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Arquinsiel posted:One of the things I'm learning from this thread is that the difference between a lay person (like me) and a scholar (like lots of you) is that we tend to read a buttload of stuff on the subject, but you guys seem to know what the progression from Understanding A to Understanding B is with <topic> and the logic behind why that understanding changed. Yeah, a lot of the most valuable stuff isn't the history it's the historiography. Does that tend to come from focusing enough on a subject that you look at all the various views and compare/contrast how they changed with time?
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Feb 5, 2014 01:28
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WEEDLORDBONERHEGEL posted:No, it's deliberate and targeted. There are books out there which do nothing but give you an overview of a topic's historiography and major arguments. Do want. Are there any subjects where the historiography is particularly interesting? (I love military doctrine because looking at patterns of thought is fascinating, and I have a feeling historiography is similarly so).
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Feb 5, 2014 03:28
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It's probably worth mention that the Sherman had one serious advantage over a Panther in a tankfight as far as acquiring targets quickly goes that isn't as well known as the slow, ungainly Panther turret. The Sherman's gunner had a set of unity periscopes that he could use for visibility when the tank was moving and for when he was acquiring targets, while the Panther gunner was limited only to his gunsight, which meant he was looking for things with a tiny field of vision compared to the Sherman gunner.
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Feb 7, 2014 09:45
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There's another problem. Without an unmagnified sight, the gunner wouldn't be able to see while the tank was moving. There was a late war program to develop a stabilized gunsight to help with that, but it never got done afaik.
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Feb 7, 2014 20:30
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ProfessorCurly posted:The problem with WWII era stabilizers is even if the gun/sight is stabilized, you aren't. You're moving with the tank and over rough terrain you're getting thrown about just like everyone else. A complaint about the stabilizer found on American tanks was that its independent movement in the turret made it a working hazard. I've seen the unity periscopes on the Sherman mentioned as being useful on the move (not the gunsight though, if I remember right the benefit of the stabilized gun was mainly having it pointing near where you might want it to be).
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Feb 8, 2014 04:23
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Pimpmust posted:If Wargame has taught me anything it's that a T-34 is perfectly decent in a infantry fire-support role even in a modern war, or to eat up ATGMs that are probably worth more than the tank I remember a pretty strongly voiced opinion from somebody that a tank is better than no tank no matter what kind of tank. Stuff like mid WWII tanks doing inordinate amounts of work supporting infantry in Southeast Asia during the rough timeframe of the Vietnam war. The firepower and that it can only really be engaged by particular weapons makes it a much harder time for the infantry without a tank. So yeah, that infantry fire-support role is apparently pretty useful.
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Feb 13, 2014 21:17
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Nenonen posted:I'm game. My technicals are equipped with ATGM launchers that outrange your T-34, now what? Yes, I get several technicals at the cost of you supporting your silly old tank, because logistics. And we're fighting this on a flat featureless plain in a vacuum and the tank and technicals are both spherical masses?
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Feb 13, 2014 22:53
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At the very most I'd want an apc for my juvenile dreams. You can get an OT-64 skot for cheap and iirc it's amphibious as well. Gas economy and not wrecking roads are nice. Never not logistics.
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Feb 14, 2014 08:57
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gradenko_2000 posted:The last bit of trivia I want to share is that the Japanese Navy would load their shells with colored dye, to make differentiation of fall of shot supposedly even easier. There are quite a few accounts of the Battle of Leyte Gulf where the USN destroyers are darting and dashing and charging the Japanese battleships in clouds and torrents of pink, red, orange and green That wasn't just a Japanese thing. The French used them (Richelieu was yellow and Jean Bart orange), the US used them (Iowa was orange, New Jersey was blue, Missouri was red and Wisconsin was green), so I have a feeling that navies which didn't use them by that point were the exception. Speaking of battleship gunnery, does anybody have any information on how accurate the Richelieu class' gunnery was? I haven't been able to find a source and someone argued that it was atrocious during WWII in broken enough second language english that I don't really have enough to identify his source.
