The Drydock - Episode 122

[Music] so hello everybody and welcome to dry dock episode 122 the last but one patreon dry dock of 2020 so let's get on with these many many questions waldo 739 asks just because shells have the same diameter does that mean they can be used in any gun with that diameter i.e could the iowas north carolinas and south dakotas all use the 16-inch shells from the colorado class so they could get higher velocity from the lighter weight shells did all of the 14-inch standard battleships use the same shell even though they used different guns but all the same caliber and did the deutschland and scharnhorst classes use the same 11-inch shell even though the guns were of two different designs or did they each have to have their own shells because older shells couldn't handle the newer guns the answer is a little bit all over the place depending on the nation in question and the specific guns in question so with the iowa's north carolinas and south dakotas they could all use the mark 8 super heavy 16-inch shell the colorado class couldn't but that was more of a function of the fact that the colorado classes shell hoists were not capable of taking the larger market shell there would potentially also have been some issues because the colorado's guns although they were 16 an inch were not designed for the super heavy shell and this is the thing if you're firing a lighter shell from a gun that's designed for a heavier shell you're probably okay as long as you regulate the charges reasonably because if you put a really really heavy charge on a really light shell you might get a hyper velocity shell you might also break the shell and make it explode in the barrel which is not a good thing but if you're going the other way if you're taking a shell a gun that's been used designed for a lighter shell and you try and get it to fire a heavier shell you can do that within reason but there is an upper limit to what you can do on that so yes in theory the iowa's north carolinas and south dakotas could have used the 16 inch shells from the colorado class however it would have probably thrown the ballistics completely out because they weren't designed for it and they would didn't have the firing tables for it so they'd have no idea where those shells were actually landing but if they'd gone through the certification process then yeah probably they could have now when it comes to the standard battleships one of the major things about the standard battleships as it turned out uh mainly thanks to various congressional and secretary of the navy pressures was that they apart from the colorado class all had the 14 inch gun now while some had 14 inch 45 caliber and some had 14 inch 50 caliber they did all use the same ammunition the only exception to that was in the world war ii era when the new york class new york and texas were issued with a new modern shell the same way that all the other classes were issued but they were issued with a slightly different shorter shell presumably for similar issues to the colorado's not being able to use the mark 8 but i haven't looked into the fine detail of the new york glasses ammunition supplies so i couldn't give a definitive answer on that ground when it comes to the deutschland and scharnhorst classes they had separate shells the sean horse glass although they had 11 inch guns their guns were very different to those on the deutschland and as a result they had a heavier longer shell with a heavier charge which had completely different armor penetration profiles range etc so yeah again if you were going to take the scharnhorst shells and try and put them in a deutschland class you're probably not going to be able to make that work if you put the deutschland class shells in the scharnhorst class guns with a bit of work you could probably get it to fire fine but the performance would be completely uh subpar compared to what you could do with the actual scharnhorst's design shells and this is fundamentally the thing of just because it's the same caliber you might be able to use the shell but it's more a factor of length for the shell hoists being designed for shelter specific size and weight because the weight will also have an effect on the amount of charge that you're using and so with with a certain amount of work which is on the scaling factor you can probably make almost any shell that's designed for specific caliber of gun work in any gun of that caliber within reasons of world war one world war ii era it's just how far off piste you're going with that is going to dictate whether or not it's in any way a practical idea because there are some cases where a marginal change and just getting some new range data might give you a different but still competent performance of the shell and there are going to be other cases where you'd have to go through an awful lot of work to make the shell work in another gun and then find actually you have no accuracy in minimal armor penetration compared what you had at first so it very much has to be handled on a case-by-case basis miles mccaskill asks in an episode of the show mythbusters test were conducted to see what happens to various small arms projectiles when they hit the water whilst angle of incidence projectile type velocity etc were all shown to be potential factors in the results for the most part it was shown that a few feet of water could provide enough protection to render the projectile's relatively harmless to a human how do these apparent results translate to the scale of typical world war one dash world war ii naval shells i what happens if a typical high explosive shell falls slightly short of the target and hits the water does it will it explode break up does it go through the water death out in contact with the hull any difference with armor-piercing shells etc etc oh physics and engineering question i do like these ones um so when you're looking at the behavior of shells in air versus their behavior in water things are actually very very different although they're both fluids from a technical perspective when it comes to calculating movement through both mediums what counts as aerodynamic and what counts as hydrodynamic are two very different things so you can see here there's some shells these are 12 inch shells but they have a platform that's designed for relatively optimal flight through the air however if you look at projectiles that are designed to travel through water um so whether they be self-propelled things like torpedoes or diving shells such as the japanese and the french developed and so forth then you'll notice a couple of things one is that for traveling under water any kind of high-speed projectile tends to be considerably longer and secondly for traveling underwater they also tend to not be quite so pointed at the nose which might seem paradoxical but it turns out that when you're traveling through water at higher speeds a somewhat blunter nose profile is preferred and a lot of this has to do with density water is approximately about a thousand times denser than air which uh has some rather interesting interactions if you're traveling at high speed through the air and then you suddenly meet water there is basically it's like hitting concrete i mean it's a bit of a crude metaphor but yeah if you're traveling at several hundred miles an hour and you smash into the water that's gonna hurt quite a lot um regardless of what you're made of now because of that massive impact and the sudden deceleration that will typically set off the fuse of a naval shell now the naval shell has a slight delay on that fuse so unless it is a high explosive shell that hasn't sort of an instant detonating fuse it's not going to detonate on contact but he shells would if you fire an hd shell at a ship and it falls short of the target it's going to explode near enough instantaneously upon impact with the water when you're talking about armor-piercing shells and this is where results for naval shells differ generally from the mythbusters tests you're still looking at the square cube law so this is where well linear and square cube so you increase the linear dimension of something by a factor let's say two and you're increasing the surface area by the square of that factor and you're increasing the volume by the cube of that factor which means that a shell or projector let's say that's twice as large will be eight times as heavy and therefore the amount of inertia that the shell possesses goes up dramatically with size so whilst firing a say a 50 caliber round into the water after a couple of meters it'll go inert because all of its energy will be expended the amount of kinetic energy that's present in a 12 inch 14 inch 16 inch or whatever shell is going to be so much greater that it's not going to slow down anytime soon now due to numerous factors with most shells actually if they hit the water they tend to obviously dive first but they actually tend to curve back up again so if you fired a completely inert shell with enough velocity there's actually a reasonable chance that you fire into the water and it'll pop back up again several dozen feet further down the line assuming it hasn't completely run out of energy because there is obviously a lot of drag resulting in the water however if your shell is designed for armor-piercing and flight through the air and not for traveling through the water it's also going to exhibit a lot of interesting behaviors when it goes into the water so for example you look at the famously the shell that bismarck fired that fetched up really deep in prince of wales so that was a diving hit but because the german shells weren't designed for passage under significant amounts of water what appears to have happened is that the shell hit the water and most likely actually flipped over 180 degrees and traveled backwards because as i said having a blunt nose which is actually better for traveling at high speed through the water this is why when you look at torpedoes they have a fairly bluntish cap rather than the very very pointed tip of very early whitehead torpedoes and it traveled in that manner backwards the fuse was completely wrecked but probably by the flip and then it came through with enough energy to punch through the unarmored deep hull of the prince of wales and then fat fetched up in the hull itself which is where they found it kind of pointing back the way it had come so a lot of whether or not your ap shell that hits the water is actually going to do any damage depends largely on what state your fuse is going to be in because your fuse is probably going to be initiated on impact with water it's just a case of will something did [ __ ] that fuse in which case you're effectively a solid shot and if it doesn't if the shell for whatever reason whether it's a diving shell or just the vagaries of design in that particular shell means it keeps pointing nose forward so the fuse keeps running your shell is going to be slowing down significantly faster than it would be in air so it's going to detonate after traveling a few tens of feet in the water depending on exactly how long your fused setting is for and what velocity your shell was at when it entered the water so if it hits say 10 foot short of a ship then yeah it's probably gonna still punch through and do some damage or at least hit the hole whether it hits the armor plate underneath the water line or it hits the hull and how much damage it does commensurately obviously the vagaries of exactly what shell exactly which angle exactly which ship will come into play but if your shell lands 60 80 100 feet away even assuming the fuse still works it's almost certainly going to detonate well short of the enemy ship texas and le shock asks what exactly is the position of specialist athlete and what are their duties i saw this on a display of chiefs positions on uss alabama so i suspect that's actually probably a shortened version of a specialist athletic officer or athletic trainer or athletic instructor depending on exactly how you want to look at it effectively what you might call i guess in america a coach um someone who is there to train the crew in their their physical activities their physical training there were a bunch of specialist ranks that were put in place in the u.s navy at various times but in world war ii which is most relevant to the alabama the specialist ranks were petty officers so chief petty officer position makes sense and they were designed to be able to allow the us navy to bring in certain civilian expertise that they needed but didn't really fit within the existing rank structure of the us navy and so they had these little um epileps as you can see here with the uh a on them and so i suspect that that's what what you're seeing someone probably just didn't want to put specialist athletic instructor and just specialist athlete everyone knows what we're talking about this will be fine so yeah effectively your your personal fitness trainer dash coach for the shipboard crew to make sure they stayed fit healthy and active um assuming that of course running around loading guns firing guns keeping the engineering department running etc hadn't already done that for them manani wanderer asks besides the mark 14 torpedoes designers which warship and weapons design teams do you most want to go back and ask what the heck were you thinking well you see the odd thing is that a lot of those designs that you might immediately think spring to mind we kind of know what they were thinking thanks to various reasons most usually inquests and inquiries after everything had gone horribly wrong which means well i already know and two i don't want to get anywhere near those people in case i catch a bad case of stupid um however there are a few where what's thinking is somewhat there it's also you sort of look at it and go yeah okay i can understand that you have a justification why you think that justification is valid is an entirely different matter and i would greatly like to inquire um so for example let's say taking looking at hms colossus whichever genius decided that having had the experience initially with dreadnought of what happens to the people the in the spotting top of a dreadnought battleship when you put the mast behind the first funnel what on earth inspired the you to go back and try the process again in later british battleships you knew it didn't work they even tried it on the lion for a bit just why it's not like you didn't have evidence that told you how bad an idea this was um for similar reasons the individual indefatigable class battle cruiser design team given the okay i can understand them not necessarily up armoring the design because at this point germany hadn't put vonda tan into service so a repeat of the invincibles kind of makes sense however the six-inch armor belt on the invincibles worked for their original intended design role of hunting down protected cruisers and armored cruisers because it was proof against pretty much anything that could be thrown at a reasonable range like say 8.2 inch shells from german armored cruisers and then when they're making the invincible claw for the innovative indepencable class for some bizarre reason they decide well we're making the ship slightly longer so that we can get better crosstek firing and we're going to have four inch armor belt at the fore and aft ends of what we would consider to be the ship's citadel you have just defeated the entire point of the battle cruiser the entire point of the battle cruiser was to outgun other cruisers and to withstand their fire in the original design concept you've just made it that whilst you still have the gunning part you no longer have the we are protected against incoming fire part because an 8.2 inch gun or an 8 inch gun or 10 inch gun or 9.2 inch gun if somebody's bought a british armored cruise and turned it against you they can punch through forage armor plate at reasonable ranges so you've just made an incredibly expensive dreadnor armored cruiser as they're called at the time where half its mission profile no longer works um what i mean i'd also like to go back and ask the designers of the deutschland class you are aware that renowned repulsion hood exists aren't you because yeah that does seem to be a bit of a design oversight and i'd also go back to the marine national design department when they're designing the core bay class and so gently lead them by the hand point at a battleship any battleship even in french retread i'll go look this is the primary battery the primary battery goes a long distance this is a secondary battery the clue is in the name the secondary battery is not supposed to go further than the primary battery okay got it good and then gently steer them back to their design table where presumably they can continue eating their bowls of wallpaper paste but they might have taken something on board and to round off that little tour i think i'll probably pop over to the 1910s design bureau in america where they're designing all the various proposals for battleships and after about the third or fourth year of submitting the designs i just go up to the guy who keeps trying to submit the torpedo battleship and just go please stop hugh fisher asks the displacement of a ship is the weight if you could lift it out of the water onto some kind of gigantic kitchen scale why do submarines have a different displacement given for when they're submerged this is because the definition of the displacement of a ship is what the ship weighs or displaces in the water when you take into account everything it has inside of it so this is why you have the difference between normal displacement standard displacement full load displacement etc because you're going to have different amounts of things aboard whether that be ammunition food fuel water for drinking etc and for submarines they have obviously the ballast tanks so when they're on the surface and the ballast tanks are mostly empty they displace a certain amount of water once those ballast tanks are filled the ballast tanks are internal to the submarine much the same way as torpedo blisters fuel tanks etc are internal on any other kind of surface ship and so if you were to then pluck the submarine out of the water with its ballast tanks full that water isn't just going to drain out so you are going to end up in a situation where the submarine now weighs more so it displaces more that's why it's now sunk um and that's basically why you end up in a situation where a submarine has a surface displacement and an underwater displacement that are two different things james shawn moore asks during the 50s and 60s it appears that most navies gave up cannon development larger than five inches although it's rumored that the dahlgren surface weapon center has a sampling of a few that are larger was this because of the reloading issues or did missiles just have too much promise there were a few heavier guns that were looked into there was an ultra lightweight 8-inch gun for example that was tested on the uss hull as you can see here but fundamentally heavy guns by the mid 50s 60s were seen as largely necessary only for coastal bombardment and it wasn't worth trying to develop brand new high caliber weapons for what was effectively a niche role considering that the existing 8-inch guns and 16-inch guns and whatever on various battleships and heavy cruisers that were stood in service would work perfectly fine in that role and by the time they went out of service in most navies then well most navies at that point had shrunk to the point they wouldn't need shore bombardment particularly and what limited shore bombardment they might need could be done by four four and a half or five inch weapons with the increasing range and accuracy of these smaller more rapid fire weapons and the commensurate drop in the amount of armor protection on ships as a result of the developments of things like missiles and bombs it also meant that the main reason for having these massive guns in a ship to ship engagement by armor piercing was no longer a factor and also large ships outside of carriers just weren't being built anymore there were some cruisers that were mostly conversions but everything else was for a good chunk of that period significantly smaller than even a world war ii era light cruiser even the bigger cruisers that the u.s navy was building missile cruisers like the ticonderogas at the end of that design line but things like that say the virginias and the californias as well even they kind of capped out around about the treaty displacement of a light cruiser around about 10 000 tons and given they had to include four facilities like helicopters missiles etc there just wasn't the space for any gun larger and with the destroyers obviously being even smaller even more so and the sort of four four and a half inch five inch range was pretty good at being an all-purpose gun it could be used as an anti-aircraft weapon it could be used as an anti-ship weapon it could be used as a short bomb weapon to a certain degree so there wasn't really any pressing need to develop a bigger gun because the idea went that well if you needed anything that you had to hit much much harder you'd either call in one of your older ships that had said heavy guns or later on you'd just fire a big missile or get an aircraft from a carrier to come in and drop bombs on it instead and that was seen as a lot more versatile because missiles can obviously be pointed in lots of different things aircraft can be carrying lots of different types of weapons whereas an 8-inch or 12-inch or whatever gun is pretty mono purpose at that point considering no one was seriously expecting to get into surface action gun fights for a lot of the period leonard brandcamp asks a question that takes up most of a page but is basically about how larger caliber weapons could be adapted for autoloading which is based off of a question i asked in a answered in a previous dry dock a couple of the things here so some manner of mesh or rigid support to the bag to help hold its shape this is for the charge bag because them getting squished by the hydraulic ram would be one of the problems and when it comes to