Naval History Forums

We can imagine that everything goes as OTL up to the 8th May but there are other possibilities. The most likely divergence may be on the 6th May. OTL the two strongest forces were refuelling on the morning of the 6th with Takagi according to Wikipedia “180 nmi (210 mi; 330 km) west of Tulagi”, when ...

Everyone was short of ships in 1942, except perhaps for the Italians who were short of oil. The IJN ships that I added to Operation MO were the ships that were relatively free and did not need immediate refits. All the old battleships except the Kongo Class had had a quiet war, so I could have chose...

Just for a change, I would like to propose something that might easily have happened. All it would have taken is slightly more urgency in getting Kaga home to be repaired and Yamamoto trying to confuse his USN opponents. OTL, Yamamoto had offered Kaga as support for Operation MO, which was aimed at ...

I suspect that Franklin was only hit by one bomb. Some of the arguments can be found at http://www.j-aircraft.org/smf/index.php?topic=5878.15. There is an interesting similarity and contrast between Franklin and Hiryu. In both cases, power was lost because the engine rooms had to be evacuated despit...

Good shooting gets straddles, good luck brings hits. However, note that the RM had obviously not practised two ships firing at the same target as demonstrated by Hood and Prince of Wales at Denmark Straits (OK, even such superb skill cannot always win). If Giulio Cesare and Conte di Cavour had been ...

Reading through this thread again, I notice the question, for example from Tom17, of how to compare the effects of hits by different torpedoes. One of the main issues is the comparison of Japanese Type 93 torpedoes with German, British and American torpedoes. My perhaps surprising take on this is th...

I remembered suggesting the idea of using a destroyer rather than PE as a sea anchor in an earlier thread viewtopic.php?f=13&t=1480&p=28939#p28939

The failure of the Type 93 torpedoes at the Second Naval Battle of Guadalcanal requires some qualification and explanation. The qualification is that the two light cruisers and some of the Japanese destroyers involved were equipped with the older Type 90 torpedoes rather than the oxygen fuelled Type...

I agree with RF and with Kondo at the time (“The Pacific War Papers” ed. Goldstein & Dillon, page 326) that the Indian Ocean operation did not offer a good chance of improving the IJN's long term prospects. Even a major victory over the RN would have cost Japan time and loses and would thus have...

I am not an expert on any aspect of naval history but it seems to me that the best chance of a victory for the High Seas Fleet was slightly later than October 1914 and probably coincided with the Scarborough Raid of 16th December 1914 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raid_on_Scarborough,_Hartlepool_and_...

I would like to point out again Owari's advantages, building time and cost. Shattered Sword quotes the cost of Soryu as 40.2 million yen. Yamato's displacement was around four times that of Soryu. The aircraft carrier Soryu was being completed as Yamato was being laid down and had almost identical p...

Now for the details of armour thickness and weights. As an first try, we can try 125 mm for the vertical shell near the barbettes and magazines and 100 mm elsewhere. If that goes from 5 metres above the waterline to 3 metres below and 60% is 100 mm, the two sides will weigh roughly 143 x 2 x 8 x 8 x...

Owari is going to have two continuous structurally significant armoured decks above the waterline, a main deck and a weather or flying deck. The main deck will follow Japanese design ideas and is positioned well above the full load waterline. Thus we will not have all the splinter proof bulkheads co...

I feel a little guilty in posting a hypothetical ship, which I have named Owari, rather than an encounter and would have probably chosen to post this at the Warships Projects BB if that board had not evaporated. Sadly I wanted to discuss a ship that was never considered rather than a design like the...

...snip... But with Command at Sea and a one Japanese Aerial torpedo, you will get some damage points and a bit of flooding that should be easy to correct, and if really unlucky another critical (maybe an 18% chance), that has about a 3% chance of jamming the rudder,...snip... I think that there we...