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Feb 16, 2014 22:26
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Raskolnikov38 posted:Behold Imperial Japanese Navy carrier battleship Ise. Amusingly I've been somewhat convinced that that was an actual upgrade because WWI battleship guns weren't as useful to the IJN as another place to put planes, especially scout planes in the air from. Very goofy looking though, and the concrete to replace the weight of the turrets never fails to amuse me.
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Feb 19, 2014 00:25
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Umm, wasn't he killed by the elder gods when the plan to resurrect an SS division at lake Totenkopf was foiled by the four Dillinger triplets and buried as a Jew?
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Mar 16, 2014 01:37
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Tekopo posted:Another question about pre-WW2 boats: What effect did the switch from coal to oil have? Is oil-burning that much more efficient than coal-burning? I know that coal was both difficult to bring into a ship and also required a lot of crew to work their rear end off in order to keep the fire stoked, as well as the entire process of coaling at sea being time-consuming and potentially dangerous, but apart from that, is oil an improvement? Turbines were available for both coal and oil-powered ship, so I'm not sure if there is any performance increase when switching from one to the other. Another part of oil being significantly more energy dense is that for a while coal fired ships were rigged to spray their coal with oil to enable higher speeds. The other huge point about the switch to oil is that oil fields aren't in the same places as coal, which had some pretty huge ramifications strategically.
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Mar 24, 2014 19:16
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Panfilo posted:I'm curious about the different configurations they had on various Battleships in history. The HMS Nelson, for example, had all 3 turrets in the front. Why? Was there a particular advantage in doing this? The Nelsons were rather distinctive. They were designed to a weight limit and they were also the British 16" armed ships to match the US Colorados and Japanese Nagatos. All that and the lessons of Jutland combined to lead to some interesting decisions to make a ship armed with and armored against 16". The turrets were brought together to both minimize the size and dispersal of the magazines and because the British were doing something weird. Unlike the vast majority of battleships, they loosened the design restriction on the protected waterline required. Most battleships wouldn't see a benefit from grouping the turrets like that, but because the British were prepared to sacrifice protected bouyancy reserve, they saved a lot of weight with that layout. Enough so that the US, who'd been building ships to a weight limit for almost the entire life of their battleship design staff was left scratching their heads as to how the British had pulled it off.
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Apr 3, 2014 18:26
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Panfilo posted:That's really interesting about the Nelsons. Very creative design. Yeah, it's interesting that there were three treaty battleship classes armed with and "armored against" 16" fire. Considering the sacrifices made on the North Carolinas (being armored as 14" armed ships didn't help matters) and the south Dakotas (first to go postwar because between the armor and guns the crew was notoriously uncomfortable) decades later, the Nelsons don't look that bad at all.
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Apr 3, 2014 20:14
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Panfilo posted:What was the logic behind using shell diameter to determine armor protection? It seems like they would try to "match" these elements- 14" of armor needed to stop a 14" shell for example. But this doesn't make any sense- how is the shell's diameter being such a big factor? Wouldn't weight, hardness, and velocity play a bigger role? Shell diameter is for battleships a rather reliable indicator of penetration capability. Some guns are better than others but barring something really unusual (read USN superheavy shells, which were good enough to make a 16" shell pen about as well as the Japanese 18", and to make the US 18"/47 Mk A's penetration sobering) the guns with the same diameter will penetrate similarly. It's not like tank guns where some have lower penetrating guns because they're shorter lower velocity guns (makes their HE shell better because the walls on the shells don't have to be as thick), pretty much all of them are 45-50 calibers long. There's not that much variation between countries within that (the Italian 15" was particularly high velocity because they were probably going to have repair facilities so they could get replacement liners easily when they wore their rifling out but that meant only 6% faster on a 10% heavier shell, than the Bismarck which traded shell weight and speed for a higher rate of fire). The rationale with the armor being matched somewhat to the