00:00:00 – Intro
00:00:34 – Ship based IFF In WW2? (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mFUNscWTm6Q)
00:06:24 – Origin of the ‘Tin Cans’ nickname?
00:07:38 – How would the situation have changed if the WNT only regulated the tonnage of individual ships and not overall tonnage or number of ships allowed?
00:12:11 – How good were the Doctors aboard Royal Navy ships during the age of sail?
00:16:09 – Was there a Royal Navy reaction to the North Sea operations of the Spanish raiders Nadir (Ciudad de Valencia) and Ciudad de Alicante in late 1938?
00:20:32 – How do Midways rate in terms of capability in the post-WW2 jet age?
00:23:33 – How would damaged/punctured belt armor be replaced?
00:30:21 – US magazine circulation systems?
00:34:08 – Can you put Littorio’s main turrets on the Scharnhorst?
00:36:31 – WW1 British shells (c.1916)
00:40:07 – Why were the Kongos seen as such a threat to other nations?
00:44:14 – Could you please explain the transit of Cape Horn by sail?
00:46:48 – Ship rating system history?
00:52:02 – Additional machinery in VTE ships?
00:54:26 – Hiyataka/Hiyatake/Hayataka/Hitaka class carriers?
00:57:16 – How to preserve Texas?
01:02:06 – Did Queen Elizabeth try and save HMS Vanguard from the scrappers?
01:05:31 – German spheres on battleships?
01:08:23 – Just how bad was the maintenance on Arkhangelsk and would it have affected her ability to do proper damage control after something like a torpedo hit?
01:11:30 – How did radio-controlled target ships actually work in the early 20th century?
01:14:49 – If the RN and RM had come to blows at the Suez over Ethiopia, what would it have looked like?
01:17:29 – Are there any notable (or known) age of sail ships which are now holding up the roof to someones parlor? Are any visit-able by the public?
01:20:57 – How was naval espionage conducted between the British, German, and other naval powers during the late 19th and early 20th centuries?
01:26:04 – What are your most overrated battles and/or ships and/or battleships?
01:34:07 – How would a pirate manage to aquire a Ship of the line, say a 4th Rate or lower end 3rd Rate? And How would the Navies of the World react to this menace to the merchant’s pocket book?
01:37:44 – Why are larger ships faster when smaller planes and cars are the faster ones? (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=URgSFglbl5g)
01:42:22 – The minutia of naval training (https://youtu.be/RY5Ln8NEMns)
01:48:23 – What happened to damaged aircraft that landed on carriers? Were they simply shoved overboard, or were they repaired/scavenged for useful parts?
01:51:30 – How were battleship guns (or in fact naval guns in general) fired? Trigger, button etc?
01:53:22 – Ships with a permanent list?
01:56:40 – Did the admiral responsible for the MarkVI detonator, Christie, ever have to face any consequences for his blunders?
01:59:16 – For the US and Royal navies what names have been the most assigned but least launched either because it was changed or the ship was canceled?
02:02:12 – In your opinion, what were the best one-offs of each ship type (cruisers and up) in WW1, the Interwar Period, and WWII?
02:08:04 – What do you want to try next in your “taste of naval history” experiments?
02:11:23 – Roughly how much tonnage did the forced circulation boilers save in the Richelieu-class battleships?
02:14:09 – Calculations for Jutland Mk2?
02:18:45 – How were the Acacia class used in the Dardanelles, Aegean, Adriatic, and Mediterranean?
02:23:37 – What went wrong in the design process for the Lexingtons in their battlecruiser form, compared to the Amagis and G3s?
02:31:11 – Naval systems that start out a bit rubbish but improves over time?
02:36:30 – Was the rivalry between the IJA and IJN really that bad?
02:42:32 – When did the British start putting complete spar decks on their frigates?
02:45:09 – What is the difference between a ship and a boat?
02:49:42 – How good was the USN 18″ gun?
Pinned post for Q&A 🙂
1:34:07 So what I'm hearing is that if pirates ever got their hands on a ship of the line, the real smart move for them would be to sell it to whatever Navy was the opponent of whom it had been captured from for a reward, even if that reward was less than the naval prize money would be?
Buildings built out of Ships timber, try USS CHESAPEAKE!
