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Kemper Boyd posted:Then again, recorded forums history. It’s also hardly classified that various SAMs have a surface-attack mode.
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Jun 4, 2021 13:23
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Phanatic posted:It’s also hardly classified that various SAMs have a surface-attack mode. I didn't want to make a meal of it but that's an issue where I thought the Quora Yamato insanity got into chaotic territory. I don't think one SAM in pop-up surface attack mode is going to maul Yamato badly. Having every SAM-equipped ship in a carrier battle group going into panic mode and firing them as fast as they can at one mile range seems like a different story. I don't think they'd actually penetrate the deck armor by themselves, but by the time she's eaten 50+ hits, everything above the citadel that can burn will be burning. If fires reach ready ammo, things could get exciting. If fires get through turret protections into a secondary or AA magazine, life on board could get downright sporty.
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Jun 4, 2021 15:48
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Can they hit something that close? Ie do they do the crazy cold start thing where they just barely jack-in-the-box out of the launcher and then point themselves in the direction where they wanna be going?
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Jun 4, 2021 16:59
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Can't the Phalanx guns be manually/optically aimed? Put 2000 20mm rounds into the gun directors and then aim for the bridge
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Jun 4, 2021 18:04
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Wouldn't the bridge be armored?
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Jun 4, 2021 18:17
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Phalanx can fire on surface targets I believe. Still not sure it or the SAMs would any noticeable damage, though.
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Jun 4, 2021 18:18
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aphid_licker posted:Can they hit something that close? Ie do they do the crazy cold start thing where they just barely jack-in-the-box out of the launcher and then point themselves in the direction where they wanna be going? How far away was the Saratoga from the Turkish destroyer it blew the poo poo out of with Sea Sparrows? According to the JAG report first missile was fired at 0004:41 and impacted at 0004:58. I can't make out enough detail on this chart to see what the distance is but perhaps someone here more familiar with the format could tell?  Cessna posted:Wouldn't the bridge be armored? Depends. Like, in the middle of the bridge there's the conning tower, and if you were expecting action you'd be in there and closed up and behind something like 20" of armor. But if you just poofed into existence a mile away from an angry DDG you'd be vulnerable for a little bit .
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Jun 4, 2021 18:23
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If everything that isn't armored on the Yamato is out of commission, can it still fight?
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Jun 4, 2021 18:26
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:If everything that isn't armored on the Yamato is out of commission, can it still fight? In the technical sense that a blind cripple can throw a punch, yes.
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Jun 4, 2021 18:45
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Hannibal Rex posted:This may not be exactly what you have in mind, but since you haven't had many takers so far: a good starting point for the early Cold War would be looking up George Kennan and the Long Telegram. Thank you! This was good stuff.
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Jun 4, 2021 18:58
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aphid_licker posted:Can they hit something that close? Ie do they do the crazy cold start thing where they just barely jack-in-the-box out of the launcher and then point themselves in the direction where they wanna be going? Figure it'll take a little time to go from "eating waffles at Sunday brunch" to "oh poo poo fire the missiles", during which they're going to be opening up as much distance as they can. CIWS can be manually aimed but I think it would be an interesting exercise to see whether they can get to a firing condition before they're out of the effective range. TooMuchAbstraction posted:If everything that isn't armored on the Yamato is out of commission, can it still fight? Going by the descriptions from Neptune's Inferno, pretty much as long as one of those ships is still floating it can probably do something, but it's going to be heavily degraded pretty quickly. You're going from coordinated fire with high-quality targeting to a local turret director manually eyeballing it through smoke and fire and picking his own targets after all the fancier stuff gets blown off. I don't think it would survive long enough for the air wing to launch against it though, all the escorts are going to start dropping SM-6 on it ASAP. Even if that doesn't sink it outright it's going to be a giant bathtub full of burning shrapnel after enough of those.
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Jun 4, 2021 19:04
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Phanatic posted:How far away was the Saratoga from the Turkish destroyer it blew the poo poo out of with Sea Sparrows? According to the JAG report first missile was fired at 0004:41 and impacted at 0004:58. My uncle was on the Saratoga during that incident and I got to visit once it got back to port in Jacksonville for refit. He showed me the launcher that still had an empty slot for the Sparrow that got fired. That's my story. I am part of MilHist now. Thanks for listening.
