The Drydock - Episode 105

[Music] hello everybody and welcome to dry dock episode 105. this is the patreon dry dock for the end of july so strap in because once again it's going to be a slightly longer than normal one manani wanderer asks who in your opinion were the most grossly incompetent captains or admirals in each era well when you go back into ancient history it can at times be rather difficult to pick a truly incompetent admiral because although there were many admirals who were pretty bad and a number who led their fleets to some fairly stunning defeats and losses at the same time it's a very divorced nature of naval warfare as compared to stuff that's a bit more easily quantifiable by today's historians for example you could point to the various roman admirals in the punic wars with carthage who led hundreds of roman ships to watery graves very quickly after they were built because they had genuinely no idea how to run a navy but at the end of the day rome won that particular war so um well i suppose there is such a thing as succeeding in spite of yourself but there you go from sort of the middle ages forward i would say there's probably five top picks uh in roughly chronological order admiral one guan i think that's how it's pronounced um who was in charge of the korean navy temporarily whilst uh various court politics had bypassed and sidelined admiral yee i pick him because admiral yee had shown through a series of battles and to be fair a considerable degree of tactical genius as well as strategic knowledge exactly how to husband the relatively small number of korean warships and inflict a series of devastating defeats on the japanese admiral gwan decided that all of this was entirely beneath him and took the fleet that admiral yi had very carefully mustered preserved and trained and then did pretty much everything that admiral yi had kind of marked down on his big never do this enlist basically sailing his ships out into a direct ambush in the open ocean where shockingly enough the superior numbers of the japanese ships cut his fleet to bits and then left admiral yi who was very hastily recalled to try and put everything back together from scratch again then i would pick admiral velner of the french navy and that's not just because of trafalgar although trafalgar is a large part of it he was also as was mentioned in the nelson part 2 video present at the battle of the nile and watched the vanguard and middle elements of the fleet began cut apart did nothing and then ran away and then in the lead up to the battle of trafalgar he knew his ships weren't a match for nelson's and yet he took them out into a hopeless battle anyway and the only reason he did that was because he didn't want to lose face because napoleon was sending his replacement now it takes an especially incompetent officer to knowingly ride to defeat purely for the sake of personal pride then i'd have to say admiral persano of the italian navy at the battle of lissa the battle of lissa video kind of explains why but when you fail to adequately give your orders you're hated by half of your fleet to the point that they won't really come to help you anyway and then you skedaddle off to a completely different ship without telling anybody and watch your fleet fall apart under an assault that theoretically they should have been fairly easily able to crush then run home and try and claim it definitely wasn't your fault and you actually won well there's there's a reason that he suffered uh quite a number of consequences as a result of that particular little debacle then as the picture that's been displayed on your screens for the past couple of minutes may give some clue i'm going to put in admiral david beatty indeed hilariously enough if you're going to google and type incompetent admiral admiral beatty's entry is the first result and that's not without cause uh as i've outlined in numerous other videos and uh um explaining in a little bit more detail in the jutlands series admiral bt had two jobs to find the enemy fleet and report its location and to keep the majority at least of his ships alive with a tertiary objective potentially of actually winning an engagement where you had superior numbers and guess what he managed to fail all of those um when you're in command of effectively the world's biggest and most powerful scouting force maybe try scouting once in a while and finally again no real surprise for those who have been watching this channel for any extended period of time the other one i would put in in the in the world war ii period would be admiral jean-soul for deciding he wasn't going to act within the spirit of his orders and instead deciding that he was going to claim he was acting within the letter of his orders and then failing to do even that and ending up getting a bunch of his people killed unnecessarily so yeah those would be my top five picks for incompetent admirals effectively it comes down to with pretty much all of them you had a choice you had very good reasons and motivations and information at hand to inform that choice and you proceeded to set all of that on fire and choose the worst possible choice that you could potentially imagine short of outright turning your ships over to the enemy without firing a shot largely because you thought you were smarter than everybody else when you really really were not texas and le shock asks what were the biggest contributions of the us coast guard in the two world wars and what would you consider their finest hour for each so in both world wars the biggest contribution of the u.s coast guard to the war effort would have to be their assistance with convoy escort duties those were the largest and most numerous duties that the us coast guard undertook in in both conflicts although it was considerably more so in world war ii than world war one in part because the us was involved in world war ii for considerably longer than it was involved in world war one but also because the us coast guard by the time of world war ii was considerably better established and had a better idea of what it was doing as opposed to in world war one when it was still at that point of service it was only a couple of years old and was still sorting itself out now as regards individual finest hours for each war i would probably say for world war one you're looking at the halifax explosion and for those of you unaware that's basically as it sounds a massive explosion in the canadian port of halifax when a freighter full of ammunition caught fire and went boom causing quite a bit of damage and indeed would remain the world's largest non-nuclear explosion for quite a considerable portion of time and caught in the middle of all of this was one poor single-lone u.s coast guard cutter and uh understandably not entirely built to withstand the effects of a near three kiloton explosion at relatively close range nevertheless uh the crew decided to almost immediately get themselves to shore and get relief parties off to help the various citizens and other vessels in halifax harbor that had obviously also been badly affected by the explosion and despite the fact that there were british cruisers and armed merchant cruisers in the harbour as well as american crews an american cruiser and our merchant cruiser nearby who also came to render assistance obviously the little u.s coast guard cutter was actually picked out in a number of reports for the excellent nature of its relief work so that definitely stands out as a finest alpha world war one and for world war ii my personal pick would be rescue flotilla one as pictured here now as well as convoy escort in world war ii u.s coast guard personnel uh served quite considerably aboard landing craft in various guises sometimes partly sometimes fully crewing them which is obviously something of a hazardous occupation considering you're driving what effectively amounts to a large square metal biscuit tin straight at enemy coastal defenses but rescue flotilla 1 had a slightly more dangerous job if you can believe it because at least on the landing craft you had direct fire support a few weapons of your own and well you're made of metal uh which might resist rifle fire in the odd light machine gun round rescue flotilla one on the other hand had a bunch of wooden hulled cutters and due to wartime scarcity after the first few cutters were produced they also just had plywood rather than bronze wheel houses so you have basically zero protection and their job was not just to be in the vicinity of the d-day beaches their job was specifically to go after damaged and sinking or sunk landing craft and other such vessels to rescue the crew now not only is the lack of any kind of armor or indeed as you can see really any kind of forward fire firing weapons of any particular use rather notable but also of course by the simple fact that you are heading for a sunk sunken or sinking vessel you are heading for an area where the enemy has demonstrated they actually do have accurate enough and heavy enough weaponry to sink a vessel and a vessel that's a lot more durable than yours and yet you willingly drive straight into that area stop and start hauling aboard survivors and well hope that the enemy doesn't sink you as well so that requires quite the considerable level of bravery and the various lives that they saved or both on d-day and in other operations definitely mark that out i think at least as one of the finest hours of the earth's coast guard in world war ii matt blom asks how would the german u-boat pens in france engineered i how did the germans determine the required thickness of concrete to resist bombing and what was the maximum sized bomb they were designed to be resistant too so the basic specification for the u-boat pens varied from pen to pen and was occasionally upgraded either whilst they were under construction or shortly thereafter as the apparent firepower of allied bombers increased but the basic idea behind it all was actually a relatively sound engineering proposition which was take the biggest nastiest most heavily armor-piercing bomb that you have which in the germans case would have been something like the pc 1600 which had a notional penetration of about eight to nine feet of concrete and then assume that your enemy will drop something even bigger and nastier so for example there were one of the pens was designed with a 16 foot thick roof which was according to calculations supposed to be able to resist a bomb weight of up to 7 000 pounds now bearing in mind that something like a big bomb like the pc 1600 was a 1600 kilogram or three and a half thousand pound weapon you're effectively designing them to be twice as strong as in theory they need to be but from an engineering perspective that makes perfect sense now as i said as allied bombs became apparently more and more destructive and also you had to take into account the cumulative effect of multiple bomb impacts because if you look at some of those u-boat pens after air raids they look a little bit like moonscapes the thickness went up and up the germans also weren't just doing pure mass slab concrete they were doing multiple layers of material to both deflect break up the bombs themselves and also then to deflect break up and reduce the effect of the explosions that might otherwise result so there were obviously big concrete slabs in there but there were layers of granite there were layers of steel there were layers of rebar concrete there were separate individual layers of slab concrete and so on and so forth so there was actually quite a lot of complex engineering that went into it all but they were even towards the end of the war trying to come up with specs that would resist something like a tall boy or a grand slam after it was shown that those particular weapons were more than capable of punching holes into the u-boat pens because well let's be fair they were absolutely huge fast moving weapons especially in the case of the tallboy and you can't really fault the german engineers for not foreseeing that particular problem so yeah in terms of maximum size bomb they were designed to be resistant to initial specs were as we said something along the lines of a six to seven thousand pound bomb but towards the end of the war there were some under design that at least on paper should have been able to resist a tall boy impact or two which is of course a 12 000 pound bomb whether or not there any of them would ever stand up something like a grand slam remains unknown but it's a little bit harder to determine that particular instance because of course tall boy is designed to be a direct impact high-speed supersonic armor-piercing bomb whereas grand slam was not quite configured in exactly the same way as tall boy it wasn't it wasn't at its most effective in a direct armor penetration capacity although given the size of the amount of explosive that it contained there wasn't going to be too many things that were going to be overly fond of being hit by one rita loy asks we all know the mark 6 exploder was used in more than just the mark 14 torpedo what was the effect that the mark vi exploder had on other us navy torpedoes so the mark vi exploder found its benighted place in not just the mark 14 but also in the mark 15 torpedo which was the us navy's primary surface based torpedo eye the one you'd find in destroyer torpedo tubes and there it wreaked pretty much the same havoc on torpedo effectiveness as it did on submarines the only slight advantage there was that the mark 15 as a torpedo itself was subject to slightly fewer design problems as compared to the mark 14 and also of course with a destroyer it tends to have a gun battery that is obviously a significant part of its primary offensive firepower and so whilst there were quite a few failures of the mark 15 torpedo it wasn't quite as deleterious on the effectiveness of u.s navy destroyers as the failure of the mark 14 was on the us enemy submarines where of course that is the primary and in some cases the only real practical weapon of the submarine miko lightnin asks what would have happened to the high seas fleet if it didn't sink itself in scapa flow probably an awful lot of arguing there was some debate within german internal high command as to whether or not they should just sink the ships anyway regardless of the outcome of the versailles treaty but certainly the admiral on the ground admiral reuter um he was reluctantly willing to hand over the ships if the armistice concluded and his government the german government acceded to the terms that included handing over the fleet but otherwise he was determined to sink them which of course he did now the problem here was that there were different motivations on different sides as to how exactly these ships should be dealt with for the british in particular they actually would rather see them sunk or otherwise destroyed there was no question of allowing the germans to retain a fleet of course of any significant size but a lot of the german ships were fairly powerful and fairly modern bearing in mind the german fleet was the only other fleet that had any substantial amount or at all any number really of modern battle cruisers outside of the royal australian navy which was firmly on the side of the royal navy and you had ships like barden and bayern as well as a number of the later ships such as the kernigs and kaisers plus various destroyers and modern cruisers and whilst the royal navy had put some of its construction efforts on hold during the first world war this had allowed particularly the american navy to close the gap slightly the french navy was well behind in terms of construction but this surrender of the german fleet could potentially if everything was divvied up allow both of those navies to come a lot closer to what the royal navy had because well for the french any kind of modern battleships would be a good thing but for the americans whilst they had maintained construction of the standard class during world war one and that was enough of a concern for the british because the standard class obviously with the majority of them being built during the 1910s were significantly superior to pretty much any ship that they had outside of the 13 and a half and 15 inch ships so there was a whole slew of 12 inch ships already obsolete but the americans didn't have battle cruisers and they didn't have modern light cruisers and there was already rising tension on the naval side of things between britain and america so the last thing that the royal navy wanted was for the americans to get their hands on say dear flinger and hindenburg and use that as the core of their battle cruiser force or indeed for ships like barden bayern to fall into hands other than their own and they didn't have any particular use for them because they liked large homogeneous classes and some of the design aspects of the german vessels such as relatively short range and now that the war was over uh the use extensively of coal power didn't really sit well with the royal navy's operational paradigms so if the high seas fleet hadn't been sunk i suspect there would have been a fantastic amount of arguing between the various powers with the british trying to advocate for their destruction the french trying to advocate to probably get a fairly large block of the german ships to put its navy back on some kind of equal footing and the americans probably looking to snipe off particular choice elements as i said like the battle cruisers and cruisers to enhance its own fleet screen which was the one area that the american battle line was deficient in by the time of the versailles treaty so all in all it's probably just as well they did sink themselves and the royal navy officers at the time did express a certain degree of relief that it rather removed the thorny question as to who got what ships by dinter just putting them all on the ocean floor leops 1984 asks large caliber german naval guns used a four-charge main charge system where part of the propellant was in a brass case whilst the rest was in silk bags why did the germans use this unique arrangement what were its advantages and disadvantages and did it have any effects on ship design so for starters the main charge which was the rear portion of the charge did indeed use a brass case there is some disagreement in sources as to what happened with the four charge with some sources indicating that the four charge was stored in silk bags in some cases saying that the four charge was stored in a tin container and then decanted for use in the gun and still other uh sources particularly norman friedman states that the four charge was actually contained in a zinc container which went into the gun along with the shell and the main charge and that this case was basically just consumed upon firing but regardless the main question is about the brass casing the reason it was adopted was to a certain extent simply an extension of smaller caliber guns where pretty much everybody used brass cases of some description but also the specific reasons were primarily two-fold so there was the now in hindsight relatively obvious advantage and at the time still apparent safety advantage of the fact that a charge in a brass case is much harder to set off in the first place unintentionally and if it does it's going to probably just burn in place it's less likely to spread to other nearby charges so there's a definite safety aspect to it all however there is also another important aspect to it which was quite carefully considered by the germans which is the fact that breaches are never quite perfect but if you use a big brass case and you feed that into the gun the brass at the base helps to completely seal the breach so you not only get slightly more power from your gun fractionally but it's also slightly less of a hazard to your crew because obviously less chance of leaks and back blast and it gives you a more consistent result with the detonation of the charge for pretty much the same reasons again so there was a minor advantage to the use of the guns themselves and separately a an advantage to actually having a safer magazine and shell handling system albeit that even with these measures in place the turret fire on satellites the battle of dogger bank showed that you could come dangerously close to losing your ship even with these kinds of measures in places if you neglected other safety procedures so without like the advantages were there any disadvantages well there were a few one of them was that obviously these kind of things weigh a fair bit and they cost a reasonable amount because they weigh a bit more and well they don't take up any more space but it makes the whole thing a little bit more ungainly it does mean that for a given volume and a given displacement allowance for your magazines you can carry slightly fewer charges which means that you either have to adopt smaller guns to maintain a similar amount of ammunition have enlarged magazines or have less ammunition so that does force a little bit of an annoying choice on you the other thing because they're expensive you generally want to retain and reuse these cartridges but if you absolutely need to you do have to dump them and dumping them does cause a bit of a problem because german turrets usually at the back would have ejection ports so that if necessary you could chuck the shell the um cases out uh this would be for things such as even relatively mundane things like you've fired so many uh shots that your turret is now knee-deep in brass which is a bit of a problem however this does present a weakness within the turret and this could potentially in an environment where you're being bombarded quite heavily be a major problem because in one of the war tests now