Individually Signatory Made Easy

Individually signatory

[Music] hello everybody and welcome to drydock episode 52 brought to you by the melted gelatinous puddle that used to be known as Drac yes it's incredibly hot here and for those of you who don't know most buildings in the UK are not designed with aircon there are in fact designed to retain as much heat as possible because we're usually a miserable dull and gray country full of cold and wandering scousers but at the moment well well for anything else he was record temperatures the last few days and yeah it's it's mind-numbing ly hot so if I do sound a little bit exhausted or you hear odd noises in the background that's gonna be a combination of lack of sleep from the vacuous party warmed sleep and the odd noises will be me trying to get a small air-conditioning unit working so that my computer doesn't turn this entire room into a sauna so with all that said and done there's not a tremendous amount of channel admin to be done this week the t-shirt and other accoutrements shop has opened and seems to be doing relatively well and yes for those of you have asked the gigantic superstructure of doom and the crushing hand of God depth charge by Jellico both of those are in the process of being developed as artwork designs and hopefully we'll have those soon enough so let's get on with our the questions shall we so this week's questions from selected videos are taken from the video on HMS Sheffield and Walters warships a review part ii so the main source is used for the video in HMS Sheffield where Norman Friedman's rather excellent book on British cruisers plus cruises in international encyclopedia and conway's all the world's fighting ships as shown above and as last week yet specific sources for specific ships in the world's worst warships video let me know in the comments below August o Solaria was that how gussto Solari asks regardless of the controversy surrounding its sinking which despite being Argentinian he believes was legit do you think the ARA Belgrano supposed I guess that means posed a serious threat to the British task force stationed in the Falklands yes the Belgrano did pose a serious threat its little battle group between it carried a number of surface-to-surface versions of the X Set missiles that were already causing the British significant problems when launched in smaller numbers and of course it was an armoured not an armored Cruiser but it was an armored Cruiser as opposed to the more modern ships that Royal Navy was using which weren't armored that possessed a frighteningly large number of 6-inch guns obviously with relatively decent modern fire control systems so if it had managed to get close enough to the British formation in order to use either the missiles present within its battle group and/or its guns it could have done an awful lot of damage whether it would have got there is another matter that's entirely up for discussion because obviously if it had continued and Conqueror hadn't been able to sink it then I'm sure the British would have thrown airstrikes at it and there were plans by the Royal Navy to meet in a surface gun battle with its more capable surface the ships that it had the more capable of surface action quite how that would have worked out who knows probably better off that we don't find out so it may well have been stopped before it got there at varying levels of cost but that doesn't diminish the fact that it was a serious threat which ultimately is why it was sunk fickle finger of fate asks why was Scapa Flow selected as a home base for the British fleet so Scapa Flow was chosen as the main British naval base in the right well basically as well for one started for a couple of reasons one of which was he is a very good natural Harbor I mean yes when they chose it somewhat short notice it was unfortified and they did spend a fair bit of time fortifying it again submarine incursion and the like but scapa flow is one of those great natural harbors albeit is it a little bit in the middle of nowhere and the other harbors were either a bit too far away or a bit too enclosed the main reason they were looking for a new harbor base in the first place was that up until very close to the beginning of the first world war the Royal Navy's policy in terms of a continental war was pretty much with the serial numbers filed off the same policy that they'd used in the Napoleonic Wars which was show up off the enemy coast with a ton of ships and blockade them into submission occasionally shooting anything that dared to come out however the very rapid advance of mines and submarines as well as the increased strength of the high seas fleet meant that when you combine all those together the policy of close blockade suddenly became not really very tenable I mean if you look at what happened to Abu QIR Hogue and Crecy that's pretty much what would have happened to a lot of ships if they tried to go with close blockade fortunately they realized this before the war broke out unfortunately they realized it very very soon before the war broke out so that's really bad phrasing shortly before the war broke out I should say at which point they needed a new base and they needed one quickly and in the end they actually made the decision that well since we're up hanging around and blockading at the top end of the North Sea more than anything else Scapa Flow is nearby it's got advantages of all the other harbors we might want to use there in the area and so they they went and used it of course once you got to the Second World War it also had the added advantage of being out of range of most of the Luftwaffe which was incredibly helpful compared to place like Plymouth or Portsmouth Weatherall now it may have been based in the early 1900's and ruku Bush says I probably speak for a few people and I say that the attack on the French fleet by the British is a special we would all enjoy well as I think I said before or I'm planning it ahem I've gone to the National Archives and got my hands on some of the original Admiralty report documents both leading up to during and after the attacks so I'm pouring over those which gives some rather interesting insights into what was said and not said back and forth between the British and French command staffs but yeah I think I'm gonna save that one for period where my blood pressure is unusually low because if I start doing on about