the Wildcat Hellcat and Corsair were incredibly important because they gave the Fleet Air Arm single-seat fighter aircraft that were designed from the start to operate from carriers which and what and high-performance ones at that which was something the Fleet Air Arm was lacking because they had a choice of either two-seat aircraft like the Fulmar and later the Firefly which well the full mod did alright in 1940 not so well after that in most cases and the Firefly similarly it was better than the Fulmar but still not something you want to particularly take up after a zero and then you've got the things like the sea hurricane and the sea fire which adapted to varying degrees depending on the model from land-based aircraft and so not as well suited to carry operations something designed from the ground up for that purpose especially when you get into the debates about radial versus inline engines and visibility for landing slightly yeah bendy landing gear and so forth so having the having the ability to field these kinds of aircraft bleedin fighter terms was very useful and you actually ended up with the multiplicity of different fighter types the fleet air on was operating being used to cover different aspects of the the fleet's air defense one of the very important things about it was the the Lyn lend-lease aircraft gave the Fleet Air Arm the ability to conduct long-range high-performance fighter escort and patrol duties because whilst in the case of stopping incoming enemy air raids for example the sea fire was actually pretty much the best of a lot especially once you got right towards the end all the Griffon engine powered ones because the sea fire like the Spitfire was up there basically an interceptor it was a very good at this job it could just go rocketing up into the sky a rate of knots that nobody else could really match but when you're talking about long term to see if I does not have the world's biggest fuel tanks and even with additional drop tanks it can't really compete with the range and endurance of the lend-lease aircraft now the formal when the five like yeah they can compete but well that would their twin seat fighters versus single seaters so yeah definitely important in that respect and the other thing of course was the avenger which was a nice big chunky aircraft capable of doing torpedo bombing and conventional bombing and a fair enough the Barracuda was also capable of doing this but the Avenger was just huge and very durable and was also available in large numbers so as the Royal Navy's carrier arm is expanded quite considerably as the war went on having the ability to cool on relatively large numbers of modern strike aircraft and fighter aircraft especially with range was also very important in aircraft carrier operations was very important to the Fleet Air Arm although obviously they were continuing to try to develop their own homegrown solutions but it's fair to say that they were very important indeed darin lou asks what's your opinion of the AI 400 submarines were they've been useful boats in a conflict or are they like the Surcouf military white elephants in the manner that they were built and at the time they were built the AI 400s were basically big waste of resources with the best will in the world lock gates are designed to stand up to quite considerable pressures there's a reason that when gates that Dockyard in frot concern as ii i had to be taken out the Royal Navy used an entire destroyer with its nose converted into a gigantic floating bomb the idea that a handful of roads have lightweight flat pack aircraft could do significant damage the Panama Canal LOX is pretty laughable to be honest but hey they probably didn't have much health of a choice they would have done some damage but sorry just no in and of themselves the idea of a large extremely long range submarine capable of going across the Pacific or anywhere else in the world to attack people at their home bases that does have a certain amount of merit but two problems one aircraft and not the thing you use in a submarine to attack things especially in world war two and two as I said they were built far too late now the reason I say this is because if you had built at the I 400s and instead of going with the silly tiny aircraft carrier idea gone with perhaps say equipping them with an absolute metric ton of torpedoes and I've already got some decent torpedo tubes up up front so given loads of torpedoes send them out on long distance attack that might well have been workable because and the reason I'm thinking this is is twofold one specifically the as they were famously intended to go for the attack on the Panama Canal the Panama Canal was not anywhere near as well defended at the very beginning of the war as it would later be all be other stuff did fall off a little bit later on but also at well as the German u-boat showed on the East Coast the US was not prepared to deal with submarine warfare activity off its own coast early on in the war so if it had been me building the I 400 I would say I would have stopped them full of torpedoes and tried to have at least one or two of them sail for the Panama Canal locks in advance of the Pearl Harbor attacks timed to strike at the same time on the same day given plenty of time to get there obviously and I would have sent others to operate off of the u.s. west coast because then yeah a couple of big heavy subs of volley firing torpedoes into the lock gates at the same time as the key to boot high is attacking Pearl Harbor that would do some fairly serious damage and then coupled with ships that are coming into and out of San Diego Los Angeles and various other US West Coast ports suddenly finding themselves being unexpectedly torpedoed and regularly because of Celia said these things would be carrying lots of Pepito's that could I mean it's again it's not gonna win the Japanese of the war but it's certainly gonna hurt the Americans a lot and it's gonna force something to delay because you've gotta then repair the damage that's done to the Panama Canal you've got children diver anti-submarine resources to sanitize the what u.s. west coast which is going to slow down shipping which is going to slow down preparation efforts potentially even you put down a few ship ships with more ships and suchlike which the US would being quite short supply off in the early part of the war it would throw a lot of spanners into a lot of works basically so yes the idea of this long-range large attack submarine the sharp and unexpected place is a good idea building it in in the middle of World War two and trying to make it a small submersible aircraft carrier very bad idea david c wharton asks what if any special measures or precautions did the royal navy take during the spanish flu pandemic of 1918 to 1920 what problems to the pandemic caused the Royal Navy and were any measures that were taken effective one thing you've got to bear in mind with the whole thing around the Spanish flu is that the theory of disease alert had taken a significant jump in the latter part the 19th and early 20th centuries was nowhere near complete so the understanding of quite how all of this was happening it was mostly there but and I say not not as nowhere near as detailed as we'd understand it the Royal Navy didn't really do quarantine and though the current situation that might sound absurd well one is very difficult to quarantine people on a warship as a number of ships in various navies are currently finding out and that's where the much less infectious disease and secondly well just the the technology the medical diagnosis that equipment etc just wasn't there to the degree that it was that it is these days so the Royal Navy did take a number of measures against disease one of the things that had come out of the 19th and traversed even the 18th century was an appreciation that disease was quite often associated with and caused by unsanitary conditions so as best they could the Royal Navy was definitely determined to keep the interior of it ships [ __ ] and span although obviously when you're in a giant metal box full of hundreds of other people lots of steam plants and condensation there's a limited amount you can do but certainly the cleanliness measures that they undertook as a general thing were somewhat effective in limiting the impact if not all that much there was of course the fact that if a outbreak was known in a particular port or section of the fleet it was possible to redirect ships or just delay ships arriving etcetera just you can plot that's fairly easy to isolate yourself on a warship when you're out at sea but with the way this thing spread and the way it could take over it there wasn't a lot you could do short of just physically staying away from the places that had it which in the 1919 outbreak was not that many they weren't that many places other than just staying out and see if you didn't have any cases already and you can do that indefinitely even if you took on supplies that a chance of catching it from those so yeah problems it caused it there were a number I mean it over ten thousand men were sick at one point which limited the Navy's ability to operate fortunately mostly after the major operations of the second of the First World War were over but when it came to things like the war in the Baltic with the trying to put itself together Soviet Union that there were limitations on what the Royal Navy could send out there because of the effects of the Spanish flu not just on the ships themselves but also on the support infrastructure and the men that supplied that and both the men and women on shore etc in the world that supplied various bits of the industry that supported the Royal Navy in terms of measures picture-taking I say because they didn't really think that this quarantine thing aboard ships and suchlike would actually be of any particular use there was a limited degree of effectiveness to what they did it certainly had some effect but not not tremendous amount unfortunately outside of well keeping the ship as clean as possible and obviously being mobile being able to try and remove yourself from the worst of it where you could Matthew Allen Adkins asks submarine warfare specifically nations other than the Germans Americans or Japanese I'd like to hear about a few of the more impressive things that those who aren't in the top three have done okay well I robe will regale you with three brief tales two of which will come from the Dutch Navy the Dutch seem to have given the number of submarines they had and the number of chances they had to have a go at someone they seemed to have a remarkable degree of success at taking on German u-boats of all things so for example of the submarine Oh 21 as seen here was on its way back into Gibraltar when it found itself being tailed by a German u-boat who haven't quite managed to figure out what it was they were tailing this was one of the small advantages Dutch submarines had there weren't that many of them and their profiles very different to British submarines and so the German u-boat was actually trying to figure out is this a weird-looking German boat is it an Italian boat is a British boat they apparently didn't even stop to think it might have been a Dutch submarine and they paid for that because we're no 21 realized she was being followed she popped off a couple of torpedoes the first one grazed down the side of u-20 95 and didn't explode but because of that yeahyou 95 turned to have make evasive action and ended up turning into the path the second torpedo which blew its Stern off and well that was the end of that Oh 21 very hopefully then turned around and came back and picked up survivors later in the war in the Pacific Theater you have the Dutch submarine and apologies to my Dutch listeners but Savard fish I'm gonna call it swordfish because that's blatantly obvious what it actually means in English at least so yeah you might think so okay Dutch submarine in the Pacific not that common a sight in 1944 but anyway what's even less common a sight in the Pacific in 1944 is a German u-boat specifically the you 168 and the swordfish was able to find this German submarine motoring along on the surface and far spread of torpedoes and hit it with apparently according to the survivors three albeit only one of them exploded and sink it and then again picked up survivors that were left in the water so yeah Dutch submarines weirdly attracted to taking out German u-boats and the other one comes from the submarine HMS trenchant T class submarine again operating in the Pacific toward the end of the war this time in June of 1945 and trenchant amongst other activities including a brief encounter with the destroy kamikaze found the cruiser a she Guara sailing past its station now Asha Goro was hugging the coastline in waters that trenchant didn't expect it to go in and so they found themselves in the rather an enviable situation of only having the barest of intercept vectors I basically that the ashigaru would pass trench in its ability to fire at all relatively quickly and the only firing solution they could come up with was one that was almost at the very edge of their range and so trenchant used the tea glasses wonderful the forward torpedo battery all that didn't fire the full spread of ten in instead fired only a spread of eight torpedoes which headed toward towards asha Gaara and then a cigar I found that well if you books yourself in to the coast so closely you can't really that make that much in the way of evasive maneuvers and the Japanese Cruiser ended up taking five hits out of the eight fired which was something of a fatal blow to the Japanese heavy cruiser so yeah that remains quite the impressive feat getting up five out of eight hits at basically a maximum range shot that you had to calculate in your head very very quickly before the targets hell that ranged completely Robin MacFarlane asks when the Russian ship or Yeol was taken into Imperial Japanese Navy service what modifications did they do so as you can see here is kind of before and after pictures there was some quite substantial changes the picture on the left is the ship just after the Battle of Tsushima and the picture on the right is several years later once she's in full Japanese service as Awami now the oil as designed its secondary and tertiary battery was a sets of twin six-inch gun turrets fairly high up in the ship and then lower down deck ported three inch guns whereas as you can see on it on the on her in her Japanese guys they actually basically took off an entire layer of superstructure one one entire decks worth of superstructure across most of the ship they made the bridge a bit smaller they took down the fighting tops from the masts they shortened the funnels slightly and she heightened the masts as well they completely removed the secondary and tertiary batteries as had been put in by the Russians so that twin 6-inch turrets went all the 3-inch positions were plated over and instead at the at the one one deck lower down as you can see there were some casement all yeah effectively as you might as well call them casement mounted six inch eight inch gun sorry installed so it still had a secondary battery but it was half the number of guns three per side instead of six beside but two inches larger caliber and lower down which increased the ship's stability and reduced displacement so overall the ship's displacement went down quite a bit as built it was about I think about six seven hundred tons taken off of the overall displacement which obviously made it a bit more efficient as well there were some light weapons put in to replace the tertiary battery but they definitely weren't whole mount it they were placed higher up in the vessel so yeah those are the main changes I mean oh she got a machinery completely rebuilt obviously the hull was repaired various other changes but yeah it was it was a pretty much a comprehensive read I wouldn't call a modernization because oil was pretty new but it was definitely a comprehensive rebuild Trey Atkins asks please give a breakdown of command structure at the Admiral level such as fleet commander theater commander etc with examples of good and bad performance each level unfortunately that's not something I can answer in a dry dock yeah the many different roles that you can give an admiral are so varied and so complex I would have to do that as a Wednesday special and so I'll put that I'll put that as a voting section on the Wednesday special then especially if you have good and bad examples at each level yeah that will run into a while and Renault asks whilst most of the anti-submarine warfare work in world war ii is primarily handled by destroyers or aircraft were ships like heavy cruisers or battleships equipped with azdak or sonar to detect or protect themselves from submarines yes the idea of fitting as dick two cruisers actually went back a fair old way and entering here and yes it is suitably old was actually the first cruiser to be fitted with our stick way back in the early 1920s and by the time of the Second World War after of some experience and various experiments it was rapidly decided that to have all cruisers fitted with a stick for self defense purposes and so yeah they were in pretty pretty short order there were a number of benefits to this one of which obviously was cruisers could look after themselves and given how often cruisers had to act independently or in squadrons of like ships this was very important but the other aspect was on when you're on convoy escort work when the weather got really bad like it often did in the North Atlantic or in the Arctic destroyers being somewhat more lightly built intending to jump around a bit more hat to stow there as decor sonar gear depending which Navy you were in to prevent the stuff getting damaged the heavier cruisers could sail around and not suffer this fate and so they could catch you keep operating in an anti-submarine protection role in weather that where the lighter escorts just couldn't as far as the battleships when it was in the late 1930s that was decided at capital ships such as battleships and carriers should be fitted with it but obviously that's a lot more of an involved process this ship has already been constructed I mean putting us putting an ass dick system into an pre-existing Cruiser is difficult enough installing it in a in a battleship where you need an even larger try dock to be able to do that and there tends to be a lot more under under the keel structure torpedo defense etc that you need to get through to fit one properly weld it does make things a bit harder so long john asks i don't understand why the go burn and Breslau were in the mediterranean at the beginning of World War one rather than the Pacific under von Spee or based out of Daraa Salaam to defend German East Africa why were they