there's a lot to be said against billy bitchell's test but this particular example of a hit is informative against osfridland one of the bombs hit a couple of dozen feet away from a turret behind the turret but the blo whilst the turret itself wasn't really damaged by the blast the blast did travel through the ejection port openings and caused overpressure inside the turret that probably would have killed everybody inside had that actually been a real wartime thing now fair enough it was a pretty big bomb but battleship shells are also relatively large and that was quite a distance away whereas you can't necessarily guarantee that shell isn't going to land nearby so there was that weakness within the turret design for using the brass cartridges that a near miss by a large explosion could actually knock out your turret even if the turret itself was structurally intact but it would be obviously quite reasonable to point out that potentially losing one or more of your turrets to near misses where the pure silk bag charge option might not have resulted in that loss is probably preferable to losing the entire ship when it when the magazines detonate which certainly would probably was not necessarily this factor that saved sailors but the fact that gave sadlets those extra seconds for its crew to flood its magazines at dogger bank sam samuel sam asks german type 40 torpedo boats how quick was it to rearm the torpedo tubes and did they carry spare torpedoes on board well the qualified answer to the second part is that no they didn't carry spare torpedoes or really any torpedoes on board because the type 40s were never actually finished but in more general general terms in most destroyers and torpedo boats were not designed to re-arm their torpedoes whilst they were at sea uh you can see from this profile drawing just how much space those torpedo tubes take up more than in footprint terms more than their main guns and you've got to remember the main gun itself is not a consumable part of the ship's arm the little shell that it fires is whereas with those torpedo tubes each torpedo is a substantial weapon and that's especially true in torpedo boats but also obviously on things like destroyers etc the only navy that had a systematic inbuilt and designed ability to reload torpedoes in a number of ships classes was the japanese navy but it wasn't unknown for various other navy's ships to shall we say acquire spare torpedoes and then reload them at sea where necessary if indeed any of the uh war logs are to be believed where you can trace the surprising number of torpedoes in excess of their design tube capacity being fired on a single voyage without any real indication that they came across a magical storeship that was able to reload them so yeah unofficially it's possible someone might have snappled up an extra g7a or two um it wouldn't be the first time that those kinds of ships had uh against regulations found somewhere to store some additional torpedoes although again being that they are fairly large weapons finding somewhere to actually store them is a little bit more problematic than finding spaces for extra shells now in terms of realm and if you're doing it properly with cranes and stuff in the dockyard there's probably well if you're strictly in terms of well we have a torpedo on the cradle on the dock side and we need to lift it into the torpedo tube the actual movement itself is probably in the order of a few minutes um albeit that the entire operation of getting one out of the armory etc is considerably longer than you've got to prep it in the tube for firing but in terms of rearing torpedo tubes at sea if you're doing it in this unofficial manner well you've got to remember torpedoes pretty hefty weapons so as i've discussed before with similar questions you could need quite a large body of men out there they're going to be some think of a risk because the chances are you're probably moving at high speed and pitching everywhere which is not really the best environment to be trying to jointly carry something that weighs well over a ton and shove it down a torpedo tube albeit that in theory is entirely possible to do so so how quickly that would have taken it depending on where you happen to have stashed the torpedo and what kind of sea state you're in and whether or not you're under fire it could be a matter of five to ten minutes it could be a matter of half an hour although i definitely wouldn't want to be on a reloading party that had to struggle with a heavy anti-ship torpedo for half an hour you'd probably have to cycle men in and out of those work parties to avoid sheer exhaustion stafford magnus asks were blowout panels ever considered for the rear of main gun turrets to prevent catastrophic explosions in case of them being penetrated there were a few notional studies that went into the idea but it was dismissed pretty quickly on a number of grounds firstly similar to actually the ejection panels and ports that were present on the german battleships people realized that they represented a weakness in the design of the ship because well if you have your blowout panel it basically can work in one of two ways either you have a similar thickness and weight of armor as everywhere else just bolted in with fairly weak bolts so the overpressure penetrates uh will not penetrate ruptures the bolts and throws the panel out in the event of an overpressure event or you make that panel very thin and weak so it will just rupture outright now the problem is if you have a weaker thinner panel then similar to the ejection ports the chances of a nearby hit that otherwise would leave the turret unaffected potentially penetrating through there even if it's at the back of the turret could potentially be a serious problem um especially in later battleship designs when you've got bombs that obviously are not going to hit specifically forward of the turret whereas obviously normally in battle you'd expect shells to be hitting the front armor of your turrets because they'd hopefully be pointing at the enemy if you're using the bolts situation again you have a problem of calibrating it precisely because there are going to be a lot of blast events and over pressure waves occurring around the turret both from the turrets guns themselves from potentially depending which turret you're in from super firing turrets etc so you don't want to make him so weak that you're losing the panel every time a nearby gun is going off but at the same time if you make them too strong then they're not going to fail in time to actually allow the overpressure to exit the turret in order to meaningfully protect the turret so this very very fine balancing act combined with the fact obviously that with to be perfectly honest if you're in the event of needing a blowout panel on your turret the chances are well two-fold one that it's not going to help the turret at all because it means a battleship great shell has probably penetrated your turret in all likelihood but also second you've got to remember there were already gaps and such in of the turret itself such as where the the gun ports where the guns were firing out and a any kind of reasonably sized blowout panel is not going to overly contribute that much to the sum total surface area by which hot gases could escape compared to those open sections for for the for the guns themselves and obviously there's some variants there depending on if there's an internal gun shield or it's canvas bagged or whatever but still the general point still applies effectively with the sheer scale of the explosion you're likely to get the chances of a blowup panel actually accomplishing all that much is relatively slim it will vent some of the explosion but it's not going to vent anywhere near enough of the explosion because you're going to have an awful lot more bang relative to overall surface area of the turret because it's much bigger and therefore its volume has gone up considerably more and there's more therefore can be more explosive in it as compared to something like a tank uh but also um as hinted at in just the immediate preceding response part when you look at the blowout panels on the ammunition storage on a tank as a proportion of the surface area of the part that's supposed to be doing the exploding those blowout panels are quite large if you translate that onto a battleship turret so that you actually have a meaningful amount of venting space you basically no longer have an armored turret indy neidel's fursona apparently asks how did ammunition handling procedures differ between destroyers with fully enclosed turrets and those with only gun shields for the main battery where was ammunition fed to the gun from now this is a general case statement so you are always going to be able to find the odd exception here and there probably in both directions to be perfectly honest but more broadly speaking when you had a fully enclosed mount or mini turret effectively such as you can see here with the twin us five inch 38 guns normally in that case you would almost have a similar setup to a full-on cruiser or battleship turret where you'd have a shell handling room below and hoists that would bring shells up to the guns now when you had effectively an open mount a gun shielded only gun then in that case ammunition would be stored around the gun both directly and in nearby ready use lockers and this would be your ammunition supply now you could then send somebody to try and find more if you ran out but to be perfectly honest there was usually enough in those kinds of lockers and immediate use ammunition supplies that if you did run out it usually meant something had gone horribly horribly wrong because you should have been able to break off your engagement for long enough to go and find stocks without being continuously under fire now as said this is the general rule there were a few guns that didn't have fully enclosed mounts that did still have ammunition hoist systems so you will find examples of that around but as a general rule of thumb that will give you an idea of the difference bryce stodler asks in the movie down periscope they take a below class submarine down to 500 feet below for testing in one scene a character runs a line across the engine room just below the surface when we rejoin the engine room the line is seen to be considerably slacking from the hull being crushed like an empty beer can is there some reality to what is displayed in the scene now i believe this is probably the scene you're talking about so yes and no um in the a submarine's hull when it's under significant pressure when it's gone down to any kind of significant depth yes it will compress so if you had a very taut line strung between two sides of the submarine's hull in an engine room or something then as you went down you probably would notice the line slackening somewhat however that slackening is probably uh i mean it's going to vary depending on the material the subs built out of how old the sub is how good quality the the material still is the exact width of the submarine hull thickness of the actual hull plating itself and so on and so forth but generally for horizontal compression i across the room you might expect a compression of half an inch to maybe a couple of inches again depending on size if it's a relatively small sub the compression is going to be less if it's a big sub like a nuclear missile sub then it's going to be more proportional proportionally in terms of the the actual length and then obviously a more modern sub is going to compress less because it's made usually of better quality steel than older subs and so on and so forth um so i wouldn't probably wouldn't expect the quite the drop of string that you see there but it probably would be visibly noticeable um if you were to somehow and for some insane reason open up all the bulkhead doors and assume they're all in a straight line you could somehow string a torch string front to back then you would probably notice quite the significant drop because obviously lengthways uh the compression is going to be considerably more in absolute terms captain landlocked asks quite a considerable question ships from the age of sail can be clearly shown to be the product of mediterranean and atlantic building techniques and rigging systems coming together to form superior ships than the regions individually had before yes to my knowledge this has also happened comparatively swiftly in the 15th to 16th century yeah i'm near enough in contrast there seems to be no impact of eight on asian or polynesian boat building or rigging in european shipbuilding my questions would be a is that true or am i just oblivious to their impact and b do you know if such topics were discussed in by european shipbuilders or navies before the end of the 19th century i'm thinking especially about stuff like crab claw sails junk rigging outriggers and catamarans to be honest it depends on the size of ship and also where exactly you draw the line at asian boat building and rigging and where that transitions to what you might call say middle eastern boat building and rigging because certain elements such as let's say the latin sail or lanteen sail depending on how it's spelled actually those kind of things do come from much further east than the sort of conventional european dash mediterranean developmental area and they're adopted in part on larger ships but very much especially on smaller ships such as briggs and sloops because it offers a significant degree of superior sailing performance under certain conditions now the main thing is that these uh other boat building traditions the the asian and polynesian ones and the european ones they evolve in very different circumstances and a ship is an integrated system so a given particular sail form will usually develop in such a way as to complement the most commonly used hole form in the area and in turn the whole form will be adapted to the prevailing sea conditions both in terms of weather and in terms of shallowness etc etc and so where you have say a a chinese junk which with a few minor changes is pretty much a mainstay for hundreds if not thousands of years um they've got to contend with the chinese coast and the western pacific whereas european ships blast the mediterranean is somewhat calmer and this is why you see very lightly built ships like galleys last a lot longer there when you talk about the north atlantic and the mid and the north sea that's an entirely different kind of environment and that in turn demands an entirely different type of ship also to be perfectly fair the european environment was a lot more competitive when it came to warship design which kind of forced development a little bit further along than you might otherwise have because well when you look at the [Music] sort of asian environment the various indian princely states whilst a few of them did have navies of varying descriptions um with a number of rather interesting warship designs broadly speaking they were mostly concerned with land-based issues and so there wasn't really a massive drive towards huge navies or warship development then you when you look slightly further east you've got big powers such as japan for certain periods of time china obviously korea but again where is their focus the chinese for a long period are going into self-isolation so whilst you can quite easily argue around the time of admiral zheng he the chinese technologically speaking are massively ahead of european powers when it comes to their shipbuilding capabilities they don't really develop that much beyond that because they go into this isolationist phase the japanese are mainly concerned for a long period of time with fighting again amongst themselves on their own islands so it's they've got a lot of coastal craft but not too many or need for ocean-going vessels and the koreans have got to worry about the japanese and the chinese so with relatively small amounts of shipping to hand they've got to focus on a lot more of defensive measures and those kind of criteria or similar ones can pretty much be applied across the board with all the other various um pacific area powers they're either too small too focused on land or have to worry about very very major competitors to actually meaningfully talk about building up a significant ocean-going wall fleet whereas in europe there's this constant power struggle between spain france the netherlands the england dash britain depending on what time period precisely you're looking at for the atlantic and north sea areas and then obviously in the mediterranean you've got a whole load of other things the various italian kingdoms and the initially the ottoman fleets and then later others such as the russians so there's a lot more closely matched competition that thus forces generally ship technology to get a little bit ahead by the time you're talking about the classic age of sale now in terms of very very specific um adopt adaptations and adoptions of technologies from certain uh environments in asian and polynesian ship design because generally speaking by this point western ships are much larger you don't see too much adoption of stuff there but you do see some general adoption of their shipbuilding techniques when it comes to some of the smaller vessels both colonial vessels in the area and occasionally other vessels elsewhere in other parts of the world but it's somewhat more limited and somewhat more if you want scatter shots or picking off odd bits and pieces um as opposed to wholesale adoption of complete building techniques now in the 18th and 19th centuries there was actually a reasonable degree of discourse amongst various european arc ship architects and shipbuilders about these various uh sort of odd ships that they were finding in other parts of the world but to be perfectly honest an awful lot of the uh techniques and designs that they were talking about basically kept running into the will it survived a north atlantic storm yes or no um and and that was pretty much the end of that for a lot of the uh designs because as i've covered in other videos and other dry dock responses the prevailing weather conditions in these different environments do have massive effects on overall ship design and ship practice sdf7 asks given variations on the method date back to fulton's nautilus could you elaborate a little on what differentiated the dutch snorkel from prior attempts or more simply why did it work that time and move into widespread use it boils down to two main factors technology and opportunity specifically the technology to successfully pull off something like a snorkel is only really available in the 1910s onwards and pretty much that's when you also see the first successful patents for something like a snorkel coming into existence that's because well you've got to let as much air in and out as possible but you've also got to slam things shut very quickly and very tightly when the sea washes over it now you can in theory do this with mechanical systems like floating valves and things like this but with the sudden change in conditions that happens when the sea overwhelms a snorkel briefly with a wave peak or something combined with the fact that on board a submarine especially early submarines with open lead acid batteries you really can't afford much if any water to come on board at all and especially anywhere near your batteries a snorkel system that allows in a lit even a little splash of water when it gets overwhelmed is very rapidly going to build up to an acceptable level of water and really any water is practically unacceptable in especially with the early subs so you need an electromechanical system that can respond a lot quicker with a lot more definitive a seal and this is the kind of technology that you see actually coming about in the 1910s and 1920s so that's the technological side of things it's then a matter of the opportunity side of things because whilst the technology is there it is a relatively speaking complex finicky and some something of a maintenance hog of a system even when it works properly and bearing in mind that back in world war one which of course at that point in the 1910s and 20s has been the most immediate experience of submarine operations the need for something like a snorkel really hadn't been there whilst aircraft had been around they weren't the kind of massive threat to submarines that they would be in world war ii and similarly uh the kind of prosecution of attacks without things like advanced hydrophones and aztec dash sonar or they did have some hydrophones in world war one the attacks just generally wouldn't last that long or if they did they'd become progressively more and more inaccurate so again the need for snorkel system just it wasn't there it wasn't worth installing this highly finicky difficult to maintain and to be fair with the displacement of submarines even by the 1920s relatively weighty system when well what was the use case going to be when when were you actually going to find any utility in it whereas by the late 1930s aircraft have developed significantly more of a threat you do have advances in hydrophone technology and the early developments in azdek and sonar and all of a sudden there's a lot more of a threat to submarines and so that's now the disadvantages of using such a system are now actually outweighed if you have one by the advantages present in being able to hover just below the water and water surface and recharge your batteries or run your diesel engines or both and so it's kind of this perfect storm where the dutch developer system that basically works and then they suddenly find the system falling into the hands of people who really actually need it right now and thus it becomes