if the Bismarck broken out into the Atlantic after fighting the battle of the Denmark straight what type of measures would the British take with their convoy escorts how much damage with the Bismarck and flicked on Atlantic shipping and what type scram of battles the Bismarck fight 163
What’s the best main battery fire control you could come up with combining the optics, radar, mechanical fire control system, and the electrical wiring from the 31 WWII-era big-gun capital ships?
In Drydock 321 part 2 you mention the theoretical possibility of building a fast battleship in the pre-dreadnought era, putting aside all the outside factors you outlined in the answer as to why this was never done, from a purely engineering perspective, what would such a vessel look like? And if some mad monarch overruled all logic and naysayers, how would the rest of the world react to such a vessel being built?
What were the major differences between the fire control systems using radar and range finders etc. between the various Navies in the WW2 period? It's apparent that massive progress and fast iteration happened in a very short time and I wonder of any instances of convergent evolution happened in these systems.
"but one thing we haven't done in our quest to look round fire control systems is actually go up to the frontline" Drach bouta pull up a Final Countdown and transport us to the Pacific Theatre of WW2 for this bit
This video should be included with every copy of Friedman's Naval Firepower book. It is hard to put it all together unless you see this stuff. Thanks, Drach. This was a real service to the history community.
Yeah, Naval Firepower is not an easy read! I am lucky if I understand one word in three, but that's possibly just my poor biologist brain rebelling against this tech stuff trying to confuzzle it!
Do space apogees count as at least a next step, or do they count as guided rock
12 дней назад+1
@@chuck2998Throwing requires there to not be any propulsion after the rock has left the throwing device (or person). I don't think we have many devices capable to throw rock to the space
It’s disturbing that a huge number of people (including historians) believe the fire control radar is what actually calculates the firing solution (and also assume any ship without it thus were incapable of calculating firing solutions because they didn’t have a fire control system).
Yes because it's a time when history crosses path with modern technology and engineering. Historians aren't engineers in general. It's not their job and it's fine.
@@sylvainprigent6234while I agree that it can be fine if they dont know something only partially related to their field it does still become an issue if they *think* they know something and as such draw false conclusions or spread incorrect information. If you want to discuss the impact of german submarines in ww2 and you are looking at tonnage sunk and how much civilians could not get imported anymore its fine if you dont understand how a ww2 submarine works. But if you want to talk about submarine tactics and counter-tactics and you do not understand what submarines can and cannot do you are probably going to say something daft. Some historical subjects are so deeply intertwined with another field that any analysis that lacks at least a basic understanding will at best be shallow and more likely than not actively misinformed. Ofc that doesn't make someone a bad historian if they do not know these things but it means that those topics are probably not ones they should cover in depth.
@@misterperson3469 - One of the major reasons, encyclopedias, including Wikipedia, get things wrong. And why those secondary sources are only for casual reference, and not for educational purposes, past middle school.
It's so difficult to retain and remember every minor detail that I would never expect any historian to "know it all." Just look at how many different crewmen are being used for these redundant postions, and then tell me how many personnel are on board the ship? Can we seriously expect one person to be intimately familiar with them all? I don't think so, so historians are probably going to be debating one another for a very long time! 😂 So... I think that it's good that they write things down so that they may be berated for their ignorance later by another, younger know-it-all. 🤣👍
Hey Drach, you are one of the best naval historian ever in my opinion, along with Ryan in Battleship New Jersey, you guys are the reason why my love for Warships, Modern or old, sparked again, thank you and have a wonderful start of the new year!!! Thank you for a great 2024
@@therocinante3443 It is so absolutely worth it, the team of BB New Jersey (Museum&Memorial) have done an incredible job of making you feel like you are on a naval vessel. There are a lot of interesting exhibits of course, but overall it feels less like a museum and more like you are on a warship and the sailors have just left.
While he is good, he knows when to step back to let the rather niche experts take over, this video is a case and point. It IS a skill that gets underrated these days.
Why Ryan never uses a drone is beyond me. I was so ready for outstanding video of the ship being moved to drydock, but those were some of the most disappointing videos Ryan has put out. I feel like we all missed a major opportunity. It wasn't until this video, by Drach, that I got to see how wonderful the ship really looked from a drone.
It's mind-blowing that all this was designed on drafting tables by guys with pencils, squares, and rulers, and it all went together perfectly in the shipyard.
