The Drydock - Episode 109

[Music] hello everybody and welcome to drydock episode 109. so this is the patreon edition of the dry dock that we have each month so buckle in because obviously it's going to be longer than average steven dick asks regarding your wednesday rum ration on battleship architecture how well did hms rodney and nelson do with their bows and waves when all three of their turrets were placed at the front and the midships and u.s battleships with their width limitations due to the panama canal thus requiring the flat sides of the hulls did they suffer for this so with regards to the nelson class it was actually quite the opposite right from the beginning when it became clear that the g3 battle cruisers weren't going to be completed and instead the 03 battleships were going to be built instead literally the first specification in the general brief that the navy gave its designers was must have good sea keeping and that carried through all the designs so when they completed the nelson class actually had a very high free board for battleships of the period and generally seem to have very good sea keeping overall now obviously the king george fifth class did have some flaws when it came to its own sea keeping um which may water down the following statement slightly but it was noted that during the pursuit of bismarck when they were traveling at speed through relatively heavy seas rodney certainly had the better of it as compared to king george v now with regards to the flat sides of us battleships it did create a couple of weaknesses and this was obviously dictated by the fact that the ships had to get through the panama canal with somewhat smaller ships like the north carolina and south dakota it wasn't quite so much of a problem although some of the issues did still arise with the iowa class it did have a couple of issues the biggest issue which is something that comes up to varying degrees in a lot of discussions about the io class was because for their size they have a relatively narrow hole form this meant in turn that the bow is very long and very narrow which leads to negatively buoyant power which leads to poor sea keeping as we've discussed um at reasonable amounts of length at other times now you might look at other battleships and go hang on a minute they've got beams in the region of 100 506 108 feet iowa's around about the same ballpark so what what you talking about but the thing is those ships are considerably smaller when you look at ships that begin to approach iowa's displacement eye bismarck interprets albeit fair enough they are relatively wide ships anyway and then you look at something like yamato which obviously a little bit larger in terms of displacement although not length they are wider than the iowa class and with the obviously the size of the magazines and the machinery etc needed to support the 16 inch guns and the high speed that was demanded of it having the slab sides meant that in certain aspects over the center of the ship the torpedo defense system depth available wasn't quite as much as the us designers would have liked there were problems um design issues with the iowa's torpedo defense system that weren't related to this particular aspect of things but since we talked about whole design specifically it's just a general lack of as much width as they would have necessarily have liked and of course hydrodynamically as well although they did their best a slab-sided design is not the best for high-speed running this is why as we've said before you see this kind of uh almost human eye profile shape of the hulls of most battleships so if they could the u.s designers would have probably preferred to have a slightly fuller bow and possibly a fractionally shorter ship in exchange for a slightly more efficient whole form but they made the best do with what they had and so this this affects the iowa class a little bit more than the south dakotas and north carolinas simply because they they are smaller vessels and so proportionally it doesn't affect them quite as much christopher dent asks what failure mechanism is most common for a typical naval boiler as a result of battle damage the boilers catastrophically detonate as soon as they come into contact with cold sea water are you from flooding or do they need to be kinetically breached in some fashion like say a projectile entering the boiler space so the most common battle damage induced failure of boilers is usually projectiles coming in not necessarily even a full projectile but it can be splinters and fragments either of a projectile or of parts of the ship that have been displaced by a projectile there's certainly a number of instances especially in world war ii where bombs and such like hit a ship and detonated quite high in the ship and generally speaking the ship's protection did its job except for a little bit of spalling and one of those spooled bits of metal was then driven obviously at fairly high speed down through the ship and punctured a boiler or in other ways caused an engineering casualty now when you talk about battle damage ships flooding ships sinking it is possible to have catastrophic failures of boilers as a result of flooding and for example i'm personally relatively convinced that if you look over the footage of hms barum syncing especially some of the newer um digitally enhanced footage which is a little bit clearer i'm pretty sure that barham's boilers cooked off around about the same time maybe fractionally before the magazines did and i'm also relatively certain you can see one or two boilers doing an exit stage left from the explosion but that aside the thing is that technically speaking boilers that are flooded by seawater don't explode in the classical sense i mean it's not going to make an awful lot of difference to the person caught in the blast because you know very literal sense it still is an explosion but what happens is the boiler doesn't detonate just because cold sea water comes in what happens is that a boiler that's running at full power is obviously very hot metal expands freezing cold sea water comes in if it comes in in large enough amounts quickly enough then that's going to lead to very rapid cooling of some or all of the external surface of the boiler and cool metal contracts and so you get a differential uh heating and cooling of different aspects of the boiler to a fairly extreme degree this leads to cracks and as soon as you get cracks well there's a lot of pressure inside the boiler and the steam escapes through the crack and as it escapes through the crack it will widen that crack very very rapidly and you get a steam explosion and then well pretty much everybody in that room is pretty much done for at that point so this definitely could happen and in some cases it did i say with barham i'm pretty convinced it did however there are two factors that mean that this kind of explosion is relatively speaking rare one of which is that if a ship is in the point at the point of sinking usually obviously byron was very quick but usually people know what's going on um and so they have time to leave so fires would be doused if possible especially with oil fire chips switch off the the burners um and that gives the boilers some time to cool um obviously if a ship's going down fighting they'll need a certain amount of power and so some boilers might be kept running um to provide power if generators are offline or whatever but broadly speaking in the event of a ship slowly sinking they will have it's already switched off the boilers which means the temperature differential won't be quite as bad and obviously the steam pressure as well won't be quite as much the other factor to take into account is the speed of flooding if a ship is gently settling then yet water will come up but it will be much less likely to cause a failure of the boiler as the heating the with the heating of the boiler and the cooling from the outside by the water will be slightly more gradual and thus there's somewhat less of a chance of failure it really needs something like a ship going full pelt so boilers full pressure full powerful heat and then being sent to the bottom very very quickly it's as in the case of barham to get something like a steam explosion or was to say if the ship's trying to maintain power until the absolute last minute and then there's some kind of catastrophic flooding event in the engine room kurakinsama asks how would world war one's naval war and jutland in particular have been developed if george trian hadn't blundered by dying such a stupid death it is one of the ever-present questions of late 19th and early 20th century naval matters actually now for those of you who may be unaware uh admiral tryon died in the mediterranean during a collision between hms camper down and his flagship hms victoria which subsequently sank during a maneuver which basically started too close together as a turning radii of the ships intersected and camper down rammed victoria then pulled back water flooded in victoria went down and a lot of people drowned although notably not one lower ranking officer john jelico who happened to be there at the time well there's a another bit of history that might have changed with that particular incident but in any case now if admiral tryon had survived that he's not going to be in an active command by the time of world war ii the the sinking of hms victoria happened in 1893 and at that point he is 61 by the outbreak of the first world war he would have been 82 so he's almost certainly gonna have been retired at this point um and very very definitely not in active c command however if he had continued on the path that he was going he was held to be a very competent naval officer overall with a lot of good ideas some of them thought to be fairly radical but a lot of them centered around people actually thinking for themselves and coming up with innovative tactics and if you've watched the jutland series you can probably see exactly where this is going um the whole point of the maneuvers that it ended up with a loss of victoria appears to have been in some ways an attempt to get the royal navy out of this pattern of always follow orders exactly and to the letter now there is a huge amount of controversy over exactly why that maneuver went down the way it did um lots of different points of view my personal point of view is that yeah it probably was in some ways an attempt to get people to think for themselves especially given that before the incident took place he'd issued a memo where he'd specifically said that if orders were given the would otherwise result in the collision of two ships that the collision must be avoided and basically try and follow the spirit of the order as best as you can now that's an oddly specific memo to circulate to your fleet shortly before you issue a set of orders that everybody can see is probably going to result in a collision but if you go through some of the court martial documents it's fairly obvious that a lot of the initial reasons dash excuses given by some of the officers involved literally boil down to well these are the rules aren't they we follow the rules we follow the orders and yeah combine those two together and at least to me it seems fairly obvious what trian was trying to do unfortunately he obviously didn't quite succeed at least not in the way he was imagining so if he but if he survives he's probably one of the officers who at that point in his later years of command so probably be talking at late 1890s early 1900s is going to be trying to shake the royal navy out of its lethargy so you'll have admiral fisher trying to scrap older ships improve gunnery but try and will be trying to get people more back into the nelsonian spirit of thinking for yourself and following the spirit of orders rather than the letter and then once that comes to jutland you if the if the whole culture has changed in that manner or at least somewhat change then you might actually see some better results more specifically when it comes to things like actually telling people what's going on whether or not bt is in redeemable in that particular sense remains up for debate but certainly some of the knight actions with the various ships actually reporting back to their commander what's going on um ships taking a bit more initiative of i can see an enemy therefore i should probably shoot it that would almost certainly put satellites down apart from anything else amongst numerous other ships and even things that occur during the the actual daylight engagement itself in terms of various ships maneuvering spotting signaling um and actually beyond that as well trying was also trying to simplify the way signals worked quite significantly and that in and of itself could help because rather than very complex signals which say as well as well as not being particularly visible or waiting for the acknowledgement um caused with battle scorching to go sailing off on its own if you have trion's way of doing things which is a lot more creative thinking and shorter signals then a fifth battle squadron might not miss bt's orders to turn period and even if they did it would probably mean that fifth battle squadron would likely turn of its own initiative and come back in after bt much sooner which would then result in fifth battle squadron either being present or much closer when the bat battle cruiser action run to the south starts all of which would result in probably much better outcomes for the royal navy sui 420 den asks how important was flogging and the cat of ninetales to the royal navy in the age of sale so flogging did have a definite place and a fairly important place in the royal navy in the age of sale as both disciplinary measure and deterrence now overall it was quite common as a punishment when you tabulate number of floggings handed out as opposed to other forms of physical punishment but on the other hand it's also nowhere near as common as you might imagine from popular movies and and that kind of thing basically because well for some understandable reasons once someone had been through a vlogging they usually weren't that keen to go through it again which sort of a proof that of the deterrent value where you would see the most vloggings when you look at records of most royal navy ships and i say most because obviously all these things were given out at captain's discretion so if you had a particularly uh ruthless captain you could see a lot more flockings and if you had a more lenient one substantially less but anyway generally you would tend to see the most vloggings on a royal navy ship happen just after it's left port uh either on the start of its voyage or after an extended period of leave somewhere in the middle of its voyage and it was far more common on ships that had recently been crewed and obviously even more common still on ships have been crewed mainly by new service volunteers if a ship's been crewed and bear in mind when they start their commission a lot of royal navy ships in the age of sale get new crews they they go on long voyages they pay off every pretty much everybody bar a few key personnel go and they almost have a brand new crew when they start their next multi-year voyage um but if that ship has been crewed mostly by returning volunteers the number of vloggings that you'd see after having just left port is substantially less than say the number of vloggings that you might encounter if it's a brand new cr set of recruits from a lot of volunteers new volunteers and or press ganged individuals and that's partly to set the tone for the rest of the voyage these are the lines you don't want to cross and partly because obviously discipline with a new crew especially an inexperienced crew at the beginning of a voyage is going to be a lot um a lot more of an issue once everyone's gotten used to what you're supposed to be doing who you don't annoy which lines you don't cross the number of flockings drops off because again generally speaking you don't want to be issuing these all the time because if you keep issuing vloggings for no apparent reason then that builds up a lot of resentment and that's how you get mutinies and such equally if you allow discipline to break down entirely you could also get mutinies because people think well a little bit more freedom and we've pretty much taken over the ship so generally a good captain would have to keep a very careful balance of vlogging and other corporal punishment means available to him but generally speaking because in part of the system um where as we said a ship that was brought into commission tended to have a new crew of some description and partly also because well they're on voyages for very long periods of time and a lot of the crew would be living very close together so you definitely did need a system where you could say this is something you really really really don't want to happen have happened to you and it's something that applies almost equally across the board because you can dock someone's pay but if you dock somebody's pay that may mean more or less to any given individual because they might have more or less use for the money and so on and so forth whereas nobody wants to be flogged um so certainly not the way the royal navy did it so it was a fairly effective deterrent in most cases when used properly john pluseniuk asks during the second world war the us essentially fought two separate wars one in the pacific and one in europe other than prioritizing the defeat of germany i've never seen a comparison of the relative resources allocated between the two theatres nor how that allocation changed as the war progressed what were the relative allocations of u.s naval resources ships manpower etc between the pacific and europe the atlantic theatres and how did that allocation change from 1941 to 1945 so this is the kind of question that in some ways almost needs its own wednesday special to answer because there's huge amounts of detail that could be put into this but hey it's a dried up question so we'll try and cover as much as we can in as short as times we can broadly speaking the us naval commitment to the atlantic was nowhere near as large as their naval commitment to the pacific especially when it comes to larger vessels pretty much throughout war because well the pacific pretty much was a naval war period with the landings as a result of having naval supremacy at least in the local area conversely whilst the war in the atlantic was vital the actual sort of main theater of war on that side of things was in europe and the atlantic existed as a means of conveying supplies men equipment etc over to that theater as opposed to in the pacific where the actual ocean itself was pretty much the theater and the occupation of various islands served to enhance the range and striking power of those naval and air forces now that's not to say that the us's commitment to the atlantic was small the us in world war ii hardly did anything small but when you look at say carriers uss ranger which is the background picture for this particular question pretty much the only us carrier that is operational in the atlantic for any considerable period of time uh in terms of actually doing war fighting operations wasp is around for a little bit as well but it's fairly telling that outside of the occasional repair and working up period the york towns lexington saratoga the essexes etc they're all in the pacific battleships slightly different story the various north carolinas and south dakotas quite often pop up at points in the atlantic especially washington which spends a fair bit of time around but obviously also you get things like massachusetts fighting uh jean-barr so that there is a certain amount of battleship commitment especially because at that point that the threat from enemy battleships say with washington quite often operating in the arctic convoys uh to guard against things like scharnhorst interprets and that's still very much a threat so there is a certain amount of commitment there but outside of shore bombing efforts by things like texas you don't see the majority of us battleship strength in the atlantic um ex well except for maybe you could argue immediately after pearl harbor um when north carolina washington is still working up on the atlantic coast and most of the standards are either in repair refit or salvage but that that's a little bit of an anomaly cruisers again when you look at general us cruiser deployment there's