stacking the charges if we're going to use a some kind of brace or casing could we not perhaps have them in such a way that they sort of auto locked one on top of the other so them running off to one side or the other would be less of an issue there as well now you can in theory put shell cartridges into some kind of consumable casing it was done actually in the manually or semi-manually loaded battleship guns in various nations you did have some brass cartridges that were used as for the base charge which um the germans especially used and various uh charges the same different navies had cases canisters whatever you want to call them various points that were made of a very very lightweight metal sheeting that was designed to be consumed upon the discharge of the gun and yes there would be a bit more build up uh residue in the barrel but it was considered worth it for the safety factor the main problem is that these charges weigh a lot you're talking once they're all fully assembled hundreds of pounds of explosive and whilst a thin metal casing that to be honest is mainly there to provide anti-flash protection would be held up and supported by the the pressure of the charge inside as because they're fairly tightly packed they're not going to have the kind of structural strength that's required to actually lock everything in place when you're talking about having to potentially deal with the force of a hydraulic ram used to load battleship guns and a slight misalignment if you're gonna make these theoretical braced charges with strong enough material to actually do that then you're going to well you're going to add weight to everything but b you're also going to have make it so that those component pieces are definitely not going to be consumed with the gun and the best case scenario is then you have to kind of do a reverse age of sale cannon style swapping out and worming out to remove all of these broken and charred bits and pieces of metal after you open the breech again which is going to be a very complicated thing to try and work out with an autoloader given the semi-random nature of those things and worst case scenario is that bits of those bracings are going to get blasted out of the gun along with the shell which is probably not going to do wonders for your rifling now in theory with an auto loading system you could pre-stack the charges and just load them in as one thing which that that's possibly doable the main problem is that the charges and the shells all have to be stored down in the magazines and if you have a look at the the full train of a battleship shell and all of its charges it's a very long train of of items if you're gonna stack all those charges one on top of the other you have a major problem of how you're going to transport them from the magazines up to the shell room and then to the guns because if you have them all pre-stacked all as one unit the gun turret's going to be have to have a lot larger footprint to bring these things up and presumably swing them around because effectively you've got long sticks of explosive at that point um or if you're bringing them up vertically and then lowering them uh down onto the in ready to load into the gun the gun turret is going to have to be a lot higher neither of which is particularly ideal now with more modern technology you might be able to get away with some kind of caseless ammunition style effect if you used some kind of solid explosive at least as a reasonably thick casing which you could then potentially have the rest of the charge inside that might be doable depending on the chemical makeup of whatever you happen to use but of course there are a number of issues with caseless ammunition the primary one in this case to be perfectly honest being the fact it's still going to be being rammed in place by a massive hydraulic piston so um it's still got to be pretty darn strong but to be perfectly honest the the slight vagaries on that scale with the charge cases are such that i think maybe with more modern technology with computer assisted technology that could very rapidly calculate the exact weight and any potential deformation etc as well as obviously more precisely control the actuators and vary them slightly if necessary you could probably make an autoloading 16-inch gun these days but back in the 40s whilst you could make the mechanism for an autoloading 16-inch gun it wouldn't have the variability and adaptability i think you'd need to deal with all the minor alterations and changes that you'd have with each load that on that scale could prove pretty deadly if you don't take them into account thomas farley asks in a recent video you talked about gun barrel wear and the surprisingly few shots that a gun barrel can take before it needs replacing in previous videos you've talked about how naval guns were a long lead item perhaps taking longer to build than the rest of the ship so were there any instances of navies running out of gun barrels for their ships during wartime i can see how combination of an unexpected war hugely increased gun usage and sheer bad luck could cause this issue and once a navy is out of gun barrels they can't get more quickly so they're in real trouble precisely because of this concern when navies ordered battleships or battle cruisers they tended to order a lot more barrels or guns depending on the type of gun that they were using because sometimes you'd have to replace the entire gun sometimes you just replace the barrel liner but whatever they'd order plenty more of them than they actually needed to technically outfit the ships so that they would always have a reserve and when the ships were having their guns or exchanged or having the barrel liners replaced that would automatically trigger either a renewal or a manufacturer of new uh material depending on what was required so in that way between the reserve and the automatic um renewal law or manufacture of new items the idea was that you would never face a problem where you'd run out of of gun barrels and by and large this tended to work if you were building a brand new ship with a brand new type of gun in the middle of a war you might have some issues depending on where your resources were being stretched but when you look at the ships that were being built during wartime so for example if you look at world war one the queen elizabeth and the bayerns in europe then well the bayerns didn't really get around to firing their guns all that much and the queen elizabeth's and subsequently the revengers and the renowned were all using the same 15-inch gun and the queen elizabeth had started construction well before the war so there was a good pile of 15-inch guns already ordered as reserves for the queen elizabeth and that obviously would just build up with the building of the uh revenges and the renowns so they're in luck there when it comes to world war ii you've got the south dakotas and the i was being built you've got the king george the fifth being built you've got vanguard um you've got richelieu etc etc but a lot of those ships were started before the war broke out so again the gun plenty more guns had been ordered in advance richelieu being cut off from spare parts um and spare gun barrels because france obviously was partially and then fully occupied didn't mean there was serious thought given to not actually getting her modernized and ready for war with her 15-inch armament precisely because in a large part of these kinds of concerns but in the end they managed to make do there there are a few cases where for various reasons ships began to run out of gun barrel life but their barrels weren't replaced now that mostly came about towards the end of world war ii when we're talking about older ships that had worn through their guns but realistically the navy is still looking and going well if the guns got to a point where we can no longer use it and we only have a limited uh stock of spares we'd rather keep those around for the ships that we think will be very much more useful going forward rather than spending a lot of time and money re-arming older ships that are probably going to go to the scrap yard in six to eight months anyway and occasionally for operational reasons as well so the reason that we've had hms terror gracing your screens throughout the answer to this particular question has been because she had pre-used guns installed when she was in singapore then sailed back to what was supposed to be uh service off of the uk coast but she ended up being diverted part way to go and so with the mediterranean fleet she wore her guns out and said they were pre-used guns so they already had a limited life span left in them anyway but for various operational reasons it just wasn't possible to bring her back to the uk where they could have replaced her barrels so by the end of her life when she fell victim to luftwaffe air attacks she was basically a floating and slightly mobile anti-aircraft battery because the the guns were completely worn out now to be fair part of that was that as an older and slower monitor getting her back to the uk around the various um air bases in occupied france would have been an interesting feat in and of itself but even beyond that when you had the queen elizabeth's the battle cruisers and the revengers and potentially vanguard as she was being constructed all making fairly extensive demands on the 15-inch 42 caliber barrel stock the priority of rearming terror was somewhat lower down the list general dipper asks can you give any examples of terrible leadership ruining an otherwise good ship oh there are so many examples of this and i mean it can even come down to things like terrible leadership ruining an otherwise good fleet star picture and for this particular question is the afontadore the flagship of admiral persano at the battle of lissa probably the most modern ironclad present at that battle turned out to be completely and utterly useless for the most part and depending on whose account you believe possibly even ended up just sinking at her moorings in a storm because of the damage she took at the battle um all down to as i say the fact that well admiral teget hoff was an incredibly good leader and admiral persano was probably one of the most ineffectual admirals on the planet an awful lot of napoleonic war era french ships and fleets could also be looked at in that perspective because let's face it the french knew how to build a nice ship now as i've gone over before there were a lot of issues and differences between british and french ship design when it came to ships that could last a long time and be fairly agile in battle but you can't argue with the fact that things like the temeraire class and the um ocean-class ships of the line first and third rates respectively were very very nicely built and powerful ships as long as they could get into battle in the first few weeks of being at sea but still and when you look at the balance of firepower in a lot of cases those ships on paper if you're playing top trumps should have wiped the floor with a british fleet and or individual ships and shipped ship engagements and didn't in fact they're the ones who ended up having the floor wiped with themselves because the leadership was entirely ineffectual well but that's what happens when you start executing entire tranches of very competent naval officers purely because they happen to have some kind of noble title and this is just kind of big disasters and defeats that we're talking about as i'm sure any number of viewers who have served in various navies will tell you you can have a ship that is just as combat capable on paper as any other in the fleet especially when you're talking about ships that are represented in fairly large classes but having a good captain or having a bad captain can make all the difference to actually how effective that ship is a good captain can take say a destroyer and can fight it as if it's a squadron and have that kind of effect on the enemy if you have exactly the same ship but you put a bad captain on that ship then that ship's combat effectiveness is probably going to drop to really something along the lines of an opv with a somewhat greater ability to keep itself alive and i mean the less said about admiral beatty and the british battle cruisers at jutland the better mark mullet asks you mentioned in a previous dry dock that semi-modern i pre-electronic gear ships could be immersed in salt water until their engines failed i wonder did uss oklahoma not get out of the water before this point of engine failure and two how well did machinery such as say the main battery deal with being underwater for over a year so with oklahoma it's a number of factors well one of the things is even by world war ii ships did have a certain amount of electronics on board and actually when you have a look at the pearl harbor salvage videos i've been doing recently uh especially part two one of the bigger concerns was the turbo electric drives obviously the clues in the name of an electrical system on some of the newer standard class which they were very concerned might never function again fortunately they managed to make some of them function with oklahoma though it was upside down and it had had big holes blown in it which between them really didn't do good things for its internal structure and layout um the main battery and other guns on it see because those things are just effectively solid in lumps of metal yes they'll be subject to rust corrosion build up etc but that kind of stuff can be cleaned and indeed a lot of that kind of equipment from oklahoma was salvaged reconditioned repurposed and reused elsewhere the main problem with oklahoma was just the stress and the strain of being repeatedly torpedoed rolling over upside down spending a lot of time upside down then having to be partially cut into in order to facilitate the salvage effort then rolled back over again and the intervening eight months or so where which she spent upside down near enough um with all the strain that that involves with disjointed structural members because of the torpedo explosions that's basically what rendered her not necessarily unsalvageable but just it was cost prohibitive to then salvation it was to be honest it was cost prohibitive to sell salvation off the bottom in the first place but there were significant side benefits to the fact of clearing the obstruction from the birthing area and once she was up well with the best will in the world she was a nevada class battleship she was the oldest of the standards apart from nevada herself obviously which had already been salvaged because she was in for less bad condition and by the time they actually had a up and around the south dakotas were coming into service the i was would have come into service before she was finished and she just didn't offer anything like enough utility to go through the extensive process of cleaning her out patching her up repairing and refitting her because she would have needed an awful lot more work than anything else that they salvaged at pearl harbor gregory albert asks of the retrofits and conversion that occurred after world war one and before or during world war ii which would you have stopped and which would you have altered to create a better ship than the original conversion dash retrofit well if we're restricting ourselves to the kind of full modernization type efforts you're really only looking at three nations undertaking them that being britain with the queen elizabeth's and renown italy with its various uh surviving world war one dreadnoughts and japan with the congos because pretty much everything else was to a certain extent refitted and to a certain extent modernized but nowhere near as dramatically as the situations i just outlined and to be honest the effects of those changes on those other ships would have been relatively minimal so out of the ones that we're talking about there the italian retrofits were done overall pretty solidly for what they had to work with so i is very difficult to point to anything that the italians did with their retrofits and say well that could have been done significantly better so i'd probably leave those alone i've gone over at to quite a significant extent previously what i would have done with the congos mainly centered around upping their protection um at somewhat if necessary at the expense of the increasing in in speed because i could make do with a 30 knot congo as long as it was somewhat better protected than the tin cans they were now it might not sound a lot dropping and not even half a knot but it actually does make a significant difference in the amount of power you need when you're talking about 30 to 31 knots or more and say i could even have live with them dropping another knot or two beyond that as long as they were well the short summaries not in a state such that they'd lose a close range gunfight to a heavy cruiser um that that's pretty bad the other thing that i would do is i definitely wouldn't stop pronouncing refit because renown turned out to be a very very good and useful ship what i would do assuming that i'm able to use my future knowledge is i would have altered war spikes refit and yes this might sound like heresy but i would have just made a very subtle alteration which would have been using my future knowledge tell the royal navy what the full spec queen elizabeth refit would have been so instead of having sort of odd hybrid um with some of its six inch secondaries remaining and some small modern aaa guns it would have then got the full queen elizabeth valiant treatment with the 10 4.5 inch guns which isn't going to affect its overall service record i don't think but it might give it a little bit more of a fighting chance against those fritz x bombers towards the end of its career but that's that's just a relatively minor change the big one again using the future knowledge would be to take valiant out of the list of ships to be modernized and uh drop hood in instead so you have a modernized hood going into world war two so the modernized chips would be then warspite hood queen elizabeth and renowned at that point war spike queen elizabeth and renown all have very good careers and hood being fully modernized would probably have a significantly more successful career um i mean starting for instance with the fact that after mirzel kabir modernized hood almost certainly would have been able to chase down strasbourg um which would have been interesting and among those who probably would have survived the battle of the denmark strait as well so there's all of those things to consider and once she'd survived obviously she would have gone on to hopefully more and better things beyond that andrew dederer asks what would be the first class of warships or approximate year that were designed from the outset to incorporate future improvements the pre-world war one arms race was notable for how many ships were made obsolete inside of a decade and there was precious little growth built into the designs i don't even hear that much about putting larger rangefinders on older ships so what improvements that were made were ended up basically being rebuilds well if you're looking at the dreadnought era it's very difficult to tell because for obvious reasons when you're designing a dreadnought battleship or battle cruiser or whatever you are trying to get the best that you can out of the design that you've got which means that you're going to be filling every possible space with warlike equipment whether that be armor machinery weapons or the quarters for the crew necessary to support all of that supply stores etc you're not really going to go with the fitted for but not with habit that you see a lot of navies going for in perhaps the more modern era but with that said going in the run-up from say the launch of hms dreadnought through to world war one really really not not a thing because ships are really packed out for the maximum possible capability you could retrofit smaller systems like rangefinders but it did leave you with the need to effectively do near full rebuilds or heavy mod modernization and refits if you wanted to improve their combat capability all that much afterwards i would say probably the first opportunity that you see when ships being designed to incorporate some few major future improvements comes about round with the treaty era and that's why i've got nelson here because she's one of the earliest treaty era ships as designed and that's purely because with the weight limits that were introduced with the treaty and the allowance for some modification um for older vessels there whilst these limits were in place there was always a certain level of consciousness should we say amongst various people that whether you were designing a treaty battleship a treaty cruiser or even a treaty destroyer with the existence of the escalator clause people kind of understood that once war came you would probably be wanting to stick extra stuff on these ships now that didn't necessarily mean that all the designs were capable of doing that but i would say round about the early treat here is when you started to see at least some designs in some nations beginning to covertly or not so covertly incorporate those features in so i mean if you look at one end of the treat here you look at things like that something like say the fletcher class which could have been built significantly overarmed and over gunned in the same way that the sims class and various other us destroyers had been but they specifically decided not to go for that and they ended up with a very adaptable ship that as i've said before one of probably one of the best ship designs ever able to take an almost infinite variety of modification if you wind the clock back 10 15 years you can even look at things like the county class and you might think oh hang on a minute how's the county class designed for it well it's not made a huge deal of and to be honest some of the attempts to then retrofit and modernize them like say with hms london didn't necessarily go anywhere near as close to ideal as everyone wanted however as the as built the county class had this sort of