The Drydock - Episode 222

00:00:00 - Intro

00:00:38 - Were there any cruisers designed so badly, they ended being worse than destroyers?

00:05:33 - Plans that make no sense?

00:13:39 - Would you consider Operation Chariot to have been justified?

00:16:56 - Were there any parallels between the notion of pre-dreadnaught armored cruisers fighting in the line of battle and the reality of battle cruisers ending up in this role?

00:22:17 - Modernising the Tennessee's?

00:24:48 - Given HMS Furious's 18-inch guns destroyed rivets, what sort of damage would Incomparable suffer if she fired her 20-inch guns?

00:29:32 - Replacing older plate with new in WW2 to increase overall effectiveness?

00:33:22 - Why build light cruisers?

00:36:37 - Raising steam

00:38:38 - Why was HMS Carcass so named?

00:41:25 - Gunners relative ranks in the two fleets at the time of the Armada?

00:45:18 - About how long before we can expect the HMS King Charles III, and what type & class will she likely be?

00:49:05 - How did the QE's catch the battlecruisers in the Run to the South?

00:52:06 - Experience of actually being on a battleship?

00:54:35 - In the opening scene of the recent movie version of Les Miserables, a veritable army of convicts is seen hauling a ship of the line into a dry dock. Short question - is this remotely possible?

[eyerollthereforeiam]

When I get my time machine working, I'll go back to the days of single digit Dry Docks. I'll tell Drach that he will one day have over two hundred.... Just to see the look on his face.

[FuriKitten]

Refreshing YT feed page like an idiot, watching for Drydock to pop up on feed, and timing my tea temperature and toilet breaks.

problem, what problem? I can quit anytime,

[dougjb]

22:00

“We refuse to make a battleship 10% more vulnerable to most battleship or battlecruiser guns to make them 10% faster than most battleships. But we will gladly make battlecruisers 20% more vulnerable to most battleship or battlecruiser guns to make them 20% faster than most battleships.”

[lamwen]

Carcass: The original war use was an animal's hide, stuffed with inflammables, and used either to start the fires that would collapse a siege mine's support timbers, or to be lit and then catapulted over a fortress wall.

[prussianhill]

Nothing better to listen to while shoveling snow on a Sunday morning!

[davidvik]

A Fletcher Class DD could easily be ready to be underway four hours after light off from a cold plant. on the reserve ship i was on in early 1971, we routinely light off at 0400 to be ready for engine orders by 0800. If we were swinging on the anchor one boiler was on line to provide ship service, at least one other would be fired for about fifteen minutes per hour to have it ready to be on line in about half an hour. On the Knox Class DE/FF we could do the same. The only time we missed a commitment due to an engineering issue was when the engine room forgot to close the main condenser drain which allowed bilge water to be sucked into the hot well thus contaminating the boiler feed water system.

[VersusARCH]

00:38 Ning Hai class cruisers. Vastly slower than a Fubuki, slightly stronger in artillery caliber-wise but with much worse in rate of fire, much weaker in torpedo armament and with an armor that cannot protect it against Fubuki's guns (only splinters). On a 50% greater displacement.

A good example of why you don't hire your expansionist neighbor to design and build your warships...

Also: the Katori class cruisers (although these were admittedly dedicated training ships). A contemporary Kagero 1/3 of the displacement of a Katori would have ripped one apart.

[jtpenman]

Thank you Drach. I appreciate all that you do.

[Zorglub]

9:11The people in charge of the management of the French navy, with a few exceptions, never had both the understanding of the necessities of naval warfare and/or the budget.

[BenPortmanlewes]

Hi Drac, just watched arrows v armour, and saw you were a big sponsor, thanks so much.

[DutchBlackMantha]

58:40: I don't think the resistance by the water is a big problem, since it matters less the slower you move. A bigger problem is the buoyancy reducing the weight on your feet, reducing friction and thereby lowering the maximum amount of force you can exert.

[kemarisite]

Regarding the QEs on the run to the south, it must also be remembered that the QEs were oil-fired while everything else present was primarily coal-fired. Increasing the fuel firing rate on an oil-fired boiler is a matter of opening the relevant valves all the way and possibly replacing the fuel injection wand with the fattest one. Increasing fuel to a coal-fired ship means men have to physically shovel even more coal into the boilers. That makes a huge difference.

