The Drydock - Episode 266 (Part 2)

00:00:00 - Intro

00:00:38 - Axis codebreaking efforts in WW2?

00:08:11 - How are battleship turrets aimed so precisely?

00:13:37 - The RN post-WW1/pre-WNT cruisers

00:20:33 - General torpedo problems at the start of WW2?

00:26:57 - Voicetubes, how well did they work?

00:29:14 - Was Hitler responsible for the Operation Tiger incident?

00:32:05 - How often do shells explode when they hit things without being fired?

00:36:13 - Did boilers pre-heat feed water?

00:39:19 - Who took that picture of USS Washington firing on Kirishima?

00:44:30 - When selecting the name for the central ship of Star Trek Roddenberry obviously wanted a name with a distinguished lineage and selected Enterprise, which, I think is a good choice. Would you have made a different choice?

00:48:47 - HMS Amelia from 1796?

00:53:47 - Were warships modified for optimal performance in certain environments?

00:59:06 - Submarine modifications that made their way into civillian use?

01:03:41 - Sir John Isaac Thornycroft?

01:07:25 - What did the "kill chain" look like for USN shore bombardment in WW2?

01:12:09 - How much could the Kongo's citadel armour have been increased by if the citadel were shorted by removing Y turret and all weight savings put into armour?

01:17:18 - How classified was Hedgehog?

01:20:43 - When was the Italian Navy at its peak in the 20th century (both technologically, and numerically), and what was (in your opinion) their best surface action of that period?

01:25:22 - What plans did the US Navy have for Ostfriesland had it not been used in Billy Mitchell's exhibition?

01:27:11 - How much energy is contained within a boiler (and released if it explodes)?

01:32:30 - Can you provide a run down of the Harwich force in the First World War please?

01:35:40 - Under what circumstances would Japan have finished Shinano as a battleship, and how would this influence the Pacific War?

01:40:43 - How much inefficiency is acceptable for ensuring room for upgrades without making a design bloated?

01:44:39 - Where did the seasoned wood come from for the Great Lakes warships of the War of 1812?

01:48:56 - How did we end up with Calibre meaning the external diameter of the Projectile, and the number of those Diameters that make up the barrel length?

01:52:33 - Strength of oars and rowers in ancient ships?

01:57:28 - Was there ever a Ship planned or constructed that could have survived the onslaught that killed HMS Black Prince at Jutland?

02:01:35 - When the High Seas Fleet sailed to Scapa, was there a verification process to ensure the ships *were* disarmed before departure?

02:04:15 - What did Portsmouth dockyard look like at the times of the crusades and what infrastructure did King Richard build in Portsmouth?

[roguejoe]

53:50 Though its outside the time period the channel covers, I can tell you that Los Angeles Class Submarines got significant upgrades during the Global War on Terror in order to operate in warm, shallow seas. Having been designed during the Cold War for Atlantic and Arctic duty, they needed additional machinery to handle warm water intake (as opposed to the ice cold water of the North Atlantic).

[ROBERTN-util]

German code breaking in World War II achieved some notable successes cracking British naval ciphers until well into the fourth year of the war. The B-Dienst, created in the early 1930s, had broken the most widely used British naval code by 1935. When war came in 1939, B-Dienst specialists had broken enough British naval codes that the Germans knew the positions of all British warships. They had further success in the early stages of the war as the British were slow to change their codes. The B-Dienst could regularly read the Broadcast to Allied Merchant Ships (BAMS) code, which proved valuable for U-boat warfare in the early phases of the Battle of the Atlantic. In February 1942, B-Dienst broke the code used for communication with many of the Atlantic convoys.

[ROBERTN-util]

When my battalion of Army infantry went through amphibious training at NAB Coronado in 1976, we officers got additional training at night. One of the things we were introduced to was the ANGLICO (Air and Naval Gunfire Liaison Company) designed to be attached to an Army or Allied division to provide experts on the subject. Our chief instructor was the company First Sergeant. He had been a PFC in an Anglico ancestor (JASCO) on Okinawa, a sergeant in an Anglico in Korea and a master sergeant in an Anglico in Vietnam. I asked him after class what his favorite fire support vessel. The answer was instantaneous - it was the Cleveland class cruiser. It's weight of shell and rate of fire made it perfect.