protection (which notably didn't happen with battlecruisers) was that a battleship which was armored against her own guns was a balanced design. Armoring a battleship is another kettle of worms but it's basically trying to protect against a given gun within a reasonably sized area (the immune zone, defined with a minimum range under which the guns would penetrate the belt armor on the sides and a maximum range beyond which plunging shells would penetrate the deck armor). So anyway, in the context of an arms race, the idea of balanced ships is compelling because by armoring and arming for a given shell, you're making a ship that can comprehensively outclass last generation. The guns and armor on a ship are where the weight goes, so one comes at the expense of the other. Thus the emphasis on balancing them. Speed is the third major component of the balance, with machinery and hull form both playing a part. Machinery is expensive and heavy. It's not topweight so it's not coming entirely out of the same budget, but it's still weight. Hull form is a matter of shaping the hull so it gives the least resistance in the water. There's a problem there, and that's that the ideal hull is longer and/or thinner the ideal as far as fitting everything in the hull goes. The magazines and torpedo defenses have a set width, so to get the fineness ratio right the hull needs to get longer. This doesn't necessarily cost weight, but in practice it costs weight because more hull length means more waterline which means more armor. The Nelson was different in that they went with a really long hull but didn't protect as much waterline so they could get the armor thickness and the guns they needed. That's how they got a decent speed on so little horsepower. About super battleships, battleships scale up to fit what metallurgy, gun designs and their country's economy can do. The biggest baddest battleship you can afford to build and operate a few of (unless you're South American and want a national naval phallic symbol) is going to be the most useful. 35k tons gets you a balanced 15" or so ship. 70k tons gets you a balanced 18" ship. That 18" ship can drub the 15" ships remorselessly without much chance of losing. The rule of thumb as far as I can tell is if you can get the numbers, make them as big as you can support. You do need the numbers to protect from stuff like how the South Dakota got blinded right before the Washington executed the Kirishima. The Guadalcanal campaign is pretty illustrative about that sort of thing, the importance of some level of numbers but also how badly a superior battleship will murder an inferior one. Brass vs silk propellant storage: yeah it's a bit of a help, the Germans did do the brass thing, it helps with sparks but if there's a fire or something, the heat will probably cook it off anyway. Probably e;fb as all get out, and it's a phone post so fact checking soon in an edit. Sorry about the organization or lack thereof too. xthetenth fucked around with this message at 01:44 on Apr 4, 2014 |
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Apr 4, 2014 01:16
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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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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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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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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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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. The side with the torpedoes continually won USN wargames in 1903, which is why they had the things and they considered a heavily armored and fast torpedo battleship using the light weight of a comparatively heavy torpedo armament (the Schofields were left behind by dreadnaught progress though, with battlecruisers looking more useful overall, and later wargames had them getting wiped out before they got into range, and the conclusion that "any increased range of the torpedo up to and beyond gun range was a point more in favor of the destroyer type than of the torpedo battleship type" as well as the things needing to be ahead of even battlecruiser machinery by enough that it wasn't feasible). The idea is more what the torpedoes can do to the coherency of the enemy's battle line, which would have major ramifications for their ability to coordinate maneuver and so on. They were a weakness which is why they got taken out but for a while they made at least theoretical sense. The USN wound up taking a cut of half a knot in order to get a four torpedo broadside on Battleship 1916, but war experience of ships not being able to launch above 16 knots and the underwater damage ships took led to abovewater tubes only from the BB 49 (South Dakota) class onwards with calls to remove all torpedoes happening in 1924. Slim Jim Pickens posted:Here's a German cruiser with a funky turret scheme. Probably. The turrets remind me of a US interwar scheme from when they were trying designs with all turrets forward out, and they tried to offset the back two turrets to improve their firing arcs. Apparently the dead zone aft was only 6 degrees.