I personally believe that the most overrated ship ever was the Yamato. I mean, just look how both of them were taken out.
concerning pirates acquiring a ship of the line; Based on examples such as Jesus of Lubech, actually buying one might be an option. Especially if you have connections and patronage… Say, an old three decker is taken as a price. The ship is sold “for breaking up”. Some time later a privateer rocks up with a razze frigate…
In the segment on ship speed and size (01:41:47), you talk about bow waves and wave troughs and how some people deny the existence of the troughs. Earlier, in the segment on Kongo's threat (00:40:14), the picture of Kongo shows a trough revealing the part of the ship that corresponds to the area on Hood that would have been hit in the current theory as to why she was lost.
On the question of espionage, I believe that James Bond once successfully passed himself of as japanese. Mind you, nipponese highlanders were a dime a dozen back in those days.
01:59:16 The running joke regarding CVN 75 is "Truman cancelled the United States a second time."
The most overrated battle IMO has to be Samar, since the outcome of that battle had very little bearing on the American landing operations (due to that being mostly over by that point), even though just about everyone thinks Taffy 3 saved the entire campaign.
The Guadalcanal night actions are IMO also overrated (including the ones where the Japanese won); the critical part of that campaign came over to the Cactus Air Force.
1:31:12 Beating on Bismarck harder than Rodney did, good lord lol
22:50. Soooooo trying to land an F14 on a Midway would be some type of danger zone? So to speak?
As a butcher I wouldn’t want to try working RN in the age of sail
"Do Not Paint Over This Sign" 😁 Safety Precautions sign in US magazine. Funny cause it's necessary.
I just got to hear Drach say Naruto Run in a drydock. I'm good for the week.
Concerning British APC ammo before replaced after Jutland by the much-improved "Greenboy" projectiles. ALL ammo made by anybody up through 1911 was of the general British type: Soft AP cap, tested at 15 degrees obliquity or less, and having a non-delay fuze (nobody had come up with a minimally-reliable delay-action mechanism, and, except for the US Navy, which used for its large-size gun projectile main armament filler Explosive "D" (the extremely insensitive ammonium picrate, the very powerful and sensitive explosive trinitrophenol (British Lyddite, French Melanite, Japanese Shimose, etc.). In fact, until 1902 the German Navy did not use asny filler in its APC shells due to their inability to go deep into an enemy warship and explode properly, while any other hits, such as on turrets, did not need such deep penetration. Thus, British APC ammo was not in any way inferior to the shells used by anyone else. The use of Explosive "D" in US AP ammo caused problems in getting full-power detonations even if the fuze acted properly, but this was true for all explosive fillers other than trinitrophenol until about 1928 when the higher-power Tetryl explosive was introduced in the boosters between the fuze and the main filler (not sure when some nations got this improvement, but US and British boosters were changed to Tetryl in 1928 for all shells requiring small boosters (base fuzes primarily) and reduced-sensitivity fillers (TNT in post-WWI British cruiser ammo)
Note that Japanese APC ammo in the Russo-Japanese War was essentially British-type and the high power and almost 100% full-detonation rate caused the Japanese to be hooked onto such explosive fillers even in WWII (they did not change to a less-sensitive filler until 1931 and, even then, only changed to tri-nitro-anisol, which was barely able to be kept intact when going through thick armor by using thick wood, plaster, and aluminum cushions filling up about one-third of the cavity. Thus, British ammo could not be considered a failure when one of the major users of it prior to WWI in actual combat considered it so highly.
The US rejection of higher-power, but also higher sensitivity, AP ammo was due in major part to safety requirements, just like their rejection of nitroglycerine in their gun propellent powders (WWII "flashless" powders used a much less sensitive additive that reduced the temperature of the blast). They allowed prior to the introduction of Tetryl a higher percentage of less-than-full-powder filler detonations, which the British also allowed after replacing Lyddite with Shellite in their Greenboy shells and afterwards, though eventually they added Tetryl (British "CE") boosters to their Shellite-filled APC shells to improve this by WWII.
German post-1911 APC shells (C/11 and after) made a few secret improvements that others only learned about during WWII when studying German APC duds (much of the improvements after Jutland in British APC ammo was due to this study).
