Complete directory
Explore every watch point in reverse video-date order, then in timestamp order within each video.
The P-4 combined a flush deck and Packard engines with a more useful weapons layout, though its alloy hull still demanded intensive corrosion protection.
From How & Why during WWII Motor Torpedo Boats(MTBs) became Motor Gun Boats(MGBs): Pacific Theatre ·
P-4 boats served in Asian fleets after World War II, with a Taiwan Strait example and a tentative connection to the Gulf of Tonkin.
From How & Why during WWII Motor Torpedo Boats(MTBs) became Motor Gun Boats(MGBs): Pacific Theatre ·
Wartime coastal fighting demanded gun armament and hulls capable of carrying it alongside or in place of torpedoes.
From How & Why during WWII Motor Torpedo Boats(MTBs) became Motor Gun Boats(MGBs): Pacific Theatre ·
Riverine gunboats could perform some similar duties, but their separate design tradition requires comparison with other river craft.
From How & Why during WWII Motor Torpedo Boats(MTBs) became Motor Gun Boats(MGBs): Pacific Theatre ·
British operations helped inspire Soviet torpedo-boat development in the 1920s, but the inherited approach needed further revision.
From How & Why during WWII Motor Torpedo Boats(MTBs) became Motor Gun Boats(MGBs): Pacific Theatre ·
A proposed fixed gun installation runs into the material problem created by placing steel close to an aluminium-copper hull in salt water.
From How & Why during WWII Motor Torpedo Boats(MTBs) became Motor Gun Boats(MGBs): Pacific Theatre ·
A torpedo boat could be viable as an affordable defensive threat even when it was not expected to win a stand-up battle alone.
From How & Why during WWII Motor Torpedo Boats(MTBs) became Motor Gun Boats(MGBs): Pacific Theatre ·
British procurement incorporated the gunboat role into new boats while crews elsewhere adapted torpedo-focused designs.
From How & Why during WWII Motor Torpedo Boats(MTBs) became Motor Gun Boats(MGBs): Pacific Theatre ·
Plausible alternate history must account for an empire already changing, rather than freezing it in place or assuming the known outcome.
From How & Why during WWII Motor Torpedo Boats(MTBs) became Motor Gun Boats(MGBs): Pacific Theatre ·
A modern uncrewed small craft may look novel while reviving the older logic of cheap, fast boats carrying danger into defended waters.
From How & Why during WWII Motor Torpedo Boats(MTBs) became Motor Gun Boats(MGBs): Pacific Theatre ·
The Gay class shared wartime fast-boat features, but the Dark and Brave class lineages remain unresolved in this exchange.
From How & Why during WWII Motor Torpedo Boats(MTBs) became Motor Gun Boats(MGBs): Pacific Theatre ·
The October 2023 exchange leaves warhead sizes uncertain and distinguishes estimates from a viewer's figures for unspecified designs.
From How & Why during WWII Motor Torpedo Boats(MTBs) became Motor Gun Boats(MGBs): Pacific Theatre ·
Soviet torpedoes began the war less reliably than British weapons, then improved quickly.
From How & Why during WWII Motor Torpedo Boats(MTBs) became Motor Gun Boats(MGBs): Pacific Theatre ·
Formidable combined proven Royal Navy ideas into a faster, better-protected 1898 battleship rather than introducing a single dramatic innovation.
From HMS Formidable(1898): Lessons of a Highly Conventional Carreer - Key Ship Series 6, Ship 4 ·
The retrospective label pre-dreadnought can obscure Formidable's place in a longer line of Royal Sovereign-style battleships.
From HMS Formidable(1898): Lessons of a Highly Conventional Carreer - Key Ship Series 6, Ship 4 ·
Formidable’s 1901 trial used only twelve heavy-gun rounds, illustrating the gap between confirming that guns worked and testing ammunition exhaustively.
From HMS Formidable(1898): Lessons of a Highly Conventional Carreer - Key Ship Series 6, Ship 4 ·
David Beatty’s post-Jutland explanations drew attention to real shell defects, communications failures, and John Jellicoe’s successful manoeuvring.
From HMS Formidable(1898): Lessons of a Highly Conventional Carreer - Key Ship Series 6, Ship 4 ·
Cost, supplier incentives, and limited dockyard control helped discourage the testing needed to uncover defective naval ammunition before war.
From HMS Formidable(1898): Lessons of a Highly Conventional Carreer - Key Ship Series 6, Ship 4 ·
A design tour covers Formidable’s class distinction, size, 18-knot machinery, weapons, endurance, and Trafalgar-derived forward protection.
From HMS Formidable(1898): Lessons of a Highly Conventional Carreer - Key Ship Series 6, Ship 4 ·
Formidable’s launch before completion shows how British dockyard capacity could clear a slipway quickly for the next battleship class.
From HMS Formidable(1898): Lessons of a Highly Conventional Carreer - Key Ship Series 6, Ship 4 ·
Formidable entered the Mediterranean Fleet with the captain and crew of HMS Resolution transferred across almost overnight.
From HMS Formidable(1898): Lessons of a Highly Conventional Carreer - Key Ship Series 6, Ship 4 ·
Formidable’s 1902 exercises near Nafplio show how Mediterranean fleet movements could reassure Greece while also discouraging an unwanted crisis with the Ottoman Empire.
From HMS Formidable(1898): Lessons of a Highly Conventional Carreer - Key Ship Series 6, Ship 4 ·
Formidable escorted King Edward VII’s yacht in 1903 and then demonstrated Malta’s ability to support a major battleship refit overseas.
From HMS Formidable(1898): Lessons of a Highly Conventional Carreer - Key Ship Series 6, Ship 4 ·
Formidable’s refit cycle becomes a practical lesson in maintenance, readiness, and the difference between ships owned and ships on station.
