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Panfilo posted:What was the logic of putting turrets amidships (like on the Ise and a few others)? On a small ship like a Destroyer this isn't as much of a problem, because its very maneuverable. However, on a big ship like a Battleship, it seems like you are basically guaranteed to have at least one set of guns with fairly crappy fields of fire. In the first generation or two of dreadnoughts, designers thought that superfiring turrets would damage the turret in front of them or incapacitate the crew, so they mounted turrets offset to the side to get more fore- or aft-firing guns. Superfiring turrets proved workable, so all guns on subsequent ships were on the centerline, but amidships turrets still made sense in terms of (as other posters said) moar guns until the lessons of Jutland became apparent. Post-Jutland there was more attention to plunging fire, which would hit the deck instead of the armored belt of the ship. Deck armor weighs a lot (the deck being quite large) which meant the top weight of turrets and barbettes posed more of a problem. Triple and quad turrets started to look a lot more interesting at that point, and they're very nearly as good as twins in every other way, so again you see fairly swift adoption. (There are concerns with interference, which can be dealt with, and in theory the port for the third gun makes the face of the turret weaker, but it's a small price to pay for a superior density of armament.) Panfilo posted:So I guess most Battleships had a two layered field of fire- the primary armament meant to engage at long ranges and bombard shore targets, and a secondary armament used to fend off smaller ships. I know keeping the guns limited to a few sizes makes estimating ranges easier. But why did the Yamato have a triple 6.1" turret in addition to the 18.1" main battery? It wouldn't have the same ranges or trajectory arc as the bigger guns, and I also heard they were lousy AA guns. You want a secondary battery because torpedo boats pose a real threat to a battleship despite their small size. You hope your screen will keep them away and you can use your speed to make their lives difficult, but when you're designing something the size of a battleship, you want to feel like it can take care of itself. You need enough range that you can keep destroyers out of torpedo range, so small guns don't cut it. You need a rate of train and fire sufficient to track something doing 33-35 knots and trying to dodge, so the main guns aren't the right answer. The US 5/38 was an unusually successful design for the time. The Germans and Japanese didn't have such a good dual-purpose weapon and had to use separate anti-destroyer and heavy AA batteries to feel confident that they'd covered their bases. Also the Nelsons were butt ugly and their guns never punched their weight due to design issues. Fie upon them. The battleship design issue that amuses me is the increasing importance of all the unarmored fire control and combat control gear in the superstructure. Sure, the armor means that nothing but a really big shell or a torpedo can sink the ship, but you could effectively mission kill a battleship by mauling the superstructure with HE rounds. Sure, it wouldn't sink, but a battleship without its directors, rangefinders, and radars is good for nothing but scampering back to port. Even without the rise of the aircraft, I think that weakness put an upper limit on how large it made sense for battleships to grow.
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Apr 4, 2014 02:25
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WEEDLORDBONERHEGEL posted:On the same note, I should probably lose my petty little grudge against Gustavus Adolphus. Aww, but it warms the cockles of my technically Swedish heart. What are cockles anyway?
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Apr 4, 2014 02:26
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DeceasedHorse posted:He does get a little lost-causy in a few parts when discussing the relative industrial power and population of the South and the North but it's not especially noticeable and he certainly doesn't get into any nonsense about southern chivalry or anything like that from what I remember. His portrayal of the various commanders on both sides was pretty fair and he clearly respects Abraham Lincoln a great deal; other than his personal admiration for Nathan Bedford Forrest I don't find any of his views to be especially objectionable, and although MacPherson's work is clearly superior in technical terms it isn't as readable (although it is by no means dry and technical). I try to read the trilogy or listen to its absolutely fantastic audiobook version once a year or so, and would definitely recommend it as both a literary work and as a gateway to more specific Civil War topics. As far as I remember his admiration of Forrest is more or less limited to recognizing his extraordinary military aptitude, which is absolutely correct. He doesn't extol him as a virtuous soul or anything. Several of Forrest's opponents during and after the war said the same sorts of things, are we concerned about their "admiration" as well? Koramei posted:The kind of person that would think of it as something to bring up is the kind of person worth being skeptical of. I just brought it up, and I've brought it up before. Do I deserve skepticism?