"Perfectly." Riiiiiiight. Meanwhile, the ship builders are inventing new swear words while beating the hell out the "perfectly designed" component with his "problem solver" to get it lined up with the other "perfectly designed " components.
You have to add the iron workers et al cutting the actual plates and welding if you say the Uncertainty Budget for the physical construction was "0.0000"! You do know the design ALMOST went out with Ordnance designed turrets and barbettes that wouldn't fit the Construction & Repair hull, cuz bureaucracy? That's why there's a knuckle in the hull at turret 1 that throws off an unintended second bow wave where the hull was redesigned to fit the redesigned, but still 'too large' barbette. Hardly an indicator of 'fit perfectly'.
Kudos to your guide; He's one of the most concise, easy to understand people you've recorded and didn't use a single filler word when presenting the fire director. His knowledge on the Mark 38 is truly comprehensive and the New Jersey is very, very lucky to have him. And all of that while this gentleman can't be a year younger than eighty; I can barely string half a technical explanation together without wandering off and I haven't even made thirty-five years yet.
I love the technology of this era. It's fascinating to see how much redundancy could be built into systems that were essentially electro-mechanical. One of the reasons I also like playing with pre-WWII toy trains.
@@jon-paulfilkins7820 redundancy in systems shows you aren't confident in your system Plus business owners realized the engineers were working with their own margins (1+1=3 at most) and decided replacements were more profitable than something sold once
@@chuck2998 The amount of times I have had to crunch and work 12-16 hour days because the process failed, the plan turned out to be based on wishes and hope etc. Yet when someone like me points out a choke point where one thing goes wrong, all stops.. and I get told I'm "not a team player". Trust me, we need make the idea of "Have a back up" normal. And we are talking very big companies.
@@jon-paulfilkins7820 Yep. Got stuck last year because Delta airlines used 1 way and 1 way only to manage their flight and cabin crews. So when that computer snafu happened last year, everything was fine, except they didn't know where any of the aircrew were, had no way of notifying them, so nobody was going anywhere. Had to be flown home a day late and on American (and i HATE that airline). No backup system, even though it should be easily enough done. Cost them plenty, but i bet they won't fix the issue.
Even _with_ range finders, I believe it was Admiral Somerville who noted that "the correct range for engaging in battle is 'point blank', at which range even a gunnery officer cannot miss".
We've lost the fine art of clockwork mechanical precision by and large. electronics might be easier, less expensive, and more reliable to make, but its harder to love a digital computer. We can only marvel at the genius and skill that went into these units.
@@luisnunes3863 The idea that you can just throw computing power at problems and 'all is easy' isn't even remotely accurate for a lot of engineering problems we solve today. It's a common fallacy among people looking in from the outside, but it is a fallacy and not reality. In reality, if you're not both clever and experienced (knowledgeable), you're not going to be able to solve those problems. In that respect, things haven't changed that much since the days when these ships were designed. They needed good engineering back then, and we still need it today. The technology has changed, and the reasons/details have changed, but the requirement for clever engineering certainly hasn't changed. People take technology for granted without having a clue about how much complexity and cleverness is responsible for that technology. Human nature I suppose.
It really does. No one goes up there tho so its always sealed and protected. he took us up there but the ladder to get into it was a bit daunting - looked so cool tho!
Some of this was so cramped that I imagined a Drachinifel version of The Cheiftain's "Oh no! The tank is on fire!" drill leading to elbows in stomachs and fingers getting stubbed in the mad scramble of what would be an "Oh no! the SHIP is on fire!" Imagine a mid-western US enlisted crewman fresh from basic training in the 1940s seeing the big ship for the first time, and then seeing the cramped space he would be assigned to.
This explains those weird Death Star gunner stations that look so very cramped and require the operator to be wearing a helmet. Similar, just without the with vast cinematic voids at your back.
Last time I was this early to a new Drachinifel video, _USS_ New Jersey was leaving the Philadelphia Navy Yard for the first time! Great content and information about these old analog systems! 😊
To think that massive mechanical computer could be replaced by something as small as your thumb driven by a button battery today. Thanks for doing these. I find them endlessly fascinating!
Very cool look at some neat tech. As an aside, it’s very neat to me how unchanged things are in the Navy today. The hand-darkened brass, the steel-braided cabling with 1/8” thick white paint on, all the places to bang your head on, all are found on ships today. Makes me nostalgic
While I'm sure there are old yellowed paper manuals explaining this somewhere, it's great to document it with an expert doing a hands on demonstration.