that especially given what I've now read in extra detail yeah angry direct might emerge and I'd rather keep my blood pressure below double its normal I have some very very choice things to say about certain people that were involved in that whole little scenario airplane master one says a common detail for the town class cruisers was the middle barrel of the triple turrets looking shorter than the flanking gun barrels what was the purpose behind this so yes on the town class you can see as per here a nice picture of HMS Belfast that the center gun is slightly shorter in appearance than the others it's not actually a shorter gun it's just stepped back slightly there are two reasons for this one is slightly more mundane and it's the less of reason and that is that by stepping the gun back it means you're also stepping the gun crews back which means that they can overlap each other a little bit because they're not all in a line which gives each individual gun crew a little bit more room to operate making easier to load which is always handy the bigger issue is to avoid an issue that cropped up quite a number of times in triple turret design and actually caused some issues for quite a while in a number of the American Standard class battleships and that is interference with between the shells so if all your guns are nice and level and you fire them all off if the gun barrels are too close together the blast and shock wave from the guns firing and the shells in flight actually interfere with the shells that are next to it because they've all been fired at the same time in a single salvo this in turn can deflect the shell slightly from their course and at long range in terms of naval artillery results in quite horrific accuracy because they go off in all sorts of wonderful directions in the American ships the say the early-to-mid standard classes they would eventually solve this for our number of methods but that included what they call delay coils which would fire the center guns slightly at a slightly different time to the others not enough to change the fact that it is still a full salvo but enough to again displace the shells relative to each other in such a manner that they didn't interfere this is a slightly less technological but possibly more practical solution which is simply by having the gun barrel set and slightly unequal positions it takes that interference pattern away so you can fire all little guns together all at once in a single salvo but the shock waves and blast waves with guns firing don't interfere with each other in quite the same way as they would if all the guns were level and that allows you to pack your guns in a little bit closer together Bradley asks if the Royal Navy ships in Norway had also back in a convoy rather than detaching glorious ahead and they'd still run into the Germans either Sean hosts could they have won that battle so if the carrier's had sailed together that's glorious and Ark Royal then they have a minimum five destroyer escort now if they're run into Sean Horst and nicer now well for one thing it's not going to go the same as historically because Ark Royal is probably going to have some kind of air patrol up which means they will spot the German ships in theory quite a bit further out than H miss glorious is o Germans really yeah you know war who would have thought boom which is basically the summary of glorious is operational career when it came to that battle anyway yes so spot the Germans earlier to be perfectly honest given that it's two battleships versus a pair of carriers and five destroyers the British would probably just pile on the this pressure on the boilers and just motor on out of there avoiding counter entirely if for some reason they decided to fight or force to fight well five destroyers is a lot more of a threat than two and given that the to a cast an ardent managed to land torpedo hit on Shawn Horst I think five is probably going to put up a relatively decent defense even if some of them are going to get are going to be lost and under well that obviously with warning and with aircraft ready on deck Ark Royal can start sorting out skewers for what they're worth and more importantly swordfish and bear in mind this is 1940 so this is in channel - with more and upgraded anti-aircraft batteries plus lots of escorts this is just your host and cogniser now with pretty much their original anti-aircraft suite against incoming swordfish and yes so that probably put a few more torpedoes into them depending on how the sequence of attacks goes will probably determine the level of success if the destroyers going first then faced with five destroyers launching torpedoes the the Shawn wall scanners are probably just withdraw if the air attack goes in first and is able to score some hits to slow them down make them less capable of maneuvering and distract them from the fact that destroyers are coming in then the destroyers managing to get off more and heavier weight torpedoes might actually hit hand the British a victory as opposed to just making the Germans go away or buying enough time for the carriers to get out of there so it could go either way it's very unlikely the first you would lose carriers this time but whether or not they win let's say up in the air a bit Beedrill bot one to one asks what refit or modernisation would you give a Lexington class battle cruiser okay so reef it's for the Lexington well I think there's gonna be this is gonna be a two-stage thing first thing as per renown and repulse get this thing back into dock yard and give it some proper armor stat given the scenario kind of like how renown and repulse were able to use quite a bit of leftover armor from other ships you could potentially bring in some of the armor plate designed for the South Dakota 1920s and if that if the main armor plate is too thick then perhaps from some of the decommissioned battleships but you need to get a lot more armor on this thing to make it at least in some way proof against enemies shot at some range rather than just being an XP pinata for anything that comes along with a gun bigger than six inches then in terms of a refit modernization but maybe late 1930s or maybe Lexington if it's still battle cruiser I'm guessing we may be bears at Pearl Harbor and gets hit and sunk well look at what they did to the Colorado's as an example obviously you want to fit radar you can it's got