there so it comes around actually to one relatively simple thing Imperial Germany and by which I mean the Kaiser wanted to play at being a big power on the block at a time when Germany was not Colonia Lee speaking the purpose of the East Asia squadron was to defend German possessions in the western Pacific but bear in mind that pretty much the only reason Germany had positions in the western Pacific was because the cars are wanted some so that he could say that he had an empire german holdings in in africa similarly motivated but had made a little bit more economic sense than a loose scattering of islands and one odd port that you'd manage to force off of the chinese and the next stage of that was well again the kaiser was obsessed with being like the british empire and he looked at the mediterranean and went hmm the british like the mediterranean they have a fleet in the Mediterranean and him and the imperial staff went we should exert our influence in the Mediterranean and as well the fact that they didn't actually have anything in the Mediterranean to God um I mean there's minor details the austro-hungarians were there but maybe they needed a bit of a leg up who knew I say yes the Gobin and Bressler were there basically as present ships to wave the German flag around and say look at us we're nice and import and scary you should you should ally with us and that's what they were doing pretty much up until near enough the beginning of World War one there was in theory a small window where they might been able to get ger burned back to the high seas fleet but unfortunately Coburn was coming to the tail end of her stint in the Mediterranean they were thinking about replacing her with mukha and so her engines etc went in the best of condition so when it looked like war was about to break out the first thing they had to do was find and then he was friendly bought to repair the boilers as much as they could and by the time that was done well war were declared and then well they were stuck and they had to make a run for it towards the Dardanelles and the rest as they say is history and so many things about the the decisions made by Imperial Germany generally in the high seas we specifically can be boiled down to in the run-up to World War one because the Kaiser wanted it to be that way and if you want me to get into the psychology of Gaza film the second that is one subject I'm not touching with a thirty foot spa torpedo and now since we've hit the one hour mark it's time for the interlude commander unnamed asks what do you think would have happened if the relief task forces of Saratoga in Lexington hadn't been delayed and hadn't turned back from Wake Island could the forces defending the Asheville have been rescued would it likely have cost the US both of its Lexington at class carriers so it's a bit of a coin toss either way to be perfectly honest Lexington is probably not at risk because it's doing a diversionary attacks that's not going to be tied up in the main engagement if Saratoga's group presses on then it's going to come down to exactly how the engagement pulls out because by the time Saratoga's group gets in even gets in range to perform some kind of relief effort the Japanese second wave had arrived and that would have been obviously sort of you and here to you now yeah this is where it gets complicated because in terms of surface combat power the US force has three heavy cruisers versus the Japanese - the Japanese have some older light cruisers and some destroyers the Americans have slightly better destroyers when it comes to being configured for surface warfare apart from anything else they're not being used for a ground invasion which helps and of course like Saratoga has the the wonderful feature of having some 8-inch guns so oddly enough if it gets into a fight the American forces actually have a slightly better chance if they roll up by surprise and engage in a surface action that's supported by Saratoga's air group if they try and go in for an aerial assault in a more conventional carrier doctrine way to try and relieve the islands then this runs into some problems because the very beginning of the war like this and with an escort of three cruisers and destroyers Lexington's overall anti-aircraft and fighter defense is not going to stand up to a combined strike from the two Japanese carriers which very well could cost them the curve the Saratoga and most of its group however there is also balancing against that whether or not the Japanese realize that the Americans are actually present at all now Saratoga does carry enough aircraft if it shows if they show up completely out of the blue and get the drop on sorry you all here you or both they might well do enough damage in that first strike wave to sink or badly damaged one or both of the carriers at which points with the Japanese then on the back foot potentially a second follow-up strike might finish off the other one which would be a huge victory for them but that depends on the Americans finding out where the Japanese are and the Japanese not reciprocating because I say if the Japanese work out where Saratoga is they've definitely got the advantage on that side of things so there's a reasonable chance that they might be able to relieve the island and or inflict some fairly major damage on the Japanese strike force but when I say reasonable as in it's in double-digit percentages it's not the majority it's probably maybe a 20 20 25 percent chance of pulling that off the majority chance is that Saratoga is either badly damaged or destroyed by the Japanese whether or not that's a reciprocal destruction that much I wouldn't necessarily want to take an estimate on because well as we see with both Coral Sea and Midway in these early big carrier engagements things can go very differently on the flip of a coin so what the actual outcome would have been would remain unknown but they obviously the Japanese have two flight decks and more aircraft so theoretically they have the advantage in that scenario Matt Blum asks did fouled holes due to marine life growth and the consequential effect on speed ever have a decisive effect on a naval engagement in the age of steam for example slowing down a ship that could otherwise have escaped an engagement yes actually in a number of ways two of the best examples actually both involve graphs pay one the Admiral one the ship and the thing is with the age of steam you've got to take into account that with that antifouling paints and such if your ships been at sea long enough for marine growth to start fouling the hull over the effects of the antifouling paint and you haven't had a chance to stop and clean it you're going to have a number of other issues building up as well including your engines needing maintenance possible contaminations of fuel etc etc which are also going to slow you down as well as just wear and tear on the machinery so all of these things have to be factored in but as a general rule of thumb on a large capital ship for the first second world war period fouling if it got really bad could knock two or three knots off of your top speed and that's just on its own let alone the effects of machinery and safe machinery fuel wear and tear etcetera so in both cases of battles involving somebody called Graf Spee in the Battle of Falkland Islands in World War one whilst Scharnhorst and Gneisenau were not as fast as the two battlecruiser that were chasing them down the margin of speed if they'd been fresh out of dock would have been a lot closer which may or may not have allowed them to escape I mean they would have been run down eventually but whether or not they would have been able to stay out of gun range long enough to say get into the cover of night or just get far enough away quickly enough that it was harder to track them etc these kinds of things mean that they might have stood a marginal chance but as because of a mixture of mechanical issues as well as the engines as well as the whole being fouled they weren't able to do so and likewise when it came to the ship Admiral Graf Spee at the Battle of River Plate by the time Brush Bay showed up you fight achilles eye axe and exeter again it's hole was fouled its speed was reduced which allowed the british ships a little bit more operational space to maneuver in because they were faster than graphs pay anyway but they were at least able to make them and Hoover's and get into position a lot quicker and a lot easier and also more easily evade any attempts to close the range at least intellects to start to get quite battered because of again of the German ships inability to quite make the same speed that it could have fresh out of dock John Riis asks how effective were the Luftwaffe x' attempts to use level bombers against merchant shipping specifically in reference to the Heinkel 111 not especially effective to be perfectly honest I mean it's the good old Spade bomber but yeah the problem with the level bombing attempts against any shipping merchant or military was the fact that well the Heinkel 111 is something of a large target so you have two choices really you can either fly that very high altitude and try and level bomb your way to victory from that aspect but a high altitude release for shipping is relatively easy to dodge I mean the accuracy is not brilliant in the first place there's a little say that didn't achieve his sometimes they did but it was more by luck than design there's plenty of accounts from sailors in both I say warships and merchant ships looking up at the sky during high altitude German air attacks are just going hmm I can see the bombs I can see where they're going I guess we'll just go the other way and that was that occasionally they did guess wrong especially if the bombs were actually on target for a change and obviously there's no particular then if they are roughly on target there's no real change in apparent angle to give you some idea of which direction you should probably be going the other option was to come in much lower and you're still doing level bombing you're not dive bombing but this thing certainly but they geeks perience some rather major losses trying that particular and you've attack because well it's one thing to be spraying away at a dive bomber or torpedo bomber that's coming in there and then breaking off and where that aircraft is somewhat agile the Heinkel 111 is many things agile is not one of them and small definitely isn't another so it took somebody truly special to miss with even the most rudimentary of anti-aircraft weaponry if this thing came flying in for a low-level air attack and yet that caused some rather high casualty figures which is why actually amongst other reasons the huncle 111 was withdrawn from general bomb based anti-shipping attacks in many instances and a number of the more she converted to torpedo bombers and yeah torpedo bombing huncle 111 s actually had some rather remarkable successes later on down the line but at the same time you also gotta remember this is an a knock particularly against the Luftwaffe nobody was particularly good at level bombing shipping because level warming shipping from high altitude with unguided bombs just it doesn't really work especially in World War two the bomb sites don't have the accuracy and unless the captain of the ship completely misses what you're doing and you happen to be on target they can just evade it's not that difficult this is why dive bombing and torpedo bombing are the primary striking elements of aircraft carriers Andrew Anderson asks not a particularly sexy question but as I work for him I'd certainly love to see what you can find out what was the scope of the Royal Fleet Auxiliary is involvement in operations in world war ii so the role of the auxilary had a rather eclectic role in world war ii they're starting off quite small then going all over the place and eventually ending up with quite a key role and this was because of the way the british plan to fight wars britain going into the war had an extensive network of naval bases and and friendly ports thanks to the fact well the British Empire was a thing and so in terms of replenishment at sea they didn't have to worry themselves quite as much as other navies such as the Japanese and all the Americans who were thinking mostly about fighting over vast expanses of the Pacific where there aren't any ports for thousands of miles let alone friendly ones so in the run-up to World War two most of the RFA's duties consisted of shuttling supplies primarily oil but other supplies as well to and from the various bases from which Royal Navy ships would in theory call in replenish refuel and head back out again although there was obviously some work done about replenishment at sea where necessary now as you might expect for a service that's mainly concerned with point A to point B Supply ferrying the RFA was not particularly large relative to the fleet it was servicing and so its initial role was relatively minor just trying to keep these things up up as bases fell as the new paradigms of war emerged where you wouldn't necessarily want your ships to be static in known dock spaces every so often and as various ships were being sunk both merchant and Royal Navy the RFA began to expand it needed to supply the fleet at sea more and more often but unfortunately at the same time as some of the bigger and faster merchant tankers and such like these are very key supply ships that are in were in relatively short supply in the Merchant Navy started to go down the strategic plan has started to look at the RFA's small fleet of relatively well-equipped tankers and go mmm we could probably use those and so just when their RFA was getting set up to go to a full fleet supply train it suddenly found its resources being pulled hither and yon by what was not entirely the directly naval requirements it also ended up as a kind of clearing house and minor design bureau for various things such as the victory ships which were the British and Canadian etc built the versions of equivalent to the Liberty ships in the US and these were actually in large pot commissioned into the RFA and then either sold on loaned on leased Lenna cetera to merchant concerns so there was that so the are the RFA was kind of bothered by the half way through with the second world war was almost as much involved in the merchant and civilian side of the war as it was the fleet resupply and maintenance side of the war now as the war progressed and the u-boat menace was gradually broken and the German surface fleet became less and less of a concern you start to see the RFA transitioning back more towards what it had originally envisaged doing earlier in the war and on a much larger scale so by the time you roll ransall 4445 and the british specifically becomes a thing then you're now looking at the RFA as you can see here doing actual full-on fleet resupply at sea going on a bit of a fast learning curve in that particular respect and by the time it comes out of the war then the RFA is considerably larger element of the Royal Navy strategic thinking in direct involvement with the fleet compared to what it had been a few years earlier in 1939 and that's basically where you get the the start of the modern RFA that's where you start see the need for honestly not hospital ships armaments supply stores oil etc all of this being taken directly to the fleet at sea and acting indirect support fleet formations this of latter part of world war ii is the crucible where those techniques are refined perfected in the needs of a certain type of shipping identified the hand of Ray asks how would you describe the impact of large fast ocean liners such as the Queen Mary Olympic Mauritania etc on the Great War and World War two their impact is somewhat varied across the wars when it comes to the First World War a lot of them are relatively quickly taken up into naval service and turned into armed merchant cruisers because well that's what a lot of them had been designed for and a lot of that I've gone over in the video about Carmen over says cap Trafalgar the armed merchant Cruiser video so take a look at that if you if you want to know more about that part but unfortunately it turns out that these really big really fast ships burn an awful lot of fuel and so very quickly into the First World War when it came to the bigger faster ones the Admiralty took a look at the fuel bill and when it cost how much and very quickly returned back to normal civilian ownership to do other things or in some cases converted them to uses that didn't involve them charging around at the mid-20s of knots for extended periods of time and it was this shift over to other uses that you see a lot of them put use in the mid to latter part of the Second World War first world war sorry so this is where Britannic which is of course Titanic's sister ship is being used as a hospital ship get sunk Lusitania is being used as well let's not get into the debate about why it was actually caring but it's being used as a transport of one sort or another get sunk some of the others are used as troop ships and other kinds of transports which obviously they're very good at they don't get sunk by and large but what if one of the things especially in the First World War that's thought is that these big fast ships are actually big enough and fast enough that they don't need to travel with convoys or even with much of if any escort because it's thought that they can outrun submarines and it'd just make it non viable for the submarines to chase them or track them obviously doesn't quite work out in lusitania x' case but there you go and in the Second World War they have a much clearer idea of what these ships are useful for and that is basically transports troop transports specifically so a lot of the bigger ships you do get one or two there are you pre perps other things occasionally like the odd hospital ship or whatever but mostly the big liners in the Second World War are used as mass troop conveyors going also all over the place really and to be fair in that role they actually have a reasonably decent effect because the number of ships you'd need to move there's several thousand troops that these things can can shift and the speed that they can shift them at is it's quite a saving actually and when I mean when you can bring over most of a division on a single ship that's well it's cause for a few sleepless nights in case one of the things gets torpedoed but if it works it it's fantastic so yeah there's there's a certain unsung hero aspect in in that respect the buildup of troops in the UK and then the supply of troops to Europe and indeed all over the place elsewhere and then getting them back home again afterwards would have been a very much more difficult and drawn-out if it hadn't been for a corps of large fast liners that were motoring on back