[WildBillCox]

The length of time in raising steam is what propelled (pun intended) the move from oil fired steam plants to gas turbine engine. If you haven't rotated a shaft by hand to warm it evenly, you've missed an eclectic experience. "You kids with your "internal combustion" and UFOs flying around the carriers . . . back in my day, we'd just gunnel pump the ship to get it a'movin'! Three hundred men jumping up and down on command. All that flab . . . now I'm hungry for a burger!"
Ahh Richard Simmons; we hardly knew ye.

[Jacob-W-]

As a modern merchant navy engineer, I nearly popped my eyes in the four hours to steam from cold, that aint even happening in modern plants. We can't even pre-heat the main diesel from cold inside 4 hours.

[CharlesStearman]

Regarding HMS Furious, I would have thought it was more likely the shock of the gun's recoil rather than the muzzle blast that caused rivet heads to shear off. Any comments?

[NathanOkun]

NOTE: Trying to improve the net armor effectiveness by replacing the armor used in a WWI-era ship using WWII-era plate has the problem that the gun projectiles used in WWII have improved even more. Most particularly, the shells can penetrate at higher impact angles and remain roughly intact, at least enough to explode properly after penetrating, which most WWI-era shell could not do, for the most part, after hitting thick armor at anything over 15-20 degrees from right angles. US WWII AP projectiles were tested at 35-40 degrees obliquity against equally thick plate as used in WWI and thus making the armor better would be of only marginal improvement for the older ships with their usually somewhat thinner armor, if not inclined. Also, deck armor against hits at longer ranges or against AP aircraft bombs is the biggest threat than hits on the side armor by another battleship in WWII. This would add a lot of weight, if needed, requiring more than just better plate of the same type.

[charlesziel]

Drach, a question for you. On your battleship tour on this side of the pond was there any disappointment on your end not being able to see one of the Iowas with their original era of completion armament? With all of the medium and light AA battery along with 40% of the secondary armament removed and replaced with canister and box missle launchers, ECM antennas, chaff launchers etc. they were no longer bristling with gun barrels that made them look like deadly porcupines.

[NathanOkun]

Except for Japan, which kept an improved form of the Vickers Cemented Armor of 1912 (KONGOs and, in house, all pre-YAMATO battleships) with higher carbon content (0.55%) and no cemented surface layer in its YAMATO Class Vickers Hardened armor -- otherwise identical except for improved manufacturi9ng techniques gave about 10% improvements, as you stated -- all other nations made significant improvements in the steel used and, especially, in improved post-hardening tempering (now avoiding the high-heat "temper embrittlement" region used by most armors prior to 1930 (using higher tempering temperature allowed a shorter tempering time, but it took some time to realize that the high-alloy armor steels did not like that temperature range, so later armors changed this to below 600 degrees C and taking longer to temper the armor and, pro0jectiles and, currently, knives and swords and so forth -- see YouTube videos on making such things). US steel was equal.to Krupp steel and, from actuasl test results, French plates were also equal to anyone else's and Italian Terni Cemented armor seems also to have been as good as anyone else's from British post-WWII studies. British steel seems to have been somewhat inferior, on the average than the other European and US steels, but the use of thinner face layers and proper tempering processing, allowed battleship-thickness British WWII Cemented Armor to be better than US Class "A" armor due to the US plates having a too-thick face (55%) in an ultimately failed attempt to damage the greatly-improved US Navy WWII AP shells (the best in the world, by a significant margin, especially at high obliquity). The US problem was simply that they did not prioritize what was the most important factor in armor, though even with a 55% face, the armor was noticeably superior to its WWI-era plates, so they did not realize this too-thick-face problem was blocking their even greater possible resistance. For cruiser thicknesses, the 55% face layer was not a problem, since the greater scaling effect of the thicker brittle face layer worked backward as plates got thinner.

My FACEHARD program found at NAVWEAPS.COM is based on actual test results (hundreds) from the US Naval Proving Ground given to me by Dr. Allen V. Hershey, who was the head of the Ballistics Computation section at the NPG during WWII and through 1955, plus other tests from Germany, Japan, Britain, and France given to me by many other people who study this subject. This program has given EXACT matches to actual tests, though usually the error is about 1% or so. I have the ACTUAL ballistic tests done by the US Navy before, during, and after WWII, plus all tests made by the US on ALL other armors made by anyone else (rather a large number, over the years).

[drtidrow]

38:00 I'd imagine that at least one boiler would be needed to run a turbogenerator or two to provide power for the ship, and maybe steam for heating if the ship was in a cold climate.

[greenseaships]

Marveling at the exquisite way Drach pronounces the number TWO all these years, I have been looking forward to this episode. It was.... OK.