a fair number of u.s cruisers that operate in the atlantic and the mediterranean but nothing compared to the numbers present in the pacific so tuscaloosa for example is a good example of cruiser that spends a lot of its time in the the atlantic and mediterranean regions but the majority of the rest of its class are all in the pacific now where you do see a lot of u.s ships compared to their overall production numbers operating in the atlantic is escort carriers and destroyer escorts and for obvious reasons because it's part of the convoys that are taking part in the battle of the atlantic obviously there's a lot of liberty ships going around as well but they're not us navy ships so we're going to ignore them for the minute um so yeah older destroyers destroy escorts and escort carriers you'll see quite a lot of those in the atlantic but even then the modern destroyers the fletchers and later the gearings etc they're all heading over to the pacific theatre and obviously there's a lot of escort carriers as well you'll see things like the independence class for example they're mostly in the pacific it's things like the bogues that are mainly in the atlantic and of course you can't forget long-range u.s navy aircraft patrol aircraft helping to close the mid-atlantic gap and the u.s coast guard which actually operates a fairly significant fleet of small ships doing various scouting recon weather report work which is actually incredibly important for the battle of the atlantic as well as some anti-submarine and convoy escort duties of their own in terms of broad change of allocation well you're looking at the us allocation to the atlantic from the start of the war increasing obviously quite substantially as ship numbers get built up in 42 and and then as a proportion it starts dropping off in 43 going through 44 and 45 although although some ships are pulled over into the pacific especially with the diminishment of the various access threats especially after the uh italians uh bow out of the war it's not so much that the us is pulling massive numbers of forces out of the atlantics more that their industries really hit it stride and they're building so many ships that the forces in the pacific are escalating in number to such a ridiculous degree that by comparison the overall numbers of ships in the atlantic proportionally make up a much much smaller number of the us navy's uh overall forces as compared to maybe what they did in 42 or only 43. leon wu asks what exactly is a frigate in both the age of sale through to modern times are or were they defined by a role or displacement or something else and the short answer is it changes massively over time so a frigate as originally conceived when the term first pops up in the uh 16 17th centuries um in some to a certain degree you could argue maybe very very very late 15th century but anyway um originally the term was more to do with a style of building than a particular role so obviously you have the classic speed protection firepower triangle a frigate at that point was held to be a warship so a relatively large vessel all at least as far as things went by the standards of the time but one that was more designed for speed and maneuverability so if you were kind of to back date the application you might describe something like a race built galleon as a frigate um obviously that's not what they were called but their successors were definitely called frigates and so you can see this in say the first couple of anglo-dutch wars there's a number of different warship designs and you look at them and you think well actually these are all ships that are fighting in the line of battle and there's a certain overlap between great ships and frigates in terms of firepower and size the consistent part is that the great ships are designed for durability and firepower whereas the frigates are designed for speed more speed and agility than the great ships are that's not to say they're not formidable opponents on their own they are especially some of the large ones but if you were to put a frigate up against a great ship in a one-on-one and they were just gonna have a knock down drag out slugging match the great ship is probably going to win um but the frigate can run away that then evolves so by the time you get to the classic age of sale a frigate at least as far as the british are concerned and most people tend to adopt this kind of classification or near enough is a fully rigged ship or so it's a rated vessel as opposed to something like a sloop um and it has a continuous gun deck but only has one continuous gun deck it can have more guns above the gun deck but it's not an official gun deck if you see what i mean um and so this basically means fifth race and sixth rates um the fourth rate in the early part of the age of sale is a double gun deck vessel and that's kind of where the definition of frigate ends if it has two continuous gun decks then the vessel is not a frigate but when you get towards the latter end of the age of sale with things like constitution showing up and various frigates that the royal navy builds in response these kind of by gun numbers at least start to enter the realms of the fourth rate even though they are frigates now that does lead to a rather interesting situation because you still have multiple gun decked ships of the lines and you have single deck frigates all the way up to the advent of iron ships but because of the additional weight expense etc etc of building in iron plus the need for having significantly larger guns you see things like hms warrior which is very very definitely a capital ship but it only has one continuous gun deck therefore technically by the standards of the time it is a frigate um it's an iron frigate uh but to everyone's sort of common knowledge just like well that means it's not a ship of the line but hms were very definitely can take on any ship of the line and win and so you get this sort of weird period in the 1860s and depending on exactly which accounts you would maybe in the 1870s where you see these iron frigates but they're actually the capital ships um then obviously the broadside ironclad gives way to the central battery ironclad and the turret ironclad and the whole thing kind of dies away and you lose the term frigate for about half a century or so and you just have cruisers battleships and then later on destroyers torpedo boats that kind of thing [Music] and then the frigate term reemerges again in the 20th century as a form of light escort ship and in some ways it kind of mirrors the some of the roles that the old fifth and sixth rates would do which was a lot of convoy escort work uh and protection that kind of thing but in a lot of ways it's also just they're reaching for some kind of term that's people they're not destroyers um because they're not viewed as fleet units armed with torpedoes with the primary intention of taking out enemy capital ships and defending against their own kind they're not cruisers because they're not big enough so what do we call them and this is where you get this whole thing of sloops corvettes and frigates are all terms that have kind of fallen out of use and suddenly all get brought back in as people are well they used to mean ships smaller than capital ships so let's bring that back nowadays frigates tend to be classified as such either because they're smaller than other surface warships in the fleet that aren't carriers and those get classed as destroyers and the smaller ships get classed as frigates but also ins in some areas of the world of frigates these days are either mono purpose ships or they are anti-submarine ships uh the the realm of the anti-aircraft warfare ship is generally speaking reserved for the destroyer but not entirely which makes things even more confusing and then of course you've got the fact that there are some ships that are classified as destroyers in some navies but other navies have ships they classify as frigates that are larger than those destroyers which which can lead to additional confusion and then of course you have some frigates which are designed for air defense which kind of takes the the well air defenses for destroyers thing out of the equation as well loch ness hamster asks what do the british intend to do with the german fleet after world war one worship's gonna be scrapped given away to other navies or put into british service so we've previously discussed how the german fleet might be split up if it was going to be split up and hadn't been scuttled but the cold hard reality of it is the fact the british wanted to keep as many of the german ships away from everybody else as possible effectively because it would weaken their own position there were a lot of german ships okay fair enough not all of them were of the latest design or particularly modern by the time of 1919 especially with things like the nationals and helga lens but things like the deaflingers bard and bayern are still competitive and the british would rather they just all go away um because if you start giving ships to other nations then obviously those nations have more ships which means that britain which is having to scrap a lot of its own obsolete ships will now have to build considerably more vessels to stay as the top dog which is an expense they'd rather not go through um at the time that this fleet was scuttled ironically enough the plan that the british and the americans had come up with was to actually scrap the vast majority of the high seas fleet and take the value of the fleet back off of the german total war reparations uh the the main sticking point was who was going to scrap what because whilst the individual scrap value of a ship is not a tremendous amount compared to its build cost the simple fact of the matter is that neither the british nor the americans had actually built any of this so scrapping ships in their own yards was a net profit for them and obviously both sides were like oh no i want to scrap that ship that's going to make me a lot of money and the other side of the negotiation was yes i know that that's why i want to scrap it at my shipyard and so on and so forth back and forth andrew delra asks decisive naval battles are a bit rare is there any other major naval war that was won by attrition similar to the battle of the atlantic quite a lot of naval wars are actually eventually won by attrition if you want to look at it through certain lens for example the napoleonic wars the naval element of that was actually largely won by attrition now you might think well hang on a minute you've got a lot of really big naval battles in the napoleonic war you've got the nile copenhagen and trafalgar if you're just going after nelson's and that's without things like camper down for example the second copenhagen um and uh battle of capes and vincent etc now yes those were important battles in the overall campaign however you'll notice one rather important thing about all of those none of them ended the naval war the battle of trafalgar has often held up as decisive and indeed it was but it was decisive more in the realms of scuppering napoleon's attempts at invading england and also in terms of establishing an ascendancy over the french and spanish navies there were still plenty of battles to come and so the blockade duty off of most of europe the constant raids the constant battles etc these things are all a kind of a nutritional warfare that grinds down the capabilities and numbers of the french and later franco-spanish fleets and eventually the blockade also grinds down the economy in actual fact as well the war of 1812 is very much a nutritional war um it the war of 1812 which is a really bizarre name because it doesn't last for just 1812 it goes on almost until 1815 so it's actually a three year or release bulk of parts of three years war um but anyway um whilst again you have the various frigate actions that have become quite famous none of those frigate actions on either side whether that be the capture of macedonian gorier and java or the counter capture of essex chesapeake president again none of those actually end the naval war they're highlights of it but they're just a small part of a larger campaign in actual fact what eventually brings the naval war of 1812 to a close is what was obviously the peace treaty but in practical terms of uh actively oper both sides actively operating significant forces what brings that to a close is again a blockade in that involves fairly large numbers of ships of the line and first line frigates brought over from the napoleonic conflict so again it's a nutritional kind of war and again it has a big impact on the economy of the person who or the side that ends up being blockaded in this case the united states effectively in general almost almost all conflicts where a naval element is either the primary or a decisive part of it are generally either one by attrition or by the threat of what the uh particular battle could mean in terms of attrition so it's actually weirdly enough it's the threat of what a navy can do in the event the decisive battle goes their way that's actually the thing that ends wars not the battle itself and this is actually a common misconstruing of mahanian thinking and weirdly enough something that even entire nations not looking at anyone in particular japan um got wrong is the mahan's doctrine in his rather famous uh pair of books about the influence of sea power on world history they don't actually say that you win a war by a decisive battle he mentions that decisive battles are very important and that's what you should aim for but what he points out is that control of the sea is what wins you the war the best way to get control of the sea is a straight-up decisive battle where you destroy your enemies fleet but it's then once you've got that control what you do with it that actually gives you the victory in the war and people who understand that that part of it they realize actually that's that's basically the summation of almost all naval wars because it's either one side gets the control of the sea and then inflicts a traditional damage on what's left of the enemy navy and the enemy nation itself or they one side gets control of the sea the other side looks at what that side is about the other side is about to do to them as a result and goes actually we'd rather let's just say that's happened and we've given up so cause then we're not don't get quite as much actual damage hugh fisher asks for someone interested in the architecture of warships in my case for building 3d virtual walkthroughs what are good sources for warship structural plans not just upper deck plans and he goes on to clarify that he's talking about something with enough detail to show the major spaces but maybe not to the level of detail of an anatomy of the ship book which to be fair would have been my first recommendation but if you're looking for something a bit more detailed than just a side profile an upper deck plan but you don't want to go into quite that level of detail um well i'd say if you want a book that covers multiple ships then norman friedman's books are actually usually pretty good um his various books on u.s battleships u.s cruisers u.s destroyers um and the one he's done on british battleships well two he's actually done on british battleships and so forth they usually have plans to the kind of level of detail you're talking about also r.a bert's series on british battleships um does a pretty good job of that so yeah good solid reference works like that will generally have that kind of important location on the ship plan details but unless a really good work or series of works like that exists for a given run of ships and for american and british ships all the way from destroyers cruisers all up to battleships and carriers those do tend to exist but once you get beyond that you either have to be very very lucky to find specific reference works or you have to get books that are specific to a given ship so for example bass gano's uh more recent book on the littorio class is excellent if you want to do a 3d model walkthrough of a littoria class ship but obviously it doesn't contain all that many plans for anything else so yeah if you if you have specific types of ships beyond the the more obvious british and american warships then let me know and i'll see what i can do about digging up appropriate resources there's an awful lot of top and side profiles for a lot of ships in various uh books but not a tremendous amount of book series at least as far as i'm aware for other navies that go into that level of detail unless you can get your hands on something like japanese cruises of the pacific war uh but that's incredibly expensive robert henry ilston asks how did cruz survive in the colder northern seas during the age of sail when on warships it would be rather difficult to have open fires or heating or enough storage for cold weather gear did they have to be specifically outfitted for those waters and how did that affect their combat ability etc so it depends on exactly what their purposes were uh which navy they belong to and how you define colder northern seas because obviously the north sea is not particularly the most pleasant of environments generally but the royal navy the dutch navy um at the time of the age of sail the various german princely states and the various scandinavian states um all had to operate in the north sea i'm pretty much round the year basis so there were certain elements of cold weather gear things like furs and oil skins and that's part of the reason not entirely but part of the reason why the trading things like seal skins and beaver furs and such like was such a roaring trade in this time period and yes if a ship's orders were to patrol a more chilly region of the world they would have to make sure to stock up on these kinds of things before they left and occasionally when they didn't that's when you got quite a few issues of course once you get into properly northern cold waters where you have ice for significant periods of the year a lot of sailors and navies would deal with the situation by just not being out there so for example in the baltic regions when you had sweden and russia going at each other there would be a season for war and then there would be a season where everything iced up and everyone just went home and sat in port and waited for the ice to go away if a ship was being sent up into these kinds of really northern waters whether that be in somewhere like the baltic or in the north atlantic if they were specifically assigned there and they knew that they were going to be in that region for an extended period of time such as say possibly over winter they would bring on additional heating equipment obviously not an open fire but you could have a ship's galley working fairly safely on a wooden ship and so similar kinds of enclosed fire boxes could be brought on board to heat the ship but you've also got to remember that most warships are built out of massive timber at the time in the classic sense of the word massive and that's actually a pretty good insulator if you don't have your guns run out so close up the gun ports make sure that most of the hatches are battened down etc and you'd be surprised with the body heat of several hundred men that in a of itself actually warms the ship up relatively well so you don't need quite the same level of fire boxes and things that you might otherwise imagine of course that is a relative term if you're stuck in an ice flow in the middle of the arctic you are going to need a little bit more than shared body heat to keep your ship warm but it's uh it's surprising just how warm a wooden ship with a thick hull can get if you just close up most of the obvious escape routes for heat douglas peck asks it's known that a big concern and great effort was put into closing the gap in the atlantic to provide better air cover for convoys from submarine attacks pby catalinas were valued near coastlines in anti-submarine warfare but was there any consideration put towards a seaplane tender specifically for catalinas or other smaller float planes that could be used for anti-submarine warfare or submarine searches as a band-aid to the mid-atlantic gap so there were a number of seaplane tenders that did actually operate in the atlantic the one of them is shown here this is the uss barnegat i believe it's pronounced and so there was some thought given however the the problem is that when you're