significantly more widespread as opposed to earlier versions silverfox575 asks when did the tradition of naming ships start and where did it come from in terms of where it came from and when it started uh thousands upon thousands of years ago verging almost on prehistory as for where it arose in a number of locations i mean we know for example that the egyptians and the babylonians at the beginnings of their civilizations appear to have ship naming ceremonies so they're definitely in the running but to be honest at that point you're talking about so far back that we have fragmentary records even for civilizations like that so it would not surprise me in the slightest that other civilizations contemporary to that period both in the use of fertile crescent area and elsewhere probably had similar practices it's just that for one reason or another we haven't recorded them quite as well or we haven't found the records of them as for why it's basically a case of sailors especially are a bit of a superstitious lot and to be fair when you see what the sea can do to you you can kind of understand why if you're going to put yourself out to see in something like the ships of those ancient mariners you definitely want absolutely everything you possibly can get on your side and so again depending on the culture the naming of the ship might be done to please a god or goddess in order to allow them to give you good fortune or give the ship good fortune and you happen to incidentally benefit from it or it might also be in some cases that it was a culture that believed that objects of given size and complexity could be imbued with their own kinds of spirits and so by nick and i know this kind of verges a little bit on sound a bit like a 40 000 with machine spirits but well it's fiction based on quite quite reality for a reason um certain cultures did believe that something like a ship would have a spirit of its own and this could be appeased or it may be angered and that may then have positive or negative effects for you so if you gave this ship that had been constructed a pleasing name that might vote that might encourage the ship to treat you well and it might also imbue certain characteristics to the ship uh in order to um to assist it and therefore you in your voyage and the confluence of that would be the naming of a ship for a particular quality or person or deity that would in theory give the ship greater capabilities and also encourage said deity that you may have named it in favor of to give you favor as well of course exactly why and how ships are named has evolved the reasoning they're behind that has evolved over time but you can still see some of it reflected in um ship names even now i mean nowadays fair enough a lot of ships especially warships are named to reflect the pride or honor of a country or a state within a country or a city within a country but there's still an awful lot of now fair enough relatively traditional handed down names that still reflect those much older practices i mean that there's a reason that ship names especially well if you're going to take the royal navy as an example but you'll find this carried over in a lot of other navies names like neptune poseidon um bellerophon mars etc show up quite often asks do you think it would have been possible to make the fairy fulmar a single seater it probably would have made it a much better fighter and the observer really wasn't necessary it would cut lots of weight and probably make it more maneuverable as well i mean in theory yes you you could take out the position and glaze it over practically it's probably not going to help all that much because the full mark is a big aircraft um you can't just cut out that observer section and weld the front and back together that um that's going to horribly affect the aerodynamics and it's still got massive wing um and i mean to be perfectly fair for the period it was designed in the two-seat has made a certain amount of sense the thing is as with the awful lot of stuff that was developed in mid to late 1930s technological evolution rapidly overtook it to the point that it was in a lot of cases obsolete before it came into service i mean it wasn't completely hopeless it did have a certain number of successes but as an actual fighter against other enemy land-based fighters and by the 41-42 the enemy carrier-based fighters yes it's not brilliant um the interesting thing is actually that there was a program in place in 3940 to develop a carrier-based version of the spitfire and no that's not the seafire as we understand it it was actually um a radically different design with a kind of cranked gold wing so it looks looked a little bit like a fusion of an f4u corsair and a spitfire more than anything else and that would have involved new stronger undercarriage obviously better um landing characteristics better viewing characteristics et cetera probably actually made a devastatingly effective single seat carrier fighter um but unfortunately around about the same time that that was beginning to show some promise it also suddenly became a point that well every single spitfire was needed for home defense for would eventually become the battle britain and unfortunately that then died a bit of a death so if you're looking at the kind of format introductory period of 3940 and looking for a good single seat fighter that's probably the one that you want to go for um just taking out the observer in the vulmar yeah it's going to give us slight performance improvement because slightly less weight etc but in all honesty it's probably going to tempt people to get into situations that the plane just really cannot handle because i said it's still a massive aircraft and not the world's highest performance one at that christopher dent asks what is your opinion on smaller quick firing guns relative to larger guns with separate ammunition as an example as a destroyer captain in a surface fight would you rather your ship be armed with quick firing forage guns or 5-inch guns with semi-fixed or separate ammunition in that specific circumstance of destroyers i would much prefer a quick firing gun with single piece ammunition than a two-piece ammunition gun and that's for a number of reasons primarily because with single piece ammunition that generally means it's single man portable and in turn that means it's much quicker and easier to load which means in turn you're going to have a much higher rate of fire it's less complex things to go wrong the fact that it's going to be slightly smaller in terms of destructive power most likely isn't really so much a problem when you're dealing with destroyer versus destroyer fights because if you're going to be lobbing that kind of ammunition at each other the sheer rate of fire as well as obviously the quicker hopefully hope accuracy that you're going to get out of the guns is going to more than offset the slightly smaller bursting charge that you're gonna have and on a ship the size of a destroyer hitting first hitting fast and hitting hard is much much more important than getting a single big shot in so yeah smaller gun with single piece ammunition all the way for destroyer fights um it's only really once you get up to things like battleships secondary batteries that you can afford to have multi-piece ammunition with a greater individual hitting power because things in the destroyer versus destroy a fight even with the best possible circumstances outside of sheer luck you're going to be winning by battering the enemy with multiple hits anyway whereas fair enough with a battleship you may only get one or two hits on an enemy destroyed before it's too late and it's launched torpedoes in which case you do want those shells to be the biggest and nastiest possible so it makes sense to have slightly larger guns for the secondary batteries of a battleship as compared to the primary guns of a destroyer cipher asks which navies in 1939 showed the most and least advancement dash improvement over their 1918 navy if you look at the major navies of the various major combatants so us uk japan france russia italy then least advancement dash improvement that's pretty easy it's the russian navy or the soviet navy at the time to be fair they had had you know the entire communist revolution in the interim combined with stalin's almost criminal neglect of the navy which didn't really help but whereas everybody else had built at least some new battleships and plenty of cruisers and destroyers and such in the intervening period the russians had questionably updated and modernized some of the gangets as far as capital ships went and that was it they didn't have any carriers they didn't have any new battleships although they were trying to build some by the time uh world war ii broke out in terms of their cruisers they'd for heavy cruisers they'd make some rather questionable design choices i mean the list of problems with the cure of glass cruisers at the time that they were actually built um well it was so long you probably could have used the reports as extra padding for the ship's armor belt um and yeah they said about some of the other interwar soviet light cruiser designs the better um they were beginning to come up with some vaguely solid destroyer designs but even there it was a little bit hit and miss with the italian influence destroyers they were coming up with and yeah generally they hadn't made that many great improvements as opposed to the most advancement dash improvement over the 1918 navy hmm well it's technological advancement and improvement also it has this weird segue with actual sort of fighting power and 1939 is is a particularly difficult one because admittedly using capital ships is a little bit of a niche thing because there are obviously things like submarines cruisers destroyers and all those sorts of things but it's a good indicative and so you look at say the italian navy the italian navy didn't have any super dreadnoughts so in world war one so it couldn't compete with the likes of the us navy the british navy and the german navy they were going to get the littoras in service but they weren't ready by 1939. the french are in a similar boat they've got strasbourg and dunkirk but neither of those would exactly be classified as top flight battleships even though they're relatively decent ships in and of themselves and again the richarli is not ready so i guess that leaves us with japan germany britain and america germany has some effective designs and some pretty poor ones again they're big battleships the bismarcks not ready in time um and overall compared to the 1918 navy the high seas fleet germany's come down quite a few notches in the world so that leaves us with the big three japan royal navy and the us navy um so in terms of advancement and improvement technologically speaking in a lot of ways the royal navy actually has the most advancement dash improvement over the 1918 navy in the they're the ones who in 1939 are ahead on radar they're ahead on azdek they're ahead on fighter control and direction and as we discussed in last week's drive up weirdly enough they're actually ahead on carrier aircraft as well um and so on and so forth now there are okay so areas where the japanese and american navies have advantages um so for example the japanese have obviously things like the long last torpedo and both the americans and the japanese have aircraft carriers that can deploy significantly more aircraft um in standard operational conditions for 1939 as opposed to the uh the british and the americans have the the better of the dual purpose secondary gun second gun stash destroying main guns in the five inch 38 so there are still plenty of areas where those other navies have also gotten um two sort of world-leading technological levels and then of course the whole thing is slightly obscured by the fact that the immediate post 39 the royal navy goes into war and the other two get another couple of years of peace time but if you compare the royal navy with its 1918 form although technologically they've come a long way they have been constrained somewhat by budgets and in 1918 the royal navy was the unchallenged master of the seas it was the biggest navy in the world by a long distance in 1939 that's not the case the us navy was kind of a well post the high sea sweet scuffling was then the second largest navy they're now the first the not first largest they're the equal first place with the royal navy um and as we said there's they've made a bunch of technological advances as well they've refitted and modernized ships and they've got new ships coming into service the japanese are certainly a lot stronger in 1939 relative to the us and british navy than they were in 1918 um and they again again they have a number of technological advantages com compared to everyone else that they didn't have in 1918 however in terms of their larger capital ships there's in 1939 they're still stuck with nagatos um they haven't quite managed to persuade yamato to come into service yet whereas the british and the americans have heavily refitted and modernized some of their older capital ships and they've got well the north carolinas and king george the fifth are a lot closer to coming into full service than yamato is so yeah i i would say on balance if you're looking at technology and ship modernizations and such like the royal navy probably slightly edges it if you look at overall where they sit relative to where they were in 1918 the us navy probably slightly edges it edward starling asks during the 20th century many badly damaged ships were scuttled rather than risk capture what was the main reasoning behind this fear that the enemy would get technological insight into the systems and construction of the ship in question or that the enemy would repair the ship and use it against its format country were there any examples of capital ships being captured instead of scuttled so there's a three-fold of purpose to it one is propaganda dash pride two is actually the ease of scuttling and three is the relative balance of power as compared to earlier periods now the first reason propaganda dash pride in the 19th century particularly in britain but more generally in part as a result of the sheer prestige of the royal navy was the fact that navy prestige generally and the particularly prestige of owning large ships had gone up massively in value in people's perceptions so whilst the bigger ships were always the pride of the navy and the private country in question during most periods of naval activity and by the time you entered the 20th century whereas let's say in 1795 the idea of losing a first or second rate in battle would be seen as a great tragedy and something to be avoided if it was captured um it was something that was kind of like well that was very bad let's try not to repeat that again with our next set of ships whereas by the 20th century had been built up to the point of if one of your battleships or battle cruisers got captured by the enemy it would be national humiliation you'd be a laughing stock um i mean you look at the number of ships present again the battle of travel this wonderful little uh microcosm because there's a couple of captured british um capital ships on the franco spanish side and there's a whole ton of ex franco spanish vessels on the british side no one really blinks too much at that it's like oh well it was on our side now it's on their side let's try and get it back um one side had a bit more success at that than the other now but so yeah there's the propaganda pride part of it it just it was not seen as anywhere near as conscionable a thing to happen as it had been in previous times i mean you look at hms pegasus which is the ship that's gracing this particular question that's the last royal navy ship to surrender in world war one well at all but the surrender happens in world war one and i mean it's an out-of-date protected cruiser it's not really worth much to the royal navy but the fact that they pulled down the white ensign and ran up the white flag was a huge deal at the time now if you transplant that back into the age of sale it's equivalent maybe a battered worn out sixth rate frigate on its way to the breakers anyway people were like oh we lost a frigate that's irritating um hope it put up a good fight and that would have been the end of it the second part is ships were actually a lot easier to scuttle uh by the 20th century than they had been previously the thing is naturally wood is buoyant so a wooden ship whilst it can found her because it's full of overly non-buoyant things like ballast and guns and people to a certain extent um they're actually very difficult to sink without smashing them into rocks and getting them to break up and such so scuttling a wooden ship is in the time that you'd be trying to do that it's almost not entirely but almost unheard of you either have to set the thing on fire which is very dangerous for you as much as anything else or you have to get your carpenters to start going chiseling holes in several feet of oak in the bowels of the ship which one is going to take forever in a day and two carpenters like most people have a survival instinct and yeah good luck persuading them to do that whereas once you enter the ear of iron and steel you can actually sink a ship relatively easily just by opening some valves and seacocks and letting the water in and that's pretty much that um because a iron and steel ship is not naturally buoyant in and of the materials it's only buoyant because of the air that is held within the hull um so yeah the fact is it's just so much easier to do which makes it much more viable option and third the balance of power because i'm kind of similar to the pride and prestige thing but at the end of the day the loss of a frigate or even a third rate or rarely a first rate in and of itself it would be an annoying blow for a large navy but it's not a fatal blow unless we're talking a very very small navy i mean even with the us navy when it when they had the six big frigates the loss of something like the chesapeake and the president a third of the original six frigates it's not an overly crippling blow to what the u.s navy is capable of doing because they can always build more and similarly the number if you just look at how long the napoleonic wars lasted the sheer number of ships captured on all sides and especially by the british didn't stop the franco spanish navy being a threat for until and especially the french day pretty much up until the end of the war because ships could be replaced relatively speaking easily um and they were just present in so much greater numbers um now if you look at uh again the battle of trafalgar the number of capital ships present there is more than the number of capital ships present at jutland uh if you're looking at battleships only and yet whilst it is a big fleet engagement it's not the only fleet that either side has there are more franco spanish uh ships of the line the first second and third rates scattered around the various ports there are entire other fleets of royal navy ships of the line such the one under admiral calder that had fought a few months earlier and turned the franco spanish fleet back from the channel while nelson was pursuing them so but when you look at um the modern era say jutland represents almost every single capital ship afloat in the two largest navies in the world and after that with the navy uh treaty restrictions everything hull numbers go down even further so the potential turning or loss of an individual vessel actually represents a significantly greater change in the balance of power than it ever had done in the age of sale um especially a large vessel so you definitely didn't want your enemy to get their hands on something like that because even if it might have been a bit of a problem for them to operate if they can operate at all it's still something that's been turned against you you also do have the problem of the technology on board the enemy might get access to which depending on the country in question could be a major problem um especially if you're talking about like modern fire control systems and radar etc but there are a lot larger issues behind that and in terms of examples of capital ships captured instead of scuttled um not in the major naval wars of the 20th century there are some examples of countries flagships or otherwise larger vessels in their navy being captured in the 20th century but it's that's on the smaller naval scales there's there's no battleship that's captured at sea or battle cruiser that's captured at sea in the 20th century once you get past the era of hms dreadnought of course tsushima there are a number of battleships captured john reese asks what were some of the more interesting ways navies tried to combat aircraft well the the two most interesting and indeed quite commonly known weird and wonderful ways were the japanese type 3 anti-aircraft shell aka the let's turn a battleship shell into a collection of gigantic single shot flying flame throwers which awesome as it sounds didn't turn out to be that much of effective uh as an anti-aircraft weapon then of course you have the british unrotated projectile launchers as seen here aboard hms nelson which follow the principle of let's try and create a three-dimensional aerial minefield and hope the wind doesn't blow it back onto our own ship which again sounds really cool but worked about as well as you might expect and then for the wooden spoon prize you have the initial placement of the three-inch anti-aircraft guns on various us navy warships which as can be seen on the video i recently retweeted did have the rather irritating side effect of being a small high-mounted platform