and forth carrying out these roles nicolai flow asks while bursting charges on large naval shells so relatively small now I vaguely recall answering something along the lines of this relatively recently so I'll go into too much depth this time but anyway it comes down to how strong you need the shell to be as you can see here the shell is actually made up of several discrete components in terms of just sheer size and then on top of that there's there's other bits internally but what it comes down to in the end is the you're firing something if you talk about large battleship shell something that sways in the order of 2,000 pounds or about a ton give or take depending on exactly what caliber gun you're using in whose nation you're in and obviously with the super-heavy 16 inches more so and the Japanese 18 point ones and that's quite heavy it's being flung at incredible speed and it's hitting at least if everything's going to plan something pretty solid ie Armour on a ship whilst traveling at that very high speed which means that whether it just crashes up against the armor or if it punches through either way there's going to be some fairly significant forces involved slowing it down whether that be partially or completely and yeah if you're if you're going to be firing a shell to do that kind of job it's got a hold together during that process at least long enough to ideally penetrate through into the ship and then detonate if you stop building a nice hollow chamber full of something that's not as solid as steel like say a chamber floor explosive then you're introducing a structural weakness which means that the walls of the shell are thinner there's fewer spaces to place things like you fuse etc and there's a much greater chance of the shell just shattering on impact and this is why high-explosive shells basic I've often thought well they refused to detonate on contact but even if they weren't this is why high-explosive shells will tend to just kind of smear themselves over and ships armor plate they've got a lot of explosive power but the shell just isn't capable of standing up to the impact forces so when it comes to large armor-piercing naval shells they've they've got to have a form that is largely solid in order for them to deliver their payload once they've delivered their payload obviously you want the biggest bang for your buck that you can get but depending on the design of shell that's not going to be too much and relatively speaking could be quite quite little I mean at the same time twenty kilos of explosive is still a heck of a bang uh-huh and various parents they're off depending on which particular shell you're using but yeah if you're firing something that weighs over a ton you might think that enough explosive that one person could reasonably carry around in under one arm maybe isn't that much to show for it but as I say this in fact is any any much larger and you just have the shell break up on impact at which point it's not really much used to anybody because if you've got a hundred kilo bursting charged you have that go off outside the ship it's probably is they're gonna have even less affecting if you just plug in a cheese shell with three times as much explosive at them the interesting thing is the british did actually try this idea with the CPC shell in the run-up to World War one which operated on the principle that well naval guns are so powerful we can sacrifice some of this penetration capability and exchange for a larger warhead to do more damage and in theory that would have worked fantastically as long as you're only shooting at armored cruisers and the bow Stern and superstructure of battleships but the armor on battleships rapidly grew and obviously with the advances in steel as well rapidly became impenetrable to CPC shells so yeah say whilst they would have been absolutely wonderful fighting lightly armored targets the fact of the matter is if you're using battleship Craig guns you're probably fighting heavily on the targets at which point you just go back to them jet regular ap Clayton ggaudet asks a 1917 Congress decides that one massive investment is better than many smaller ones and actually proves the construction of a class of four of the Tillman for two battleships before the Washington treaty is finalized how effective would they have been as long-term assets with relevant upgrades in world war ii and how would other major naval powers try to compete or counter these maximum battleships well if they'd somehow managed to get that going the washington treaties we know it wouldn't have happened there's how do you account for these things within something like the framework of the Washington treaty no one else had any interest in even attempting to build something this size The Washington treaty for it to work at all would basically have had to have said right well whatever the tonnage of the Tillman's adds up to Japan and Britain can build any ships they like of any size dimension armor weight etc gun power they like up to this tonnage and then we're all gonna follow rules that are going to set up seemed absurdly tiny and pathetic in comparison to what they've just built but never mind so yeah all of that aside to be perfectly honest they would not have been tremendously useful in world war ii and that's for two reasons one they're so massive that at the time getting them in to do modernizations is what one would be insanely expensive and two i I have doubts you'd even be able to sensibly do so I'd love to see I'd love to see someone come up with a drydock that was available in the 1920s USA capable of actually holding one of these things once it was fully completed and even if there was one I'd rather suspect they'd be very few and far between and needed for other things but anyway even if these things are built that the main problem is speed the standard class battleships for all their strengths weaknesses in the back the bunch of them got blasted apart Pearl Harbor their single biggest weakness is pretty much the same thing that the r-class faced in World War two they're just too slow for modern fleet operations you can use them as backstops you can use them as Shore bombardment you can use them as convoy escort you can use them as line defense if someone's coming for you and to be fair this kind of thing would probably mess up a Yamato pretty nicely although quite what form the Yamato's would take if the the the Japanese knew these things are around I don't even want to think about yeah their main thing is they're big and they're slow which would make them horribly vulnerable targets for submarines and especially aircraft they can't do carrier escort they can't meaningfully sail away from whatever unholy combinations of shipping the Japanese have come up with in response to them they're basically the world's most expensive Shore bombardment ships by the time of World War two unfortunately unless you wanted to go completely berserk and let's say find some kind of gigantic dock yard strip all down spend about as much as you'd spend on a small squadron of other battleships to completely refit it in the late 1930s with technology engine technology together to go reasonably quickly Robert Henry Elston asks in the wednesday special an age of sail cannon types you mentioned how certain heavier cannon we used for close-range attacks while others had longer ranges but with lights of projectile weights did any of the naval powers of the day develop a doctrine for using more long-range guns paired with chain or bar shot to disable a vessel and then go in for the kill versus focusing on shorter range but harder hitting heavier cannon and just truck trust that the toughness of their vessel and the sailing skill of captain and crew or was it more ship or ship and captain basis in the time period that was covered in that particular video to be honest naval guns were just about coming into accepted and widespread use so really fancy fleet-wide tactics in as much as a fleet-wide was even a thing didn't really exist the ships were so weird and wonderful and different to each other that you basically built the armament for the ship in particular or occasion you might build a ship around a certain type of armament and again bear in mind that the vast majority of these guns were anti-personnel weapons there were relatively few anti-shipping weapons on a late 14th 15th 16th century warship as compared to what you might think you'd see in the classic age of sail a bit further down the line and the same thing with shot there was a lot of different types of anti-personnel shot but when it came to kinds of specialist shop that you'd use against different parts of the ship again this was more heavily developed in a slightly later period in the 17th 18th centuries so yeah occasionally you'd have ship you might see ships that were rigged in certain ways for certain purposes but that would be either be very much one a well we particularly designed this ship to see if this would work or the captain has decided that he wants this armament on his ship and and seeing how that went cost is another factor as well because the bigger heavier guns whether that's the the big long bronze culver ends or the slightly shorter heavy iron cannons they're rarer they cost a lot more and yet they also have slightly more impressive results if they go boom so you see a lot of minion sakers falcons etc and their various derivatives because well they're small they're easier to handle and you can get more of them on a ship and since again they're still thinking in primarily anti-personnel poke purposes the this is more attractive than spending all your money on a half-dozen cool friends or cannons which again also going to be slower to reload Manami wanderer asks which warships and classes of warships had the best and worst kill to death ratio is from the age of steam onwards this is actually really difficult one to answer is depending on how you count things because if you're looking at overall which classes of ships sunk the most other ships it's gonna be submarines um basically it's the 1st 2nd 3rd 4th etc etc so all the way down to places going to be occupied by submarines now fair enough most of their kills against helpless merchant ships but still its killers kill the only slight problem you have there is that obviously almost all submarine classes that were involved in racking up those numbers of kills also tended to take relatively significant hull casualties as well I suspect that if you were gonna dig down through that you'd probably find that probably something of one of the u.s. World War two fleet submarine classes would probably fill that category because obviously they weren't that although they did suffer casualties and losses against the Japanese they weren't suffering them at anywhere near the rate of the kriegsmarine a-- and its u-boat core so although the u-boat core will almost certainly be miles ahead on ultimate kills if you average that out and to kill death I suspect that the u.s. one of the u.s. subclasses would probably come out on top in that respect if you exclude submarines again you still have a problem of some classes are just produced in vast numbers and others aren't so something like the Fletcher's for example a number of lectures are lost but they're just so many of them they're gonna have a lot of kills between them whereas any kind of battleship almost cruiser classes they're just not produced in the numbers and they don't see enough actions to to rack up the number of kills that they need to get anywhere close to the board I mean the queen elizabeth-class probably has a decent shot at things but that's almost entirely down to war spy and that in and of itself is almost entirely down to the the Second Battle of Narvik because for battleship Warspite has a ridiculously long kill tally I mean it gets a bunch of damages and the possible assists at Jutland and so forth but if you add up the number of destroyers it takes out plus obviously cruisers sunk at Mattapan etc war spy has a very long kill tally on end of the Queen Elizabeth so they only lose Barham so that's probably a fairly positive one and whereas if you look at other things like well something like even worse Avery now and will repulse they they take 50% losses because repulse gets sunk and renown doesn't manage to rack up quite the same kind of kill counter or spy it does and so on and so forth and then yeah so it's very difficult to quantify that kind of thing it would require a very very in-depth scenario to come up with precise figures it might I mean imagining trying to tally every single kill and every single hole loss on something like the Fletcher class or the wicks Clemson class or any of the other destroy classes that were produced in mass numbers it would take a while Thomas Farley asks you refer to the T class submarine and stated standout feature to be a forward spread of 10 torpedoes but is this such a significant feature when the T class only carries 16 torpedoes in total as in not enough for a full reload wouldn't a forward spread of eight and a total of 16 make more sense so to understand the T class you have to understand the operational environment they were designed in they were initially designed in a period where everyone well at least the British and some other navies thought that the whole unrestricted submarine warfare thing that the Germans had pulled off in the first world war would be made illegal under international treaty and therefore you didn't need to design a submarine for long term underwater commerce Ray hunt raiding or merchant ship hunting because that kind of activity would be declared unlawful and if you're not allowed to sink people by surprise and you instead have to surface and use your guns that well then you might as well use small cruisers to do that instead for a more vulnerable submarines so they were looking at developing a submarine for primarily hunting enemy warships which are of course faster and tend to be a bit more agile and a little bit more alert than the average merchant ship on top of that there was the consideration that well the British knew that they were developing azdak and they assumed that everybody else would be developing something similar and given that what they knew of the ranges that this was capable of what we now call sonar they determined that it was relatively unlikely that a submarine that was hunting a warship group would be able to get very close to the warships because theoretically oversee their schools away with their as dick or sonar equivalent and so you'd have to be launching from basically the maximum range of your torpedoes and it doesn't take a rocket scientist to work out that if you are launching effectively dumb fire weapons with a several minute run in time at an extremely long distance against target that's both fast and able to maneuver and probably looking out for this kind of thing your chances of hitting anything a relatively slim and so the solution was well if we can't hit with one or two or four torpedoes we just need to fire as many torpedoes as possible and something will hit at which point once we fired it to be perfectly honest they're going to come after us so we don't need to worry about full spread reloads we just need to get away and have a few in reserve in case we need to follow up and hence the idea of the 10 torpedo salvo was born now the 10 torpedo salvo is made up of six forward tubes and then as you can see here to external tubes external to the pressure hull so these are basically single-shot weapons so you can't reload these at sea just the six internal ones and then there's also a couple of amidships tubes which you can't see on this particular t class because they've been reconfigured from how they were designed and these also single-shot tubes so although you had 16 torpedoes total ten of them were in the tubes four of those obviously being in the inaccessible tubes that were single-shot only and then you've got six left over which is a full reload for your six forward torpedo tubes that you can reload at sea so yeah it's a relatively small torpedo armament for a submarine of this size but it does have quite the heck of a punch if it comes across a warship or indeed a merchant convoy it can send an absolutely devastating single salvo and then skedaddle which is basically what they were designed to do his lordship asks in the age of Steel warships how common was it to include elements of ship design purely for aesthetic reasons and were there ever instances of ships getting into trouble because of some part of it that was designed for appearance over functionality so although appearance in terms of prim paintwork and such was very much a thing in the late 19th century major structural elements of warships being designed for aesthetic not so much there were of course certain concessions to the aesthetic made during the period of relatively speaking piece such as as you can see here the U at late 19th century US Navy's trend for rather ornamental bow plat ornaments but to be fair the age of sail had spent most of its period with figure heads and figure heads lost it well into the ironclad age so that's not exactly something you can hold against them and they did along with other navies have a very clear idea of what would happen in wartime navies can be pretty darn ruthless when it comes to making sure the ships are ready for war so these kinds of radicals secondary features where they're not actually part of the overall ships structure were designed to just be taken off when it came for wartime so yeah in general warships didn't get into trouble with the few small theta creatures that they had because they were they would either be removed as planned in time of ramping hostilities or worse comes to worse in general as best to be done they'd just be stripped away there are quite a few tales of various ships in kind of the late 19th early 20th century where they end up heading into action possibly somewhat unexpectedly in the context of their overall voyage and it's kissing okay is that breakable is that flammable yes can we store it below without inconveniencing the rest of the ship no right rip it out chuck it over the side people learn the lessons of Tsushima quite well when it came to having easily exposed and unnecessary burnable things on ships so yeah there's there's that I guess there's a certain element to warships whereby if you design them properly they look pretty good anyway so you need relatively small embellishments and they generally Navy's will try and make sure that those embellishments are removable in pretty short order bill Cunningham asks how does a naval officer in the Royal Navy born a commoner become a lord well the formula is actually relatively simple firstly be born in a time such that when you get to some reasonable level of