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Jun 4, 2021 19:07
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What if they had orders not to damage Yamato but board and capture it intact so it can be turned into a museum/floating casino?
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Jun 4, 2021 19:13
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Wingnut Ninja posted:You're going from coordinated fire with high-quality targeting to a local turret director manually eyeballing it through smoke and fire and picking his own targets after all the fancier stuff gets blown off. How much training and practice would you generally get in doing that during the run-up to WW2?
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Jun 4, 2021 19:15
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Nenonen posted:What if they had orders not to damage Yamato but board and capture it intact so it can be turned into a museum/floating casino? How much would an EMP disrupt the Yamato's fighting capability? How about a giant videoscreen showing an episode of a shipgirl anime?
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Jun 4, 2021 19:18
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poisonpill posted:Hey history guys, I've been told this thread is the place to ask about military history. I'd like some recommendations on the operational and strategic thinking and military / political footholds of the Cold War. I've read Command and Control, the Dead Hand, a bunch of stuff about Vietnam and the CIA. I'd like to know more about operations in Latin America, the balance of power, and especially how politics shaped and opened up following the collapse of the Soviet Union. If this is too broad of a question, I'll take just good stories and well-regarded general non-fiction. I'm just looking to shore up my knowledge in this area, not write a paper or anything. On the political side, Kinzer's The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles & Their Secret World War and Bevin's The Jakarta Method: Washington's Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World uncover some of the hidden history of the Cold War you're asking about, . The short answer is that the US had a secret weapon, and it was the right-wing death squad. These two books have a strong perspective about the basically deadly nature of US foreign policy in the 20th century in service to a rigid anti-Communism. An actual senior Cold War historian of my acquaintance says that Westad's The Cold War: A World History is "Simply the best single volume political history of the Cold War", but I haven't read it myself. And to get into the nitty gritty of procurement policy, Enthoven's How Much Is Enough?: Shaping the Defense Program, 1961-1969 is a study by one of the major actors of how the "just build it, we cannot allow a missile gap!" attitude of the early Cold War evolved into an attempt to put some limits on defense spending.
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Jun 4, 2021 19:23
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Tomn posted:How much training and practice would you generally get in doing that during the run-up to WW2? I don't remember if Neptune's Inferno talks about how much they trained that way, or how effective it was, but it was a mode they planned and designed for, so presumably they practiced it at least a little. Probably not with as much smoke and fire though. Then again you'd think the Navy would test new torpedo designs to make sure they actually worked, but  .
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Jun 4, 2021 19:39
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Russian SSN following the carrier around sees the Yamato and think they've been teleported back to WWII
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Jun 4, 2021 19:50
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Phanatic posted:How far away was the Saratoga from the Turkish destroyer it blew the poo poo out of with Sea Sparrows? According to the JAG report first missile was fired at 0004:41 and impacted at 0004:58. This article says 3 miles. God what a clusterfuck. What a moronic cascade of poo poo decisions. "I know! Let's wake up some out-of-the-loop people in the middle of the night so they can run a simulated missile firing (which they've never done) then not tell them it's an exercise, ignore them when they specifically ask if it's a drill, then order them to "arm" and then "fire", while they are sitting at the actual missile control panel pushing buttons live!" Everything says the actual missile operators weren't punished, I really hope that's true. They had zero expectation of being involved in the exercise, then got woken up in the middle of the night, not told it was a drill despite them asking, then explicitly ordered to fire. What the gently caress else were they supposed to do? I feel like if I was an officer watching a dude push buttons on a live weapons system, I would not say "arm" and then "fire" unless I actually wanted them to you know, fire.
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Jun 4, 2021 19:58
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Phanatic posted:How far away was the Saratoga from the Turkish destroyer it blew the poo poo out of with Sea Sparrows? According to the JAG report first missile was fired at 0004:41 and impacted at 0004:58. The scale's not noted on that moboard, but if you tell me what islands those are and the distance between them, I think I can.
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Jun 4, 2021 20:02
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Uncle Enzo posted:Everything says the actual missile operators weren't punished, I really hope that's true. They had zero expectation of being involved in the exercise, then got woken up in the middle of the night, not told it was a drill despite them asking, then explicitly ordered to fire. What the gently caress else were they supposed to do? Even then, I would be totally devastated if I suddenly realized that my idiot bosses made me push a button that caused the deaths of several people and an international incident. How could I continue my service after that? Just the investigation itself must have left a terrible taste.
