Naval History Forums

One of the most “possible” improvements to Bismarck would have been to add a lower belt. If we imagine adding a duplicate of the upper belt below the main belt, we know it would cost about 1,000 tons. I can imagine that replacing Bismarck's 150 mm and 105 mm batteries by King George V's 5.25 inch ba...

Looking back over the thread, there was an unanswered question about the Littorio Class. acccording to Bagnasco, main rudder was jamed in Vitorio Veneto by the explosion wich position did you have an transversal drawing of rudderequipment (rudders and machinery) I can't actually give the required da...

I think that Edinburgh's performance was a spectacular demonstration of the quality of her design and her crew's determination. Alone of the cruisers that had been hit by two torpedoes, Edinburgh continued to fight effectively and inflicted crippling and eventually fatal damage on an enemy destroyer...

What I don't understand is when this topic was stated to include "combat vessels", but then the point is made that USN "battleships" didn't take a lot of damage so there was no indication of their ability to do so. What about all the cruisers and other ships that were heavily da...

As I knew nothing about this topic, I have been using Google to try to find something to say. I still know very little but I have begun to suspect that the effective range of light AA was as much determined by the gun sights as by the gun's ballistics and rate of fire. There is of course a trade off...

There may be some problems in establishing exactly what occurred. After all we do not have Yamato's logs although some information was probably officially noted after questioning survivors. Even those notes may not have survived the destruction of records following the Japanese Surrender. Normally m...

Yamato had an auxiliary rudder, but in testing it wasn't able to turn the ship. Funny how much luck plays a role. Between them the Yamato and Musahi were hit by 30 or so torpedoes - and not one to my knowledge took the rudder out. During her final sortie, Yamato suffered a torpedo hit or hits aft w...

...snip... Really the only Japanese light AA weapon of the war was the much maligned 25mm/60. Strictly as a gun only, it seemed to be fine. It had a good muzzle velocity and a maximum rate of fire in the 240 range. Unforunately there were other problems. It's loading system lowered it's effective r...

I have been trying to think of a test for deciding if an operation or a campaign was a victory or a defeat (possibly better a success or a failure). I came up with the idea of imagining that the planners had been given full details of the outcome and asking whether they would they have gone ahead wi...

The Hurricane was absolutely critical for winning the Battle of Britain and the individual Hurricanes, roughly two thirds of RAF fighter strength, were statistically as likely as Spitfires to shoot down enemy aircraft. This was especially true for attacks against bombers as the Hurricane was a more ...

I have now remembered my source for the original statement that the armoured freeboard of KGV at deep load was 9ft 9in. It was the comparison of KGV and North Carolina by the RN in 1943 as reported by “U.S. Battleships: An Illustrated Design History” by Norman Friedman, page 278, https://books.googl...

Does “standard” mean as in Washington Standard Displacement i.e. with no fuel on board?

Thank you for the link. I looked at page 3 and it seems to me that the two pictures at Singapore illustrate the problem. In the first, perhaps taken shortly after arrival, the top of the armour belt seems to be more than twice the height of the sailors above the waterline. In the photograph of Princ...

I am deeply shocked that you doubt the famously reliable source Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_George_V-class_battleship_%281939%29, which has: “The main armour belt was 23.5 feet (7.2 m) high and covered the hull side from the main armoured deck to finish 15 feet (4.6 m)[20] below the...

These depths of armour belts depend on the load. The belt on the King George V class was 23 ft 9 inches and at deep load was intended to have 9 ft 9 inches of armoured freeboard, which was calculated as a minimum so that the ship would not have to return to port immediately after the explosion of a ...