operating a seaplane tender generally speaking they have to slow down or stop to deploy their aircraft so they're quite difficult to use in a convoy and obviously slowing down and stopping independently makes them a very nice target for u-boats but they were still used they did have a certain amount of utility the main problem comes from the fact that whilst they could support larger aircraft twin engine flying boats and such they couldn't carry them around and the north atlantic is a very nasty stormy environment so there's no necessary guarantee of being able to launch or recover a flying boat if indeed you built sea plane tender big enough to house something like a catalina at any given time and indeed well there's no real guarantee of being able to launch or recover a smaller aircraft either but because the smaller aircraft can stay aloft for shorter periods of time you can usually predict a weather window where that might be possible whereas because a catalina can stay aloft for hours upon hours on end you don't really have a guarantee if you launch if even assuming you built a big seaplane tender that was able to carry a catalina if you deploy it you have no guarantee that six hours later when it comes back the the weather will be good enough to recover it at which point you you have a major problem what the they were used for was to operate smaller air flow planes but obviously because they have a shorter range and less capability they're not able to provide a full service of air cover their overall sort of if you imagine that the radius of action is actually relatively small in relation to the overall mid-atlantic gap and they could also be used to support flying boats but that required a harbour or some other form of relatively calm location so effectively the seaplane tenders could act as mobile supply stations etc but there aren't really any major islands in the mid-atlantic where this is viable this there is this the reason why the allies occupied iceland it gave them a little bit of a boost out into the atlantic but until the really long range stuff like liberators came along it was it was effectively a catch-22 with the seaplane tenders you could either support something like a catalina in say reykjavik but it couldn't close the mid-atlantic gap or you could go out and use the planes that you could actually physically carry on a seaplane tender in the mid-atlantic but their range wouldn't be enough because they were smaller and as we said if you tried to build some kind of gigantic seaplane tender that could carry a catalina well at that point that you've effectively invented a slightly less efficient form of escort carrier and that is the kind of thing that they were going for more generally paul going asks as completed the nelsons were both relatively slow and over a thousand tons below the 35 000 ton limit how much additional speed might another thousand tons of machinery have given them well you're never going to get an exact answer without a massively complex series of calculations based on whole form strength of the drive shafts efficiency of the propellers the rpm that you'd be getting from the additional power well and of course the fact that well the nelson class were built with just under 2 000 tons of machinery on board so if you're adding another thousand tonnes you're effectively half again as much machinery now fair enough some of that machinery is generators and things not connected directly to the boilers and turbines but still there's an awful lot of additional space you're going to need so you're probably actually going to end up having to change the whole form unless you sacrifice a lot of other bits and pieces but let's say for the sake of argument that through tardis technology or because everybody is has i don't know packed the food store into the superstructure or something they somehow managed to find the space to really cram in another thousand tons of purely propulsive machinery roughly speaking then that would give the ships something between 65 and 70 000 shaft horsepower and again very crude calculations because i don't have the time to do all the necessary ones to give you a precise answer but given that the power of a ship and the cube of its speed do have a proportional relationship assuming all the other factors are listed are in some way dealt with it would indicate that the nelsons might have been able to hit somewhere between 26 and 27 knots probably pushing close uh slightly to 27. and now you might look at something like the king george the fifths and go well hang on a minute the king josephus needed a hundred and ten thousand horsepower to hit around about 28 knots yes but you've got to remember that the power requirements increase exponentially as speed goes up so even the difference between say 26 and a half and 28 knots is a fair bit amount of power and also the king george v's were larger and heavier than the nelson's so they would need more power on that basis as well plus as i said that's a very crude calculation based on a rough proportionality so yeah i'd say 26 and a half knots but plus or minus maybe half a knot to a knot once the finer details of the calculations are worked out which certainly would have been an interesting speed to see them go i mean although it wasn't obviously over a measured mile there are certain accounts as i mentioned in my video on operation rhinobunk that rodney might have even been able to push 24 and a half 25 knots given the circumstantial evidence on its chase of the bismarck even though its engines were clapped out so they certainly did have a bit of higher speed performance built into their hull design but well i guess we'll never know unless somebody happens to have on hand some of that lovely really complex hydrodynamic modeling software and fancy's plugging in all the facts and figures for the nelson and we figure out where we're going to stick another thousand tons of turbines and boilers texas and le shock asks looking back at the history of george bush after he was shot down and picked up by uss finn back he and two other airmen were apparently kept aboard for a number of days before they could be offloaded and during which they were pressed into chores around the submarine what kind of chores would they be remotely qualified for besides scrubbing on the deck and how would the submariners and airmen get along generally speaking submariners and airmen tended to get along relatively well largely on the basis that well the submariners had just saved the airman's lives so they tended to be somewhat grateful for that um in terms of george h.w bush specifically he was aboard finn back for about a month before the finn back could make its way back to midway to let him off and back to his uh carrier now as far as chores or tasks or duties of border suffering go there are a surprising number of relatively low level duties that you could probably get an airman to do at least under supervision relatively quickly um i had a look through various accounts written about uh his time aboard the finn back and to be fair a lot of them are fairly slim on the ground in terms of what they uh describe him doing but he himself did mention in an interview once that one of his duties was as a night watch person or night watchman aboard the fin back manning the co uh the watch station aboard up on the top of the conning tower so there's one i mean a standing watch aviators were chosen for having good eyesight amongst other things so yeah having him stand watch is a pretty obvious one to to have him do and there's always bits of cleaning low level maintenance carrying stuff around etc all of which needs to be done and can be done by practically anyone so i suspect when he wasn't doing uh watch duty and he wasn't resting that he probably would have been tasked with stuff like that so helping the uh carry food over to the galley helping carry bits and pieces of spares around or cleaning generally that kind of thing trey atkins asks was there ever a point that japan could have realistically beaten the us during world war ii if we take it as japan enters world war ii with the pearl harbor strike realistically no because at that point um america's blood was up enough that they were going to just crush japan almost whatever it took and to be honest by the time you got to 1945 even if japan had somehow pulled off a stunning series of victories at say coral sea midway um santa cruz et cetera even if all of that had gone japan's way by 1945 it would have just been a case okay lob nukes at them until they give up the reason i put this question here as opposed to in the alternate history and other questions in the live stream is because having done more in-depth look and research at the kantai kessin doctrine for the video on the same that was released a couple of weeks ago it strikes me that pretty much the only time japan had a realistic chance of quote-unquote beating the usa would probably have been in the early maybe the mid 1930s basically before the yorktown class come into play and america gets serious about building up its cruiser and destroyer forces again because you you can make a certain amount of argument that perhaps by the early 19th to mid 1930s or 33 34ish that japan has a slight advantage in the overall quality of its cruises given the torpedo almond and everything for a major battle and it's certainly been building a lot more modern destroyers than the us had been at that point with ruggio in service you've got a slight argument again for having a slightly better carrier arm with akagi and kaga as opposed to having on the u.s side lexington and saratoga pretty much on their own i mean technically the americans would also have ranger but [Music] the americans were a lot more reticent about using ranger in frontline duties as opposed to the japanese with rue show so badly mispronounced that that time um but in and then in terms of their overall anti-cass and doctrine the carrier striking power at that point not quite enough that the carriers going wrong badly wrong one way or the other is going to massively affect japanese tactics and strategy and so given that early mid 1930s war plan orange is still in effect their sort of idea of knocking out a bunch of the pacific fleet in a traditional and then decisive battle it kind of might have worked at least it's probably the closest time period that it's plausible that it might have worked and given that the u.s fleet is still based in san diego at that point they can't go after pearl harbor so there isn't a surprise attack on the cards and america is both pulling out of the uh great depression and is in a relatively isolationist mood at that particular point say relatively it's been in a lot more isolationist move previously and obviously um it was gradually coming out of that as well but that kind of point might have been about the only time that with a big decisive battle that gives them a decisive military advantage for a few years whilst everything gets rebuilt the japanese might have then been able to come to some form negotiated settlement with america america would almost certainly be back a few years down the line but in terms of winning a war quote unquote that's probably about the only time they'd be able to pull it off lucas cam asks how did the role of boy seaman in the royal navy evolve from the age of sail to the end of the first world war in a lot of ways the role remained relatively the same there were however two major differences between say a boy seaman if you're looking at i don't know 1750 1800 and 1914 the first of which is age although boy seaman could be uh recruited into the royal navy still at an exceptionally young age and even younger if you lied about your age um on an approximate scale the age of a boy seaman who is actually at c trended somewhat higher um so you could have a boy seem as young as eight in the age of sale by the time of world war one world war ii there are still um records of boy seamen who were in their early teens of 1314 um which might seem ridiculously low by our standards but it happened um and also on top of that by 14 19 14 19 15 and even world war ii 1939 generally speaking at that point boy seaman in their younger teens usually wouldn't be at sea they would be usually in port part-time aboard ships maybe taken out on peacetime cruising etc but it would only be when they sort of hit their mid-teens that you'd start to see them out at sea as part of the regular feature of the ship's crew but as i say this is a general trend and there are always exceptions that prove the rule the other change which was probably the slightly larger one because at the at the end of the day if you're 12 13 you're gonna be a boy seaman one way or the other in either of these two areas but the other thing was the kind of training and expertise that you would get so if you were in the age of sale you could be a boy seaman or a young midshipman in your early teens and there's not a lot that anyone would say otherwise whereas by world war one world war ii generally the the young officer candidates the midshipmen would tend to be schooled and trained ashore first so by what will one the the midshipmen and such like you wouldn't find them quite as young as you might find the occasional boy semen but the training specifically as well would would be somewhat different with boy semen in world war one and world war ii they would have more generalist training um seamanship navigation cleaning how to use various things like sounding ropes and weights and everything the idea being that by the time you got to turn into enable c minor 18 you would then be able to further develop those skills down a particular branch or path whereas if you were in the age of sale navy you'd actually start to pick up very specific skills that might dictate most of the rest of your naval career much much earlier so you might find yourself as a powder monkey for example and if you did you would probably naturally graduate into working the ship's artillery you might find yourself an officer's servant which might then either put you to walk into the idea of taking up a role in that kind of area as an assistant to the officers or possibly um if you were slightly better off in terms of your station at birth you might then become an officer candidate for uh lieutenant qualifications or you might help be helping the ship's surgeon or the ship's carpenter and that might be setting you up to develop your career down that line so effectively in the age of sale your career path although you might be able to change it but in large part if you were a boy seaman it would largely be pretty much determined by the time you reached 16 or 18 in the majority of cases whereas in the 20th century royal navy you would still have more options open to you by the time you hit the age of majority as opposed to in the age of sale captain landlocked asks what's the relationship between the royal national lifeboat institution and the royal navy like especially during world war one and two also why isn't it a government agency and the relationship between the rnli and the royal navy is generally pretty good apart from anything else they often need to work together as whilst the rnli obviously does a lot of search and rescue for people and ships in distress with when their crew aboard and at risk if there's a medical casualty who needs to be evacuated pretty quickly it'll usually be either a coast guard or royal navy helicopter that shows up to do so and so the rnli crew often uh cross train with royal navy uh training establishments in order to ensure that the handover and procedure when they're undertaking those kind of roles is done safely and correctly during world war one and world war ii the rnli was there mainly to as is its role is generally to rescue people from ships in distress and such like so they were quite valuable um and obviously the royal navy is going out there doing the fighting aspect the rnli is helping ships that have struck mines been hit by torpedoes gone aground or for whatever other reason are in distress near the uk coast um as far as the rnlies not being a government agency they were founded as a charity and apart from a short period in the 19th century where they did have government subsidy other than that they are basically a self-funding charity by combination contributions and legacies and it kind of grew up from for a variety of reasons and the main one is that there are places where people get in distress and also ships get in distress on a fairly regular basis but where it may not be economically feasible for a government paid agency to maintain a permanent station because you've got to remember in the uk if something goes horribly wrong with a ship that you're on or you get swept out to see you might see a visit from the rnli from her majesty's coast guard or from the royal navy depending on exactly where you are who's the closest and exactly how bad of a disaster you're in and so there are these sort of three tiers the coast guard initially when it was set up kind of overlapped a lot with what the rnli did in terms of rescue efforts for people in distress at sea but the coast guard these days tends to do more of the search part of search and rescue since they have access to a lot of helicopters they also have uh roles and responsibilities with regards to customs and border security and obviously they can do medivac lifts and they will do search and the rescue part where necessary um they're quite active in that but generally speaking the actual rescue element is more often than not handled by the rnli and then of course above that you have the royal navy if they need something truly heavy lift like a merlin or something like that or just so happens that if the navy is closer than the nearest coast guard base you might will get a navy helicopter or if you're really really lucky and you're sinking inside of a royal navy ship they might send out a boat or two for you lord hawthorne asks hi drak have you ever been to rnas yeovilton to visit the fleet air arm museum and if you have what did you think of it and would you visit to do a special on pre-cold war naval aviation and the answer is yes i have been to rnasey ovalton i've been passed an awful lot more times than i've visited it to be perfectly honest because i've been going to tankfest pretty much every year for the past five or six years apart from obviously this year and you tend to pass close by to uh yeovilton on your way down it's always very recognizable by what i call the gigantic concrete wine glass um which is this random structure that on or near the base that is just there and visible for miles because the area is very flat but um yeah it's it's a very interesting museum i definitely recommend going there the carrier experience is quite interesting um especially i mean there's loads of there's loads of naval aircraft so of course i'm going to like it but yeah the carrier experience they have is also quite good and they've managed to secure quite a lot of uh rare and interesting examples of aircraft as well so yeah definitely recommend a visit if you can obviously in the current circumstances at the time of publication there is a pre-book limited number system in place for obvious reasons um but if i would i do a visit to do a special pre-cold war navy aviation yeah yeah i would um i might look at doing that as a collaboration um because there's one or two people i happen to know who have considerably more experience on the aviation side of things than i do um but i yeah one way or the other definitely i'd uh look to do a special debt there and if it if it is just turns out to be me going down there to have a poke around in a bit of a film then obviously i will let everybody know ahead of time so if you happen to be in that neck of the woods and uh there's any tickets left given the limited numbers they do each day then sure i will quite happily let everyone know appalachian tiger asks what niche could a turtle ship have filled in an early age of sale european or mediterranean navy with role appropriate improvements to the design how long could they have remained viable combat units in the period when the turtle ship is mainly operating size and displacement wise they're actually fairly competitive with the larger european ships obviously there are some absolute monster galleons and such like but when you look at say drake's revenge and the elizabeth bonaventure the