Bruships 53: The Big Gun Era... Questions

The stream frames the big-gun era as roughly 1850 to 1943, giving viewers a useful boundary for the Q&A's battleship and gun-design questions.

The ship sits between competing interpretations, but a 28-knot design would require small-tube boilers and likely points toward triple 15-inch guns or six 18-inch guns.

Renown illustrates what an R-class-derived design could become when speed was prioritized from the outset.

A speculative British 18-inch design is appealing because it opens a plausible route toward six 18-inch guns on a fast capital-ship hull.

Re-engining could have raised their speed, but the Royal Navy would have had to trade the machinery savings among speed, armor, weapons, and fire-control improvements.

Possibly; a worked-up Nelson might have accompanied Hood in place of Prince of Wales and brought reliable systems plus nine 16-inch guns to the action.

Modern battleship shells would likely be self-guiding, GPS or laser guided, and part of a broader missile-age weapons environment.

The bore gives the gun's nominal size, while barrel length is expressed as a multiple of that bore diameter.

Their combat performance is strong, but moving and sustaining them abroad requires a logistical system that is easier for the United States or an allied deployment to absorb.

Speed matters because it lets one battle line dictate range, angle, and whether it can force a crossing-the-T position.

Enemy warships imposed the more dangerous requirement because a poorly matched naval battery could get its own ship sunk.

Probably three or four twin six-inch turrets, following the same general direction as Renown.

It could explain added complexity, but it seems unlikely because serious Royal Navy autoloader work appears later, in the 1920s and 1930s.

Shell weight depends on purpose, shell type, material density, steel thickness, and explosive content, so rough shortcuts are only rough checks.

Yes for cruising speed and global movement, but not nearly as much for escaping or defeating missiles traveling at extreme speed.

The Iowa should benefit from being decades newer, while an 18-inch-gun design would struggle to carry armor equal to its own firepower and would likely emphasize speed and the first hit.

A rough estimate puts the shell near three tons, requiring a powerful autoloading system because manpower could not move it.

Massively, because large fleet movements and live firing produced operational experience that peacetime systems had lacked.

It made sense because the United States expected heavily armored Japanese opponents, whereas the British light-shell approach did not deliver enough compensating range or rate-of-fire benefit.

A rough comparison turns shell weight into fleet scale by asking how many battleship salvos equal the mass of a Tribal-class destroyer.

A shell compared to a car makes the engineering burden of faster battleship loading immediately concrete.

Tillman IV, because American shipbuilding capacity favored producing more ships, while Japan had a clearer reason to compensate for expected numerical inferiority with an exceptionally powerful individual ship.

Britain would first try to stop completion with bombers, then accelerate a larger Lion-derived 18-inch-gun battleship if the threat survived.

The Royal Navy's hit-first, hit-hard tradition reaches back to Howard of Effingham as well as Drake and Raleigh.

Under the cited 1945 procedure, closing the firing key completed an electrical circuit that ignited the charge.

Quadruple turrets improve tonnage efficiency and density of fire, but they create serious operating and beam problems.

Britain would likely answer with large but more numerous 18-inch-gun ships rather than a single enormous one-off, because industrial capacity favors classes over isolated monsters.

A proposed arrangement combines Zumwalt-like shaping, extensive vertical-launch capacity, one to three main turrets, aviation facilities, and six- or eight-inch guns for a large modern escort.

They were vulnerable, but shielding could address the problem if the navy was willing to pay for it; cost was the stronger constraint.

A warning would identify the fire's location, while the crew might still fire loaded guns to remove shells and charges before they cooked off.

Smaller quick-firing guns can wreck exposed systems but lack the range and destructive effect of a battleship's heavy battery, while also consuming valuable weight.

A beamy capital ship could carry ten twin turrets, perhaps on a Queen Elizabeth- or King George V-sized basis, depending on superstructure and firing-arc choices.

Japan pushed evasion farther than most, but every major navy occupied some point on a spectrum between strict compliance and outright disregard.

Modern targeting reduces the need for large ranging salvos; historically, slow-loading heavy guns fired, checked, and corrected, while faster secondary guns corrected during continuous fire.

A large destroyer seemed the likely next step in 2021 because it would advance beyond the frigate program and test the complex air-defense integration needed before a carrier.

The answer depends on the definition: early aids appeared around 1902-1905, the Dreyer table was a major integrated system, and the 1927 Admiralty Fire Control Table offers the more convincing claim to reliability.

British and American designers were seriously studying autoloaders, including for proposed designs, but the technology had not matured enough to be fitted.

Its placement made sense for broadside fighting, but dependence on broadside arcs remains a design weakness.

Destroyers that rapidly acquired torpedo reloads in wartime illustrate how treaty-era designs reserved space and weight for later additions.

Their electrical demand would likely drive designers toward a nuclear power plant.

Not reliably, because the smaller projectile lacks the range and ballistic behavior of the heavy shell at battleship engagement distances.

The logistical argument favors 15-inch/45 guns, but Britain chose 16 inches because rival navies had moved to that caliber.

The eight-inch installation operated through a more restricted motion range, while the six-inch design attempted the full range and therefore faced greater complexity.

