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Cythereal posted:Y'all were good at naming warships, at least. Yes, I'm including the Flower class and the HMS Gay Viking. A lot of the sailors aboard the Flowers viewed the naming of the class as a cunning psychological warfare tool against German U-boat crews; while dying for the Fuhrer might be glorious, being killed by a ship named for a flower like Hyacinth, Periwinkle or Cowslip was faintly comical.
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Aug 22, 2019 13:15
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Milo and POTUS posted:People said last thread that the harbour defence motor launches were originally destined to sail (quite literally) to the Caribbean. Given their armament and intended destination (according to the wiki ,they eventually ended up in the Mediterranean) I guess they were meant for anti-sub patrol boats mainly. Other than general interdiction what goods were the germans hoping to stop from being trafficked? Sugar seems most obvious, right? What goods were the Caribbean holdings contributing to the war effort The HDMLs weren't built to sail to the Caribbean, they were built to be carried as deck cargo on merchant ships, and to be simple enough that they could be built in local shipyards. A few vessels were given sailing rig for extended range, yes, but this was just eight boats from the 486 built. HDMLs were anti-submarine patrol boats. As their name suggests, they were meant to protect harbours from submarines trying to infiltrate them and sink ships inside. While no HDMLs made it to the Caribbean, a number of the older Fairmile B motor launches were operated by the Trinidad Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve (which drew men from all the British-held Caribbean islands), some of which were built on Jamaica, as well as two minesweepers built on the Cayman Islands. The Trinidad RNVR had been established primarily to protect the oil fields and refineries on Trinidad, which provided just under 40% of the oil used by the British Empire during the 1930s. Trinidad also had the largest asphalt lake in the world. Guiana, meanwhile, was a key producer of bauxite ore for aluminium. Trinidad was a useful base for protecting the shipping carrying this, as well as ships heading to the Panama Canal.
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Aug 25, 2019 16:17
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xthetenth posted:Later on, the British build the Nelsons as their treaty allowed 16" battleships. They make them very long and cluster their guns together up front. This utterly loving baffles the US. The clustered guns meant that the overall length of the section they had to armor was comparatively short, but the long hull meant they didn't save anything if they protected a given percentage of the ship's waterline like everyone in the Anglosphere had done. If. The US didn't get that the UK had decided to make the ammunition and machinery spaces as small as possible to minimize the weight in protection, and make the hull long so the ships could have lower drag, meaning they needed less machinery, and just lean into it by not protecting much of the waterline, which mean the relatively small amount of machinery made for a comparatively small weight of armor for a given thickness. Yeah, the Nelsons really confused the US. There were a good few years where the USN thought that the Nelsons were hybrid ships, with a carrier deck aft, as they couldn't work out why the RN had done what it did.
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Sep 15, 2019 13:09
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aphid_licker posted:Love how the Nelson looks. What's the armored bit, roughly from the middle of the front turret (it sits on an internal tower made of armor as I understand) to slightly behind the funnel? The main belt ran from the front of the foremost (A) turret, to underneath the mainmast, ending after the aftmost pair of 6in turrets. The turrets were sitting on an armoured barbette, yes, but the handling chambers at the bottom of the turret needed protecting from shellfire.
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Sep 15, 2019 14:14
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Cythereal posted:A lot. Both the US and Britain were slowly moving towards mass deployment of carrier divisions like the Japanese did. This isn't quite right; the British had experimented with multi-carrier tactics in the late 1920s and early 1930s, and generally planned to keep their carriers together in a fleet action. This was used in action early in the war - Ark Royal and Glorious operated together during the Norwegian campaign, for example. However, due to a scarcity of carriers (exacerbated by the early losses of Courageous and Glorious) compared to the amount of tasks that required a carrier, the RN rarely got to concentrate their carriers until 1942-3. The Japanese only really adopted massed carrier groups from late 1940, as the IJN digested and interpreted the lessons of the Sino-Japanese war. This isn't to say that the British had everything right about the use of carriers. The main reason for the British use of massed carriers wasn't to deploy massed carrier strikes, as the IJN planned. Instead, it was a defensive measure, with British carriers operating together in the early war not effectively coordinating their strikes. The RN, in planning its air defence tactics, followed the RAF's assumption that 'the bomber will always get through', that fighters would not be able to locate and catch attacking aircraft before they made their attacks. Guns would have to be used to break up attacks by enemy aircraft. This was most effective when the guns were massed, so the carriers were massed. They were also kept close to the battleships, which could add their firepower to the defence. Such an arrangement also made defence against submarine attack easier. However, it made it harder for the carriers to make frequent manoeuvres to launch aircraft.