box protection where most of the armor was concentrated around the magazines but outside of the rather disastrous attempts to retrofit london once world war ii broke out you discovered that the county class suddenly received or because of the realm in the late 1930s were in the process of receiving significantly more four and four and a half inch armor plate in relatively quick succession these these ships are receiving them and they seem to slot in awfully well it's almost like someone had planned for the eventuality of completing the ship's arm belt if you like and likewise with those ships whilst a lot of ships across various navies did suffer quite a bit with top weight issues from having to install extra anti-aircraft guns extra radar etc etc you don't see the counties suffering from that quite as much again outside of london as you do certain other ships both in the royal navy and outside so i would say that something like the county is probably one of the early examples although it wasn't very widely announced so yeah generally the treaty here is kind of when those things start to come about john mccarthy asks was battleship machinery custom designed for each ship class or did designers select from what was readily available from commercial suppliers and why it's a bit of a mixture really the choice of boilers was usually what you might call an off-the-shelf design but at the same time there weren't that many uses for high speed machinery sets at the time you sure you had fast ocean liners and they did obviously generate a bit of commonality but when you look at the vast amount of merchant shipping and other shipping that was being built at the time or anytime during the dreadnought era they're usually considerably slower the number of ocean liners that could compete with or exceed the speed of a battleship or even worse battle cruiser or a cruiser was fairly limited so what you tended to find is that the turbine system and especially in the us case with the turbo electric drive system that would to a certain degree be custom spec for the navy it might not be necessarily be custom spec for a particular ship class but it would usually be a naval specification because as i say there's just not the market for them out outside of it as i say with the turbo electric drive the us navy's the only one who's building to electric drive ships at that site so of course it's custom built at that point um and of course displacement space durability etc these are all very specific to ships when it comes to the boilers it's a little bit more open-ended high-pressure boilers well because you have a lot more of them you might have on a four-screw ship you might have four sets of turbines but you might have especially in world war one over two dozen boilers in some cases obviously that would reduce as you get into world war ii but then the interwar period but the number of ships using high pressure turbine at turbines and thus used needing uh high capacity boilers also tended to go up at that period but because the boilers were sort of almost almost plug and play systems where you'd if you needed x tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of horsepower you just had more boilers each generating a smaller amount of power so on a low power ship you might use let's say six of those boilers if you're talking the interwar period and then in a really fast ship you might use eight or twelve or something like that um obviously world war one there'd be more on on both ends of that equation so those would be to a certain degree off the shelf um in fact when you look at a number of interwar and world war ii ships they often talk about using the insert class name here power plant in another ship and that would be just lifted wholesale across so there's a certain amount of commonality for turbines and turbo electric drive systems although they will to a certain degree tend to be more specialized for specific classes especially in the larger ships but boilers would be very much more interchangeable chris gregory asks which of the navies involved in world war ii were the best at night fighting did this change during the war and what made them better than others in the early part of the war it was pretty much two horse race between the royal navy and the japanese navy the japanese navy had superior knight optics they invested a lot more heavily on that side of things however the royal navy obviously had a significant advantage with having surface search radar in place in at least some of its ships right from the start of the war which would obviously see them in very good stead for various night actions especially against people who didn't have surface search radar because the thing is you've got to remember surface search radar early on has a very limited range it's only later during the war that the range extends significantly to the point that it can out compete with optical spotting during the daytime in good weather and still later when it actually becomes long-range fire control radar but at night when you can barely see a thing in most lighting conditions and in places like fog and such even a surface search radar with a range of five or six miles is still massively better than most kinds of optical stuff now if you're going to put a dead heat between the royal navy and the japanese navy for the first part of the war for night fighting i would probably give a slight edge to the royal navy on two grounds one of which is that radar works in all weathers not just darkness so the japanese navy say will have very good optical based night fighting equipment but if it happens to be a night where there's fog or a night where it's raining or all sorts of other weather conditions that might affect visibility the japanese night fighting equipment is going to be relatively useless whereas the royal navy night fighting doctrine which uses a lot of the radar as we said is still going to see them through and secondly the pretty much only night time encounter between the royal navy and the japanese navy that actually occurred as opposed to almost occurred in the early part of the war involved a couple of destroyers british destroyers sneaking in past the japanese navy not actually finding the landing ships they were supposed to be targeting because that turns out the japanese actually gone to the wrong beach but there you go um and then sneaking out again now granted one of they did get spotted on the way out and one of the destroyers was lost but for all the wanted night fighting capability of the japanese and the much superior forces that they had in the area they had completely missed the two destroyers sneaking in and if the japanese landing ships had been where they were actually supposed to have been they could have had some fairly major casualties going on there all in exchange for the loss of a single destroyer which is probably a fairly good trade so i i would give the edge to the royal navy at the beginning of the war by the end of the war things had evened out to a certain degree mostly due to the proliferation of radar it meant that you could have um various german torpedo boats at etc i mean the e-boats mtbs and mgbs are always fighting a night action but obviously too small really to mount any kind of significant radar but towards the end of the war a number of german ships were operating with pretty good surface search and fire control radars we know obviously that say scharnhorst was approaching or and what turned out to be the battle of the north cape um in part using her radar um obviously he got knocked out that didn't work out very well for sean horse but the radar was still being used and of course after taking um a few fairly nasty kickings from the japanese in the early part of the pacific campaign the us navy wised up a fair bit to the night whole night fighting thing and they ended up going for uh night fighting as well as using their own radar advantage and that kind of all-weather capability was demonstrated quite well in things like the battle of samar so with that radar advantage the japanese advantage in optical night fighting tech did slip relative to the royal navy in the u.s navy quite a bit as for who was better between the us navy and the royal navy in overall night fighting by the end of the war um if you're talking in terms of a straight up night action i honestly wouldn't be able to call it because that kind of comparison i don't think has been done all that much um the only thing which i could sort of point out and go this is a definitive advantage assuming roughly equal numbers match up which of course with the us navy almost certainly would never happen but there you go but assuming that it was a local score transaction or something like that the royal navy did have a far greater amount of its carrier based aircraft capable and trained for night action as opposed to the us navy even right up towards the end of the war uss enterprise was fairly unique in the us navy and being able to conduct its air group during night actions whereas the royal navy was able to do night actions of various descriptions almost from not quite almost from the start of world war ii and by the end of world war ii the majority of the fleet air arms um air wings were capable of performing night strikes matt blum asks historically which was more dangerous in the age of steel and steam a hit to the gun turret or direct it to a magazine it seems shell hits to both locations did or almost did result in a number of historical detonations or near detonations of the magazines i'd say a direct hit to the magazines although it's much harder to achieve is by far the more dangerous because a direct hit to the turret whilst obviously there is a danger of the ammunition both in the turret and in the handling room below going up quite quickly if the anti-flash protection systems are in place and you haven't completely overloaded the turret with charges you're going to be in a relatively decent position to for your ship to survive even if you've lost the turret whereas if you take a direct hit to a magazine unless you're very lucky and it's a shell hit at or below the water line that comes with its own free fire extinguishing in the form of the stocking great hole that's just been blown through the side of your ship um chances are that is going to set off a fire which is going to set off the magazines which you're probably going to either destroy or if you're really lucky you very badly damage your ship in almost all cases so well i mean when you look at the number of ships that took a mag a hit to the magazine there's very very very very few of them that come out in anything close to good condition a lot of them will just flat out explode others especially when you're talking about things like light cruisers where the total amount of explosive present isn't vastly great compared to the overall size of the ship still coming out of it very heavily damaged there's a minority of hits where there's a hit to the magazine that doesn't do something catastrophic whereas there's quite a lot of instances of ships losing one or more turrets and although that's obviously very inconvenient for the turret crew the ship itself is never in any particularly great danger um obviously yeah if you're a battle cruiser in bt's fleet at jutland maybe don't necessarily count on that particular paradigm working out for you but at the same time if you look at jutland itself um look at the number of german battle cruisers who had some or in some cases all of their turrets knocked out but were never in actual any great danger of sinking as a result of those hits his lordship asks tell us about the german spur brecca anti-mine vessels i i think that's vaguely right to my uneducated mind the concept of clearing minefields by deliberately ramming the mines with your ship seems bonkers was there method to the madness why did the germans do it that way and not through more regular mine sweeping well yes they were a little bit crazy i suppose the spare precas or however they're said um yeah they they had two main roles when it came at least their mind clearing duties initially there was this idea of well we'll just charge through on enemy minefields and clear a path just by detonating anything we hit and then people could follow in our wake shockingly this approach did result in a reasonable number of them being sunk um the other aspect which was perhaps a little bit more understandable was if we think we've cleared a path through an enemy minefield we'll have one of these things lead in because there's a small but not non-negligible chance of a mine having drifted into the channel and then if we hit the mine and detonate it then we're pretty much guaranteed that now it's safe for the ships behind us to proceed and in that respect the ship that can take a couple of mine hits is probably a good idea the main reason that the germans needed to take this approach was speed because conventional mine sweeping is a relatively slow operation and uses a number of quite small craft whereas using a spare breaker you can proceed at what whatever the speed of the ship is so something in the mid teens of knots usually and that allows you to clear a path a lot faster for incoming or outgoing ships and to potentially clear a path through enemy minefields considerably quicker which is more of a problem for the germans considering that most of in both world one and two most enemy minefields were not necessarily right on their doorstep and so if they were going to clear paths or maintain parts through them they would need to do so at a fair old clip they couldn't bring out small slow regular mine sweeping vessels and start work that way because then the royal navy would just show up and sink them which was somewhat inconvenient and to try and do this and bear in mind they were designed mainly around the idea of contact mines they would put additional metal plate um sometimes armor plate in the bow and front of the ship and because most of them were converted cargo ships they'd also quite cleverly filled the cargo holds with something that was very buoyant like cork so that even if the hole was breached well it's just being supported by a massive cork so it's not going to sink anytime soon as mine technology advanced and just hitting one dead ahead was less likely a way of setting off more sort of magnetic mines detonating under the keel the use of the ships became somewhat more well even more questionable than the original idea of just ramming headlong into them um yeah it still sounds as mad or even on multiple times of saying but the thing was the other thing was at least that way you if you have uh one of these ships sailing dead ahead of a valuable capital ship and it hits a mine um say in a clear channel at least you know that mind it is very definitely gone um and so if it can take two or three mine hits before it needs to go in for repairs well that's a lot better for getting your valuable ship through the uh otherwise cleared mine channel as compared to having a capital ship hit two or three mines and then be in dock for months and months and months and then you don't have the access to that ship's services so there is a certain method to the madness um but it does perhaps also reflect some of the operational realities of germany when it comes to who exactly controls the ocean and where the priorities lay in manufacture because if you're going to do mind sweeping in more conventional manner then not only do you have to have the controls mentioned before you have to have the requisite number of minesweepers which can be another major problem lord hawthorne asks was pq 17 right to scatter well the convoy had its orders and they were fairly urgent or at least they sounded it so the convoy itself they didn't really have much choice they were told to scatter with immediate effect they had to scatter with immediate effect as for whether it was the right thing to send the order out to scatter the convoy in the first place that is a bit more of a an open question these days knowing what we know now obviously we know that was a mistake pq 17 should have stayed together based on the political sensitivities and the information they had at the time i can see where the logic was in ordering pq17 to scatter on the other hand it was a a little bit of make sure i would say paranoia and and worst case scenario thinking which to be fair in a um in a war like world war ii is not necessarily a bad thing but um if it was kind of in a box where german surface shipping was the primary dash only threat to the convoy then yeah i probably based on the patchy information i had at the time probably would have ordered pq17 to scatter but equally based on the fact that the surface threat was only one of three threats obviously the others being the u-boats and the aircraft attacks on the balance of things i would say pro it was probably just about this side of the wrong call to make pq 17 scatter at the time but that's based purely on an examination of the facts available not taking into account um i say that the political considerations and the other wider considerations that the admiralty might have had at the time so yeah it's a little bit on edge though i would say at least in my estimate i know a lot of other people have opinions based on equally on the same evidence very strongly one way or the other captain soviet asks you've mentioned frigates built on lake ontario during the war of 1812 which got me thinking i looked up the capacity of the saint lawrence seaway and it looks like a treaty heavy cruiser would fit through the locks which means some fairly large ships can go into some relatively small compared to the ocean bodies of water what were the largest ships operated on enclosed bodies of water during various ages of naval development it depends if you talk about naval vessels exclusively then proportionally for the era the warships on the great lakes are probably the single largest combatants because ships like hms and lawrence they are literally full-on ships of the line um the capital ships of their era first rate so you're looking at the equivalent of operating a full-on dreadnought battleship for the period so by proportion that's probably the single largest when you're looking at large ships that are operated in a sort of quasi-governmental role then proportionally you're probably looking at something like the nemi ships in italy um the ones that were basically floating palaces for the roman emperors but well they're just absolutely massive in and of themselves and b most warships of the time are smaller than warships in the age of sales so they proportionally are considerably larger still and there were a reasonable number of warships of varying sizes that were operated on various river systems in the amazon region during various conflicts with brazil and other nations that occupy those areas but broadly speaking when it comes to full-on warships operating on something like a lake that can only be accessed by a river uh i mean unless you make a very very interesting argument about the black sea that you won't find too many large warships you'll find quite a few that will venture up rivers in various cases for example the cruiser hms london may ended its way up the yangtze a little bit during the amethyst incident trying to help out that ship and that's obviously a full-on heavy cruiser but generally speaking if you're going to be investing that kind of money into a ship especially in the era where you're talking about steam and steel and iron those ships will need to be operating on the oceans for you to get the proper utility out of them and also the number of rivers that can actually transport ships of significant size far enough up them to reach a lake is actually relatively rare because you've got to bear in mind you're talking about drafts of between usually 20 to 30 feet sometimes more for a large cruiser or something of that ilk and whilst there are river estuaries and river melts that might have that kind of depth the further up the river you go you're actually going to be losing that kind of depth very quickly so it's only the the absolute biggest uh waterways like the saint lawrence waterway the yangtze and the amazon that kind of thing where you're going to find these ships operating and even then they're mostly going to be sticking to the rivers because they're going to want to go back to go back out to sea at some point so most lake worn warships tend to be smaller and also for most lakes unless you're talking about something like the size of the great lakes in the main if you are going to be operating a lake born warship just because you possibly technically can get a deep draft multi thousand ton ship to float in it doesn't necessarily mean that's going to be all that much good to you because there might be very limited parts of the lake where that can occur and generally when you're fighting on a lake or in the area surrounding a lake a lot of what you're going to be doing is going to be shore assault shore bombardment that kind of thing at which point shallow draft and therefore smaller size is much much more preferable to having something that theoretically is bigger and better than everyone else's but can't actually affect anything other than sit in the middle of the lake and look pretty moon gara asks how are naval shells made what sort of quality control should be included so as not to end up like the italians in world war ii by the time of the first and second world wars making a naval shell is actually an incredibly complicated process but in very very quick and rough form most shells are usually started off by casting the shell in a rough form now that you'd probably barely consider that as a possible projectile for an 18th century naval cannon if you ever see the the first rough casting of a of a shell case but well celebrity i guess so that gives you the general shape of things now even at that stage if you're talking about an hg shell or an ap shell things do start to diverge somewhat but the the main thing you've got to do is turn a rough cast into a functional weapon so that will generally involve