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100 Years Ago Roll up, roll up, see the evacuation of ANZAC show, complete with obligatory stories about self-firing rifles and Clement Attlee being one of the last men out of Suvla Bay. Almost as soon as they're gone, a gale blows in, which is the first thing that's gone right in theatre since...since... Eheheh. Meanwhile: the Schneider CA1 project gets official French support and sanction, Flora Sandes is learning how to sit around doing gently caress-all and wait for something to happen, Louis Barthas goes off on a route-march under the watchful eye of Captain Cros, and Robert Palmer is patronising Tommy Atkins. Blistex posted:have an all out "big gun brawl" in Iron Bottom Sound 
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Dec 20, 2015 18:59
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| # ? Jun 8, 2024 00:19 |
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Nebakenezzer posted:
Possibly. On the other hand, Hiei and Kirishima. bewbies posted:I've long thought that had someone committed to using battleships as the centerpiece of a combined-arms approach that they could have been extremely effective. Call it a...Surface Action Group or something, I guess? When they were moving in open water and had plenty of screens/support, battleships were not terribly vulnerable to air or sub attack and obviously were very dangerous to anything they got close to. Most of the battleship losses of the war happened either in port, or when a navy decided it would be a fine idea to send their capital ships out to do their thing with no or minimal air cover, no ASW support, and only their organic AA to defend them. I think this depends on theater. In the Pacific, the battleship basically can't bring the carrier to battle, and trying to damage the combat capability of a carrier by shooting its planes down with AA isn't a great way to go about it. In the European naval theaters, there's many more restrictions on the carrier, and the battleship has much better chances to pose a real threat to the carriers or provide a critical contribution.
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Dec 20, 2015 19:05
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I could see a plausible scenario in which the IJN doesn't disperse its fleet at Midway and the battleships get a chance to do some damage. At that stage scouting and carrier air operations were much slower and sloppier then they'd be later on. I could have sworn I saw a factoid once that if you wanted to be anally technical about it, there were more battleship vs battleship surface actions than carrier vs carrier during the war.
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Dec 20, 2015 19:12
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xthetenth posted:I think this depends on theater. In the Pacific, the battleship basically can't bring the carrier to battle, and trying to damage the combat capability of a carrier by shooting its planes down with AA isn't a great way to go about it. In the European naval theaters, there's many more restrictions on the carrier, and the battleship has much better chances to pose a real threat to the carriers or provide a critical contribution. Remember that the whole point of a navy is to enable related land operations and shipping; if you can do that without needing to fight a pitched battle you still "win" the naval war. A battleship task force that had a bunch of AAA light cruisers and a fighter-only carrier running counter-air would be a seriously difficult target to attack from the air; it wouldn't have had the range or flexibility of a carrier strike group but it would have been significantly better in surface actions, particularly at night or in bad weather.
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Dec 20, 2015 19:21
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Blistex posted:Someone really needs to remake Task Force 1942 and add the carrier operations from Pacific Air War to it as well. WOW's "health bar" and simplistic mechanics just don't do it for me. I'd kill for a start to finish Pacific campaign where I had to island hop, cut off enemy supplies, land troops, send out carrier strikes, and just have an all out "big gun brawl" in Iron Bottom Sound. Hopping in a fighter/bomber's cockpit wouldn't be deal breaker, but I sure as hell want to be able to take over a fire control station or assign DC parties to different areas. Lol, I'm pretty sure that's waaay outside Wargaming's scope, but it sure is fun to drop a Derski's 10 torps into the side of a South Carolina when he's tunnel visioned on another ship.
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Dec 20, 2015 19:30
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nerds
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Dec 20, 2015 19:35
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Just wait until Gajin adds ships to War Thunder sometime in the early 22nd century.
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Dec 20, 2015 19:48
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bewbies posted:I've long thought that had someone committed to using battleships as the centerpiece of a combined-arms approach that they could have been extremely effective. Call it a...Surface Action Group or something, I guess? When they were moving in open water and had plenty of screens/support, battleships were not terribly vulnerable to air or sub attack and obviously were very dangerous to anything they got close to. Most of the battleship losses of the war happened either in port, or when a navy decided it would be a fine idea to send their capital ships out to do their thing with no or minimal air cover, no ASW support, and only their organic AA to defend them. I like this idea. Though, I think the only people who'd commit to such a thing would have been the United States, for 1) the nighttime fighting reasons you mentioned and 2) they could actually replace the battleships. TBH the Americans are kind of the overdogs when it comes to battleships. Not only could they afford to make the entire ship out of the expensive high-quality steel that most nations reserved for their battleship's armored core, they have great radars which allow for engagement of targets way beyond what other battleships could realistically do.
