Montana after the carrier became the centerpiece
A Montana answer separates whether the ship could work from whether the fleet still needed it at the center of operations.
From Bruships: A Special - Questions/What If's till the Bru runs out? (3) ·
Complete directory
Browse all time notes.
Explore every watch point in reverse video-date order, then in timestamp order within each video.
Specialist escorts versus the Dido compromise
A fleet-mix answer weighs specialized Tribals, J/K/N destroyers, Leanders, and Arethusas against a dual-purpose cruiser.
From Bruships: A Special - Questions/What If's till the Bru runs out? (3) ·
Plan against a capable enemy
Sound planning assumes an opponent is broadly equal, with strengths and weaknesses that may differ from one's own.
From Bruships: A Special - Questions/What If's till the Bru runs out? (3) ·
Why fire ships worked against the Spanish Armada
The Armada fire-ship attack is presented as a tactic whose success depended as much on failed countermeasures as on the idea itself.
From Bruships: A Special - Questions/What If's till the Bru runs out? (3) ·
Japan's decisive-battle expectation
Japanese planning expected victory in the decisive battle to end the war, leaving little concept of a prolonged conflict afterward.
From Bruships: A Special - Questions/What If's till the Bru runs out? (3) ·
Hypersonic speed does not remove the targeting problem
A modern-weapons answer separates missile speed from the reconnaissance, guidance, maneuvering, and production system needed to make it effective.
From Bruships: A Special - Questions/What If's till the Bru runs out? (3) ·
Why submarines keep weapons inside the pressure hull
A submarine-design answer connects reloadability and magazine depth with hydrodynamic cleanliness and acoustic discretion.
From Bruships: A Special - Questions/What If's till the Bru runs out? (3) ·
Why an old hull design can limit a young warship
Power routing and internal layout can make a major warship upgrade equivalent to rebuilding the vessel from within.
From Bruships: A Special - Questions/What If's till the Bru runs out? (3) ·
VLS magazines, sea reloads, and peer war
A discussion of hypersonic warfare broadens into missile-magazine depth, the loss of at-sea VLS reloads, and post-Cold War assumptions about short naval engagements.
From Bruships: A Special - Questions/What If's till the Bru runs out? (3) ·
Build an SSGN from the SSBN production line
A mature SSBN hull and production system provide the efficient foundation for a new guided-missile submarine.
From Bruships: A Special - Questions/What If's till the Bru runs out? (3) ·
Why ballistic-missile submarines are capital ships
Ballistic-missile submarines sit outside the battle line but qualify as capital ships because they exert strategic influence at the level of states.
From Bruships: A Special - Questions/What If's till the Bru runs out? (3) ·
Missile loadouts follow the deployment
Installed launch cells and the weapons actually embarked are separate measures of a deployed ship's combat power.
From Bruships: A Special - Questions/What If's till the Bru runs out? (3) ·
Why every major navy studies hypersonic missiles
Hypersonic research supports offensive development and the defensive understanding needed to build countermeasures.
From Bruships: A Special - Questions/What If's till the Bru runs out? (3) ·
What a vertical launch cell actually contains
A plain-language explanation unpacks the launch, protection, data, and monitoring functions hidden inside a VLS module.
From Bruships: A Special - Questions/What If's till the Bru runs out? (3) ·
Why more battleships would not solve Vietnam
A naval-gunfire answer separates the ability to destroy targets from the political and operational plan needed to exploit that destruction.
From Bruships: A Special - Questions/What If's till the Bru runs out? (3) ·
Preparedness makes the cost of war visible
A reflection on hypersonic weapons argues that studying war and maintaining credible forces help leaders understand the consequences when politics fails.
From Bruships: A Special - Questions/What If's till the Bru runs out? (3) ·
How many missiles before a warship becomes an arsenal ship
A magazine-size answer places a rough boundary between a heavily armed first-rate combatant and a specialized arsenal ship.
From Bruships: A Special - Questions/What If's till the Bru runs out? (3) ·
Tax compliance, state capacity, and essential workers
A political-economy answer links tax compliance to the practical capacity to fund defence, services, and the people who make a community function.
From Bruships: A Special - Questions/What If's till the Bru runs out? (3) ·
Public health as economic infrastructure
Baseline health care supports productivity, family security, crisis response, and employers while leaving room to debate how the system is administered.
From Bruships: A Special - Questions/What If's till the Bru runs out? (3) ·
What a modern first-rate warship would look like
A compact analogy maps the age-of-sail first rate onto a very large modern missile combatant.
From Bruships: A Special - Questions/What If's till the Bru runs out? (3) ·
When universal basic income might make sense
The case for UBI depends on automation raising output and income per worker enough to support a simpler universal payment.
From Bruships: A Special - Questions/What If's till the Bru runs out? (3) ·
Atlantic blockade as a logistics problem
The opening reframes the U-boat campaign from a simple idea of strangling British trade into a problem of logistics, construction time, and torpedo supply.
From Battle of the Atlantic (Original): Crackpot Schemes or Good Ideas Badly Done p7/7 ·
Escort orders and the 1938 answer
Britain's 1938 orders for Flower-class corvettes, Hunt-class escort destroyers, and other convoy escorts shaped the Atlantic campaign before war began.
From Battle of the Atlantic (Original): Crackpot Schemes or Good Ideas Badly Done p7/7 ·
Escort production through capital-ship pauses
Britain paused some cruiser, battleship, and carrier work, but its 1938 escort program continued and could draw on a broad shipbuilding base even after France fell.
From Battle of the Atlantic (Original): Crackpot Schemes or Good Ideas Badly Done p7/7 ·
Type VIIs versus escort mass
German Type VII U-boats are compared with Royal Navy corvettes, trawlers, destroyers, sloops, and four-stackers to show why escort mass mattered.