dreadnought the ark royal all those kind of ships the length and displacement wise a turtle ship is kind of competitive with a lot of them and superior to some so in a if you wanted to score on a scale of 1 to 10 where 10 is the absolute monster galleons and 5 is your average sized warship etc a turtle ship's probably maybe a seven or eight it's reasonably well armed in terms of numbers and size of guns again for the period and it's going to be a lot more agile for obvious reasons now the one weakness it's going to have is that a lot of its speed relies on rowers which means it's not a sustainable speed although it does have sales it's overall hull shape hull plan sale plan etcetera mean it's probably not going to be all that useful for a atlantic or north sea european navy um it's not quite as well suited for open sea war for open ocean warfare as a race built galleon or a full-size galleon or something like that but even there it could see a role as a coast defense ship i mean they even as late as the 1500s the especially the french but even to a certain extent the english were still using galleys and effectively this is kind of a very heavily armed galley if in the european sense um kind of with its full length with its full-length gun deck it's kind of actually more towards the gallius style of design but i say it's it's not quite the uh ocean-going hull shape that the gallius especially had so yeah as a harbor defense ship maybe something for the solent if you're on the english side of things or if you're down in france something to defend big harbour estuaries and ports where it would have quite the swansong is in the mediterranean where well the weather is either zero or 100 and nothing much in between but this is in the mediterranean this is where you see a lot of uh things like lightly built galleys and such like survive for a lot longer where burst speed is more important and the boarding although boarding is common everywhere boarding is very very important in the mediterranean warfare of the period and so this kind of vessel in the mediterranean would actually be very useful because as i say it's almost to the european eye it would almost be like a a variant on the gallius design and the gallius was one of the most powerful most important warships available in the mediterranean at this time period so it would certainly see quite a useful role there again it's whole shape perhaps meaning it's going to be more confined to coastal areas but that's not where nowhere near as bad as it would be in northern european waters because of the vast majority of the mediterranean could be defined as coastal um in some way shape or form and transiting those few rare areas where it's not is probably not going to pose too much of a hazard for it so yeah very useful in that respect and with improvements to design can they remain viable combat units well this kind of full gun length full length gun deck might then influence gallius design um so although it may not continue onwards in northern european waters for too long a kind of a full-length galleous full-length gun deck gallius probably would evolve out from it uh in the mediterranean they'd probably stay combat effective for probably around about the same length of time as galleys and gallius galleouses more generally did um and only eventually being supplanted as the classic age of sail dawns because at that point ships are just getting much larger whichever side brought a large number of these to something like the battle of la panta would probably have quite a decisive advantage because outside of ramming there's not a tremendous amount that most of the ships present either side could actually do to something like a turtle ship and ramming especially with the lightly built mediterranean galleys is going to be somewhat hazardous when you have that many guns pointing at you brian ropa asks i don't know how much you want to go down the route of a professional youtuber but have you considered doing drak designed limited edition kits for various historical warships with some of the proceeds helping out museums or museum ships i don't know if anyone else would be interested but i would be maybe throw in things like hms by jove thunderchild second amendment rights etc etc well when it comes to some form of uh limited edition drac sponsored uh model kit i'd be perfectly happy to do that um it just would need the uh companies who make those model kits to get in contact with me because i well i have no idea who which ones to even begin to contact or if they'd be interested so yes if if the other party is willing that that would be great um as far as the various ships that i've come up with in my uh loose design uh musings including obviously hms drack as well then yeah i'd be really happy to see them in model kit form um someone has actually thrown together a 3d model of hms track for me which is absolutely wonderful but in in terms of the others it would be a case of well it'll be a case of finding someone willing and able with their 3d design skills to turn 2d images into a 3d format and then finding some way of turning that into models now obviously these days with 3d printers i could 3d print a small number of them on my relatively small 3d printer if people fancy a model of about four or five inches or or less but obviously that's a relatively slow production process because i could probably only print maybe two two or three at a time um so i suppose again there are commercial 3d printing firms that might do it but even then that's a relatively low volume production as opposed to if someone wanted a a proper full-on sort of airfix revel style kit at one to 700 or something then again that would be a case of getting involved and talking to various commercial kit design and manufacture firms and again if they're willing to talk with me i'm more than willing to talk with them um but i need to know where to start in that regard first i i do kind of really like the idea of a one to seven hundred hms thunderchild model um but yeah i'd certainly be willing to consider it if other people willing to work with me snowstalker36 asks how do you feel about the us navy's habit of renaming classes when the lead ships were sunk in world war ii for example the astoria class becoming the new orleans class the navajo class becoming the seminole class and the cherokee class i'll be honest it's one of those things that irritates me no end but that's more more or less because the way people classify classes as a whole tends to irritate me no end uh to some degree considering that there's still no official agreement as to whether a class should be named for the first ship laid down or the first ship launched and commissioned um or possibly even launched or commissioned and normally this isn't too much of a problem because the the first ship of the class gets laid down it usually gets launched and commissioned first so it kind of wins on all categories but then you do get some instances where a ship will be laid down as the first of its class but another ship laid down later will actually launch and commission quicker because the yard that it was in did a better job and then you'll have a forever onwards slightly passive aggressive argument in various books as to what particular class of ship it should be because some of them will go with one and some of them will go with the other and then on top of that as you mentioned this habit that the us navy sometimes has of oh well the first ship that we named the class after has been lost so we're going to call it by this surviving it's like oh just just stop it the bismarck class didn't become the tirpitz class just because bismarck got sunk um i mean even the deutschland class of the second world war it didn't become the ludzow class when deutschland was renamed so uh yeah similarly the indefatigable class is still the indifferential class of battle cruisers even though the lead ship did go up in smoke at jutland and likewise the invincible class is still the invincible class even though invincible went up in smoke at chartland as well so yeah there's enough problems with coming up with a consistent class naming system for ships without people constantly renaming them in the middle of a war just because a ship got sunk gerald levitt asks why did hms barrick perform so poorly against admiral hipper for those of you who are unaware hms barrick and admiral hipper clashed in 1940 when hippo was trying to attack a convoy and ended up in a gunfire exchange with beric which hipper got decidedly the better of with beric sustaining four hits and taking a reasonable amount of damage that required a fair wild to fix whilst hippa didn't sustain any hicks from hits from beric's own counter fire so why did that happen well two reasons really one of which was that in a slightly odd turn of events um hippa had radar and beric didn't or at least if beric did it wasn't turned on um and partly also because of the weather so when uh hippa's attack developed hippa actually thought she was attacking a relatively undefended convoy and it came as something of a surprise to find it was actually a very heavily guarded convoy and her closest uh target was in fact uh atmospheric but she still had the weather advantage so that whilst hippa could see beric to a certain degree and had a certain amount of radar data coming back as well um although beric knew there was a target out there by all accounts beric was targeting based mainly on the gun flashes of hippa's guns because they couldn't make the make the ship out specifically and so in that context it's perhaps a little bit easier to understand why hippa um scored hits on beric and not the other way around simply because hippa had much better information and a better vantage point and beric was operating off of very sketchy con conditions as far as being able to determine what the ship was and where it was now obviously if beric had had radar switched on then that might have been a very different matter but from the history of the ship it would appear that it didn't actually have any fire control radar fitted until ironically enough it was under repair in early 1941 following this engagement at which point it received a type 284 fire control radar so if it had that then yeah there might well have been a very different story but it didn't and so hippo got decidedly the better of that particular fight brian smith asks i remember hearing that the royal navy wanted to get bismarck before getting into range of the luftwaffe coverage how effective was the luftwaffe against ships and separately which ship name has been used the most and or the longest by the royal navy on different ships effectiveness against warships and shipping in general depended greatly on what units were trying to do the anti-shipping strikes and to a certain extent what aircraft and weaponry they were trying to use but the luftwaffe did have certain formations which were highly trained in the use of anti-shipping weapons both dive bombing and torpedo strikes as well as the occasional attempt at level bombing and these units could be pretty effective um one of the most famous ones of course being fleega corp 10 um although whether that's flight corps zayn or flight corps x um i don't know german speakers let me know in the comments below but anyway they operated in the mediterranean for a good chunk of the war and were rightfully feared as highly effective ship killers the efficiency of the luftwaffe over the english channel in the north sea varied dramatically because sometimes you would have units that specialized in anti-shipping strike state uh going after coastal convoys and the like and other times it was the more generic luftwaffe elements that just happened to be going after harbors or anchored ships or targets of opportunity in terms of bismarck the reason they were particularly worried about getting into luftwaffe coverage there was well one unlike the english channel the north sea or even the mediterranean there was absolutely no fighter cover of their own possible for the royal navy ships um i suppose arc royal could have sent a few aircraft up but um arc royal trying to take on the entirety of the western france-based luftwaffe on its own that's not really a recipe for success then you've also got to take into account that the reason that most of the luftwaffe units were in western france was specifically for anti-shipping strikes and recon so when you're faced with little to no fighter cover and potentially quite a lot of luftwaffe aircraft who are specifically skilled in exactly this kind of environment you really really don't want to put yourself at risk in that manner as far as british warship names the most common sort of large ship name that might be immediately recognizable to people is actually hms eagle which depending on how you count it has something in the low to mid 20s um i say depending on exactly which ships that were called eagle you assign to the royal navy because obviously prior to a certain point there's the english ship or the royal ship um but not necessarily the hms but it the all-time winner at least so far appears to be uh hms swallow with a total of 39 vessels of either the royal navy or in service to the royal family or something along those lines um being recorded at various points especially an armed vessel of some description the latest version of which sadly isn't in royal navy service anymore it was uh it's now in service with the irish navy and can be seen here sam samuelson asks what were the most effective and widely used german mines in mid to late 1944 well it's a very specific question but i'm happy to say i can give you a very specific answer or at least most of an answer so i'm not necessarily sure about effectiveness because that would require going through every single allied warship loss to minds and then trying to figure out which minds are responsible for which which to be honest is probably a phd resource question in and of itself i'm even assuming you can do so but in certain terms of wide use the most widely used or most widely deployed german mines in the naval field in mid to late 1944 were the emc style mines which you can see here these are quite literally the classic spherical mine with horns um however there's a very strong contender in mid to late 1944 specifically from the lmb dash s type mine which is the magnetic influence mine a slightly modified version compared to their original model and specifically the dash s is the model that was designed to be deployed by s boats so given this mid to late 44 that's almost certainly going to reflect a massive mining effort by german coastal forces in response to the allied invasion and continued resupply of invasion forces in normandy and other areas thereafter bill cunningham asks on u.s navy ships returning from deployment they will often allow a tiger cruise this is where family members of the crew can join the ship to voyage with it from the last port of call to the home port when and how did this tradition develop and is it only a u.s navy thing or is it found in other navies as well as far as it being done in other navies well i can't speak for all navies obviously but i do know that in the royal navy they do occasionally allow family members aboard a ship albeit it doesn't appear to be from at least from my research um to quite the same extent that the us navy does it seems for the royal navy to be more a case of it'll be an especially organized event families board the ship the ship goes around does a few things puts on a few demonstrations and then comes back into port so it's usually a one day thing rather than the tiger cruisers which as far as i can tell appear to be for however long that last leg is so quite often a relatively long period of time as far as the origin of the tradition well it seems to be from the standing orders of relatively simple and effective idea that it's probably good for the sailors morale to have some family or friends aboard to help reacquaint them apart from anything else with the idea of some civilian life whilst the ship is in relatively safe hands heading on its way back home when well i suspect there's a few uh us military veterans who can probably provide a little bit more detail but as far as i can tell the earliest references i can find to a dependence day cruise which i believe is the other more mundane reference to it appears to be from the late 1950s so as far as being able to put my finger on any kind of documentation that definitively says yes this was a dependence day cruise um or dependence cruise and this happened late 1950s appears to be when it originated um but whether or not it goes back further than that i'm afraid i can't really answer definitively but i'm relatively sure there's probably someone out there who can and hopefully they'll even listening to this video sui 420 den asks how does the testing of large caliber guns work and how much space is required i what's the process for finding out things like well this 16 inch gun can penetrate 12 inches of armor at 25 000 yards do they simulate conditions on a testing range the answer to how much space is needed is a lot most naval gun testing ranges for somewhat understandable reasons are coastal i.e they they usually actually the start of the area where they actually base the gun is usually quite a few miles inland but the range generally will run all the way down to the coast so if they do happen to do a full range shoot the shell isn't going to go randomly ploughing into some poor old farmhouse or something obviously they do then have set up an exclusion zone in the sea as well but there you go now in terms of finding out things like the penetration values there's a number of ways of doing this at close range they will literally just set up a slab of armor plate and this was especially important in a lot of the earlier tests where the criteria was has to penetrate x amount of armor at x range and back in the 1800s or 1860s 1870s that range wasn't actually fantastically far because for the various reasons we've described in other videos you weren't going to be shooting more than a few hundred yards maybe just over a thousand if you were really lucky so you could physically set up a plate of armor at that range and shoot at it until you hit it and then you say oh well it has penetrated let's say four and a half inches of armor at 500 yards good right this this gun is now in service and that's all i really cared about um when once shells and guns managed to get significantly longer ranges in the 20th century it obviously became a lot more difficult because again we as we've discussed in the video for fire control it's actually incredibly difficult it's a target that's miles and miles away and well blowing up random bits of your own landscape might be doable but it would be expensive and very time consuming and then of course you have to worry about the possibility of duds so what they would tend to do would be to do a number of shorter range tests again in manners that we've described in previous videos to judge the impact force and speed of a shell and that could be calculated and then compared to what the mathematics said theoretically its speed and therefore energy should be at that given range and then there could be a synthesis of calculated values and practical values which could then be extended out to the further ranges and then using a bunch of fairly complicated mathematics you could work out overall penetration dependent on angle full angle of target range etc etc and that kind of calculation got more and more complex as time went on because with the sort of 1870 1880s maybe even pushing into the 1890s the angle of fall whilst it did exist was relatively small because again ranges were pretty short so when you look at armor penetration calculation formula for that period they're actually relatively simple they are probably only involve maybe three to five variables whereas once you get into the realms of dreadnoughts and if you say have a look at the nav webs website where there's the us uh empirical formula for armor penetration which as the name suggests was developed by the us navy which was one way of calculating penetration different navies had their own methods um you can see it's actually become a lot more complex and requires a fair bit of calculation and i mean you can fairly easily if you half decent excel create a spreadsheet that will do it for you but given that at