especially if it's an ap shell forging it to harden it up a bit but you've also got to mill it down from rough to the kind of smooth profile that you're used to seeing for most shells because you've got to control the weight very precisely and not just the weight but also the balance so from the rough casting you generally try and uh smooth out mill it down get it into an appropriate shape you then have to drill it out and where you're drilling that casting is going to depend obviously if you're using a nose fused hd shell you're going to have to clip the nose off or you might have cast it with a hole in the nose but you can have to drill the nose out to fit the fuse there if it's a armor-piercing shell then most of the drilling is going to be going on at the base to um neaten up the the hole where the base fuse is going to go and also where the explosive filler is going to go and then obviously once you've finished these processes as i said if you're an ap shell you're going to have to try and harden it a little bit um there's a separate manufacturer for the armor-piercing cap that goes on top of it but you you still want the shell itself to be fairly hard as opposed to a high explosive shell where you're not so concerned um but there is still some work to be done there and that in a very very very rough format is how uh you turn the casting of a shell into something that's a functional weapon then you've got to obviously install the explosive charge ins which has to be carefully weighed you have to install the fuse etc and in the case of the armor-piercing shell you also have to attach the armor-piercing cap and also potentially the the windscreen um which is the very very pointy part of most armor-piercing shells especially in the world war two period and then your shell is completed then obviously you usually spray it with some paint too so everyone knows what kind of shell it is now in terms of quality control so it basically comes down to weight because this is in an era before computer can aided manufacture now whilst there are jigs and such that can regulate theoretically um what's going on to the same kind of uh dimensions every single time you say miller shell down it's not unnecessarily 100 guaranteed that that's the case and also when you come to complex shapes such as the nose um your automatic guidance if you like might either be limited or in some depending on the ear exactly or in some cases not existing it may be purely done by eye and so on and so forth and also the casting itself whether it's a good cast or a bad cast you might get air bubbles you might have a poor mixture of metal that's being used etc so when you're doing your quality control check you have to weigh these shells which obviously by the time they're become fully complete um they weigh a substantial amount even the casting will weigh a lot so you have this weird dichotomy of you've got to have scales or some kind of other measuring device that can actually register the colossal weight of these things but also has to be precise enough to give you an accurate reading of exactly what that weight is because the variance in let's say italian shells well they had problems with variance in the the weight of the charges and the weight of the shells but the variance was actually only up to around about one percent which you might think is is not an awful lot but actually what amounts to quite hefty quite a hefty amount when you're talking about shells that weigh over a ton um but so your measuring device has to be able to accurately say right well here's our target weight whatever that happens to be um it could be 2 800 pounds if you're uh manufacturing us 16-inch shelves and then you've got to be able to look at it and say okay well this one is 2801 this one is 2798 or something like that and you've got to work out is this margin which you're always going to get but is this margin within tolerance and if it is with intolerance fine if it's not with intolerance then you have to discard that one and effectively start over and where you set these tolerance markers and whether or not the people manufacturing the shells actually stick to those tolerance markers combined with how accurate your machinery is to actually check if where your shell sits with relative of the tolerance markers that is where most of the quality control issues will lie the other issue you have to take into account is the balance of the shell because it even if you can manufacture shells that are all exactly the same weight that's not going to matter from an accuracy perspective if the balance is completely off and well castings kind of help with that but even then manufacturing errors and also again poor quality of metal used in the castings can result in things like air bubbles or impurities that are slightly more dense and if say you've got a very nose heavy shell and the next one you manufacture is tail heavy and the next one is perfectly balanced then if you fire all three shells out of a triple gun turret then those shells gonna go into wildly different areas and probably at least one of them is going to start going end over end so i know i've talked in the past about just how precise the manufacture of the naval guns were if you want to actually hit anything especially at the kind of ranges you're talking about in the first and second world wars the amount of precision engineering that has to go into the shells is also quite considerable maximilian hubert asks you've spoken about hms sydney before but have you read the official final report by the australian department of defense and do the explanations for the loss without survivors in their make sense in your opinion i have and indeed if anybody has many many hours to spare because there's a lot of documentation you can find it at defense.gov dot a u forward slash sydney2 that's sydney and then i i as in the roman numerals but lower case for some reason um forward slash final report there's an awful lot of documentation in there uh it goes through the whole encounter from start to end including examining all the various uh alternative shall we say theories about sydney sinking now in terms of their final conclusion they don't actually make a specific one they suggest uh three potential most likely candidates for the mechanism for the ship sinking and of those they reckon two of them are the more probable and i i tend to agree with them from an engineering perspective and what that comes down to in very brief summary is that with the ship so badly damaged by its battle with cormorant a lot of its internal bulkheads and doors etc things that are supposed to keep the ship subdivided would have been riddled with shrapnel and thus not really able to function fully in the man to which they're intended it also obviously has a big hole in the side from torpedo hit which doesn't help and is progressing through the sea however as we know from weather reports at the time the sea state at the end of the battle was about sea state three and over the next few hours escalated to between five and six which is a considerable increase obviously now this in turn means of the two most likely scenarios for its sinking as water came on board the sydney in in scenario one it would have pitched and rolled more heavily because it has now water in internally doing a free surface effect there wouldn't have been too many of the sydney's crew left alive anyway because of the sheer amount of damage and raking fire explosions etc that occurred to the ship's upper works and armament and superstructure as well as obviously damage from direct hull hits and the torpedo explosion so the relatively limited numbers of men still alive anyway as the sea state gets worse and as the ship begins to pitch and roll considerably more violently that would mean that well any sensible crew at that point would not have been near any exit points because of the chance of being chucked overboard and so when the ship finally rolls over that water can start pouring in through the various ventilation hatches and shell damage holes etc in the upper works of the ship and on the main deck then all of a sudden the ship's going to flood incredibly quickly it's going to be flooding through all the areas the crew would normally try to get out of and it's just gonna heal over and sink fairly quickly probably by the bow that would certainly account for why there were no survivors the other possibility which is tangentially related to it is that with the massive great hole in the bow because of the torpedo hit that as the sydney was moving along again in the rough sea states because that's just a fact then possibly the the shored up bulkheads behind would have given in to the water pressure as as the force of the weather increased at which point water would have rushed through the length of the ship again bypassing most of the bulkheads as i mentioned already because they'd been damaged at which point the ship would have filled up fairly rapidly from below and again gone down pretty quickly and then the rough seas would have probably accounted very quickly for anybody who was quick enough and lucky enough to get out and off of the ship in the most case and again because of the increasing rough weather and the increasing heel and pitch of the ship most of the crew probably would have taken shelter relatively speaking deeper inside some of the more intact areas of the ship which would have made escape a lot more difficult so both of those scenarios make sense and it could have been one the other or combination of both but obviously um because of well the fact that the ship went down without survivors we're never going to know 100 which of the two or which combination is going to be the the way that sydney actually sank but let's say from an engineering perspective i think those are pretty solid reasonings jonathan welk asks could the north carolinas or the south dakotas ever have been up gunned to the 16-inch 50 gun i mean anything's impossible in theory but realistically probably not i mean apart from anything else just look at the weight issues now each 16-inch 50 gun weighs around about 10 tons more than a 16-inch 45 gun now that's you might think not necessarily too bad because even across all nine guns you're looking at an all-up increase in weight of only about 100 tons and whilst 100 tons high up in the ship is not necessarily a good thing you could compensate for that perhaps take off the conning tower or something like that the large issues come into things like balance because not only are the guns heavier they're also obviously longer they're another five calibers longer so their point balance is going to be different the turrets themselves weigh considerably more so each 16-inch 50 turret is around about 300 tons just over 300 tons heavier than a 16 inch 45 turret so even assuming they are of exactly the same dimensions you're now looking at a thousand tons of extra top weight for the turrets plus the 100 or so tons extra top weight for the guns so one one just over 1 100 tons of extra top weight that is not something that a ship like the north carolina or the south dakota is going to be able to cope with very well now luckily due to the colossal mess up that was the design of the barbette and the turret um between two different naval bureaus in the design of the iowas actually turns out that the bar bet diameter is pretty much the same as the 16 inch 45 so at least you're not having to drill out entire portions of the ship to install a new larger barbette because that will put the put it completely out of any kind of reasonable standard because you're not going to just go cutting apart vast swathes of your battleship to stick a slightly larger gun turret in so the main issue is the weight and on a treaty era ship of around 35 000 tons an extra 11 to 1200 tons is about three percent of overall displacement and say its overall displacement mounted fairly high in the ship so the only circumstance where i can see that happening is if for some reason the us navy decided they wanted to do this upgrade and it would have to have take place in maybe the late 1950s in an era where aircraft and missiles weren't a thing where guns were still the supreme masters of the sea at which point given that they could already handle the mark 8 shells it would be theoretically possible to do but you would have to have some major weight savings involved so i say the conning tower would probably have to come out and the ships much like some of the world war one eraships that were then brought in and modernized in the interwar period would probably have to be bulged which would also help with their torpedo defense but would mainly be put there to increase the ship's stability to cope and buoyancy to cope with the increased weight so effectively yet theoretically yes but it would have required a colossal amount of modification and practically speaking is not going to happen in our timeline looks the lynx asks how is weather measured and forecast for fleets well these days it's all super computers and satellites which to be honest once they're up and running are fairly boring in my opinion the launch of a satellite and big white spectacular especially when it goes wrong which is relatively pleasing to my uh in a pyromaniac but um yeah outside of that not a lot happens other than data gets fed but back in the day it was a lot more complicated in fact weather forecasting actually came into effect largely due to maritime issues because well if you get a very bad storm on land well okay fine but usually it's not awful unless there's massive amounts of flooding whereas if you get a bad storm at sea um yeah ships especially in the age of sale and the early ages team really don't like that and it can lead to quite catastrophic consequences so weather forecasting as we understand it really only kicks off in the latter part of the 19th century and initially it takes advantage mainly of the fact that things like the telegraph have been invented so you can actually report weather ahead of the weather actually arriving um on top of whatever poor person is about to be hit by it and prior to that it would generally just be a case of people would pull their observations so at this latitude we usually experience storms between november and february and at this latitude it's relatively calm between july and september that kind of thing and these would go into little naval almanacs and so as long as you roughly where you were a captain would consult the element i can go oh right okay well we can see that we're here roughly here and according to the almanac we should expect to encounter this kind of weather at some point at this time and then obviously people would use their own local knowledge and expertise in what kind of weather effects presage certain more spectacular weather effects and that that would kind of be the extent of your weather forecasting whereas by the late 19th century with the advent as i said the telegraph network and measurements of pressure as well as obviously with all of this data the ability to much more accurately calculate what was likely to happen based on repeated observations this would allow for larger scale weather forecasting to be made and this would then be transmitted via telegraph to various ports where ships would be informed flags and various other signals would be flown so if they knew that a gale was approaching there would be a a signal that could be flown in in the port to tell everyone there's a gale approaching you may not want to necessarily sail right about now um and then once the radio network began to be established in the early part of the 20th century then these reports could start to be transmitted out to uh ships and fleets at sea and of course with things like uh the various pressure reading gauges people could be trained and put aboard ships and then they could have their own little instrumentation array and by using the updated almanacs which obviously now with all the work that they've done in the latter part of the 19th century could be a lot more accurate about exactly when where and how weather tended to occur they could then make their own analysis using their instrumentation and go right well okay well this kind of effect presages this in this area so therefore we're probably going to get hit by this or it's going to be really nice and calm and sunny so there's always a certain element of guesswork although once you get into world war ii you can use things like radar to look at incoming uh cloud formations and atmospheric disturbances but you also have weather ships one of which is pictured here these kind of take off quite a bit in the late 19th early 20th centuries because obviously whilst you can have in somewhere like europe you can have loads of telegraph stations all over the place so if there's a let's say a blast of arctic weather coming down from northern norway you can have a whole bunch of chain chains of telegraph stations on the norwegian coast who can be advising okay well up here in the north of norway it's absolutely freezing there's ice flying everywhere it's really horrible and then the next station two three hours later reports oh yeah that weather's arrived to us that can chain down the norwegian coast and go across to scotland england france germany and they could look at the previous history and go okay well this is the path that's roughly taking this is usually the kind of weather we end up with once this system reaches us down here therefore we can advise everyone several hours or even days ahead of time what the weather is likely to be but when you are talking about things like the atlantic well there's not too many places in the middle of the atlantic or indeed the pacific where these kinds of observations can be made and even if there are you might be operating in a patch of there where there isn't any um and so these weather ships would go out and they'd kind of fill in the blanks reporting changes in pressure changes in general weather etc and all this would go into central weather bureaus who could compute what was happening what was likely to happen and send that out to everyone again but by and large right up until the end of the period that we usually cover here sort of the end of world war ii a lot of it is still notionally we believe that this is what the weather systems are going to be for your area coming from the central weather bureaus but a lot of it is still reliant on the uh weather officers aboard certain fleets making their own local calculations um typhoon uh cobra for example the one that halsey well one of the two the halls he managed to sail is fleet through um whilst they were getting general indications from externally that the weather was going to go south a lot of the workers precisely what was about to happen where when and why was going on aboard the fleet itself so yeah it's actually very very much more educated guesswork than you might otherwise think even in an era of radio transmission and radar etc in world war ii cody asks which is worse for a navy lack of manpower or lack of resources it depends on what scale you're talking about because a significant lack in one can completely [ __ ] a navy even if theoretically both being short on a more reasonable scale might indicate the other is worse so what i mean by that is generally speaking i would say a lack of manpower is the worst of the two because assuming you're talking about within reasonable margins if you lack resources you can still have a smaller fleet and you can train your men to be very very elite with that fleet good case example would actually be things like the us-6 frigates in the war of 1812. especially if they'd had to fight anyone other than the royal navy maybe something like the quasi wars and it's possibly a slightly better example whereas if you lack the manpower then you can have loads and loads of ships but you can't crew them so it doesn't actually matter that you have the resources and so you're effectively suffering from the lack of both at the same time and also if you are completely lacking in manpower whilst you can try and train them up to be elite the very fact that you're lacking um the necessary crew means you're probably having to scrape the bottom of the barrel which means that you're going to have significant problems training your crew up to be as elite as they can be now obviously this is within reasonable margins uh if if the disparity is too great then whichever one you have the massive disparity in is obviously going to be the overriding principle if you want to take an example of of lack of resources um look at say the us navy in the 1900s and early 1910s they had the manpower no doubt i mean the us had plenty of people that for them to choose from but the lack of resources afforded to them by congress and therefore the lack of a navy outside of battleships for a good portion of that period left the us at a critical disadvantage if it faced off against anybody else of similar or even slightly lesser size because as i've covered in numerous other videos they would have completely lacked any kind of modern fleet screen which would have meant they'd be blind and completely unable to position themselves advantageously against an enemy fleet who would know exactly what they were doing and could position themselves tactically to receive the us's attack or launch their own attack in the manner that was best suited to the enemy and of course when the enemy has a functioning fleet screen that also means an awful lot of torpedoes which for world war one era ships are never never good news and if you flip things around somewhat you can look at say the imperial russian navy at the end of the 19th beginning of the 20th century where their lack of trained manpower probably contributed in a significant part to the losses they suffered in the russo-japanese war because they were in that case they weren't lacking bodies russia had plenty of men to throw at the problem but what they were lacking was trained sea personnel and and that was really their undoing uh the fact that the russian navy at least as far as actual accuracy of gunnery uh acquitted