The logistics and machinery would be extraordinary, while the rotating arrangement would not meaningfully improve loading or firing performance.

Japanese publicity could misidentify Nagato as Yamato because a controlled photograph without scale made simple visual deception effective.

They might damage a trapped light ship, but a cruiser or destroyer can answer with heavier, faster-firing naval guns that would destroy a World War II tank with one hit.

The counterfactual envisages purpose-built fleet carriers in the early 1920s and a parallel race that could produce 45,000- to 50,000-ton carriers and roughly 70,000-ton battleships by the late 1930s.

Six inches marked the practical lower end for a cruiser, while British Hawkins-class interests and negotiation produced the eight-inch upper category; larger 9.2-inch proposals raised fears about powerful Italian Mediterranean cruisers.

One interpretation is an attempt to give carrier groups the strongest possible escorts against an enemy battleship reaching gun range.

HMS Unicorn used her four-inch anti-aircraft battery against shore targets during the Korean War.

Carrier defenses are valuable because they force an enemy to spend more resources and accept more risk, not because they guarantee survival.

That seems very likely because the change from the older 15-inch/42 appears small enough to make a retrofit practical.

A discussion of postwar hybrids widens into the Royal Navy's loss of politically effective senior leaders and Britain's investment priorities.

Allied occupation forces would seize and study it, spreading the advantage and accelerating global development rather than leaving Germany dominant.

Beatty fares worse in this assessment because Halsey at least sometimes admitted error and achieved a higher overall success rate.

Modern aircraft and armor would dominate early fighting, but ammunition and support for systems that 1939 industry could not replace would become the limiting factors.

More slowly than might be expected: battleships and experienced officers remained in service, so the estimated decline takes roughly thirty to forty years.

With F-35Bs and Merlin helicopters, the carrier would rapidly overwhelm the 1982 Argentine air threat, assuming its present air group and support arrived with it.

His conduct is judged heroic, while sixteen-year-olds in military service were far more normal then than they appear to modern viewers.

A Town-class cruiser is the preferred choice because a six-inch cruiser is flexible enough for small-ship work while its torpedoes preserve a threat against battleships.

Allied F-35B interoperability was planned from the start, while buying only two carriers accepts readiness risk; three usually preserve a capability and four can guarantee a continuous deployed requirement more reliably.

Battleship procedures assumed torpedo attack because the ships were obvious high-value targets and torpedoes were the main way smaller combatants could sink them.

Newer ships and better armor might have reduced losses, but removing slower ships could also let Beatty surge ahead of the Fifth Battle Squadron and encounter trouble sooner.

They may be waiting for the lengthy fitting-out stage, or the government may have paused the program and withheld funding for the next construction phase.

As guns became larger and heavier, turrets let fewer weapons cover wider arcs and bring multiple barrels to bear, freeing weight for machinery, armor, and fuel.

They strengthened the promise of cradle-to-grave welfare and made universal care attractive for humanitarian, workforce, and economic reasons.

A book reading shows how deep-desert reconnaissance depended on vehicle care and navigation as much as combat skill.

The discussion separates plausible institutional reasons for secrecy from proven explanations for the Thresher disaster.

The chronology separates Oxford's early teaching community from the later foundation of its colleges.

Somerville receives the criticism because more aggressive action during Operation C could have inflicted serious losses on the Japanese carrier force, despite admiration for him.

Yes; if a British armored carrier reached gun range, its heavier armament and protection would make the encounter very dangerous for a Japanese carrier.

The physical danger of underwater operations is used to challenge claims that future navies should consist only of submarines.

D. K. Brown's The Grand Fleet is the recommended starting point here for understanding the ships.

Neither the cheapest possible design nor the most exacting standard produces useful wartime mass on its own.

The proposed matches are Vian with his Tribal flotilla, Jellicoe with battleships and a hypothetical Agincourt, Nelson with Agamemnon, and Cunningham with his first command, Scorpion.

Andrew Boyd's work is recommended, especially the planned British Pacific Fleet successor to The Royal Navy in Eastern Waters, although that most directly relevant book had not appeared when the video was recorded.

A rescue decision shows why Vian's initiative inspired subordinates and frustrated the command chain.

The scenario imagines an aggressively employed Polish battleship whose allies would control it mainly through tight orders and restricted fuel.

Proposed names include Nelson, Rodney, Vian, Howe, St Vincent, Duncan, and Cunningham, with Jellicoe and Beatty available for a larger class.

Mistaken identification under threat expectations is the favored explanation here, although the surviving evidence is insufficient for certainty.

The sinking of UB-116 is a strong possibility, although shore bombardments continued close to the armistice and make a definitive answer difficult.

The answer expects better Polish discipline and argues that violence against civilians depends heavily on troop treatment, officer accountability, and whether the command chain still functions.

Six Tribal-class photographs in Brassey's 1939 reveal how prominently the Royal Navy presented the new destroyers before the war.

The German 1934 type receives the criticism because its light-cruiser-sized guns undermined the rate of fire, fire control, and maneuvering performance needed in the destroyer role.

The Tribal flotillas' work with Hood shaped their belief that they should have screened her during the Bismarck operation.