the time that all of these formulas were created a computer was a person who was particularly good at handwritten mathematics um you can understand why it took a little bit of a while to generate the figures and then you'd end up with something that could look something like the picture that's being shown a penetration curve table they took various forms and then that would give you an approximate idea of whether or not you would be successful at penetrating the enemy's armor at a given range but at the same time this was more of a theoretical exercise that gave a rough idea for a ship's commander as to what he could expect if he happened to hit the thickest parts of the belt armor assuming of course that the information that a given navy had about another navy ship's armor thickness was completely correct because at the end of the day you're not going to have a captain of a battleship engaged in a fight with another battleship who's going to sit there and go hmm well according to my table because the enemy ship is at 30 degrees from me at this particular range i don't stand a chance of penetrating his belt armor so i'm not going to fire because one that's stupid and two there's plenty of other things on a ship that aren't protected by main thickness of belt armor that will break quite easily if you fling battleship shells at them so they still keep shooting it would mainly inform overall tactics and strategy so for example the royal navy's estimates of how far away bismarck's guns could penetrate hood's deck and at what point hood would move into a range where deck penetration was not likely and belt armor would be the main thing that would be hit informed admiral holland's tactics when he closed in on the best mark at the battle of denmark straight for example but as was witnessed in that battle it didn't stop hood opening fire well before it reached the range at which it was going to turn the other way that they can test on a firing range is to reduce the charge in a gun and obviously that reduces the overall velocity because calculating although you have to use drag coefficients and such calculating the velocity of a shell over distance is actually one of the relatively speaking easier equations to work out and so you could say okay well we know the muzzle velocity is say i don't know 2200 feet per second at the muzzle but 15 000 yards it's gonna be let's say arbitrarily 1 600 feet per second so let's reduce the charge to produce a shell that's flying at 1600 feet per second out of the muzzle and then we can set up a piece of armor and angle or whatever a point basically point blank range and fire it and because it's traveling at this lower speed you will therefore get the effect of a shell that's traveled fifteen thousand yards without actually having to shoot it fifteen thousand yards this generally could be a very good way of practically checking your calculations without putting out anything at too much risk but it could have certain disadvantages in the nature of the assumptions that you might be making some of which might have to do with angle of fall and the relative angle of the enemy armor etc but the biggest risk came when you were trying to do rather more esoteric things with your shell penetrating enemy armor so for example in my view at least one of the major flaws of the italian scheme for the decapping plate on the latorio class battleships was the fact that when they were testing to see what effect it would have on a 15-inch shell they didn't actually use a 15-inch shell they used a 13 and a half inch shell now they calibrated that to be moving slightly faster so that it would have the same kind of kinetic energy as a 15-inch shell which okay there's still surface area issues to be had there but as a kind of broad rule of thumb check it's probably valid to test the armor penetration of a 15-inch shell with given amount of energy in that way the problem is that because they were testing specifically for decapping d-capping is also proportional to the length of the shell and the diameter of the shell in question and obviously a 13 and a half inch shell is physically smaller than 15-inch shell and you can't do anything about that which means that some of that test data i suspect is actually probably not quite valid because a basically without having to go into a lot of very complicated maths when you're talking about decapping a shell has to tumble in order for the armor-piercing cap at the front to detach and separate sufficiently that it's actually going to make a difference and a smaller shell or projectile obviously can tumble in a smaller space a larger shell needs a larger space in order for that detachment to work so if you use a 13 and some point something or 12.6 inch or whatever in shell if you get a system that just about works against that it won't work against something like a 15 16 or 18 inch shell because there's not enough space left now if you leave tons of extra space okay fair enough but at which point why even bother testing with a smaller shell manani wanderer asks i seem to recall hearing or reading that one of the us battleships from world war ii never lost a man in combat is there any truth to this and also were any other ships salvaged and put back into service after fully sinking as per the hundley so yes the ship that never lost a crewman in combat was uss massachusetts which as i've said before therefore makes it my choice of ship to sign up for if i ever get time traveling thrown back into world war ii because shockingly enough i actually like life so i will stay on the ship that's guaranteed not to lose anybody now as regards ships that were salvaged and put back into service after completely sinking there were a number it depends how you define fully sunk because well one of the easiest examples obviously a lot of the ships at pearl harbor they were sunk they were on the bottom um and they were salvaged and brought back into service for the majority of them um albeit that obviously they sank in shallow water and some of them even though they hit the bottom there were parts of them that were still above water um then you've got a number of ships as one of the what is pictured here that were sunk by japanese artillery during the siege of port arthur in the russo-japanese war they were put back into service after the japanese refloated them there's a couple of submarines during the immediate run-up to and into world war ii which sank again in relatively shallow waters of british one one of the british t-class being one of them which sank were salvaged brought back up and put back into service again seidlitz is actually a good example because it definitely sank when it was in port but obviously it came back again into service and so i will even then by that measure queen elizabeth and valiant as well sunk by italian frogmen and then salvaged and brought back into service but if you want to go with slip beneath the waves completely very deep well relatively deep down and then brought back up into service it's pretty rare because one it's the deeper the water is the more difficult it is to get at the ship and two well to make a ship sync usually requires relatively catastrophic damage in the first place but if it's had the time to drop any significant distance and accelerate under the water when it hits the bottom that usually does even more damage and generally will render the ship not worth salvaging there are one or two exceptions to that but the majority of the exceptions you'll find will be further back in history so wooden warships when they sank will a they mass slightly less be their negative buoyancy when they start to sink is generally speaking somewhat less because obviously wood in and of itself is relatively buoyant and um as a result when they hit the seabed there's usually less damage and also they don't tend to require quite as much catastrophic damage in some cases in order to sink looking things like mary rose and vassa and so there were was practices back in the age of sale and previous to that of salvaging ships that had sunk completely and bringing them up so they they tried to actually do that with mary rose um in in tidal zones it's in entirely possible to do you basically wait for the low tide you get a few intrepid divers so this has to be relatively speaking shallow water but so not in the ocean depths um but then you can sling ropes under a ship um attach those ropes to a couple of very very lightened uh hulks either side tide rises ships go up they lift the ship you can then tow those into shallower water tide goes out ship settles on the bottom shorten the ropes repeat the exercise and eventually you can bring it into shallow enough water that you can start pumping it out patching it up and re-floating it and a number of warships were salvaged in that manner so they tried it with mary rose but that didn't quite work mr v asks which was more out of date uss texas of 1892 during the spanish-american war or the uss texas dreadnought battleship during world war ii now as far as the two uss texas and where's the plural of texas is it texas's tex-eye answers in the comments below um anyway the first uss texas as compared to the second one in the spanish-american war in world war ii respectively it's a little bit of both really it depends whether you're looking at it in direct comparison to the people that they're actually fighting or in comparison to the world generally because if you look at the first uss texas um then by the time of the spanish-american war against the spanish she wasn't massively obsolete um in may i mean to be fair that's mainly because a lot of the spanish fleet was truly obsolete and as we've discovered um in one of the videos we did on that particular conflict they really couldn't shoot straight um so with her armor and heavy armament in texas for example okay she might not be a straight match for paleo but the spanish pre-dreadnought but she'd probably give a very good account of herself and that's the strongest ship in the spanish fleet so so not at all obsolete for the spanish-american war against spain particularly but in the broader context of battleships under construction and just entering service at the turn of the 19th to the 20th century then yes in that respect the first texas was hopelessly obsolete it still had comparable speed uh but it had the last generation of armor plate it had harvey whereas the newer ships had cropped steel it had a very weak armament compared to pre-dred naughts of the turn of the 20th century um and yeah it really wouldn't have stood that much of a chance against the modernized ships now when it comes to the dreadnaught battleship texas it's almost the other way around because if you consider say texas versus bismarck or texas versus yamato um or indeed i mean okay with the germans that's probably about the only one well the sean halls have the speed i guess but that's probably about it but when you consider say texas versus nagato as well in the sense of the enemies that texas it would be directly fighting and their sort of top-line ships kind of the analogy to the spanish palaio in that respect the dreadnought battleship texas is actually more obsolete because well texas versus yamato sorry that's that's really not going to end well um apart from anything else but in terms of the broader context of texas as a battleship in in the context of all the various navies it's getting on a bit but there are actually still plenty of other battleships around that texas is fully capable of fighting that are either through modernization or recent construction relatively speaking modern because she's still got decent fire control equipment she's still got those 14-inch guns they will still hurt her main disadvantages are well a slightly obsolete armor layout but it's still relatively uh decent in terms of thickness and durability and her speed but considering that she can shoot out well past practical battle ranges the speed is it's an issue but it's perhaps less of an issue so i said yeah against something like bismarck nagato or yamato texas would lose but if say texas was going to go and fight a congo or fuso and issei maybe ashan horst the sean was a bit of a difficult one because it has speed and armor but the the gun power is a little bit anemic um or say one of the modernized italian ships which have again they've got the speed over texas but they don't have the armor all the firepower then texas is actually quite competitive with those whereas the the pre-dreadnaught texas really wasn't competitive with the majority of the sort of the leading powers fleets so yeah hopefully that's as clear as mud john mccarthy asks back in the days of coal-powered steamships culling was an arduous filthy job done by manhandling sacks meanwhile the ship was stuck in harbor for days at a time were any methods developed to mechanize and speed up the process to a certain degree yes when navies could be bothered and when ship design was correctly done so for those of you who like model railways and i know there's a few of you out there listening to this i highly recommend looking up the pearl harbor calling station in sound of the world war one immediate post world war one era because that thing is a beauty of railway engineering and that was designed in part to to help speed up and mechanize to a certain degree coaling now the two main problems was one where are you getting your coal from and then two how is it getting into the ship uh as john mentions there's quite a number of ships where it's literally put it into man portable sacks and they get hauled down and through the ship into the various bunkers and of course if coal is coming in from a dockside that's one thing the ship might be almost level with it if coal's coming from another ship completely you might be level with it but it's probably going to be at sea or something like that and it's going to be a little bit interesting and dangerous or it might be coming from ships or barges coming alongside as per this photo now in that those respects like like you can see here and also in places like the pearl harbor calling station there was a degree of mechanization brought in because if so the most basic form would be here is a big pile of coal here's some shovels here's some sacks people have to put the coal into the sacks and then trudge onto the ship down through the ship into the bunkers chuck the coal and then come back and repeat the process in this case as you can see there are people down in the coal barge filling larger sacs which are attached to the cranes which are then brought up and in this particular case as you can see on the bottom left there is actually a hatch with some coal scattered around it where the coal can be shoved which will then go down to the bunkers so that obviates a certain amount of the um trudging the coal all the way down through the ship although there would still need to be a party down in the bunkers to redistribute the coal because they can't just sit in a big pile in the middle of the bunker it has to be properly moved around so this would limit the amount of backbreaking labour to a certain degree with with this particular method mainly through the use of that hatch but also those little cranes and when you look at the pearl harbor calling station there were some absolutely massive claw cranes so you wouldn't even necessarily need the um the coal party down here like you have with the barge you could in theory just grab a bunch of coal and have it craned onto a ship and as long as that pile could be shoved into a hatch they'll go down to the button because like that in theory your calling party would consist of a few people to make sure the crane went to the right place and then use brooms or shovels or whatever to shove the coal into that um shoot and then a few people down in the bunker to redistribute it which would be a far far cry from almost the entire crew laboriously trudging sort of 30 40 kilo bags of coal for days on end aaron davis asks can you relate any tales of ships getting into impossible positions that prove decisive in a battle this is impossible as in one side saying well there's no way to get a ship in there it's just too shallow too narrow etc the ship just won't fit and the other side proving them wrong there's actually quite a few examples of this one of the easiest ones is actually the knight action at guadalcanal which saw kirishima sunk by washington the japanese estimated that the various channels and islands etc that made up that particular chain had waters that were too shallow and too difficult to navigate for the u.s to risk sending in any of its big battleships which case and then they sent the congos which were almost as large but never mind um so yeah the the reason that kirishima was there in the first place was because they didn't think the us would dare risk a supposedly slow and ponderous deep draft battleship in such an environment and as it turned out not only was the us prepared to do that it was prepared to do it with two battleships which as it turned out was probably just as well um and of course the japanese lost kirishima to uss washington another example would be the battle of the nile as shown here where the french had their defensive line anchored in they reckoned the the water between them and the shore was too shallow and the approach too narrow for anyone to get in that side so they're waiting for an assault from the sea and nelson just turned around and went yes you say that this is impossible i however say half my fleet goes behind you and as such you had the battle of the nile and that was pretty much the end of napoleon's ambitions in egypt then during the last siege of constantinople the ottomans needed to get warships in a certain part of the sea around constantinople to complete a blockade and this was impossible because of the defenses and then the ottomans decided right well if we can't access this part of the bosphorus by sea then we will just access it by land and overnight hauled a bunch of their ships up onto land rolled them across the land past the defenses and back into the sea again and then showed up where they were least expected and least welcome federico bozzi asks were heavy cruisers with the exception of des moines worth their cost or was it better to go with more six inch guns instead of less eight inch ones so by the use of heavy cruiser we're gonna go with the sort of interwoven world war ii period and as you said with the des moines um we're entering the realm of the auto loader so if we're looking at the period wherein you have the actual distinction between heavy cruisers and light cruisers i later part of the treaty era system but before auto loaders it's a very specific period but it depends to a great extent what you're trying to do and the reason for that is that if you're looking for a ship that will kill enemy cruisers and can potentially threaten larger enemy ships to some degree then you probably want a heavy cruiser i.e something with an 8-inch gun whereas if your plan is to fight escorting ships such as destroyers then you want something that's more rapid fire and more numerous uh your six inch gun and then with the quick firing six-inch guns that were coming around about the time of the towns and the brooklyns then you can consider the six-inch gun also for fighting an eight-inch cruiser but that's specifically because with the treaty system it's very difficult to balance a treaty cruiser and so most of the eight-inch treaty cruisers have armor that's penetratable by six-inch gunfire so it really depends as i say on what kind of mission profile you're looking at and also the time of engagement because whilst a six-inch gun cruiser can in theory at the same kind of displacement overwhelm a 8-inch cruiser with considerably more six-inch shells than the eight-inch cruiser can get off eight-inch shells that does require firing over time so an engagement of multiple minutes and i think this is why you see with the japanese most of their cruisers go for eight inch guns because they're envisaging a kind of very fast-paced night battle where they might only get off a handful of salvos at any given target before having to switch target or they're moving on to engage battleships or whatever at which point the individual heavier hitting power of the 8-inch salvo makes more sense whereas with the us navy whilst they like the 8-inch gun for its long-distance hitting power and the fact