Top 10 Worst Ideas Ever Put On A Battleship

[Music] hi i'm ryan semanski curator for battleship new jersey museum and memorial and today we've got another top 10 video today we're going to be looking at the top 10 stupidest things that were ever part of battleship design again this list is my own opinion so your list may differ and we're specifically looking at battleships and battle cruisers here some of these things were done on smaller vessels with success but i think did not work particularly well on battleships so as always feel free to disagree with me or agree and let us know in the comments section what your thoughts are on the top 10 list in the number 10 position i have diesel power now some battleships like the iowa class have auxiliary diesel generators for creating electrical power that's great that worked fine but some battleships particularly german designs from world war one and world war ii attempted to use diesel power to drive the entire ship or like the world war one designs they just wanted one or more of the propeller shafts run off of diesel for cruising at long range and other shafts run off of a traditional steam plant germany spent a lot of money trying to develop this and ended up with no workable product at the end don't get me wrong diesel power worked fine for the commerce raiding pocket battleships but blowing it up to full-on battleship size never worked and all of the resources germany put into this was a waste german battleships were never supposed to be designed for long range they didn't have acceptable crew accommodations the crew lived ashore moved onto the ship for a voyage out into the north sea to fight the royal navy and then the survivors come home and go back ashore so making your battleships extremely long range with cruising stuff and blah blah blah blah it makes no sense for germany given their doctrine during world war ii uh with diesels for their commerce rating ships and having a doctrine of using battleships as commerce raiders it starts to make a little bit more sense but also the ships have ballooned in size uh to these really absurdly gigantic ships that just aren't effective as commerce raiders so not a good idea at that time and maybe it could be done today but uh didn't make sense for their doctrine or their technology in the number nine slot sky guns this was a concept that wasn't used too too frequently i can only think of u.s navy ships that did this particularly battleship texas had a pair of sky guns mounted what is a sky gun the u.s navy took a three inch 50 caliber gun and mounted it on top of a crane derrick put a little basket around it and then had the idea that well these guys need some sort of protection so they were going to somehow get their hammocks up there to pad the railing to give them some sort of splinter protection so now they've got an anti-aircraft gun that's mounted pretty high up in the ship you can fire down on torpedo bombers if you want and it keeps your precious deck space free but how do you get ammunition up to the sky gun the whole point of aa guns is you're firing fast to put enough flack in the sky to try and shoot down a plane and there isn't much room for ready service ammo on top of a crane derrick uh and there isn't any hoist that gets it up there so presumably had some sort of chain fall or block and tackle and one of the few guys that could cram up there is just hauling these uh projectiles up to the gun and now you've got loose ordnance hanging above the deck in battle fortunately like i said this wasn't widely used this wasn't used outside the united states to the best of my knowledge and it was removed pretty early on this is one of the earliest attempts at mounting anti-aircraft guns on warships and they find out it doesn't work and get rid of it and all that i didn't even mention that you know that that crane post is probably vibrating with the ship moving and all that weight up there so so you're not even aiming accurately so that one's only in the number nine slot because it wasn't particularly widely used in the number eight slot i have an echelon mounted turrets so a number of battleships starting with the british invincible class battle cruisers have turrets mounted one on each side of the ship but in theory uh they can fire cross deck to give you both broadsides um again we talked about this in a turret farm video uh there's a link to that in the description below but british didn't want to concentrate all their guns forward and aft because they were worried that one shell could knock out all their guns so they spread them out along the deck and with them spread out along the deck that limits their arks of fire so the idea was if you mount one on each side they can still fire across that because you've got open deck there around them that open deck can be used to store ships boats but in practice the blast effects of firing the guns crossed deck was an issue so in reality that was never really done it would damage the boats it would damage the superstructure it limits the amount of superstructure you can have and so limits the interior volume of the ship so your ship is more cramped because you can't put superstructure around most of the midships part of the vessel and spreading out turrets all over your deck like that means that almost any shell that hits your ship has the potential penetrating down to a magazine because now your magazines are spread out all over the ship so and echelon turrets bad idea um not the worst idea that's ever attempted with