First, Krupp introduced a much stronger high-temperature solder to hold on their soft AP caps so that they remained functional up to 30 degrees obliquity.(a form of "tough" cap), since all other soft caps, including the earlier Krupp designs, would begin to peel off the nose at over 15 degrees and never work at over 20 degrees (all AP caps other than Krupp — except perhaps WWII Italian Navy APC shells — were soldered on using a lower-strength low-temperature solder, sometimes with crimping into a ring of pits around the lower nose added for additional strength). Note that the acceptance tests for plates over 0.5-caliber KC were not increased in impact angle, so the shell body strength, even when the cap worked, was not really much different from British or US AP shells during most of WWI. This meant that 11" and 12" German naval guns firing post-C/11 Krupp APC ammo could punch through most plates of roughly 6" WWI-era KC armor in an intact condition (if going fast enough, of course) and getting a chance of causing deep hull damage. Not through thicker plates, though, so there was no improvement over British APC against BB-thickness armor (explains why only British BCs were blown up at Jutland, no matter how good or bad the British anti-flash powder safety systems were).
Second, Krupp found out that tri-nitro-phenol could not take an armor impact against plates over 0.25-caliber thickness without being set off at roughly 0.003 second, which turns out to be the typical delay in a base fuze without any delay mechanism. In fact, with this filler, in hits against thick armor, the fuze did nothing in almost all cases since the filler was very reliable, as the Japanese found out. This precluded the use of a delay-action fuze, so they switched to TNT as the filler. This filler was not quite insensitive enough in its pure, single-piece form, so Krupp had a wooden cushion added to the tip of the cavity and formed the TNT into stacks of separate pre-formed blocks with thin cushioning material separating them. This filler was kept by Krupp through the end of WWII for its shells with armor penetration of any kind. This filler was less reliable when set off by the pre-Tetryl boosters, which is why German shells had so many duds for the British to study.
Third, the German secret delay-action base fuze was developed. It was a very poor design, being essentially a regular non-delay base fuze with a single primer/detonator hit by the firing pin modified as follows: (a) To reduced the blast power of the primer/detonator on the black-powder delay element inserted in direct contact with the trinitrophenol booster charge, a corkscrew "tortuous tunnel" (British term) of triangular shape was inserted that more than tripled the distance that the primer/detonator blast had to travel before hitting the delay element.
Four, the delay element was made of a thin wafer of black powder pressed tightly to the booster and with a thin iron foil layer with many tiny holes facing the primer/detonator to further reduce the blast on the black powder. However, due to the irregular effects of that corkscrew tunnel, many cases occurred where the blast did not set off the black powder properly, so the delay became forever (dud). To help fix this, a small amount of loose black powder was poured into the fuze just in front of the waver to get the fuze to work, even if the delay was now very unreliable as to its length (I think 0.025 second was the spec requirement).
Five, unlike all later delay-action fuzes, there was no detonator after the delay element to properly set off the booster. Using tri-nitro-phenol as the booster meant that it was much easier to set off than most other explosives then in use, but burning black powder without a confined area to build up a major explosion was not very reliable even using tri-nitro-phenol. What most other later fuzes used, including the delay-action version of the British APC Number 16 base fuze used in the Greenboy shells, was to put an extremely sensitive explosive like fulminate of mercury or lead azide (used as the primer hit by the firing pin) between the delay element and the booster, so that the burning delay, when it hit its far end, would very reliably set off the detonator just like it had been hit by a firing pin, so that the delay element did not decrease the blast that set off the booster. This design lack made the KGerman base fuze even more unreliable.
When the German fuze worked properly (half of the time?), the delay caused significantly more internal hull damage than the shells with non-delay fuzes, but at the Battle of Jutland only a very few shells using these fuzes allowed the shells to reach deep enough into the target to endanger the ship in any important way. WARSPITE took such a hit that came close to disabling an engine, if I remember right, but that was the worst hit due to the delay working that I know of. Battleship heavy armor works in slowing down an intact penetrating shell so that it does not go very far after penetration, especially if the shells are rather small, as the 11" and 12" German shells were. This is the major reason for making naval guns so big, even if a smaller gun might be able to barely penetrate the armor.
So, British pre-Jutland APC shells were not inferior to anybody else's APC shells. What the Krupp shells gained in occasional deep penetration, they lost in greatly increasing the number of duds. Note what British ammo did to those German battle-cruisers — some barely made it back to port. It was only when better fuzes and boosters were introduced in the 1920s that reliable post-penetration shell blast effects were achieved.
My parents had a set of decorative miniature barrels of which the largest bore the legend "Made From The Timber of HMS Champion"/
I remember Drach talking about preserving ships in Orbeez on the Yorktown! It’s a hilarious idea to imagine pitching that to a board of trustees.