that was completely open to the elements and subject to very considerable blast from the main guns so yeah considering how high up they are and the kind of uh sort of climbing the crews would have to go and to get to them unlike the more conventional main deck mounted anti-aircraft weapons those crews would probably be at their action stations if the main guns had to go off and there's not really a lot they can do because if there's one place you don't want to be that's even worse than in an open platform next trend a small anti-aircraft gun whilst battleship guns go off underneath you it's even closer to those guns on a ladder bail enoras asks what did the axis do surface-wise in the mediterranean post-italy surrender did they manage to achieve any notable successes post italy's surrender or switching sides depending on how you want to look at it um there wasn't an awful lot of surface action to be perfectly honest the vast majority of continuing axis action in the mediterranean was by submarine and by air attack so u-boats were still around for a while and obviously air attack to be honest can construe the vast majority of german anti-surface activity their surface-based units mostly consisted of some anti-submarine warfare efforts um which were curtailed relatively quickly as the allies advanced into italy and the occasional foray by mine layer in the probably the one of the biggest successes they had in that respect was uh this particular mine layer originally called i'm not even gonna pronounce it in yugoslavian but it was called dragon except in yugoslavian um captured by the germans when they invaded and renamed draca or dragon and by this point she was being used as a mind layer and that managed to take out with one minefield two destroyers and damage a third before uh both fighters caught up with her as can be seen in this picture that's probably about the biggest surface-based success that the germans had post the italian surrender in the mediterranean in world war ii but clothier asks british pathe or path they i don't know how good that's pronounced uh british path shall we call it recently posted a video of a newsreel from 1949 celebrating the return of hms royal sovereign to the royal navy after service under the soviet flag this caught me off guard as i'd never heard of this before i'm sure i can find the answer through other sources but more fun to hear your story of the ship and the reasons it went into russian service basically it comes down to weirdly enough given what we were just talking about the italian surrender in 1943 because once that particular treaty had been worked out there was still a war going on but there was the issue of giving up the loot uh always an interesting activity for the victors of a war and it was decided that more loot dash reparations dash whatever you want to call it was due to various combatants involved which somehow given the italian mediterranean theater involved the soviet union and what the soviet union had asked for and received in theory released on paper was a number of italian warships including the battleship julia cesare there were a number of complications involved with this like the fact the italians weren't particularly keen on the idea and julia cesare was in the mediterranean and well russia was very far away and so eventually it was decided that until everything had calmed down a little bit and it was possible to actually sort out sending julia cesare over to the soviet union the royal navy would effectively supply a substitute ship and that was hms royal sovereign renamed to archangelesc i think uh that's how you pronounce it anyway um and that promptly became the single largest vessel in soviet naval service and was used to escort convoys on the latter part of the arctic convoy routes so that was all fun and games after the war then the british sorted out getting julio cesaro to the russians and they were effectively said well can we have our battleship back please um the russians additional no no no we have the battleship and and you don't and we don't really want to give you the battleship back also so we're going to claim that it's not actually sea worthy and it wouldn't survive the journey anyway um at this point immediately post world war ii relationships hadn't broken down to the point that british officers were entirely excluded from russia and they were able to pop over and have a look at the ship and kind of say well actually that that's kind of nonsense the ship can make it home um whether the russians actually wanted to keep something as old as royal sovereign or whether they were just embarrassed by the state it was in i don't exactly know but it could be either because when it turned back up in the uk it turned out that it appeared the russians had never actually revolved the main guns and so um in the half decade or so it had been under the soviet ensign especially when you consider just how bad the weather and conditions etc are in the arctic ocean the gun turrets were basically frozen in place you would not have ever gotten them to move uh i don't think they make wd-40 in cairns big that big um and so that was just a a single case point within an awful lot of other subsystems um the ship was still sea worthy but as a warship it was basically shot um it could move backwards and forwards and that was about it and so unfortunately the thing had to be scrapped because there was no way shape in no way shape or form was it justifiable to repair it and that was the end of hms royal sovereign aka archangelesque paul from chicago asks the battle of passchendale was conducted ostensibly to destroy bases of raiding u-boats i posit this was the final was this the final blow to the british sea power state as this was the moment the government replaced naval power with military power a government policy supported by both liberal and conservative parties agree or disagree i would tend to disagree to be perfectly honest capturing the u-boat bases by land did seem to be in some respects a slightly less uh costly way of disrupting the german submarine campaign as opposed to sending in ships albeit well the battle passchendaele dash third battle of not exactly the world's most bloodless battle to say the least um it's a very unique circumstance to be honest because whilst yes the army does have a lot more of a role in british political calculations post world war one and obviously you'll set a factory in the existence of this new service of the royal air force which hadn't existed prior to world war one and indeed was still the royal flying corps for the majority of it um the sea power of the royal navy was still a massive part of government policy that was necessary largely because britain had an empire and troops can't really walk on water they still need to get from point a to point b and the only way for them to get from from point a to point b when you're talking about the british empire generally is to go by ship and to go by ship safely you need a navy and ideally the enemy to get to you usually has to come by ship and it's much much quicker easier and more effective to sink an enemy invasion convoy when they're at sea with warships than it is to let them land and then have to fight it out in an area where your troops are potentially going to be surrounded outnumbered and outgunned thousands of miles away from home when the enemy would quite conceivably be a lot closer and you can see that during the interwar period uh and when the critical rearmament phases came along whilst yes though obviously the royal air force did receive a big boost the uh the army received uh big booster funding the royal navy also got a fair boost of funding the main reason why you don't tend to see quite as much of that effect by the time war breaks out in 1939 is simply because naval stuff takes a lot longer to build you can build a tank in a matter of weeks you can build a plane in a matter of weeks you can't build battleship in a matter of weeks so and also battleship costs a lot more than a single plane or tank so if you're trying to build up your air force you can turn uh air force of mostly biplanes into one of mostly monoplanes in a couple of years you can turn a force that's mostly got light tanks into something approximating hit medium to heavy tanks in a couple of years but you're only about two thirds of the way through a single battleship modernization in a couple of years so yeah the the navy is an an item that is very much a long-term strategic item and the fact that everything changed so quickly in terms of both naval treaties and then rearmament in the interwar period does put the navy on a bit of a back foot unfortunately uh but it's not really sidelined as the primary arm of british striking power pretty much actually until the cold war when the whole british army of the rhine and the focus on russia becomes a thing video dude 26 asks in the leander class video you mentioned the royal navy's light cruiser conundrum that got me thinking about the sloop exemption under the 1930 london naval treaty did the royal navy ever seriously consider using sloops as surrogates for light cruisers in the commerce protection role sure with a treaty limited top speed of 20 knots they're not going to be running down any commerce raiders however if all they accomplished was to drive said raiders off then well as far as commerce protection goes mission accomplished with a maximum arm to four six inch guns they had a punch that would certainly make a light cruiser sit up and take notice particularly if they were deployed in pairs the royal navy did think about it and dr alexander clark on his channel actually has a couple of videos on sloops and other such light vessels and the thinking that was going into them during the interwar period however the royal navy viewed sloops primarily as an anti-submarine dash potentially anti-aircraft escort um not so much of an anti-surface escort because when they did their various studies they concluded that in order to drive off the average light cruiser commerce raider it wasn't just a matter of you have four six-inch guns it was the same issue that came back with the number of guns on battleship main batteries in the dreadnaught era in the 1900s which was that you needed a minimum number of guns for a decent salvo and you also needed those guns to be fairly well coordinated now one of the big advantages of sloops was that they were lightweight and cheap and once you start adding in heavy fire control directors and training mechanisms for the guns they swiftly become less and less cheap and you start pushing the weight limits quite considerably so they did think of the idea of a diminutive for commerce escort only but that was the arathusa class as pictured here which well not exactly but in appearance-wise they look a lot like leander's minus one of the rear turrets the super firing one uh and that's with six guns a direct controlled firing etc that was pretty much the minimum they they considered as a useful escort where you were potentially having to face off against enemy cruisers and also that's light cruisers now a four six inch gun sleep yeah that could pretty easily especially in groups stand off against an armed merchant cruiser of some sort like the cormorant however one is slow speed means you have to have quite a few of them deployed across the convoy because you're probably not going to be able to respond if you're on say the back left of the convoy and the enemy our merchant cruiser appears to the forward and starboard area if you've only got maximum speed 20 knots you're probably not going to be able to respond fast enough so you need a lot of them um and on top of that you've also got to take into account that you're not just talking about enemy light cruisers or the caliber of the leander so maybe if it was something like a tender you class then yeah a couple of sloops could stand off against it if it was a kernigsberg glass well a couple of sloops could probably survive long enough for the atlantic to take the koenigsberg for them but if it was something like a megami class a cleveland class um or something along those lines then to be perfectly honest no real realistic amount of sloops is going to stand off against something like that and then you've also got to think about especially for the royal navy what they were looking at in terms of ships that they might have to face as surface raiders was more along the lines of things like the deutschland class and the admiral hippers and obviously if you're talking on the japanese side of things the miyokos the otagos etc and those kind of things there's a no reasonable amount of sloops are actually going to deter even an arithus definitely not going to stand much of a chance against one in straight-up combat but it might just about possess the volume and accuracy of fire especially with its torpedo launchers as well to deter such a raider at least long enough for the convoy to scatter so yeah unfortunately if you had just been light cruisers the royal navy had to worry about they might have gone with some kind of heavy sloop design in multiple numbers but once you introduce the the really big light cruisers and the heavy cruisers into the equation you need something with just a bit more punch peaceful conquest asks i was reading about william hall the first black man and first canadian sailor to receive the victoria cross i was surprised to see that although he was serving aboard hms shannon the action for which he received the victoria cross occurred in luck now which is very much in land that led me to a few questions about british naval brigades in the victorian era firstly how well did naval artillery compared to their shoreside equivalents in the royal artillery when it came to land-based combat and secondly was their use more of an ad hoc well you know how to work a gun and we're in sudden desperate need to get off that ship and lend a hand or something that was part of a planned overall strategy for the british empire at the time regarding deployment of forces or something else so generally speaking naval artillery tends to compare very favorably with land-based artillery if you're looking at guns of approximately the same caliber and that's because as i've think of code in a couple of other dry docks land-based artillery at this point is moved purely by muscle whether that be men horses mules oxen whatever and so weight is a huge consideration which means that quite often in land-based artillery you get relatively short barreled artillery to save on weight and you also tend to get lighter artillery for the relatively sane reason that humans are a lot squishier than warships and so you don't need a particularly large gun to take out men and cavalry in fairly effective numbers and obviously smaller gun allows you for to have a greater rate of fire there are of course sieges and such like where you do need heavier longer-range artillery but that is a very specialist item and there's not too many of them now obviously the royal artillery they exist and so they have their own artillery but the vast majority of it is this lighter field artillery whereas on a ship once the gun is actually mounted broadly speaking it's more the range and the firepower that's important as opposed to the weight and so the average naval gun will be of a longer barrel and thus more powerful generally more accurate and also longer range secondly when it comes to the victorian deployment of naval artillery it's it's kind of a halfway house between the scenarios you describe it's certainly not the army co-opting naval artillery units onto land um they were two separate services and the royal navy especially the captains of the ships would probably look at any army officer trying to shanghai his men into being the army's and artillery support with quite a lot of displeasure however the flip side to that was the in and of itself the navy was usually quite happy to go ashore and help out the army i mean obviously there's the inter-service rivalry part no naval officer is ever going to really pass up the chance to go yes yes army troopers yes i will come and help you you will definitely need my help now look at the glorious navy and it's wonderful artillery but also for the majority of the 19th century obviously at the beginning of the 19th century you still got napoleonic wars going on but for the classics or british empire period the mobile units of the army either the units that would usually be sent out to deal with colonial trouble spots are very much light infantry dash cavalry there's not a vast amount of artillery that gets hauled around and so when you have scenarios where an army unit needs artillery support quite often the nearest and most accessible artillery of any great numbers and firepower is going to be the guns of the ships that brought them there and since the guns could be dismounted and they did have carriages for the lighter ones like 12 pounders and 4.7 inches and stuff like that and for some of those middle caliber and the larger ones the navy was pretty good at improvising carriages as well you would very often end up with ships putting their guns ashore to help with the campaign it did occasionally happen in the napoleonic period as well but in the napoleonic period where there was a serious naval threat it was less common because obviously you need your guns just in case an enemy warship shows up whereas in the the british empire period of the 19th century the chances of anyone actually showing up with a warship to try and challenge the royal navy were pretty much slim to none so detaching some of your guns along with some of your crew to man them because obviously naval gun has trained in how to use artillery and for them having a fixed position where nothing is moving relative to them is wonderful for sieges because compared to firing guns from a ship this is a walk in the park yeah that you'd see a lot of these naval gun detachments put out famously at the siege of lady smith the cruiser hms powerful landed a number of its guns to help with the uh relieving of that particular siege in the one of the boar wars and ultimately at the end of the day if if push really came to shove anything of sort of cruiser size or above that was wandering around the oceans would possess guns with far more destructive power than anything the regular army artillery was likely to possess pretty much anywhere so although it was rarely if ever used the option to land a 7.5 or a 9.2 inch gun or something of that ilk basically something that could just about be physically moved um it did exist because outside of european land armies out in the colonial areas there was no answer to that kind of firepower assuming of course that you could get it to the target veenva asks how reliable is the anthony role as a source for the tudor navy i assume the illustrations are not to be taken quite literally but how do you figure out what to take seriously and what not to when studying a source as old as this so the anthony role is actually a surprisingly accurate depiction of the tudor navy for the period that it was created in now that doesn't necessarily extend to the illustrations themselves i mean here's the great harry and well any uh half decent student of art will be able to work out that well let's just say the great harry was a very powerful galleon it was not however a four-dimensional space-time warper which is what it would have had to be for this particular profile to be entirely accurate um however it still does have some value in an illustrative capacity is that the general outline of the ships is is broadly considered accurate although the exact number and placement of the guns not so much for example those two guns either side of the rudder that's not going to happen the back of the ship was not flat like that all the way down there's also some question as to some of the exact positioning of some of the stern guns and such like they just appear to be appended on um and obviously we have most of the wreck of the mary rose which we can compare against her depiction in the anthony role and see where the differences lie however the reason why the anti-rule is such a useful uh source for the tudor navy is in part because it gives an idea of some of the softer details such as the number of flags and bits of heraldry and stuff that were put on the ships which is something you don't often see in a lot of purely written records and as far as anyone can tell that part is actually pretty accurate um that you just did love themselves some flags however the main value of the anthony role comes from the written part because it's not just a a pretty picture book it is actually a fully itemized list of the capabilities firepower crew etc of the ships in question and it's that written part that is the more valuable for the historians who are trying to analyze the tudor navy and broadly speaking this is kind of a general rule of thumb for most of the various navy's records at the time is what you're looking at primarily designed to show off or is it primarily designed to be a bureaucratic record or is it somewhere in between because the record-keeping sides of things at this point and indeed quite far back into naval history are actually pretty good if uh if a naval record says this ship had 32 guns and it had of that maybe 15 were minions and three sakers four culverins and few cannon it's pretty much certain that that is exactly what it had if it's accompanied by a picture that happens to show it carrying like 13 bombards and a small dragon then you probably don't regard the illustration quite as much um and so this is why actually resources like the anti-role are incredibly useful as opposed to even some of the