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Oct 11, 2019 22:47
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:That s aid, the Edinburgh has a max displacement of 10400 tons, so I'm not really sure why it's a light cruiser instead of a heavy cruiser. And then there's things like the Konigsberg, nominally a CA but with a max displacement of 6650 tons. Ship designations, man. Seems like I'll just have to figure out some way to make the lighter-weight ships attractive, or accept that some ship options will be largely ignored by the players in favor of More Guns. The definition of a light versus a heavy cruiser comes down to the naval treaties of the 1920s and 1930s. The Washington Treaty of 1922 limited cruisers to a maximum standard displacement of 10,000 tons (n.b. standard displacement is very easy to game, so most cruisers went above this in total displacement). This was then followed by the 1931 London Treaty, which split cruisers into 'light' cruisers with 6in guns, and heavy cruisers with 8in guns. This was, as defined, the only difference between the two types, but most light cruisers of the 1920s and early 1930s tended to be smaller ships, displacing 5-6000 tons. However, in the late 1930s, people start to realise that 6in guns can be better than 8in guns - you can fit more on a ship of the same size, they fire faster, and the penetration advantage of the 8in doesn't matter when you're fighting lightly armoured cruisers. This meant that you get cruisers like the 'Town's, of which Edinburgh was the last evolution, which have light cruiser armament on a heavy cruiser's displacement. Konigsberg, with 6in guns, was always a light cruiser, and I don't recall seeing anything call it a heavy cruiser. FrangibleCover posted:
This is wrong. The battlecruiser was, when originally constructed, intended to support the scouting line before joining the battleline as a fast wing. They were never really built to cruise independently, and rarely did so. They were descendants of the first-class armoured cruisers of the 1890s and early 1900s, which were built for exactly this role. Fisher's writings, while not fully explicit, strongly suggest that he was thinking along these lines when designing the first battlecruisers. They were primarily used with the fleet in exercises pre-1914. They had a clear place in naval thinking as an innate part of the battlefleet, and this continued throughout WWI and the interwar period. The Alaskas, meanwhile, don't fit into this place. They were explicitly built to hunt raiding cruisers. They needed to be so large thanks to the threat from the German panzerschiffe and Scharnhorsts, both built for raiding shipping, as well as the perceived threat from Japanese ships of a similar size and role. They were never expected to fight in the battleline, or to be able to fight battleships. They could be considered '2nd Class battlecruisers', but large cruiser works just as well, and is the term that was historically used.
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Oct 13, 2019 23:41
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MrYenko posted:“Ladies and gentlemen, may I present to you the Montana class BBBN.” The Italians did actually have a few CGBNs - several of the Italian Navy's cruisers built in the 1960s were designed to carry Polaris SLBMs. Giuseppe Garibaldi had four Polaris tubes from 1961, while the Andrea Dorias and Vittorio Veneto were fitted for them, but never received the tubes. Italy was never actually allowed to purchase the missiles, though, and so these ships never actually carried missiles. The Italians did try to design their own SLBM, the Alfa, which had a few test firings but never entered service.
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Oct 14, 2019 15:40
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Nebakenezzer posted:In Neptune's Inferno, didn't the author state that the difference in firepower between a 8" gun and a 14" inch one doesn't double, it goes up exponentially? The amount of damage a shell does is related to the size of its bursting charge. The charge is dependent on the internal volume of the shell, and hence scales roughly proportional to the cube of the radius. A larger shell has a larger bursting charge - the British 8in AP shell had a 5.2 kg bursting charge, while the bursting charge for the 14in Mk VII's AP shell was 22 kg. The HE round for the 6in gun used by the 'Town's and other British cruisers of a similar age had a 3.6 kg bursting charge, less than the 8in's AP round (their AP round had a 1.7 kg charge. However, a smaller gun will fire faster, and more guns can be carried. A triple 6in turret weighed about as much as a twin 8in turret. The 6in gun would also fire a little less than twice as many rounds per gun as the 8in. This meant that a British cruiser with twelve 6in was putting out 122 kg of explosive per minute, while a similarly sized cruiser with eight 8in was putting out 124.8 kg. In other words, both ships would do a similar amount of damage to a target if every round hit. Given that the 6in cruiser is firing more shells, though, it is more likely to score a hit, so will, in the long term, do more damage. Nebakenezzer posted:Also Mr. Abstraction, let me ask this question for you: did weather affect World War 2 Radar? If a squall was between two groups of ships, were one effectively hidden from the other? Radar was not especially affected by bad weather. Some radars could be damaged by wind and water damage, but this was minimised by the design of the radar housing. Rough weather could make it harder to track targets, as the ship's roll brought the target in and out of the beam, but this was only really a problem with ASW radars, which were trying to track targets low to the water. Nebakenezzer posted:I know you were thinking of weather as cosmetic, but in both World Wars it could have serious effects. The Italian fleet, for example, was more or less built for daytime engagements with no radar, which is why the British only engaged their surface fleet at night or in poor visibility. This isn't quite right. There were several engagements between the Royal Navy and the Italian Navy in daylight, and in good visibility. Of the three major fleet actions - Calabria, Cape Spartivento and Matapan - the first two were fought in daylight, and with good visibility. Warspite would score one of the longest-ranged hits in the history of naval warfare during the Battle of Calabria. There were also several cruiser actions in daylight, such as the Battle of Cape Spada. The RN had trained for battle at night, unlike the Italian Navy, but this choice was motivated more by the possibility of battles with the IJN and USN. Both of these navies had refitted their ships for action at long ranges during the 1920s, but the RN had not been able to do so. Instead, they planned to neutralise the American or Japanese advantage at range by fighting a close-range night action. Randomcheese3 fucked around with this message at 16:09 on Oct 17, 2019 |
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Oct 17, 2019 15:45
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Gort posted:This does ignore the concept of armoured warships, though. If your six-inchers can't penetrate the armour and the eight-inchers can, the eight-inchers have more options. That's true, but the general expectation was that cruisers weren't going to be fighting anything with enough armour for this to matter. 6in guns could penetrate the armour of most cruisers at typical combat ranges, and they weren't expected to fight battleships.