Small fast ships
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Combining gear problems
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1:32:39 exactly. Bismarck was a super duper uber battleship that against 2 treaty battleships lasted only 30 minutes in combat and managed to score, with a super duper uber mega saiyan optical firing control system…NO HITS ON ANY RN SHIP.
02:45:09 With regards to submarines, the origin of referring them to "boats" have several possible sources in the US Navy. The early Holland submarines were very small, and Holland's company was originally known as the "Holland Torpedo Boat Company" before becoming Electric Boat (still known by this name to this day). An alternate origin is the term "Pig Boat", which possibly originated from the appearance of early submarines resembling piglets suckling a sow when nested to a tender, the porpoising of the submarine when diving and surfacing, or the smell of the boats. At any rate, whether originally corporate or as an insult by other sailors, submariners adopted the name and made it their own.
During the time period after 1916 both the US (due to the major improvements in metallurgy by the Midvale Company) and British (by the results of Jutland making them study Krupp shell designs and finding out that they needed new test specs for their AP shells — they hadn't been updated in decades since the first major ironclad, HMS WARRIOR, was commissioned) had some major improvements in their AP ammunition and, in the British case, also a better understanding in how the 10%-black-powder-filled Common, Pointed, Capped (CPC) shells for use against smaller armored warships actually worked.
The Midvale Company had developed in 1911 an 8" (203 mm) Mark 11 MOD 1 AP projectile that, in most cases when tested at right-angles, remained intact even when it bounced off the armor it hit, which was previously considered impossible against Krupp Cemented type of face-hardened side armor. Since this was not a battleship shell, though, it seems to have been ignored by the US Navy. In 1916, though, in its Midvale-made 12" Mark 15 MOD 6 AP shells, Midvale had enough test results to apply this hardening/tempering system to its battleship ammo. The results were even better, even when tested at up to 15 degrees from right-angles all of its new "Midvale Unbreakable" shells remained intact whether penetrating or not, allowing the "Effective" (British "Fit-to-Burst") striking velocity to be lowered to the barely-penetrating-in-any-condition "Navy Ballistic Limit" (British "Perforating Limit"). This immediately made all prior US AP ammo obsolete. Because the AP caps remained soft, though, the impact angles for possible unshattered penetrations did not improve.
Only when hard-capped mid-1930s US Navy new AP projectile designs were introduced did projectile shatter of US AP shells no longer occur at any impact angle (the caps always worked), though of course other types of damage could occur, especially against the lower shell body at higher impact angles as the shell was "refracted" to a more-right-angle direction as it punched through. The WWII hard-capped AP shells, made by all three manufacturers of US Navy AP shells — Midvale, Bethlehem, and Crucible Steel — used a Russian Doll (softer regions of smaller size as one went from the top to the bottom of the shell and from the outer surface to the explosive cavity surface) "Sheath Hardening" method, where the entire nose was of one maximum hardness (525 Brinell or 555 Brinell, depending on the manufacturer's idea of the optimum nose hardness), then along the centerline the hardness dropped rapidly to the minimum hardness of circa-249 Brinell, which it kept to the tip of the explosive cavity in the lower half of the shell. Along the outer surface of the shell, the hardness dropped much more slowly to about the minimum 249 Brinell value just above the lower bourrelet where the driving band was cut, going rapidly softer to the 249 Brinell when you reached the surface of the explosive cavity from top to bottom. This eliminated any sudden steps in hardness anywhere between the highest and lowest hardness values, so cracking of the projectile near the explosive cavity from a force from any direction was minimized. Later shells had some improvements in the hardness pattern, such as having the minimum hardness upper to 256 Brinell in the 12" Mark 18 MOD 1 to make the shell slightly more rigid at oblique impact and a proposal, never actually implemented after WWII, to change the final tempering temperature of all AP shells to 350 degrees F from the WWII standard 475 degrees F, which was found to give a harder and more rigid shell lower body but with no increase in cracking during experimental tests. US naval ammunition had much more variation in design during WWII than any other country had.