From HMS Formidable(1898): Lessons of a Highly Conventional Carreer - Key Ship Series 6, Ship 4 ·
Formidable’s moves between home and Atlantic formations reveal how public anxiety and politics shaped the language of British naval defence.
From HMS Formidable(1898): Lessons of a Highly Conventional Carreer - Key Ship Series 6, Ship 4 ·
Formidable’s nucleus-crew period shows the tradeoff between keeping reserve ships alive and preserving specialist knowledge of their machinery.
From HMS Formidable(1898): Lessons of a Highly Conventional Carreer - Key Ship Series 6, Ship 4 ·
The Fifth Battle Squadron’s three Formidables and five Londons reveal a Royal Navy practice of constructing related sovereign battleships as a tactical unit of eight.
From HMS Formidable(1898): Lessons of a Highly Conventional Carreer - Key Ship Series 6, Ship 4 ·
Formidable covered the British Expeditionary Force, carried Marines to France, and moved between bases as invasion fears shaped Channel Fleet deployments.
From HMS Formidable(1898): Lessons of a Highly Conventional Carreer - Key Ship Series 6, Ship 4 ·
Lewis Bayly brought colonial-war and surface-fleet experience to Channel command, then later became an effective anti-submarine leader after learning from Formidable’s loss.
From HMS Formidable(1898): Lessons of a Highly Conventional Carreer - Key Ship Series 6, Ship 4 ·
The loss of Formidable on 1 January 1915 followed an unescorted Channel exercise that left a battleship line exposed to U-24.
From HMS Formidable(1898): Lessons of a Highly Conventional Carreer - Key Ship Series 6, Ship 4 ·
A brief postscript connects Captain Loxley’s death with Formidable to his son Peter’s fatal journey to the Yalta Conference in 1945.
From HMS Formidable(1898): Lessons of a Highly Conventional Carreer - Key Ship Series 6, Ship 4 ·
The Admiralty distinguished a lack of formal prohibition from poor operational judgment, relieving Bayly while retaining an officer who later adapted.
From HMS Formidable(1898): Lessons of a Highly Conventional Carreer - Key Ship Series 6, Ship 4 ·
Formidable was lost only three months after one submarine sank Aboukir, Cressy, and Hogue, making the danger of unescorted patrols impossible to treat as wholly new.
From HMS Formidable(1898): Lessons of a Highly Conventional Carreer - Key Ship Series 6, Ship 4 ·
Destroyers, cruisers, and battleships had to work as a formation, because a capital ship without a screen could not use its own power against a hidden submarine.
From HMS Formidable(1898): Lessons of a Highly Conventional Carreer - Key Ship Series 6, Ship 4 ·
The criticism of Bayly is framed through a historical method that uses knowledge and vocabulary available in 1914 rather than assuming later anti-submarine doctrine.
From HMS Formidable(1898): Lessons of a Highly Conventional Carreer - Key Ship Series 6, Ship 4 ·
The closing counterfactual asks whether Washington-style treaty rules could have preserved useful older battleships or converted their allowance into extra dreadnought tonnage.
From HMS Formidable(1898): Lessons of a Highly Conventional Carreer - Key Ship Series 6, Ship 4 ·
A naval gun's effectiveness depends on the moving ship, the target, the mounting, and the fire-control problem as much as on the weapon itself.
From Ranging & Stabilising: How Gunnery Evolved from 1860 to 1960 ·
Before the 1860s, metallurgy and reliability improved, but a gunner from the age of sail would still recognise the basic loading and firing practice.
From Ranging & Stabilising: How Gunnery Evolved from 1860 to 1960 ·
Ironclad armour and reliable steam power turned gun power into a defining feature of warship design, beginning a new contest among protection, speed, and firepower.
From Ranging & Stabilising: How Gunnery Evolved from 1860 to 1960 ·
The 8-inch/55 Mark 16 used self-loading machinery and semi-fixed ammunition, offering a sharp contrast with the manually worked broadside cannon of 1860.
From Ranging & Stabilising: How Gunnery Evolved from 1860 to 1960 ·
Officers who began with near-Napoleonic-era systems had to understand weapons and controls that would remain credible into the world-war era.
From Ranging & Stabilising: How Gunnery Evolved from 1860 to 1960 ·
An 1880s built-up gun used successively fitted hoops and tubes under tension so the complete barrel could contain propellant pressure.
From Ranging & Stabilising: How Gunnery Evolved from 1860 to 1960 ·
Wire-wound and monobloc barrels offered different ways to obtain strength as steel purity, alloy control, and casting improved.
From Ranging & Stabilising: How Gunnery Evolved from 1860 to 1960 ·
Better casting and steel purity made monobloc barrels possible, but longer barrels and stronger charges still imposed wear and replacement trade-offs.
From Ranging & Stabilising: How Gunnery Evolved from 1860 to 1960 ·
As guns became fewer and more powerful, their propellant had to deliver range without creating smoke that hid the enemy from the firing ship.
From Ranging & Stabilising: How Gunnery Evolved from 1860 to 1960 ·
A low-smoke or long-range propellant was still unsuitable if uneven performance made otherwise identical shots disperse unpredictably.
From Ranging & Stabilising: How Gunnery Evolved from 1860 to 1960 ·
Projecting features on spherical shot could engage a rifled gun, but the same shape created practical handling and loading problems.
From Ranging & Stabilising: How Gunnery Evolved from 1860 to 1960 ·
Naval arsenals shifted from solid shot to explosive shells just as more powerful guns made projectile reliability harder to achieve.
From Ranging & Stabilising: How Gunnery Evolved from 1860 to 1960 ·