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Oct 17, 2019 17:50
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Cythereal posted:6 inchers were also expected to fight destroyers and raid commerce. Yes, though I skipped over those as they weren't armoured. Cruisers were fairly useful as commerce raiders for the RN in the opening days of WWII, and did pretty well in the Mediterranean too. British cruisers swept most of the German merchant marine from the sea in the first few months of WWII - Ajax actually captured more ships off the River Plate than Graf Spee, for example. In the Mediterranean, British surface raiders savaged a number of Italian convoys. In the first half of 1941, the RN's surface forces did more damage to Italian shipping than submarines or aircraft, though over the course of the war, they would come off worse.
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Oct 17, 2019 18:11
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Gort posted:Huh? What about armoured cruisers? I was mostly discussing interwar cruisers, which were not expected to fight larger ships. The heyday of the armoured cruiser was 20 years earlier, and, under the paradigm in place then, having fewer, larger guns was superior, hence why you get ships with 2-4 9.2in guns. Sorry for not being clearer about what I was talking about.
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Oct 18, 2019 23:05
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Saint Celestine posted:Except, that they were supposed to provide support for the main battle fleet if required, as an additional wing. Which would subject them to possible return fire of a calibre that they were not armored for. IMO, in the view of the original BC design as Fisher/The British envisioned, it was flawed. It was only until the fast battleship that the design flaws were rectified due to increases in technology. The battlecruiser was perfectly sound as a fast wing of the battlefleet. At Jutland, the British ships were compromised not by any lack of armour, but by poor storage of propellants. British propellants were more volatile and flammable than German ones, especially when old. Crews often left old cordite charges aboard, rather than changing them as frequently as they were supposed to. They also often failed to store the charges properly, which caused the loss of the pre-dreadnought Bulwark in 1914, the armoured cruiser Natal in 1915, and Vanguard in 1917, all to accidental explosions. The RN's main takeaway from Dogger Bank was that the Battlecruiser Fleet needed to raise their rates of fire. Accuracy at the battle was low, roughly 2%. The BCF had no protected gunnery range at its base at Rosyth, so couldn't train for accuracy without risking losing a battlecruiser to mines or submarines. Raising the rate of fire was easier to train, but required the turret crews to compromise safety standards. More ammunition was stored in the turrets and placed in the hoists, and on some ships, the crews might have altered the anti-flash protections, speeding up the hoists. On Lion, though, the gunner was replaced in June 1915. The new gunner, Alexander Grant, replaced the ship's stored cordite with completely new charges, and instituted safer procedures while maintaining a high rate of fire. In particular, he reduced the number of charges stored in the turrets. At Jutland, the three battlecruisers exploded after turret hits. These were on the gunhouse or barbette, the above-decks portion of the turrets, rather than the handling chambers or magazines belowdecks. There's direct eyewitness evidence from aboard Invincible of the hit on the turret that exploded, both from inside and outside it. There's no such evidence from either Queen Mary or Indefatigable, though one of the other hits on Queen Mary did start a fire in a turret, from which we have survivor testimony. However, reports from observers on other ships indicate that the explosions occurred slightly after hits on turrets. Lion would survive a turret hit which started a major fire in the turret's handling chamber. Lion survived this hit because the reforms implemented by her gunner slowed the spread of the fire. On the three ships that exploded, there was a direct train of cordite from the turrets to the magazines, especially if the flash protection was compromised. On Lion, there were no charges in the gunhouse, meaning that the fire was minor in its early stages. The flash protection was in place, and the hoists were down, meaning there was no path for the flash of the shell or initial stages of the fire to reach the handling chamber and magazine. It was only once molten lead from burning cables dripped into the handling chamber that the main fire started. She survived this because the gap between initial hit and the fire entering the handling chamber was long enough for damage control to take place, with the magazine being flooded. Had the crew fought the fire in the gunhouse better, and ensured it was completely out, the cordite fire would never have started. On the other three ships, the fire reached the magazine within minutes, if not seconds, to quick for anything to be done to stop it. The German ships had thicker armour, but the effect of this is hard to discern because British shells were worse than German ones (only 27% of British shells operated correctly, compared to 63% of German ones, even on thinner armour). However, it's clear that turret fires were started at similar rates. There were nine hits on British turrets, with four fires started, as compared to five fires from ten hits on German ships. The German ships survived because their propellants were inherently safer, and because fewer charges were exposed to fire. The Germans had nearly lost the battlecruiser Seydlitz to a turret fire at Dogger Bank; this fire had been caused by a shell which did not fully penetrate the armour, but caused spalling which ignited charges. The near-loss of Seydlitz caused the Germans to reduce the number of charges stored in their turrets, and in transit, reducing the severity of the fires at Jutland. It's worth noting that Derfflinger, which had the most serious fires of the German ships, had the most charges left exposed to fire. Had the British followed the German example, or the example of Lion, it's likely that none of the battlecruisers would have exploded. Increasing the armour would reduce, but not eliminate the risk, as long as poor procedures were followed.
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Dec 1, 2019 21:24
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xthetenth posted:There's only so many ways to make the tradeoff of speed, armor and armament. The German BCs were armored better, but their guns weren't particularly threatening to anything other than British BCs and old BBs. SMS Lützow sank for a reason, despite being one of the newest and best protected German BCs. That reason was as much to do with German failures of design and damage control. After all, the hits that did most damage to Lutzow were 12in shells from Invincible and Inflexible, shells that were only about 20lb heavier than Lutzow's own shells. While German ships were arguably better sub-divided than British ships, they had more large compartments outside the areas with thickest armour - especially the forward torpedo flat, the main culprit for Lutzow's sinking. The bulkheads between compartments on German ships were also not fully watertight. There were a lot of voicepipes, cableways, and ventilation trunks running through them, and these penetrations were not easily closed by valves. Finally, German ships had insufficient pumping capacity to counteract heavy flooding. British ships started the war with similar problems, but the loss of Audacious to flooding after a relatively small mine strike in 1914 showed that they were issues that needed to be fixed.