a fair bit of speed to it you can probably afford to lose a little bit in actual fact the lexington's are probably in a very good position because they're ridiculously insane top speed for a battle cruiser you can afford to refit all their machinery with modern machinery and downsize the machinery spaces and thus the displacement quite a lot because you don't even have to match it like for like as you put enough power in for say 30 to 33 knots you still got something perfectly capable of escorting a carrier but needs dramatically less power which obviously means dramatically less engines quite aside from the issues with obviously replacing old machinery with new that and obviously strip out the secondary casement guns 5.5 inch 38 caliber twins everywhere and being a battle cruiser it'll be quite long so it can fit quite a number of them maybe five or six targets beside obviously keep the main guns probably get rid of the caged mast put some nice tripods in there and combined with hopefully some decent level of armour you've then got a ship that's capable of taking on anything in the imperial japanese battle line except for the yamato's because it can well it matches firepower with everything up to and including a Nagato it's faster than anything the Japanese have in capital ship terms and it's you in theory would either be as well-protected or better than a Nagato at which point you have a very useful fast battleship albeit one with potentially a little bit of light lightweight protection compared to a true battleship but then again their North Carolina South Dakota and I always got away with 12 inches of armor so why not the Lexington's getting away with 11 or 12 that's how I'd do it anyway armchair warlord asks a two-part question firstly would it have been more useful to continue to produce more essex-class carriers instead of building the Midway's as I understand the Midway's had stability problems and secondly was British ship Armour actually qualitatively superior to American armored in world war ii i have seen conflicting acclaims so with regards to the s6 instead of the Midway's yes the mid-waist did have some stability issues I have had some Americans refer to the Midway's as a roll roll roll your boat gently down the stream but as I said I think they were still definitely worth building basically if you look at the Essex's although they were very good for world war ii the rapid advances of technology did leave them behind the fact that they were so good let them serve Ani and various roles as covered in a couple of videos on the essex-class but they were secondary roles they were not fleet carriers in the space of what maybe 15 20 years at all so yeah I mean they couldn't even operate the f4 so though we can compare them to the Midway's the Midway's could operate the for and that really they couldn't off operate the f-14 I'm sure Tom Cruise was very disappointed about that however they were able to later operate the f-18 so the Midway's therefore had a much longer service life span and obviously being larger could carry more aircraft and so they gave for more useful service because well you had a super carrier flight deck that could use as everything in the US any inventory apart from the f-14 which meant that you could use them as part of your your battle force basically throughout the Cold War with the exception of one line which obviously broken up earlier and yeah whereas you compare that to the essex-class a handful more Essex's given the sheer numbers that they had are gonna be far far less use to the US Navy when they can't operate its premier fighter and occasional interdiction and ground attack aircraft as compared to the Midway which actually can and cannot set up can also operate more of them now as for whose armor was better what boy isn't that a little can of worms to open up but anyway it depends on what kind of army you're talking about because you have broadly two types of armor in World War two you have face hardened and you have homogeneous steel so face hardened steel is the big heavy stuff you put to protect your capital ships especially obviously your battleships most especially and most obviously of the belt armor so in terms of the face hardened armor that was used on the large ships in the big roles like the belt armor in that particular case British armor is qualitatively superior to American what they called class-a armor and that's simply due to metallurgical and makeup metallurgical and chemical advances made during the interwar period that the Germans also independently made as for how much I've mentioned before in various videos the figures vary wildly some people have you believe it's only three to four percent superior other sources would say it's 25% superior which is a fair bit most sources tend to come down somewhere between eight and twelve eight and fifteen percent so when I'd run the rough calculations in my head I tend to use a factor of between ten and twelve percent depending on the thickness of the armor and that seems to be about right so yes face hardened armor plate World War two period British Armour is superior when it comes to the other type of Harmer plate this is the homogeneous steel plate that's just monolithic block of Steel doesn't have any particular face hardening qualities or anything it's got the same material properties throughout which in u.s. terms is Class B armor that is a different issue entirely I would say broadly speaking you're not going to get much better in for homogeneous Armour plate than US Class B and if you are s going to be marginal so for that take it or leave it the British quality control for homogeneous Armour plate wasn't as good as American so you could probably make a decent argument to say that Oh overall if you're going to be building a class of ships and if you are looking at that Class B or homogeneous Armour plate then yeah sure I'd quite happily say that you probably get better value out of using American Armour but if you're using if you're going to go with the face hard and stuff for the main protection for your pal ships and such like yeah I'm gonna go with a British bias in difficut margin kestrel Owens asks can you explain the differences between what came before pre dreadnaughts pre dreadnaughts dreadnought super trade notes etc like I guess I mean we should what what the ships that were before free journals what specifically