Naval History Forums

RF - Neither Taranto nor Bismarck would have been effected; neither required fighter escorts. Taranto was at night and Bismarck was far at sea. The changed policy would have prevented disasters like the daytime Kirkenes/Petsamo and Scarpanto raids. Kirkenes cost HMS Victorious much of her airgroup w...

The FAA would probably have been better off if this attack had failed. Because it succeeded, the FAA got the impression that it was acceptable to send an inadequate number of unescorted planes to attack warships. As it turned out, this attack was unique. In virtually all similar attacks by FAA plane...

I was doing some data-mining in my database the other day and found something that surprised me. Aside from Pearl Harbor, the US Navy lost only one warship, frigate-sized or larger, to an air attack while in port. This was the old four-stacker destroyer Peary lost in the Japanese carrier plane attac...

Jose - Some had a double or even triple bottom but not a complete double hull.

By frame spacing, I assume that you mean transverse frame spacing. The distance between frames really doesn't signify much about the ship. The frames exist to provide support for the ship's outer skin (and belt armor) and decks. If a ship has a thin skin like Titanic, you need a closer spacing to pr...

dunmunro - Thanks for the heads up. However, Vince O'Hara kindly emailed me very useful documentation on the land-based CAP provided for the Vigorous convoy. That allowed me to complete the map to an acceptable degree.

Carriers are inherently unsuited for raiders. Raiders are typically employed by the weaker sea power. Therefore, one of their needs is stealth; they have to be able to disappear into the vastness of the ocean. However, if someone sees a single-engined enemy plane in the middle of the ocean, it is ad...

boredatwork - You are correct, I was confusing the authorization date with the starting (laid down) date. The South Dakota class was designed and authorized in March 1905, seven months before Dreadnought was laid down. They were, however, only laid down in December 1906, the same month that Dreadnou...

boredatwork wrote about the problems that Germany would have developing an aircraft carrier: whose primary reason d'etre - her aircraft - were the responsibility of an entirely different service at best indifferent to naval requirements and at worst frequently outright hostile . Unfortunately, the s...

neil hilton wrote Does anybody know of any actions involving MTBs in WW2 against a formation of warships? In the Vigorous convoy action, the convoy reversed course at 02:00. The covering force, a group of warships not part of the convoy or its escorts, reversed too. Six German E-boats from Crete too...

alecsandros - Sorry, I missed seeing your question about my database's power calculations. These are algorithms that use the raw data to obtain a rating for the ship in gunnery/torpedo battles. Besides evaluating a ship, it is used to evaluate groups of ships to get the probable winner of historical...

lwd - A slight correction. You wrote that "If dispersion a has CEP is twice as big as b, then your chance of hitting a ship anywhere in the CEP area for a is ~half what it would be for b". This is wrong; a CEP is a radius but you will be scattering shells over an area. Therefore, if you do...

I think that some of the discussion here is confusing dispersion and accuracy. Dispersion is the scatter pattern around your aiming point. Accuracy is the deviation of the center of your dispersion pattern from the aiming point. Accuracy is very important; if you can't center your dispersion pattern...

alecsandros - I agree, the fire control computers of the time were amazing technical achievements. Those analog computers were intricate mechanical marvels. However, the fire control solutions still had to estimate the further position of the target. To do this, they used the "rates of change&q...

RNfanDan - The 50 cal rather than 45 cal does give some advantage. The longer barrel gives a better muzzle velocity and so better range and better penetration. However, it has a disadvantage too. Because of the lower velocity, at any particular range, the 45 cal will get better deck penetration beca...