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Dec 2, 2019 00:32
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xthetenth posted:That's a point, would the 11" shells their German contemporaries would have been throwing done significantly worse outside the major armor? The bursting charge on the German 11in armour-piercing shell was about 20 lbs, while that on the British 12in was 26lb or 27lb (depending on model of shell). The 12in did have a heavier HE shell, though I don't have numbers for the bursting charge in the German shell. The difference in bursting charge probably wouldn't have made much difference in less-armoured areas. If Lutzow had been hit with 11in, rather than 12in shells, she would probably have suffered the same fate. Saint Celestine posted:How is a comparison between the first German BC and first British BC apples and oranges, its two years. Apples and oranges would be comparing Invincible to Derfflinger. The ships are roughly similar except for the naval doctrines that defined their designs. German thought was that these ships would inevitably find themselves in the main battle line, and armored them sufficiently for it. British thought was fleet scout and vs cruisers. Firstly, the British were absolutely planning to use their battlecruisers in the battleline. Fisher had been long interested in a 'composite' design, one capable of both performing cruiser warfare and fighting as a battleship. British exercises towards the end of the 19th and during the first few years of the 20th Century showed the utility of fast ships in the battleline. They were also influenced by the successful use of armoured cruisers in this role during the Russo-Japanese war. The idea that the battlecruisers weren't intended for use as a fast wing of the battlefleet only really shows up post-Jutland, as a way to exonerate Fisher for their perceived failings. Secondly, the British ships weren't that badly protected compared to other British ships. While their armour was thinner, the belt of the Invincibles was in line with those fitted to other ships intended to lie in the battleline. It was the same thickness as on the Canopus class battleships, and on earlier British armoured cruisers, similarly intended for close fleet work. The British tended to prioritise thinner armour spread over more of the ship, as they were more concerned with the effect of HE shells on unarmoured areas of the ship. The armour on the Indefatigables was a misstep, but the Lions and Tiger had thicker belts more in line with German practice. The Renowns had thin armour, yes, but this must be understood in terms of Fisher's thinking. With her 15in guns, she could outrange most enemy capital ships, and with her 32 knot speed, she could keep the enemy ship in a range where her guns were effective, but her opponent's were not. The British ships could definitely take hits. The losses of the British battlecruisers at Jutland were not caused by a lack of armour, but by poor magazine practices. Where turret hits didn't cause magazine fires, the ships displayed a remarkable ability to keep fighting. Tiger took 15 hits at Jutland, joint most of any British capital ship with Warspite. Warspite had to limp back to the UK, heavily damaged, while Tiger was in a position to continue fighting. Lion took 16 heavy hits at Dogger Bank and 13 at Jutland, but was never in any serious danger of sinking at either battle. Had the British crews been following proper procedures for propellant storage and handling, it's likely that every British battlecruiser would have successfully returned to Rosyth. Randomcheese3 fucked around with this message at 03:07 on Dec 2, 2019 |
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Dec 2, 2019 03:02
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Saint Celestine posted:Sure, they took hit, mostly from 11" and 12". Replace the German BCs with the British BCs, and Scheer's 2nd turn most likely results in 5 sunken BCs. Comparatively, look at the beating Seydlitz took and somehow made it back to port. It's not that likely; British ships proved a lot more resilient to the sort of hits that doomed Lutzow and put Seydlitz into the position she was in. British ships were better designed to stop the spread of flooding, and had more portable pumps than the German ships. None of the British battlecruisers that sank were sunk by shell hits that penetrated the hull or magazines; it was all turret hits that caused the explosion. As Lion shows, these turret hits were survivable with proper safety procedures. Turret hits that did not penetrate the armour could still cause fires. If the British had been following German-style magazine procedures, then it's likely none of their ships would have sunk, but if the Germans had been following the procedures prevailing in the Battlecruiser Fleet, it's likely that Derfflinger and Seydlitz would have exploded too.
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Dec 2, 2019 10:26
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Saint Celestine posted:What are your sources for this? Staff's book has locations of every shell hit on all the German BCs. You replace Seydlitz with any British BC and it doesn't make it back. My sources are Staff's German Battlecruisers of World War One, Roberts' British Battlecruisers: 1905-1920, Friedman's The British Battleship: 1906-1946 and Fighting the Great War at Sea, Brown's The Grand Fleet, Burt's British Battleships of World War One, Brook's The Battle of Jutland and Campbell's Jutland: An Analysis of the Fighting. There's also a few papers, especially Lambert's "Our Bloody Ships" or "Our Bloody System"? Jutland and the Loss of the Battle Cruisers, 1916. Running through the hits on Seydlitz, only the turret hits were more dangerous to a British battlecruiser than to a German one, and this is because of poor procedures. Had the British ship been following the same ones as Seydlitz's crew, then she would have survived, much as Lion did. Most of the hits exploded outside the armour, or penetrated armour that was no thicker than on British ships. It''s also worth noting that British shells often failed. Post-battle testing found that armour-piercing shells typically exploded on impact with plates thicker than 1/3rd calibre (i.e. a 4in thick plate for a 12in shell, or 5in for a 15in shell), while inert shells typically failed to penetrate 6in plates fully intact. The hits forward, which caused most of the flooding along with the torpedo hit, were much more easily survivable for British ships, which had better pumping capacity, fewer penetrations of watertight bulkheads, and better damage control procedures. Compare the travails of Seydlitz to those of Inflexible after she was mined in the Dardanelles in 1915. Inflexible had a mine go off under her bow, blowing a hole 30 by 26 ft in her side and bottom forward. While she flooded rapidly, she only gained 5ft of draft forward, compared to a 15ft increase in draft for Seydlitz at Jutland - though part of this is due to the lack of battle damage creating further leak paths in Inflexible.
