Golden Age Resources: Superweapons of WW II

[Tim]

Re: Golden Age Resources: Superweapons of WW II

 

Hmmmmm.....

 

save the rifling but be sunk by enemy aircraft...

 

or...

 

not get sunk but loss some rifling.

 

I think they made the wrong choice.

 

Well, most of the time, the BBs rarely got in range to fire. on other ships.

[megaplayboy]

Re: Golden Age Resources: Superweapons of WW II

 

Well' date=' most of the time, the BBs rarely got in range to fire. on other ships.[/quote']

 

yep, had Midway gone the other way(with 3 American fleet carriers on the bottom of the Pacific and one Japanese CV sunk by a sub), we probably would have seen more action between heavy surface combatants in the following 12 months (though there was that one night action at Guadalcanal, can't remember whether that was in 42 or 43 though...).

[Spence]

Re: Golden Age Resources: Superweapons of WW II

 

Trouble was that those rounds tended to do horrible things to the rifling of the gun barrels' date=' so they tended to avoid using them.[/quote']

 

Well' date=' most of the time, the BBs rarely got in range to fire. on other ships.[/quote']

 

yep' date=' had Midway gone the other way(with 3 American fleet carriers on the bottom of the Pacific and one Japanese CV sunk by a sub), we probably would have seen more action between heavy surface combatants in the following 12 months (though there was that one night action at Guadalcanal, can't remember whether that was in 42 or 43 though...).[/quote']

 

Umm... I was referring to using them for AA against aircraft. A 18" shrapnel round would make one *bleep* of a flak round. Sure it would be more of a shotgun style blast, but a salvo would be nasty to the old WW2 aircraft. Just the discharge would most likely wreck a torpedo planes run and dive bombers trying to dive into it would not be happy.

 

I'm just saying....

[lemming]

Re: Golden Age Resources: Superweapons of WW II

 

yep' date=' had Midway gone the other way(with 3 American fleet carriers on the bottom of the Pacific and one Japanese CV sunk by a sub), we probably would have seen more action between heavy surface combatants in the following 12 months (though there was that one night action at Guadalcanal, can't remember whether that was in 42 or 43 though...).[/quote']

 

The whole campaign for Guadalcanal was 8/42 - 2/43. And I believe the action was in late '42 with the BBs. Most of the other actions were cruisers and such. (Plus lots of carrier stuff)

 

Leyte Gulf, while being a huge air fight, had a BB element as well. IIRC, it had the rebuilt survivors of Pearl Harbor.

[Ian Mackinder]

Re: Golden Age Resources: Superweapons of WW II

 

Umm... I was referring to using them for AA against aircraft. A 18" shrapnel round would make one *bleep* of a flak round. Sure it would be more of a shotgun style blast, but a salvo would be nasty to the old WW2 aircraft. Just the discharge would most likely wreck a torpedo planes run and dive bombers trying to dive into it would not be happy.

 

I'm just saying....

 

Yes, I know they were intended for use as AA. But as I see it, there were various kinds of trouble with the concept in practice.

 

There was the rifling problem. Yeah, yeah, I know, lose the rifling or lose the ship. But what about a BBH that wrecked most of its primary armament just to kill a few aircraft? The IJN saw the primary function of these things as being really impressive flagships that could easily kill other BBs. Killing aircraft was a job for the escorting destroyers and aircraft.

 

Also, I imagine it would have been rather like killing houseflies with a shotgun. OK, a lucky shot may take out a few planes, but the close-in armament was probably better suited to that job - and a lot of the "lesser" AA guncrews would have to leave their posts or otherwise take cover whenever the big 18" guns were fired.

 

Finally, I really doubt if 18" gun turrets had a particularly rapid traverse, or could angle particularly high - both of which are things one usually looks for in a semi-dependable AA weapon.

[Spence]

Re: Golden Age Resources: Superweapons of WW II

 

Yes, I know they were intended for use as AA. But as I see it, there were various kinds of trouble with the concept in practice.

 

There was the rifling problem. Yeah, yeah, I know, lose the rifling or lose the ship. But what about a BBH that wrecked most of its primary armament just to kill a few aircraft? The IJN saw the primary function of these things as being really impressive flagships that could easily kill other BBs. Killing aircraft was a job for the escorting destroyers and aircraft.

 

Also, I imagine it would have been rather like killing houseflies with a shotgun. OK, a lucky shot may take out a few planes, but the close-in armament was probably better suited to that job - and a lot of the "lesser" AA guncrews would have to leave their posts or otherwise take cover whenever the big 18" guns were fired.

 

Finally, I really doubt if 18" gun turrets had a particularly rapid traverse, or could angle particularly high - both of which are things one usually looks for in a semi-dependable AA weapon.