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Apr 4, 2014 02:30
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Alright, as someone who really doesn't understand the whole Lost Cause argument, can somebody explain it to this non-American? I understand that it's southern apologism, but it doesn't make any sense to me on the face of it: if the South was doomed to fail, aren't they just even bigger idiots for starting it? Or does it involve the whole 'tyrannical Lincoln totally started it' thing too?
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Apr 4, 2014 02:30
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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PittTheElder posted:Alright, as someone who really doesn't understand the whole Lost Cause argument, can somebody explain it to this non-American? I understand that it's southern apologism, but it doesn't make any sense to me on the face of it: if the South was doomed to fail, aren't they just even bigger idiots for starting it? Or does it involve the whole 'tyrannical Lincoln totally started it' thing too? The wiki on it is actually really good so I'll just post this: quote:Confederate generals such as Lee, Albert Sidney Johnston and Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson represented the virtues of Southern nobility and fought bravely and fairly. On the other hand, most Northern generals were characterized as possessing low moral standards, because they subjected the Southern civilian population to indignities like Sherman's March to the Sea and Philip Sheridan's burning of the Shenandoah Valley in the Valley Campaigns of 1864. Union General Ulysses S. Grant is often portrayed as an alcoholic. That pretty much covers it. None of these things are accurate of course, and the general point is to hold up the CSA's effort as noble and admirable and so on. Here's a low-brow example of a modern "Lost Cause" kind of work.
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Apr 4, 2014 02:36
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PittTheElder posted:Alright, as someone who really doesn't understand the whole Lost Cause argument, can somebody explain it to this non-American? I understand that it's southern apologism, but it doesn't make any sense to me on the face of it: if the South was doomed to fail, aren't they just even bigger idiots for starting it? Or does it involve the whole 'tyrannical Lincoln totally started it' thing too? the JJ posted:Aww, but it warms the cockles of my technically Swedish heart.
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Apr 4, 2014 02:36
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Taerkar posted:To further expand on armor for warships there were many different approaches taken to how to armor them. Some went to try and cover as much as possible, but this typically resulted in either being a bit underarmored everywhere or being too heavy/slow to be all that useful. The later American BBs took the 'All or Nothing' approach, which resulted in them having some rather impressive protective schemes (especially due to the ability of the US to splurge on the good stuff) by simply protecting the key parts of the battleship with the heavy stuff and giving the rest of it lighter protection. Oh no. I'm going to end up doing it again. Zorak of Michigan posted:In the first generation or two of dreadnoughts, designers thought that superfiring turrets would damage the turret in front of them or incapacitate the crew, so they mounted turrets offset to the side to get more fore- or aft-firing guns. Superfiring turrets proved workable, so all guns on subsequent ships were on the centerline, but amidships turrets still made sense in terms of (as other posters said) moar guns until the lessons of Jutland became apparent. Not everyone's designers did. However I've seen some points raised that the structures to put wing turrets' weight on the keel was not necessarily worse than the problems raised by the topweight of the superfiring turrets on such a small ship. the problems of wing turrets scaled hard though, and wing turrets made for magazines vulnerable to torpedoes but it wasn't as obvious at the start of the era as at the end. Amidships turrets were similar. If triples in a big enough caliber aren't available or workable, then to get the 8-12 guns that seems the sweet spot for battleship armament, then you need either amidships turrets, wing turrets or to run 8 guns in fore and aft superfiring pairs. You can't really get more guns otherwise because the small hulls of the time meant that the structure wouldn't take that much weight on the ends of the relatively fine hull. The amidships turrets seem pretty reasonable from that perspective until you actually get some practice sailing a ship with the damnable things. That's when you realize that having one turret out of all of the turrets on the ship nice and cozy in between machinery spaces does more than make the machinery layout a pain. It also means that you get stuff like steam lines running around the ammo magazine for the amidships turret which warms the powder. This changes the ballistics and throws the accuracy of the guns in that turret noticeably off. For a while though, it was considered structurally impossible to put all the guns on the ends of the ships, so it was either amidships guns or none at all. I'm not really sure whether frustration with the things not working well or bigger hulls allowing more firepower at the ends was the cause of the switch away from amidships guns. The wiki articles on the early US battleships are actually pretty good, they're sourced extensively from Norman Friedman's US Battleships: An Illustrated Design History, which is a pretty outstanding book.