larger and more grandiose artistic depictions and things like paintings where of course a artistic license is always taken and be with the best will in the world quite a number of artists drew ships without ever actually having seen them that's not to say all arts artists are that bad a number of artists did quite carefully and um with great consideration study the ships that they were painting before they did so but it depends what the focus of the painting is uh quite often a lot of depictions of navy ships in this period are kind of background images to something else whether that be the people or the place other places that are being depicted anthony kobeck asks why did the bear yang fleet of the late queen dynasty fail so poorly during the first sino-japanese war perhaps focusing on the chinese ironclad ding yuan well this has been addressed in a few dry dock questions before so quickly and briefly it was a combination of a couple of factors one of which was human the crews didn't have a particularly great amount of training the officers didn't have a particularly great amount of experience and there was a huge amount of corruption in the fleet all of which meant that their fighting effectiveness uh with a lack of training and equipment was not brilliant that's not to say they weren't brave they certainly fought very very hard but at the end of the day a very very hard fighting but inexperienced and untrained crew is usually going to lose to an equally hard fighting but well trained and well led crew the other factor is technology which kind of sweeps around a little bit to the corruption angle as well because when it comes to that side of things a ship like ding yuan was very powerful at the time that it was launched but this was the late 19th century and what constituted very powerful and what constituted obsolete could be separated by a period of as little as five years and the ship had been in service with the chinese navy for a little while by the time the first sino-japanese war broke out and the necessary funds to keep the thing updated hadn't actually been forthcoming well they'd initially been forthcoming but they'd been diverted to other things that weren't navy related and so even though it was just over 10 years old by the time the war broke out technology had advanced to the point that it was slightly behind the times it was still a big ironclad and proved very difficult for anything that wasn't another ironclad with equally large guns to actually sink but it was also relatively ineffective compared to what it could have been if it had been given the small refit and upgrades that had been planned for it in the early 1890s that would have made it a lot more capable and that way it would have to a certain degree made up for some of the deficiencies in training amongst the crew um not necessarily sure it would have changed the overall outcome of the battle of the yalu river if indeed we can never come up with a coherent narrative of what happened at the battle of the yalu river but um it certainly would have allowed it to do something a bit more than it actually did appalachian tiger asks how exactly would one lay mines from a submarine does it involve specialist equipment tactics etc it depends greatly on the system in question so broadly speaking there are four ways that you can deploy mines from submarines as well as a number of weird and wonderful um unique methods but the four general methods starting with the crudest which is literally especially with one world war two vessels strap mines onto the deck of the submarine and kick them off when the subs on the surface a bit like you if you're a conventional mine layer it's a bit risky but it means you can use pretty much any submarine in extremis as a mind like although you really really want to get rid of those mines as soon as possible so perhaps more useful for emergency laying of quote-unquote friendly minefields that kind of thing the second is to come up with some form of mind that can be launched through a conventional torpedo tube now obviously those mines aren't going to be anywhere near as powerful as the really big ones but again it does allow you to repurpose almost any submarine as a mine layer now when you've got submarines with dedicated mine laying facilities this tends to take the form of one of two versions either you have a kind of upwards firing or almost upwards firing mind laying tube or series actually series of tubes usually mounted in the bow of the submarine which to a certain extent kind of looks like a very primitive early version of the vertical launch system cells that some modern submarines have launching cruise missiles and in these you would stack one two maybe even three mines depending on the size of the submarine and as you sail along you would open one of the hatches a bit like a torpedo tube patch and you'd pop out however many mines were in there and hopefully you were moving slowly enough that the mines would pop out and float up and away arming themselves well after your conning tower has sailed on past that's one way of doing it and the other way which for the majority of world war one and world war ii was by far the most common for either submarines that were dedicated mine layers or submarines that had dedicated mine laying facilities was a kind of conveyor belt system so this might take the form of one or two long conveyor belt type arrangements with a bunch of mines on them and these would feed into again one or two mine laying tubes so these would be considerably larger than a torpedo tube and so there were a few of them usually this these would be mounted in the stern and as the submarine sailed along it would just deposit the mines one after the other kind of like how you'd fire a torpedo but with somewhat less use of compressed air because you're not actually firing in any particular direction you're just kicking it out the back of the submarine far enough that it doesn't hit you on its way out um so yeah there's some specialized equipment although you don't necessarily need it if you're going to adapt existing subs and prepare to accept some compromises uh tactics wise well submarines are supposed to be sneaky so sneak around get to an area and then sail in roughly speaking a straight line as you deposit one line of mines then hopefully remember where that line is before turning back and laying another line of mines that's closer to home and so on and so forth until you're out of trey atkins asks has technology ever advanced in such a way that outdated ships could beat a newer model because the defenses against it fell out of use or something like that yes a few times this has happened but it's depending on exactly what time period you talk about there are a number of qualifiers so actually weirdly enough looking at the chinese bayang fleet although the two iron clads in question were theoretically a little bit out of date and obsolete by the time of the battle of yalu river there so the zhou nicole thinking that dominated with the french and at the time japanese navies was calling for more numerous lighter ships with quick firing guns and torpedoes so that was the new technology at least for as far as their technological line of development was concerned and it turned out that a ironclad that was just massive in the sort of physics sense of just having this sheer mass of iron armor was actually contrary to their expectations pretty much proof against almost anything they could throw at it i mean later on it'd get torpedoed which was a bit of a problem but in gunfire terms actually one of the things that came out of the battle of the ali river was a fairly significant discrediting of the journey cole style because no matter what they threw at it shell wise the chinese iron clads just would not die and if they had had a little bit better training and uh upgraded weapons etc it could have been a very very different fight so that's that's one consideration so late 19th century people who think that the light ship is the way to go no no that the older ships would have beaten you there in the more modern era well if anybody had a gun cruiser or similar floating around still from world war ii if and this is where caveats come in if one of those things with radar guided fire control etc get got into visual range of a modern fleet that modern fleet would be pretty stuffed because most modern deck guns are single 4.5 or five inch weapons and fair enough they can fire very rapidly they've got radar guided fire control everything but at the end of the day they are still what in world war two uh considerations would have been destroyer caliber weaponry which a large light cruiser or a heavy cruiser would be relatively well protected against and modern ships do not have in any way shape or form any kind of appreciable armor against shell so if you would say have something like a des moines uh even hms tiger for that matter a worcester town class baltimore something like that especially des moines if one of those things just rocks up at 10 15 miles for whatever reason and starts blasting away it's gonna be a lot of very dead modern ships very very quickly um ciws isn't going to help you much sea ram isn't going to help you much against inca incoming rapid fire eight inch salvos from a ship like that so yeah the the defense to that is to have more and bigger guns yourself and armor modern ships don't have armor they do have missiles but the time it would take them to salvo to lock on and salvo out enough anti-shipping missiles to break something like a des moines i think the des moines if it's pulling the trigger at the same time is going to be the one that comes out the winner in a one-on-one there and those are the two most obvious examples but generally speaking as a rule and you might actually see that coming through as a theme even in those when this kind of scenario tends to happen it tends to be because technology has advanced incrementally rather than revolutionarily and people decide for whatever reason that this means that they can build newer ships much smaller much lighter much faster much more cost efficient that kind of thing which is fine as long as they're fighting other ships of a similar disposition but then they come up against some big old clanker of an of an ancient vessel that just has the sheer mass to absorb the little pinpricks that the modern ships can throw at it and in some cases just sheer protection as well and keep on trucking right up until it's on top of them and then at that kind of shorter range the more modern nature of weapons doesn't actually make too much odds so yeah that happens at various points in things like the age of sail and even as far back as ancient times as well oddball oddball0311 asks i was watching dr clark's videos on back pocket cruisers and when he was outlining the daring class he mentions how the 4.5 inch guns are fitted on upper deck mounts as opposed to between deck mounts what are the differences between the two and what caused the delay in their development so the difference is for lighter guns how is that gun mounted within the ship an upper deck mount is also sometimes called a transferable mount and this kind of mounting is well effectively these swatches would be if someone says i want to put in a gun mount and its classification is upper deck mount literally all you need to find is do we have some clear deck space you don't need to worry what's below the deck you don't need to worry what's running under the deck you don't need to worry about any of that it's just do we have some clear deck space and is there anything there but they'll be affected by blast effects if if there isn't then great we can stick something down literally bolt it to the deck the gun is now in place job done might have to connect up some power cables or whatever but that that's about it and then if you want to take out that gun mount again it's unbolt it get a crane lift it off and you'll have exactly the same thing you had before maybe a couple of bolt holes in the deck and that's all whereas a between deck mount is a mount where a lot of its associated machinery and so forth actually involves going down into the deck itself and then so then that case you have to worry about okay what's the deck below this proposed mounting location and so on and so forth um so it's more akin to a cruiser or battleship style barbette and turret arrangement where the mounting pieces the deck so if you again go back to your scenario of well we found this clear patch of deck space we want to put a gun mount on if it's a between deck mount someone's going to have to break out the cutting torches cut a nice circ circular hole usually in the deck drop the mounting in so you can have to consider what's in the deck below um and what might be affected there possibly further decks below depending on exactly how much between decks we're talking about and then if it comes to removing that mount you are going to be left with a sucking great hole in your deck which is going to be something of an issue so it's a lot easier to move upper deck mounts around and it's a lot easier to install them and it's also a lot better especially on something the size of a destroyer because you can then make use of the space directly beneath as well so unless you specifically want to install other systems with an upper deck mount you can literally bolt it on and then you could be sitting directly underneath the gun on the deck below and apart from the occasional bang echoing through the deck you're not gonna know anything about it whereas with a between deck mount you can go ah well here's a bunch of working machinery i guess i'm not gonna have to go somewhere else it also means a ship with upper deck mounts is much better placed for upgrades if necessary because again you can just unbolt it lift it off and drop in a new system as opposed to if you've got between deck mount you then have to start thinking when you're designing the new system of okay well it's machinery between decks is so wide is that going to involve us having to cut more of the deck away is it going to leave us with a gap are we going to have to put in some kind of uh plating to marry them up uh is it going to go deeper is it not going to go quite as deep are we going to have to put sports in that kind of stuff whereas with between deck mount uh sorry an upper deck mount it's literally we've taken one gun off we're now putting an approximately similar size gun on happy days the flip side is of course if you're developing an upper deck mounting you've got to fit absolutely everything in this mount above the deck which means you're going to have to either invent some new and in increasingly inventive technology or you're going to have to sacrifice certain capabilities or you're going to have to make everything very compact and all of these present various challenges whereas with a between deck mount because you just have more space you can introduce more features more easily without massive compaction and innovation of systems so it's easier to make a more capable between deck mount but a upper deck mount of the same capability whilst it will be more expensive and more complex to construct offers greater utility because apart from anything else especially if you're talking about things like secondary batteries on cruisers or battleships the upper deck mounts can be installed in far more locations than between deck mounts can be and far more easily william tyson asks is it true that the german 12-inch guns were superior to the british 12-inch guns i keep hearing the former had significantly higher velocity and hitting power than the and that the german 12-inch was similar in performance to the british 13.5 inch it's a surprisingly common and depressingly common um meme if you like that's been going around for a while a lot of people will say when you point out that well german guns at jutland and other places in world war one just weren't as big oh yes but the german 11 inch gun was just as good as the british 12 inch gun and the 12 inch was just as good as the british 13.5 inch no no no no no this is not the case not by a long shot now whether or not the german 12-inch gun was superior to the british 12-inch gun and that's a completely different question um yes the later versions of the german 12-inch gun such as what you would find on say the der flinger or in this particular case in front of you uh the hindenburg those were superior to the british 12-inch guns in some part due to modernity the guns on deflinger and hindenburg and wealthy as long as it lasted were 50 caliber guns whereas the majority of guns on the british ships were either the relatively decent 12-inch 45 caliber weapons which tended to obviously that they're not quite stable they're slightly shorter power weapons not quite as high velocity and it's a known fact that to be perfectly honest the british 12-inch uh 50-caliber weapon was not the world's greatest by a fair distance so it's entirely fair to say the germans had a better 12-inch gun in that respect fine however there's a difference between being in the upper echelons of firepower as far as 12-inch guns go because if you want the absolute upper echelon of firepower for 12 inch guns you actually have to go to the russians with the ones on the gangets and then trying to say that somehow this makes them equal or near equal to the british 13.5 inch weapon a lot of the time people point to various armor penetration tempers oh yes well look the armor penetration values are close it's like or in some cases superior it appears it's like nope again with the german armor penetration tables they show the effect of different types of uh shell in this case armor-piercing shell when they're fired in fully operational wartime condition i.e with armor pier this is in caps etc whereas the british armor penetration values for say the 13.5 inch gun that are most commonly available and the ones that most people go for they are for shells that are not capped so they don't have their armor piercing cap on um if they did have their armor piercing cap on which obviously they would do in wartime then they have considerably more penetration power and this is actually noted um if you look at the british entry for the 13.5 inch gun on nav webs this actually noted in their footnote 2b on armor penetration notes that a capped shell would have about 20 10 to 20 improvement in penetration at low velocities and 30 to 50 percent improved penetration at high velocities as compared to the data tables given and the reason i use that is well one nav webs is a pretty decent source for all things naval artillery wise um and two because it has nice shiny tables a lot of people like to quote it often without actually bothering to read into significant amounts of detail as to what it's actually saying um so yeah once you take that into account you actually see that the armor penetration capabilities of the 13.5 inch go up to a point where they are considerably better than the german 12-inch at any kind of given range and you basically end up with the scenario roughly speaking once you've calculated it all out the at the kind of battle range you're fighting jutland at which is sort of in the mid mid to low teens of thousands of yards um generally speaking the german 12-inch gun doesn't quite have the armor penetration capability to punch through the typical armor of a british battleship and at the slightly longer ranges it can't quite make its way even through the 9-inch armor of the british battle cruisers um which is something of a problem the other thing is with a much lighter shell the german 12-inch gun will lose velocity much faster which means that its armor penetration drops off very rapidly between 10 and 20 000 yards as compared to the heavier 13.5 inch shell now granted obviously the british did have a number of significant problems with their armor-piercing shells in the early and mid-parts of world war one with them detonating prematurely but that's a shell design flaw not a problem with the gun when the shells are actually working properly the penetration of the british guns at similar ranges is higher enough that it actually is then capable of punching through again assuming the shot works properly pretty much any armor that the germans have present even though the german battleships and battle cruisers on average carry thicker armor than their direct british equivalents so there's that but there's also um when it comes to just power what happens once the shell penetrates and i know i've mentioned bursting charges quite a bit but when you compare the bursting charges of the british 13.5 shell against the german 12-inch shell you find that depending on the exact shell variant but on average the british shell has about a 50 greater bursting charge which means that when the shell actually penetrates and detonates 50 more explosive power now there is obviously a scaling issue in the just because you've doubled say the amount of explosive doesn't mean you're necessarily going to get double the effect but it still is it's a big enough chunk of explosive and in addition that is going to make a difference relatively significantly to the amount of damage that's going to be done and the the most amusing thing about all of this um i mean obviously this isn't to denigrate your particular question because you're reporting what have you've heard but the people who spread these kinds of effectively naval myths is that they maintain this position in the face of the testimony of the navy that they are supposedly defending because the imperial german navy the high seas fleet one of if not the single biggest lesson that came out of jutland from the high seas fleet was admiral