The rather major change in the hardness pattern from the earlier "Through Hardening" — with the entire projectile nose of one maximum hardness everywhere and then a sudden step to the minimum middle and lower body hardness at the joint of the nose and cylindrical body, which was originally used with chilled cast iron projectiles — and the British-developed improved form called "Decremental Hardening" — where the Through Hardening method was modified to have a more gradual softening at the base of the nose to the minimum hardness around the tip of the explosive cavity but kept constant at any distance downward from the centerline to the outer surface (unlike the Sheath Hardening, there is no improved rigidity against forces from the side, so high-obliquity impacts can bend the shells much more than with WWII US Navy AP shells) — when Sheath Hardening was introduced, imply to me that this may have been, among other improvements in hardening and tempering that the Midvale Unbreakable AP shell used, the basis for the later major improvements in post-1930 US Navy AP shells resulting in 35-40-degree oblique impact spec intact penetration requirements against 0.8-caliber of US Class "A" KC-type armor from plates of the 1921-25 "Bethlehem Thin Chill" (15-20% face thickness) made by both Bethlehem and Midvale for and then stored due to the cancelled Washington Treaty of 1923 battleships to the latest Thick Chill (55% face) WWII armor and, even more, the ability of these US Navy WWII AP shells to penetrate in an intact condition plates much thicker than the US AP shell's diameter — 17.3" Thick Chill Class "A" barbette armor using 14" Mark 16 AP projectiles at 30 degrees, for example — which was virtually impossible for any non-US AP shell made at any time by anyone else.
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Also during the British post-Jutland overhaul of the shell designs for more realistic APC/APBC/SAPC oblique-impact intact perforation requirements (tougher middle body and base designs; insensitive Shellite or, for smaller guns using the CPBC/SAPC shells, TNT explosive fillers; and use of hardened AP caps that work against shatter at any impact angle that might occur in a battle), they found out some other interesting facts:
(1) Cast projectiles (12" Mark VIIA APC, the first of the Greenboy shells), where the shell was machined from a single pre-shaped steel shape with only heat treating used to adjust the hardness and toughness of the projectile nose and body from point to base, were considerably weaker and more brittle than forged larger shells, where the cylindrical metal blank was squeezed, hammered, and bent to its final rough shape, being heated and reheated between and during mechanical shaping treatments, forcing the cylindrical initial shape into various curved nose-shaped dies and creating the large internal cavity by forcing a cavity-shaped hardened-steel shape into the shell bottom. The mechanical working of the projectile's metal caused the "grain" of the various crystals formed in the shell's metal to line up in ways that reinforced one-another along the directions that impact forces from hitting thick armor would also align. Thus, while the 12" shell could not remain intact when used against 8" (0.67-caliber) KC plate (British "Cemented Armour") at 20 degrees or more obliquity, there was no problem with the larger shells at even high angles against plates of several thicknesses — tests of the HOOD's design armor by 15" Mark VA APC shells demonstrated this conclusively. Forging was used in all later British shells to be used against armor of any type or thickness.
(2) Possibly due to the fact that Shellite was somewhat less powerful than TNT, though Shellite could usually be detonated by a black-powder booster just like Lyddite could, smaller British guns in cruisers and destroyers — and strangely in the 16" AP shells for NELSON and RODNEY — used TNT as their explosive filler when introduced in the 1920s, though Shellite was resorted to for the 14" and projected 16" guns in the British WWII battleship designs. TNT was not detonable using black powder and was difficult to get reliable full-power detonations until Tetryl was introduced in 1928. From the many tests that I have seen, including those against the German battleship BADEN, Shellite had a rather large number of less-than-full-power explosions from its use of the same black-powder ring-shaped booster used with Lyddite. It seems that to get delay-action deep target hull penetration, any explosion was considered acceptable. Thus, until 1928, the TNT-filled APC/CPBC/SAPC shells were accepted even with their non-optimum explosive effectiveness. This was similar to all US Navy Explosive-"D"-filled shells AP and Base-Fuzed Common shells until they introduced Tetryl also in 1928, even though the US Army had been using Tetryl boosters in its Explosive-"D"-filled shells since 1918, indicating that the safety requirements of the US Navy were such that retests and re-retests were necessary to convince the safety personnel that Tetryl was "safe enough". Once the Tetryl had made TNT-filled British naval ammo get fully-acceptable test results (90% reliability), eventually the Shellite-filled large-caliber APC shells (all but the TNT-filled 16" Mark IB) were improved by using the same Tetryl booster used for the 16" APC to get full reliability by WWII.