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Apr 4, 2014 02:49
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bewbies posted:The wiki on it is actually really good so I'll just post this: WEEDLORDBONERHEGEL posted:Tyrannical Lincoln started it, and doomed but spunky underdogs are an appealing image. Losing is romantic, ask the Irish. Ah, OK, so it's just the standard southern apologist arguments rolled into one big umbrella term. Fair enough.
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Apr 4, 2014 02:54
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xthetenth posted:It also means that you get stuff like steam lines running around the ammo magazine for the amidships turret which warms the powder. This changes the ballistics and throws the accuracy of the guns in that turret noticeably off. There's something fantastic about that calculation. They only had analog computers and optical rangefinders, and they could still make the whole thing work well enough that variances in powder temperature threw it all off.
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Apr 4, 2014 03:06
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Zorak of Michigan posted:There's something fantastic about that calculation. They only had analog computers and optical rangefinders, and they could still make the whole thing work well enough that variances in powder temperature threw it all off. quote:So why did the Navy never follow through with digitizing the battleship’s big guns? I asked retired Navy Captain David Boslaugh, former director of the Navy Tactical Embedded Computer Program Office, that question. And if anyone would know, it's Boslaugh. He played a role in the development of the Navy Tactical Data System—the forerunner to today’s Aegis systems, the mother of all digital sensor and fire control systems. Source They had to figure out a lot of stuff. Apparently the Richelieu shot some atrocious groupings because the shockwaves from the gun barrels were interfering with each other, and they didn't get properly worked out for a while. If anyone wants more info, the Weapons and Weapons Technology section at http://www.navweaps.com/index_tech/index_tech.htm is pretty fantastic about that, especially the articles on the Mark 51 FCS, Mark 1, and fire control systems in World War II.
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Apr 4, 2014 03:13
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Ah! Almost forgot!swamp waste posted:This primary source stuff is really interesting, thanks for posting it. Anyone here who knows German though, please check it out, it's a very fun read. Edit: A good source for the German-American equivalent to German healing magic is available in English for free, though, so you could read that. Or go to Pennsylvania, which still has people who do that. Some of them blog. HEY GUNS fucked around with this message at 03:22 on Apr 4, 2014 |
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Apr 4, 2014 03:18
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Zorak of Michigan posted:In the first generation or two of dreadnoughts, designers thought that superfiring turrets would damage the turret in front of them or incapacitate the crew, so they mounted turrets offset to the side to get more fore- or aft-firing guns. Superfiring turrets proved workable, so all guns on subsequent ships were on the centerline, but amidships turrets still made sense in terms of (as other posters said) moar guns until the lessons of Jutland became apparent. Not quite. The U.S. went with centerline arrangements from the very beginning. The British knew the advantages that could be gained and ultimately adopted superfiring turrets, but didn't bother to redesign their turrets so they could actually, y'know, superfire. Why did the British have this problem? Because they didn't want to relocate the sighting apparatus part of the turret. No other reason, just laziness.
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Apr 4, 2014 03:20
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It's also kinda silly how some of the earlier 'Modern' battleships had open fighting positions on top of the main turrets. Positions that would be quite unmannable during an actual fight.
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Apr 4, 2014 03:27
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Probably near impossible to answer, but how does naval firepower compare to land firepower? Does a battleship equate to the artillery of a division? Or more? You hear examples of battleships being beached as forts... is that mostly a symbolic gesture, or does it make a real difference?