shearer going up to the high command and the kaiser and going we need bigger guns um the makinsons were due to have bigger guns but as a result of the lessons of jutland that's what was the direct cause of the erzatz yorks being redeveloped from some of the later makkinson hulls with even bigger guns and the l20a alphas or whatever they're called again their design was revised for for bigger guns because the german navy recognized that their 12-inch guns did not have the firepower of the british 13.5 and definitely 15-inch guns um even with the malfunctioning british shell so they were determined to get much bigger guns much faster so if the navy who owns the weapon has decided they need a bigger gun chances are they probably need a bigger gun this is one of one of the uh constant amusements i find with a lot of these um naval myths like say for example with the debates over armoured flight decks versus unarmored flight decks for carriers or how much did the us navy and the royal navy learn from each other during the uss robin deployment um and all sorts of other things be like oh wow everything was absolutely perfect on my chosen side it's like okay now here's the actual reports from the people of the navy that you are supposedly saying with everything was fine and superior in and the actual naval officers are saying different the actual naval officer saying we need to learn of this we need to adapt this and it happens on both sides in those scenarios um if the navy officers say that actually our existing systems are not one sort of 100 perfect and we need to make them better chances are they probably need to make them better corvus asks you have mentioned that the uk hasn't as many museum ships as it might have because there just wasn't enough money to go around once the useful bits have been removed and repurposed if a ship had cost x amount what percentage of x could be expected to be recovered on scrapping also would the armor plate that was so much effort and expense to make be retained as such or just thrown into the furnace with the rest of the structural steel so basically when you sell a ship for scrap you're going to get a negligible amount back compared to the cost of building the ship and for ships that have had a long service the amount of money that will have been sunk into refits repairs etc is going to balloon that even further i mean if you look at something like say hms dreadnought um in 1905 1906 when she's built she costs just under 1.8 million pounds to go from kia lang to in service when she is scrapped in the early 1920s even though there's been obviously inflation and such they get just under 40 000 pounds back as scrap value so compared to one almost 1.8 million you're just not going to get much if any return on your scrap value you get something and obviously when ships get larger and there's more valuable elements in them you can expect a slightly higher rate of return but it's still it's not even going to be 10 of the value that you put into building the ship in the first place let alone all the value sunk into the ship in the process of keeping it in service and refits and repairs as we said earlier so some specialist items will obviously be useful now the scrapper obviously expects to make a profit so it's not actually the true value of the ship i mean it's much like with your car if you smack your car hard enough into a solid object that it's a write-off it's scrap value that you might be able to sell it for is actually going to be usually a lot lower than what your insurance will pay out because at least in the uk your insurance has to pay out the actual value of the car as opposed to what they can get for at scrap because the scrap dealers want to make a profit and so yes you bash in your front end well the scrap value of an old car might be 50 quid but if the tires are relatively new each of those tires might go for 40 to 50 quid already and let alone lights wiring internal fixtures other body panels etc etc and so on so it's the same thing with a warship the scrappers will not pay all that much for it but once they break it up various components the brass the bronze the high-grade steel electronics etc they'll probably the sale of any one of those items as a collective whole will make them a lot more money than they actually paid for the whole ship as scrap when it comes to things like the armor plate that's very niche some of it would just be sold off as a very high grade steel to be used in other circumstances pre-forged or re-smelted in some cases it would be sold on to other very specific purposes i mean there's a number of uh gun ranges both in the u.s and the uk and i believe one or two in france as well where their backing plates are literally old armor plates from various scrapped warships which is a somewhat prosaic usage of the armor plate but it also had other values in things like bunkers blasted chambers and other testing facilities as well so yeah some of the more critical components could be reused in situ but to be perfectly honest when you're talking about uh potentially upwards of ten thousand tons of high grade armor steel a lot of that is just going to end up being sold as high grade steel with that needs minimal work to reforge into something different chris gregory asks as most ships even warships at war spend much more time sailing than fighting which warship classes of the second world war had the best seaworthiness and or sea keeping qualities and which classes had the worst sea keeping or seaworthiness the answer can vary quite a bit depending on the exact sea conditions you're talking about but broadly speaking some of the best sea keeping ships were ships like say the county class cruisers very high sided very nice and stable the bismarck class because of their width and their extreme stability were very nice ships at sea as long as the weather didn't get too bad um then they tended to be rather violent moving ships but that's a qualified uh case i guess for destroyers the fletcher class were actually pretty good sea boats um i mean obviously they are going to get thrown around and bobbed around quite a lot because they're destroyers but for destroyers the fact that they were pretty stable and had the right distribution of weights meant that they were more comfortable than most and at the other end of the spectrum in terms of bad sea keeping and seaworthiness well the german koenigsberg class are a wonderful case in point in that they're so awful that they're not actually really fully ocean capable um which is a bit of a problem really the king george v class were pretty seaworthy but their sea keeping was actually in heavy weather pretty awful because of that very minimally raised if at all bow which tended to just take loads of water um over the bow so yeah at high speeds and in bad weather the king george the fists tended to more excavate their way through the ocean than anything else and for different but also bear related reasons you obviously have things like the iowas with their wonderful tendency of knifing their way through the season um spraying the resultant mess back up into the main batteries but there is a fine distinction there because both king george the fifth clasp and iowa class ships were incredibly seaworthy whereas the koenigsbergs just weren't um i.e assuming you retain engine power at the end of a massive atlantic or pacific storm you would expect king george the fifth or an iowa to still be there you'd probably put money on the kernigsberg not being there anymore whereas sea keeping um which is sort of keeping the water where it should be which is not on top of the ship in in that respect yeah the i was in king george the bits not the world's greatest designs in that particular manner snow stalker 36 asks a number of questions so of course in line with dried up rules i will answer one and the others can be reposted for the next month so first question given how well rapid-firing 6-inch gun cruisers such as the brooklyn and town classes ended up performing for the u.s navy and royal navy would the japanese navy have been better off leaving the megamies in the original six-inch configuration ah there are so many issues with switching to the eight-inch guns for the megami's um stability issues build quality issues etc etc um practically speaking yeah i think they probably would have been better off um apart from anything else if they'd kept all their triple sixes then they probably would have been forced to look for something other than that for the yamato class secondary batteries which would mean well i mean the amateurs ended up with a lot of secondary weapons anyway after various refits but it might have encouraged them to look more towards the anti-aircraft defense of those ships a little bit sooner i mean overall there's there's not really any engagement that the megami class took part in where having more numerous rapid-fire six-inch guns would have been any significant disadvantage over the eight-inch guns really and there are a couple of scenarios where they would have done a lot better i mean for example uh the battle of samar is a classic one because i'm pretty sure that if you'd had say commando chucking out dozens and dozens of six-inch shells in rapid succession johnston probably wouldn't have lasted anywhere near as long as it did when commando's firing eight-inch guns obviously much slower fewer shells and with a lot more over penetration going on so yeah i mean to be fair some of it is a little bit of hindsight but overall six-inch armed megami's probably would have done marginally better than their eight-inch gun versions albeit they still would have ended up as an exciting collection of artificial reefs courtesy of the us navy but no that's neither here nor there edmund ressor asks what are the differences between a large cruiser a heavy cruiser and a battle cruiser did a super heavy cruiser exist it really does run into a lot of very political naming conventions to be perfectly honest because you've also got a factor in super cruisers and such like and then there's the eternal debate over what exactly is the role purpose design etc of a battle cruiser which is an entire matter of its own but the heavy cruiser is a creation of the naval treaty system in the interwar period because prior to world war one you had protected cruisers and armored cruisers then the armor cruiser kind of died a death dash evolved into the battle cruiser depending on exactly how you follow naval design tradition and so you had light armored cruisers or light cruisers um or just cruisers coming in and then with scout cruisers as kind of the diminutive then the treaties forced this division between the light and the heavy cruisers so heavy cruisers defined in the treaty wet manor as a cruiser with an armament of more than six inch guns but less than or equal to eight inch guns so that's and typically the heavy cruiser would be built with an eight inch main battery a large cruiser well there's not really so much a large cruiser but a large insert designation here's a large light cruiser for example is generally a bit of a political smoke screen to disguise the fact you're actually building something that definitely is not that but by calling it a large insert other thing cruiser you can pretend that it is that other thing cruiser just a bit bigger which makes it easy to get funding this is the same kind of uh should we say inventive naming that gets you things like the through deck cruiser that turns out to be the invincible class aircraft carrier or the japanese helicopter destroyer that honestly gov isn't actually an f-35b capable aircraft carrier um and yeah admiral fisher's large light cruisers which turn out to be hms furious and hms courageous energy is glorious which in no way shape or f or form actually me any kind of definition of light cruiser large or otherwise um you then have this sort of towards the end of the 1930s and into the 1940s this subtle division between battle and super cruisers now in my opinion at least and this is a subject of debate amongst naval historians so different people will have different opinions with equal amounts of evidence to back them up but a super cruiser is to me an outgrowth of existing heavy cruiser designs which means they may have either more of the same guns i mean maybe like 12 8-inch guns or they may have heavier guns but not guns that come up to battleship scale so an alaska class would be a good example of a super cruiser because although 12 inch guns at one point were battleship scale at the time that they alaska's are being built the 15 16 and 18 inch guns are battleship guns so a 12-inch gun is no longer a modern battleship caliber but it is greater than the eight inch so there's that also supercruisers tend to have armor more comparable with cruisers um more generally all possibly slightly scaled up in a lot of ways the the super cruisers protection speed profile etc resembles the earliest battle cruisers the invincibles um it's just not the main armament equivalent because obviously back when the invincibles were built the 12-inch gun was a battleship caliber weapon and whereas battle cruisers again my opinion tend to be more along the lines of battleships where you have increased the speed slightly down rated the armor compared to what you would be otherwise capable of doing and usually slightly reduced the gun firepower as well so in this respect when you look at the invincibles or any of the british battle cruisers really as a general rule of thumb when you compare them directly to at least until you get to hood when you compare them to their battleship equivalents they carry the same caliber of weaponry they just tend to carry one less turret so the invincibles carry eight twin twelve inch the dreadnought carries ten the lions in its derivatives carry um eight 13.5 inch turrets whereas their battleship versions the the orion's king george v signed dukes carry ten um the renowns they carry six twin uh six fifteen inch guns in three twin turrets whereas the revengers which the derivative of carry uh eight 15-inch guns in four twin turrets and so on and so forth so and the broadly speaking with the germans it's kind of similar of sadlets malt ker et cetera carrying 11 inch guns just in slightly fewer turrets and then deathlingers carrying 12 inch guns in slightly fewer turrets and their battleship equivalents are carrying the same guns just more of them so yeah a battle cruiser is kind of a rebalancing of the capital ship the battleship model as opposed to a supercruiser which is an outbreak outgrowth of a cruiser so until you get to the rapid-firing gun stage of immediate post world war ii broadly speaking you would expect a battle cruiser to easily beat a super cruiser in a one-on-one gunfight um because the actually the best example of that is blucher bluka is kind of prototypical super cruiser relative to its immediate contemporaries loses quite hard in a fight with actual battle cruisers um but a supercruiser will be slightly cheaper to run and will be just as effective against normal cruisers because the battle cruiser against a normal cruiser is just a massive sledgehammer to crack a nut whereas perhaps a supercruiser is a geology hammer to crack it up but that nut is still very much cracked um so yeah that that that's at least my way of going around things super heavy cruisers well that's just a super cruiser basically something like an alaska i mean you can even make a certain argument for des moines being a super cruiser because it's pretty chunky compared to a baltimore and although it doesn't carry any more main guns it does have considerably more firepower thanks to the autoloaders dave collier asks can you tell the story of the phrase the world wonders and its usage in the battle of leyte golf so this all derives from actually a relatively clever uh trick that the u.s navy put into its in ciphering program to try and ensure greater signal security one of the oldest tricks in the book for deciphering enemy communications is to look at the start and end of a transmission because through human nature an awful lot of transmissions are just written in a normal fashion then encrypted and most people include either salutations or greetings at the end so you might say you're sincerely order or admiral so-and-so or in the germans case they really like putting ohio hitler in practically everything now if you happened to know that this was a relatively common practice through other in intelligence then you could start looking at the various encrypted signals and then if you knew that say every message sent by a certain set of transmitters began with the phrase hello everybody you could start analyzing the patterns between the characters in the opening part of each transmission and try and work out what's the differences here we know it says hello everybody so we can work back the individual cipher but then by comparing the differences between the various encrypted characters and the different messages we can also work out how the cipher is constantly changing and once you've broken that you can break through into the rest of the message and all of a sudden you know what the enemy is doing now to make sure that that didn't happen the us navy introduced a system whereby you would have your message whatever that was and then you would have to append a three-word nonsense phrase to the start and the end and because this would be completely irrelevant completely unrelated to the message itself and would obviously change completely at random every time this kind of identifying the the forward and aft parts of the message if you like to try and uh pull common themes from it wouldn't work and because these would vary obviously by length because you could say um start a transmission with yes one two one oh well not one two one but you start with yes one two so that would be a nine characters someone else might choose their nonsense phrase to be something like michigan pacific stroganoff which obviously has a lot more letters in it and so if you're trying to look for oh well so many letters in we're going to find common phrases it's not going to work either and you do that at the end as well so that cuts off the potential like yours sincerely or whatever being commonly picked up now you could just use completely random jumbles of words you could use completely random jumbles of letters that vaguely resembled words but again human nature usually meant that people would pick code phrases that actually made sense as some kind of three-letter sentence or saying because it's just easier to remember and much easier for the human mind to come up with now when it comes to the battle of leyte golf admiral nimitz wanted to know what the heck had happened to task force 34 which was the heavy covering force that halsey had talked about leaving behind to cover where eventually center force would approach and then start attacking taffy 3. so he sent a message that was basically saying where is task 434 so specifically because he wanted to know exactly where this thing was his message was where is repeat where is task force 34 which is a relatively standard if slightly strident naval transmission but nothing particularly out of the ordinary once obviously other data like who had come from and such had been appended on and then the nonsense phrases had also been appended the two nonsense phrases that were installed for on this transmission were turkey trots to water and the world wonders and the idea to help with um deciphering at the other end was that these things would be separated from the main message by repeat letters so in this case the full transmission was turkey trots to water gg that's the separator from sync pack action com third fleet info com inch ctf 77 x so that's all your your metadata as to who the heck it's from and to where is rpt repeat where is task force 34 rr there's your um separator again the world wonders that's the full text of the transmission however for whatever reason the poor old um decryption officer on the uss new jersey missed the rr for whatever reason uh even though other stations that picked up the transmission didn't but i don't know whatever maybe it might have been a bad day so instead of getting a question of where is task wars 34 halsey instead got where is task force 34 the world wonders which as you can tell has a slightly different tone to it and uh yeah it's uh something of a slap in the face uh in that particular manner now to be perfectly fair um as i'll probably make my feelings clear on admiral halsey probably deserved a transmission like that um when it came to his handling of his forces in and around the battle of samar but still um whether he deserved it or not it was significantly stronger and more sarcastic than in that form than admiral nimitz actually intended it to be um and so yeah it had a rather interesting effect on halsey because yeah if uh if a naval superior actually deliberately sends you a message like that they are not happy in any way shape or form um especially in the us navy you might get a smattering of like sarcasm in the royal navy here and there but the u.s navy is not known for being overly sarcastic in the orders it gives to its uh subordinate officers unless somebody is really really making a point of just how badly you have stuffed up mark malet asks from tamichihara's account of the battle of vela golf he noted that the spacing between the destroyers was about 500 meters is this spacing about typical for ships in a line of battle in the second world war and would it change significantly if the ships were cruisers or non-carrier capital ships it varied greatly depending on the ship and depending on the circumstances in question so