command in the Royal Navy there's a war going so yeah not a lot you can do to control that but this is why a lot of the examples that you'll find are from the 18th and 19th century when the Royal Navy spent the better part of a half a century at war with somebody or other so you think it was pretty certain that you'd find somebody who was of command age at the time that all wars getting going in somewhere in the world so yes he's born at the right time which which helps you have to be they have to have to be of command age at the time of war then be hard to hit very important um you can't be made a lord or a knight if you get shot he tends to have rather negative effects on your long term life expectancy especially in the 18th and 19th centuries I mean if you like Nelson or something like that you might lose an eye or a limb or something equally disposable but taking a cannibal to the chest tends to shorten your life expectancy rather viciously and then you have to take into account the third factor which is you better hope you have the right mix of luck and/or skill because if you're of the right age and you've got command of a ship or ships and you've managed to not get blasted apart by the enemy then chances are you're gonna wind up in a battle sooner or later at which point you've just got to be good enough to pull off something really noteworthy whether that's an individual ship action that everybody in else in the battle can't goes whoa hang on a minute that's that's impressive or you are leading your squadron or fleet to an utterly decisive and crushing victory and that's basically it make your reputation and your past promotion to high ranks is and there enough guaranteed and well by and large the Royal Navy and the British establishment don't like the high ranking Admirals to be unentitled which means that sooner or later if you if someone can point and say look look at this man he defeated so many French ships and Spanish ships and has brought in much prize money and and now there's an entire squadron that's made up of ships that he captured this precious little excuse not tonight you and then you become a sir and then you might get a five-count Achor a peerage or some other equally wonderful title which this is why Sir John Gervais has been featuring me during this period because he was okay he wasn't dirt common person but he was from a non noble background son of a barrister ended up being the Earl of st. Vincent because yeah basically shiny things given out for beating the French repeatedly over the head with cannonballs and of course in the more modern context of the age of steam and steel it's usually shiny things given for exploding Germans Rachel Ann asks which class of 20th century capital ships carriers battleships and battle cruisers do you think were the best value for their owner for battle cruisers it's I think a relatively easy choice because you're left looking effectively the renowned Zhaan the congos all the World War one battle cruisers yes a number of the classes gave good service but they were in and out of service relatively quickly for various reasons and well after that you had yeah the congos the hood and the renowned no one else really built them and less kind of you count may be done cook but yeah that's not gonna feature high on the list of best value for money to be perfectly honest and between the two well the Cong having the congos encouraged the Japanese to think that they had a chance at surface actions so given what that they were a small part of dragging the Japanese into I'd say that probably wasn't the best value of written return on investment for their particular home nation which by default kind of leaves the renounce because hood gave a lot of good service in between the wars but unfortunately as we know exploded rather annoyingly early in the second world war whereas whilst repulse was lost obviously in part for said renown went on well had already got a fair number of impressive actions under its belt by the time repulse went down but would go on to become a fairly vital linchpin of the Royal Navy during the Second World War not including obviously all the stuff that it did in the interim in peacetime helping to shore up the British Empire so for battle cruisers best return on investment I think definitely the renowned some renowned specifically but renowned class generally for carriers I'm actually gonna go with the Lexington class it's obvious is tempting to go with the Essex class bug for their sheer numbers and their longevity but to be perfectly honest the Essex class a lot of their longevity is out of the front line and when you talk about capital ships they are your frontline big units and the Essex class overtaken in that role by the mid-50s to a point that I'm sorry but they I couldn't really consider them capital ships if you're gonna go Victorian on it maybe second-class capital ships by that point but when you if you compare that to the Lexington's the Lexington's teach the US Navy how to carrier basically because with the best will in the world Langley teaches you that you can carrier Lexington teaches them how to actually carrier you're also teach them a lot about how to design carriers which they obviously those lessons then go into designing the Yorktown's which gives you the enterprise which is not bad legacy to have and all the other subsequent courses carries that bill in the run-up to and during World War two they also obviously give good service during the actual Second World War itself so Lexington obviously lost somewhat early but Saratoga continues to give good service and keeps coming back almost as much as Enterprise does as well so it's giving it's going good service throughout that period it's holding the line especially when everything else is either sunk or damaged and yeah so broadly speaking for the return on investment that they got out of them I'd say the Lexington class as frontline Capitol units probably win the carrier aspect of things and pretty much the only one with a similar kind of record would be HMS furious but unlike Saratoga furious was not but a frontline combatant for significant parts of the Second World War and for battleships I'm gonna go with the queen elizabeth-class that's probably not of great shock to most people although I would know that this is almost entirely carried by Warspite to be perfectly honest I mean the Queen Elizabeth class as a whole actually you can see why there could return on investment they're very capable at the beginning of the first world war they serve through most of the first world war they obviously have a fairly key part to play at Jutland as part v battle squadron they continue to be numerically the royal navy's frontline battleships throughout the interwar period obviously Nelson and Rodney exist but there's only two of them and there's five of the Queen Elizabeth's going into the war obviously you have war spikes career does that really need any introduction Queen Elizabeth and valiant do a fairly good job of holding the fort in the Mediterranean Malaya does a good job of scaring Shan the Shan horst's Boram Boram does a good job for as long as it's around I suppose you could also say Barham so there's a salutary lesson as to why you don't let submarines gets too close to your battleships but as possibly being a bit cruel but overall just the sheer length of service and some of the strategic points they hold down as well as war supply it's ridiculous kill ratio and survivability means you probably got to give it to the queen elizabeth's on that buzzer say Warspite is really holding the team up there because we have fair enough Second World War Malaya and Barham are significantly less useful now I know people could argue definitely the iowa-class but again the iowa-class i they're very close but i personally would knock them out the running for the same reasons that I'm not the essex-class out there running when you're looking at carriers which is that we're talking about capital ships and whilst are the Iowa's remain technically speaking obviously though they're still battleships all the way through to now being museum ships by shortly after the end of the Second World War and the battleship is no longer kind of the frontline strategic piece that it was so the capital ship post or second world war is very much the aircraft carrier at which point I for capital ships specifically I'd discount it because they're their roles in short bombardment and such like in Korea Vietnam etc definitely and the Gulf War very definitely useful their roles as surface action group leaders in the 1980s useful but they're not capital ships at that point in the strictest definition of the word the other ones that I would say become pretty done closer actually the Colorado's because they get a lot of useful service in the second world war certainly once they're rebuilt of course you have the Battle of circle straight for example showing how capable they are and they hold the fort as some of the biggest and meanest ship capital ships during the interwar period the basically the only reason the Colorado's don't pull equal or possibly ahead of the queen elizabeth's is because they're built after the First World War so they don't have that additional bit of usefulness in the in wartime service in the First World War that the Queen Elizabeth's do and that's this is basically the thing that puts the Queen Elizabeth generally above everybody else is that they serve with distinction on frontline roles shoot two entire world wars nobody else nobody else really does so oh well there you go Wesley Johnson asks do you know anyone who produces videos such as yours but for merchants or commercial shipping and/or have you considered expanding into Fleet auxilary such as Oilers replenishment vessels fleet tugs etc honestly no I don't I don't know anyone who does the merchant commercial shipping in a manner similar to my own if anybody does know someone who does that then yeah feel free to leave a comment below point and point us in that direction how I considered expanding to fleet auxiliaries that kind of they if it's a fleet auxiliaries of RFA supply etc I will cover them at some point it's just that well 5-minute guards are done in chronological order and of request so that's why they're a little bit haphazard and all over the place and people just haven't requested that many fleet auxiliaries yet or if they have that far far far down the list so it's just a matter of time I guess Paul from Chicago asks can you compare the Trent affair to the Assam amaru incident okay so briefly for those of you who may not be familiar with it the Trent affair was an incident third about as close as anything else came close to pushing the British Empire into war with the Union during the American Civil War and Orwell obviously didn't happen but it resulted from a u.s. ship stopping a British a vessel that was amongst other things conveying to passengers who the Confederate states had designated as diplomats in an ongoing effort to try and get their wealth that the Confederacy recognised as a independent legitimate nation I get diplomatic recognition the frigate stopped the ship sent a boarding party aboard removed the two Confederate diplomats and sailed away with the Asama Maru incident this was the case in World War two before the Japanese declared war where a number of German crewmen who had been on a German ship that had the Royal Navy had tried to stop they'd scuttled their ship they'd been rescued by a then neutral US cruiser and then taken passage aboard a Japanese ship to try and get away and Royal Navy Cruiser rolled up fired a warning shot stopped the stopped the merchant ship at the sama Maru and again removed the Germans as prisoners in both cases this did cause something of a diplomatic incident because of the violation of neutrality and in both cases it was resolved without war breaking out between the countries in question at least as a result of that particular incident although obviously Japan did end up war with the UK shortly thereafter for completely separate reasons now viewed in sort of generalities as we've just done it the incidents do seem similar however there are a few subtle differences in both cases it you can make a legitimate argument that the seizures were illegal and indeed in both cases some in some of the prisoners were released in the treinta case while there were only two prisoners and both them were released in the asaba maru instance some of the German prisoners were released others were kept hold of however when it comes to the details that the differences are that basically with the asama Maru incident the obviously the Japanese ship is neutral that's and that's no different however the German crews aboard were from a German vessel and Britain was at war with Germany so they were clearly on opposite sides the German crew had scuttled their vessel rather than surrender it to a Royal Navy ship which whilst it didn't make the members of the Kriegsmarine a-- was definitely a hostile action and so there was not necessarily a full case but there was a certain amount of case to be made that the the germans constituted the enemy in some way shape or form and germany was a recognized country that Britain was at war with and so the cruiser did have at least the right to seize or stop a neutral ship to examine it for war contraband whether or not enemy crewmen be they merchant or Kriegsmarine account as war contraband is pretty much the whole reason there's a massive argument over it with the Trent affair again if follows a similar kind of principle in that the Union frigate stops the Trent and removes the two Union other two Confederate diplomats as supposed war contraband however there's a little bit of doublethink going on in at this particular point because well again the Confederate diplomats are not members of the Confederate Navy or whatever so they're not directly belligerent however the the main thing is that the Confederacy obviously was trying to get diplomatic recognition the Union didn't want that the Union wanted to view this is purely an internal affair though the last thing they wanted was for other countries to recognize the Confederate States as a completely separate political entity and nation in and of itself but this opens up a rather interesting legalistic can of worms because if the Confederacy is not a different independent state they're not separate organization and therefore the union is not acknowledging that they are at war with anybody which they weren't they were they were refusing at this point to say that there was a state of war in existence then that meant that legally speaking their ships didn't have the right to stop neutral shipping in any way shape or form to examine them for contraband of all whether or not people counted as contraband and again this was a whole argument that basically came down to no they probably don't but you did the the a warship can only have those rights to stop a neutral ship to examine for contraband of war if there is a war and if they are on one side or the other of that war which point they're classed as belligerents and they have certain penetrant rights which is a wonderful term the thing is if you deny that a war has is even going on you therefore cannot have the rights of a a belligerent or which then means you actually technically don't have the right to stop anybody because you can't examine something for contraband of war if there's no war obviously I think I made that point enough times already but yes so that's that's the subtle difference in that the the Union was trying to claim belligerent rights whilst at the same time insisting that the status that would allow them to claim belligerent rights didn't actually exist which put them on a weaker footing when it came to the legal interpretations of what exactly was going on as compared to the asama Maru incident although as I said in both cases it was adjudged to be a violation of neutrality and some wall prisoners were released as a result of it the the main difference obviously being whether or not the ship that stopped the neutral vessel was a belligerent in the first place and so overall that puts the Union legally speaking at a slightly in a slightly more difficult position than it put the the British Cruiser but that both were playing a little bit fast and loose with international law although obviously the the differences in these the details that we've just gone over meant that the Union ended up technically disavowing the actions of the u.s. frigate whereas the British never actually it disavowed the actions of their Cruiser they just said that effectively yeah sorry about that and also one or two of these people might we might probably shouldn't have taken off the ship so here you can have them back well that's two hours down time for another short interlude Swee for 2010 asks are there any warships that could have won the Blue Ribbon from contemporary ocean liners and what would be the first warship to theoretically be able to hold it so the blue ribbond is rather technically unofficial but basically it's the it's the accolade you get if you're the fastest ocean liner to cross the Atlantic now the main reason that warships would have problems getting this award I mean obviously it's there but warded to ocean liners anyway so let's assume for a second that warships are allowed to take part the main problem is fuel their coz lotion liners and such they're they're big they displace a lot often a lot more than many contemporary warships but because they don't have to worry about things like guns and armor and all that kind of thing things they can devote a lot more space to passengers and fuel which means that even with the relatively inefficient engines you have in the 19th century they can run for considerable time because they've got a lot of fuel on board so they can run full-speed mmm near enough will speed for long distances across the Atlantic and once you get more efficient engines and suchlike developed in the 20th century they can obviously run the Atlantic and maintain some seriously high speeds now once you get into the thick yeah once you get into the latter part the nineteen thirties I don't think there's any warships really capable of winning it because the speeds drift north of 30 knots which is pretty darn quick I mean there's relatively few warships that can make that speed and have anything close to the endurance to be able to make a full transatlantic crossing at that kind of speed certainly once the the last one of the United States does it pushing nearly 35 knots I'm sorry but pretty practically any warship capable of 35 knots doesn't have the the unrefueled range to make that crossing it at that speed anyway in in the mid-to mostly the latter part of the 19th century warships being still