themselves at the battle of sushima was actually remarkably well um it just let down in a lot of ways by the the shells themselves that was largely a product of just having so much time to train people who are effectively complete and utter noobs up to something approaching a competent level but actually the battle of tsushima is another a good example of things because again the russians didn't technically lack for the resources they probably actually threw too many resources at the problem considering they sent some really old and broken down ships that were more of an albatross around rudosvinsky's neck than anything else but if they'd been able to sail out with just their more modern ships but with elite crews right from the start they probably would have done a much much much better job um atsushima obviously as i said they had some limitations when it came to the fact that their shells etc just really weren't up to snuff compared to the japanese ones but it would have been a lot closer of an engagement stafford magnus asks what happens if a loaded gun tube is filled with water or fouled by ice is it still safe to pull the trigger and if not how could the gun to be cleared if you've somehow contrived to get your battleship's main guns filled with water then under no circumstances should you ever be pulling that trigger because in the words of the potter puppet pals it's a pipe bomb yay or not yay especially if you're the one in the turret um yeah water's not very compressible and it tends to weigh a fair bit pull the trigger on a 16 inch or 15 inch gun full of water and you're just gonna [ __ ] your own ship um if on the other hand you do have a gun full of water and you don't want to be carrying an extra incredibly expensive pipe bomber board um then most guns can elevate to a below horizontal angle so firstly turn your gun away from where you're getting all the water coming aboard probably from across the bow so turn the gun as far back as you can and then crank the elevation down to the absolute minimum might be minus three minus four degrees something like that and due to this wonderful thing called gravity the water will run out um probably still not massively safe to fire the gun um and hopefully it's not loaded at the time but that's probably the best you can hope for um and just make try and hold that there for as long as possible to make sure it's thoroughly drained this is why guns have champions and such for peacetime cruising and water i'm cruising when they're not expecting battle but um yeah so if the gun is not loaded then you probably once you think it's absolutely fully drained one way is to elevate it up to the maximum elevation and then open the breach and have a bunch of people with buckets there to collect whatever might be left with ice it's a somewhat different matter because unlike water ice doesn't tend too often to collect deep into the barrel unless of course it's water spray that's coming in then frozen but if it's just kind of built up as you can see here firing the gun is not necessarily going to be the wisest or safest of course is because of course pressure is going to build up before that ice ruptures but in most reasonable circumstances if it's an absolute emergency you might be able to get away with it with the thinner coverings of ice if it's properly thick and solid you probably don't want to run the risk but it's certainly considerably less dangerous than firing a gun that where you've filled the barrel with water somehow in most cases with ice you send somebody to uh or multiple somebodies to chip the ice off and if you're in an absolute emergency they just have to clear the barrel end um and then stand very very well back and watch the fireworks show when the shock of firing spools everything else off of it coos army is triple zero one asks you mentioned footage on one of the lexington class coming through a smoke screen in one of your special videos but i've been unable to find it could i trouble you for a link oh believe it or not i'm actually having some problems relocating the footage myself um it happened a number of times that here's a still from fleet problem nine which occurred in 1929 and there you can see the ship just coming out the smoke screen there i know i've seen quite a few shots both of the lexington class and a number of other ships bursting through smoke screens which all looks very dramatic there's another one that i've definitely seen which involves more of an air dropped smoke screen which is more vertical than this one which is more horizontal which also looks very impressive but i cannot for the life of me find where those are stored now so if anyone else knows where they are um since the u.s national archive catalogue doesn't seem to be cooperating with me on the day of the recording um then please let me know william h burke iii asks did the adoption of naval boilers lead to ships having desalination systems to water both their boilers and sailors if not when were these systems first introduced and how did they evolve so desalination systems in principle were known about well very very very long before um steam and iron ships but in terms of installations that you could actually take on border ship and use again there were still systems known before the age of steam and iron broke out but as you might imagine when you have to use significant amounts of heat to separate salt water into salt and water then having those kinds of systems on board you could kind of do it in on a small scale in a ship's galley on a wooden ship but you're not going to find many captains in favor of even more sources of fire on board wooden ships but once iron ships come around yes they do start to show up but they're not i would say commensurate with the rise of the steam ship and the iron ship even by the middle part of the latter half of the 19th century whilst a number of ships do at this point have desalination plants aboard a lot of ships still don't and it's only as you come into the early part of the 20th century that you start to see desalination plants become near enough universal aboard ships but even then they're not sort of allowing for fully proliferate use of fresh water the earliest desalination plants installed aboard ships are mainly actually to provide more fresh water for the boilers for feed water because using salt water it can be done in boilers but your boilers aren't going to last very long so generally ships would go out much as they would do in the age of sail when they had just barrels full of fresh water for the crew they would go out with freshwater tanks and some of that would be for the crew most of it to be perfectly honest would be for the ship's machinery for the boilers mainly and the desalination equipment would top up those tanks so kind of trying to stay ahead of the drain caused by both human and machinery use as the desalination systems got more capable and more compact then obviously the navies could afford to start becoming a little bit freer with restrictions on the use of fresh water but even so even on modern ships at least on warships fresh water isn't a free commodity that you can just use however much you like there are still limitations on even though with the loss of naval boilers in the traditional sense you don't quite need quite as much fresh water for running uh your machinery and propulsion systems as you used to do in the early part of the 20th century there's a reason for instance that say the the uss niagara was offered as a desalination ship to the us navy around the time of the spanish-american war part of the reason for the relatively slow uptake of desalination systems compared to when ships first started using engines in part with just the technological capability of the desalination systems themselves in terms of water output versus relative size and fuel consumption but also the fact that for a good chunk of the part of the 19th century that saw naval um ships using boilers a lot of those boilers were secondary or else the ships were relatively short range and so the amount of fresh water that they carried on board could be relatively limited without too much top up because you weren't expecting to use them all that much it was only once you got into the last couple of decades of the 19th century that ships were routinely expected to be cruising around away from land without any real way of topping up their fresh water supplies for considerable periods of time and that's when you start to see desalination equipment spread and improve a lot more rapidly but even so even in things like uh submarines where you really really are operating far away from home and not really going to be topping up with fresh water from outside sources anytime soon whilst they do have desalination plants aboard and obviously quite well they're running on batteries as well anyone who's served on one of the older submarines can tell you and if there are any world war two submarine veterans uh listening they'll be able to tell you water was definitely in very very short supply soft llama asks i was watching some world war ii naval movies and i noticed when told something by an officer the ratings sometimes reply i and other times with ii what's up with that also in norman friedman's u.s ship type volumes he references armor thickness as so many inches backed by 20 pound sts i know he defined this term some of his other volumes but i don't have your memory so what is sts and what does the pound rating refer to so the sts question sts is special treatment steel which is a type of steel that the us used especially in world war ii in ship construction it was kind of a halfway house between normal structural steel and armor grade steel so it was stronger than the average structural steel um but it didn't require anything like as much processing to manufacture as actual face hardened armor steel or even homogeneous armor plate which meant it was quicker and easier and cheaper to make also you don't want to build an entire ship out of armor plate um as interesting as that might sound because armor steel is a lot more rigid than structural steel so if you build an entire ship out of armor-grade steel it will snap um which is which is not a good thing but sts was pretty much about as close as you could get to the strength of armor steel without the corresponding problems with brittleness and cost the 20-pound reference is probably down to a much older method of measuring the depth or thickness of an armor plate and this goes back all the way to the very earliest armor plates there is obviously a way that you can do that by going okay well here's an armored plate it is x inches or centimeters or millimeters thick however unit measure you're using however the problem with that is that especially with the earlier armor plates and to be honest even through to world war two whether or not you've got it uniformly that thick is a completely different matter it might very well be let's say six inches thick or two inches thick or whatever at the point that you're measuring but if you move your micrometer or your tape measure along two three feet in one direction or the other you might find it's actually thinner or thicker in that area and then that's just at the edge of the plate if you look along the plate on both sides you might see that actually there are variations in depth there as well um and even if it is of a uniform completely uniform thickness you have no guarantee as to whether this part of the plate is denser and this part of the plate is lighter or whatever so one of the other ways that was come up with of measuring it was that they would calculate at a certain metal quality so let's say the because the remember steel is an alloy um but they'd work out okay so for this kind of steel at this particular mixture at this particular purity etc a let's say foot by foot by foot cube so 12 by 12 by 12 inches weighs a certain amount so if we want a one inch thick plate we know that for a square foot that one inch thick plate is going to be 1 12 of that weight and then they would take that and they would look at the armor plate and they go okay well if we've got let's say 100 square feet of this armor plate and we know that one square foot at an inch thick weighs this much then a hundred square feet at one inch thick should weigh 100 times that or how whatever thickness whatever surface area you're looking at and so they would weigh the plate divide it through by the surface area divide it through by the thickness in inches and they would check and they would say okay well this seems to weigh about what it should weigh therefore the plate is probably correct so uh in the case of a sts plate whether they're measuring it in square feet or square meters or whatever it'll be for a given thickness we estimate that this plate should weigh 20 pounds for a given unit of area and it will there be therefore be 20 pound sts um you see there's quite a lot as well on british drawings especially world war one when you look at deck armor whilst the belt armor might very well be measured in inches you'll see quite a lot of deck armor drawings we'll talk about 50 pound plate 30 pound plate etc rather than a specific inch requirement and that can lead to certain confusion um when you examine exact thicknesses because you might find that let's say uh king george v's armor plate is 50 on the belt is 15 inches thick in theory but when you actually measure it you and you look at some of the documents you might find that they've measured it and gone uh well we're actually ordering it by weight per unit thickness and so the actual thickness might be slightly thinner or slightly thicker depending on obviously each specific case each specific type of plate in question because they're they're working to weight rather than to an exact thickness as for i and i i um i suspect that any some serving or recently served or veteran naval officers and men might be able to shed some more light in detail in their particular services but from what i've been able to discern um using i or iii is the correct response to an order because if you say yes sir then that implies that you had a choice to say no sir whereas if you're being given an order um you do not have a choice so the correct response is i or i i there's some suggestion that i've heard that using i i'm is kind of yeah i'm going to do this right this minute sir whereas i might mean yes i understand i will follow your orders sir but it's not necessarily an immediately proximate thing so for example if i don't know if if the captain says to you hoist this signal and you're in the middle of a battle as he needs to go immediately you might respond i i sir whereas if the captain says right you make sure this deck is clear clean cleaned and scrubbed by the time i get back this afternoon you might say i sir because you're not necessarily going to go and start scrubbing right that instant that's one argument i've heard um another argument i've heard is that it's simply that technically it should be i and people just accept iso because it's shorter and less repetitive so yeah as i say those of you who have or are serving in navies and might be able to shed some more light on this please let us know in the comments below bill cunningham asks i'm working on my new channel the name john erickson has come up a few times i was aware of his work on the uss monitor but not aware of his work in the development of the propeller i've read about all kinds of crazy methods to apply thrust via machine power mechanical laws paddle wheels and other such but how did the propeller develop by with the ss archimedes and grow from there so the propeller was in theory known of for quite a long period of time i mean the fact that the first successful um screw-propelled ocean-going ship was called the ss archimedes kind of gives a hint of to how far back with the archimedes screw people knew of the concept of using a screw to move water around but getting it to actually work on a larger scale was another matter entirely so um ericsson as he noted was part of the early key developments of propellers as well as another chap called smith in the uk and they both were kind of working separately on this idea and they were thinking well there's got to be some some benefit to all of this they as they working mostly independently managed to work out that a traditional archimedes screw which obviously multiple turns long was not the most efficient um some of the discovery actually came up somewhat accidentally in smith's case and by a bit of testing in erickson's case which was initially they had these shorter screw propellers but they were very much screws archimedes style screws with more than one turn um in smith's case he had a two-term propeller which then broke um he was left with sort of a just about a turns worth of propeller and suddenly discovered this was about twice as effective and he was like oh okay i i guess i guess this is a thing so from that point on propellers were modified so if you have a look at some of the initial propellers like the ones that were fitted to our community ss archimedes itself they are quite literally a single full turn of an archimedes screw as time went on from that in the early part of the 19th century people started to redesign and cut down and redesign and cut down because they discovered that actually having fewer or shorter uh blades in terms of that the horizontal length was making the ship more efficient and then um after a while of everyone having two bladed screws people like well if if it's so short relatively speaking or then now there's space to add more blades maybe more blades will work and so as time went on more and more blades were added and propellers became more and more efficient more and more powerful now the interesting thing is that between the sort of 8 18 late 1830s early 1840s which is when the archimedes set out and the construction of the ss great britain which was not tremendously long after that um in uh well the mid 1840s so if you're only you're talking less than a decade's worth of advancement propellers had gone from effectively a cut-off section of an archimedes screw to this which is the ss great britain's final propeller form and whilst it doesn't necessarily look entirely like modern propellers do the funny thing is that let's say within the decade the propeller had already reached most of the efficiency it was ever going to this propeller form on on the great britain actually has something like 80 85 percent of the propulsive efficiency of a modern screw propeller and given that we've had a century and a half from almost two cents not quite so century and three quarters or so to improve it's one of those cases of where you get eighty percent of the way on twenty percent of the effort and then the last twenty percent takes the remaining eighty percent of the effort or whichever particular percentage ratio of that saying you want to adopt um and thereafter whilst propellers have increased in propulsive efficiency to a certain degree it hasn't been anything like those initial few years of propeller development most propulsion or screw propeller developments subsequent to that once you get past probably somewhere around about the latter part of the 19th century have mostly been centered around things like reducing cavitation more laterally obviously stealth and other factors such as that rather than directly trying to make propulsive efficiency work although there are different blade shapes that needed to be developed for different kinds of regimen because a propeller that is incredibly efficient at moving you along when it's rotating relatively slowly and your aim for your top speed is maybe 10 to 15 knots is going to look radically different from the kind of propeller you need to propel a ship along at 30 to 35 knots and when the shaft itself is obviously going to be rotating a lot faster and the ship itself might be of a completely different size and scale so yeah there's there's an awful lot to unpack there but well hopefully within five minutes that gives a short history of the development of propellers and how they came about joshua pasquale asks would it have been possible to create boilers that use electrical coils to heat the water similar to the way an electric stove works and say have a couple of oil fired boilers to start the engines and generate the initial electricity for the others and then use the steam from the electric ones to move the ship and provide power to the boilers so effectively what you're talking about is kind of like a starter motor but for ships part of the problem to be perfectly honest is going to be where you're going to get the power for the electrical coils to heat the water because you need an awful lot of energy to heat water up to any kind of boiling point which means that if you're going to be heating water on the scale of even a small boiler to generate initial power to get everything else started that's going to require an absolutely massive power bank or power supply and of course on a ship that's powered by boilers the power supply is coming from the boilers so um unfortunately much as a plug-in extension lead into itself doesn't give you infinite free energy um you can't use power from boilers that haven't started to power electrical coils to heat the water to start the boilers and well for a long long long long time in the era of boiler-powered ships having a um battery-powered boiler would be not looked upon with a great deal of favor given just how well dangerous electronic links and especially the kind of batteries the lead acid batteries etc that they had at the time would tend to be as various forms of liquid fueling came into use there were some attempts to get oil fired um boilers going as the sort of this kind of thing um it oil firing did have the advantage that you can just turn the oil on and start burning it as opposed to coal where you have to bank up the the fires and work the fires up to heat first before you can start transmitting heat into the water itself but um this is also where diesel came in diesel generators and also even diesel engines partial diesel