[porpoise]

On Axis code breaking, probably the most famous is the American Black Code and Colonel Fellers.

The Italians broke the US Black Codw by getting the keys from a local cleaner, walking into the embassy and taking photographs. Separately the Germans cracked the code themselves via other means.

Fellers was the US liason in Cairo and he was provided with extremely detailed indormation on basically all North Africa and Mediterranean operations which he meticulously reported to Washington using the State Department codes he was ordered to use.

As a result, from late 1941 (even before Pearl Harbor) until the end of June 1942 the Germans and Italians got pretty much daily updates on everything that was going on in the Mediterranean. This information was extremely useful to Rommel and also directly lead to the Axis decisively defeating the Operations Harpoon and Vigorous convoys to Malta.

Eventually Ultra intercepts revealed the Germans had a source in Cairo and they tracked it back to Fellers' communications.

[tomdolan]

It might be interesting to do a video about the six dry docks constructed at Yokosuka, Japan between 1864 and 1940. They’re all still in use today and are the principal construction sites of many of the iconic ships of the Imperial Navy.

[Toneman]

The photograph is magnificent. The power it captures is manifest. The person who took it is brave indeed, as are the men involved in this particular action. This photograph, while obviously a piece of brilliant art, needs to be seen as an affirmation of the courage of those who fought for the freedom of speech I am engaging in by writing this comment. Enjoy, all.

[Archiec]

Make sure that history never forgets the name Enterprise.

[jeffsaxton]

According to a document supplied to writers for Star Trek way back when, there were to be 14 Constitution class starships: Constitution, Constellation, Enterprise, Yorktown, Lexington, Farragut, Republic, Intrepid, Exeter, Hood, Excalibur, Valiant, Kongo, Potemkin

[Archiec]

All the axis powers service branches apparently listed each other as worse enemies than the allies

[clairekholin]

Interestingly, where I grew up in Wisconsin, it is relatively common for playgrounds to have simple voice tubes and I can attest to them working pretty well.

[timenginemannd]

@ 39:19 Strange fact about the Spanish-American War is that probably the most killed and wounded Rating in the US Navy were the Photographer's Mates, since they had to have their heads and at least forearms outside of the armored parts of the ship to take the combat photos! (Add to it the size of the cameras back then, and the "slow speed" of the film, requiring more time exposed per photo, plus the time for winding the camera (or changing the plate) for the next picture, you can see why this is...) Please also remember the disparity between the penetration capabilities of the majority of the Spanish guns .vs. the armor of the US ships.

[matthewpalmer]

1:08:28 I actually sent you an email on this subject a couple months ago, but I know you've been busy/it probably didn't get read, so I figure I'll post here since you've brought the topic up. Dr. Donald Mitchener at the University of North Texas (where I just graduated with my doctorate) actually wrote a book (published 2021) on this topic, "U.S. Naval Gunfire Support in the Pacific War: A Study of the Development and Application of Doctrine." He would probably be very willing to do a discussion with you on the development of Naval Gunfire support and its doctrinal systems/changes during the war, if you got in touch with him!

[jonsouth]

even in the 2010s the patrol boats I worked on in the RN had voice tubes and I loved using them

[briannicholas]

This has been a perfect Naval weekend for me. We've had new Drach videos and on Saturday I got to attend a ship Commissioning Ceremony.
I live in coastal Maine, USA, and the city of Eastport hosted the Commissioning of the New USS Augusta (our state capital name), LCS 34. It was quite the event. Despite the Littoral Combat Ships being a very bad design with a lot of issues, I must say she looked very impressive up against the pier.
We haven't had a surface ship named Augusta since the WWII era Northampton Class Heavy cruisers. And that Augusta had a good career, even carrying Presidents Roosevelt and Truman across the Atlantic for allied conferences.
So a perfect weekend, great naval history and some modern navy stuff as, well.
Thanks Drach

[stephenroyal]

I was told by a gentleman that made some of the voice tubes on the Battleship Massachusetts that the thickness of the metal was critical for the tube to work properly.
He also spoke of packing them with sand to make the bends. Those tubes were a copper alloy, brass I think. It could have been an earlier Fore River Shipyard ship though. memories fade.