typically speaking for a night action ships would be closed up a lot a lot closer in than in a day action but this could vary again if you're destroyers you can pack them in a lot closer because a destroyer is more agile and it's a physically smaller ship as compared to a cruiser or battleship which might be less wieldy and so would require a little bit more spacing just in case of change of speed or maneuvering but at the same time when tactical issues called for it even large ships could close up a lot closer so for example although it's not a second world war example you look at the battle of jutland with just under 30 capital ships in admiral jelico's line of battle that line stretches for about six miles now that sounds like a lot but when you consider the number of capital ships involved if you convert that into kilometers and divide through the resulting just over nine kilometers with the 28 odd capital ships you actually realize that even if you treat the capital ships as a point sources with no length of their own the spacing is actually maybe two-thirds of the 500 meters mentioned in this destroyer account and once you take them together actually yes the battleships do exist in three dimensions and they have their own length the spacing between the ground fleets capital ships is actually even less than that um and battle line for generally for ships uh c would be fairly close order it was effectively the minimum distance will be defined by assuming the enemy salvo is on target with the normal scatter of shot let's make sure we're not within that scatter of shop and basically give them free hits even if they've missed their intended target plus a little bit of space for maneuvering room and that's about it because the more concentrated your fleet is the more preponderance of firepower you can bring to bear and the easier it is to relay orders but in other circumstances like say if you're heavily outnumbered there may be advantages and disadvantages to closing up or widening the formation if you widen things out you force your enemy to split fire more but at the same time if you tighten things up and you're vastly outnumbered you could end up with the enemy obscuring their own guns which was kind of something of a problem uh with a number of situations where one force vastly outnumbered the other and the sheer number of shell splashes made it very difficult to work out who exactly was on target and who needed to adjust their gunnery carriers though in terms of line ahead they virtually never did it but when they did they tended to keep a bit more of a distance if they were doing flight operations because well aircraft launching they needed some space to do so although again in some circumstances like say the battle of cape matapan there were carriers forming a line ahead formation in battle with battleships although they had to be persuaded to turn away from that particular encounter so yeah um spacing there's no such thing really as typical spacing there might be suggested normal spacing for a particular type of ship in a particular navy as suggested by the standing orders but that's going to vary from navy to navy from ship class to ship class and in any particular given tactical situation is probably going to be altered anyway cicero asks the naval act of 1794 approved the then eye-popping sum of 688 888 and 82 cents to construct outfit and crew the original six frigates of the united states navy apparently halfway through the construction of these vessels construction was stopped due to an exhaustion of funds blamed on reasons that seem awfully familiar over documentation and reasonable materials requests and the scattering of the frigate's construction to yards across the east coast to provide economic stimulus compared to the costs of a similar british fourth rate however was the original allotment of funds reasonable for what congress wanted moreover was the third congress really making unreasonable requests for things like southern live oak and the construction of each ship at a different yard so actually congress's original budget wasn't too far off to be honest even in the best of circumstances it probably still was a little bit underfunded now the reason for this we'll have a quick look hms leopard 50 gun fourth rate okay marginally bigger than the euro ships and ironically enough also later to be involved in a bit of a standoff with said u.s ships but when she was built a couple of years earlier in 1790 she was built for just under 24 500 pounds and then had to be fitted out at further cost of just under three and a half thousand pounds so overall you're probably talking about 28 000 pounds just under that for the total expense involved in construction and fitting out of the leopard whose armament broadly speaking main gun deck 24 24-pounder guns upper gun deck of lighter weapons etc is broadly similar to what the u.s navy was trying to achieve with its frigates albeit the leopard says fractionally larger however whilst that is the building and fitting out costs it does not include the costs to crew the ship for its first voyage which the u.s estimate does now let's look at the us estimate with this almost 700 000 figure well you've gotta divide it three by six first because there's six frigates being built you then have to divide it through by four point seven five because that's the pound two dollar exchange rate uh four point seven five dollars buys you one pound in 1794 and that arrives at an equivalent value allocated per frigate of 24 171 pounds and 50p well actually technically speaking six shillings and a couple of pence but whatever now this immediately as you can see is about three and a half four thousand pounds less than the cost for leopard leopard is a slightly larger ssa but it's not that much larger and this figure is supposed to also pay for the crew so yeah no um congress has underestimated there by a fair margin you would probably need to have i would say if you're going to crew the ship as well you probably need to allocate about the equivalent of about 30 000 maybe slightly over 30 000 pounds for for each ship and when you translate that back so multiply 30 000 by 4.75 to convert to dollars and then multiply it by six because you have six frigates that comes up to 855 000 which is um quite a bit more it's like one almost one and two third million more dollars than congress had actually budgeted for um so yeah congress's budget was probably going to run out anyway but it it's it's within a shouting distance of an accurate estimate at least as compared to yet just how much money they actually ended up spending on finishing the ships so [Music] i don't think asking for southern live oak was an unreasonable request yes it was going to push the cost of the ships up slightly and they probably should have taken that into account but well we can see the combat results of that and the durability of the ships it as a sort of cost benefit it definitely was worth it the construction of the ships each at very different yards in order to provide economic stimulus this is a constant problem in many navies but the us navy especially um for a lot of time where you're trying to effectively bribe individual state senators to vote for something congressman to vote for something by promising that some of that money will come back to their particular area um now fair enough the uk kind of does that at the moment in as much as the uk up until relatively recently had ship building capability of one sort or another up and down the uk and on the south coast in portsmouth in places like belfast and newcastle as well as scotland and it has been a fairly calculated political decision to consolidate most of the heavy british warship construction industry in the past few years in scotland because it allows the government to say oh look well if if scotland leaves the uk i know this is virgin into modern politics but it has a direct bearing on this um it kind of allows the government to say well yeah you'd lose all that money and all that work now when it comes to this scenario with the american uh ships in the various shipyards yeah it's a similar kind of thing of well if you vote against this bill then all of this money that we were honestly planning to spend in your particular shipyard won't happen except that because you need more than one or two votes you end up having to spread these things out all across the place and that makes for inefficiencies because you now have six sets of effectively project management six sets of supply lines six sets of everything whereas if you were to say right well this shipyard or these couple of shipyards are the best at building it so we're going to give most or all the contract to them you have much fewer sets of management much fewer sets of duplication work much fewer sets of lines of supply and thus overall costs come down but it is very much a political decision as opposed to a direct engineering or naval decision and so in a lot of ways congress pretty much shot themselves in the foot in that particular scenario if they wanted the ships cheaply then they should have identified one or two good builders and said right you get to do this wholesale they tried to play both ends against the middle and ended up having to spend an absolute fortune in addition which if they'd been honest with themselves from the start they probably would have had to earmark anyway because these kind of things are not exactly unforeseen john reese asks do you happen to know the reasoning behind several factions modifying their medium or heavy bombers to carry torpedoes during world war ii so it depends on the faction in question or the the siding question if you like the motivations varied quite considerably but generally speaking a medium or heavy bomber has a lot more range than the average single engine torpedo bomber which is a big advantage especially if you're trying to raid enemy shipping from a long way away so if you're trying to say conduct torpedo strikes against german shipping from the uk in occupied europe or if you are the japanese and you're planning on the pacific campaign or you're the americans and you're planning on stopping the japanese from their pacific campaign um and so on so range is definitely a factor additionally as you can see here with the heinkel 111 torpedo bomb conversion the larger aircraft can carry usually carry more than one torpedo which means that for a given aircraft making a given attack run then you have a higher chance of damaging a ship there's also the fact that along with range comes better navigational capabilities because obviously a large bomber you have more crew you can have someone dedicated uh to doing quite a lot of navigation as well as more self-defense whereas in a single-engined bomber like an avenger or swordfish whilst you might have a navigator occasionally they're gonna have a lot harder of a job navigating from a relatively small and possibly open position as opposed to a navigator in the relatively spacious confines of a medium to heavy bomber and when you're out at sea navigation is pretty important there's also what other aircraft do you have now in a number of cases there were perfectly serviceable single-engine torpedo bombers and this was a supplemental force to do certain specific mission types however in other cases such as especially with the luftwaffe they didn't really have that many single-engine torpedo bombers so and they didn't really have many single-engine aircraft cable being converted to useful torpedo bombers either there were a few that existed but it was a lot easier to retain a margin of performance by just sticking torpedoes under in this case a medium bomber like a heinkel 111 than it was to try and persuade something like say a stuka to carry a heavy torpedo because he could do so but stukas were vulnerable enough as it was let alone trying to get them to do to low and slow torpedo runs and even with the sheer numbers of aircraft produced in world war ii there was also a certain margin when it came to heavy and medium bombers of multiple uses now obviously something like a swordfish or an avenger could be used as a bomber as well but its bomb their bomb carrying capacities were somewhat more limited as compared to their torpedo carrying capacity whereas with a heavy or medium bomber hunger 111 wellington g3m g4m a26 etc you could afford to put the relevant mountings for torpedoes etc and as you said possibly carrying more than one without overly compromising that aircraft's ability to land re-equip with bombs and go out and drop a very heavy useful bomb load so you could get a lot of dual or multi-purpose rolls out of the same aircraft assuming of course you could train the crews to manage those roles effectively so yeah there were a number of advantages to doing so and pretty much every major nation actually did so in some way shape or form although exactly what balance of those various factors they were taking into account as their primary driving force varied from nation william h burke iii asks it seems like in both world wars allied dash anton intelligence military deception and coms decryption were more effective than what the axis dash central powers achieved in the naval sphere why was it that this was so one-sided alternatively was it less one-sided than it seems in retrospect in some respects it came down to a matter of luck in for example the room 40 video the there was a certain degree of luck in the royal navy recovering or other people recovering and then giving to the royal navy practically every code book that the germans actually used um that was certainly a huge stroke of luck and contributed greatly to their superior signals intelligence then when you get to world war ii things like enigma you have the luck of having some incredibly intelligent polish and other european uh signals code breakers and cryptanalysts who are all ending up in the uk at some point fairly early in the war now whether or not the british would have made anything close to the kind of advances against stigma they would have done without them is very very much open to doubt but in that case of the germans own success have worked against them somewhat because they took over all these countries it meant that the combined cryptanalysis resources of pretty much the whole of europe that wasn't germany was arranged against germany all in one location so yeah that helped um so yeah matters of luck certainly play a part but also it's not always quite as a one-sided the german and naval encryptions in especially world war ii were pretty much the hardest to break and to keep broken uh compared to that the army and the luftwaffe codes and other general codes were a lot easier to to break and would stay broken for a lot longer and the german the critics marina was actually much better at signals security and adaptation than the other branches of the armed forces although again it still still was broken with a relative degree of regularity then you also have to take into account that whilst a lot of the decisions and encounters that were made on the basis of that cryptanalysis relate some rather decisive battles and such like which in turn obviously amplifies the supposedly one-sidedness of the situation it wasn't entirely one-sided now fair enough the germans didn't have the world's greatest success breaking royal navy codes although they occasionally would the italians actually had a much greater level of success at breaking royal navy codes now whilst it never approached the same level of success that the allies were having in reverse against the germans it did mean that at various points had multi signals were compromised and there were a number of instances where royal navy ships either suffered or had to abort missions because of counter moves made on the basis of that intelligence it's just you don't hear so much about it because in the end germany and italy lost um so sort of in the common mind obviously they can't be quite as good and people therefore don't do so much digging but also because they they genuinely didn't have the same kind of breaks of luck and strokes of genius that the allied dash on taunt signals it had so although they did manage to crack various allied codes they weren't able to do so as consistently or for as long in any given situation as the allies were federico buzzy asks what was the maximum thickness of armor that could be produced if i remember you said the japanese had some trouble producing yamato's main plates because it was difficult to cool them properly due to their thickness yamato's main plates were pushing it for the japanese but still just about within their capabilities or they were having some issues the the bigger challenge actually was the face plates for the main battery turrets which were considerably thicker and did have a whole host of issues 20 i think 22 plus inches of armor you it was beyond the reliable ability of technology at the time to pull that off um you could with a bit of luck but the quality was not going to be 100 as much as you'd want it to be now as far as the maximum thickness of it could be produced it varied obviously over time you look at say the 1860s american civil war at that point thanks to technological advancement the royal navy and the marine national were able to produce four and a half inch plate solid single solid plate the americans weren't um they had to go with laminated layers of thinner plate but technology advanced the americans caught up by the mid to late 1860s they were able to produce solid four and a half inch plate will be maybe the quality wouldn't be quite as good but they could do it um whereas before they couldn't and this kind of rolls on as arm-up is produced in thicker and thicker quantities um the ability to do so the industry to do so obviously goes up once you get into the face hardening process that's a completely different story as opposed to just solid lumps of iron um and so the ability to produce armor scales as it goes through world war one into war period world war two you always have to remember that actually turret faces in a lot of ships actually tend to be the thickest parts so the main belt is not usually too difficult to produce it's more about the size of it rather than the actual thickness um so yeah you can probably reliably produce buys off the world war two period an 18-20 inch thick slab of armor um if you're doing it for a turret face and that theoretically chains into being able to produce a similar thickness of armor for the um belt of your ship if necessary however due to square cube laws the sheer volume of metal goes up quite considerably as you add thickness and so yeah without a significant advance in the technology particularly around the cooling and heating of steel you're probably looking at somewhere around 20 inches maybe just a fraction over 20 inches of armor as being the most realistic that you can produce with late 30s early 1940s technology reliably when you're coming to produce space hardened armor as i say obviously the japanese did make some innovations in producing slightly thicker plate um with some varying degrees of success but it was really pushing the envelope and if everyone had wanted to go in that direction there would have had to have been some form of change in advancement in the procedures and processes involved in order to accomplish that aaron davis asks with history there will always be questions that cannot be answered what battle or incident would you most like to have all the answers to and why i think it's really a tie for me um one would be the battle of the yalu river i know we've covered that a couple of times in this dry dock but seriously i've been trying to put a script together for this battle for a video for months now and i've got three books specifically on the battle of yalu river that at least two of which claim to be the definitive account plus a bunch of other references from uh other works that sort of cover in passing can you get a single bit one of them to agree on the major timeline of things in any way shape or form no about the the most consistent parts that you can get are the after action damage reports from the japanese fleet but that still doesn't necessarily tell you when the damage was inflicted or by who and and even then some of the uh quote unquote definitive accounts talk about damage that the japanese damage reports don't actually show happening i mean while the japanese damage reports do show some fairly major damage some of the diff so-called definitive accounts don't mention at all so it should have been a lot better documented considering that it's a relatively speaking recent battle so yeah i'd really like the answers to that particular encounter the other incident i think i'd personally like answers to would be what happened to the hms victory that immediately preceded the one we've got now because well to be honest pretty much all we know is she went down in a storm for ages where everyone thought she'd gone down was actually completely wrong turns out she'd gone down somewhere else but why she'd gone down there what the circumstances were that led up to that etc well when things go down with all hands it's pretty difficult to work out so yeah i'd like to know exactly what it was like how bad was that storm and what circumstances led a whole first-rate ship of the line to founder um in the english channel brad asks what were the plans for using the treaty ports in ireland before they were handed back using them as naval bases seems pretty conservative would merchant ships be unloaded there so no merchant ships wouldn't be unloaded there because at the end of the day those ports were still within the at the time irish free state