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Dec 20, 2015 19:54
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Also superior fire control - IIRC the Iowas were the only battleships ever built with fire control computers that could maintain a track while their own ship was maneuvering. I think the idea might have merit if you found yourself with a strong battleship force but a deficient carrier force, but overall, I can't imagine any high command deciding on it as an overall doctrine. The carrier can control a lot more area, where the battleship needs to depend on weather and timing. It's one thing to try that sort of thing on the table and another to drive it home to your sailors that they're going to have to steam at flank speed for 6 hours through enemy air (and possibly sub) attack before they can strike a single blow. Then you catch up and it's quite possible that the enemy has battleship escorts, so it's a superior number of attacking ships but battle damage and fatigue against fresh defenders, and if they even lose a couple knots of speed due to battle damage, then they'll never catch the carriers. If they can't catch the carriers, then they just suffer more air attacks. Yeah, you might break through and sink a carrier with gunfire, but then you might lose everything. It makes more sense in close waters like the Med or North Atlantic. Replace the fighter-only carrier with land-based air and you're not too far from actual Axis doctrine, and the British respected it enough to sacrifice carrier striking power for armor.
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Dec 20, 2015 20:20
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P-Mack posted:I could see a plausible scenario in which the IJN doesn't disperse its fleet at Midway and the battleships get a chance to do some damage. At that stage scouting and carrier air operations were much slower and sloppier then they'd be later on. Yeah, there's easily more BB v BB actions than CV v CV. That's because Germany and Italy had no carriers, the twins get called battleships, and because carriers are brutally effective at murdering carriers. In the pacific: CV: Coral Sea Midway Eastern Solomons Santa Cruz Philippine Sea Cape Engano BB: Second Naval Guadalcanal Surigao Strait In the North Sea: BB: Twins vs. Renown Denmark Strait Bismarck getting murdered Battle of North Cape In the Med: BB: Mers-el-Kebir  Calabria Matapan Spartivento (Kind of) I think that's the full list of only BB vs. CV Zorak of Michigan posted:Also superior fire control - IIRC the Iowas were the only battleships ever built with fire control computers that could maintain a track while their own ship was maneuvering. USS North Carolina was the one that maintained a constant solution in back to back 450 degree turns followed by back to back 100 degree turns, it's all WWII US battleships and maybe WWI ones depending on their refits. And carriers cost a hell of a lot more than just their price tag, there's a ton of wargaming and doctrine development to actually turn a carrier from a box full of kindling to a means of projecting death. Battleships and land based aviation makes a lot of sense for Italy and a good bit of sense for Germany if they could manage it right. It might be viable but would probably be suboptimal in the Pacific unless you were working on a shoestring budget. I'll also mention that I think the British have a long and proud tradition of making wildly suboptimal carriers that hamstring their air wings in a fundamental way. bewbies posted:Remember that the whole point of a navy is to enable related land operations and shipping; if you can do that without needing to fight a pitched battle you still "win" the naval war. A battleship task force that had a bunch of AAA light cruisers and a fighter-only carrier running counter-air would be a seriously difficult target to attack from the air; it wouldn't have had the range or flexibility of a carrier strike group but it would have been significantly better in surface actions, particularly at night or in bad weather. I think this is totally viable as long as any large scale naval transport that needs to happen occurs in confined waters. It's a debate very centered on naval geography. xthetenth fucked around with this message at 20:43 on Dec 20, 2015 |
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Dec 20, 2015 20:21
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You also have to remember that in the atlantic and med carriers aren't nearly the dominant force that they are in most of the pacific. Why? Land based aviation. No CAG is ever going to be as nasty or resilient as its opposite number of land based aircraft. The fact that their airfield can be sunk is just an added headache. BBs in Europe can effectively operate under an umbrella of land based air cover. Conversely if they don't have air superiority they are hard hosed and any CV's in the area won't last too long either. This goes beyond simply striking, as well - land based recon aircraft are a thing. Plus geography means you really don't need them. Why bother flying off of CVs if you have England or manland Europe to stick as many aircraft on as you want? Minus anti-sub work the only actions I can think of that used CVs in numbers for actual strike work were the way early stages of Torch. In the pacific you don't have that luxury and the CVs are frequently the only airplanes around. All the compromises made to be able to do carrier ops don't matter because the other guy is making them too. Also note that the USAAF was deployed in pretty decent numbers in areas like the Solomons where the geography made land-based air feasible. Things get all weird towards the mid-end of the war, but that's mostly due to disparities in aircrew training. Even then, when US carrier groups took on islands with airfields they generally did it in a situation where they outnumbered the gently caress out of the Japanese.