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Dec 2, 2019 20:58
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Beardless posted:Excellent, thank you! Peter Scott's The Battle of the Narrow Seas is also worth a read. Scott commanded a gunboat flotilla during the war, so he really knows what he's describing, and it's full of anecdotes from people he served with. It was written shortly after the war, so more recent histories which can use German sources are more accurate as histories, but Scott really brings it to life.
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Dec 14, 2019 11:50
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Vincent Van Goatse posted:Yeah, but in my field it got taken seriously until recently. Which paper's this?
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Dec 18, 2019 18:37
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:I'm reading The Grand Fleet, and in one section it goes into some detail on use of different transmission systems from the power plant to the drive screws. It then notes offhandedly how despite all the advances made in this area, many WW2 ships (presumably the author is implicitly talking about UK ships here) had to make do with triple-expansion engines, but doesn't say why. Was it due to losing access to factories that could make the necessary components? Needing to streamline ship production because of the sheer quantity of craft needed? Something else? In essence, it was because triple-expansion engines are much easier to build. Turbines require fairly precise engineering, while tolerances are much lower for the simpler triple-expansion engine. This meant that only a few yards and companies (mainly those that already produced naval vessels) had the ability to produce turbine engines, while pretty much any civilian yard had an engineering department capable of producing a triple-expansion engine. Any attempt to use those yards for naval production would therefore be limited in the choice of engines. Most escorts and smaller craft designed during the war were intended to be produced by civilian yards - the most famous example is probably the 'Flower' class of corvettes. The increased speed of production due to the increased simplicity was an added benefit.
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Dec 22, 2019 20:49
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FrangibleCover posted:Just air attack, just US Battleships. After Pearl Harbor you have Prince of Wales and Repulse off Malaya, Roma in the Mediterranean, Tirpitz in her Norwegian fjord-fortress, Yamato off Okinawa, Musashi around the Philippines, Haruna, Ise and Hyuga at port in Japan and Hiei at Guadalcanal. And I think I've missed a couple. You've also got Cavour, which was sunk by aircraft twice. First time at Taranto, by a single British torpedo. She was then salvaged, and towed to Trieste to be reconstructed. Italy surrendered before she was fully repaired, so the Italian navy scuttled her to prevent the Germans capturing her. The Germans refloated her, only for her hulk to be sunk again by a USAAF raid in 1945. Littorio and Caio Dulio would also be sunk at Taranto, but would be refloated and returned to service.
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Feb 17, 2020 19:44
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thepopmonster posted:There are a lot of opinions on how armor is attached to BBs and specifically BB turrets at this link: https://www.quora.com/Were-the-larg...ates-or-welding Armour was not a structural element, but was added on to the hull after it had been constructed. The hull frames and plating were riveted or welded together, to form the ship's structure. The armour was then bolted on to the ship, often after it had been launched. Unlike with the shell plating, individual armour plates weren't attached to each other. The bolts used were large (3-4in in diameter for the armour used on the Iron Duke class of 1912), and had a neck to ensure that the screw threads were not the narrowest part of the bolt. The armour was typically attached to a backing plate to catch spalling. This made repairs fairly straightforwards - a damaged plate was simply unbolted and repaired or replaced. Turrets were somewhat different, because they didn't have an internal structure, unlike the hull. Typically, a ship's turret would be assembled in a workshop, which had a pit wide and deep enough to take the turret 'stalk' (which contained the hoists and turntable), as well as the armoured gunhouse. This allowed it to be tested, before being broken down into its constituent parts, and brought to the ship for final assembly. Turrets were typically bolted together, though they might also be welded or rivveted together on final assembly. Having a large rigid object in a hole in the middle of the ship did lead to problems - the quadruple turrets on the British King George V class battleships had frequent reliability issues, caused by the ship's structure warping around the turrets.
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Feb 26, 2020 13:41
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Nebakenezzer posted:Jesus Christ, what I probably should have been clearer there - it wasn't the weight of the turret warping the hull, but the action of the waves. As a ship moves through the sea, it experiences a bunch of stresses from wave action. The two easiest to explain are 'hogging', where the ship is supported at the centre by the peak of a wave and the ends, in the troughs, sag, and 'sagging', where the ends are supported by peaks, while the centre sags into the trough. Making a ship stronger means making it heavier, which can exacerbate the stresses. On the KGVs, the turrets on the quadruple turrets had very high tolerances, so could easily be put out of action by a small change in the diameter of the turret ring.