 

 

All very valid points. But toward the end when the Yamato and Musashi were sunk, they pretty much knew the operations were critical to regaining momentum. Even if the Yamato didn’t. The Musashi would definitely have known the risks and its mission was even more critical.

 

Using my handy dandy hindsight , if I was the skipper of the Musashi I would have been using any and all options to keep afloat long enough to engage the surface targets.

[TheQuestionMan]

Re: Golden Age Resources: Superweapons of WW II

 

2010 Update!

 

 

Happy New Year

 

 

QM

[kahuna's bro]

Re: Golden Age Resources: Superweapons of WW II

 

ands to you sir

[Susano]

Re: Golden Age Resources: Superweapons of WW II

 

Did you guys see the Nazi Belt Buckle Gun in the Pulp Thread?

 

http://www.herogames.com/forums/showthread.php/77076-Nazi-Belt-Buckle-Gun

 

Not a superweapon, but still....

[st barbara]

Re: Golden Age Resources: Superweapons of WW II

 

The Japanese (and the British) also had anti aircraft rockets. The British "Z Batteries" actually succeeded in downing a few German aircraft. They were ungided as far as I know. The Japanese tried using a wire guidance system but it wasn't very successful. The japanese anti aircraft rockets were ship mounted , while the "Z-Batteries" were only land based.

[Ian Mackinder]

Re: Golden Age Resources: Superweapons of WW II

 

Hmm. IF I recall correctly, one theory about the loss of HMS Hood involved a fire breaking out among stored AA rockets.

[Lawnmower Boy]

Re: Golden Age Resources: Superweapons of WW II

 

Hmm. IF I recall correctly' date=' one theory about the loss of HMS Hood involved a fire breaking out among stored AA rockets.[/quote']

 

It's a theory, but it is pretty clearly wrong, and, more to the point, it is pretty malicious spinning that gets you to a "blame Churchill" vibe. That part comes with the territory for a major politician, but it usually has a sneering anti-semitic corollary that really should be off the table. (Churchill's scientific advisor, who allegedly pushed the "Unrotated Projectile," was Jewish.) *

What actually happened is that a 15" shell reached the 4" AA ammunition magazines. Deflagration created overpressure, a major structural member failed, and the poor old girl collapsed on herself. It was slightly mysterious to some (like the specious mystery spun around the loss of the battlecruisers at Jutland), because the magazines are designed to vent to atmosphere, but Hood was over 20 years old and a heavily worked structure even before she went dashing into the Greenland Strait executing Holland's brilliant interception plot.

 

*There's a 1946 article on the British wartime rocket programme in, I think, _Proceedings of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers_ by the senior civil servant director, Sir Eyre Crow,** that anyone interested might want to track down. They'd made good rockets, and, as engineers often do, had come up with an excellent solution that just needed a problem. Not my favourite bit of tech for using that line --the Bailey Suspension Bridge defines "solution looking for a problem," but interesting nonetheless.

 

**Eyre Crow? There's names like that going around? I got stiffed!

[Ian Mackinder]

Re: Golden Age Resources: Superweapons of WW II

 

It's a theory, but it is pretty clearly wrong, and, more to the point, it is pretty malicious spinning that gets you to a "blame Churchill" vibe. That part comes with the territory for a major politician, but it usually has a sneering anti-semitic corollary that really should be off the table. (Churchill's scientific advisor, who allegedly pushed the "Unrotated Projectile," was Jewish.) *

What actually happened is that a 15" shell reached the 4" AA ammunition magazines. Deflagration created overpressure, a major structural member failed, and the poor old girl collapsed on herself. It was slightly mysterious to some (like the specious mystery spun around the loss of the battlecruisers at Jutland), because the magazines are designed to vent to atmosphere, but Hood was over 20 years old and a heavily worked structure even before she went dashing into the Greenland Strait executing Holland's brilliant interception plot.

 

*There's a 1946 article on the British wartime rocket programme in, I think, _Proceedings of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers_ by the senior civil servant director, Sir Eyre Crow,** that anyone interested might want to track down. They'd made good rockets, and, as engineers often do, had come up with an excellent solution that just needed a problem. Not my favourite bit of tech for using that line --the Bailey Suspension Bridge defines "solution looking for a problem," but interesting nonetheless.

 

**Eyre Crow? There's names like that going around? I got stiffed!

 

Interesting, thanks for that.

 

Oh, and I do "blame Churchill" for various things. He was a great man who was there at the right time, but (like us all) he had faults - and some decisions he made were, even without hindsight, really bad.

[TheQuestionMan]

Re: Golden Age Resources: Superweapons of WW II

 

2011 Update!

 

 

Happy New Year!!!