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Apr 4, 2014 03:31
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ALL-PRO SEXMAN posted:Not quite. The U.S. went with centerline arrangements from the very beginning. The British knew the advantages that could be gained and ultimately adopted superfiring turrets, but didn't bother to redesign their turrets so they could actually, y'know, superfire. The US had its own moments of laziness. In 1941 the British licensed production of the Hispano 20mm cannon to the US due to British fears that their production would fall behind and American interest in getting a cannon on their fighters. In the process of pre-production, the Americans lengthened the firing chamber by one-sixteenth of an inch, leading to a high rate of jams where the firing pin wouldn't strike hard enough to fire a round. The British, who had previously encountered this problem and solved it by shortening the firing chamber by one-sixteenth of an inch, recommended shortening the firing chamber by one-sixteenth of an inch. The US declined that advice and spent the next four years trying to find any possible way to make it stop jamming that didn't involve shortening the firing chamber, and eventually just gave up, shipped a good portion of the 40 million 20mm rounds they'd already manufactured to Britain, and armed all their fighters with the AN/M2 .50 cal. The USAAF calculated that one Hispano delivered the same firepower as ~2.3 .50s, the British put it closer to three.
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Apr 4, 2014 03:42
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Fangz posted:Probably near impossible to answer, but how does naval firepower compare to land firepower? Does a battleship equate to the artillery of a division? Or more? You hear examples of battleships being beached as forts... is that mostly a symbolic gesture, or does it make a real difference? You can put some BIG loving guns on a boat and have it be more mobile than anything short of, say, train mounted stuff on land. The Iowa had 9 16 inch guns as it's main armament. A quick wikicheck tells me that a modern arty battalion has ~12 ~150 mm guns. So navy guns are way bigger, and you've got about 3/4 of a battalions guns on just one BB, not counting the smaller tubes and AAA. To quite a totally random internet source: "An example of this is the French Army of Italy, which in 1796 had 60 artillery pieces to its credit. Sixteen years later, at the Battle of Borodino, the artillery for both sides totaled nearly 1,200 guns which fired an average of 15,000 rounds per hour during the course of the day's fighting." A good ship of the line at the time had 74 guns, or more than all of France's army in Italy (which, to be fair, wasn't the highest priority in the fighting.) Trafalgar saw about 60 ships of the line, so multiply that by 74, just on those boats you're looking at about 4 times as much there as in the big throwdown at Borodino, so this is a pretty common phenomenon.
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Apr 4, 2014 03:48
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bewbies posted:That pretty much covers it. None of these things are accurate of course, and the general point is to hold up the CSA's effort as noble and admirable and so on. Here's a low-brow example of a modern "Lost Cause" kind of work. God drat, how was it I knew what this link was going to be before I even moused over it?
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Apr 4, 2014 03:50
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On the IJN Shoho, where is the bridge located? This is a weird carrier that doesn't have an island at all; the top of the ship is a completely flush flight deck. With no island, how the hell does the ship see where its going?! Are torpedoes really that big of a threat to battleships? Aside from the Bismark's rudder getting jammed (more of a Golden BB type moment) and the sinking of the Royal Oak by a U boat that snuck in the harbor, I can't think of any other Battleships that were torpedoed and sunk by submarines. Even torpedo bombers took many direct hits to actually get the ship to capsize, and that's assuming the air group is coordinated enough to all attack it from one side. Yamato's efforts in dodging torpedoes ended up taking it completely out of the battle when they were attacking Taffy 3. Its also interesting that for all the guns and lead a Battleship could throw into the air, they sucked at reliably shooting down aircraft (at least before radar fuzed shells came into play). I heard that the Bismark was unable to shoot down any of the attacking Swordfish torpedo bombers because the little biplanes flew so slow the fuzes on the AA shells were going off at the wrong time (I'm assuming they were detonating short of where the bombers were). And on the airstrikes that sunk the Yamato, the Yamato herself only shot down a dozen or so planes (out of hundreds). I know the fire control solutions for hitting aircraft can get pretty complicated; with surface ships you need to estimate range, heading, speed all relative to your position. But at least surface ships are only going to be moving and turning so quickly. But for aircraft all this needs to be calculated plus they are approaching at hundreds of miles an hour, which I bet makes the margin of error pretty huge. Plus there tends to more of them, so they would have to keep making new solutions, while against surface targets you can use shell splashes to adjust. I heard the IJN used dyed shells, presumably so they knew what ship was hitting where (the shell splashes would be a particular color).
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Apr 4, 2014 04:02
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I know the USN used dye loads as well, they weren't a uniquely Japanese invention.