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Jun 4, 2021 20:06
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piL posted:The scale's not noted on that moboard, but if you tell me what islands those are and the distance between them, I think I can. The big island is Chios.
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Jun 4, 2021 20:09
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Biffmotron posted:On the political side, Kinzer's The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles & Their Secret World War and Bevin's The Jakarta Method: Washington's Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World uncover some of the hidden history of the Cold War you're asking about, . The short answer is that the US had a secret weapon, and it was the right-wing death squad. These two books have a strong perspective about the basically deadly nature of US foreign policy in the 20th century in service to a rigid anti-Communism. An actual senior Cold War historian of my acquaintance says that Westad's The Cold War: A World History is "Simply the best single volume political history of the Cold War", but I haven't read it myself. Thank you for this. This looks right up my alley. Kinzer's The Brothers audiobook first up.
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Jun 4, 2021 20:13
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Nenonen posted:The big island is Chios.   I calibrated off of the difference between Chios and Daskalio. I used the calibration tool in drawboard, but you can't trust the level of precision described there, so here's what's going on: the distance between the two islands is 11.37 statute miles (mi), which is about 10 nautical miles (nm) or 20,000 yards. I copied the same length directly north and you'll see it goes to the fourth ring. One ring on the chart normally represents 1,000 yards or 1nm, and you can scale either 5:1, 2:1, 3:1, 4:1, or 5:1. In this case, it looks like they're using thousands of yards and the 5:1 scale. So each ring represents 5,000 yards (or you could use the far right scale, though I can't really make it out at this resolution). That puts TCG Muavenet about 7,000 yards (or 3.5 nm) away from the USS Saratoga on this maneuvering board. Drawboard describes this as 4.13 mi which converts to 3.59nm, but based on a lack of precision in my calibration and how this information would have been reported, do not trust that level of precision. 4 statute miles is an appropriate estimate.
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Jun 4, 2021 20:48
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Dumbass Yamato chat continued because I'm honestly curious - at close range, am I right in thinking that whether a Standard managed to arm and detonate, the target would be getting spattered with an assload of burning solid rocket propellant? That's the part I'm really struggling to wrap my head around. Superbattleship takes no damage from explosives, but now it's liberally sprinkled with something not far short of thermite. What even happens? This part of the scenario interests me a lot more than the "durr Carl Vinson is helpless against battleship guns" crap. Edit: I hope the minimum engagement distance for Standard isn't public at all, but even if it is and it's too short for the Quora scenario, I'm taking the missiles anyway. Yamato gets a time/space rift, USA gets a tweaked missile guidance algorithm. Re: what can Yamato do without her superstructure? Well, the turrets have their own rangefinders. They can't match what's in the superstructure but they'll probably good to at least 10k yards. Odds are smoke will interfere with line of sight before the horizon does. Figure the battleship can probably get a couple more salvos off under local control before the smoke or smoke screen ruins their fun. (Unless the answer to my question above turns out to be real interesting.) As the range grows, the ship might also be able to generate misses, since time of flight grows, and the individual turrets don't have directors that can integrate predicted target motion, much less unpredictable target motion.
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Jun 4, 2021 20:53
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Uncle Enzo posted:God what a clusterfuck. What a moronic cascade of poo poo decisions. "I know! Let's wake up some out-of-the-loop people in the middle of the night so they can run a simulated missile firing (which they've never done) then not tell them it's an exercise, ignore them when they specifically ask if it's a drill, then order them to "arm" and then "fire", while they are sitting at the actual missile control panel pushing buttons live!" 
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Jun 4, 2021 21:09
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Uncle Enzo posted:This article says 3 miles. Anyone have a good write up of this? I never heard of this incident before today.
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Jun 4, 2021 21:27
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Zorak of Michigan posted:
At that short a range and that large a gun I'd expect you could just aim directly with the turret sights right? Like in a lay the sight on the target and fire sort of way. If anything the problem might be the shells being too hardened? Would an armor piercing shell go right through an unarmored CV? Though maybe they bring along HE of some variety for that.
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Jun 5, 2021 03:03
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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I'd be real surprised if a CVN didn't activate an AP fuse. They don't have belts but they're heavily built ships, because the designers knew they might be eating supersonic ASMs, and built them with multiple layers of passive defenses.