[OtakuLoki]

I can't confirm when pre-heating feedwater became common in USN ships.

What I can say is that I've seen the Deaerating Feed Tank (DFT) aboard the USS The Sullivans. This tank collects the condensate water coming from the condensers, and while the tank is named for removing any entrained air/oxygen from the water before it gets put back into the steam boiler where free oxygen against the very high temperature water tube surface is a BAD THING for potential corrosion, it's also an important part of the efficiency of the steam plant allowing low pressure steam to remove entrained air from the water, while heating the condensate water from the generally near-room temperature condensate water to some higher temperatures.

So, you'd have a low pressure (for values of low pressure when compared to the operating pressures of a Fletcher-class steam plant - so under 40 PSIG) bubble of steam over the feed water in the tank. The condensate returning from the tank would be fed into the tank through a nozzle that would separate the incoming feed water into smaller particle stream - allowing for more efficient heat transfer into the incoming water. Between that, and the bubble of steam over the water in the tank, the DFT would preheat the now pressurized water to above boiling temps for atmospheric pressure.

This tank also provided positive suction pressure (head) for the feed water pumps so they wouldn't have to expend energy sucking the water into the pump - just pushing from the pump into the boilers. The volume of water in the tank further provides a buffer for demand as the plant speeds up or slows down.

One quirk of the DFT: By going from a high rate of speed on the main turbines, to a much lower one, you can vastly increase the condensate water coming into the DFT. Which means you're adding a lot more cold water mass into the tank, at the same time as the bubble of steam above the water in the tank starts to shrink to account for the greater volume of water being stored in the tank. If you drop power drastically enough, you can condense that steam bubble I mentioned. This is known as, "Quenching The DFT."

This is a BAD THING and can make the DFT try to jump around as the pressure inside the vessel goes from positive pressure, to vacuum, and back again in very short order. It's loud and makes a lot of dust fall down from the insulation around the piping.

DFTs are still used in most USN surface steam plants, to the best of my knowledge.

[ROBERTN-util]

From my training at NAB Coronado in 1976, USN doctrine was one destroyer in direct support of a battalion, a heavy or light cruiser in general support of a regiment or brigade and a heavy cruiser or battleship in general support of a division.

[nathanokun]

The Krupp armor from OSTFREISLAND was tested at the US Naval Proving Ground. There had been some later improvements in Krupp Cemented armor in the later BADEN battleship tests by the British (I have enough data to be able to correlate British APC with US AP as to penetration ability) though the improvement was not by a lot. Pre-1930 KC armors were between 10 and 20 percent lower in penetration resistance (thickness for equal resistance to a given projectile) than WWII KC armor types. The older KC was also more brittle and even a very thin "Hood" (form-fitting soft-steel thin soldered-on nose caps), that witr used in the later base-fuzed SAP/Common projectiles to allow long pointed windscreens to be screwed on without damaging nd thus weakening the projectile nose by cutting threads directly into it, could in many cases keep these shells from being destryed on KC impact if hitting at a high-enough impact velocity. Post-1930 KC, in most types, wouold shatter such improved SAP/Common shells as if they were completely bare-nosed by having some small ability do bend slightly under impact, at least enough to cause the shell nose to begin breaking first. Only Japanese WWII Vickers Hardened (VH), a new improved non-cemented type of their prior Vickers Cemented -- from KONGO made in Britain in in 1912 -- now only used in thick plated of the YAMATO Class battleships, was not so improved (basically it was so thick that they never thought to improve its toughness in such a manner -- who would be firing SAP shells at these ships big enough to worry about?).

[ivanthemadvandal]

Enterprise just rolls off the tongue much better than Yorktown.
DS9 also heavily featured the Defiant

[nathanokun]

BUSNARCJ's shallow-sloped armored turtleback Wh-steel deck edge (68 degrees backslope from vertical) is very difficult to penetrate from the side after getting through the 12.6" vertical KC n/A belt armor plus the thin wood (?) support and hull plating behind the belt. In most cases at shorter ranges the engines, boilers, and magazines under the sloped deck are invulnerable -- only steeply-falling bombs or plunging gunfire with SAP or AP projectiles could usually get through that deck.