(3) Hard caps worked better than soft or tough caps because they punched a deep pit into the plate face as they were destroyed — which a softer-faced cap could not — and this acted just like the use of a center-punch just prior to drilling holes in steel plates at a manufacturing plant. No new soft-capped British ammo was made (neither was any US Navy soft-capped AP ammo after the last Midvale Unbreakable 16" Mark 3 AP projectiles were completed for the COLORADO Class battleships, where no new-design, hard-capped AP ammo was introduced until the miod-1930s.
(4) British Common, Pointed, Capped (CPC) 10%-black-powder-filled anti-ship (and anti shore in some battles) ammo, was an unusual soft-capped semi-armor-piercing ammo used by the British Navy during WWI. The nose was very similar to a British APC shell, including a soft AP cap for penetrating face-hardened armor at a near-right-angles obliquity. It was specially designed for large guns hitting small enemy ships. The cap was for those ships that had face-hardened armor (battle-cruisers) but armor thin enough, up to 0ne-third caliber, that the shell at those low impact angles could remain intact after penetrating. Black powder in the usual uses exploded with a powerful blast, but not a true detonation, so the shockwave created did not have anywhere near the same power as a detonating explosive like TNT or Lyddite, being about 0ne-third as powerful and causing more damage due to the fireball it creates than its explosion power. Also, however, the shell is blown into fewer, larger, slower pieces, forming more like a shotgun blast moving in the direction of the shell when it exploded, with the heavy nose and base plug punching the deepest and largest holes in front of the shell. The blast from the base fuze takes up to 0.075 second to spread to enough of the black powder filler to finally tear open the projectile body, so that the shell has a very long delay built-in without the need for a delay-action base fuze. Note also that even if the shell breaks up during penetration, the friction from the breakup will usually set off the filler and it will cause considerable fire and fragment damage from the side of the shit hit to as far as the pieces can reach inside the target. In effect, the results of being hit by this shell were in many cases just as bad or even worse than when hit by a Lyddite-filled APC shell. Until the new Greenboy APC ammo was introduced, the post-Jutland battle instructions was to use CPC instead of APC in most situations. It seemed that the British had realized that deep penetrations were better, but until Jutland had not been able to overcome their previous infatuation with the most powerful filler being the best filler, ignoring all other facts.
(5) British CPC had another effect that was previously not realized when hitting thick face-hardened armor at a low obliquity. The projectile would collapse like a bag of water dropped from a height onto a concrete plate, being compressed lengthwise as the nose decelerated and the weak middle body kept moving forward. However, when CPC shells hit at low obliquity at a high-enough velocity for a similar size and weight APC shell to perforate the CA plate hit, an unusual thing happened. The black powder, made up of finely-packed, but separate powders of sulfur, charcoal, and potassium nitrate (saltpeter), was thrown forward by the intense inertial slowdown at the plate face, compressing it to a virtually solid mass with all of the empty spaces between the powder grains squeezed out. This pushed the powder into the front half of the cavity where the shell was surrounded by the armor plate as the nose punched through. Thus, the filler was held tightly in a oval-nosed cavity held rigid by the thick nose and the armor to the sides and the huge force from the rear due to the sudden slowdown. It was also crushed so tightly together that it started exploding everywhere at once throughout its entire volume, simulating an HE detonation. Since the amount of filler was three times what was in the usual APC shell and one-third as powerful, the result was a detonation inside the armor plate exactly like a Lyddite filler detonating while its shell was imbedded halfway through the armor. This caused British CA plates so hit in tests to have enlarged holes made in them and many plates actually split in two through the hole. Thus, CPC shells could have even better anti-hull armor damage than the APC shells that were supposedly the ones designed to so penetrate the enemy target. Another result not understood and not utilized until after it was no longer the major weapon result desired. It is necessary to fully test and understand the results of the tests of anything that you need to do a task, military or otherwise…
During the time period after 1916 both the US (due to the major improvements in metallurgy by the Midvale Company) and British (by the results of Jutland making them study Krupp shell designs and finding out that they needed new test specs for their AP shells — they hadn't been updated in decades since the first major ironclad, HMS WARRIOR, was commissioned) had some major improvements in their AP ammunition and, in the British case, also a better understanding in how the 10%-black-powder-filled Common, Pointed, Capped (CPC) shells for use against smaller armored warships actually worked.