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Jun 5, 2021 03:13
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Zorak of Michigan posted:I'd be real surprised if a CVN didn't activate an AP fuse. They don't have belts but they're heavily built ships, because the designers knew they might be eating supersonic ASMs, and built them with multiple layers of passive defenses. They’re also built with the idea that a jet might plow into the deck on a bad landing. There’s a certain level of robustness that goes along with the possibility of that.
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Jun 5, 2021 04:34
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:Did they also get training on allied equipment? I'm sure there were situations where a GI might end up with a looted Bren gun or so on. Nice! I have heard that Canadian and ANZAC air forces always had their eye out for .50 cals, as the standard kit was Browning .303s, which had a fantastic rate of fire but lacked the punch of the .50 Was this also a thing in the army? If so, I understand Question: when it came to torpedo bombers and dive bombers in the Pacific during World War 2, did the ratios of bombers change as the war went on? I ask because it strikes me that torpedo bombers, if they can land the attack, have a good chance of crippling/operationally knocking out even the biggest warships. But, because of the limited way you have to attack, it means the attack is easier to dodge/your fighters can just massacre the torpdeo bombers if they are in the proper position. In contrast, while a 1000 lb bomb will definately gently caress poo poo up, you'd actually need many hits to accomplish what one or two torpedo hits would do, unless you got lucky. But, the tradeoff is that dive bombers can attack in a few different ways, and they seem to be more survivable than the TBs. Now I know that Hellcast and Corsairs could attack as well as be fighters, but I guess I'm wondering if either side would hold back on deploying torpedo bombers but always deploy dive bombers, or what
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Jun 5, 2021 18:54
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Nebakenezzer posted:Question: when it came to torpedo bombers and dive bombers in the Pacific during World War 2, did the ratios of bombers change as the war went on? I ask because it strikes me that torpedo bombers, if they can land the attack, have a good chance of crippling/operationally knocking out even the biggest warships. But, because of the limited way you have to attack, it means the attack is easier to dodge/your fighters can just massacre the torpdeo bombers if they are in the proper position. In contrast, while a 1000 lb bomb will definately gently caress poo poo up, you'd actually need many hits to accomplish what one or two torpedo hits would do, unless you got lucky. But, the tradeoff is that dive bombers can attack in a few different ways, and they seem to be more survivable than the TBs. The biggest change on carrier aircraft as the war went on was increasing fighters and reducing bombers. They recognized the need for a lot of fighters for strong CAP, and later fighter models could carry rockets and bombs to act as fighter-bombers anyways, especially when striking ground targets. They basically doubled the size of the fighter wings, some of that was accommodated by building larger carriers and some by reducing the bomber component. Consider Enterprise as an example, at the start of the war her air group was 18 Wildcat fighters, 36 SBD-2 Dauntlesses for scouting and dive bombing, and 18 TBD Devastators for torpedoes. In the fall of 1944 her air group is 36 Hellcat fighters, 20 SB2C Helldivers, and 16 TBM Avengers. They cut more from the dive bombers than the torpedoes, some of that is because there were more dive bombers to start with and some because that's the role easier to replace with a Hellcat as a fighter-bomber.
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Jun 5, 2021 19:14
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I wonder how much of this all was a side effect of all the US torpedoes being hot garbage too. Did even one US torpedo cause any damage at Midway?
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Jun 5, 2021 19:35
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Rocko Bonaparte posted:I wonder how much of this all was a side effect of all the US torpedoes being hot garbage too. Did even one US torpedo cause any damage at Midway? Air dropped torpedoes didn't score a single hit during Midway, the wiki page for the Mark 13 has a large section about efforts taken to fix it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_13_torpedo quote:In mid-1943 an analysis of 105 torpedoes dropped at speeds in excess of 150 knots (280 km/h) showed clearly why aviators distrusted the Mark 13: 36 percent ran cold, 20 percent sank, 20 percent had poor deflection performance, 18 percent gave unsatisfactory depth performance, 2 percent ran on the surface, and only 31 percent gave a satisfactory run.
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Jun 5, 2021 20:01
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Massed air torpedo attacks against enemy fleets were already obsolete before Midway, it just took all of VT-8 and most of VT-6 and VT-3 eating poo poo for the navy to begin to realize it.