turrets i've got a couple more uh up this list that are primarily gun related that are that are worse than that it was a step in the right direction center line turrets are better and centerline turrets mounted four and a half so they've got the largest possible arc of fire or best but most people tried a lot of stuff in the number seven position we've got spotting posts directly over smokestacks uh this is another thing that the british primarily are guilty of so especially their earliest dreadnoughts like hms dreadnought has a reverse facing tripod uh and the smoke stack right between it which means that all of that coal-fired smoke blows right up into your spotting position and your guy's trying to spot the fall shot for the main guns can't see a thing hms dreadnought only had one spotting post later battleships added additional ones american battleships almost always had two during this period and eventually this gets somewhat corrected realistically this is pretty low on the list because with coal-fired ships you're always making black smoke and that black smoke is just going to obscure some of your spotting positions just because of what it is that as the ship is moving through the water that's causing the smoke to blow back so your after spotting position is almost always going to be choked out with these exhaust gases um however not building your spotting post directly above or behind a smoke stack really helps with that and uh the british just didn't get that right with dreadnought they were limited that's where the boilers were so that's where the exhaust needed to be they didn't want to trunk it all the way through the ship that makes sense uh the the locations of the turrets forced the boiler and engine rooms to be in some some weird places because those were spread out all over the ship that makes sense primarily the the early british battleships both for their own royal navy use and for export such as the brazilian minus darius class in the number six position i've got wing mounted turrets this is very similar to an echelon mounted turret this was the design principle that came before that and prior to just throwing everything on the center line wing mounted turrets involves having two turrets one on each side of the ship uh pretty much next to each other or maybe with a superstructure in between hms dreadnought had this uh early german dreadnoughts had a hexagonal arrangement of them and this is kind of a call back to earlier pre-dreadnought battleships that had their secondary turreted battleship in those sorts of positions uh but in practice you're installing two turrets and the full weight of two turrets when you can only ever fire one on the broadside granted if you're firing forward or aft you have more firepower than if you just had center line turrets but uh that was a rare feat and the ark so fire these guns weren't really that great so if you were just a little bit off of center line suddenly you lose that other turret it's a whole lot of weight for nothing and because it's mounted on the side of the ship that means that you've got to add more armor plate on that side of the ship over the magazines because there's no depth to your protection like with the centerline turret there's a projectile coming through the side of the ship can go straight into your bar bet and cause all sorts of issues i'm not aware of this ever happening but not only do you have to have extra weight of turret you now have to have extra weight of armor in that area so wing-mounted turrets uh a bad idea it's an understandable design feature coming out of pre-dreadnoughts into early dreadnoughts um and it makes sense that within very short order they go from wing turrets to an echelon turrets and then from an echelon to all center line and from all center line to uh all four and aft you know maybe they should have stopped and thought about turret placement they were so concerned with can we get the most barrels on our ships that they didn't think about are these barrels actually gonna be useful in my number five position i've got hull mounted sponsons so very common with early dreadnought battleships to have uh openings in the ship's hall for your secondary battery and uh this ended up being a bad idea american battleships uh pretty much from our earliest dreadnoughts straight on up through the mississippi class were designed with these hall mounted guns you can see them very clearly on texas arizona ships like that as originally built this is problematic because it's taking up a lot of your interior hole volume and its big openings in the side of the ship which proved to be an issue when these ships were operating in the north atlantic particularly where you're getting high waves covering your ships earlier dreadnought or earlier pre-dreadnought battleships tended to be purely coastal so this wasn't a big issue they are direct descendants of ships of the line and so they have a ton of broadside guns and so they're mounting guns in the hall like they always had but by the dreadnought era you would think we would have moved beyond this the arcs of fire of these guns have been opened significantly from broadside guns so that they can fire and the the entire hole is sculpted in weird ways to give these guns uh large arcs of fire to be able to forward fire forward and along the broadside and whatnot but to do this you're making a much larger hole in the hall and granted there are metal plates that are supposed to cover that but they're not watertight and these guns are basically