running under mostly sail and steam except for some and the the non sail powered ones don't have again don't have the range or indeed probably the speed to to do a full power transatlantic crossing because the issues we mentioned earlier I think the the period in which warships could have won the Blue Ribbon if they're allowed to compete will probably be from the 1890s through to the mid 1930s because at that point the speeds for it are in the high teens and the 20s of knots which are speeds the warship contemporary large warships at the time can exceed and the warships that can exceed them do have the range to just about pull it off so you'd be looking at the large larger protected cruisers and some of the larger armoured cruisers in the 1890s and 1900s and then inland from the mid to late 1900s through to the mid 1930s you'd be looking at battle cruisers those ships would have the range and the speed to outpace the merchant shipping and manage to make it all the way across the Atlantic without running out of fuel crew smaller cruisers in both cases probably could maybe pull it off but they'd they'd be pushing it up against the fuel margins a lot close so the the amount of range that a lot the warship has when it's running at full speed drops off very very quickly so you need something with an awful lot of a fuel bunker äj-- Andrew Dodaro asks is there any study out there about high in the ship flooding he asks because of Kirishima Congo and Shinano all sank due to flooding damage above the engine rooms leading to a loss of stability I'm not aware of any particular study done in pease time looking at specifically high in the ship flooding and how to cause it but the principle of the problems that this could cause was actually relatively well known in various circles and it is elaborated on tangentially or possibly direct and also directly in a number of articles and design studies etc albeit not as I say it not as a specific like we're going to study exactly how to cause this now obviously the problem as you mention is that if you flood the ship higher up the dispell the displacement of the water that floods in is going to be there the same because you've blown a big hole in the side of the ship but you're gonna end up with a big heavy mass either water higher up in the vessel which and as we've discussed many many times the higher up you put a weight the more effect it has on a ship stability so yeah the same amount of weight that you might be able to say put into the ship's engine rooms or somewhere else lower down in the ship that would simply cause the ship to settle so far in the water higher up especially if it's over on one side could cause the ship to capsize even if that increase in displacement wouldn't otherwise be able to actually cause the vessel to sink just by making its displacement greater than its buoyancy now there there are various incidents that reflect these kinds of problems as well both in terms of direct damage and in terms of progressive flooding so when protected cruisers were designed this was an ongoing concern because obviously the protected Cruiser has this soft Turtleback armor to protect it deck and it's therefore possible for flooding to come in above it which would destabilize the ship and potentially roll it over which amongst other things influenced exactly how these decks were designed the would sell all that so when it went down the German battlecruisers in World War one a part of its problem was that due to damage it had suffered up in the ship to the back particularly to the boughs from various shell hits when the hits from invincible cause the torpedo rooms to flood and obviously start dragging the bow down it meant the water could flood in through these holes have been blown in the front of the ship and all this water sat above the armored deck thus flooding relatively speaking structurally high in the ship which definitely didn't help in terms of its it's sinking and it was also known weakness in Bismarck's armor design because again low armored deck once flooding begins if people start poking holes higher up in the ship and water floods in then you get a lot of water sitting high up in the ships overall structure which actually causes a list that's a lot more significant than it would be if that same amount of water was flooding in lower down there's also various other cases like so even with the USS franklin users frankly know at one point was relatively relatively high risk of capsized and sinking not because of the well in this particular case that we're talking about not necessarily the damage that it had taken but all the water that had been pumped into and onto it to fight the fires which was also collecting high up in the ship and that was threatening the ship's stability although fortunately as it percolated further down into the ship and off the ship that situation was gradually recovered so both from a naval architectural view and also from the view of ships captains who were nowhere the worst places to take damage and flooding were it was a known quantity as I'm not necessarily sure there was ever a direct study about how to specific and cause this kind of damage pick us to be perfectly honest apart from anything else the accuracy of weapons owned the first and second world wars was more a case of well we hit something this is good we'll worry about the details later but certainly if you were a submarine captain and you were thinking about how to set your torpedoes to run then yet consultation with other captains you might come up with the idea of trying to cause the flooding higher up in the ship now the only real problem with that is that if you're taking on big heavily armored targets and you set your torpedo to run shallow there's a relatively good chance it's going to hit the upper part of the computer defense system and the lower part of the belt and the ship's can be fairly capable of resisting the impact at that point this is why you want to try and run deep if you can but obviously if the ship's not particularly well protected in the first place relative to the weapon you're pointing at it then by all means go for it Seifer asks you've mentioned a few ships that had issues with recoil and muzzle flash from their main guns besides the large recoil damping mechanisms behind the gun itself was there any substantial or particularly laughable attempts at other recoil mitigation or flash suppression so the problem of recoil I mean it's been an issue as long as naval guns have been a thing so by the time you get to the late 19th and early 20th centuries the principles behind a fairly well understood which means that when things go wrong when you're trying to deal with recoil and and such like it usually means somebody somewhere has messed up not that they have kind of it's not is not something that they can't possibly have foreseen it's something they should have foreseen and just for whatever reason didn't usually it's to do with economy measures whether that's financial or because they're desperately trying to eat every last tonne out of the design to comply with the treaty restriction but one way or another if someone starts eating into the strength or scale of the recoil damping mechanisms etc the present then you end up with some rather severe problems some Italian cruisers had this problem where they built their recoil mechanisms to light and the gun was effectively and threatening to just well a course um rather nasty shock damage to the rest of the turret and be also bounced just clean out which is not enough fairly good thing so that to reduce the charges in the way of shell until eventually someone could try and fix that obviously the Nelson class is infamous for the initial problems they had with their guns which were in large part down to the mountings being built to lightly compared to the original design that had been developed for the g3 class again to try and shave tonnage off to fit everything within the Washington treaty limits the other thing to take into account is that recoil for a given gun would vary depending on the ship so just because a ship to different ships carry the same gun doesn't necessarily mean their mountings are going to be the same because efficiency wise it's better to stop the gun as soon as possible because then you can have a smaller either a smaller tighter mounting or you can have the same size mounting with more operational space and obviously they say this is preferable but the quicker you stop the recoil though I mean the amount of force that's used to stop the gun is the same but it's being enacted over a shorter period of time so the shock to the rest of the ships structure as a result firing the gun is greater if you if you stop the thing entirely I mean that this is kind of thing so if you just built a really really heavy mount that had no recoil tamping in whatsoever and just held the gun in place yeah you the gun would never move but the amount for stat would be transmitted suddenly to the rest of the ship structure would be immense or probably just tear itself off off of the mounting or sooner or later it would do that so yeah so on destroyers for example even if they're carrying the same gun in the u.s. 5-inch gun in the UK may be a four and a half you'll find that the the recoil length on most destroy guns is actually considerably longer than the recoil length of exactly the same gun when it's fitted to a cruiser or a battleship because on a cruise or a battleship the ship's structure is strong enough to accept that knock and then obviously take advantage of the shorter recoil whereas on a destroyer it's usually not the case so you want a longer stroke on your recoil to be able to sort that out and this is the other thing where it's not economy measures messing up that particular sliding scale is also where you sometimes see some rather interesting recoil issues this is also why all other issues such as increased armor protection aside mounts on battleships for secondary and antiaircraft and dual purpose weaponry tend to be slightly heavier because they've got to build the recoil structures heavier to absorb the force of the recoil in a shorter distance to gain those other advantages Federico bazi asks in naval gunnery could you make a ranking of the best by your definition or criteria three long-range near misses in World War two so if I was gonna pick a top three I would probably pick to the wood fairly comfortably take the crown of longest range in naval hit in history had a hit and the third one would be potentially not so much not quite as long range as the other two potentially but definitely much more of a game-changer so the two long range near misses I would pick would be the Iowas engaging I believe as Japanese destroyer in the latter part of the Second World War they obtained a number of straddles but didn't hit anything that would definitely be in up there then you've also got in theory yamato possibly hitting or not hitting but damaging white plains with a near miss that one I mean if it's actually true would by far enough maybe if it would be by far and away the longest range naval hit in history had the shell actually hit it didn't so whatever that I know there is a there's a bit of a debate as to whether or not shell actually was from Yamato there's a fair bit of evidence reason we produced that says he was there's also some relatively strong counter arguments that say it wasn't and it was from another ship that was closer in that's not debate I'm gonna get into here because yeah that would take far too long however the assuming that that did the assuming it was from Yamato then obviously that would be a very long range near-miss the other one would be at the Battle of Cape sportive in tow or as it tell Awad to tell what I don't know apparently the Italian school is something different but at that point vittorio veneto as can be seen above engaged a number of British cruisers at pretty long range of 27,000 ish yards Plus and scored a number of straddles but again no no direct hits that was probably one of one of the longest range near misses that had the potential to actually change things because let's face it at the end of the day if yamato had blown away white planes would it have changed the outcome of the Battle of Samar all that much not really similarly whether or not the Iowas managed to kill that particular Japanese destroyer was not going to massively affect the outcome of the Pacific campaign at that point but if the Italian shell in charge quality issues had been addressed in this this is an issue that crops up in a number of different battles but this one very particularly if vittorio veneto had been able to use its superb fire control systems to drop accurate gun fire on the ships and the bear in mind that they had the range they were straddling it's just the guns had the the spread of a shotgun and a Meem shotgun at that very my table viously actually shotguns don't have that much a dispersion before the gun that's going on after me but never mind so yes if they've managed to hit some of those British cruisers that could have had a major effect both in the fact that they would have come out of that particular battle a head-on kills and also the it would have denied the British a number of very valuable cruisers at a time they really couldn't afford to not be having cruisers so yeah that's probably potentially the most game-changing one more than they necessarily would have changed over that come of the war but it certainly would have had a rather major effect on the outcome of the Mediterranean naval conflict for a while Corvus asks two questions both flag-related and I'm going to allow this particular one what was the original purpose of flying a jack it would seem that by the time you've sailed into a port and dropped anchor or tied up at the dock people already know who you represented and how does an extra flag at the bow not necessarily one that looks like your National ensign help and the second part is what do submarines do about the need for a commissioning pennant well the answer for submarines is well they still use a commissioning pennant as witnessed here it may be one of the few things that's actually above the waterline but they'll still have one and just make sure to bring it in afterwards there's usually something pointy them associated with the submarine sail that you can fly a commissioning pennant from even if it's for a short period of time now as far as the having your jack or your flat other flags in port it comes for a number of for a number of reasons firstly that way back distinguishing ships was actually very difficult a ship was a ship was a ship without a flag you couldn't really tell who was who and this isn't just about warships was about merchant ships when you're back in or the 15th 16th even as late as some of the 17th centuries what constitutes a warship and what constitutes a merchant ship is something of a blurred line so if you are looking at a poor and you can see several dozen ships at first glance would be very difficult to tell who's a warship who's a merchant ship and who does who belongs to which nation so you still even in poor need these identifiers up and apart from anything else there's various issues such as well this ship might look the same as this ship and they might both be from the same nation but if ship a is a merchant ship then the port authorities have certain rights and privileges to aboard and inspect it etc if ship B is a warship a lot of those rights are somewhat more curtailed and it's useful to have a flag up there so that you can work things out before potential accidental boarding incidents and gunfire and screaming etc so yep this is why warships tend to identify themselves even once the dissension between warship and merchant ship becomes a bit clearer in the age of sail both because of certain commonalities of design and also because lots of different navies to be fair mainly the Royal Navy made a habit of nicking everybody else's warships you couldn't really point to a specific national design characteristic and say well that means this ship is very definitely in service of this power as I apart from the similarities the fact that people capturing each other ships rend at that point moot you could make a broad generalization but if say the French show up with the Barrett or the American shop with the Macedonian or the British show up with half of their fleet he you're gonna go well this is clearly a product of this particular asian stocks but it's actually in service of a completely different nation so yeah you still need flags to identify that because not everybody was present when the ship sailed in to work out who belongs to to what nation and the last part is that warships are considered to be effectively little mobile patches of sovereign territory and you need a flag to signify that without that flag bearing in mind that there is a whole set of etiquette regarding the display of flags if you're not flying any flag or obviously if you're flying a white flag this could indicate some kind of surrender or submission etc and that's not something you want to do with a piece of what's effectively your nation that just happens to be floating in someone else's Harbor so you always keep a flag flying unless there's some other part of the etiquette demands otherwise there of course also courtesy flags which you might fly in another nations port to acknowledge that you respect your host nation so this is why you can sometimes have a ship that might be flying multiple different flags it might be flying the ensign of the Navy that it's in it might be fly then also be flying the national flag of the nation that it belongs to which will be quite often two different things obviously the Royal Navy has the White Ensign that the Union Jack is the official flag of the UK and then on top of that you might also have a courtesy flag acknowledging the the port that you happen to be in so you can't have a ship that's quite happily sitting there in the middle of the day in a friendly port but it might be flying three separate flags just to make sure that all these points are made clear to everybody Stafford Magnus asks if the king george v s-- had been fitted with the 16-inch guns in three triple turrets intended for the lions what impact could this have had on the engagements the king george v were involved in well you can take two possible outcomes from this one very negative one relatively positive the very negative one would be just to point helped that well the 16-inch guns the best of all in the world probably wouldn't been ready till 40 to 43 so the impact they would have had would have been very negative because the king to show v wouldn't have had any guns which is something of a negative modifier to a battleships ability to inflict pain and destruction on