propulsion like the germans tried in some of the ships in the high seas fleet for example because those very much could be near enough switched on at almost a moment's notice and then obviously provide power and speed to get the ship moving whilst the rest of your steam boilers were brought up to pressure so the idea in principle yes it can work but in the early part of the 20th century if you're going to be doing that you're going to be wanting to do it probably by some form of diesel generator or some other kind of similar system rather than effectively a showing kettle leops 1984 asks the duke of wellington twice described his army as the scum of the earth could the same be said of the sailors in the age of sale well in terms of their origins at least for a large part of the actual crew as opposed to the officers if you want to be technical yeah you could probably say that but in terms of the quality of the men and what they were able to do i'd say that's probably not so much the case i mean apart from anything else the there would there was a significantly larger number of officers um on board a ship compared to the number of men as compared to what you might find in uh army units of the time but on top of that as i say that this to be a sailor in the age of sale was actually to be a very skilled individual um if you were say on a gunnery team um in in the gondola gun decks you had to be part of a well-drilled well-oiled machine and that would load aim and fire the guns as safely and quickly as possible and of course you're handling a basic a very very large piece of artillery for the time so a gunner or part of a gunner's team would generally be [Music] fairly fairly well skilled and um sailors up on the mastered yards as well was a very high skilled specialist job and these skills were transferable if you spent five or six years up on the masts of a frigate then if you left navy service you could probably find fairly easy passage on a commercial sailing vessel of some description so you had a lot of transferable skills and if you look in the army at say the artillery regiments they're usually held to be somewhat more professional than perhaps some of the rank and file infantry and if i say if you're on a gunner team you are effectively part of a very large artillery unit um so yeah in in terms of common origin yeah you could probably make the argument but in terms of transferable skills into later life and therefore sort of where they might find themselves uh towards the end of their working careers assuming they hadn't drank it all the way no i would say probably from from a social status point of view especially in a time of war where they could pick up a bunch of prize money a retired sailor with a good career behind him could probably find himself at a relatively higher social station than the equivalent um rank-and-file soldier in the army assuming of course that both have made relatively sensible decisions as to how they were going to use their pay dash prize money etc and their skills once they left the armed forces graham r asks how much of an impact did the invention of smokeless powder have on naval artillery quite a considerable effect but perhaps not in the way that you might immediately think of as you can see here from this american battleship from the first world war period firing the fact that it's called smokeless propellant is perhaps a bit of a misnomer reduced smoke propellant might be a bit more accurate when you're talking on the scale of naval artillery um reduced smoke obviously being compared to black powder propellants but to be perfectly fair um reducing the amount of smoke output relative to black powder propellants is not exactly difficult i think some house fires probably result in less smoke than a large num amounts of black powder being fired off um so the the the actual production of smoke being reduced compared to black powder was somewhat of a benefit but as was actually pointed out to me during my trip to the vasa museum even with black powder the gun smoke of your gun itself is not so much for a problem as long as you're moving because as long as there's a relatively decent amount of wind or your ship is moving at anything much above walking pace by the time you've reloaded and you're ready to fire again you'll have gone away from where your smoke is unless the wind is really irritating and is keeping pace with the ship but um perhaps more saliently is that other guns smoke might drift down on you and if you're in a fleet other ships gun smoke might drift down on you that's actually where most of the problem lies rather than your particular guns smoke when it comes to shooting again the large impact that smokeless powder had although i'd say it did mean that fleet battles were somewhat viable instead of we've had two broadsides and or whatever and now everything is just a massive pool of slowly expanding smoke which would happen in black powder weaponry um if you were relatively stationary as you would be in a lot of the palmelle battles that were expected for the middle of the 19th century but anyway the main change was the fact that smokeless powders also tended to be a lot more powerful and had different burn profiles compared to black powder so all of a sudden this is what enabled the longer barrels of guns so if you look at um the most of the guns used in the american civil war and in the immediate period thereafter in the 1870s a lot of them although they are considerably larger than age of sale cannon when you look at the bore size of proportional to their length they're not that much divorced from long barrel 32 pounders that would have been familiar to nelson whereas once you get these smokeless powders which i say have a very different burn profile very different pressures and temperatures etc and a lot more power behind them compared to black powder now there is a point to making the gun barrel longer and the shells go higher velocity and further and with more power and that is the main actual effect of what we would loosely group together as the smokeless propellants graham r asks what presidential or congressional election had the largest impact good or bad on the us navy the best election as far as the u.s navy was concerned was probably that of wilson in 1914 1915 because that resulted eventually in the naval act of 1916 which was pretty much the catalyst for kicking the u.s navy up from its previous status as one of the larger navies but very much smaller than some of the others up to ambitions to become the largest navy on the planet now obviously with the washington naval treaty and such that ambition was somewhat forestalled for a while but if there's anything that marks the change at least in u.s intention from going from we have enough ships to safeguard our interests to we are want to be the naval hegemon of the world that is probably the the turning point and it's that election that kicks all of that off so if you like a large u.s navy ultimately they're probably that's probably the congress to go and thank terms of largest impact negatively on the us navy you're probably looking at the elections of the last part of the 1860s when the american civil war era navy was cut down right to the bone and beyond to the point that i think at some points there were certain congressman gnawing on the us navy's marrow that particular act denied us a couple of things i mean it denied us a chance to see what the us navy would have come up with in the weird and wonderful era of the latter part of the 19th century when it comes to iron clads um u.s navy ironclads as far as everyone is because it basically consists of monitors uss new iron sides dot dot dot and then they come up with texas and maine um so yeah there's a there's a lot that we were denied in terms of naval design there but in a number of ways this also nearly crippled the u.s navy not in just in terms of well leaving it to a point where several of the south american navies by the latter part of the end of the 19th century were looking at possibly overtaking them um but it also left them when it came to rebuilding in almost a similar position to that that the kriegsmania found itself in in the 1930s with the complete atrophy of naval design and building skills and one only really has to look at some of the initial designs for things like texas and maine and some of the weirder cruisers that would the us navy produced in the early part of the 1890s to see that there were some serious issues with ship design in the u.s navy bureaus mostly because they had no idea what they were doing at that point they were kind of trying to throw things together from back burner projects a few a small core of staff and looking around at everyone else and going well what's everyone else doing because we don't know um they were very lucky in that this claw back period occurred in the run-up to what would eventually become the dreadnought race which meant that the us navy was able to make some fairly serious mistakes in ship design learn from and refine them and get themselves back onto an even keel in terms of ship design or obviously still having to work through some congressional strangling in terms of funding and ship size but it established them in a relatively decent position for the outbreak of the dreadnought race if let's say the that that particular gap in funding and shipbuilding had continued for another five to ten years so that the us navy was looking at trying to drag itself out of that period of virtually no ships having been designed in the early 1900s then there's a very good chance that could have cut off the us navy's battlefield ambitions when it came to the dreadnought race at the knees because they probably would have spent 19056 through to 1910 just trying to figure out what on earth a dreadnought was and how do you make one as opposed to coming up with some pretty good designs especially towards the latter part of that five year period and that in turn would have meant that by the time you get to 1916 with a us navy still playing a lot of catch-up it would have been much less likely for that um rather decisive naval act of 1916 to a either have been passed or b if it was passed for it to have anything like a reasonable amount of effect joe kovale asks a lot of cruisers and battleships have portholes along much of the hull how do these portholes relate to the armored belt are they located only above it are they located on hull plating exterior to the belt or do they go through the belt portholes when you can get a clear photo of a ship that's roughly side on actually help give a good idea of exactly how armored and where that armor is on a ship um the reason for that is that portholes are not put through the armor belt and the armor belt most of the time at least is on the exterior of the ship and when it's internal usually an internal sloped belt like on the iowas you don't have portholes exterior to that because there's no one in between the armor belt and the exterior plating to benefit from them so where portholes are at areas of the ship that are not armored and where they aren't is usually a good indicator that there is armour in that location um so if you see it that well a ship has however many inches thick belt if you look at the side profile of the ship you can get a good idea of how extensive that coverage actually is so taking for example the picture that's on your screen at the moment this is one of the renowned class battle cruisers when they were just complete and you can see a lovely double set of portholes running pretty much the entire length of the ship which indicates that yeah that whatever armor they might have notional as it is is not really present much at all anywhere on the ship it's it's going to be very very minor which makes the ship rather hideously badly protected now if we then switch and now we see repulse in her last year of life you can see the additional armor plate that was installed on her side as a result of well everyone looking at that first photo photo and going yeah we saw what happened to jutland when you try this let's let's not um and uh because as i've said before even though the explosion of queen mary was and the near loss of line was down to boy ammunition handling as i've also pointed out the loss of indepthable and invincible whilst ammo handling didn't help with that it was also down to the fact they just did not have the armor in in question either um but anyway looking at ripples you can see there's a nice big slabs of armor and across the midships up to the gun turrets either end they've pretty much suppressed that lower row of portholes because now there's armor slabs in place so you can tell immediately that the ship is considerably better protected than it was 20 years earlier snowstalker36 asks the turtleback armour scheme used by the germans in world war ii is generally outdated and outclassed but given that they were building their fleet to fight the french the french preference for closer range engagements and the turtle back strength at close ranges was it really that bad of a choice at the time um failing to keep command and control connections protected by armor as a separate issue in my opinion the thing is given that yes the french did prefer or thought that they were going to have closer range engagements in world war one that didn't really carry through into the interwar period and then into world war ii so when the bismarcks were under construction the germans would have known about the dunkirks and french heavy cruisers and such built it in the interwar period and thus they would have known that the french had kind of dropped their preference for closer range engagements the dunkirk's guns could reach out quite far they were designed for relatively long distance engagements um certainly engagements at a distance beyond where the turtleback scheme really comes into any significant um effect but so there's that and also the fact that to be perfectly honest if you're designing your ship for one very particular engagement scenario against one potential theory theoretical method of attack that's not a very good way to design a ship you should be designing a ship to cope with as many different kinds of attack as possible and considering more than one opponent because yes but as you said the the critics marina were mainly thinking about fighting the french but they couldn't rule out fighting out other other ships from other navies and even if they were designing it against the franchise to say if they're going to fight the dunkirks which they would know about the time um when they were designing the bismarcks then they would have known well actually we need to be able to engage actively at a longer distance there's there's some claims thrown about that oh the bismarcks were designed to fight the royal navy at close ranges in the north sea but well for one thing no they weren't um and for second the [Music] the idea of a close range engagement in the north sea could happen but when you look into the kinds of ranges that the fighting was opened at even say jutland and obviously with fire control advances those engagement ranges would be longer in uh war in the 1940s and then you look at the known characteristics of well the most common british battleship gun in service at the time the 15-inch 42 even fighting against 15 inch 42 the turtle back system just does not make sense um there really is precious little excuse for the inefficiency of the bismarck slayer and it's armor layout in particular as i've said before you can if you adopt an all-or-nothing armor scheme and make a few minor changes to things like the secondary battery you can design a ship that's got the speed of a bismarck it's got the main guns of a bismarck it's got better aaa than a bismarck and it's actually got better and thicker armor scheme than a bismarck and you can do it on considerably less tonnage something around about 38 000 tons um so yeah it's just basically the the main reason for taking the the turtle back style as opposed to the all or nothing is well that's what they knew how to do um and that was basically it really the senkari asks breaking from my usual ancient world questions normal service being resumed at some point probably i was talking to my family and a story came up about them in the 1970s or possibly late 60s sailing up into portsmouth and dipping their flag at a battleship i'm guessing probably tiger or blake as a courtesy that was returned followed by the enthusiastic children repeatedly lowering and hoisting their motorboats flag in a misguided attempt to get the warship to repeat the courtesy for a royal navy ship in port how does that work surely there can't be someone whose duty is to stand by the ensign while at anchor in harbour waiting to return compliments to passing civilian vessels equally i can't imagine someone being tasked to have to quickly drop what they're doing and attend the flag if a compliment needs to be repaid now as far as i'm aware and yes i know this is a british merchant flag because we're talking about um merchantmen and other civilians saluting capitals well warships um as far as i'm aware whilst royal navy vessels and other vessels of other navies will re return a salute made whilst they're underway generally once they're in port and they're not act on sort of on active duty at sea salutes generally won't be returned unless there's a specific reason to like say the royal yacht is visiting or a specific uh known foreign ship is coming in um and if a salute is returned it will basically be at the discretion of the commanding officer or it might well be that one of the ships that was uh that was saluted and returned the salute in question may either have just come into port may have been preparing to go out and therefore was in a more active and ready state um but yes generally if you just happen to sail down um portsmouth harbor and and dip your flag at one of the say one of the carriers that's uh could be import at any given time i wouldn't hold my breath on expecting a return courtesy um but again this is one of these things where where it being a more modern scenario if there are current or former members of the naval services who'd be able to enlighten us a bit further as to what exactly the status of a ship in port is when it comes to being saluted by a civilian then i'm perfectly happy to be further enlightened in the comments below paul from chicago asks did polish naval forces ever attack russian forces during world war ii not that i'm aware of and i think that's mainly because well the the polls were looking mainly at germany as being the obvious aggressor in september 1939 for obvious reasons and they'd already begun enacting the plan that would see a fair chunk of the polish navy make its way over to britain to continue the fight and whilst there were elements of the german navy the critics marina coming in and conducting missions off the polish coast and attacking elements of uh polish shore bases and ships the russian navy the red navy at the time really didn't go all in that much when it came to the soviet part of the offensive against poland from the east so between the relatively short duration of that campaign and the fact that most of the polish navy was concerned with fending off the germans long enough for their ships to get elsewhere they didn't really have the time or the opportunity to engage the germans and by the point that they were mostly safely over in the uk and uh poland had been taken over then at that point obviously working with the royal navy they were tasked to support royal navy against the people they were actually at war with which at that point was the germans and obviously then by 1941 the russians were now technically allies so during the second world war i i don't think there was ever really any opportunity in the narrow window that was available for the polish navy to engage russian naval forces christopher hamilton asks one of the things i've often wondered about the line of battle is isn't the first position in the line almost suicidal given that you're engaging each enemy ship in the enemy line fresh while being battered to pieces was this just accepted or am i missing something it depends on how the line of battle engages and also on the quality of your opponents so broadly speaking and obviously there are always exceptions and differences but broadly speaking there are four main ways that a line of battle engagement might develop you've got the trafalgar style and nelson style where you drive headlong at the enemy uh to break their line and actually cause a pell male battle rather than a formal line battle you have the head-on approach where you have one line coming one way one line coming the other way and you kind of pass down the length you have a kind of i guess you could call a meeting engagement where you have two lines of battle they cite each other and they gradually drift closer towards each other and almost like a zip and then you have the overhauling line of battle so this is as it might sound where you have one line of battle that's ahead and another line of battle is coming up behind and trying to overhaul and engage the enemy there's a lot of permutations and differences but those are the four main ways that most line of battle engagements tended to start if your opponent is as good as you or better in gunnery terms then something like nelson's approach would be utter suicide because you're approaching head-on you've got if you're lucky maybe two to six chase guns which you can use against your opponent and you're going to be facing multiple broadsides from multiple enemy ships so yeah with that would be completely and utterly suicidal unless of course you happen to be nelson and that you know that your french opponent's rate of fire and accuracy is pretty abysmal even with that said the sheer number of guns pointing at victory meant the victory had taken a fair battering by the time it broke through the french line but it was big enough and tough enough to take it royal sovereign um similarly at the other side and actually this was one of the bigger concerns at the battle of trafalgar