 

 

QM

[SSgt Baloo]

Re: Golden Age Resources: Superweapons of WW II

 

Did I mention Luft 46? http://www.luft46.com/

[TheQuestionMan]

Re: Golden Age Resources: Superweapons of WW II

 

The Last Bump for this Thread

 

The responsibility I leave to others. For love of the Game.

 

QM

 

PS: Cheers

[Cassandra]

Re: Golden Age Resources: Superweapons of WW II

 

The Hood was designed for a time when Naval guns impacted directly against an opposing ships armor. Modern guns like those on the Bismark plunged and hit the deck, not the armed side of the Hood. Because the armor hadn't been updated the shell penetrated the deck, and exploded deep inside the ship. The resulting force of the explosion set off both the forward and aft magazines at the same time dooming the Battlecruiser.

[Cassandra]

Re: Golden Age Resources: Superweapons of WW II

 

The Japanese had their own Atomic Bomb Program, Project A. The Navy program concluded in 1942 it would take ten years and that was only if they could get a supply of uranium. The Army program continued until 1943 with no real progress.

 

They did attempt to build a microwave based death ray, but ran into problems that prevented completion.

 

A conference was held to discuss starting up the Atomic Bomb Program in 1945. It was suppose to start at 8:15am, August 6, at Hiroshima University.

[Beast]

Re: Golden Age Resources: Superweapons of WW II

 

WW1 ships had the range for plunging fire

Just not the fire control systems to make use of it

 

Hood was made to take on anything short of a BB or BC,as it did not have the armor to stand up to those kind of weapons even after her refits

in essence BC's where egg shells with big hammers

A big bully to go and beat up on CA's and CL's but run when that sides Big Brothers (BB's) showed up

 

Hood was used as she could dish out pain she just could not take it

and in that situation every ship was needed to hunt down the Bismark

Hood was also seen as the flagship and a symbol, not just another battle wagon

this got her to the top of the target list

 

 

The Hood was designed for a time when Naval guns impacted directly against an opposing ships armor. Modern guns like those on the Bismark plunged and hit the deck' date=' not the armed side of the Hood. Because the armor hadn't been updated the shell penetrated the deck, and exploded deep inside the ship. The resulting force of the explosion set off both the forward and aft magazines at the same time dooming the Battlecruiser.[/quote']

[Clonus]

Re: Golden Age Resources: Superweapons of WW II

 

Let us also remember the wacky Allied weapons, real and fictional.

 

The bat bombs.

 

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/04/old-weird-tech-the-bat-bombs-of-world-war-ii/237267/

 

The Tesla Death Ray

 

http://davidszondy.com/future/tesla/teslaray.htm

 

The robot planes of Operation Aphrodite (which succeeded in killing a future president of the United States)

 

[Lawnmower Boy]

Re: Golden Age Resources: Superweapons of WW II

 

WW1 ships had the range for plunging fire

Just not the fire control systems to make use of it

 

Hood was made to take on anything short of a BB or BC,as it did not have the armor to stand up to those kind of weapons even after her refits

in essence BC's where egg shells with big hammers

A big bully to go and beat up on CA's and CL's but run when that sides Big Brothers (BB's) showed up

 

Hood was used as she could dish out pain she just could not take it

and in that situation every ship was needed to hunt down the Bismark

Hood was also seen as the flagship and a symbol, not just another battle wagon

this got her to the top of the target list

 

HMS Hood

 

Quickly, to the Too-Much-Context-Mobile, Robin!

 

So, way back in May of 1916, the Brits and the Germans had a set-to in the North Sea. Pretty indecisive, notwithstanding the Germans having many fewer battleships. This was disappointing to the Brits, but, taking the long view through the Anglo-Dutch Wars, pretty much expected. Things haven't changed that much.

 

However, the Brits lost three of their battlecruisers to uncontrolled deflagration of propellant in magazines. That wasn't supposed to happen! The fleet returned to Scapa Flow and quickly determined why: everyone had been ignoring ammunition handing regulations, so there was lots of flammable propellant tracked all through the ships, waiting to be ignited. It really had nothing to do with their being battlecruisers. No capital ship of the era was designed to exclude flash from areas where propellants could be found. The problem was that the amount of fuel present in these areas defeated fire protection measures. The only reason that it was battlecruisers that suffered is that it was the battlecruisers that saw more action.

 

It was also terribly, terribly embarrassing. Court-martial most of the officer corps embarrassing. Only you can't do that, because you need someone to drive the ships, so the facts were put out, and everyone went on to live with it. Well, except for the "make it didn't happen" school of humanity, which is always making up stories about how they didn't do anything wrong, and it wasn't their fault.