the enemy but assuming that we hand wave that and say okay the king george v s-- were designed for whatever reason with the 16-inch guns maybe that they get delayed for a few months by bureaucracy and then like the north carolina's lead they are able to be escalator clause up up to 16 inch armament so they're into service as such it's dip if you look at the different engagements the amount of impact is gonna vary I mean when you're talking about fighting against Shaun Horst at the Battle of North kph mr. Duke of York well Duke of York won that engagement rather handily with its 14-inch guns the 16-inch guns they're just going to cause a bit more damage so that's not so much of a major factor where it they could have made a big difference in terms of the engagements that the King taught of this were involved with big surface engagements are actually the the two fights with Bismarck because well hopefully the 16 inch triples would have been a bit more reliable than the 14 inch quad sand twins on the on the Prince of Wales so in the initial battle of the Denmark Strait this could actually have a major difference both bashing two times one if Prince of Wales is so obviously carrying such heavier fire power compared to Hood it's possible the Admiral Holland might switch his flag before he leaves and sail in Prince of Wales at which point Prince of Wales is leading the column and basically taking the hits instead of hood and with hopefully working guns and fairly big powerful guns it potentially might win a gun jewel with Bismarck outright without hood ever getting exploded leaving obviously hood free to prey on Prince Aegon and all help with Bismarck so that that's a possibility I mean it might have just gone roughly the same as historically but even then the 14 inch hits that hit this mark obviously would be more damaging if they were 15 if there were 16 inch hits so there's that and obviously you'd be getting off assuming the turrets are somewhat more reliable more shot so there's a chance for additional hits when you flip over around to the final battle if King George 2/5 is carrying the 16-inch guns instead of 14-inch guns well miss marks still dead so yeah it doesn't overall change the outcome that much but a modern powerful set of 16-inch guns on King George the fifth might well do a little bit more damage to the Bismarck which might which would might end up sending the Bismarck down a bit earlier which might settle some of the young ongoing arguments on the Internet as to what exactly sank Bismarck um a little bit more easily Lewis maskull asks I think I get the theory of why the German high seas fleet used eleven inch guns rather than twelve inch like everyone else but I'm struggling to understand why with the Kaiser and wittelsbach pre dreadnoughts they dropped from the 11 inch of the Brandenburg's to the nine point four inch that strikes me as an armored Cruiser calibre by the late 1890s by the time they were built presume I'm missing something but what so the reason is actually weirdly very rather simple although it takes a little bit of digging to get around to appreciate exactly what the Germans run about at the time bear in mind we're talking about the 1890s the range of engagement is actually still pretty close in and well as we see with World War One World War and going into the interwar period not necessary so much World War two but still different navies have very different ideas about what Ranger actually can be fighting out obviously historically the the French thought in World War one in the World War one period that fights were going to be what was actually even credibly short ranged the Germans a little bit longer than that the British longer still and the Americans thought it was going to be ridiculously on range which it changed about a bit by World War two but that was basically the the paradigm in the 1910s and 20s now in the 1890s the Germans thought that the ranges of combat were going to stay pretty short and they were on the shorter side of the engagement range bracket anyway and then that meant that with the nine point four inch gun the 240 millimeter gun at the kind of ranges they were talking about than the nine point four inch contact she had the penetration to punch through the belt armor of most of the ships that they could expect to be fighting obviously the 11 inch gun could all do the same thing but the key difference was that whilst the nine point four inch gun was smaller and Thor see smaller shells for bursting charge he could fire a lot quicker and so the theory was baring mind he was still talking about the kind of the hail of fire being the dominant way of thinking at this point the Germans were basically thinking well if we use the nine point four inch gun we can't have our enemy as hard with each main gun shot but but the rate of fire we can put out we can probably hit them three or four times in the time it takes them to hit us once and three or four nine point four inch shells will probably do more collective damage to the enemy than a single 11 or 12 inch shell would do to us plus it meant that obviously the mountings were lighter so that they could devote more weight to other parts of the ship which which is an additional advantage but it basically came down to that that idea that it's going to be fighting an extremely close range at which point we we won't rate a fire because the penetration is good enough obviously that fell off rather abruptly once proper range finders and salvo firing and being general increase or in naval gunnery ranges that all that that will allowed for and entailed came in towards the end of the 1890s and the beginning of the 1900s but well hindsight's 2020 and they didn't have any psychics in their midst at the time spartan asks can you tell us briefly what went wrong with operation like so what went wrong with this operation which in English up its operation Viking the exact accounts vary depending on what you read but from from a source that I've been able to find that seems to quote significant portions of the original German reports obviously translated into English because my GCSE German is not up to the task of reading massive amounts of World War 2 documents it's basically a massive communications failure so German operational High Command had set out clear rules for obvious reasons as to how the Kriegsmarine and Luftwaffe were supposed to cooperate when it came to operating in the North Sea and other similar areas where they were both going to be trying to attack enemy targets they were supposed to tell each other what was happening so if if the kriegsmarine and we're gonna send out ships they would say to the Luftwaffe right we're gonna send ships out they're gonna operate in this area so please only attack targets in this other area don't attack it and and obviously if the look law for sending out a strike force then that said what we're going to have a strike force they're gonna head over this route so can you tell the ships if they see aircraft coming in this direction please keep an eye out and don't shoot at them so this is a well and good however on this particular day the Kriegsmarine heh decided they wanted to go and attack some British fishing trawlers off dogger Bank because well British fishing fleet off dogger Bank never catches a break and they decided to send out a half liter of destroyers all well and good however at the same time fleet corpse 10 which or which was at the time based in northern Germany decided they wanted to attack Allied shipping in the Thames and Humber estuaries so they sent out a strike force of bombers and they each hold the creeks marina then what they were doing the officer in the creeks marina who was supposed to pass this on the operational commanders of that part of the Kriegsmarine his operations failed to actually do his job and tell anyone that this was happening equally however the kriegsmarine it just flat-out didn't tell the Luftwaffe directly what was happening but what they did do is they requested air cover but they didn't get a response from the Luftwaffe although you could argue that the Luftwaffe should have figured this out that well the kriegsmarine der doesn't ask for an air escort unless there's something there to escort but nobody really put two and two together so both sides had kind of told the other what was going on and neither side actually knew what was going on then partway through the operation somebody in the kriegsmarine I realized what was what had was potentially about to occur or might occur and asked the Luftwaffe to tell the Bombers that were airborne please don't attack shipping in this area because they're probably friendly apparently for whatever reason that part of the Luftwaffe couldn't talk to the fleet corpse 10 bombers that were in the air they said maybe you should tell the Destroyers not to shoot our aircraft the creaseman were like well we're more concerned about you bombing our ships and so there was big argument about that no one actually told anyone out at sea that anything was going on and so in the evening the destroyers are merrily running along and they see an aircraft and the aircraft's not flashing any recognition signals because why would it because the aircraft doesn't know that there's any friendly ships around and so the the ships go round well this aircrafts not flashing recognition signals it's flying around it must be hostile let's start shooting at it that aircraft goes I don't like being shot at so I will turn around and bomb the Englander and did a pretty impressive job actually considering what we were talking about Heinkel 111 little 111's in level bombing early because he actually hits a fast-moving destroyer unfortunately that was the leap wreck mass yeah and yes only brick masks poor old thing hit badly damaged on fire and one would get shot at a bit more wanders off comes back to has another go possibly school some more hits liberabit mass explodes breaks in half and sinks only just over 50 of her crew survived and in the middle of it all for random fun the Mac Schultz just randomly detonates as it turns out the British had actually been deploying mines in that general area but the reports US was so confused I mean that the aircraft only thought it was attacking one ship the Germans apparently all various ones of them had seen this aircraft but how the aircraft hadn't seen them no one knows so eventually the the Kriegsmarine an investigation client sorted down when it's probable the lebryk mass was hit by a bomb and then whether or not the second explosion that finished it off and broke in half was a bomb or a mine they're not the jerries a bit Alton but it's almost certain Mac Schultz did hear mine directly and so yeah you get this wonderful situation where the Germans send out a half --lo tiller of destroyers in a maritime strike force the British have no idea what's going on and they have a few fishing boats wandering around merrily who don't actually get involved at all and yet it ends up being a British tactical victory because the Germans lose two destroyers get another one another one damaged and the Luftwaffe ends up with a slightly shot up aircraft um all with the British not actually being anywhere in sight so yeah well done the Imperial Japanese Navy an army would be proud William H Burke 3rd asks some modern tanks are designed for extreme ease of maintenance hearing you mention how expensive warship engineer Fitz could be I wonder has any ship ever been designed initially to be easy to give it major component upgrades and if not watching what things if any did naval architects do to make future upgrades more feasible enter stage left IJ and Megami you will notice in this picture she is carrying triple 6-inch turrets these things are the Japanese did not intend the Megami to have triple six inch turrets the Japanese had run up against the treaty limit for eight inch cruisers and decided they wanted more 8 inch cruisers but they're gonna be seen to be so flagrantly violating the treaties just yet and so they built these Megami class with well triple six inch turrets the fact that they also manufactured twin 8 inch turrets in exactly the same numbers and specifically designed the Barbet and shell rooms of the Maga Me's to be able to handle the largest shells and the minute they walk back on their treaty obligations mysteriously you lifted off the 6 inch turrets and dropped in 8-inch turrets and made them into heavy cruisers well that's just a lot of careful planning isn't it so yes that Maga Me's are basically the example of ships specifically designed to be able to have major component upgrades in the future now as far as other upgrades were concerned there were some things that naval architects to do to try and allow for upgrades where they thought there was a chance of these happening so for example whilst engine refits were expensive and costly quite a number of the larger capital ships were designed with various plates and measures in place that could be relatively speaking easily removed to allow access for well general maintenance and repair but also replacement later down the line because capital ships at the specific time were told that like mid 1910s 1920s etc they were designed with the thought that they were going to be in service for quite a while and so some kind of full upgrade like that might well be necessary another example would be the South Dakota and North Carolina class battleships all the time probably should be the other way around where they're 16-inch 45 caliber guns were designed to be able to handle the AP mark 8 shell whereas the 16 inch guns on the Colorado class which were much earlier which was a 16 inch 45 caliber were obviously before the super-heavy market had been designed and so the shell handling facilities on the later US ships were able to handle the market as well as the older shells if they absolutely had to although as it turned out they didn't although you can tell that they would have had this capability because the high-explosive shells that were used on the North Carolinas and South Dakota's were significantly shorter than the AP market and he Fassler asks considering what happened to them what should the East Asia squadron have done differently tried sailing through the Indian Ocean perhaps poor old vanship a really was between a rock and a hard place there was little chance of sticking around Tsingtao because he knew sooner or later the Japanese would be coming for him if no one else was and the Japanese Navy he definitely outgunned the East Asia squadron he didn't want to head south southwest - trying head into the Indian Ocean because well one in that direction lay HMAS Australia which he didn't rate his chances against and even if somehow he managed to give HMS Australia the slip well you've then got to somehow still get home and what the choices you can get try and get through the Indian Ocean there's a fair number of British ships and there there's some French and Russian ships on the way as well and then you have a choice well you're not going to try going through the Suez Canal because one that boxes you right in - it's controlled by the British and three even if they let you through which to be honest if you tried they very well might mainly because you then get to meet the Mediterranean fleet at the other end then your only other option is try and head down the coast of South East and Africa around South Africa where again it's an it's a semi natural choke point the British can be waiting for you South Africa ISM is controlled by the British although I had a couple of years a couple of decades earlier had a couple of Wars about that and it's a very long distance to go basically the Indian Ocean at this point outside of the little bits of German East Africa is very much in British hands as I said the Suez Canal is in British and South Africa is in British hands various parts of the East African coast are in British hands of course India which includes the area which we now know as Pakistan Bangladesh and Sri Lanka was in British hands um the list goes on so yeah going through the Indian Ocean is a very bad idea even if somehow you managed magically managed to make it through well you're going to end up in the South Atlantic same as you would comb across the Pacific at least going across specific there weren't quite as many British ships today you can't stay you can't go that you can't go south you can't go south the West you pretty much only choices to head across the Pacific now um in so doing he did almost all the right things I think that what the one area where he made a slight mess up was that he chose to try and attack the Falkland Islands if he hadn't if he just motored clean on pass then given the invincible and her sister ship were in the process of calling up and needed several hours to get up steam if Vaughn she had skirted the Falklands completely and motor Don North he probably could have got enough of a head start that by the time anybody actually noticed that hey the Germans are overdue or maybe simple to spots them further up he might have had enough of a head start to either give them give sturdy the slip or just flat-out outrun him heading for a safer port of course there's the possibility that either Princess Royal all elements of the Mediterranean fleet come out to block him but at least when he's in once he's in the Atlantic he's got options of various neutral ports he could try and duck into and at least inter there if he's blockaded in everywhere else is basically just putting yourself in a circle of guns and hoping that what everybody shoots but somehow misses you loose the links asks could HMS Iron Duke have been reactivated and used as a convoy escort in the Mediterranean during the Second World War in a theoretical unlimited money situation of course but in the more real-world practical situation the Royal Navy found itself in not really I mean here's Iron Duke in the late 1930s at the Spithead naval review of shoots one in the foreground now you might notice there's a couple of things that have changed about her since you've seen every no glory days in the First World War namely she's missing two turrets the forward one is just a capped Barbet now and well the aft turret is now a 5.25 inch twin um because she was a gunnery training ship and well yeah that there's a there's so many things that would have had to have been done to her I mean for a start she's not had any major engine reef it's because of her time mostly deactivated in about 5 10 15 years so she heard power plants probably gonna break down at some point she's also had a bunch of armor stripped away which is why you might notice she's riding quite high in the water amongst other things of she's missing two of her main gun turrets as she's not been in regular service in the 1930s as a frontline battleship she's also