makes each of them different or is there more vague differences so this is very hard to quantify because to be honest although there are some broad definitions almost every naval historian has their own slight tweaks and variations on how that works so I'll give you my sort of take on the matter and you can see what you think and compare it to other people's takes so what came before pre dreadnaughts well you start off with things like Gua and warrior which are broadside ironclads they can't have iron health a can of wooden hulls with iron plate tacked onto them but effectively they look like the last generation of age of sail frigates except now made of with well having iron coatings and usually slightly heavier guns this then moves on at least in capital ship terms to the central battery ironclad which he wears where the armour starts to concentrate a bit more around the center and you usually have sponsons or casements built out to allow the fewer guns now concentrated only at the middle on the hull to five fore and aft you then move on from there although obviously there's a lot of overlap and back and forth to turret ships and I say we're talking about capital ships only here so we're ignoring things like monitors and such for the minute but you've got the turret ships things like monarch or captain then you start to see the masts going away so you get massless turret ships like the devastation then from there you go on to variety of turret ships and Barbet ships so this goes through thing and this is there's quite a lot of variety in those so you start off with something like devastation but that also includes ships with multiple single guns which the French seem to like quite a lot you've got ships like the Italia class which basic have almost no armor and the guns are put an echelon in the middle you've got the armored slippers of things like HMS Victorian H my son's per eye and then you kind of start to see everything drifting back into an alignment with something like the Royal Sovereign class which is basically the layout of a pre-dreadnought only with compound armor and Barbet guns you then get into the pre dreadnaughts so the pre dreadnaughts are effectively characterized by fully armored bar bets which later would become to come to be known as turrets carrying four guns of roughly 12 to 13 inch caliber but some variation did exist twin turret forward twin turret aft and then in the secondary tertiary and whatever else batteries you want down the side approximate speed in the high teens and also using steel armor usually Harvey steel or some variation thereof until Krupp steel is invented the dreadnoughts main difference from the pre-dreadnought is usually seen as dispensing with the main battle-ready secondary battery it can exchange for an a much larger main battery of heavy guns with centralized fire control and secondary batteries and in some cases tertiaries of they're purely to deal with destroyer attacks and torpedo boats and things like that they're not there to engage really the enemy battleships themselves now once you get into the dreadnought era this is where things get very difficult because you can disable dreadnought superdreadnought but then you've run out of things to call them very quickly and it's also very very broad categorize ation some people then go fast battleship but whatever so my classification will be first generation dreadnought so that's things like dreadnought South Carolina Nassau or helgeland that kind of stuff so those are all big gun ships and they're pretty much what I said with the successes the free dreadnaughts usually with 12-inch guns you then have for me at least second-generation dreadnoughts so this is where you start to see the dropping of echelon or wing turrets so all turrets from the centerline they're still 11 or 12 inch gunships but they've generally all adopted with the exception of one or two special cases they've generally all adopted turbine propulsion at this point and the secondary battery has gone up to between four and six inch as opposed to some of the very early ones which had a very light secondary battery so these would be things like kaiser class florida wyoming class hms neptune may be things like think such things such as that so effectively they're they're the next evolution of the 12-inch gun dreadnought design you then have the super dreadnaughts so the first super dreadnaughts as defined are things well actually art is defined by the rod like fh mr. Ryan so this is where effectively the guns start to escalate whereas on the second gen superdreadnought the second gen dreadnoughts one of the other things you might see cropping up is the triple turret on the first-generation super dreadnoughts the characterisation is bigger guns so you've got 13.5 inch for the british 14 inch for the Americans the Germans are a little bit behind on that matter so would they're less at the better you've then got to me at least second-generation super dreadnaughts so second-generation superdreadnought is going to be something like Queen Elizabeth all the US standards so gun power can go up all gun numbers can go up so you either 12 14-inch guns eight 15-inch guns it's the second generation super dreadnoughts quantitatively superior to a first generation superdreadnought I mean for all the fact it is a great ship if you took something like say a Pennsylvania class up against USS Texas it's not really a much of a question that Pennsylvania wins likewise queen elizabeth versus an iron Duke or in Orion and someone has hope for them all let's say a Bayern vs. a Kaiser so there that that's nice officer merely says a second-generation super dreadnaughts then everything goes a bit skew post-world War One because you've got battle cruisers entering the mix things like hood which arguably is potentially a fast battleship then you have the monsters the n3s the south dakota's the ptosis etc that are all being built post-world War One but they kind of all just die off so they you might as well call them Washington cherry trees for lack of a better term because they didn't really come about that much Colorado's example good example again of a second generation or maybe a generation 2.5 superdreadnought and then I think after that you gain to slow and fast battleships so you've got things like Nelson possibly arguably Colorado etc which are the slow battleships sub 25 knots Nagato