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Apr 4, 2014 17:57
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Panfilo posted:Wouldn't the offset turrets affect the balance of the ship? I don't think the Ises were that terrible actually. Better a way to get a few more fighters in the air than yet another obsolescent battleship. It's not like the Fuso or Yamashiro did anything at all. As far as other hybrids go, there's the worst aircraft carrier ever built in my opinion, the early set up of the HMS Furious:  What makes it so so awful? They wanted to land on that goofy forward deck. With the superstructure and the uptakes in the way. So the pilots had to fly right around the bridge and the huge amounts of turbulence from her exhaust and then sideslip onto the deck. Yeah. They didn't intend for the planes to be able to land on the Ise again though, so that made that simpler. Another early hybrid is one of the design schemes for the Yorktown (scheme J, Sheme I was the one chosen), which was designed when they didn't realize how much more useful capital ship sized carriers were and had planes that didn't need all the deck they could get, which mounted three triple turrets forward to protect against cruisers.  Zorak of Michigan posted:This is more a question than an answer, but I'm guessing that moving the turrets aft in that German light cruiser design also means they can be a deck lower, which might have some useful stability benefits. Does that make sense, true warship experts? Oh dear god yes. Designers go through changes trying to get more metacentric height. More topweight means less metacentric height which means a smaller force to bring the ship back upright (there is a limit, too much and the ship rolls too hard back upright, making the gunnery less effective). When I mentioned topweight in that big wall of text a while back, it's all about metacentric height and resulting stability, even when damaged. For example of how hard they worked to lower their turrets have a look at that US design study I mentioned earlier.  See how they drop the hull by a deck after the forecastle? I bet that thing would've been crazy wet forward in rough seas, but they needed to get those turrets down, even accepting sacrifices like that and on another version the inability of one of the turrets to fire forward at less than 17k feet.
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Apr 4, 2014 18:49
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They're also notable for being the only "hybrids" to not let their guns get too much in the way of being a good carrier. They'd been getting progressively more AA armament and by Coral Sea the Lex had had her 8-inch guns removed, I believe to fit more 1.1 inch quad turrets: It is interesting to see Captain Marc Mitscher's take on it in 1940 (unfortunately I don't know who he means by we): quote:We have always felt, a good many of us, that the Lexington and Saratoga were the best ships we have ever built for all purpose ships, carrying the protection and armor of a cruiser. We will have twelve carriers that need cruiser protection and that cannot be sent out on independent missions unless they have cruiser protection. I feel that we have two carriers, the Lexington and Saratoga, that can be sent out on independent missions and if they lose their cruiser protection they can still protect themselves with their aircraft and armament. Therefore we feel we should look into that field for future carriers over and above the twelve that we have now that are more or less restricted in their activities. This sentiment might have had an impact on the design of the Midways. Amusingly though, because of their small hangars and compromised layouts, the Lexingtons couldn't fire their 5-inch guns a lot of the time while aircraft were being respotted.
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Apr 4, 2014 19:33
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:Analog computers are equal to digital computers in precision, they just lack flexibility. For a specialized application like ballistics, there's no real advantage to digital other than being able to input data automatically from other sensors. You can even rig that up, but the integration is a right pain. Tachymetric AA fire systems got their information straight from the radar. The USN Mk 37 and RN systems with the Gyro Rate Unit are examples of tachymetric systems.
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Apr 4, 2014 20:37
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The reviews for those books stand as mute testimony to how bad that is in the US.
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Apr 4, 2014 23:53
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WEEDLORDBONERHEGEL posted:I was about to mention: read the bad reviews for the second one, they're lovely. I especially like the one by someone going by Sepp Dietrich. It hits the paranoid right winger checkboxes perfectly too. xthetenth fucked around with this message at 00:23 on Apr 5, 2014 |
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Apr 5, 2014 00:18
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gradenko_2000 posted:The counter-counter-factual is that it's either much more difficult to hit and sink a battleship out in the open ocean (the mistakes of Force Z notwithstanding) or that the Japanese were unable to deal decisive blows against USN carrier forces. Yeah it's been a while for me since I read it otherwise I'd do another spergpost. I'm more likely to do a detailed WWII battleship armor post though because that's fun research. Gotta say though, every time the Yorktown gets mentioned as being the only ones who are doing competent stuff like getting their squadrons together for a strike because they're the experienced carrier and it's just  .