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Apr 4, 2014 04:06
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Panfilo posted:Are torpedoes really that big of a threat to battleships? Aside from the Bismark's rudder getting jammed (more of a Golden BB type moment) and the sinking of the Royal Oak by a U boat that snuck in the harbor, I can't think of any other Battleships that were torpedoed and sunk by submarines. Even torpedo bombers took many direct hits to actually get the ship to capsize, and that's assuming the air group is coordinated enough to all attack it from one side. Yamato's efforts in dodging torpedoes ended up taking it completely out of the battle when they were attacking Taffy 3. HMS Barham and the Japanese Kongo and Haruna. All three sunk by submarines alone. That's not even counting the dozen or so that were sunk in WW1. Torpedoes were actually a major threat to warships of all sizes including battleships. This was something that had been recognized since the 1880s.
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Apr 4, 2014 04:13
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the JJ posted:You can put some BIG loving guns on a boat and have it be more mobile than anything short of, say, train mounted stuff on land. The Iowa had 9 16 inch guns as it's main armament. A quick wikicheck tells me that a modern arty battalion has ~12 ~150 mm guns. So navy guns are way bigger, and you've got about 3/4 of a battalions guns on just one BB, not counting the smaller tubes and AAA. Battleships could put out an incredible amount of firepower, but practical concerns made it not quite as effective as it could be. Because battleships didn't train with landing forces very much, the coordination was often not very good, and in the earlier US landings, surface battlegroups would have to leave to avoid being attacked by aircraft or submarines. This improved gradually over time, but the amount of new ships and new crews who were untrained in shore bombardment limited their effectiveness, too. The more and more I read, the more I learn about the importance of troops in a combined arms group training together. This is probably why the US Armored Division basically became the template for all divisions after World War II; the armored riflemen, armor, and self-propelled guns training together dramatically improved cooperation.
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Apr 4, 2014 04:18
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Panfilo posted:On the IJN Shoho, where is the bridge located? This is a weird carrier that doesn't have an island at all; the top of the ship is a completely flush flight deck. With no island, how the hell does the ship see where its going?! The bridge is under the flight deck at the front of the ship, you can see the windows in upward angled pictures of the ship. Panfilo posted:Are torpedoes really that big of a threat to battleships? Aside from the Bismark's rudder getting jammed (more of a Golden BB type moment) and the sinking of the Royal Oak by a U boat that snuck in the harbor, I can't think of any other Battleships that were torpedoed and sunk by submarines. Even torpedo bombers took many direct hits to actually get the ship to capsize, and that's assuming the air group is coordinated enough to all attack it from one side. Yamato's efforts in dodging torpedoes ended up taking it completely out of the battle when they were attacking Taffy 3. If you want to sink a battleship with gunfire you need a really big gun, and if you're out at sea you need a huge boat to stick that gun on. If you want to sink a battleship with a torpedo you just need to get close enough to launch the torpedo, the size of the boat is irrelevant. Panfilo posted:I heard the IJN used dyed shells, presumably so they knew what ship was hitting where (the shell splashes would be a particular color). Everybody used dyed shells. I know they were at least used as far back as WWI and were probably used much earlier than that. It's a cheap, effective way of figuring out whose splashes are whose when you've got several ships firing.
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Apr 4, 2014 04:24
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WEEDLORDBONERHEGEL posted:Losing is romantic, ask the Irish.