later ireland um and so if that nation whatever name it's happened to be going under at any particular time was neutral then you would be fairly hard pressed for it to argue it was maintaining its neutrality if it allowed supplies to britain to be transported through and they would have to be because well ireland isn't physically connected to the uk which apart from northern ireland which means that you could maybe unload supplies for northern ireland but if you're going to unload supplies from northern node you might as well send them straight to belfast um and other than that all you'd be doing would be compromising the neutrality of ireland by transporting goods through them to northern ireland where you'd have to re-embark them on ships and send them across to the mainland uk anyway so not really much point in unloading merchant shipping at the treaty ports um the the basically the treaty ports existed for two-fold purpose both purposes being military and very strategic in nature one of which was that well if you're trying to guard the atlantic whether it be from submarines or surface raiders these ports are closer to the atlantic than ports on the mainland of the uk so it's better to base your ships from there because you can react faster and be out at sea longer and secondly because with ireland in the hands of a foreign government it means that the uk can't base full defense forces there and it's very very bad for um uk security if somebody were to overrun the relatively lightly defended irish free state or ireland um in order to gain a foothold obviously then they can directly threaten northern ireland and they're very close to the mainland uk as well and able to cut off british shipping very easily coming into and out of the atlantic and so it's in british interests to defend ireland even if ireland's navy itself isn't up to all that much and that so that's the other main purpose of the treaty ports is basically to make sure no one else can come in and cause trouble for ireland in order to maintain the safety and security of the uk julian arnott asks how the masters of age of sail ships held down is it just by weight or is there some other way and how easy is it to change masts out at sea masts and spas are partly held in place by their own weight but there's also a vast amount of rigging this doesn't necessarily hold the things down but it does hold them in place because there will be a fair bit of sway and so you can see in this example of hms victory in slightly happier times the master rigging well the rigging and such like and ropes are designed mainly to stabilize the masts to prevent them from going backwards and forwards and left and right etc too much there is a certain amount of sway that's necessary to be allowed and rope is flexible um but not too much because otherwise they will snap and that's a very bad thing um they're also held in within the within the ship itself by various clamps and bolts and such like as well how the spars are attached well again mostly by tying and ropes with some bolts and plates depending on the specific ship in question and how easy is it to change them out at sea uh practically impossible because well you can look at the amount of rigging that's involved and also you need cranes and such like it's just it it's not going to happen out so you're not going to replace a full mast if you lose one you can jewelry rig a much lighter smaller mast if one happens to be lost in a storm or shot away but that is as i say going to be a much smaller type of mast as compared to the full mast and spas that you have when everything is vaguely intact so yeah there were occasionally ships with cranes that could come out and remast smaller ships like bricks and sloops and maybe a small frigate but even then it would still be a slightly larger version of a jury rigged solution because the amount of block and tackle and roping you'd need to replace a mask that had been shot or away or blown away it's not something that a ship would carry at sea bill luster asks could you talk about the practical aspects of mine laying operations in world war one and world war ii aside from submarine mine layers it seems almost suicidal to sail into enemy waters in a small undergun ship full of explosives so yes mind laying is a rather hazardous activity because the enemy definitely doesn't want you to do it and yeah you're full of very delicate explosives so they can stop you from doing it in a rather decisive fashion but this is why in world war ii a lot of mine laying was done by aircraft because not only because they're faster and theoretically can penetrate deeper into enemy defenses before dropping their minds but simply because well they're a lot harder to intercept even if they carry individually fewer mines now there were still mine layers the aberdeel class is pictured here um in both world war one and world war ii but it generally came under two primary guys when you're not talking about submarines one of which was covert mine laying so this would be done by especially with the germans by merchant raiders or on merchant cruisers when they'd head out they'd carry a lot of mines and because there were merchant ships and usually merchant ships disguised as other merchant ships they would take that opportunity to lay mines in areas where a warship would be obviously much more easily spotted and dealt with so there's that and a certain degree the british and americans and such would also do similar practices but it was a lot harder to do because a merchant ship off say the north west coast of scotland is a relatively expected site a random fishing trawler just off the coast of heligland bite not so much um now the other type of my lab kind of like the ab deal class or the manxman class are very very fast and they would run in under the cover of knight and drop off their minds and then turn around and try and get away as fast as possible or sometimes they'd come in at high speed during the day lay their minds overnight and then try and get away under the cover of nights as fast as possible and their high speed was key to this because they could transition into the area a lot faster so if you timed it right especially given the limited range of most aircraft at the time you would ideally trying to approach the boundary of enemy aircraft patrol areas around about the evening you'd then run in under what would ostensibly be their air coverage area during the hours of darkness you would lay your minds around about midnight early morning and then you run as fast as you possibly can back the other way so that hopefully by the time dawn light appears you might be vulnerable to air attack you'll be right at the marginal edge of their air cover which means that even if you are attacked it'll probably be by an aircraft that happens to be in the area because by the time he's summoned friends you will with any luck be beyond the range of retribution sui 420 den asks how does the borudino-class battle cruiser compare to her contemporaries if the russians were able to complete them so assuming that they've been able to complete them around about the time they actually wanted to do so which would have been 1915 1916-ish they would have presented quite the interesting conundrum for the other navies of the world their speed wouldn't have been fantastic compared to ships like tiger ludsau etc the the battle cruisers that were launching in and around all that time actually to be honest coming into service in and around that time i suppose you could look at hindenburg and renown it's a bit slow 26 to 27 knots that's kind of this is the speed you expect to see from the very first battle cruisers may be the second set built armor-wise after some revisions was okay it's just just a fraction over nine inches maximum belt thickness so comparable to lion princess royal queen mary and tiger less armored than the german battle cruisers obviously but as shown at jetland for that 1915 1916 period against 11 and 12 inch shell fire as long as it doesn't get too close that's probably all right now armament is very very nice um i mean okay it's got this kind of flat iron almost ganga style turret layout which isn't necessarily the best rocks of fire but 12 14-inch guns in a period when tigers mounting eight thirteen point fives def linga and lutzow are doing eight twelves uh the kong goes fair enough they have 14 inch but they've only got eight of them and this has twelve so the burdeners would have had a lot of firepower for battle cruisers but it's kind of that trade-off of in this particular case they're trading off firepower against speed and so yeah it would have been an interesting scenario comparing to their contemporaries it would i think have depended on the numbers available on each side because they were planning on building four if the borudinos were up against roughly equal numbers or maybe maybe one greater so five versus four then they've got pretty decent odds i think because of that massive preponderance firepower they've got half again more firepower than anyone else so that's always good the speed means well they can't dictate the engagement but and i mean there are issues with the 14-inch gun the russians are planning to use but we can assume that they would have resolved them at least somewhat to say the speed's not fantastic but you're not really going to want to close in against that kind of massive firepower and staying at range their armor should be relatively decent now where they might be at a disadvantage is if they end up fighting substantially more than five to four odds so if say jutland doesn't happen and hindenburg gets commissioned and you end up with a six versus four or potentially worse of first scouting group versus the borudinos then the fact that they can't escape means they they're in trouble and likewise if they end up fighting the battle cruiser fleet in a circumstance that doesn't really involve bt um so either first second and third battle cruiser squadrons or first and second with fifth battle squadron in close attendance the numerical advantage of not just guns but also in terms of the fact that various ships can engage the borudinos whilst they themselves are unengaged means that they would probably have to withdraw but they don't have the speed to withdraw at which point that they're in trouble so yeah they would have made a very interesting and and worthy addition to the annals of the battle cruisers assuming that no massively unexpected issues cropped up assuming they were completed in time obviously jacques asks what is your favorite naval title got to be hands down and without a doubt lord high admiral there is no better naval title jellyjellybean asks in your video the architecture of dreadnought's blueprints of success you discussed the bulbous bow what speeds were bulbous boughs and warships designed for was it their maximum speed to get an extra knot or two their cruising speed to save fuel and extend range to look good i asked because previous reference to metacentric height led me to another channel of nick the naval architect he posted some videos on bulba spells including one on their limitations where he says bulb spells only work well at or about a specific speed warship designers must have thought bulbar spells were worthwhile but i haven't heard what they were hoping to achieve so bulbas bells on warships were designed mainly around the maximum speed in order to well as you say gain an extra knot or two compared to what they would have been able to achieve otherwise or to achieve a similar speed and with a reduction in overall engine power that was required so the reason for that is as you say bulb spells they above a certain speed above about 12 15 knots they do work to a degree but the effect of their work is massively reduced compared to at their optimal speed and so really well you might see a few savings here and there by having a bulbous bow at other speeds in some areas that will be offset by the additional weight that you've and drag even both by having it in the first place in the case you see a marginal uh saving but it's not really worth writing home about it's only in that zone where it's specifically configured for that you will actually get the big savings and so because running at full speed is the thing that burns the most fuel and the drag etc is the biggest limitation on top speed for a given power plant the bulba spells generally were configured for around about the top speed that they were hoping to achieve for that particular warship and when you look at the various power plant requirements for battleships that were capable of going 26 27 28 knots compared to engine requirements for battleships of roughly similar displacements that were going up to sort of 30 plus knots you can see the massive increase in power requirement therefore the massive increase in engine space and machinery space that was needed and the bulbous bow helps cut down on that quite considerably and so that is where the most savings are going to be because if you've got a bowler spell that's configured to work well at cruising speed well then you'll save a little bit of cruising fuel which will extend your range if you keep the tanks about the same size but your machinery you'll probably actually end up needing slightly more because the bulb will spell might act against you when you're running at top speed and thus either your top speed is going to be lower or you can actually end up leading more machinery whereas if you do it the other way around the boulder spell helping the most at the top end speed well your cruising speeds are most efficient anyway so a very slight reduction there isn't the end of the world but if you're able to run with 20 25 or more less horsepower at a given target top speed than a contemporary battleship that doesn't have a bulbous spell well that's a whole lot of extra machinery you don't need which means that space can be devoted to other things whether that be firepower protection etc etc in terms of displacement or reducing the overall size and thus cost of the ship in terms of hull volume or using that whole volume for completely different purposes jake hart asks a very similar question um he said you mentioned rambows had a partial effect of cancelling the bow wave but i would have guessed certain rams create a wave that interferes constructively with the bow wave thus making the total wave larger are there any noted instances of this occurring or is it simply too unlikely in practice in theory it's possible however the speed regimens at which a bulbous bow or bulbous bell-like structure creates constructive interferences where the two waves start to overlap and thus become even worse um in in terms of rising higher for it for the ship that's a very very niche area and to be honest mathematically it normally would happen at far too lower speed for it to actually matter because the amount of bow wave at that point is going to be so tiny that whether it's four inches or eight inches isn't going to actually matter to a large ship there's also the fact that whilst ram bells did have something of an effect that as you can see from hms polyphemus here they're nowhere near as large as bulba spells and so their effect on the sea is nowhere near as large this is why they had an effect but not the same effect because they're not they're just not displacing as much water so even if by sheer happenstance and luck the bow wave created by a ram bao happened to work exactly at the in the best way possible at the exact target top speed of the battleship in question because it's much smaller it's not going to displace as much water which means it might reduce the bowel wave on the actual ship itself slightly but not by anywhere near as much as an actual dedicated bulb or spout design louis maskel asks in warrior to dreadnaught by dk brown on chapter 12 under the section c keeping he writes there seems to been have been an almost masochistic view that life at sea should be unpleasant in commentating about the victorian obsession with lower freeboards as compared to those who came after them in your opinion is this just a rather nice piece of hyperbole or does it hit on some element of victorian design in this era there is a reasonable bit of truth to that um you can see here hms trafalgar with its uh wonderfully low free border i think this is probably the only c state in which uh it's not going to be taking water over the bow um now yeah there's a certain amount of truth to it the the reason that free boards were so low was because of the weight of the fully armored cylindrical turrets and the massive amounts of iron and later compound armor that they were having to install to keep the citadel safe just meant that well one the those heavy turrets if they were mounted much higher would cause stability problems on ships of this kind of size and secondly if you're going to install two foot of solid metal armor it can't be very tall otherwise again it's just going to drag you down so by lowering the free boards it meant that you didn't have to protect as much of the hulls area which meant your overall armor volume was less which made you stay afloat and your gun turrets also came down a level which meant that they cause less stability issues and you see this actually in the majestic class when the most of them are built with fully armored barbettes but hms hood the predecessor by name to the famous battle cruiser was built pretty much to exactly the same design but with the traditional circular fully armored turrets and just to keep that thing stable they had to drop everything by a deck and so it looked a lot more like this than it did the rest of its majestic half-sisters so yeah there's uh there's reasons for it but at the same time the victorians did know how to improve sea keeping aboard ships with low freeboard the breastwork monitors are perfect example of this uh with their little pop-up panels to improve seakeeping and there's no particular reason why that couldn't have been put in place on battleships of this kind as well but i mean yes it would have cost slightly more but not a tremendous amount but yeah there was a certain element of well yeah we we could do this thing but it'll cost slightly fractionally more and there may be a tiny tiny tiny amount of additional shrapnel generated in battle and the main benefits to be perfectly honest are to the crew and well the crew should be tough and hard men so they're clearly not going to need it all that much so we could eliminate it of course there were other opinions within the victorian admiralty that tended more towards the practical side of maybe being able to fight in a sea state that didn't involve mill ponds but um the victorian british navy was large enough and had a diverse enough range of thought that if you laser in on any particular admiral or group of admirals you can usually find an argument to support both sides of a particular controversy and everything in between and there usually some admiral going off on his own idea about how the aliens from mars have directed that he invent a death ray that can be projected from the captain's eyes or something like that um it was a rather interesting time and lastly for this section gabriel a hawkins asks i was watching the launch of hms prince of wales as it was making its way into the fog and there was a man standing on the bow of the ship dressed in circa 1700 clothing probably a kilt appearing to hold a staff or something similar it also appeared as though he was somehow watching over the ship i've since tried to find videos of this without success as it seemed pretty cool so do you know anything about the video i saw is this some kind of royal navy tradition it's not a launch tradition that i'm aware of immediately offhand given the context that prince of wales is being was launched in scotland the appearance of somebody in a kilt in some form of ceremonial position wouldn't come as a massive surprise to me but um it would have it would be a case of well i guess that would seem appropriate for the area i'm as i'm not entirely sure of any particular launching tradition surrounding the royal navy in general or ship's name prince of wales in particular that calls for this and i also tried to look it up to see if i could work out what was going on but likewise had no luck so yeah unfortunately i don't know but if anyone out there was either present during the launching of prince of wales or happens to know anything about said possible tradition please let us know in the comments below and then well there'll be at least two people whose curiosity has been satiated and that brings us to the end of this month's patreon dry dock at least the pre-recorded section of course there will be the patreon dry dock live stream which will have taken place at the point that you're listening to this either the day before or two days earlier and so that will form the other part of this uh q a where all of the sort of alt history etc questions from the patreon questions for this month have been answered separately so thanks very much for listening and hope to see you again in another video soon apologies again for the slight delay in announcing winners for the giveaway but um well as you understand there has been a few complications of late um i hope to have the announcement of winners i'll put it up as a community post oh during the week once i've narrowed down all the uh names and next to drydock definitely i will also announce it there so again thanks very much and see you again in another video

Channel: Drachinifel

Views: 1,297,926

Keywords: The Drydock, Drachinifel, Q&A

Id: V7qE12TPUdA

Length: 196min 18sec (11778 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 02 2020