Today we take a look at the last generations of battleship designs, covering everything from nuclear missiles to rocket-assisted Tallboys and re-inventing the pre-dreadnought!
Sources:
https://www.usni.org/press/books/russian-and-soviet-battleships-0
https://www.usni.org/press/books/us-battleships-0
https://www.usni.org/press/books/british-battleship
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Battleships-United-States-1935-1992/dp/1557501742/
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Nelson-Vanguard-Warship-Design-Development/dp/184832149X/
Lion class design study drawings by Tzoli (many thanks!)
Naval History books, use code ‘DRACH’ for 25% off – https://www.usni.org/press/books?f%5B0%5D=subject%3A1966
Free naval photos and channel posters – www.drachinifel.co.uk
Want to support the channel? – https://www.patreon.com/Drachinifel
Want to talk about ships? https://discord.gg/TYu88mt
‘Legionnaire’ by Scott Buckley – released under CC-BY 4.0. www.scottbuckley.com.au
source
Pinned post for Q&A 🙂
'And the entire rear gunner had to be left behind.' Which was far preferable to only leaving behind half the rear gunner.
Great vid as always. You missed one tiny point tho: it wasnt until the late 50s or early 60s that the commies were capable of producing armor plate over a certain thickness (9.6" rings a bell but I am eyeballs deep in my thesis while listening and couldn't find the reference quickly) and much of what they did produce for the Stalingrads and Sovietski Soyuz classes routinely failed in testing. IIRC, both classes were going to utilize overlapping thinner plates to make the thickness, but how well it would have worked is a discussion for alternative history writers.
42:00 sounds like someone twirled their mustache, dusted off a Tillman design, relabeled it USS Iowa, & handed it off to the KGB, & laughed heartily afterwards.😅
OMG…I love the incredulous sarcasm in your voice, when you're describing some of these outlandish designs & the nonsensical decision making behind them. The hilarity made my day!
I wonder if someday the "battleship" will make a return as a nuclear-powered railgun platform. Entirely science fiction at this juncture. But who knows.
Treaty is just another worthless American word that when used, generated a document that made America shoot itself in both feet while the other signing parties laughed their asses off at American stupidity
Obsolescence arrives when the cost of protecting a weapon system exceeds it's useful offensive capacity. When battleships became mainly useful in defense of carriers whilst requiring heavy escorts themselves they became obsolete. Nothing has changed.
Commenting for the algorithm
Funniest thing I saw today.
until now…. /jk
Improved precision guided and/or over the horizon antiship weoponry, enhanced warheads, etc has altered traditional big gun BB's status from 'the backbone of the fleet' to 'target'. Fast, sleatlhy, medium sized vessels armed with the AAA, offensive and defensive guided missles currently deployed seem a better option these days.
30:43 ,,, thats no seaslug, looks like either a Bloodhound or Thunderbird photoshopped in? 30:10 is a Seaslug 🙂
Battleships: Back in my day, we didn't have fancy shmancy carriers and bulk fuel carriers, we just had seaplane tenders and colliers and we liked it that way!
Huh, I guess I never wondered where they got all those ships they sunk during the atomic tests
Man, I feel like just coming across all those snakes is dangerous enough, having your pants down that close to poisonous snakes… Eyyyy!
That was good. I love the polite-sounding British excoriation.
Despite all this video says … You Have to admit Battle Ships Are Fricking Awsome 🙂
Always fascinating insights!
you have taken the run-on sentence to a new level.
Absolutely love the idea of a cia agent feeding a Soviet spy the most wild things about the Iowas
I don't know why they didn't go with my design of putting some wings on the side. What's the enemy going to do when the Battleships start flying?
😂LAUGHABLE AT BEST😂💤🚽🤡
Excellent video as always.
The really beautiful thing that RAF Coastal Command discovered with the 'flattening out' of 'short' rocket launches was that, given the correct shallow dive attack angle, this harmonised nearly perfectly with the ballistics of the old .303-inch machine-gun. A Coastal Command training video (available on YouTube and I think Armoured Carriers has posted it up) actually instructed pilots of Rockbeaus and Mosquitoes to fire all guns as they attacked.
The principle was that 20mm cannon and .303s were not harmonised with each other, but the cannon would strafe and suppress the target vessel (reducing the obvious deleterious effects of return flak fire) on the approach, then as soon as the .303s were seen to be reaching the target that was the time to let fly with the rockets, which would enter the water just short, steer themselves level, and strike the target below the waterline, sinking it outright.
Brilliant tactics, derived entirely from battle experience and usefully taking full advantage of a Beaufighter or Mosquito FB's cocktail of weaponry to a frightening level of effectiveness.
That all said, today, the Battleship does look like a good idea. Thanks to recent developments such as VLS Missiles and SeaRam. The lines would be a lot cleaner.
Plus, it's not like we're not already heading that direction. Could you imagine someone trying to explain away a 22,000-ton Destroyer? I know I can't. And if you're going to have Cruisers again, you're going to want Battleships, too. Because try explaining away a 55,000-ton Cruiser? I know I can't.
Christ is king.
At 3:55 is a photo of the USS Wisconsin tied up next to the raised hulk of the USS Oklahoma. It shows the difference in size between the WW1 era battleships and the newer models.
Wonder if any designer contemplated translating tank reactive armour to warships? Did anyone experiment with it?