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Apr 4, 2014 04:36
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Fangz posted:Probably near impossible to answer, but how does naval firepower compare to land firepower? Does a battleship equate to the artillery of a division? Or more? You hear examples of battleships being beached as forts... is that mostly a symbolic gesture, or does it make a real difference? I think as far as rate of fire a WWII destroyer could put down roughly similar firepower to ~15 land howitzers by virtue of rate of fire. The real question though was the spotting. There's some pretty sound examples of naval gunfire being way less effective because they couldn't get good spotting for it, such as the German bombardments against Poland right at the start of the war. Taerkar posted:It's also kinda silly how some of the earlier 'Modern' battleships had open fighting positions on top of the main turrets. Positions that would be quite unmannable during an actual fight. Ask the US about the design with the secondary turrets literally fixed on top of the primary turrets. Then again that's why they knew superfiring would work. Panfilo posted:Are torpedoes really that big of a threat to battleships? Aside from the Bismark's rudder getting jammed (more of a Golden BB type moment) and the sinking of the Royal Oak by a U boat that snuck in the harbor, I can't think of any other Battleships that were torpedoed and sunk by submarines. Even torpedo bombers took many direct hits to actually get the ship to capsize, and that's assuming the air group is coordinated enough to all attack it from one side. Yamato's efforts in dodging torpedoes ended up taking it completely out of the battle when they were attacking Taffy 3. Umm. HMS Prince of Wales begs to differ after disemboweling herself after taking a torp hit in the screws from a torp bomber. That's some pretty critical damage, and probably didn't require the followup considering how much machinery and the electrical system went down. And she was a modern ship, hits to the screws are just plain ugly, although stuff like skegs might be able to help to some degree. quote:Its also interesting that for all the guns and lead a Battleship could throw into the air, they sucked at reliably shooting down aircraft (at least before radar fuzed shells came into play). I heard that the Bismark was unable to shoot down any of the attacking Swordfish torpedo bombers because the little biplanes flew so slow the fuzes on the AA shells were going off at the wrong time (I'm assuming they were detonating short of where the bombers were). And on the airstrikes that sunk the Yamato, the Yamato herself only shot down a dozen or so planes (out of hundreds). That didn't help, but the really worse thing was that the guns couldn't depress far enough to get on the biplanes which were flying at wavetop level, where the waves also really fouled up the radar picture of them. The Yamato wasn't supported that well and there were so many planes she got buried under a wave of bombs and torpedoes really quickly. quote:I know the fire control solutions for hitting aircraft can get pretty complicated; with surface ships you need to estimate range, heading, speed all relative to your position. But at least surface ships are only going to be moving and turning so quickly. But for aircraft all this needs to be calculated plus they are approaching at hundreds of miles an hour, which I bet makes the margin of error pretty huge. Plus there tends to more of them, so they would have to keep making new solutions, while against surface targets you can use shell splashes to adjust. Yeah, it's a numbers game. Just fill the air around them with shells and make the shells as effective as you can. Mechanical computers were a huge help there, especially the more advanced ones that didn't require human input once they had their target, and proximity fuzes were huge. Raskolnikov38 posted:I know the USN used dye loads as well, they weren't a uniquely Japanese invention. And the French, and so on, I'm pretty sure basically everyone did. Every battleship got its own color so splashes could be distinguished.
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Apr 4, 2014 05:12
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xthetenth posted:Yeah, it's a numbers game. Just fill the air around them with shells and make the shells as effective as you can. Basically a flak curtain but for ships, then?
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Apr 4, 2014 05:27
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I thought Prince of Wales got screwed because she lost power and her setup was in such a way that they couldn't quickly restore power. Also apparently her 'pom-poms' were ineffective against aircraft.
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Apr 4, 2014 05:27
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Panfilo posted:Its also interesting that for all the guns and lead a Battleship could throw into the air, they sucked at reliably shooting down aircraft (at least before radar fuzed shells came into play). I heard that the Bismark was unable to shoot down any of the attacking Swordfish torpedo bombers because the little biplanes flew so slow the fuzes on the AA shells were going off at the wrong time (I'm assuming they were detonating short of where the bombers were). And on the airstrikes that sunk the Yamato, the Yamato herself only shot down a dozen or so planes (out of hundreds). Is there objective data on these things? At the anecdotal level it's very difficult to compare results effectively. Yamato never really had a chance. They could have dismounted her entire main battery to replace it with antiaircraft guns, and the sheer number of attacking airplanes would have sunk her just as surely. I don't think any small group of aircraft would have enjoyed attacking her, though, and that's really all you can hope for. Anything that floats can sink if you put enough holes in it, but you hope that your armor, passive defenses, and AA guns will give her a chance. In 1942, they were probably right - can you imagine American carrier aircraft of 1942 getting through, say, Hosho's contingent of Zeroes and coming through with enough of a coordinated attack to sink Yamato? I don't love their odds.