The Midvale Company had developed in 1911 an 8" (203 mm) Mark 11 MOD 1 AP projectile that, in most cases when tested at right-angles, remained intact even when it bounced off the armor it hit, which was previously considered impossible against Krupp Cemented type of face-hardened side armor. Since this was not a battleship shell, though, it seems to have been ignored by the US Navy. In 1916, though, in its Midvale-made 12" Mark 15 MOD 6 AP shells, Midvale had enough test results to apply this hardening/tempering system to its battleship ammo. The results were even better, even when tested at up to 15 degrees from right-angles all of its new "Midvale Unbreakable" shells remained intact whether penetrating or not, allowing the "Effective" (British "Fit-to-Burst") striking velocity to be lowered to the barely-penetrating-in-any-condition "Navy Ballistic Limit" (British "Perforating Limit"). This immediately made all prior US AP ammo obsolete. Because the AP caps remained soft, though, the impact angles for possible unshattered penetrations did not improve.
Only when hard-capped mid-1930s US Navy new AP projectile designs were introduced did projectile shatter of US AP shells no longer occur at any impact angle (the caps always worked), though of course other types of damage could occur, especially against the lower shell body at higher impact angles as the shell was "refracted" to a more-right-angle direction as it punched through. The WWII hard-capped AP shells, made by all three manufacturers of US Navy AP shells — Midvale, Bethlehem, and Crucible Steel — used a Russian Doll (softer regions of smaller size as one went from the top to the bottom of the shell and from the outer surface to the explosive cavity surface) "Sheath Hardening" method, where the entire nose was of one maximum hardness (525 Brinell or 555 Brinell, depending on the manufacturer's idea of the optimum nose hardness), then along the centerline the hardness dropped rapidly to the minimum hardness of circa-249 Brinell, which it kept to the tip of the explosive cavity in the lower half of the shell. Along the outer surface of the shell, the hardness dropped much more slowly to about the minimum 249 Brinell value just above the lower bourrelet where the driving band was cut, going rapidly softer to the 249 Brinell when you reached the surface of the explosive cavity from top to bottom. This eliminated any sudden steps in hardness anywhere between the highest and lowest hardness values, so cracking of the projectile near the explosive cavity from a force from any direction was minimized. Later shells had some improvements in the hardness pattern, such as having the minimum hardness upper to 256 Brinell in the 12" Mark 18 MOD 1 to make the shell slightly more rigid at oblique impact and a proposal, never actually implemented after WWII, to change the final tempering temperature of all AP shells to 350 degrees F from the WWII standard 475 degrees F, which was found to give a harder and more rigid shell lower body but with no increase in cracking during experimental tests. US naval ammunition had much more variation in design during WWII than any other country had.
The rather major change in the hardness pattern from the earlier "Through Hardening" — with the entire projectile nose of one maximum hardness everywhere and then a sudden step to the minimum middle and lower body hardness at the joint of the nose and cylindrical body, which was originally used with chilled cast iron projectiles — and the British-developed improved form called "Decremental Hardening" — where the Through Hardening method was modified to have a more gradual softening at the base of the nose to the minimum hardness around the tip of the explosive cavity but kept constant at any distance downward from the centerline to the outer surface (unlike the Sheath Hardening, there is no improved rigidity against forces from the side, so high-obliquity impacts can bend the shells much more than with WWII US Navy AP shells) — when Sheath Hardening was introduced, imply to me that this may have been, among other improvements in hardening and tempering that the Midvale Unbreakable AP shell used, the basis for the later major improvements in post-1930 US Navy AP shells resulting in 35-40-degree oblique impact spec intact penetration requirements against 0.8-caliber of US Class "A" KC-type armor from plates of the 1921-25 "Bethlehem Thin Chill" (15-20% face thickness) made by both Bethlehem and Midvale for and then stored due to the cancelled Washington Treaty of 1923 battleships to the latest Thick Chill (55% face) WWII armor and, even more, the ability of these US Navy WWII AP shells to penetrate in an intact condition plates much thicker than the US AP shell's diameter — 17.3" Thick Chill Class "A" barbette armor using 14" Mark 16 AP projectiles at 30 degrees, for example — which was virtually impossible for any non-US AP shell made at any time by anyone else.
(CONTINUED BELOW)
The (building) FFG-62 class of frigates, so far, are being named for the original frigates: Constellation, Congress and Chesapeake. United States may still have a chance– — Constitution remains on the lists. I doubt President will be used.