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Dec 20, 2015 20:36
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Taking on land based air is what the Big Blue Blanket got developed for, and that's a complex doctrinal system with some serious requirements in terms of ships and just a huge bucket of air power. Carriers do have a bit of an advantage in being able to put massive amounts of air power up over a small area and overwhelm it, though.
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Dec 20, 2015 20:48
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xthetenth posted:Bismarck getting murdered Lol can we start quoting this as the official battle name
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Dec 20, 2015 20:55
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What can you tell me about the racism in soviet/russian military? All I know it existed and could be pretty nasty.
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Dec 20, 2015 21:34
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Nebakenezzer posted:Lol can we start quoting this as the official battle name The assassination of Bismarck by the coward King George V.
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Dec 20, 2015 22:54
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Raskolnikov38 posted:The assassination of Bismarck by the coward King George V. Honestly Rodney more than KGV.
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Dec 20, 2015 22:56
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So I'll probably be spending a day in London after christmas and I'd like to visit the Imperial War Museum or the British Museum. Is it feasible to visit both without feeling rushed and actually taking stuff in, or am I spreading myself too thin? Obviously the British Museum is massive and you could easily spend a week there, but I only have a day and I'd like to make the most of it.
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Dec 21, 2015 00:04
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Rent-A-Cop posted:Just wait until Gajin adds ships to War Thunder sometime in the early 22nd century. I think one of the Devs mentioned how they had been testing it, and even battles with only a few people on each side were still taking over an hour to complete. Playing WOW is pretty lame, as there are islands everywhere, and everything fires and manoeuvres like a cartoon with Nintendo-era health bars. I played 10 games right after I installed it, and despite not knowing 80% of the controls, or doing a tutorial, I managed to win all of them without getting sunk once, and managing to average about 2-4 kills each map.
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Dec 21, 2015 00:22
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Churchill posted:So I'll probably be spending a day in London after christmas and I'd like to visit the Imperial War Museum or the British Museum. Is it feasible to visit both without feeling rushed and actually taking stuff in, or am I spreading myself too thin? Obviously the British Museum is massive and you could easily spend a week there, but I only have a day and I'd like to make the most of it. I'd do the IWM properly; but then I'm quite miserable about the British Museum (too big and too broad and too much stuff in it for its own good). If there's things in the BM you specifically want to see, fine, but it's not a place I'd go to just to go to it. If you want to do a twofer, I'd make the other one Science/NatHist/V&A (they're all better and you can see at least most of what's in any one of them in an afternoon), or the Museum of London.
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Dec 21, 2015 00:26
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Both of those museums are whole day affairs. You can do the BM in a single day if you don't need to cover every square inch of it to be happy. Frankly it's a great place to just go to with no agenda and aimlessly walk around for 8 hours, discovering cool poo poo as you go.
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Dec 21, 2015 00:39
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Speaking of RN and USN rivalry, I was reading up on Convoy PQ 17 and there's a part where a Leo Gradwell led his ASW trawler and some merchant ships to the Arctic ice shelf using a sextant and his pocket atlas where they painted their ships white and parked Sherman tanks on deck with main guns loaded. Seeing as my only experience with tanks versus boats is from Battlefield 1942, would that actually have been a deterrent against U-Boats? Also kinda amazed but not amazed at the fact that no one got blamed or disciplined and that Stalin was so incredulous at the stupidity of the whole thing that he thought the Allies were holding out on him.
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Dec 21, 2015 01:12
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If the sub surfaced then possibly. They are not armored and handle holes worse than surface ships. Still have to hit them and I doubt the ship had tank gunners.
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Dec 21, 2015 01:16
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Taerkar posted:If the sub surfaced then possibly. They are not armored and handle holes worse than surface ships. Still have to hit them and I doubt the ship had tank gunners. On the other hand, once the tanks open up on them the submariners don't know that the guys firing have no idea what the hell they're doing.
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Dec 21, 2015 01:24
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Taerkar posted:If the sub surfaced then possibly. They are not armored and handle holes worse than surface ships. Still have to hit them and I doubt the ship had tank gunners. I doubt even a veteran tank gunner could hit anything from a rockin ship deck.
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Dec 21, 2015 05:18
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With enough dakka and a short enough range you can hit anything.