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Apr 4, 2014 05:41
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Are there any real examples of land or sea AA totally defeating sizeable air attacks on their own? It seems like lots of armed forces invest crazy amounts of money and resources into AA guns or SAMS or whatever, but at the end of the day none of them are ever as good at killing planes as another airplane.
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Apr 4, 2014 05:49
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Pornographic Memory posted:Are there any real examples of land or sea AA totally defeating sizeable air attacks on their own? It seems like lots of armed forces invest crazy amounts of money and resources into AA guns or SAMS or whatever, but at the end of the day none of them are ever as good at killing planes as another airplane. Well even if AA isn't scoring many direct kills it can still serve as a highly useful deterrent. If it forces bombers to fly much higher or at night or anything that results in poorer accuracy it's served at least some purpose. You also have to take moral into account. How well could soldiers work or civilians support the war effort if you're letting people bomb you without even attempting to shoot back? It sends a really poo poo message that you're basically helpless.
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Apr 4, 2014 05:57
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the JJ posted:A bunch of different times. History is not a linear progression from backwardsness to forwardness. Okay, I'll rephrase: As far as I know, and I could be wrong, but leaders used to lead their troops into battle. Genghis Khan, Tribal warlords, etc. Now, our head of states sit in an office and direct troops. When did this change? And if this never occurred then I guess the movies taught me all wrong.
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Apr 4, 2014 06:06
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It never really changed. Sometimes heads of states led themselves, other times they sent subordinates to do the leading.
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Apr 4, 2014 06:08
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the posted:As far as I know, and I could be wrong, but leaders used to lead their troops into battle. Genghis Khan, Tribal warlords, etc. Now, our head of states sit in an office and direct troops. When did this change? And if this never occurred then I guess the movies taught me all wrong.
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Apr 4, 2014 06:08
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the posted:Okay, I'll rephrase: Probably around the advent of long-distance communication? In 1870, the Emperor of France and the King of Prussia squared off, leading their respective armies. That's not that long ago. Getting your king captured can have pretty bad consequences, as the French have learned many a time, so as soon as your head of state could not put himself in mortal danger, it was probably a good idea to not do that. By the time WW1 rolls around, radios and the telephone let you order massive assaults from the safety of your commandeered chateau, rather than in person, so it's no surprise that that became popular, at least amongst the generals and their staff. As far as the general personally fighting in a battle, that was usually kind of a last-ditch emergency sort of thing. Or an incredibly bad idea. Sometimes both.
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Apr 4, 2014 06:16
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xthetenth posted:Amidships turrets were similar. If triples in a big enough caliber aren't available or workable, then to get the 8-12 guns that seems the sweet spot for battleship armament, then you need either amidships turrets, wing turrets or to run 8 guns in fore and aft superfiring pairs. Or you could do what the French did. I would imaging the amidships turret could fire aft of the beam to a certain extent, and at high elevation, but not by much. Looking at that, the all turrets forward concept looks a lot better, doesn't it ?  This has been a preview of my French carriers post, which is forthcoming.
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Apr 4, 2014 06:17
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WEEDLORDBONERHEGEL posted:I do not remember this. I will look up any mention of gambling, but Kronfeld's book (WHO'S SURPRISED?) has only a rudimentary index.