in birthing spaces and mess spaces so now you've got cold north atlantic water maybe not enough to endanger the ship but it's coming into these spaces where the crew is eating and living it's causing mold and all sorts of other issues these ships are damp and cold just bad idea all the way around particularly by the dreadnought era and it's relatively late in the dreadnought era before these are removed granted the american ships during this period are broken decked which means that their uh their main deck is the one that goes full forward to aft but only the aft part of it is fully open and then there's a raised deck from about midships forward that is the o1 level and that's where most of these guns are mounted so they are technically above the main deck and they're technically in a weather deck but in practice that's interior volume of your hall one of the earliest things that the u.s navy does post world war one when they're modernizing their ships is bumps all of these up into the uh superstructure level and that's a much better place for them number four and this one would be mounted higher but it only applies to a certain time period that is single purpose secondary guns during world war one single purpose secondary guns made sense there wasn't any major air threat but by the inner war period and world war ii it makes no sense at all for ships to have single purpose secondary guns the aircraft threat is at least as big if not bigger than the threat posed by torpedo boats destroyers and other smaller vessels so the fact that ships like yamato bismarck littorio and reichelu all have single purpose secondary guns typically of a six inch or 5.9 inch 6.1 in diameter makes no sense no sense the the five inch gun has plenty of stopping power and a higher rate of fire because you can more quickly manually load that lighter shell and it can be used as an anti-aircraft round these nations were deficient in developing dual purpose secondary guns and they really suffered for it during world war ii their ships suffered from air attacks significantly more than allied ships that did have dual dual-purpose guns and could defend themselves better in the number three position and i promise this is the last one dealing with gun turret placement and this one is a purely american one super firing turrets now there are two types of super firing turrets and i don't mean both of them uh most american battleships always had uh dreadnought battleships on had super firing turrets where one turret is mounted above and behind the one in front of it so that you can fire both of them that's great however early american battleships like the kearsarge class and the virginia class had super firing turrets where there was an eight inch turret mounted on top of a 12 or 13 inch turret what's the positive about this why did the united states try to develop this older pre-dreadnought battleships tended to have wing-mounted eight-inch guns which means you could fire two turrets in [Music] any direction two forward two aft two on each broadside so you have one mounted on each corner of the superstructure the us navy thinks to themselves well how can we mount the center line so that we can fire three turrets on any broadside and so the ships were supposed to have one mounted on each wing and then one mounted on top of each turret pre-dreadnought battleships tend to stay within the same size range they do not balloon in size the way that dreadnoughts do and so they all tend to have the same main and secondary battery guns and the same layout and there just isn't that much centerline space to mount a turret in the good kind of super firing way so the u.s navy says all right let's drop these turrets on top of the existing turrets with the kearsarge class it wasn't the worst thing in the world believe it or not the next several classes of battleships moved away from it but kearsarge was a crack gunnery ship so she didn't suffer too much those older main battery guns had such a slow rate of fire that the eight inch guns mounted on top didn't really get interference from it now all the shell handling and everything had to come through the lower turret and get into the upper turret and the upper turret does not rotate independently so your upper turret is aiming wherever your main battery turret is aiming which at that time when you're engaging in relatively short ranges isn't an issue but later on as your main battery guns are able to hit targets at longer ranges they need significantly more deflection they need to lead their target more than the gun on top needs to and as the rate of fire improves uh suddenly the faster firing uh lower main battery gun is interrupting shell handling and aiming of the gun up above so with the kearsarge class it's an interesting experiment then the u.s navy goes from these big round turrets that maybe have enough room inside for the shell handling for the upper turret and goes to a more traditionally shaped square flat-faced elongated turret and nobody else tries to adopt this insane idea but then with the uh virginia class pre-dreadnought battleships ships that are built around the same time that hms dreadnought is being built and one of the last classes of pre-dreadnoughts the us navy tries to go back to it and it just uh doesn't work and the us navy likes the idea enough that with their dreadnoughts they go to super firing when they've got the room to do it but on pre-dreadnoughts it's a bad idea number two torpedo tubes the great range of the main battery of battleships