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Jun 5, 2021 20:20
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Rocko Bonaparte posted:I wonder how much of this all was a side effect of all the US torpedoes being hot garbage too. Did even one US torpedo cause any damage at Midway? While that was certainly a factor, most of the issues that the US torpedo bombers faced at midway were due to strike coherence issues and flying obsolete aircraft, rather than technical malfunctions of the torpedos themselves. Had the strikes been conducted with Avengers and arrived in coherent, escorted packages, we’d probably talk about the early-war Mark 13 in the same breath as the early-war Mark 14. They were both terrible. Note that I don’t think substituting Avengers for Devastators would have made a damned bit of difference. The TBF detachment from VT-8 flying from Midway got savaged almost as badly as VT-8 proper. I just think that the obsolescence of the TBD overshadows the real issue: The torpedo attack profile puts you in a ludicrously vulnerable position: Low and slow in the slowest, largest aircraft in a carrier air group, flying into the teeth of both the fighters and the AAA from the enemy surface units. All of that said, towards the end of the war the Mark 13 was actually a pretty good torpedo, but the vulnerability of torpedo bombers had become clear to everyone involved. Pretty much all of the dedicated torpedo bomber projects then ongoing were cancelled (XTB2D, XTB2F,) developed into more generalized attack aircraft (XBT2D/AD-1,) or re-tasked into other missions (XTB3F/AF.) (And to be fair the Skyraider was designed as a multipurpose dive/torpedo bomber from the beginning, and was even briefly known as the Dauntless II.) EFB: MRC48B posted:Massed air torpedo attacks against enemy fleets were already obsolete before Midway, it just took all of VT-8 and most of VT-6 and VT-3 eating poo poo for the navy to begin to realize it.
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Jun 5, 2021 20:26
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MRC48B posted:Massed air torpedo attacks against enemy fleets were already obsolete before Midway, it just took all of VT-8 and most of VT-6 and VT-3 eating poo poo for the navy to begin to realize it. That's a really weird take given how successful both Japanese and American torpedo bombers were during the war. I mean, at Midway specifically the Japanese torpedo planes are what crippled Yorktown and set her up to sink. Hornet was also crippled at Santa Cruz by a pair of hits from torpedo bombers, leading to her eventual sinking. Later war after the US un-hosed their torpedos the Avenger did some loving poo poo to Japanese surface ships and shipping. Most famously the Yamato - she took 11 torpedos and about half as many bomb hits and it was the torpedos that did her in.
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Jun 5, 2021 20:27
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Cyrano4747 posted:That's a really weird take given how successful both Japanese and American torpedo bombers were during the war. I mean, at Midway specifically the Japanese torpedo planes are what crippled Yorktown and set her up to sink. I'm not saying they didn't get hits in, but as the above poster wrote out, torp bombers are much, much easier to shoot down vs dive bombers. Also my phrase was massed attacks vs escorted fleets. Avengers did indeed work great against lone or poorly defended targets like merchants or subs caught on the surface. Basically unless you have complete air superiority, torpedo bombing is a suicide run.
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Jun 5, 2021 20:43
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Cyrano4747 posted:That's a really weird take given how successful both Japanese and American torpedo bombers were during the war. I mean, at Midway specifically the Japanese torpedo planes are what crippled Yorktown and set her up to sink. Even early war US torpedo bombers had some good days, sinking carriers Shoho at Coral Sea and Ryujo at Eastern Solomons. Even with all the flaws in the Devastator, Avenger, and Mark 13, a torpedo is still the best way to get water into a ship if you're willing to take the losses from the guys going in.
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Jun 5, 2021 20:43
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MrYenko posted:While that was certainly a factor, most of the issues that the US torpedo bombers faced at midway were due to strike coherence issues and flying obsolete aircraft, rather than technical malfunctions of the torpedos themselves. British torpedo bombers were pretty effective, despite being largely obsolete. Part of this was because the RN was the only one of the major powers to develop night strike doctrine and techniques; its a lot easier to make a torpedo approach, even in a slow aircraft, when no fighters are airborne. Part of it comes from the fact that the British torpedo attack looked very different from the American one. The Americans came in at low level, throughout. The British attack started at 5,000 feet, diving rapidly to drop at about 100 feet at a few thousand yards from the target. This meant they had both more speed when attacking, and an ability to manoeuvre during the approach. This faster approach was enabled by their torpedoes, which could be dropped at about 50 knots higher airspeed than the Mark 13, and from a higher altitude.
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Jun 5, 2021 20:46
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