flip-flops either side of that categorization and you have the fast battleships so things like again arguably hood but then later on North Carolina king george v rish leo pissed park etc they're all the fast battleships and then do you run out because they're all done so yeah that's that would be my idea anyway Naomi Claire NL asks checking out that's my favorite non-british age of sail warship the French Ocean class it seems very that there are a few that spent quite a long time before being launched all commissioned what's the story behind that apart from the Napoleonic Wars not going well was it because there were ones built outside the main naval bases of Toulon and Brest so things like skilled manpower are a problem to a significant extent the Napoleonic Wars would be a good summary of what actually caused the problems it was a whole range of issues and some of it was simply the fact that due to losses and what the Revolution perching a lot of their competent officer corps at the beginning and verse of things the French Navy was running out of skilled crewmen to actually man these things and the osteon class was a very very large set a series of very large ships so when it came to do we actually have the manpower priority tended to go to smaller ships first which obviously if you're not going to crew this ship in the foreseeable future they're not much point in spending money finishing it with the British blockade their work supply shortages of certain critical items not even necessary because they can get them but more cuz they can transport them because yes you can transport canon overland in the early 1807 yes you can transport masts and spars and things like that over land in the early 1800s it's just incredibly difficult and incredibly slow it's much easier to stick them all on a small coastal trading vessel and send them along with hosts by sea unfortunately when you have six hundred odd Royal Navy warships floating around looking menacingly at anything that so much as dares venture out of port this becomes something more of a problem and so yeah supplies and logistics dry up especially for the really big stuff because although no warships mast is a particularly small affair the size and bulk of a first-rate masts and rigging is significantly greater than that of a frigates so again that slows them down as well and I finally was also to be fair a certain lack of interest after a trafalgar Napoleon had well more Russian shaped things to worry about especially when it came to the winter and the whole focus of the French campaigns shifted much more to land-based and so obviously funding another opportunity other sources of resource to allow them to continue building began to tribe as well because there was basically no real appetite for them the French trying to build another Navy to refight trafalgar apart from anything else they didn't help you have people like a panel cochrane who were just run in occasionally and burn or capture friendships just as they'd finished them or just before they'd finished them which really didn't help the whole apathy towards the situation from the french side of things Brandon Conover asks what do you think of the Japanese Cruiser scuba well that's a bit of an interesting one isn't it well here it is the supposedly well inaccurately titled protected Cruiser at Tsukuba it's actually an armored Cruiser and in some ways you could even say it was a battle cruiser before battle cruisers were a thing not aware this was a pre journal era that ship it was designed as an armored Cruiser so yet the postcard is wrong there it had a belt armor hum but eat although it was classified as an armored Cruiser it had basically a pre dreadnoughts main armament I mean let let's just read off the main armament so for 12-inch guns in two twin turrets one for one our secondary battery of twelve six inch guns encasements tertiary battery of twelve 120 millimeter or 4.7 inch guns and a handful of three pounders and three torpedo tubes now does that sound like anything to you yeah it sounds pretty much like the island of a pre-dreadnought and that's pretty much because that's what it is except that at the time period that it was laid down and launched which was 1905 lay down to launch at the end 95 commissioned in 1907 it was faster than any pre general battleship being capable of between 20 and 21 knots in exchange for which it had reduced bail times and maximum belt thickness of 7.1 inches although ironically enough this did make it still more heavily protected than the invincible class battle cruisers which were about to begin construction so by all rights it's effectively a pre-dreadnought battleship it's somewhat that's what protected slightly faster similar kind of main armament he just happened to suffer the unfortunate fact that well as we just said it was laid down at you know five so the next year out came dreadnought and then a couple years down the line out came the Invincibles and the poor old thing was basically done for it was reclassified as battle cruiser around 1912 in acknowledgment of its capabilities but ultimately yet 22 21 knots using vertical triple-expansion engines it was never going to be seen as a true battle cruiser ii in the sense of the Invincibles one date han and their respective successes so yeah as a concept I quite like it it certainly shows a school of thought that was fractionally ahead of the curve much like actually the satsumas were to be honest compared to a lot of other naval schools the thinking is just in some ways a bit a bit like the blue car actually the world war one blue car that is it went down slightly the wrong line due to being slightly too early so in blue his case they got the speed right they've got the armor right they've got the guns wrong in this case they got the armor right well go better than invincible anyway they got the guns right for the armament they knew off for chemical ships at the time but they got the speed wrong because well they didn't have turbines and such so yeah he's a very good ship would have probably been the start of a trend had the Dreadnought not come along and just suffer from the slight unfortunate nature of being left behind by history zombie hero 14 asks during the shelling of North the Normandy coast on d-day Royal Navy ships fired their turrets in sequence whilst the US Navy fired them all at once was this just a preference or