meant the torpedo tubes were useless they were holes in the armored hall of the ship or like the german battleships did they are just warheads sitting exposed on the main deck in uh torpedo tube launchers like scharnhorst interprets had i have no idea why any world war ii battleships carried torpedo tubes this is one that practically every pre-dreadmap and dreadnought type battleship up through the end of world war ii had i can only think of one time that these tubes were used in combat and that is when hms rodney a ship built in the 1920s tries to torpedo bismarck bismarck is utterly disabled and so rodney is able to get within range there's no evidence that that torpedo actually hit the target and shrapnel from a near-miss from bismarck might have impacted one of the torpedo tube doors on rodney and caused some leaking so these are holes in your underwater hall they tend to be fixed positions either on the bow or the side of the ship this causes issues you've got to be perfectly broadside to your target to fire them also if your ship is going at any speed the torpedo trying to exit the tube broadside is getting pulled by that current and whipped in the wrong direction or sheared off uh there are just so many issues with these things it baffles me that everybody kept retaining them it's one of those weapon systems because everybody has it well we've got to have it and granted nobody expected battles to be fought at the ranges that they end up being fought and so it's purely on hindsight that we're able to look back and be like if their guns could shoot 10 12 15 miles why didn't they just plan on fighting at those ranges knowing that hey if my guns can shoot this far i'm not going to try and push in closer during a major engagement and so battleships never really get into range to use their torpedo tubes against each other the one time that it happens and rodney's having trouble sinking bismarck with uh main battery guns um the torpedo either fails to detonate or misses entirely or you know maybe it was a hit and just nobody realized it regardless it didn't contribute to the loss of the ship submarines destroyers have large amounts of torpedoes so they can fire a spread and they're likely to get multiple hits battleships tended to have one or two on each broadside uh and they're an explosion hazard one of the leading theories on the destruction of hood is that her torpedoes are what are detonated that cause sympathetic detonations throughout the rest of the ship honestly i'm surprised that doesn't happen more often torpedoes have rather large warheads and finally that brings me to my number one bad design feature of battleships and that is paraveins why on earth would you use your most expensive and powerful warship as a minesweeper granted uh some navy like the u.s navy tends to not operate mine sweepers in significant quantities in wartime that's because they're so small that if we get into a war we can just build and commission a ton real fast and we've got mine sweepers now great no problem uh and granted you don't want your battleship to not have a capability what if she accidentally blunders into a minefield uh you might need those pair of veins i can't think of a single instance where pair of veins benefited battleships maybe some of the pre-dreadnoughts in the dardanelles used them but then again several of them were sunk by mines during that campaign off gallipoli in world war one so they can't work that great uh battleships are bad ships to use as a as a minesweeper it's better to just stop them if you think you're in a minefield and wait for some of your escorts to clear the way now if you want more information on how a pair of vane works there's a link in the video description to that we filmed on the battleship massachusetts that still has them fortunately the iowa class battleships had theirs removed at some point in their career but they were built with them we still have a couple of pieces of equipment installed that were used in association with the pair of vanes and they were at least removed by the vietnam commission because that paravein winch was used for something else but essentially you've got these torpedo-shaped things that have wings on them you they're chained to the very bow of the ship and as you move through the water at a certain speed they come up on either side and they're tethered to the ship by a cable and they're supposed to catch mines which are anchored to the sea floor by chains cut those mines loose so they float to the surface and then your marines are supposed to shoot them with rifles and make them explode before they hit the ship if that sounds utterly absurd to you it's because it is but it also highlights a major weakness of battleships battleships are very vulnerable to underwater explosions even ones built with torpedo defense after the vulnerability was realized it's a real cheap way to disable your enemy's most powerful asset and so i guess it makes sense that everybody tried to put a defense for this on their ships but battleships should not be used as minesweepers so what does your top 10 worst design features of battleships look like did i miss anything do you think i should have rearranged things let us know in the comments section down below battleship 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Channel: Battleship New Jersey

Views: 493,504

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Id: awSfgPeK5uM

Length: 26min 41sec (1601 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 09 2022