that it means as fleet screens the eight inch cruisers can form a useful supporting element against enemy capital units especially obviously as with the case of with he a against lightly armored vessels like the congos um if the battleships need any help there but if but when they're looking at cruisers they're going to fight other cruisers specifically you get things like the brooklyns and the cleveland's because they're anticipating much longer form engagement and likewise with the british they have the counties but when they're building things like the towns they're thinking about prolonged engagements either when someone's trying to break into the fleet screen to get at the battleships or if they're escorting convoys you've got surface raiders and such like or if you're going after enemy shipping you need to carry a lot of ammunition and so in those circumstances the six-inch gun makes a bit more sense so yeah it's it's really down to mission profile ideally if they could i think all navies probably would have gone for eight inch heavy cruisers but that would require the treaty system to either be highly modified or non-existent because that was the general trend of cruiser guns but when you're constrained to 10 000 tons then there are numerous roles for which a six-inch gun once the quick-firing technology is introduced in turrets actually makes more sense than an eight-inch in certain circumstances sdf-7 asks a fairly complicated question that basically boils down to how is force distributed on a ship when it's in a dry dock and do designers have to specifically factor that in when it comes to designing ships as opposed to just designing them to support themselves in water ships generally are constructed so that all loads eventually lead down to the keel which is why the keel is so vital break the keel and usually the ship's basically doomed because it'll tear itself apart there are occasions where particularly strongly built ships or ships where they've had a keel break that hasn't involved in moving any particular speed have been able to be recovered but required massive work to repair uh but the longer the short of it is effectively most of a ship's load vertically will or can transition down to the keel which is why it has to be so strong now when it comes to putting a ship in dry docks one one of the major problems with just balancing the ship on the keel and also obviously bearing in mind that a lot of ships by the time you're talking about pre-dreadnoughts and dreadnoughts are fairly flat along the bottom for long sections which means that the keel is also a good place for distributing a lot of weight because there's a lot of overall surface area relative to the mass and size and shape of the keel that can be placed on a flat surface or near flat surface if the whole curve somewhat um as opposed to propping things on the side so as a result this is why you see ships mostly resting on keel blocks as you can see here with oregon because of course i'm going to use this picture when we're talking about force distribution within dry docks now that's not to say that you can put absolutely everything there because well apart from anything a strong gust of wind and it could fall over sideways so you do have to prop it all around this becomes less of an issue when you're talking about steel vessels with older ships the wooden warships the structure the structural loadings are much more diffuse so you have to prop them in a lot more places with sort of full-on structural props this is why when you take a look at something like hms victory um in dry dock when you look through the various iterations of hull propping that it's had there's usually quite a lot of them now obviously with advances in modern technology and calculations with more recent props they've managed to put in their management in fewer but there's still quite a lot of fully load bearing props whereas with something like oregon as you can see you can support the entire ship mostly on those heavy guild blocks at the base and then you've got these side props which are mostly i say there to stop the ship falling over and then there's a few props that will go around the the rest of the underside of the hull which will partially take the load but again they're in large part for stability purposes but they will be positioned normally uh opposite structural beam elements and frame elements of the ship rather than just onto the hull plating so again the stress is being transmitted into the skeleton of the ship if you like and you've got to remember when you're building a steel ships when you look at some of the dockyard photos that kind of skeleton of the keel and the framework is self-supporting it has to be before they add all the various bits and pieces that go inside and onto it and this is effectively the it means that designers generally don't have to think specifically about dry dock loading because when the ship is being built um on a slipway or whatever it has to be self-supporting outside the water at that point anyway um now fair enough when it's launched it's not got a lot of stuff like superstructure guns and some other major elements attached to it yet and so the overall load does increase but there are safety factors built in and also at the end of the day when a ship is being thrown about in the waves let's see there's going to be sudden movements of the overall ships loading so if you're in a fairly sharp um short wavelength atlantic storm or north sea storm if your ship is plunging or rising over in overall under a wave you might find that a third of your ship is suspended in mid-air now if you're in a pre-dreadnought that might mean something like four or five thousand tons worth of load is completely free hanging and so the the moment of force is going to be when that where where the ship re-enters the supporting element of the water so that kind of point is going to have to withstand that entire turning moment of thousands of tons and obviously the bigger the ship even more you could be talking about 10 10 000 plus tons um now obviously that load does get distributed through the structure of the ship through the uh the hull frames and such like so it's not all being exerted on just the keel um but that force will transmit through the say the to the structure of the ship and eventually down into various other elements of the keel so the bow doesn't fall off or something yes the famous front fell off uh sketch being called unto there um so yeah as as stf7 mentions it's difficult to explain it fully without glossing over a huge amount of complex engineering but the very short form of it is that between the whole framing the structural beams and girders and the keel a ship is self-supporting generally so as a result you don't specifically need to take into account what if we haul it back out of the water because there's so much safety factor involved in the design of warships that to be perfectly honest even if you would think even if the designer sat down and thought about only the loading involved when the element of the ship that's actually launched is being built and obviously that being freestanding outside the water the amount of safety effect you'd have to put in any way just to make sure that that survives this the loading at sea in rough weather you'd end up with a ship that can quite happily sit out of water in an environment like a dry dock mostly on its keel without too many problems where you do have problems is that obviously all of this is designed to be mainly vertical loading so if you get a ship that rolls over or either capsizes onto its side or goes completely upside down the structure isn't designed for that and so once a ship has capsized if it capsizes violently or particularly far or remains capsized for any particular length of time especially when you talk about steel warships that's when you start to get irrevocable damage to the whole framing because all of a sudden that load that would be transmitted ultimately down to the keel is being transmitted down to some side element of the ship that was never designed to take that kind of loading and then you're in trouble although do bear in mind we are talking about warships here so what merchant ships and their designers happen to do can range from things like icebreakers that potentially have an even stronger whole structure than a warship all the way down to cheap manufactured cargo ships that will fall apart in the first major indian ocean storm that happened to pass through kevin mason asks could you explain the difference between a three gun turret and a triple turret i can but i indeed i actually already have so if you go to dry dock episode 84 at the time stamp of 35 minutes and 48 seconds you will find me answering that particular question so over there over to there so i guess you get two questions next week or next month so just remember that leops 1984 asks when did major navy stop using slipways for constructing warships in the 30s and 40s it appears to be a mix of graving docks and slipways for capital ships but postwar seems to be almost entirely graving docks what led to this change well they haven't entirely abandoned slipways for the launch of major new capital ships as can be seen in the background uh courtesy of stefano ferrara this particular lhd the italian i think it's trieste um again feel free to cover correct pronunciation in the comments as you can see is being launched from a slipway um i must admit the first thing i thought seeing this video was when you see these little uh rigid inflatables there so that's a that's a very bold move you're making there i wonder how well that's going to pay off for you but yes so yeah slipways are still under a fair bit of use the thing is the the larger the ship the more energy it has as it goes down the slipway and the further it goes off into the basin which i think we've covered in other drydocks basically the problem is that a lot of dockyards that were built with slipways that allowed a run out of a certain amount back when ships were a lot lighter and now ships are a lot heavier doing that would be um interesting shall we say plus it means that when you're expanding your dockyard facilities you don't have to worry about looking for areas with long slip way runs because if you can just float things out it makes things a lot easier now you can see there's an awful lot of momentum being arrested in this particular case they're very very short bringing that up very very short but you can actually see just how little room they've got with that slip way i don't know exactly what measures they use beyond the traditional weights and chains and pulleys and cables and stuff um you can see from the steam and smoke there's a fair bit of friction being burned off there but um yeah that's an awful lot of ship to get moving and then stop again fairly soon and you can imagine if that runs or a little bit too far along i mean there was the launch of the pre-dreadnought albion had a problem where basically they launched in similarly confined waters um except that the stopping measures didn't work as well as intended and ended up flooding a lot of people and almost running ashore the other side so yes um engraving docks once you've dug them out which is a bit of an effort but it does make it slightly easier to just float ships out if you have limited space um so that's why but the slipways as we said still used in a lot of places where they exist colin ware asks rear admiral daniel callahan at the naval battle of guadalcanal was his indecision in opening fire a stroke of luck that allowed the range to close to a point where his outgunned fleet could cause significant damage to larger units of the japanese force or could better results have been achieved if the u.s had taken better advantage of its radar to land the first hits of the engagement to be honest it's it's a bit difficult to judge um because there are elements of the battle that could have gone better if the us navy had been able to open fire sooner and there are elements that could have gone a lot worse if they had so one of the ways that a lot of the us units were either badly damaged or knocked out was because they effectively could get swarmed in the sort of close-range melee action that occurred you could have destroyers just rolling up or like the poor old atlanta suddenly finding themselves in the crossfire of half a dozen japanese ships and not a lot that they could do about it um so in that respect if action had been joined further away so they could keep their formation more they would have been able to mutually support each other better but on the flip side the japanese that would same would apply for the japanese um also if they'd been able to use long they're opening fire at longer range using the fact that they could see the targets on radar and again keeping their formation that would have probably allowed things like atlanta and juno to do a lot more damage to the japanese destroyers and it would have allowed some of the heavier u.s ships like portland and san francisco to do a fair number on some of the japanese cruisers however the flip side of that is that it meant it would also mean that the japanese would within their formation be able to send off quite significant salvos of long lances which well between the long lance being a relatively salty weapon for world war ii and then in fact it's the middle of the night the americans probably wouldn't have seen coming um so with a lot with a little bit more time and a little bit more sort of deliberate thought going into launching mass salvage of long lances as opposed to kind of point blank oh quick launch um and some of the point-blank rapid overwhelmings of some of the japanese destroyers that occurred you could end up seeing more u.s losses to the long lances the other thing is that a lot of the damage that was done to hie which was the big kill of the battle will be somewhat delayed was because a lot of the fire that it took was either pretty much point blank fire at which point the eight inch shells of the american cruisers could punch through and also from drive buyers from destroyers and such where they were physically under the he has arcs of fire so they could shoot up the superstructure the bridge and various other unarmored sections and do damage as well as drop the occasional torpedo in without here being able to meaningfully reply of course if they're further away and the action starts then the japanese still have very good night fighting tactics and abilities and any sort of long distance torpedo launches the japanese have more chance to dodge the destroyers and cruisers are going to be firing at here here can definitely then counter fire so they're going to take damage a lot lot quicker and also at longer range he is armor relatively thin as it is for a capital ship is probably going to be able to resist eight inch fire a lot better and whether or not the destroyers will be able to hit at longer ranges with their five inch guns is somewhat open to question depending on the range itself also depending on the fact that well they're going to be under fire and your accuracy goes down with distance anyway and of course even if they do score hits the chance of them scoring the kind of concentrated hits that they did to ea superstructures is very much reduced so certain elements would favor so the engagement of the lighter elements would probably favor the usn for longer range fire but the overall balance of power when you consider the torpedoes and the heavy elements of the japanese force would probably favor the japanese so overall it's i mean it was a horribly nasty battle with lots of losses on both sides but if the us navy had opened fire sooner if they'd had slightly more coordinated combat information systems and use their radar uh contacts to look for and then engage the targets i have a feeling overall it might have actually gone worse for the us navy um especially because if the japanese admiral isn't wounded and had half his staff shot up then he might realize that he's actually winning the fight and he can press on to bombard his actual targets which of course would be a net negative for the us brian ropa asks given edward sheehan's exploits finally being awarded the victoria cross can you name another sailor or naval airmen whose deeds you feel are deserving of their nation's highest commendation and if so who are they yes there is one candidate that immediately springs to mind that would be captain pettigrew of the s s beaverford now some of you will have heard me talk about this before but ss beaverford played a remarkably little mentioned role in the protection of convoy hx84 which came under attack from the german deutschland-class panzer ship admiral shir now what that engagement is most famous for is the on merchant cruiser hms jervis bay launching itself at admiral shear in a gallant but ultimately doomed action which saw it sunk now that's not to diminish in any way shape or form the sacrifice of jervis bay and its captain and crew and indeed uh the captain of the jervis bay rightfully got a posthumous victoria cross for standing off against admiral shear for as long as he could however ss beaverford was as the name suggests not an armed merchant cruiser it was part of the convoy and it only had a absolute minimal armament basically to take care of maybe the odd u-boat that was dumb enough to surface close by and although it's not fast for a warship at 15 knots and equipped with turbines it was actually relatively quick for a merchant vessel so once the jervis bay had gone down buying time for the convoy to scatter beaverford actually had a very good chance of being a survivor of the convoy it could have turned its heels put on maximum power to its engines and well it's kind of like if you're trying to run away from a tyrannosaurus rex you don't have to be faster than the t-rex you just have to be faster than everybody else and yeah beaver food could have got away but instead captain pettigrew sent out a wireless message he just said it's our turn now so long the captain and crew of ss beaverford and bear in mind they're not they're not royal navy they're not royal canadian navy they have no obligation to do this but they turn and engage admiral shear with a three-inch bow gun and thanks to jervis bay breaking uh admiral shears radar the sheer can't see beaverford when it keeps tucking in and out of smoke and so thus starts a several hour engagement where beaver beaverford basically baits and fires on sheer consistently drawing fire upon itself to allow the work that jervis bay had started to continue and indeed it succeeds because there are 38 ships in the convoy and shear only manages to take out six of them including beaverford and jervis bay and the other four were mostly taken out in the gap are between jervis bay being taken out and beaverford engaging so beaverford definitely saved an awful lot of lives and although the captain was not military therefore was not technically eligible for the victoria cross britain does have a highest gallantry award for civilians which is the george cross and i think at the very minimum captain pettigrew deserves the george cross um obviously now or posthumously but the crew also deserve um some form of recognition and it's very sad that they haven't actually really got that paul from chicago asks what is a lake freighter and what do you think happened to the edmund fitzgerald well a lake freighter not sound too glib is a freighter that operates on a lake but more specifically um it's tend to pretended to be held as a specific type of freighter that operates in the great lakes region between the us and canada the main distinguishing features of it of them compared to ocean-going freighters is in structural terms is mainly the fact that they have a shallower draft partly because well it's lake and some parts of the lake obviously have shallower waters but also beca because whilst they are very large and they have their own storm systems etc to be honest some of the great lakes are more like inland seas they because of the mechanics of their size they do have slightly different waveforms as compared to something like the atlantic or the pacific and again so you can get away with a shallower draft now in terms of the edmund fitzgerald which is one of the largest lake freighters to sail and ended up getting sunk under circumstances that remain mysterious for quite a while