was there a reason for the difference preference did come into it to a certain degree I mean there were some US ships not necessarily capital ships but there were some US ships that would fire sequential salvos and there were some British ships that were just unloading with everything all at once but in terms of precise reasoning why I suspect a great deal of it would probably just come down to the doctrine of Shore bombardment by both sides because what both sides both parts of the same side I should say because ultimately your target is a ground target it's not going anywhere which makes things awfully easier for fire control systems and calculating for time and time and flight of shells etc but as a result the British tended to follow the system since they had the luxury of not really being shot back by anything that was a serious danger to them of being in contact with people ashore who could correct the fall of shot or with aircraft and such like so piece off a case of okay right well we're firing on this target let's fire turret one let's say if you're what knee fire turret one report did it okay was it longshore left right okay correct firefight turret two in theory this could allow you to zero in on your targets a lot faster and minimize your expenditure of shells whereas on some US Capitol ships it was more a case of well we know approximately where the enemy is okay load everything up and bear in mind that most fortifications are not designed to stand up to heavy kit battleship caliber naval shells it was just a case of well I imagine the captain of a u.s. warship going out onto the wing of his bridge staring at the Normandy coast bringing up a scroll and and then just going dear grid coordinates I no longer wish you to exist signed the US Navy open fire and that will be pretty much the end of that because well hey if you blow up everything at the grid coordinates you don't necessarily need to correct for shot or fire again each method has a quant has a quality all of its own and now we gone to the discord questions so apart from last week's question which is almost inspired me to make a video of like what happens if the Great Eastern survives through to 1950 or something like that let's look at this a fort master says so I found I went on the internet and I found this um the battleship of the future barring the stupid design decision of putting smokestacks at the waterline what do you think could be done to make this a feasible battleship of the future so what I do to improve this oh yeah I think this article must have been written by or the drawing at least as must have paired by somebody who had heard battleships but had never actually seen one or contemplated one and probably had also seen something like a coronation class steam locomotive from passing Oh streamlining that will do right so the numerous problems with this but for one thing I don't know if you can see in the resolution of the picture but those turrets won't actually turn the arc on the packet is far too far too little and they're flush with the superstructure so congratulations you you have constructed a battleship whose I guess q turrets only function is to blow away the rear superstructure when inevitably it rebels and declares its independence from the rest of the ship other than that oh my goodness if the King George the fifth didn't have enough issues with having a quarter in a twin this ship has a quarter then a triple then a twin then a twin then either a twin or triple is not entirely clear and then a court again you may want to rationalize that down so yes if you're gonna go with six turrets I mean I guess six tarts designs have been done we'll look why you don't just go with two three turrets tax and instead have some weird q turret amidships between the superstructure but anyway whatever just doing human triples um you get the same number of guns roughly and it'll be make logistics so much easier the superstructure I mean there's not a tremendous amount wrong with it maybe a fraction short for good fire control but it is what it is I try and merge it all into one to be honest cuz I be better just to have a via and Atlanta style triple turrets stack fore-and-aft instead of that weird Q shirts position I don't understand that secondary batteries well actually they might not be suffering from the same con actually term problem as the main batteries the secondary batteries are actually not terrible ironically enough as for the midship section and the side protection yeah that's just I mean look at the bit on the left the selling point of this thing with this exhaust trunked exhaust fences yeah for torpedo hits it'll be deflected upwards or downwards you don't want to deflect a torpedo downwards into the lower portion of your ship this is a stupid idea I mean upwards ok fair enough upwards into the main armor belt that probably will do less damage but downwards really this is a selling point I mean not to mention the fact that if the torpedo just has a contact detonating warhead and it blows up right next to your exhaust vent it's gonna mean well loss of loss of updraft in your engines at best at worst it's could only heat to copious amounts of water flooding your engines instantly and rending rendering you mostly powerless yeah I've just know you also look at the top right look at how much space that trunking is taking up just run the flippin funnel up through the rear of the enlarged superstructure and have it done normally those would be my major issues and - complaints with with this particular design the less said about that little one down on the center-left the alternate version the better but yeah that those those are my main those are me more complaints otherwise of the aesthetics otherwise relatively nice [Music] soup asks what was the reasoning but why the Japanese as to why they built lighter cruisers to lead destroyer flotillas I mean this was actually an extension of a concept of that a couple of navies in the First World War had tried out including the British shoe so it also specifically built like cruisers for this purpose and the whole thing drew out the flotilla leader concepts obviously the flotilla leader as discussed in the couple of videos we've done about destroyed development was kind of a bigger and slightly Nastia destroyer flagship for the flotilla commander or Commodore to lead the entire flotilla from and I needed