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Apr 6, 2014 07:20
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Zorak of Michigan posted:Yeah, but even if carrier aviation fights to a draw that leaves both battle fleets intact, the fighting around Guadalcanal shows that Japanese training and doctrine were superior in many ways. In particular, the USN would have been totally unprepared for the range and speed of Japanese torpedoes. However, the torpedoes and other attritive attacks are what the 5:3 superiority was there for. The Japanese plan called for 15% of their torpedoes to hit but in action only 6.71% of torpedoes fired hit, which ends up at one hit per two average destroyers. Worse yet their plan of the decisive battle called for a lot of long-range concealed firing, when the best hit rates by far were achieved with short range attacks firing them at maximum speed. Finally this figure does not include duds. Azathoth posted:Exactly. At the rate that the U.S. was building carriers, Japan needed to win a victory like the one at Midway every 6 to 8 months, from mid-1943 onwards, just to keep pace with U.S. production. The U.S. built more carriers in 1944 than Japan built throughout the entire war, and even if we posit some counterfactual scenario where the Japanese have some strategic mastermind who pulls off an amazing string of victories, each victory was still going to come at the cost of lost pilots. The pilots thing is a pretty key bit. Between Coral Sea, Midway, Eastern Solomons and Santa Cruz, the IJN lost a huge number of the pilots without which Kido Butai was just a bunch of useless hulls. Never mind that apart from Midway every major fleet battle between carriers was a pretty even trade as neither side could get their strikes to the enemy carriers in time to stop the enemies from getting their strikes off barring a disadvantaged situation like the Japanese got themselves into at Midway. They lost 110 aviators at the Eastern Solomons and 145 at Santa Cruz, so the 121 aviators lost at Midway wasn't exceptional. Midway was especially bad for the Japanese because of the maintenance personnel and hulls lost, however. xthetenth fucked around with this message at 19:04 on Apr 6, 2014 |
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Apr 6, 2014 18:34
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Boiled Water posted:
Got into range of the 5"/51 guns the US defenders had, got the cruiser Yubari's superstructure riddled with 11 shells and the destroyer Hayate's magazine hit at least twice, which blew her up. Then Captain Henry Elrod hit the destroyer Kisaragi with a bomb right on the stern where the depth charges were and blew her up. Whoopsie.
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Apr 6, 2014 21:49
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bewbies posted:The Luftwaffe had passable but not great aerial torpedoes as early as 1936, though the Stuka would not have ever carried them. The He-115 (a low performance maritime aircraft) used them pretty extensively (around 20-30 per month) throughout the first few years of the war; later on they were adapted for the workhorse medium bombers and used very effectively in the Mediterranean. How were the Luftwaffe pilots at maritime strike at that point anyway? If I remember right, their performance against stationary destroyers off Dunkirk was pretty terrible, and that doesn't indicate the best performance against steaming battleships which are maneuvering targets that they have to release against from higher up to land penetrating hits on. Also, if the Luftwaffe got air superiority over south England, would this have had any effect on US bomber procurement? If I remember right, the long range bomber idea that led to the B-36 was being considered pretty strongly in case they couldn't turn England into the airfield they did historically, and German fighters are a bit of an impediment.
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Apr 7, 2014 19:56
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iyaayas01 posted:It might have delayed the bomber campaign a bit but the B-29 was already well in development before the Battle of Britain was decided (would've had the range to strike from fields in northern England where the Germans wouldn't have been able to establish air superiority operating from France) and in any case by that time the US would've been cranking up fighter production considerably and would've more than likely been able to wrest air superiority over southern England with the influx of fighters combined with the RAF. Yeah, I was wondering whether it'd take a total loss of the Isles to push it over to the B-36, or whether it'd be possible to make a situation bad enough without requiring really weird stuff to happen to take the UK out.