now i've i've done some reading up on the ship and it's sinking the various theories behind it and um it's disgusting discovery of the wreck i don't think any one particular theory is the sort of the the cause of the sinking now the thing that i'm drawn to the most as a kind of direct and immediate issue is that when they've gone and had a look at the wreck multiple hatch covers on the ship are either gone or torn up open and so sort of the structure around the hatches some of the clamps etc they show evidence of being smashed in by a massive force now of course if the hatch covers that cover massive cargo hold are completely destroyed that's going to cause a huge amount of flooding which is probably then going to cause the ship to sink or break it apart and sink because it's as well you can see the ship there if you imagine there's suddenly now a massive load extra load of water well extra load that is water that it's never been designed to hold well above its um normal uh carrying capacity now all sitting amid ships you can well imagine that that kind of thing accompanied by the show amount of force necessary to smash in those hatch covers and get the water in the first place would probably cause it to break apart and sink but then the question leads back of well what caused that massive force to be exerted on the hatches and i'm i'm kind of tempted to put to agree with and some elements of the rogue wave hypothesis which is basically there was there was another ship nearby that reported being hit by several very large waves and the once the waves had hit them it they continued on towards the position of the edmund fitzgerald and the timing suggests that they arrived in the area around about the time that the ship sunk now in and of themselves rogue waves hit ships at all sorts of times in all sorts of places and they do cause a lot of damage but unless you talk about some ultra cheap mass-produced cargo container ship that no one particularly cares if it goes down after the second or third trip journey with the possible exception of the crew and the people who whose cargo is aboard um outside of that rogue waves don't tend these days to sink ships out right in and of themselves they can if they cause other problems but it's most usually damage so what i'm personally as an engineer what i'm tempted to think collating all the evidence is that it was probably a combination of factors so the ship was known to not not function the best under heavy seas but it probably would have survived in and of itself but i think what probably happened is that the ship was wallowing in the storm that that uh happened over that night and whilst it was wallowing these rogue waves two or three of them show up out of nowhere probably just hit the ship broadside on this is the nature of rogue waves and they're completely not expecting it that in and of itself isn't great but the sheer force of them and bearing in mind you're on a lake um so there's a lot more debris as well the waves possibly either carrying some kind of solid debris with it or rips something loose from the deck itself or multiple things but whatever the case between the sheer force of the wave and possible debris being carried this is probably responsible for smashing in a number of the cargo hatches and with the mass of a wave bearing down on it and then i say that the all of this water now pouring into the cargo hold that's going to create a massive overload at relatively speaking a point section of the ship which as i said it's not designed to take in the first place it's already under massive stress from the storm it's just taken a massive kinetic impact and that's probably the final straw that causes massive structural hole failure ships breaks in half and down it goes very quickly and because all of that happens probably in the space of 15 20 seconds as these waves hit possibly one after the other that's probably why it just disappears without a trace because the the massive impact of the wave is gonna effectively wreck any like a radio antenna etc that are aboard the ship then it's almost only going to lose power as it breaks in half and once it's broken in half that's it it's just it's going to go so i think that's probably the combination of factors now where the you might get the finer details of exactly where and why it broke in half etc is to a certain extent irrelevant but uh it's more sort of the detail of the thing but i think personally that's uh probably the most likely uh timeline of events john reeves asks what were some of the more interesting ways navies tried to deal with the threat of aircraft in both world wars and how quickly were naval defense is able to adjust or evolve to handling the threat of jets well i believe in previous videos we mentioned things like the unrotated projectile launchers which the royal navy tried which was the idea of trying to create an aerial minefield with a bunch of rockets that were launched from massive boxes mounted to the decks you've got the japanese type 3 anti-aircraft shells are you in attempt to turn the battleship cannon into a gigantic long-distance flamethrower then you have the weirdly bizarrely actually successful but also incredibly odd um anti-aircraft lagonda flame thrower and yes you did hear me say that right so this one i haven't really discussed too much before the idea was basically a gigantic heavily pressurized flamethrower mounted on a merchant ship or a destroyer with the idea that when an enemy came in to bomb you you sent up a towering column of flame and not to suggest you that you were already on fire but to effectively hopefully make the pilot break off his attack um and if he doesn't well he's flying into a gigantic jet of flame um plus i suspect between the massive ball of flame and the smoke there's probably a certain amount of visual obscurity involved especially with dive bombers the funniest part of it all is not just that it technically actually worked but also the the whole sort of the story behind how they actually took it into service now ostensibly this the story goes that when they were testing the system they were a bit worried it might work too well so they told the first raf pilot who was going to fly against it what to expect and he kind of ignored it so they thought oh okay well that's probably because he knew what was going to happen so let's send in another pilot and not tell him what to expect and he also pretty much ignored it um and then they discovered that this is the kind of thing that can only really happen in the british armed forces the second the reason the second pilot probably had completely ignored it was because in his pre-war life he'd been a circus actor diving through things like fire rings and so the idea of hiding at high speed towards a large burning object didn't really faze him at all and then again something that can only happen in the british armed forces the royal air force and royal navy concluded that since the germans probably didn't have that many pilots who had prior fire fire magic circus experience it might be effective they didn't send a third pilot in who didn't have circus experience and had been told what was going on oh they're just like oh well the germans probably don't have that many fire train circus x circus pilots so um yeah we'll put it on um yes okay that that's certainly a logic of some description um and but apparently the main effect is that after a few uses where no german bombers were actually down but apparently the germans did start flying at slightly higher altitudes which made their bombs slightly more likely to miss and if you want to learn more about that and other wonderful wonderful um weapons shall we say um there's uh there's a rather wonderful book by uh gerald paul called the weezers and dodgers the inside story of clandestine weapon development um in world war ii absolutely wonderful book uh the amount of crazy stuff that people came up with and some of the even crazier reasons that they put forward to manage to get it into service um just wait till you find about the road find out about the road based version of the of this gigantic flamethrower that had a bit of a um fire exchange literally with some sentries it's it's great as far as how naval anti-aircraft defenses initially adapted to jets at first actually pretty well you've got to bear in mind that the evolution of anti-aircraft guns had actually progressed through world war ii along the pretty much the same lines as it needed to adapt to the early jets which was that well going into the second world war you had heavy anti-aircraft guns 4.5 inch 5-inch guns etc for blanket barrage fire and then you had initially things like uh the 1.1 inch 50k machine guns um the pom-pom something like that for close-in defense but the and then you had obviously the 20-millimeter oerlikon now the thing was with the the lighter weapons like the 20-millimeter etc they could hurt an aircraft certainly um the 50 the machine guns were pretty much pointless because very very very few aircraft ever got close enough for them to matter but with the 20 mils they could certainly hurt an aircraft the main problem was that they could hurt an aircraft after it released its weapon whether that be a bomb from a dive bomber or a torpedo and so that kind of didn't help i mean it meant if you hit it it meant the plane probably wouldn't be coming back but you still had a bomb or torpedo coming towards you so that was a problem in and of itself this is why the 40 millimeter both is although it was bigger and heavier became rapidly very popular and why the oil can almost began to be phased out towards the end of the war because the bofors could hit further and obviously get the 40 millimeter shell hit harder so meant you could try and shoot down aircraft before they release their weapons and of course you still have the heavy a in the background that could hit even further out but obviously didn't have the same kind of rate of fire but once you've got radar guidance involved that and proximity of users that helps the heavier aaa no end um also obviously help them light a medium a somewhat um but because aircraft speeds and the range of weapons was also increasing so for example at the beginning of the war if you're going to drop torpedoes you have to fly low slow and pretty close by the end of the war with various modifications things like the avenger and the mark 13 you can actually drop from fairly high fairly high distance reasonably decent speed and so between things like that and glide bombs like the fritz x and um early missiles aircraft were able to start deploying weaponry beyond even the effective range of most of the variants on the bofors now in some respects they would still pass into the range of the bofors and some of the larger weapons you could probably try and engage with the bofors themselves um and that was with the most advanced weapons things like straight bomb drops etcetera meant the both still had a certain amount of applicability but to get now to the range where you were having to be able to destroy an aircraft before it released a weapon you had to go even further out and so this meant that whilst the the heavier anti-aircraft weapons of the 5-inch guns 5.25 4.5 etc still had a big lease in life and in fact were becoming even more important the fact was that they as heavy mounts um didn't really they didn't really work on mass unless you did something like the the french anti-aircraft cruiser that they completed after the war and so you needed something that was bigger and nastier than a bofors so it could reach out further but not quite so big and heavy that it would effectively become the ship's main battery as well and this is where you saw various efforts at the three-inch anti-aircraft gun automatic radar guided etc and they were pretty pretty lethal um the mounts did have a tendency to break down as a lot of auto firing large gun mounts did um the british and the americans both had variations on three-inch and six-inch um dual-purpose automatic radar-guided weapons um the some of them say some of the mounts worked better than others but on the days that they were working um these kinds of mounts actually handled the jet threat pretty well because early jets although they were faster than propeller driven aircraft they weren't that much faster the same kind of technology you could use to intercept a prop driven aircraft you could use to intercept a jet and the fact these you had automated automatic proximity views firing radar-guided guns really did help with that um but as time went on you started to see the development of standoff missiles and at that point you were reaching a zone where no gun could realistically reach out far enough and fast enough and that's when you had to start thinking really seriously about anti-aircraft missile systems but that was for some point in the future so the early naval adaptations to jets were these kind of high caliber fast firing automatic uh guns and they actually did a pretty decent job to the point that i still maintain that had they managed to get the two tiger class back into service um in time for the falklands war or of course my ultimate dream a refitted vanguard where the 5.25 has been replaced by automatic three inches probably taken from the tigers then the argentine air force were the kind of low level bomb dropping missions they did they wouldn't have had that many aircraft left after a very very short period of time um and the a4 of course is a couple of steps beyond the early jets so yeah that that's kind of the trajectory of naval defenses then once you get into missiles and everything that's when i kind of throw my hands up in the air and go rock it go whoosh um to a certain degree because if there's one thing that any of the conflicts since world war two have taught us missiles are never as effective as their designers say they are either offensive or defensive gabriel a hawkins asks again a fairly fairly long question that i think boils down to germany and world war ii didn't appear quite as devastated by the blockade as germany and world war one um it seems that the blockade was a lot more effective in world war one as compared to world war ii and if this is accurate why was the world war ii blockade less effective the world war ii blockade of germany was pretty effective but perhaps in other ways um when you look at things like the availability of fuel oil and how much of a problem germany was having with that the kriegsmarina pretty much by about 1943 was running on borrowed time even with the ships had left because of shortages of fuel oil and towards the ends of the war they were having problems even keeping things like their tanks fueled and keeping the luftwaffe in the air i believe even they were having to truncate luftwaffe pilot training because again they had not enough fuel to run a full training course as well as keep what fighters they had left going so that blockade was certainly effective um we also know that they were short of critical materials like tungsten so it when you uh were making things like the more advanced armor-piercing shot for tanks that was in short supply similarly because of the unavailability of these rarer metals their jet engines had pretty short lifespans as well so there certainly was a a fairly biting effect however there were a few things that factored against it firstly was that some of the materials that germany had begun to run really short of in the first world war by the time of the second world war there were synthetic processes to produce either them or decent enough substitutes which helped um second of all was the fact that in world war one germany was pretty much straight into a blockade with no other options because britain had closed off the seaways um and trade with russia wasn't possible because they were at war with russia and so and obviously france was fighting them italy was eventually decided to fight them in austria hungary as well so they were kind of boxed in they had very limited uh they were basically limited to what they could produce pretty much at home there was a certain amount of relief to that when russia bowed out of world war one um obviously massively counter-balanced by america joining world war one but there you go so compared to world war ii germany obviously had a lot more success at the start of world war ii um which yeah that kind of helped them because they then had access to a lot more land when it came to things like crops for food for food um which was another thing that they ran short of in world war one in part due to bad harvest some part because obviously then they couldn't import food through the blockade um so they had access to a lot more of europe's arable land and a lot more of europe's resources as well so not just their germany strategic stockpiles but various stockpiles and production facilities for i think various elements materials technology in places like france obviously italy was on their side um they could trade with spain even though spain didn't officially join them um they occupied pretty much all of eastern europe so there was various bits and pieces for them to pick up there all of this largely stuff that they hadn't been able to do in world war one so that gave them a bit of a leg up and of course almost up until the point that they actually invaded the soviet union they could also to a certain degree circumvent the british blockade by trading with the soviet union who in turn could trade with other people so that they they bought themselves a little bit a fair bit of time with that so maybe about two years or so before the blockade would really start to to bite because one by one those various avenues closed down but even then they still had access to a lot more land they had access to a lot more resources so that was always going to stave off the the effects of the blockade um to a great degree as uh up until they start to run out of those stockpiled materials but also it has to be said the germans and world war ii were um should we say just a touch more evil in some of the things that they were doing um and without obviously getting into things like the holocaust you have the simple fact that they were prepared to use slave labor on mass which they weren't in world war one um and they were much more prepared to just loot and steal what they needed to keep things going from people uh like the people they'd enslaved all the people they'd sent to the camps and between those measures that sort of kept them going on a bit of a shoestring to be fair by the end um but it did keep them going a lot longer than acting in a slightly more civilized manner in world war one had managed peaceful conquest asks what damage and casualties did the halifax explosion caused to naval forces in halifax at the time and what effect if any did it have on convoys in the weeks thereafter damage to the naval vessels in halifax was actually relatively minimal i mean the blast did cause minor damage but one their warships they're designed to stand up to blast damage and two they were relatively far away from the actual fire when it obviously turned into a massive explosion so they weren't right on top of it since the fire occurred in the shipping channel not right into the harbor itself um although it did explode next to a pier so it's one end of the harbor um there were some casualties mostly minor injuries there were a couple of boats that had been sent out from a couple of the naval vessels that were heading towards the um the burning ship to try and assist it and there most of the people in those boats unfortunately were killed by the blast but in terms of overall numbers compared to the numbers of people who were killed generally it was relatively small in terms of the effect on convoys it was actually relatively minimal um although obviously there was massive devastation which did hamper halifax's ability to operate as a port to a certain degree because the collision had happened in the shipping channel heading in and out of halifax as i said earlier it was only part of the actual port area that was hit um not the inner port areas and so whilst there was a slight delay it took less than a week before convoys going in and out were actually recommenced using the intact facilities which did also have something of a benefit because it meant that with large amounts of merchant shipping transiting into and out of halifax in fairly short order it meant that relief