a number of nelson's captains actually point out well your ship's going to get shot to absolute pieces you let someone else take the lead and initially nelson agreed to that and then he decided no no i think i'm going to be in the lead anyway and victory suddenly went to well as what counted for full sail in the breeze that was present at trafalgar and and kept its position in the line but as you might notice victory is a first rate and therefore was able to take the punishment a lot better than say a third rate would have been able to if you're in a kind of meeting engagement where both lines kind of drift together then you're effectively just engaging the one or two ships that you're opposite numbers anyway so it doesn't matter too much if you're in a head-to-head then yes in theory you might be engaged by every ship as you pass down the line however one your enemy is in the same boat and two your enemy because of the time it takes to reload and the relative speed of those kinds of engagements is going to have to be making a certain value judgment of yes in theory every single one of our ships down this line could get a broadside on the first enemy ship but even assuming we managed to knock out that enemy ship that means that most of our ships are going to be in the process of reloading when all the other enemy ships come down the line with fresh broadsides which means that in exchange for really really badly pounding the lead enemy ship our enemy fleet the enemy fleet gets effectively a free broadside for almost all their ships at our entire fleet so whether or not you choose to take that option up is is a bit of a tactical judgment and therefore that's going to probably lessen the impact on the lead ship when you've got an overhauling engagement then yeah at that point because it's it's a much much slower form of of the two lines engaging there is a fairly significant risk that the lead ship might well become very battered but in the age of sale if that did happen and you've got a bunch of your friends coming up behind you once you realize the battering has gotten to a level where you might become combat ineffective fairly soon you would haul out of the line and the ships coming up behind would literally form a kind of human shield to protect you even if it was only coincidentally as they sailed on um up and past so you can look actually at some of the ships at the battle of the nile for example is a good example of this a number of the leading british ships especially the ones that cut down the the outer side of the french line did get fairly badly battered and had to pull out the action somewhat but then other ships that came in behind them just piled in and depending i say on how fast that overhauling takes place it cannot you can also have similar issues to the kind of head-to-head pass of yes we've really badly batted that one ship but we're opening ourselves up to all its follow-on friends and as a result of this there was usually some consideration given to who should be leading the line of battle and depending on the commander and also depending on the ships available it could flip around a fair bit you might use say the fastest ship to minimize the time that it's being individually engaged you might use the heaviest ship because it can take the battering and give out a fairly powerful battering in return or you might use a ship that's just kind of middle of the road nothing particularly special about it effectively kind of expendable because you might consider that let's say send a third rate in first have a big first rate sat right behind it the third rate will eventually get battered and be forced to break out of line but that's fine because it will be covered by the first rate at which point you've got a first rate effectively coming in right behind the broadsides have been fired at the third rate so you're getting the first rates worth of broadside firepower consistently delivered down the enemy fleet with obviously considerable effect so there are a lot of considerations as to what ship you might put in um into that line of battle position but it it could be quite dangerous um certainly but it was also a position of great honour and because ships generally at least didn't tend to blow up or sink that often you might be satisfied with a position of well i led the battle i did a lot of damage to the enemy it was a great honor yes i had to pull out a bit later on but come on i was fighting the entire enemy fleet solo before everyone else got there so yay me um at least assuming you survive of course colin williams asks were japanese operation names random or were they blatant references to their targets operation mo being port moresby operation me being midway etc we could have add operation al being the aleutians at that point when you look at japanese operational names it can seem that way a bit i mean operation fu literally it's called that um is the invasion of french indochina operation d e this invasion of the dutch east indies operation ts the invasion of thailand um operation b is the invasion of borneo operation al is the invasion of the aleutians as you said me is midway mo is uh port moresby operation b is the invasion of burma um i mean technically the andaman islands is operation d you can kind of see a d connection there operation j is the invasion of java it's operation r rabal etc so you begin to see some patterns but at the same time there's also a lot of other stuff that doesn't add up that way so uh the invasion of china for example is operation e uh the uh the inve the attack on pearl harbor is operation ai and the invasion of the philippines is m uh the reconnaissance operations in the indian ocean's operation c as in the letter not the uh the body of water um then you've got uh sumatra's operation l uh gradle canal is k a um a fair enough invasion of java is operation j but then you get attacking places like the solomon islands is operation ta et cetera et cetera so there's there seems to be a certain strong connection with some but then others that are happening at the same time are completely different um i think some of it makes just letters of the japanese alphabet um to a certain degree maybe there is a certain amount of connection i mean i don't speak japanese um but one of the things that you have to bear in mind is that the japanese didn't usually go talking about let's say operation mi when they were talking about midway the signals intercepts were talking about target af which obviously has no particular uh lettering connection to midway and af was actually their code name for midway which was then figured out by other methods um by u.s cryptologists mainly by getting them getting midway to broadcast that oh no we're out of water because our water filtration has broken down and then shortly thereafter the japanese codes were saying oh yes target af has ran out of water oh okay thank you um so yeah there may be some connection maybe those who speak japanese can um elucidate a little bit more on that but as far as it being like a dead giveaway for us code breakers they were using different uh code designations to actually talk about their target so it wasn't quite that easy john reese asks in your research which admiral or officer have you found that possessed the best sense of humor um a good sense of humor is actually surprisingly well spread amongst naval officers even nelson was known to have a very dry sense of humor but the thing is as you probably all appreciate senses of humor differ quite radically from person to person and also from culture to culture so um some of say admiral nelson or even admiral duncan's um rather dry sharp british wit that you can see in some of his letters and sayings appeal to me quite a lot but may not appeal to other people um similarly some of the uh us officers especially in world war ii that i read about i can have a great deal of fun with um some of their senses of humor but for other people i know in the uk they see them as a little bit boisterous and in your face but um yeah so i i don't know if i've got a top pick but one that's always stood out to me um was one that's actually sent a tale was actually sent to me by one of the viewers and can be found in the book twilight of the gods by ian tol which is actually a pretty good book in and of itself so i shall read the passage to you as while the fleet rested at any wethop the sailors and officers often took liberty ashore two different islets had been designated as recreation zones one for officers and one for enlisted men beer was rationed two cans per man but there was plenty of black market liquor available as well especially on the islet designated for officers recreation one day in mid-august a group of well-oiled hornet aviators was standing on the dock waiting for a launch to take them back to their ship horseplay ensued an ensign was shoved into the lagoon he swam back to the beach and charged down the dock intent on revenge dozens more went into the water before long any man wearing a dry khaki uniform was a fair target even commander harold l hal the hornet's air group leader was seized by his feet and arms and swung into the lagoon he didn't mind after all he wrote it was good clean fun and the water helped shake off the effects of an afternoon of imbibing returning dripping wet to the dock bowel glimpsed a small white-haired man being pitched headlong into the lagoon the victim was already airborne when bouel recognized him as admiral mccain naval etiquette gave certain leeway in certain circumstances but in general drunken aviators were not permitted to lay hands on a three-star admiral and heave him into the sea bowels shouted a warning but too late he and several others dove after mccain immediately and he relates after we got hold of him and helped him to his feet he was gasping and wheezing and said get my hat boys get my hat the hat a special version of a field for tea hat with the gold band and scrambled eggs almost all green from the soldier was his lucky hat and well known among the fleet pilots we retrieved the hat got the admiral back up on the dock and expressed our deepest regrets for our conduct he was a small man almost fragile and looked like a strong wind could blow him away dripping salt water seaweed and coral sand he kept grinning as he shook hands with each of us whilst we would continue making our apologies he asked for a dry cigarette lit up and started telling us how good it was to be back with his fighting men with blue eyes twinkling from a wrinkled face dominated by both the nose and ears of heroic proportions mccain looked all the world like like a leprechaun as the boats began to arrive one of the first was mccain's motor launch completely light spotless with brass gleaming and a three-star blue flag flying it was a beautiful sight the admiral was now having fun with his boys and didn't want it to end so he asked us to join him on the boat he would take us each to our ship to the dismay of the spotless boats crew a dozen or more dirty bedraggled pilots came aboard with the admiral we then wound up our way through the massive warships in the harbour delivering each pilot to his ship and if that's not an excellent display of a sense of humor i don't know what is i mean you're a three-star admiral and a bunch of slightly drunk rough-looking pilots just randomly pick you up and lob you into a lagoon i can see an awful lot of naval officers having some very angry words but apparently admiral mckay just thought this was the greatest and funniest thing ever as long as he got his hat back which is obviously the most important thing jake hart asks it seems like the entire history of the us navy is filled with ships that were over-gunned relative to their size second amendment jokes aside is this created by some coherent line of thinking a coincidence the circumstances the u.s has been in or something else entirely for the most part it's actually weirdly enough a set of very bizarre circumstances and coincidences generally associated with periods when the us navy was actually trying to match or exceed other navies and uh this kind of thing disappears somewhat when the us navy goes through rougher patches but then at those points you don't see so many ships built and therefore you don't really notice the drop off in the number of guns so realistically you're probably looking [Music] at three periods where you see a lot of u.s ships ending you see an awful lot of guns and then one period where you see an awful lot of ships but actually probably not too many guns so the one where you don't see too many guns is the american civil war period now obviously at that point they're fighting each other they have an awful lot of ships and some of the guns are pretty substantial but between the fact that they're mainly trying to get as if i'm on both sides actually trying to get as many ships as they can out there um the confederacy because they're trying to get somewhere close to matching union forces at least locally in the union because they're trying to hold down a blockade of the confederate coast and protection of union shipping and hunting down of confederate raiders um and so at that period you actually see an awful lot of shipping but the actual numbers of guns on them proportional to their size outside of monitors um is actually pretty low and even on monitors they usually only have two two three four guns um when you talk about the big guns some of the obviously things like virginia the more broadside uh case but ironclads have a few more guns than that but even so they you're usually not looking at a massive number of guns per ship although they might be relatively heavy so that's that's the one period that kind of goes against the rule the other three periods you're looking at the war of 1812 the run-up to world war one kind of the the pre-dreadnought and dreadnought building race and then world war ii itself now world war ii itself the sheer number of guns is largely due to the fact that america has the capacity to build them and given the massive aerial threat and the relatively speaking lack of surface threat in the pacific theater well as the um battle of the eastern solomons showed in enterprises after action report they literally just cover the deck space in guns we need guns um that's not to say the japanese surface threat wasn't substantial it's just that the vast majority of action that the us was seeing was involving air attack and so you just had these massive numbers of a guns proliferating um the fact that the other navy that was facing a lot of air attacks being the uh the royal navy didn't have quite as many gun barrels was partially down to the factory just let's say the u.s could produce it just so many of them um and also partly down to other considerations um especially around top weight with operational conditions in places like the arctic but that's a whole lot separate discussion um in nov itself now the other two areas say in running up the pre-dreadnought dreadnought building race in the earlier part of things because congress was so badly limiting the actual size of u.s ships as well as the numbers in order to be even vaguely competitive the us navy believed it had to have the maximum possible armament on these ships because if you armed them well you might say rationally but if you are them proportional to their size and to their numbers you'd end up with a fleet that looked very nice but individually those ships would be very unlikely to be able to take on um their equivalence in um head-on combat and there would be a large number of neighbors that had more ships as well so you just wouldn't win a war so you ended up piling on guns to try and either match or even over match enemy warships that were actually considerably larger so you ended up with these sort of floating gun batteries with hilarious numbers of guns pointing all directions that's one of the reasons why you get those two classes of bru dreadnoughts with secondary guns in turrets that are attached to the top of the primary gun turrets for example and then back in 1812 and the run up to that quasi-war and everything in a similar sense you've got this case of the us navy isn't allowed to have many ships um and they're not allowed to have as large ships although the six frigates are big for their size they're not ships of the line and so they need to be as heavily armed as possible in order to have any kind of effect because they're not going to match the french the spanish the british navies etc in numbers of frigates so if you just build say a dozen normal frigates then okay great well whoever you fight turns up with four doesn't you lose immediately whereas if you build six very heavily armed frigates then given the sheer scale of the united states and the ocean there's a fairly good chance you can win a bunch of single and 2v1 ship actions which is exactly what the us navy did after the war of 1812 once they finally get into the ship of the line building game they take a look at everyone else and they kind of actually have a similar problem in that they're now finally building ships of the line but the numbers just aren't there because the funding isn't there and so they end up going with this uh slightly odd all 32 pounder battery just to get as much firepower as possible out of the smallest number of hulls once you get into realms where the us actually has a fairly large navy and is kind of on a par with everyone else you actually see the overall proportional number of guns start to drop off except in cases like world war ii where aaa guns are going everywhere so if you compare the overall battery of say um late 1910s early 1920s u.s navy designs they're broadly comparable with designs that being thought up elsewhere in terms of overall numbers of guns per ton of ship and similarly okay they've got the treaty restrictions to take into account but the treaty ris treaty era ships are similarly proportionally um armed to other treaty era ships from other navies and then once you edge beyond the scope of this channel into um the more modern era i suspect that probably holds true as well i mean certainly what i've mentioned in terms of modern ships you've got the old ship like the zhong the great which is bigger and has more missiles than an alley burke so whilst the us our navy has always had a very healthy number of guns for or other weapons for its ships the exact numbers and ratios of those guns tend to increase more dramatically in times when the us navy is having to compete with fewer ships in its own force or smaller ships in its own force or both as compared to when they're more on a par with everybody else gabriel a hawkins asks there have been varied opinions on the effectiveness of battleship dash cruiser shaw bombardment in your opinion how effective are battleship stash cruisers at shore bombardment and what is the most effective example of shore bombardment in the modern era post 1914 so yeah there's quite a lot of divisor opinions when it comes to heavy bombardment generally speaking i'd say like cruiser bombardment i'd kind of wrap in with destroyer bombardment because it's similar caliber obviously not entirely the same but the difference between a five and a six inch gun is considerably less than the difference between a six inch and an eight inch gun or any battleship level gun um from what i've read it seems that the lighter gun fire support especially destroyers and to a certain extent like cruisers was very much more useful in direct fire support it could fire faster the ships could get in closer um and so for supporting the actual troops in the middle of an amphibious invasion it's very very handy where i think the heavy cruisers and the battleships get a little bit short changed is that for obvious reasons you're not necessarily going to be one want to be pumping 14 and 16 inch shelves straight onto the beach a few hundred yards ahead of your own troops um but where they do have a value that is very much more difficult if not impossible for um smaller ships like destroyers and light cruisers to match is in long range uh supporting fire for amphibious operations so this is things like uh counter battery operations against enemy artillery for one thing it may simply just be too far of a distance for destroyer or light cruiser guns to shoot as opposed to battleship or heavy cruiser guns and for another thing especially in world war one world war ii the accuracy of a target you probably can't see you're probably being radioed into it by a spotter aircraft or by units on the ground is not going to be all that great and with the best one in the world if you fire a four inch five inch or six inch high explosive shell a bunch of artillery and it lands 50 yards away and the odd and this field battery is even vaguely well positioned and somewhat dug in they're not going to care outside of the odd fragment if a 14 or 16 inch shell lands 50 yards away it doesn't matter if you're dug into a really nice deep trench you're gonna know about it and so the suppressive effect is going to be considerably greater so i think that that's one aspect of it and the other aspect which again takes into account just the extreme distance that these guns can fire is where you need to fire at positions that are or enemy troops etc that are well well in land um so for example there's a number of accounts when either i can't remember i think it was rodney it was either rodney or nelson i'm pretty sure it was rodney was operating in a gunfire support roll off of the french coast and allied troops were under attack by german tanks and they called in 16-inch gunfire to support them and depending on whose account you read the actual effectiveness in terms of destroyed and knocked out tanks may have been anything from virtually nothing to total but that's largely not so relevant to the fact that the german attack broke down and the allied troops morale was boosted greatly by basically calling in these gargantuan um impact shell impacts and and seeing at least in one case seeing a german tank flipped end over end by taking near near enough direct hit so just the sheer morale effect of that even if that was