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Feb 26, 2020 20:11
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Nebakenezzer posted:I'm salty enough to know hogging and sagging. Interesting! Did all the KGVs have this, or did they fix it/build the later ships differently? As far as I can tell, the problem was inherent to the design of the turret, though they were improved over time. Prince of Wales' problems were more down to the fact that she was not fully complete at the time of the battle with the Bismarck - she still had men from Vickers, who built the turrets, aboard. KGV faced issues with the turrets during Bismarck's final battle, meaning she fired fewer shells than Rodney, despite KGV's 14in gun firing faster. Similarly, Duke of York had problems at the Battle of the North Cape. According to D K Brown, the problem could be caused by the ship bending only a few inches. The source of the problems was the 'transfer ring'. This allowed shells to be transferred from the magazine to the turret at any angle of training. However, the tolerances were too high on it, and it couldn't handle the natural flexing of the ship. spiky butthole posted:The problem with the kgv's turret sockets could have also been mislaid calcs. For instance, There's no real evidence for this. The problems with the RN's propellants had been solved by 1918. By 1939, they were reliable, and as safe as propellants get. The reliability issues were noted in practice, as well as in battle, so it doesn't seem to have been a problem related to panic firing.
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Feb 27, 2020 15:36
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Nebakenezzer posted:Also carrier ops in World War 2 required daylight. The Fleet Air Arm was, at the start of the war, the only carrier force capable of flying night-time strike operations. The interwar Royal Navy had put a lot of effort into practicing for night action. This was largely as a way to counteract the fact that the Japanese and US Navies had modernised their battlefleets in the 1920s, while the RN had been too strapped for cash to do so; American and Japanese ships could outrange British battleships in a day action, but in a night action, this advantage was moot. Carriers were a key part of this, attriting the enemy battleline and preventing it escaping, and so had to be capable of night operations. This focus on night operations was part of the reason why the FAA's main strike aircraft seem underwhelming. The RN prioritised low-speed handling in its carrier aircraft, making it easier to land on a carrier at night. The biplane Swordfish and Albacore were great at this, while the massive Fairey-Youngman flaps of the Barracuda gave it similar handling qualities despite being a monoplane. However, these capabilities came at the expense of speed, making them easy targets for fighters, even for torpedo aircraft. The RN had only a few chances to demonstrate this capability. Taranto, where 21 aircraft sank three Italian battleships (though two would be salvaged and repaired), was probably the standout. The Bismarck chase was another good example, with aircraft from Ark Royal and Victorious making night attacks in atrocious weather. During the Japanese raid into the Indian Ocean in March-April 1942, Somerville was able to manoeuvre his fleet into position to attack the Japanese carrier fleet during the night of the 5th April, without being detected. Unfortunately, his scouting aircraft didn't get an accurate fix on the Japanese fleet, forcing him to cancel the strike and withdraw.
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Mar 6, 2020 03:22
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Cyrano4747 posted:I’m pretty sure that was a joke. There’s no way you’re pressing armor anywhere near that thick. Curved tank armor tends to be cast for this reason. Battleship armour plate was typically run through presses, though they could not create especially complicated shapes. The most complex were probably the circular arcs for the barbettes. To do this, you needed massive pieces of equipment - British armour manufacturers had up to 12,000 ton presses.
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Apr 8, 2020 09:18
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:
One of the big problems with the radios in use at the time of Jutland was that they were essentially self-jamming - the spark gap transmitters used produced a tremendous amount of noise across the spectrum. This meant that if two messages were sent at the same time, they might well end up jamming each other, even if they were sent at different frequencies. Then there were issues with damage and reliability. The transmitters required long festoons of insulated cable. A break in the insulation could render the radio useless. Finally, there were worries about giving away the position and strength of the fleet. If the enemy intercepted the messages, it could give some important information away, and since the British were doing that to the Germans, they had to consider the reverse. Even so, the Grand Fleet did practice using radio for maneuvring, and was proficient in it by Jutland. Despite the disadvantages of it, radio was roughly five times quicker than using flags for tactical signals, though it was significantly slower for longer messages like contact reports.
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Apr 10, 2020 18:25
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mllaneza posted:US PTs used Bofors 40mm AA guns, L60 caliber and very high velocity. The British used a mix of the Bofors and their domestic 2 lbr, with the Bofors being the better gun. The Germans topped out at their 37mm AT gun in a QF mounting. The RN used no less than five 40mm guns on its light craft. The 2-pdr Mk VIII was the famous 'pom-pom', basically a Vickers/Maxim MG scaled up to 40mm calibre. It fired a slightly heavier shell than the Bofors, but had a lower rate of fire and muzzle velocity. The Mk XI and XII were developed from the sub-calibre guns used for target practice on destroyers. These guns were mainly used on the smaller, slower Harbour Defence Motor Launches. The Mk XI had a short barrel and was used to fire case rounds, while the Mk XII was a more versatile weapon. They were low-velocity guns, especially the Mk XI, and to inaccurate to use at ranges over 1,500 yards. The last 2-pdr gun used was the Mk XIV, a semi-automatic weapon designed by Rolls-Royce. Pressed into service before it was fully ready, it was poorly balanced and hard to use in a seaway, but had a fair rate of fire. Details on the ammunition are scarce, but I think it fired the same rounds as the Mk VIII. Finally, we have the 40mm Bofors gun. The RN also had a number of heavier weapons. Old 3 and 6 pounder Hotchkiss guns, developed in the 1880s, and still in service as saluting guns, were used on a significant number of gunboats. While obsolete, they were fairly effective HE chuckers. The Army's 6-pdr AT gun was also used, when fitted with the Molins auto-loader also used on the Mosquito. The propellant charge was reduced to limit flash, and only HE shells were carried. With a rate of fire up to 40 rounds a minute and a heavy shell, it was a very effective weapon. Towards the end of the war, they were developing a light 4.5in gun, though this didn't enter service until after the war.