not had any reef hits involving increasing or any anti-aircraft weaponry except for that twin 5.25 that was stuck in the mainly as a training item so yeah if they were going to bring her back into service you'd end up well you'd have to try and find some main turrets or maybe you leave them off to enhance the AAA but you'd have to do a complete anti-aircraft battery refit you'd end up with a ship that can only make about 21 knots anyway and he's probably gonna be out of action with the machinery casualty at some point sooner or later and with the best will in the world she also hasn't had any major deck armor increases since the latter part of World War one so she's not going to be particularly protected against bonds or torpedoes given that again World War 1 capital ship so yeah it's not really practical I'm afraid she'd be too slow and too under-protected to make much of a difference of anything she might have some utility as an indian ocean convoy escort i mean that used the georgia severoff in that position and that's mainly because well even with an three 13.5 inch guns the gun turrets she's still capable of scaring off German surface Raiders or Japanese surface Raiders in our merchant crews a category kind of thing but yeah not much more than that I'm afraid and that's of course before the Luftwaffe bombed her and Scapa Flow sweet 420 dan asks what was the feasibility of the anglo-french fleet to force the straights open at Gallipoli and thus avoiding the catastrophe at Astra fee of the land battle well I've covered how you could get through the Dardanelles before being a number of different questions I'll be very brief on this one but if you're going to confine it purely to the big anglo-french attempt to force the Straits rather than an earlier point yes you could if you are willing to take a few more losses obviously in hindsight we know that they were always through the minefields so there is that so that yes in absolute terms they could have made it and if they had pushed on a little bit further then they would have managed to break through yes they would have lost more ships and it would have been very messy but I think losing a few more much large Li obsolete pre dreadnaughts while it would have been a heavy price to pay would still be a small price compared to the absolute carnage that was the landings themselves the other way to get through with perhaps fewer casualties would have been to preempt Jackie Fisher's ideas about how to go about landing in the Baltic grab a few of these brew dreadnought stick them into Dockyard quickly and fit them all up with some quick and nasty bulges just really really big ones doesn't really matter they don't have to be pretty and just force them through sell them through because that's the other like underwater projections what did in most of the pre dreadnaughts that ended up getting sunk so yeah stuff move to the gunnels with bulges seal off every unnecessary compartment deep down weld everything up make them as water as possible drive them straight through cuts if you can't get the proper military minesweepers you can have to use your battleships and at that point then you won't hopefully you won't be losing ships to individual mine strikes they can take a mind and either keep going or possibly take mine and then pull back and that way you'd quite easily force the strikes Gabriel a Hawkins asks I'm told one of the plan counters to operation sea lion was to sweep the channel with Britain's battle line and this plan constituted a significant deterrent to German invasion plans as the Luftwaffe had a questionable questionable ability to penetrate the armor of heavy British units however the Germans had also placed a sizable shore batteries on the western coast of France as well as railway guns to assist in the planned invasion that certainly had the power to breach battleship grade armor did the British have a plan to counter the shore batteries in the invent of an invasion so this is one of the more hotly debated topics around operation sea lion at least when it comes to what the British were done in response because well you can find documents and sources to support the view that the British would have charged him with all the available battleships you can find sources that say from the Admiralty that they wouldn't have sent in any capital ships and everything in between there was a lot of back and forth the official line from the Admiralty technically was we keep on capital ships back until we can eat in the event of an invasion and unless that were absolutely necessary in certain caveats can be made on the other hand some of the officers who actually own the ships and suchlike as well as well practical experience looking at how the Royal Navy acted would suggest that if push came to shove caution would probably go to the wind but nevertheless when it comes to shore batteries in particular there were two factors that would the Royal Navy would have exploited one of which is the weather specifically night which is a form of weather when you were talking about sea and air operations and secondly is well the Germans would have been on the wrong side of the channel with as relates to these guns so for passing through the Dover Straits which is where the entirety of the English Channel can be covered by the short guns you would just pass through at night I mean a night attack would be the preferred method for the British anyway so that makes sense the other part is the assuming you're gonna clear the Dover batteries or well technically the the Calais batteries if you're talking about the Germans but never mind once you're into the channel itself the channel gets wider and you're out of any practical range of short battery to engage you but if you're still remaining within the range of a short battery of any description there are a few things to remember one of which is that a lot of short batteries and railway guns fire a lot slower than battleships vehicles battleships obviously have this whole massive system though their whole purpose is dedicated to firing the main guns a railway gun not so much they tend to fire a lot lot slower and also accuracy as actually covered in the video earlier this week the battleships have all sorts of fancy range-finding equipment so they can fire fast and more accurately than most sure batteries can and so they're probably going to ignore some of the shore batteries who aren't really going to be able to engage them if they're merrily slaughtering their way through German landing craft on the English side of the channel and if they do become a specific problem then one or two battleships will probably be churlish or engaging in counterbattery fire or if the invasion forces are right onto the beach you'd probably have the big Dover battery guns doing a counter battery job with their German counterparts across the channel to free up the battleships for direct fire missions against the beaches themselves that the coastal guns can't aim at gotta find my dad asks I was wondering how the Brig and the justice system aboard warships works he then relates the camp at his great uncle serving as an anti-aircraft gunner being in the brig and everything released from the brig to return to his a position in the middle of the Battle of the Coral Sea so he asks I was curious about temporary released from detainment was this common practice in times of enemy engagement and what kind of offenses would land someone in the Brig and how it justice justice be administered whilst at sea so the brig which is kind of an American term but we'll use it as most people know what it means these days or otherwise confinement aboard a warship is actually pretty rare as a punishment because in such a tight community as a warship disciplinary infractions are usually a case of you did something wrong but you're not a risk to the rest of the crew and you're still able to do your duties because bear in mind you still have to feed this person you know you still have to look look after them to whatever degree is necessary and there's a lot of jobs that need doing aboard of warship and not that many people to do them so just basically putting someone in a cell and the ship having to incur most of the costs of keeping them around and getting none of the benefits of having a trained crewman means that if you're going to lock someone up they've either go I've got to done something really bad or be a danger to everybody else so most of the time punishment would be a case of handing them extra duties punishment duties making them subject to certain restrictions in what they could do in their off-duty time and such like and to be honest if if the what they've done required a heavier punishment than that at least went to about the World War 1 World War two period it probably didn't want them on the ship at all to be perfectly frank and there would usually be some ship or other that could take him away yeah you would normally you would put them in the brig at such a point that you couldn't actually trust them anymore now in peacetime and on certain ships and in various navies this may change but in general wartime it would have to be very specific so it to end up in in the brig that said if the ship's under attack and you need every man to defend the ship then if this person in any way shape or form has applicable skills that would help to defend the ship and then not an immediate danger to everybody else aboard then yeah of course you get them in action because any any single person can make a difference and the last thing you want to do is to report back to the Admiralty in question well yes the ship could have been saved but the one office or man who had the particular technical knowledge and action station to be in that area that could have saved the ship well we had him in the brig throughout the entire thing because we didn't like him or because he he'd done something separately wrong the Admiralty will hold you over the coals a lot more for losing your ship than they will for temporarily letting a brig or imprisoned man or officer out as far as what would exactly land you in the brig quote-unquote well the ship would have to be at sea otherwise you'd just be sent ashore if you were going to be confined and if you were at sea as I say it depends to a great degree on the Navy in question the culture of that Navy whether or not the ship is at war and also the captain because well the captain's word is law most of the time when a warship so yeah if it's peacetime and the Cape's is a fairly strict disciplinarian you might find all sorts of things could wind you up with a short steak and find in some way shape or form whereas if it's wartime that's going to be lessened and also as I say the since it's the captain and in some cases other members of the senior staff will make be making these decisions exactly how they stand on how useful you might be would also affect whether or not you end up in the brig or given some other kind of Duty so it's not really question that can be boxed into to give a specific answer missus Gabriel a Hawkins asks I've often wondered what was the typical age for boys to be sent to see either as officers or as regular seamen as it doesn't seem credible that experienced seamen would take orders from inexperienced twelve-year-old officers especially in stressful situations such as battle or violent storms especially if those orders were blatantly wrong is this my modern American mindset that's unable to fully comprehend the disciplined hierarchical world of the British Navy in the age of sail or is there something else that explains why this worked so once the rank of midshipman became a kind of favored area for young boys to enter the fleet as part of their naval Korea and bear in mind that originally the rank of midshipman was had a completely different purpose per we're talking about this sort of mid to late age of sale repurposing of the rank they typically join around age thirteen fourteen a little bit early a little bit later one way or the other but yeah so elite going on mid teens would be kind of the period that they would they would come in now in terms of tech gaming orders yes they technically outranked the the ordinary seaman practically speaking everybody on board knew that as pretty much as you say the no one's going to be taking orders from a twelve-year-old who has no idea what he's doing in the middle of a battle the Midshipmen were there primarily to learn from the more experienced or and our high ranked officers and indeed if they were any good if there were going to be any good they'd also be learning from the men as well that even if they might notionally be in charge of something or other but bear in mind that there'd be plenty of left tenants on board and any orders that a midshipman might pass down again assuming they'd knew half of what they should would simply be relaying orders from higher up you would not trust a midshipman in anything approaching ordinary circumstances to be the one making the decisions and giving the orders so let's say for example if you're on a gun deck in the middle of a battle you might have a master gunner or another officer of some description calling the order to fire for the gun gun deck that oughta might be relayed by Midshipmen at various points because of this very noisy environment but you wouldn't expect a midshipman to actually give the order to fire of their own volition so yeah I mean as the as the Midshipmen gained experience very much you needed at least three years experience as a midshipman before you could sit for a left tenants Commission then by the end of that period they probably were fairly competent at giving low-level day-to-day orders for the specific instances that they might end up having to sue fires in the in the day-to-day operation of the ship but once it comes to big major situations like battles and storms they're effectively messengers if you get to a point in a battle or a storm where the highest-ranking officer that you can get something out of is a midshipman you're probably already in a life boat or a impromptu raft at that point and as we're nearly done we'll press on without the interlude so mem Mori asks it seems large destroy designs like French and German ones tend to have more drawbacks than advantages what kind of things could be changed to allow that direction of development to work something like shimakaze maybe and finally were there any significant advantages that these large destroyers actually offered that were crucial to their respective navies a lot of the problems that arose from having overly large destroyers basically came down to the fundamental fact that the navies that built them we usually smaller than other navies and thus they had to try and fit as much bang for their buck into specific ships rather than generalized classes and this is always a bit of a a bit of the quandary that you have if you're a large Navy you tend to have lots of commitments which means that since no one has an unlimited money machine you ending end up needing to have lots and lots of decent ships rather than a handful of wonder ships so this is why you see for example the UK at the end in the beginning of World War 2 mass producing things like the LM n classes rather than mass producing the tribals the u.s. mass produces the Fletcher's etc whereas you look at the smaller navies like Germany France ten to certain extent Italy and also to reasonable to extent Japan they try and get they know they can't match the US and UK and destroy numbers so they try and build larger destroyers that in then theoretically have a comfortable individual advantage over a single destroy they might meet up with or possibly two now the other problem he generally comes from trying to do too much so the Germans tried to put too much gun on their ships the French they tried to make them too fast the Japanese tried too much of everything because again if you're paying this amount of money and you're building a few large ships the temptation is to try and cram absolutely anything and everything on board to make sure you're getting the absolute best that you can so to make it work well you have to take a sensible view as to what makes a viable combat unit so for the Germans that's toned down the size of your guns for the French it's you don't need to go quite that fast for the Japanese it's well pick something and do that stop trying to be at a small light cruiser I mean there's ways of doing a light as that's what a light cruisers are on to destroy a hull but one of those things isn't literally putting a light cruiser on a destroyer hull and so when you look at the large destroyers something like say a tribal class or some of the US destroyer leader types and to be fair some of the Japanese types as well the best way of building a large destroyer is to choose a specific part of the Destroy mission paradigm that you're going to emphasize so with the tribal place cases that's guns English in McCarthy's cases I guess that's torpedoes etc they use your extra size and displacement for that don't go overboard on all the others and if you need to cut those things other things down a bit so you then make a destroy that's good at one thing above most other destroyers and bear in mind yes you normally have speed protection firepower in destroys you don't really have protection so it destroys it's more like speed guns and torpedoes so yeah do one thing really really well if necessary trim out cut a couple of one or two bits from something else and keep the rest the same that's how you make a successful large destroyer SDF 7 asks a relatively long complicated question that basically amounts to why didn't ask or carriers get designed and ordered significantly earlier than they did in historical timelines but there's a whole medley of factors really but to briefly highlight some of the more important ones some plans for what we might recognize as an escort carrier of merchant aircraft carrier had been devised in the 1930s the so it was being thought about but it was a little bit on the back burner for a variety of reasons and one of those was perceived threat you've got to bear in mind that although and he said broom warfare tactics were under development in the 1930s there was in some quarters perhaps a little bit of an over reliance on a stick - sonar as the fait accompli for getting rid of submarines and well if you've got a system you can mount on destroyers and other escorts to get rid of your submarines why'd you need this sort of small aircraft carrier going around there was of course also the idea you could hunt submarines with fleet aircraft carriers but HMS courageous tells us quite how all that went yeah not a good idea but on top of that there's also need and it's not just need of the merchant ships or need of the Navy or need of anything else