From Battle of the Atlantic (Original): Crackpot Schemes or Good Ideas Badly Done p7/7 ·
Wolfpacks, intelligence, and veteran losses
Wolfpacks had to locate convoys across a vast ocean while Allied routing intelligence could bypass them, and successful contact exposed veteran U-boat crews to concentrated escorts.
From Battle of the Atlantic (Original): Crackpot Schemes or Good Ideas Badly Done p7/7 ·
A later war strengthens British ASW
Delaying war would give Germany more time to build U-boats, but it would also let Britain and the Commonwealth field more escorts and aircraft carriers from a stronger maritime base.
From Battle of the Atlantic (Original): Crackpot Schemes or Good Ideas Badly Done p7/7 ·
More U-boats provoke counterbuilding
Replacing German battleships with more U-boats might improve the opening attack, but geography remains and Britain would answer with more escorts and ASW carriers.
From Battle of the Atlantic (Original): Crackpot Schemes or Good Ideas Badly Done p7/7 ·
Surface raider carrier counterfactual
A counterfactual section weighs whether a German surface group with 15-inch Scharnhorsts and Graf Zeppelin would have posed a more complex Atlantic threat than U-boats alone.
From Battle of the Atlantic (Original): Crackpot Schemes or Good Ideas Badly Done p7/7 ·
ASW weapons and institutional learning
The Royal Navy carried First World War convoy experience into a growing escort fleet and a pre-existing program of depth-charge throwers, mortars, and ahead-firing ASW weapons.
From Battle of the Atlantic (Original): Crackpot Schemes or Good Ideas Badly Done p7/7 ·
German capital-ship construction bottleneck
The proposed German carrier-and-battlecruiser threat runs into a shipyard constraint: too few large hulls could be built in parallel after the First World War.
From Battle of the Atlantic (Original): Crackpot Schemes or Good Ideas Badly Done p7/7 ·
Trained ASW crews as capacity
Experienced anti-submarine officers and trained crews made escort hulls usable, showing that personnel readiness was part of Britain's maritime advantage.
From Battle of the Atlantic (Original): Crackpot Schemes or Good Ideas Badly Done p7/7 ·
U-boat program opportunity costs
A resource counterfactual asks whether Germany needed enough U-boats to force convoy escorts, rather than 700 boats, and where the saved industrial effort might have gone.
From Battle of the Atlantic (Original): Crackpot Schemes or Good Ideas Badly Done p7/7 ·
Human cost and the Atlantic's reputation
The terror and sudden losses experienced by merchant crews gave the Battle of the Atlantic a reputation more desperate than the long-term escort balance alone suggests.
From Battle of the Atlantic (Original): Crackpot Schemes or Good Ideas Badly Done p7/7 ·
Escort pool and Operation Torch
A late section explains why Atlantic danger increased when escorts were diverted to major operations such as Operation Torch.
From Battle of the Atlantic (Original): Crackpot Schemes or Good Ideas Badly Done p7/7 ·
Atlantic geography and tradeoffs
The closing argument reduces the submarine campaign to geography: close to British ports meant air cover and minefields, while the mid-Atlantic meant too much ocean to search.
From Battle of the Atlantic (Original): Crackpot Schemes or Good Ideas Badly Done p7/7 ·
Why Hunting Tirpitz is useful for source-led naval history
The review introduces Hunting Tirpitz as a heavily illustrated, archive-based guide to Royal Navy operations against Bismarck's sister ship.
X-craft passage planning for the Tirpitz attack
A read-aloud passage follows the miniature submarines from Loch Cairnbawn toward Norway and shows how reconnaissance shaped target assignments.
Tow failures and navigation errors before the attack
The X8 episode shows how fragile the approach phase was, with broken tows, lost contact, searching, and mistaken course transmission.
X9 is lost during the passage to Norway
The read-aloud operational narrative follows X9's disappearance after a communications defect and broken tow, making the raid's attrition visible before the attack phase.
X8's charge failures force her crew to scuttle the craft
X8's worsening trim and premature charge detonations damage the miniature submarine so badly that her crew must abandon and scuttle her.
Submarines as high-value but fragile wartime assets
The review uses the X-craft story to explain why submarines are valuable but harder to sustain than surface ships.
Why human torpedoes were simpler than X-craft
Human torpedoes built around familiar torpedo technology are contrasted with the greater engineering demands of a miniature submarine.
X-craft as a substitute for weapons Britain did not yet have
The closing analysis presents the X-craft and its detachable charges as a wartime substitute for modern guided weapons against a stationary harbor target.
Vicksburg rewarded repeated riverine experimentation
A Vicksburg comment shows how canals and minor waterways could look crackpot before gunboats and transports found a workable route past the batteries.
From Crackpot Schemes or Good Ideas (Non-Churchill) – The Comment Questions... ·
Channel patrols and the limits of tidy war planning
A question about Channel patrols turns into a lesson on new tactics, wartime mistakes, and why threat matrices cannot remove uncertainty.
From Crackpot Schemes or Good Ideas (Non-Churchill) – The Comment Questions... ·
Mass politics can harden war aims
A comment thread compares older negotiated settlements with the harder war aims of the American Civil War, First World War, and Franco-Prussian War.
From Crackpot Schemes or Good Ideas (Non-Churchill) – The Comment Questions... ·
Failed European revolutions encouraged Union underestimation
A comparison with recently suppressed European uprisings explains why Union leaders could mistake secession for a manageable regional revolt.
From Crackpot Schemes or Good Ideas (Non-Churchill) – The Comment Questions... ·