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Dec 21, 2015 05:31
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Sometimes merchant marine guys want to play tanker, doesn't seem too far-fetched that they would try it. Doesn't mean it would effective if put to the test.
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Dec 21, 2015 05:51
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I'd imagine that .50BMG would suffice for putting dangerous holes into subs.
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Dec 21, 2015 05:57
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Nenonen posted:I doubt even a veteran tank gunner could hit anything from a rockin ship deck. Sherman DDs  (Its a bad example I know)Depending on the size of the target and its range, a tank could still hit a sub. Even near misses would be very dangerous.
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Dec 21, 2015 06:02
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Xerxes17 posted:I'd imagine that .50BMG would suffice for putting dangerous holes into subs. Nope. Submarine pressure hulls are thick and difficult to penetrate, which shouldn't be surprising considering what their job is. You need a decent-sized shell (4" and larger) to stand a chance of punching through a vital point on a surfaced submarine. The 3"/50s on the destroyer escorts we gave to the Royal Navy fired shells that often bounced off surfaced U-boats.
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Dec 21, 2015 06:12
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ALL-PRO SEXMAN posted:Nope. Submarine pressure hulls are thick and difficult to penetrate, which shouldn't be surprising considering what their job is. You need a decent-sized shell (4" and larger) to stand a chance of punching through a vital point on a surfaced submarine. The 3"/50s on the destroyer escorts we gave to the Royal Navy fired shells that often bounced off surfaced U-boats. Glad to have my  corrected. I have never been much of a botes man.
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Dec 21, 2015 06:39
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ALL-PRO SEXMAN posted:Nope. Submarine pressure hulls are thick and difficult to penetrate, which shouldn't be surprising considering what their job is. You need a decent-sized shell (4" and larger) to stand a chance of punching through a vital point on a surfaced submarine. The 3"/50s on the destroyer escorts we gave to the Royal Navy fired shells that often bounced off surfaced U-boats. Is that because of the flat trajectory or just lack of penetrating power?
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Dec 21, 2015 06:44
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ALL-PRO SEXMAN posted:Nope. Submarine pressure hulls are thick and difficult to penetrate, which shouldn't be surprising considering what their job is. You need a decent-sized shell (4" and larger) to stand a chance of punching through a vital point on a surfaced submarine. The 3"/50s on the destroyer escorts we gave to the Royal Navy fired shells that often bounced off surfaced U-boats. You don't necessarily have to hole a sub's pressure hull to sink it either.
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Dec 21, 2015 07:22
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Does even a little damage to a pressure hull count as a mission kill?
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Dec 21, 2015 07:35
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Rent-A-Cop posted:Spraying down the deck and conning tower with .50 will make life pretty unpleasant for anyone outside the pressure hull, and hey you might even break something important! And while you're spraying and praying the sub launches a torpedo and blows your rear end up.
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Dec 21, 2015 07:46
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ALL-PRO SEXMAN posted:And while you're spraying and praying the sub launches a torpedo and blows your rear end up. Details.
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Dec 21, 2015 07:48
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ALL-PRO SEXMAN posted:And while you're spraying and praying the sub launches a torpedo and blows your rear end up. What does doctrine call for? Do subs that surface to use their deck gun follow behind the ship, or do they pull up besides them?
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Dec 21, 2015 09:06
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Fish of hemp posted:What can you tell me about the racism in soviet/russian military? All I know it existed and could be pretty nasty. Well, you really wanted to be white, because the Russians had little regard for anyone slightly Asian/Muslim. One Osprey I read positioned that the internal security troops of the USSR were made up of those some guys because they're "cruel and hate Russians" which is perfect if you like putting down rebellions by drowning them in blood.
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Dec 21, 2015 09:51
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Standard MO was to use security personnel from elsewhere in the empire, so they don't get subverted by the locals and are only accountable to the central government. So Russians in chechnya, Chechens in moscow, who cares what happens when the government loses its monopoly on violence.
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Dec 21, 2015 10:56
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Jobbo_Fett posted:Sherman DDs Um, given they weren't supposed to fire while they were swimming, yeah... 
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Dec 21, 2015 11:01
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| # ? Jun 8, 2024 00:19 |
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JcDent posted:Well, you really wanted to be white, because the Russians had little regard for anyone slightly Asian/Muslim. See also pre-revolutionary Cossacks. (well not necessarily hate but they're less likely to think 'oh these guys are ordinary Russians just like me, I'm not gonna shoot them').
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Dec 21, 2015 11:02
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