it's the overall needs of the nation so in the earlier of 1939 1940 there certainly was a need for these kinds of ships but the one country that actually needed them in a big way which was the UK I had rather more important things to worry about when it came to things like the Battle of Britain and so there's no point in having an aircraft carrier of any size if you don't have a t aircraft to operate from it and the Royal Navy was having to fight tooth and nail just to get the aircraft that it was getting on its fleet carriers let alone distributing dozens of flights across lots of smaller platforms with the Royal Air Force screaming quite rightly for it to an extent for practically every bit of industrial infrastructure capable of producing an aircraft the size of a fighter to be churning out hurricanes and Spitfires and last is also the it's not just the perceived threat of the u-boats it's also about aircraft because remember the catapult arm merchant and the immediate predecessor to the escort carry was mainly about shooting down long-range German aircraft long-range maritime strike and patrol aircraft flat-out weren't a threat during the 1930s few enough of them existed and the ones that did were basically either incapable of actually harming anything or would have to get so close to harm somebody that the ia defenses in theory should be able to take care of them and of course when you look at who everybody's thinking of fighting at those at that time well if you're fighting Japan they're going to be using their own aircraft carriers so you be using your carriers to counter them if you're fighting the Germans up until 1940 the Germans don't have any Atlantic facing airports and runways of they're anywhere close to the Atlantic nor for most of the nineties they have aircraft capable of long-distance patrols over the Atlantic so how are they even going to get there it's not an issue the only people you really have to worry about are the Italians because while they're in the middle of the Mediterranean and you know can use escort carriers against the Italians you're either going to use your own loan based aircraft if they come out far enough places like Malta and such or again you're gonna use your fleet carriers so the advent of suddenly Germany has lots of air fields or in western France and now has this bunch of FW 200s this is something they weren't really anticipating William Urbanski asks why did a lot of guns both large and small have bell shaped or flared and muzzles I've heard at one time it was believed the muzzle needed to be stronger to handle the pressure as the projectile left the bore but as early as the u.s. Civil War possibly earlier this was found to be unnecessary and you started to see cannons with straight lines all the way forward so why did this practice continued in so many guns after this time now it's not definitive because well yeah this was a fun one there there were a lot of should we say dissenting opinions about this but what seems to make the most sense to me as an engineer going back through it is that this is an outgrowth of a much earlier practice so if you look at much earlier cannons they are banded now there banded will in part because initially they were built kind of like barrels and so bowels needed banding and so to the guns but even once they were cast they were still in need of certain reinforcement banding at fairest points because of failures and such like in one of these bands then in fact one of the heaviest bands was either cast or fitted around the muzzle of the gun to stop it cracking the flare seems to be an evolution of that and it's just basically becoming more integral to the gun itself now as far as handling the pressures the projectile left support well the rest of the cannon is having pretty much the same issues except that obviously the as the ball leaves the gun you get the exhaust and the pressure all going out so it's not pressing on it quite as hard at that point however the thing you've got to remember is that how elders you can probably see from these guns the guns taper going forward so there's less and less material containing the pressure as you go forward and along the rest of the length of the cannon that pressure at any given point is being distributed pretty much in all directions possible through the rest of the gun so whilst failures obviously can and did occur they're not quite as common as where you would usually get minor engineering failures that could then turn into major ones which was at the muzzle because the muzzle obviously being the cutoff point well it's only got half as many directions within the material to redirect the energy that it is under you've also got it subjected to quite differential because somewhere they halfway down the cannon barrel it's going to heat up and then it's gonna slowly cool down because of its mass and because of where it is relative to the rest of the gun the muzzle on the other hand is going to be heated if from more than one direction because obviously that flare of fire is going to spill around it it's also going to expand differently because it's not confined at one end so the outer edge of the barrel has a lot more capacity for expansion then the then maybe even a point two three inches down the gun and it's also got a cool quicker because greater surface area and usually stuck out in as far as possible or outside the hull of the ship all these things do you make some a slight difference and so if you are gonna get cracking as it not the kind of immediately fatal this gun explodes cracking but the kind of this gun might explode in two or three shots cracking its gonna start happening at the barrel unless you have really good mythology and or various other changes that you make and so one of the easiest ways of countering that is to put in well initially a band button with in this case a flare because you're introducing a lot more material to the muzzle which means it's gonna retain heat longer so it's not going to be snapping back and forth which we and hot and cold quite as much and also there's just a lot more mass to it which means that if these kind of micro fractures start to develop they're going to find it much harder to propagate to such degree that they're going to compromise the structural integrity of the gun because there's just a lot more iron there to break as opposed to us or a straight line run so yeah it's kind of a long-term insurance thing you you over build it and it's Morton builds likely to last longer now as a this is only one of many possible explanations that I've managed to find if my research but as an engineer and with my knowledge of particular engineering materials such as iron and steel it seems to make the most logical sense to me if I was faced with the problem of building a cannon or cannon like projectile launching weapon from scratch that would actually be one of my major concerns where is the initial point of failure like likely to start assuming the rest of the material is cast uniformly and probably a similar kind of safety measure to what I design in to be perfectly honest Barret McDowell asks you've mentioned many times how many navies complied with naval treaties by simply lying how well-known was it that these lies were so prevalent and why was nothing really done about it intelligence about it was patchy for the most part and by the time it started to become blatantly obvious the Naval Treaty system was on the verge of breaking down anyway this in this off MIDI 1930s so everyone had their suspicions and some suspicions were stronger than others but two things one II it's a different thing to have suspicions as opposed to being able to prove them and the subsidiary of that is well if you're being very technical about how you interpret the rules you don't necessarily want to call someone else out on it if a fear they might turn around and do the same to you but the other thing is people really well say most people the big powers the ones who might actually do the calling out part and trying to force people back into line they kind of wanted the treaty system to work and there's only a certain amount oh you can do at least they thought without making it so blatantly obvious to everyone that absolutely everyone is going to on someone and it turns out well yeah that's true but by the time that happens I've treated some and broken down anyway put regardless the idea was that if if it's the smaller Navy's breaking the treaty limits by a little bit by lying about a thousand or two tons here or there if the larger powers kind of turned a little bit of a blind eye to that on the grounds that well it doesn't really matter if the Kriegsmarine is building 12,000 or 13,000 or 14,000 ton heavy cruisers because let's face it they can only build half a dozen of them and we've got two or three dozens so they're gonna lose anyway and if we could make a big fuss about it then they'll withdraw from the treaty system entirely they'll build something might actually legitimately be a big problem and also if the treaty system collapses then we have to spend vast amounts of money because the medium and large-sized powers such as a say Japan are gonna take that as co-op launched to start building their really big designs and then we have to match them and so on and so forth so it was a when you're dealing with the smaller navies it's just a little bit too much like hard work and cost to actually expose them even if you know about it and that's that's basically an assay but by the time you pick a was really really obvious that people were quite flagrantly cheating on a level that as actually worrying most of everyone except for the UK France and the USA had walked out the Naval Treaty system already indy neidell x' fursona okay so his whether any serious attempts by either the greeks marina or ijn to put the Panama Canal out of action there were a few plans not really any major attempts the Germans had operation Pelican the Japanese obviously had their plans with the I 400 carrier subs but in terms of actual attacks no not really the thing was obviously the Germans weren't can retract the Panama Canal before the end of 1941 because America was neutral and they'd rather it stays that way for as long as possible once the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and America found itself at war with Japan and Germany and everybody else you couldn't see comprised Axis powers the Americans put some rather heavy defenses in place because they were worried that the German all the Japanese might try and attack the Panama Canal and well that immediately ruled out the easier options like sailor u-boat or of Japanese submarine up and fired torpedoes at the gates and well the Japanese in the early part of the war would with that particular tactic ruled out had a lot of other things to be worrying about in the Pacific campaign and as far as the Germans were concerned well much as the Japanese are very valuable allies the longer the Panama Canal is open given that America is somewhat understandably ticked off with Japan at this point that's more American warships heading through to the Pacific and the more American warships head through to the Pacific the few American warships there are in the Atlantic also the theory goes it just turns out that well if America is going to have lots of warships in the Pacific doesn't necessarily rule it out from having lots of warships in the Atlantic as well but hey uh hindsight once it did become apparent that perhaps the Panama Canal was a little bit more of a help to the Allies that it was to the axis it was a it was basically too late they D it was too well defended it was too far away any kind of attempt on it was going to be a very very shall we say optimistic attack and none of them really ever golf the ground and finally dominick von Bismark asks is it possible and realistic to have a battleship using into water world water technology capable of being an efficient icebreaker unfortunately not basically it was you can see here ice breakers require a very different whole design to battleships they need an almost constantly rounding hull the battleships tend to when you look at them from a profile view above you can actually usually see they're kind of a there's a bow and a stern and a largely rectangular section amidships they also need to have a fairly blunt bow with a very quick curve to allow them to ride over the thicker parts of the ice and all of this means that the average icebreaker is not the world's best open sea boat and it's also not particularly fast because this whole form is not good for speed battleships on the other hand well they need to be very good at open sea and they need to be moving at a fair old clip as well so these to hold characteristics are completely odds with each other the other thing is that battleships generally will have their underwater search areas going down quite a fair way and with a lot of older and refitted ships also have bulges incorporated into them and these are very bad when you're trying to pass through ice because the ice that you've just broken tends to pass down the sides of the ship and that's exactly the kind of hole form which gets a lot of ice scraping along the side of your ship so yeah not a good idea there if you design a battleship that it is in any way shape or form particularly suited to the ice breaking role it's never going to go anywhere fast and it's going to roll so badly the crews probably going to be half dead from seasickness by the time you get anywhere and if you're trying to use a normal battleship for ice breaking well it's they're usually big enough and mean enough to do basic ice breaking with very thin ice anyway just answer count their sheer mass although it wouldn't really want to see what the scratches and dings in the hull look like afterwards but yeah if you're talking about properly heavy ice no the design compromises you need to make would be completely unacceptable for a battleship and yeah the owned the only ones that would really make even half-decent icebreakers would probably be something like the core paper tires gang goats etc because those two French and Russian pre-world War one retinol designs tended to carry their armor belts at relative thickness relatively high thicknesses all the way to the front and are after the ship which means that at least as far as ramming ice is concerned they're probably got a slightly greater advantage in that respect than many others but yeah generally speaking you don't want to use a battleship as an icebreaker and that brings us to the end of this week's drydock so some of you might be wondering well why such a short patreon drydock track well I'll explain this briefly most of you will probably have heard this all well not most each some of you might have heard this already because there should be a live stream going out on Friday before this goes live in which this also be covered there but basically because of the sheer size of the dry docks it's just getting completely unworkable so what I thought about doing and put it to a vote on patreon and got pretty much well not entirely but near enough unanimous support on was the idea of splitting the drydock so what I determined to be the more historic not historical because that sounds a bit that's a bit unkind and unnecessarily so the original timeline history based questions shall we say shall continue in this dry dock format on the Sunday or Saturday for a patreon so and so hope you probably noticed that pretty much all of these questions are based on specific questions about stuff that happened or was planned to happen or could have happened in real life history the stuff that is compliant with our timeline and the questions that are more on the speculative side of sort of what if this really big butterfly flaps its wings and something completely different happens or what does drag do if he's in charge of a certain fleet or any number of other similar to alternate history or speculative questions these kinds of things I will do separately on a live stream the Friday before the patreon drydock goes up from now on and we'll see how that works so that kind of split things a little bit and it means that where the speculative side of things is which is obviously where well you can't really research a specula a really speculative question like I don't know what if shenana was completed as a third battleship and sent out to fight that that's not something you can look at a book and or documents and go oh okay that's what would have happened because this is what actually happened in a competitive situation it's it's just didn't it's not not possible so at that point you either have the basic grounding in naval history to be able to answer it or you don't and if you do then you should be able to answer it mmm pretty much as asked so I'm gonna try that with a live stream I will just have the list of questions I'll go through the questions I'll get my answers and assuming and I haven't run out of voice or time by then when I get to the end of that as usual take questions from the regular sort of live stream question part so we'll see how that works this month and next month and if it works great if it doesn't well we can always try something else you never know but hopefully people like this way of doing things as far as other channel admin goes thank goodness I've begun to get more reports over the past week or so of people's Thunder child posters arriving so I've been graphing with hose against when the posters were sent out and it would here that I'm a fair enough most of them were headed out to the US and it seems that the delay for USPS deliveries versus the sort of four to six working days that's advertised on the actual post service that was paid for yeah it's a little bit of a difference we're talking about five to six weeks different actual posting time so they're they're running about four to five weeks late possibly more in some cases but hopefully now that I've got a cup of several dozen people saying yes I've definitely got it hopefully those of you who saw where's my poster hopefully you've got it now and if you still don't have it by the time you're listening to this well again please drop me a line and let me know what's going on the next print run is probably about week and a half two weeks out so if you still received it by then oh also new new one and by a different Postal Service obviously otherwise we're just feeding someone some some lucky USPS guy random posters all the time but never mind so I think that's all that needs to be said for the moment once again thank you very much for watching and I hope to see you again in another video

Channel: Drachinifel

Views: 1,204,524

Keywords: The Drydock, Q&A, Drachinifel

Id: wcQn_FsgrkE

Length: 209min 47sec (12587 seconds)

Published: Sun May 31 2020