the only tank actually that problem actually destroyed was massively massively greater than sort of plastering the area in six inch fire might have achieved even if the six inch guns could reach that far so yeah i think battleships and heavy cruisers definitely have a place in shore bombardment in the first part of the 20th century but it's a very different place to where you might imagine shore bombardment being in terms of kind of direct support fire for troops on amphibious assaults in terms of the most effective shore bombardment of the modern era weirdly enough i'm going to go for a short bombardment that didn't actually result in all that much which is the very early bombardment right in the early days of the war by uh the battle cruisers against the ottoman forts in the dardanelles now you might be thinking hang on a minute isn't the darnell's campaign a complete mess the shore bomb didn't achieve much et cetera yes you're right but that was the later shore bomb apartments once the ottomans had had several months to correct and reinforce all the lessons that they were taught by this very first bombardment which often goes unrecognized that first bombardment say was very early in the war um it pretty much laid out the entire ottoman fortification systems there was back practically nothing left once that had finished this would have stopped an allied fleet from sailing up the dardanelles and quite happily going after um istanbul now yeah there were there were a couple of lines of mines but nothing even close to what was present during the actual maine gallipoli campaign the weakness was that once the short bomb was done it was done mainly as a kind of and we're very angry with you kind of thing no one actually thought about exploiting it there and then um and then with the help of uh gobern and bressler's crew as well as various other specialists the ottomans took one look at this completely decimated fortification system and right well if that's what they can do we need to rebuild to withstand that and that's where you get the defenses that cause so much problem uh during the actual gallipoli campaign so i'd say that's probably the single most effective shorthand bomb it's just a pity no one have actually followed up on it sliced bread asks when and why did peacetime paint schemes stop being a thing in major navies around the world and if one was to be reintroduced today for the royal navy what would be your preference so the peacetime paint schemes kind of stopped being a thing in the early to mid 1900s peacetime well paint schemes generally had been a thing for obviously a very long time but towards the end of the 19th century there was this notion of well if we go to war now that you know range actually matters um we probably should paint everything in some shade of grey to try and uh give us a certain camouflage advantage but we'll keep the peacetime paint scheme around until it's necessary then in the let's say in the mid mid 1900s people started thinking oh well um war might develop a lot faster than we thought was possible before and we want to be able to sort of distinguish ourselves as we are we are serious military or camouflage all of this kind of thing and so ships started to be built with just some form of gray paint and then um ships that already had that paint scheme were repainted in grey in terms of if one was to be reintroduced to the royal navy what would be my preference i'll just go back to the late 19th 30 20th century royal navy black white and buff colour scheme um courtesy of got jaeger here is a um a type 45 in said paint scheme and come on it looks so much better than the existing stuff and imagine for hms dragon how good a contrast that red dragon would be on on a black hull as opposed to the sort of the weird grey that the royal navy uses these days it i'm not entirely sure what how an aircraft carrier would look because they don't tend to have all that much of the superstructure you could paint white but um yeah i mean you look at this you look at some of the stuff i've posted before of like an arleigh burke or the iowa in great white fleet colors as well i mean come on everyone knows that these days painting i mean painting this your ship gray now is kind of shorthand for we are a military ship yes but in terms of camouflage it can have some camouflage effect but realistically does it actually make any difference these days in modern warfare um i would submit that if you're in a situation where the the visual spotting of a target is a significant issue you're probably either fighting someone who's so many technological levels behind you that it doesn't matter or you're fighting in an environment where everything has gone to pieces so badly that again it probably doesn't actually matter whether your enemy can spot you at 10 miles or 5 miles conversely um it would make things a lot easier to distinguish who was who um in fleet photos and stuff and as i say the great white fleet color scheme the royal navy color scheme they just look so much nicer um at least in my opinion um i don't know what the rest of you guys think but i i think a return to peacetime color schemes wouldn't hurt anything and it would certainly make everyone look a lot nicer going around bfw asks what made some navies like the royal navy move away from the heavily armoured conning tower earlier than the us navy it was a mixture of practical combat experience largely from world war one combined with lessons learned from other navies where the royal navies had had observers present during conflicts particularly the battle of tsushima because what the royal navy picked up at the battle of tsushima was actually that conning towers were relatively bad for your health admiral turgo for example spent a lot of time out and about on the deck of mikasa and he lived as did the majority of japanese bridge crews many of whom didn't go to their conning towers conversely when you looked at a lot of the russian ships an awful lot of the russian command crews did go to their conning towers and they got horribly killed because effectively what it turned out is that the mechanics of armor protection when it comes to big slabs of belt armor don't really scale when you're trying to do an equally or even heavier protected conning tower that's actually got a fairly small volume what tended to happen or at least so it seemed at tsushima was that when a conning tower was hit then one of several things would happen either the blast wave or the fire would come in through the viewing slits anyway and kill everyone inside or the entire thing would effectively ring like a giant bell except even worse and the shock waves of the impact would kill everybody inside or the hip would spool off a bunch of high-speed fragments from the inside of the conning tower which would go zipping around inside ricocheting off and slice up and kill everybody inside um so the armor wasn't actually doing all that much to protect people maybe the odd person would get lucky but when you look at say rotherswenski's flagship the conning tower takes a hit and there's like maybe one or two people left alive and and vaguely sense it by the time that's the ringing is all done um whereas yes okay if you were out on an open bridge and the shell hits and it explodes then yes you're probably all going to die as well but that isn't really much of a difference in terms of whether you live or die but if a shell say would have passed six feet in front of you okay there'd be displaced air issues which could be quite serious uh that kind of caliber shell but if a shell passes six feet in front of the bridge it's far less likely to incapacitate the entire bridge crew in such a fatal way whereas if a shell was gonna pass six feet in front of the bridge crew when they're in the conning tower it's just gonna hit the front of the conning tower and then see previous uh comments on exactly what happens at that point and when you combine all that with the fact you can barely see anything out of the conning tower anyway so your command effectiveness goes down so you're much more likely to be in a circumstance where the enemy manages to land a shell somewhat near your command card as opposed to being out on an open bridge where you can actually see what's going on it became very rapidly apparent to a lot of uh royal navy officers that it was probably just best to stay on the bridge because you'd get more command efficiency and your chances of dying were actually probably fractionally less especially if the bridge could be made splinter proof and that combined with those lessons combined with a general distaste for not being able to see all that much meant that during world war one the vast majority of royal navy um bridge officers just never used the conning tower at which point by the time you got into the interwar period and they're talking about modernizations and new ships etc they're just looking at it and going well no one ever uses the blasted thing and it's three to five hundred tons of useless dead weight sitting quite high up in the ship affecting stability which we could use that weight on other things so we'll just take it off and either not put it back at all or if we are putting one back we'll just make it splinter proof because that is apparently all that you actually really need whereas in some other navies like the us navy they didn't have all that much combat experience in and certainly no real capital ship combat experience coming out of world war one and their observers um weren't present in some of the other battles like sushima anything like the same level that the royal navy had observers and so they had less of this practical operational experience to draw on when they were making decisions about using the conning towers which meant that the theoretical benefit of having 12 14 16 inches of armor between you and your uh and the outside world if you're the bridge crew seemed to be still in effect and so it took a little bit longer for us officers and the u.s navy to decide that actually maybe this wasn't such a brilliant idea and in part because of that um it also meant that the conning towers are actually used a little bit more um but in the end everyone eventually came around to the idea that they're probably not really worth it the legacy asks i've known for quite a while that the royal canadian navy was very large during world war ii so large in fact that numerically it was the third largest during the war only behind the united states and britain how was the canadian government able to afford such a large force how was the navy able to crew such a large force and how was able to exceed expectations despite most of their crews lacking any prior naval experience part of it was the fact that as you point out most of this size was numerical the royal canadian navy had exactly two large surface combatants both which were like cruisers everything else was destroyer size or smaller which of course those individual ships have significantly smaller crew requirements than on a per ship basis as compared to cruisers battleships full-size fleet carriers etc secondly some of those ships in fact a lot of those ships came via various agreements um some of the destroyers for bases ships um the old wix and clemson classes were transferred over to the royal canadian navy so they were transfers rather than purchases likewise um some of the ships that were handed over from britain that formed and the us that formed other elements of the canadian fleet they were more transfers just to get things running and the ships that were being built in canadian yards to say generally were smaller ships and therefore you can build an awful lot more of them for a given amount of money when it comes to the crews now yes they did have to bring in a lot of crew who hadn't really had a lot of sea experience before if any but at the same time the canadian coast do have a fairly strong maritime tradition so they were able to recruit from that the royal canadian navy already existed so they could dilute some of the cartridges of experienced officers from there and also because bearing in mind this is still the period of the british empire there were a fair number of canadians who had served or were serving in the royal navy so especially those who had served in the royal navy but were now retired from the service for whatever reason could be called in to provide a corps of experienced sailors for the royal canadian navy and even some that were in the royal navy again could be cartridge off at request to help form up uh core crews um if necessary and with a lot of their focus being mainly on anti-submarine warfare it also meant that the distribution of experience was somewhat faster because if as i say most of your navy is focusing on convoy escort and anti-submarine duties then that means after several missions the crew that you've got their experience have obviously acquired experience in that particular kind of operation can pass on those tips tricks and information to other crews relatively speaking easily whereas if you were looking at like an all-singing all dancing maybe like the us navy or the royal navy then just picking up one set of crew skills in this case anti-submarine warfare convoy duty doesn't necessarily translate across the whole of the navy quite as well when other parts of the navy might be running um convoy escort duty say in the mediterranean that's mostly dealing with anti-air warfare and another part might be dealing with battleship warfare for monitoring things like possible breakout of bismarck or scharnhorst and obviously your submarines and all sorts of things like that so by being a largely mono-focused navy it enabled skill distribution and sharing to occur on a much wider scale much more quickly um and also the fact that for a good chunk of time the canadian forces were able to rely on volunteers which obviously means people are going to be slightly more motivated and in the last question for this week bill luster asks i've been reading ian toll's third book on the pacific war twilight of the gods a lot of people seem to have been doing that recently is pretty good um in it admiral turner claims that 1945 iojima was as well defended as any place on earth and another officer stated it'd be easier to invade gibraltar is it possible to compare the two bastions defenses and how do you think the iojima invasion force would hypothetically fare against the rock in a sandbox war game yes it is possible to compare iojima and gibraltar but the comparison is a little bit difficult because they are actually somewhat different in the way that they're defended even though initially they might it might seem to have certain similarities versatile is about three times the size in terms of surface area compared to gibraltar and a lot of um gibraltar it consists of the rock which um obviously is is somewhat more difficult to work with than most of although obviously there is mount suribachi uh there as well but it's um somewhat more forgiving than the rock of gibraltar is for a lot of their time weirdly enough gibraltar actually has more heavy defense guns the irjima certainly has more defense guns um for dealing with surface attack than uh gibraltar does some unsurprising perhaps given the sheer size of it uh as i said but also just generally it's got a very very dense um artillery park however gibraltar has a range of somewhat heavier weapons um be that some 5.25 inch dual purpose batteries also uh around about a dozen 9.2 inch batteries which are a threat to pretty much anything that's not a battleship and also even a threat to a battleship if it gets close enough so there's all of those you've also got um the um gibraltar there's a few victorian era really monster guns um they'd be relatively dangerous if they actually hit anything close in but then they're not don't really factor into the overall defense efforts but the thing is most of those 9.2 inch defense guns were installed quite high up back in the victorian period and early 1900s and so they're configured for defense primarily against a seaborne only attack whereas i don't think that they'd last very long in a kind of iojima invasion scenario where there's significant threat from the air because they're just not designed to withstand that kind of attack whereas obviously iojima's defenses by and large were designed knowing roughly what was coming at them so they're a lot more integrated gibraltar's defenses in terms of repelling a surface attack largely consist of the royal navy force h and the other navy royal navy forces that are there by the time of world war ii the the shore defense guns are there for they would probably mess up landing forces if they're still intact but they're definitely not capable of going toe to toe with uh with a full-on air sea invasion um gibraltar is quite heavily bunkered and tunneled as is iojima gibraltar has an awful lot of aa guns and things a the aaa defenses in gibraltar are probably the most modern defenses they've got um so at least for a while it would be relatively difficult to get through those without suffering significant casualties the flip side is of course as a gibraltar is a lot smaller so the amount of area that has to be hit by long-range bombardment from battleships and air attacks etc is proportionally somewhat smaller and therefore something of an easier job at the same time the main reason i would say that iwo iojima is probably slightly harder to take on than gibraltar is because of that naval defense element iojima by the time they were planning it the japanese knew that the japanese navy was not going to come and help them they knew that outside of some karma kazi's and bits and pieces that uh the various japanese navy and japanese army air forces probably also not really going to come to help them so they built the entire thing with as modern defenses as they could designed for a long dragging out fight on land with shore bombardment and air bombardment etc and that's pretty much the only thing you could do against the u.s navy of the time whereas to say gibraltar is designed in and of itself mainly to shelter its populace and to defend against air assault with the seaborne assault by world war ii largely being guarded off by the royal navy if you were to put the irjima invasion force and send it against gibraltar instead then well if if the us navy knows it's going after gibraltar and it knows the strength of the royal navy ships that are present to defend it they're obviously going to increase the number of surface ships battleships cruisers and carriers that are going in with an anti-shipping role and once you've taken those out then uh gibraltar's ability to fight against a land invasion is considerably less than iojima's so yeah it for a massive overwhelming force like the the us navy at the end of world war ii where if you take that that that kind of defense point in a kind of isolated bubble they're always going to win iwo jima will cost them more because it's designed to cost them more um whereas gibraltar isn't gibraltar is designed to defend against a somewhat different form of opponent and in terms of repelling a sea born assault of a reasonable size gibraltar is actually probably better set up for that because a force of battleships carriers cruisers destroyers and submarines is actually probably a much better um thing to use to deter in amphibious invasion than some fixed guns but when you're talking about this kind of force you can you can separate and eliminate those defenses a lot easier than you can with yojima and that brings us to the end of this patreon dry dock thank you very much for listening um just one bit of channel admin to go but it is a fairly big one you may recall way way way back earlier this year there was actually a ship design competition so apologies for the time it's taken to actually get all the judging done but well there were an awful lot of very high quality entries and as you might appreciate the between myself and the judging panel a lot of things have cropped up over the past few months which have also delayed things but without further ado um there were theoretically going be uh three podium places uh one for uh so first second and third one for each for brazil argentina and chile so nine total winners um but due to the way the finalists shook out um we've kind of kind of had to reallocate a couple of winners and uh mix things around a bit so there are in fact 10 winners um out of them so many entries we received and over the course of the next week or so i will be endeavoring to put as many of the entries along with their artworks backstories etc up on the website that's uh drakenfeld.co.uk so everyone can see them um so in the uh chilean category uh in no particular order the winners are the almarante brown by 919 the concepcion by michael fister the lipitard by maya shimizu and in the argentina argentina what the argentinian category argentine maybe um yes so many people liked to call their designs river davia but the river davia design by dubsy 109 the moreno design by tobias even and the bbe 1910 designed by hugo webber were the the winners there and then for the brazilian design vessels the amazonas by eduardo charlier and the guerrico by unheimlich both won but because we didn't get a third brazilian design uh in on the list of finalists for me to choose from we've also gone with the next strongest design which was the nuevod julio by chrissy voidbeast of cruises um and then the wild card prize the the last one number 10 going to another river davia designed this one by fang c so if you recognize any of those names then obviously please get in contact with me either by discord or via email and we will sort out your prizes and as i said thank you very much for everyone who entered and for the wonderful artwork many of you sent in it will all be shown on the website as i can get those articles up so once again thank you very much for listening and see you in another video

Channel: Drachinifel

Views: 1,064,760

Keywords: The Drydock, Drachinifel, Q&A

Id: Q9EPZ5ZM9u8

Length: 202min 49sec (12169 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 29 2020