 

the fault of choice was the weak armour of the battlecruisers, the culprit was the old First Lord, Admiral of the Fleet Lord Fisher, and, really, except for history books that are wrong (of which there are a lot), that was all there was to that. Jutland showed that, in general, British capital ships were underarmoured, due to the fairly common peacetime presumption that aggression counts for everything, and that if you hit the enemy lots, they will agreeably not hit back.

 

Except that at the same time, the Brits were building the first of a new class of battlecruisers. That were, like all British capital ship designs to this point, underarmoured. Back they went to the design shops to receive heavier armour. Unfortunately, this was armour on the same scale as received by previous battleships, and not armour on a scale suggested by a leisurely postwar rething. The leisurely postwar rethink hadn't happened yet!

 

This delayed their production, and the last three of the class were cancelled at the Armistice, leaving Hood, which had grown into an enormous monster of 45,000 tons displacement. Well, being almost finished, they couldn't exactly scrap the boat, and Hood, about as heavily armoured as any battleship of the era, which certainly wasn't heavily armoured enough. It also had a secret flaw: attempts to keep structure weight and cost down had led to a lightly built ship that "worked" excessively in seaways.

 

Meanwhile, and in a completely unrelated way, navies all over the world were faced with keeping their WWI-era battleships in service for much longer than expected due to postwar austerities. Over time, most were refitted, notably by being given newer, lighter engines that freed up a great deal of displacement to improve their combat power in many ways. Of these, two refit trends stand out. The first is increasing elevation of the main guns to make use of better fire control coming in --pioneering electromechanical and pneumatic-hydraulic and what-have-you computers. This made hits at long range more likely, and hits at long range are more likely, geometrically speaking, to be slightly-less-glancing hits on deck armour.

 

Note that battleships have always had deck armour. Even though hits on decks are less likely at short ranges, they still happen, and, besides, there are coastal batteries on higher ground and rolling to be considered; the whole "immune zone" thing is, at best, an oversimplification. But there was a new threat now: aeroplanes! While clearly no amount of deck armour could stop the heaviest bomb conceivably droppable by some aircraft that didn't exist yet, you could thicken up the decks. This might incidentally increase ship protection against shells hitting the decks, but, as Nathan Okhun points out, the last thing you want to do to a glancing shell hit is divert it into the bowels of the ship with an encounter with too-thick deck armour. In this, as always, battleship design is compromise.

 

So what happened to Hood? Heavily worked by a run through high Atlantic seas, it turned away from Bismarck's fire to bring its broadside to bear just in time to receive a very ordinary 15" shell either on its rear deck armour, or, much more likely, through its 12" belt armour. That shell penetrated to a 4" magazine, that is, a magazine designed to supply 4" AA guns with propellant (I don't think that the 4" HA had fixed rounds) which designers anticipated might be penetrated, and which was therefore provided with venting that ought to have removed the expanding bubble of deflagrant gas from the ship envelope relatively safely.

 

Instead, Hood blew up. Why? Examination of the wreck by submersibles has led to two main theories. Either the flash from the deflagrating 4" magazines spread fire through the fuel tanks that reached the forward 15" magazines, or, more likely in my view, the heavily worked structure failed to contain the deflagration overpressure, causing the ship's structural girder to fail, and Hood simply fell apart.

 

Either way, it is a sad story. Ships are complicated all-or-nothing machines. One minute, you're safe as houses in a human-made ship pounding through the waves at upwards of 20 knots. The next, some critical aspect of this critical system fails, and you're swimming. Add in an enemy trying to do you harm, and a requirement to carry lots of incendiaries and use that tricksie, tricksie fire (Elvish thing, that), and you're just asking for trouble, as far too many sailors, on far too many ships, discovered in WWII.

 

Just to bring out a lesson that deserves to be brought out, this was not all the fault of the "make it didn't happen" school of human thinkers. But here's another example of them, caught red-handed trying to mess up our understanding of the world. Boo!

[Cassandra]

Re: Golden Age Resources: Superweapons of WW II

 

The British has a habit of designing their battlecruisers with too little armor. Three of them bought it the same way as the Hood did at Jutland.

[Clonus]

Re: Golden Age Resources: Superweapons of WW II

 

The British has a habit of designing their battlecruisers with too little armor. Three of them bought it the same way as the Hood did at Jutland.

 

It was more a matter of failing to only use BCs in appropriate roles. They were designed to only hunt smaller ships, which the Bismark was not.

[Cassandra]

Re: Golden Age Resources: Superweapons of WW II

 

True enough. The British battlecruisers made short work of the German Armored cruisers at the Falklands.

[Zeropoint]

Re: Golden Age Resources: Superweapons of WW II

 

The important thing is that "battlecruiser" is an awesome name for a ship class, right up there with "dreadnaught".