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Apr 14, 2020 08:57
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Hyrax Attack! posted:Was reading about Operation Kiebitz, the failed German plot in 1943 to have four U-Boat commanders escape from a prison camp in Ontario. Franz Werra was the only one to escape from an Allied camp - he made several unsuccessful attempts to break out of camps in Britain, then was shipped to Canada and managed to escape off a train into the then-neutral USA.
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Apr 16, 2020 16:31
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SlothfulCobra posted:I think that it's less that Malta was geographically unique from every other potential place to fit a Mediterranean base and more that Malta just happened to be the island that Britain had managed to legally finagle into its dominion through wheeling and dealing. The fact the island had already been built up as a fortress over the last few centuries was just a handy bonus. Malta does have one geographical feature that other islands around that area, like Pantelleria or Lampedusa, don't have, and that's a large natural harbour. The Grand Harbour and Marsamxett Harbour (on the other side of Valetta) are huge, with plenty of space for mooring ships, as well as for dry-docks and maintenance facilities. This made it a vital base for British submarines and surface forces attacking Italian convoys, as well as for future offensive operations once the North African coast had been secured.
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Apr 17, 2020 13:18
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Slim Jim Pickens posted:Malta is just one of those things that were overblown post-war by the Brits, because it was a good story that reinforced the importance of the empire. While aircraft from Malta weren't that significant, the surface and submarine forces based there were much more important. The 10th Submarine Flotilla, despite never being larger than 12 boats, accounted for a fifth of all Axis shipping losses in the Mediterranean. The surface forces were somewhat less successful, though, but did destroy a number of convoys. They could not operate effectively from Alexandria or Gibraltar due to the air threat in transit. Both of these were also more significant in 1940-41, when the RAF in North Africa was limited in strength, and the USAAF was not present. Hyrax Attack! posted:Regarding the Suez Canal (and the Panama Canal) were there ever plans for the Axis to try something similar to the St Nazaire Raid to sacrifice a few obsolete destroyers packed with explosives to give the Allies a longer commute? I don't know as much about Suez, but seems like if Japan had been able to wreck the locks it would have taken years to get those fixed. Suez doesn't have locks, so there would be nothing to attack. I'm not aware of any plans to sink blockships in the canal, but there were fairly frequent minelaying sorties by Axis aircraft. These created massive queues of ships; by the end of March 1941, there were some 110 ships waiting at its southern end for the canal to be cleared. These traffic jams were also attacked by aircraft, to some success. Randomcheese3 fucked around with this message at 17:37 on Apr 17, 2020 |
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Apr 17, 2020 17:30
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Milo and POTUS posted:Where was pre LL Britain getting their food? Or even post LL. Canada? India? I know a lot of Canadians served (wiki says 1 million which seems a staggering percentage), but I imagine their materiel contributions were more food based than industrial? Most British beef imports came from South America, especially Argentina. Lamb was imported from Australia and New Zealand. India provided most of Britain's rice imports, and with Sri Lanka, the vast majority of tea imports. In the pre-war period, Canada only provided about a third of Britain's wheat, with Australia providing about a quarter. South America provided a further 15%.
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Apr 18, 2020 13:24
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aphid_licker posted:What was GB using rice for in this period? Any particulary interesting recipe(s)? I don't really know much about food history - I'm more interested in naval history. Looking at the 1936 Manual of Naval Cookery, though, it seems like they were using rice in much the same way as we would today. The recipes either specify it as a side for curries, or as an additive to soups. Rice pudding and kedgeree are about the only dishes where rice is a main ingredient. There's also a 'rice cream soup' recipe, which calls for simmering rice and veal in milk for three hours before passing the mixture through a wire sieve. Randomcheese3 fucked around with this message at 00:17 on Apr 19, 2020 |
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Apr 18, 2020 18:34
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aphid_licker posted:Man now I want to look up a 1930s British curry recipe. The first is a fish curry. The recipe doesn't specify the type of fish, but one of the recipes for the ratings uses tinned salmon. Naval Cookery Manual posted:Proportions.—1/2 lb. cooked fish, dessertspoonful of curry, 1 dessertspoonful of flour, 1 onion, 1/2 pint of fish stock, 1 oz. fat, lemon juice, 4 ozs. rice, and 1 apple. Then there's a 'curry of cold meat'. This seems to be a way of reusing leftovers from a roast, as again, the type of meat is not specified. Naval Cookery Manual posted:Proportions.—2 lbs. cold meat, 1 large onion, 1 apple or tablespoonful of chutney, 1 teaspoonful of salt, 1 oz. dripping, 1 1/4 pints of stock, 1 oz. curry powder, 1/2/ oz. flour, 1 tablespoonful lemon juice, a little garlic may be added.