Drach, Drach, Drach – I have to correct some of your terminology used in your discussion of what constitutes a ship and what constitutes a boat (time stamp about 2:38 or so). Actually an age of sail ship, barque, brig, square topsail schooner etc. carries yards which themselves have yardarms. The yard is the whole spar carried (usually) at approximately right angle to the mast. The yardarm is that portion of the ends of the yard, usually painted white, outside of the band holding the lifts. The lift is a piece of standing rigging (means it doesn't run thru a pulley & is often wormed, parcelled & served as well as being tarred) that supports the ends of the yard when the sails are furled/the yard not hoisted.
USS LONG BRACH CGN-9 was a good "one-off" in a number of ways: BOTH (!!) TALOS and TERRIER AAW GMS carried; 1st nuclear-powered surface warship; etc.
Can some one tell me what they ment at.. taste of naval History.. question?
He said the look of dread on my face… And show a video, in a pantry of some sort… Or something…
Is that an actual video… Is it for maybe Patreons ONLY. I never seen it. And I have been looking through this channels videos all day everyday… For months
In the mid-1970s I was on the USS FOX CG-33 during a post-overhaul shakedown cruise. Very interesting trip for me! One good thing was that the ship had as its cook the person who had won the best chef in the Navy award the previous year. I gained 6 pounds in three weeks…
Huzzah for the Cromer fishermen taking on Franco's minions!
As someone who lives on the Great Lakes I would like to say that the vessels that operate on the lakes even the massive 1000 footers are referred to as Boats or Lakeboats and if you refer to them as Ships most enthusiasts and Mariners will correct you. The exception to this rule are Salties or Ships that primarily sail in the ocean but still regularly find themselves in the Great Lakes.
1:42:40 Pretty obvious to me that sailors don't get down off a ladder you just get down off a duck.
22:37 Drach buddy, pal, chum. There was not a issue on the flight deck with operating tomcats it was hangar height, they were too low to allow for a Tomcat to be jacked up for a gear swing. Tall tales and all that.
Brilliant video thank you ❤️👀👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍
Personally I think drach is pretty hard on the Bismark, but it's definitely overrated when you're talking to the average wheraboo.
Weird nitpick of the Drydocks…
I wish people asking questions would just ask a question. Too often I hear Drach read a question, then proceed to read the essay that comes after it establishing a position on the subject.
@Drachinifel As a young idiot Midshipman I cut my teeth on descending down ladders forward on Her Majesty's Australian Ships (As they were then) TOBRUK and MANOORA. As you said; it was faster and easier; you basically slid down putting all your strength into your arms on the rails and basically allowed gravity to carry you down, controlling your descent speed using your feet. This was commonplace alongside and at sea. What was also commonplace, however, was the amount of people who hit their heads on the opposite sides of hatchs whilst descending due to an unforeseen pitch of the ship. It was also surprisingly difficult to descend down a stairwell forwards during damage control whilst wearing OCCABA as the tank had a tendency to hit the rungs as you went down. All pussers did it of course, but even when I first joined, RAN's Green Team (Sea Training Group) were cracking down on it to eradicate it as some boffin had done the studies to show that descending forwards was more dangerous than descending facing the rungs. And it probably was, on average.
I think it's pretty obvious where the Bismarck hype comes from. It's all the old school cold war historians that mostly drew from first hand account field rumours and contemporary propaganda. The Germans suffer from being turned into this Goliath type enemy to the Allies David. You see it with everything they have. Pocket battleships the terror of the seas. The mighty Panzer. The ahead of its time German mechanisation of forces/mobile infantry. The list goes on yet is hardly true to reality. Same era of documentaries I think a lot of us grew up with that also talk about Sherman's being tinder boxes, Garand ping killing people and such and then there's the. If only for Doenitz got the subs he wanted, the G43/STG44 was standard issue, They had more of X Panzers, Developed Jets sooner. Basically if only they had an entirely more beneficial starting point in the war and massively more resources they'd have won. because the Germans were this mighty behemoth of an enemy that none but the channel and Russian winter could halt and we'd all be speaking German if not for those two things because nothing could stop them and thats why …they lost.. Kinda stuff that I'd wager 80% of the dad's of those that watch this channel say in some form.
I don’t see how a Bismarck could beat an Iowa even in theory unless “Hood” style wildly lucky hits were somehow part of the design.
Iowa was faster and had superior guns and vastly superior rangefinding. It could just stay endlessly beyond bismarcks effective range and pelt it with effective fire. If Bismarck tried to close it just runs away, firing computer guided 16 inch shells all the while