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Apr 7, 2014 20:30
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FAUXTON posted:I think it may be worth pointing out when it comes to what-ifs is that the US had the luxury of actually following through with development on a whole bunch of those what-ifs whereas the Axis, with wars occurring nearby in addition to smaller production capacity, didn't have that luxury. That's why you see a lot of those crazy Wunderwaffe ideas only on paper (or only partially prototyped) whereas the US not only built the B-36, but built several, iterated on the design, and flew a nuclear reactor around in one for Cave Johnson-esque curiosity. That difference throws a ton of those what-ifs into question because it means the US could have pivoted to a transoceanic war in the Atlantic instead of just giving up on Europe altogether if the UK fell. Yeah, the decision really seemed to boil down to whether to prioritize the B-36 and therefore the R-4360 or the B-29 and therefore the R-3350 in large part. There's a good variety of designs from the war that are basically R-4360 powered planes to do the job that something with a R-3350 wound up doing historically. The B-29 and R-3350 got priority so there was always funding made available for them. The B-36 was a totally nuts plane and actually pretty capable at very high altitudes, if I remember right, the B-36 won a test dogfight with an F-86. Afterburning jets made it totally obsolete though.
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Apr 7, 2014 20:45
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bewbies posted:Well, if I remember right at Dunkirk they sank around 25% of the available targets and damaged twice that many. It wasn't a total massacre like they were hoping, but that isn't a terrible performance. If they were targeting unescorted heavies that were close enough that they could haul 1000kg AP bombs I think they wouldn't have had a whole lot of trouble at least reducing/heavily damaging whatever was there, though outright sinking a battleship really took either torpedoes or a lucky shot. Air attack sunk five destroyers of 39 (two more sunk by E-boats, one by mines and one by submarine) between 29 May and 1 June, and considering that the ships would be doing things that would require being stationary for relatively long stretches of time, that doesn't bear much promise for dealing with the response to Sealion coming in with harder targets, all targets under steam, a larger force and a smaller window of opportunity in which to strike.
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Apr 7, 2014 22:04
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Would Patriot be able to damage said slug enough to break it up or something? Last I checked, nuclear warheads were a bit more finicky than slugs of metal.
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Apr 23, 2014 00:29
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iyaayas01 posted:That said I feel like the topic is a little outside the scope of this thread...but it's well within the scope of this one! I semi-routinely forget that I'm not in that thread when I'm in this thread. And yeah, lost perspective on how energetic that missile is because the comparison is carrying so much energy.
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Apr 23, 2014 02:15
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Xlorp posted:How not-simple of an exercise in logic is it to game out the exploitative stunts and idiotically obsolete strategies before you commit a generation of your country's blood? Can it be done or is the problem always too big? Judging the effectiveness of various strategies requires actual experience, and even then it's hard to get a feel for what's actually going to happen, such as if you compare the Russo-Japanese war to WWI.
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May 15, 2014 01:14
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Should've invented the tank to carry the logs.
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May 18, 2014 18:47
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The Japanese were also fond of using their torpedo bombers as level bombers to help out when attacking land targets, so factor that in to the estimate. If I remember right that strike on Midway was half the wing of four carriers. That's not a small number of planes. Weird question. Aircraft carriers are a lot of airpower. Would they be able to temporarily wrest local air supremacy away from an enemy which hasn't totally collapsed?
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May 19, 2014 23:58
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Yeah, isolated islands were doable even early war. I'm more wondering what might've happened if Japan folded and Germany was still a credible threat or a very early cold war scenario, and what carriers might've been doing and how successfully.
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May 20, 2014 00:12
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Isn't the German bombardment of the Polish positions on the Westerplatte another example of how hard it can be to spot the fall of shot well? They lasted for seven days before running out of ammunition while under bombardment.
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May 23, 2014 06:32
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P-Mack posted:So I'm halfway through Wedgwood's Thirty Years War and definitely seeing the WWI influence, with a lot of time spent pointing out every missed chance for peace in the early part of the war. The edition I got has an additional introduction where she admits that the book was strongly influenced by when it was written. She also says that after WWII she no longer thinks all war is pointless, but sticks to her guns that this one in particular was. Kaigun by Evans and Peattie discusses this in excruciating detail. Such excruciating detail that the development of air power and air doctrine got its own sister volume, Sunburst. It's pretty fantastic and similarly readable to Shattered Sword.
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Jun 5, 2014 05:03
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