supplies could also be sent in by ship relatively quickly as well as by train and other methods that were used william h burke iii asks have you ever read the book ignition exclamation mark it's an amusing anecdotal history of liquid rocket fuels and how they were developed and secondly um were any special fuel additives or hypergolic propellants used in ships engines to get them started faster get extra power or create a smoke screen well to answer the second question no i'm not aware of anybody throwing hypergolic propellants into a ship's boiler to get it to start faster although it probably would have had the desired effect and possibly a number of secondary undesirable effects to go with it i do know that there were various fuel additives that they used to try and counter problems with contaminated fuels um sulfur sodium those kind of things that kind of ruin engines but yeah in terms of here's something really explosive and probably toxic but burns really pretty let's chuck it into the engine and get going i'm sure someone tried it at some point but i'm not aware of it being a regular practice at least in the year of world war one and world war ii um as far as the book ignition and i haven't read it yet but it is now sitting in my kindle library because well one it's called ignition with an exclamation mark it's a history of rocket fuels which is even better and skimming some of the reviews i see immediate mentions of things like chlorine trifluoride and red fuming nitric acid which means this book is precisely the kind of light reading i really like um i might even learn a few extra chemical mixtures from it so that'll be fun alfred mullet asks of the following three technologies what could have made the biggest impact to the development of the dreadnoughts if it had accelerated faster boilers and engines guns or fire control systems of those choices i would have to go with boilers and engines so the example that he gives in brackets is sort of the engine technology of 1939 being available in 1910 and the reason um for that is that if you advance gun technology the example given sort of having maybe the 15 inch 42 caliber available when the orions are built is that gun technology actually advances pretty quickly i mean you go from having a 12 inch 45 to 12 inch 50 to a 13 inch gun to a 15 inch gun in the space of just over half a decade um and you would have had 16 well you did have 18 inch weapons by the end of world war one and if it wasn't for world war one you probably would have had 16 18 and 20 inch weapons by the 1920s so advancing gun technology by like two or three inch caliber doesn't assist all that much because they're going to get there in a couple of years anyway under normal systems fire control systems if everyone's advancing it kind of evens everything out um and if you're talking about having things like the admiralty fire control tables instead of dryer tables and and such like it's going to increase the accuracy of the guns but that's an that's an escalator on all sides now that might cause some complications because with more accurate long-range fire control systems earlier on that's going to force a change in armor layout much quicker and much earlier on which which could be significant but fire control systems can be lifted in and out and fitted and refitted relatively speaking easier compared to most other systems the reason i go for the boilers and engines is because well one refitting boilers and engines is a huge task so having the better technology earlier is means you don't have to go for that same kind of massive refit but secondly the sheer amount of space and weight that is saved in having 1939 boilers and engines instead of 1910 versions is absolutely huge to the point that you'd probably actually completely obviate the battle cruiser as a concept because with the amount of space that's set aside for engines and machinery in the average 1910 1911 near a battleship if you just replace that on a like for like volume and weight basis with systems from 1939 i mean okay you'd have to make modifications to the hull as well to account for the new optimal speed but you'd quite happily have ships motoring along at that point in the high twenties if not without changing all that much and something like the queen elizabeth's um certainly in 1913 from 1914 obviously again with a slightly different hull shape but with the 1939 engine technology on a light for like basis they would quite happily motor along at 30 plus knots which would be quite the terrifying thing um and of course they're more efficient they can go further etc etc so yeah if you really really want to change up technological development give yeah get those advanced boilers and engines because if if you don't want to go at those insanely high speeds if you're perfectly happy to motor along in the low 20s in world war one even with this this advanced engine tech then that means you can have a very very compact machinery space which in turn means you can have a much more compact armor system because everything can be moved in towards the middle which means you're much better protected or let's face it it's a world war one naval arms race they'll probably just put even more guns so you might have like a 13 and a half or 15 inch version of hms aging core because they've got nothing better to do with a long hull form which they'd need for the higher speeds christopher dent asks flag officer seymour seems to get quite a bit of blame for appalling communication in the battle cruiser fleet at jutland however some sources list commander reginald plunkett drax as the senior flag officer on bt staff if this is so shouldn't he then as senior officer be the one to bear responsibility for poor communication yes i suppose you might ask the question should the wonderfully titled um commander reginald alma ran furley plunkett ernie earl drax and yes that was his full name and he later became admiral sir with kcbd so jp and dl after his name but there you go um yeah shouldn't he take the blame as a flat there's the flag commander well so i think it's due to a slight misunderstanding of the title um it's very easy to look at flag lieutenant seymour and go ah well the rank is obviously associated with signals and communications therefore flag commander more senior rank and therefore he should bear the responsibility which just not quite the case um so drax and seymour were part of bt's personal staff and bt was an admiral obviously and as such he was a flag officer so he was entitled to fly a flag basically um flags being very important at the time of the british empire just ask eddie izzard now what this meant was that the admiral would have his own personal staff separate from the command staff of whatever ship he happened to be uh on board at the time and his staff would be known as because they were the uh staff of a flag officer as flag insert rank and then their name so flag commander drax was a commander who happened to be on bt staff and because he was on bt staff he was a flag commander it doesn't actually mean he had anything to do with flags um lieutenant seymour he was there and he was bt's communications officer so he was in charge of dealing with uh all of the flag signals that got sent out it's just that him being a flag lieutenant kind of muddies the waters a bit when he's dealing with flags so one assumes that maybe that title has something specifically to do with it um with that said uh flag commander drax did help out somewhat with wireless communications aboard hms lion at jutland but as far as bt's own observations are concerned drax's primary duties seem to be helping him in observing observing the fall of shot and the enemy's movements so he was not a signals and communications officer memory asks i've heard multiple times about warships with insufficient reach being modified by making the gun ports bigger to allow more elevation but it seems nothing was changed in terms of fire control equipment if the guns and the rangefinders etc could handle the additional range already why not design with that elevation capacity in the first place isn't it better to have the range and not need it instead of relying on your opponent to politely wait until you can reply like bt did and even if they didn't expect to fly to that range i don't really see how slightly bigger slit is going to affect the turret that much it's largely two things cost and weakness now with the cost the issue is that if a gun is going to be elevated higher then its recoil mean is going to have a more of a vertical element to it than a horizontal one so if you fire a gun at zero degrees obviously it moves backwards horizontally if you fire a gun pointing straight up 90 degrees it moves downwards and at various angles some component both if your gun is going to aim higher or a higher angle there's more of a vertical component and that means that either you have to mount your gun higher off of the deck in which case your turret needs to be higher which means it's heavier it's more obvious targets more expensive etc etc or you have to have a gun pit and you have to make that deep enough uh which has its own complications uh because it can be a bit difficult to get around apart from anything else and impinges on the height of the shell room underneath so forcing your shells and magazine path down which making the passage for ammunition longer so there are complications to having a gun that aims higher up and of course you have to design your recoil mechanisms to be able to absorb recoil at greater angles there's also the loading mechanism because if your gun let's say only elevates 10 12 degrees you can probably design a loading mechanism that will allow you to load your gun at any angle so if let's say you can only elevate your gun to 12 degrees making a loading system for a battleship shell that can load at 12 degrees not too difficult um by the time of world war one and certainly world war ii so you could then aim your guns keep them there fire the the ammunition and then just reload in place whereas if you're going to elevate your gun to 20 degrees 30 degrees etc you either have to go through a lot more effort and expense to make a loading mechanism because obviously the loading mechanism not only has to function at a non-horizontal angle but it also has to push now upwards instead of horizontally which means it's also actually going to be stronger which means it's going to be bigger which means it's going to be more expensive and so on and so forth or you have to elevate your guns up to a certain level fire and then you have to lower the guns down to a point where your loading mechanism can actually load close everything up and then elevate the guns back up again which introduces a time lag time delay and also you it might not go back to exactly where it was before and now fair enough you can be making corrections anyway but it still is a minor concern so all of these increase complexity and cost and then there's also the vulnerability issue because as you can see here with this american ship the gun slit that the gun elevates up and down in if your gun is going to elevate higher that has to be a taller one and that introduces a greater window of vulnerability because hopefully when you're firing at the enemy your guns will be pointed at the enemy which in turn means that their shells will be coming in straight up the face of your turret amongst other things and the bigger the gap you have in the front of your turret the more chance there is for fragments or indeed an entire shell to penetrate the turret bypassing the turret face armor now okay it's a very small target and it might not happen but is it really worth the risk of doubling the chances of it happening if you don't think you're going to need the extra range so a ship with lower gun elevations will be have a generally speaking be able to have a slightly shorter turret which means a cheaper turret it's a lesser target profile it's less vulnerable to forward penetration because it's got less of a with less weak spots and overall it's going to be a cheaper weapon system to build all of which are very attractive things to contractors and constructors and people holding budgets etc and ultimately is it worth paying a bunch of money and a ton of additional potential weakness in your system and potentially even reducing the number of guns you have on your ship to allow them to fire out to a range where you probably don't think that you're going to be able to hit anything anyway and this is why you have ships with varying elevations the french were continuously thinking that in world war one for example the ranges were going to be exceptionally close hence the range issues with the core base and to a lesser standard extent the britannias the germans thought battle ranges would be a bit longer um but as we know they were slightly paranoid about protection so their guns could range out certain distance but not quite far enough as it turned out in some cases and uh the british who a lot of them went through world war one and it's immediate preamble thinking that the enemy was going to run away and therefore might be some distance away wanted to be able to shoot a considerable distance and of course as uh fire control systems improved in their accuracy as time went on gun ranges went up and elevations went up and this is why you had things like the modified uh queen elizabeth so queen elizabeth valiant war spite and of course the rebuilt renown and such they had their gun turrets able to elevate up to 30 degrees and things like the r class and the unmodified queen elizabeth couldn't elevate that far because they hadn't had their turrets modified yet had to have superchargers so they could reach out to similar ranges christopher hamilton asks how much ability did a ship in the age of sail have to replace its sails i found information on their ability to replace the masts but nothing about the sails so when it comes to replacing and repairing sails the first option was to repair them so if you've got shot holes and such bearing in mind that some of these sails could be the size of tennis courts or larger you don't take that kind of thing down without good reason so first option you send men up with sewing kits basically and uh so some of the holes um second option would be to take the sail down um which would be quite the involved operation but could be done in relatively calm waters ideally in harbor but um if you're doing it one at a time you can do it in calm calm weather as well bring it down so up on deck if the damage is a bit greater and then hoist it back up again or absolute worst case if it's just been shot or blown to pieces and there's no really not really any salvaging of it for sale purposes because remember if it's a big sale you might still be able to salvage some of the better sections for use as smaller sales on other parts of the ship um but to replace it often a ship would carry one or more replacement sales in its hole some big folds of canvas and you would hoist one of those now obviously you're not going to carry a spare sale for every sale that you've got otherwise your ballast would be entirely canvas but they would carry a fair amount and obviously there would be large-ish sections of canvas that they'd also carry which could form just big patches if necessary so um let's say one of your main sales had caught in a good chunk of a canister or star shop broadside and there was a socking great hole or a series of holes in one part of the sail you might just patch that and keep going the thing is the sails are very actually heavy well anyone who's actually sailed on a sail ship that's not going to come as a great surprise to them but although they do billow in the wind and they look all nice and everything a big sale on an age of sale ship of the line will weigh an awful lot enough to smother someone and certainly far too heavy for any one person to lift so it would be an all hands not quite all hands on deck but and all hands on the sails task to un-rig it first because remember it's going to be tied into the ship's mast and rigging in order to keep it in place when the wind is blowing so all of that's going to have to be undone and then it's going to be lowered so you won't detach immediately the ropes that are holding it up at the top you'd use those to help lower it down and kind of the whole thing in reverse so yeah it definitely could be done the smaller sail the easier it was but repair first then take it down and repair and replace only as a last resort if they could they would try and do this in port if they couldn't it could be done at sea um but it too was to a certain degree easier than replacing masts but because as you said because it was kind of a semi-routine and not not often but routine often enough to be a known procedure it doesn't get mentioned quite as much as having to rig up entire new masts and that brings us to an end of this month's edition of the patreon q and a now for those of you wondering where the live stream for that accompanies this particular edition of the dry dock is um there's a bit of a scheduling clash on friday the 28th so it will be taking place but it will be taking place on friday the 4th of september so keep an eye out for that and for those of you who may be wanting to pop down to london uh just to correct something i said in the previous dry dock it is this coming tuesday but this coming tuesday is the first of september not the second uh last time i stupidly said that tuesday the second which is completely wrong so tuesday the 1st of september i'll be in london looking at hms belfast and the golden hind replica so i will be free and available around about between two o'clock and four o'clock in the afternoon um on the riverbank in front of belfast belfast of course is currently closed so i'm able to go aboard to do filming but obviously only myself my cameraman can actually go aboard and do that filming uh hence why the two till four slot when i'm not filming will be the opportunity to say hi to the one or two of you who might be uh suicidal enough to venture through central london these days and the only other thing that remains to be said and this will go up in a community post as well around the time this dry dock goes live is that the battleship new jersey is in need of some assistance so you may remember they started a youtube channel up a while ago during lockdown which i popped into a community post and a number of you went to say hi and they've reached out to me again to point out that unfortunately because of what's going on in the world at the moment despite being legally allowed to reopen they just aren't getting the visitor numbers somewhat understandably given the what's going on in the in the states at the minute um but they're not getting the visitor numbers to sustain keeping the ship open uh for the rest of the year so they're having to close up shop so that the museum ship uss new jersey is currently shut it will hopefully be reopening in the spring next year but during that time obviously there are still some running costs involved and they are trying to continue with providing video content from the various experts that are associated with the ship and of course some features from aboard the ship and so in order to do that they've set up a funding drive and basically i'm here to this part of it is saying well if you would like to donate then please by all means do so and well if you can't let's face it uh the financial circumstances of the world at the moment are not exactly the most stable so please don't feel obligated or as if i'm telling you to do so i'm simply raising awareness and hopefully we will see more interesting content coming out from their channel in the interim and then hopefully they'll all be able to reopen again around about easter next year which will also in theory be the time of my tentatively rebooked trip to america assuming that again everything can actually go ahead so with all that said uh link in the description for that just underneath the timestamps for the video questions and thank you for listening to this three hour five minute or nearly three hour six minute dry dock and hope to see you again in another video or live stream

Channel: Drachinifel

Views: 490,307

Rating: 4.6995454 out of 5

Keywords: The Drydock, Q&A, Drachinifel

Id: 4xv8F2NdAGY

Length: 185min 52sec (11152 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 30 2020