to be bigger because they needed the extra space for the command staff and although you might as well stick an extra gun or torpedo or whatever in as well back in the First World War the British built a series of light cruisers where they trim well you know what why not just go even bigger because the one problem with the fletcher leaders destroyers was they were just about visually distinct enough that they could be picked out and targeted but whilst they were slightly bigger and meaner than the average destroyer they weren't big enough and mean enough to hold off two or three destroyers that might come after them in a coordinated attack to try and decapitate the command structure whereas a like cruiser that could keep up with the destroyers and obviously possessed quite a few more guns and in slightly larger calibers that could hold off a significant portion of the of a destroyer attack so it boosted the firepower and also gave an even better platform for command and control as was being more survivable so this concept kind of continued onwards into the post-world War one period with more things like the igano class for the Japanese and to a certain extent even the Omaha class for the United States Navy so yeah basically the idea was the flotilla leader can then be in a large ship it's got plenty of space for him to organize and cupon from it's got a higher vantage point it's got the firepower to deal with any potential enemy destroyers it might run into again obviously assuming and that wonderful weather aloft ami seemed to do that no one else will build a counter to them but never mind and overall would you just be a better command than a slightly enlarged destroyer so there that's that's pretty pretty much their reasoning a life beyond living asks if modernized similarly to other existing World War one era capital ships with the British 12-inch and 13.5 inch armed battle cruisers be a valuable asset for minor combatants in world war ii such as the commonwealth nations for the 12-inch gun battle cruisers no the Invincibles were out-of-date you can exactly when they were of date by but by the end of World War one they were very definitely out of date their armor wasn't adequate by that point to be honest neither their guns weren't particularly brilliant either much better 12 inch ones that come in they turret layout wasn't good their speed definitely wasn't fantastic [Music] yeah and I just know they need they needed to go I mean there's a reason the chileans didn't accept them 13.5 inch ones however potential I mean their top speed isn't too far away from what the congos were when they were built so if they're completely modernized you could potentially do something very similar to the congos one for one replacement of old machinery with new switchover to oil firing that'll push their speed up to uh something where they can keep up quite comfortably with most light and heavy cruisers 13.5 inch guns still not pushover armor if you're talking about something like tiger or princess royal armor is actually with a few tweaks here and there is actually better than what the congos would have had so that's yeah that's your speed firepower and protection triangle so if you've got all of that in place yeah you're not going to be fighting any major enemy capital ships with them but for Commonwealth nations that have to worry about enemy cruisers or running escorts Oh Canada Australia New Zealand etc very possibly would have been useful and valuable assets I mean a refitted HMAS tiger operating at the Battle of the Sunda Strait would have changed things quite dramatically obviously would need to modernize and bulge and give them a little bit of torpedo protection and I'd wager yeah maybe not a lion but Princess Royal and or tiger fully modernized would definitely be able to stand up to a Kongo so maybe had hm-hm in z-s Princess Royal and HMAS HMAS Tiger sailing is up around as a pair at the beginning of the Pacific War that would have given the Japanese quite a few conniption fits because those two are going to lay waste to any Japanese heavy cruiser that rolls around and given that to Kongo seem to be the default deployment for a lot of early operations in the area by the Japanese to Congo's I would not put money on in that engagement particularly so yeah they could have been very viable the only obviously downside to that is that you would almost certainly lead to everybody building counters or responses or protesting or whatever so that is very much a scenario in isolation and not a what you can necessarily classifies what probably be a true scenario the turret welder asks if you had to serve as a crew member on an access ship which theater would you be fighting in um that's an easy one I would be in the Mediterranean fighting in the Italian Navy because the worst thing you have to worry about in the Italian Navy is incompetent senior officers well also try and keep a better look out at night if you're on a heavy cruiser but anyway yeah if I go and serve the Japanese Navy well one I'm gonna have the other Living Daylights being out me every so often by whichever officer decides I haven't signed my shoes exactly right I'm really unlucky I might be assigned to a 25 millimeter gun crew and there's every possibility I might be asked to go and die gloriously for the Emperor as a kite and driver or some other equally idiotic thing and if I'd managed to dodge all of that well then I might as well start throwing rocks at the ungodly numbers of aircraft the USN is going to throw at me later in the war which doesn't sound like a very fun idea to me at all if I'm gonna be in the kriegsmarine well much of the Kriegsmarine was probably in my estimation at least the least not supplied of the three German branches of the military I'm still fighting for the Germans which I have something of a problem with considering the background of some of my family's closest friends but anyway the listed event lack the better if I was going to end up in the grease ring there is well one u-boats no I do not want serve on a u-boat there are many ways to die but being crushed to death under the Atlantic by depth charge is not all the one I want to get go by not by a long shot I also don't want to drown in the freezing Arctic waters of Norway I really really don't want to wake up one morning to find water spike coming around the corner in the middle of a fjord and