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Apr 19, 2020 00:17
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Carillon posted:How was the gunfire getting called in? Was it planes or were the men on the ground directing fire for the guns? I guess I'm curious how much that tactic relied on having aerial dominance. A large part of the gunnery spotting was done by aircraft. Each of the major warships involved in a landing had a spotting aircraft associated with it, in addition to the shore fire control parties. This allowed the ships to fire on targets further inland than the troops had reached. The Royal Navy used two main methods of air spotting. The first, 'ship control', saw the spotter giving information on the fall of shot relative to the target. The gunners on the ship could then walk the shells onto the target. The other, 'air control', had the spotter instruct the gunners onto the target, telling them to aim up, down, left or right, and by how far. Initially, the ships used their own floatplanes for spotting, but experience in the Mediterranean showed that these slow aircraft were far too vulnerable to flak and fighters. For Normandy, the spotters flew fighter aircraft - Fleet Air Arm Seafires and RAF Spitfires and Mustangs. The USN's pilots flew British aircraft too, using Seafires and Spitfires. The FAA pilots were issued with the Franks Flying Suit, an early G-suit, which used water-filled bladders to counteract up to 7.5 gs. Mike Crosley's memoir They Gave Me a Seafire includes a section describing his experiences as one of these pilots. He flew three missions over the beachhead on D-Day, spotting for Warspite, firing on a number of gun batteries and positions inland. The weather on the day was bad, forcing the spotters to low level and making them easy targets for AA. Four FAA aircraft were lost. A bigger threat, though, was friendly fire, either from ships or other Allied aircraft. The air spotters continued operating after D-Day, spotting in support of the attacks on Cherbourg and Caen. By the end of June, they had lost 31 aircraft, in course of flying 2,400 sorties.
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Apr 27, 2020 21:58
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BalloonFish posted:There was also fire support from Sexton SPGs (and other types no doubt - the source in front of me is dealing with Sword Beach) firing from the open LCTs lying off the beach waiting for the clearance to go ashore. Direction for these was provided by an officer and assisting NCO with the neccessary radio gear stationed on the Navigation Leader boats (usually HDMLs) lying off the beach and using both direct observation, feedback from shore-based spotters and the HDML's radar set. The British used Sextons, while the Americans used Priests. They were intended to provide so-called 'drenching fire' on the beachfront, hitting targets relatively close to the waterline. It was only vaguely effective as long as the Navigation Leader boat was present. Off Gold Beach, the boat intended to guide the LCTs carrying the 147th Field Regiment never linked up. As a result, the regiment's SPGs fired on (and landed on) the wrong beaches, hitting La Riviere rather than Le Hamel as originally planned. This may have contributed to the casualties suffered at Le Hamel, but it's hard to tell. Beyond this, you also have the fire laid down by the various gun-armed landing craft offshore - Landing Craft Gun (LCG), Landing Craft (Flak) and the various types of Landing Craft Support (LCS). For Normandy, these were not tied into the systems of fire control used by larger ships, and nor were they guided by navigational leaders like landing craft. Instead, they fired on targets spotted visually by the gunners and crew of the boats. As such, they were relatively ineffective.
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Apr 28, 2020 02:04
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PittTheElder posted:Regarding naval bombardment effectiveness, do you know if there were major differences in performance between the beaches? As ever Omaha seems to be a perfect storm of poo poo going wrong, while it seems to have been more effective elsewhere? It might have been covered up by the aerial bombardment being more effective on the other beaches though. The main difference between the beaches was the completeness of the defences. Rommel's intention was for every possible landing beach to be covered by concrete bunkers, but these had only been completed to a significant extent at Omaha. On the British beaches, there were occasional concrete fighting positions, but most of the defences were either in trenches and earthen bunkers, or were dug into pre-existing houses. As the German defences were less well-protected, the bombardment was naturally somewhat more effective. Where concrete bunkers did exist, though, the bombardment was less effective and fighting was harder.
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Apr 29, 2020 18:13
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Kaiser Schnitzel posted:How big of an impact the did the confederacy's commerce raiders really have? Was Raphael Semmes actually a brilliant sea-captain, or just a lucky opportunist in a big ocean full of unprotected american shipping? The Confederacy's raiders weren't that successful in and of themselves. They only captured 261 ships, with only two of these being steamships. This was a tiny fraction of the Union's merchant fleet. However, their presence worried merchant owners, who chose to either lay their ships up, or to transfer their ships to safer flags - some 715 ships, representing 490,000 tons of shipping, would be transferred to the British flag between 1861 and 1864. These worries were a significant contributor to the decline of the US merchant navy over the 1860s. In 1860, the US merchant fleet stood at 2.4 million tons, while in 1870, it was 1.3 million tons.
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May 9, 2020 00:01
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Squalid posted:was this Americans actually selling their ships to british merchants, or The same Americans shuffling a title under a British proxy? Also were there any consequence to the decline of the US merchant fleet? The flag a ship flies is decided not by the nationality of the owner, but by the country where the ship is registered. Mostly, the change was driven by American owners registering their ships as British. 261 ships was not a lot, compared to the success of the Union blockade of the Confederacy; this captured or sank 1484 ships. The American ocean-going merchant fleet in 1860 was somewhere in the region of 3,500 ships, so the Confederate raiders captured something like 7.5% of it. Unlike the Union blockade, this wasn't significant enough to reduce the Union's ability to import supplies.
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May 9, 2020 10:16
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HEY GUNS posted:Right but the entire point of a fleet in being is that you don't have to actually do significant things to act as a deterrent. I know, this was why my original statement was that 'they weren't effective in and of themselves' - they didn't sink/capture many ships, but they were a major contributor to the decline of the Union's merchant navy. Beyond that, the Union was still able to import arms and the like, as they could still use foreign ships for this.
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May 9, 2020 21:01
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HEY GUNS posted:I think I'm agreeing with you, I just couldn't remember your name. No worries, I probably came across a bit defensive too.
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May 9, 2020 21:03
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