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Apr 4, 2014 06:36
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Pornographic Memory posted:Are there any real examples of land or sea AA totally defeating sizeable air attacks on their own? It seems like lots of armed forces invest crazy amounts of money and resources into AA guns or SAMS or whatever, but at the end of the day none of them are ever as good at killing planes as another airplane. Not really, although they deter attacks by making for a certain amount of loss and also potentially requiring some of the attacking planes to suppress the AA. Kills alone aren't the only metric of protection. mllaneza posted:Or you could do what the French did. I would imaging the amidships turret could fire aft of the beam to a certain extent, and at high elevation, but not by much. Looking at that, the all turrets forward concept looks a lot better, doesn't it ? I think that design was pretty awful because it managed to have the problems of quadruple turrets, which took a long time to work out in WWII, and an amidships turret to mess the firing up. Also it's a bit later than the time where it got really awkward putting more than 4 or so guns on the ends of a ship (although some of the late 12" US ships had amidships turrets way far back). The all turrets forward design had the advantage of being mechanically twin turrets sitting side by side and concentrating all firepower forward for hunting the German twins they were meant to counter. I wonder if they could've fit two pairs of larger guns fore and aft on that topweight. Might have been too heavy near the ends though. xthetenth fucked around with this message at 07:06 on Apr 4, 2014 |
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Apr 4, 2014 07:01
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mllaneza posted:Or you could do what the French did. I would imaging the amidships turret could fire aft of the beam to a certain extent, and at high elevation, but not by much. Looking at that, the all turrets forward concept looks a lot better, doesn't it ? The arrangement of the 5" guns looks awful. Granted, I'm pretty sure this was a WWI design, but those 5" guns would have pretty narrow fields of fire, sharpy limiting how many could fire at a single target. The other funny thing I heard the French (and a few other nations did at one point or another) was to mount torpedoes on their battleships. On paper, this might not sound like a terrible thing for a Battleship to have- they could fend off ships trying to get close, or use them for night time engagements (the best time to use torpedoes in surface battles). Unfortunately, the torpedoes themselves are a big liability since the launchers tend to be pretty exposed and having all that explosive and fuel detonate due to fires on the superstructure or simply enemy shells hitting them could easily doom a ship.
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Apr 4, 2014 07:19
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Panfilo posted:The arrangement of the 5" guns looks awful. Granted, I'm pretty sure this was a WWI design, but those 5" guns would have pretty narrow fields of fire, sharpy limiting how many could fire at a single target. I'm reasonably sure we talk about how bad casemates were in this very thread. Panfilo posted:The other funny thing I heard the French (and a few other nations did at one point or another) was to mount torpedoes on their battleships. On paper, this might not sound like a terrible thing for a Battleship to have- they could fend off ships trying to get close, or use them for night time engagements (the best time to use torpedoes in surface battles). Unfortunately, the torpedoes themselves are a big liability since the launchers tend to be pretty exposed and having all that explosive and fuel detonate due to fires on the superstructure or simply enemy shells hitting them could easily doom a ship. Basically everyone put torpedoes on battleships, but they weren't in "the superstructure," they were fixed submerged tubes. It makes more sense than you think, since an enemy battleline steaming in line ahead is a pretty loving great torpedo target, even if you have to run the fish slow to get out to even pre-WWI range. You can also use them to finish off a disabled ship that is not in a sinking condition. As likely engagement ranges opened as the years passed, the vulnerabilities outweighed the (admittedly dubious) benefits, and they were removed or filled in.
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Apr 4, 2014 07:48
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the posted:Okay, I'll rephrase: I think it's not that it never changed or whatever, it's just that human history is not a linear progression down a tech tree wherein, at some point someone hits the 'lead from behind' advancement and we all fall in line behind that. I think the most recent head-of-state as real commander in chief, like, involved in planning and moving his physical location to be nearer the front was the last Russian czar, but you can go back as far as, say, mythical Troy, Hector led the armies but Priam was too old so he bummed around the palace. It's not like we're flipping switches between binaries here.
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Apr 4, 2014 08:15
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| # ? May 27, 2024 17:56 |
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Pornographic Memory posted:Are there any real examples of land or sea AA totally defeating sizeable air attacks on their own? It seems like lots of armed forces invest crazy amounts of money and resources into AA guns or SAMS or whatever, but at the end of the day none of them are ever as good at killing planes as another airplane. There's maybe a case to be made for the Helsinki raids made by the Soviet Long-Range Airforce (ADD). The wiki is pretty good on this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Helsinki_in_World_War_II#The_great_raids_of_February_1944 Basically, AA was good enough to disrupt the attacks to the degree where only 5% of the bombs fell onto the targets, which pretty much counts as a total defeat. Of course, there were other factors such as the ADD never really being as good as the USAAF or the Brits at large-scale bombing. Then there's the Egyptian-Israeli experience where for a while, Egyptian air defenses on Sinai absolutely wrecked the Israeli air force.
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Apr 4, 2014 10:03
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