sitting around waiting for the RAF to blitz turning our existence is not fun either so mmm kind of by default you end up in the italians and it's like well okay so decent food don't really have to worry about massive amounts of carpet-bombing not likely to be sent on suicide missions not working with quite the worst not working for quite the worst genocide or maniac and yeah individually as long as I don't end up on one of the one of the condottieri type cruisers and but individually I've got a relatively decent chance of surviving things and a Mediterranean weather what else can you ask for so yes Italians most probably that the best posting to go for a time traveling British person who was forced to be in the Axis Navy plus obviously Italy ducks out of the water League which is great so I get I get to say I participated in the war and only put only get put my life at risk for half the time it's a good deal all around I'd say turret welder says if you had to design any kind of ship for combat in World War two what kind of ship would it be destroy accrue Zecharia etc and what would it be like well aside from my ultimate battleship concept as seen here so kindly put together by discord use amorous dollies which remains to me the the ideal pinnacle of massive ridiculous battleship design if I'm forced to be slightly more realistic and design a ship for a nation for combat and have it be a single class what would it be like what would it be well I think we're probably looking at depending on how sadistic I want to be I would either try and design an actual half-decent cruiser for the kriegsmarine a-- i something that's not so unseaworthy they dare not send it out into the Atlantic or else so hilariously overbuilt that it weighs almost as much as a Baltimore and has about the same firepower as a 1930 0 actual treaty compliant cruiser this one actually took a lot of thinking about to be honest but because basically Road comes down to as well if we're designing for the Americans can I do better than the Fletcher probably not can I do better than the Essex probably not a bar could give you an armored deck give make an armored deck Essex but though though it wouldn't end up with all sorts of shenanigans kind of do about them the Baltimore's again probably not and well you've got the Iowas it's like well they don't need to do much better than the I was well because why we're with the Japanese battleship force by the time they came into service with the British like there's a few bits and pieces I can I could look at doing but at the same time there's not gonna be the money to build them I already mentioned the Germans the Italians had good ships but through various various shenanigans managed to not use them properly there's nothing really I can do to help the Japanese they picked fight with America in America's own personal pond so I guess I can make a white flag machine for them it might save a few lives no sir I've decided if I could design any one ship they'll be ready for combat in World War two and may just about be realistically built - - affordable by its owners I would build a sort of top-of-the-line heavy cruiser for the Greek Navy because I feel the Greeks kettle a bit hard done by the Free French the Polish Norwegian etc navies that skedaddled over to the UK after their various countries fell they either brought with them good ships that they could keep fighting with like the risk of each or they were given modern ships like the stored during the fight with the Battlement the Scharnhorst the battle north cape poor old greeks they kind of had to do with what they what they had mostly obviously someone who got lost fairly quickly and poor old George's have a rough although it was very good back in the day eventually got relegated to convoy duty so they didn't really get the same opportunities to have a go at their oppressors the same way that the Norwegians and the Polish and the Free French did so given that it's Greek maybe they probably gonna be able to afford one but like the other off at the time it's going to be they're gonna have to therefore go for quality assuming that they've got a few drachma to put together I would probably design something along the lines of a heavy cruiser but since I'm not signatory to the naval treaties I would go for four triple eight inch turrets I could probably buy them off the Americans I'm sure they'd be happy to do that my displacement is probably going to be in the fifteen to eighteen thousand ton range and given that it's Greece so obviously they're throwing this together from all sorts of different navies let's see so let's have the British build the hull I have the Americans supplied the main guns [Music] I'm not taking German machinery no no no no no no no I'll have Italian machinery I'll stick twin 4.5 inch AAA guns from the UK in as my heavy AAA some 20-millimeter Oerlikons which I'll probably Snapple off the Americans for my secondary AAA and I'd probably be looking at either six to eight of these 4.5 inch turrets probably a couple of dozen 20-millimeter I'm going to have to go with the seaplane launcher because hey this is a runnable door to the aerial scouting part is necessary and who knows by the obviously using hindsight by the time the war breaks out that will leave me some displacement to lose in order to get radar and yeah with the machinery in place the channeling machinery in place officer can be short-range because it's Mediterranean fighter so ramp up to maybe 33 to 35 knots and stick a couple of core torpedo tubes on each side this gives me a oh and armor wise yes or II give it a um I probably give it a 6 or 7 inch thick belt to be able to and or three inch deck to be able to fight off other heavy cruisers so with my single almost Cruiser killer flagship I would then give obviously that'd be for the Greek Navy and then when Greece gets invaded it along with the other off and the various destroyers all will go skedaddling down to Alexandria where if that ship will probably prove be a very valuable asset in the Mediterranean fleet so ever off can go and enjoy semi-retirement escorting convoys and I can charge around shooting Italians and the odd German throughout the war and I think they'll be very fun and that brings us to the end of this week's drydock thank you very much for listening I hope you enjoyed it and I hope you can in another video some point soon in the future