Amazing what the 1940 -45, USS Jersey Iowa battleship and her sister ships where capable of without 2024 computer. They are big, mean girls who could pack a punch. Thankyou gentleman for a in-depth look on how to fire an Iowa battleship with big guns. much better than reading a pamphlets.
The complexity of these systems completely blows my mind. Absolutely fantastic - thank you. Could you do a similar video on how surface vessels aimed and fired torpedoes? ?
Coincidentally, I've just been listening to a RUclips audiobook of Tom Clancy's "Red Storm Rising", specifically the part where a couple of Iowas "introduce themselves" to the Soviet forces who were occupying Iceland.....
If one of them was - The USS Wisconsin (BB-64) I hope she didn't get too annoyed with the Russians like she did with a Korean gun battery which she blasted off the face of Korea after they had the audacity to fire and clip her.
Huh. Need to do some 3d scanning and get solid models to fab some more handles for the control wheels. Looks like there has been some cannibalism happening.
To Roy and the crew, thank you for the hard work that y'all do to keep the channel going. I miss Paul and his Shatner-esque pauses. His wit and knowledge was truly outstanding. May y'all have a successful year, and I look forward to seeing what comes next.
I finally was able to go visit the New Jersey recently and it was an amazing experience, unfortunately wasn't able to get to see all of it due to time constraints. Absolutely amazing experience and a gorgeous ship, highly recommend visiting a local museum ship, especially if it's an Iowa or other battleship.
So basically, the radar is not directly sending data to the plotting room... it is still the operator doing the same corrective action to keep a crosshair pointed to either the actual target, or on the 'rendering' of the target on the radar screen ? This is amazing and at the same time a very elegant 'upgrade path' from the legacyvto modern device
You have to realize at this time, those radars were finicky and prone to failure. You needed a system that would work when the radar set inevitably failed. Which was MUCH more likely if you were taking return fire. Electronic systems are much more robust today, and thus reliable enough that it's just not useful to have optical backups. Although i would not be surprised if even on a modern cruiser there isn't some manual backup. The thing that killed big guns on ships was aircraft and anti ship missiles. Manual aiming of guns is just not possible on targets moving that quickly and that are able to maneuver. Guns are still necessary IMHO for dealing with small boats and boat drones. But you don't need big guns for those kinds of targets.
-All that was going on was that the fire control computer was taking range and bearing data from the radar Operators instead of the optical director Operator and optical range finder. Otherwise, the procedures were the same. -Manual matching of the radar target "pip' for range tracking was not particularly accurate. -It's far better to auto lock. For instance, if a target is 15km away which is 100 microseconds would initially set the pip on the target which then sets a 100 microsecond timer. The timer would gate the return pulse search for say 99.99 microseconds to 100.01 microseconds and only accept pulses within that +/-15m band. The timer would then reset to the new value so long as it wasn't for a target moving at more than say 60 knots or about 36 meters/second. The result is a far more consistent and accurate range track. The American chief engineer for the SCR-584 point blank refused the US Army for manual fall-back tracking. (MIT professors tend to have big ones) auto tracking was so much superior. The German FuSE 64 Mannheim FLAK radar had auto tracking and even in the height of allied jamming could follow an aircraft automatically even if it wasn't possible to see it manually. -Once you have the range gate you can do autotrack (ie left right signal) easily. -The German FuMO 26 and British Type 284P radar both had blind for control via lobe switching but the British radar managed 0.1 degree accuracy versus 0.25 degrees for the German radar mainly due to the electronic evaluation of the left right signal instead of visual. The Germans could do this but just didn't want the expense and maintenance of extra vacuum valves.
@@bernhardzunk7402 There is actually good reason NOT to autotrack surface targets by the radar. Firecontrol needs a smooth solution for target motion, as it generates the solution in just a few seconds. The way it works has a target detected and a tracked manually until the computer says it has a solution. The director is then shifted to automatic, and it follows the solution generated by the computer, as do the guns. In essence, the autotrack is the computer solution. The operator now watches to correct if the return deviates from the generated solution. This can be by errors from the initial solution, or by changes in target motion. This is the same whether the input is visual or radar. Auto tracking radars tend to hunt all over large slow moving (less than 100kts) targets, now getting a strong reflection forward, now aft, now at the waterline, now in the superstructure. The apparent motion is far greater than the actual motion of the target. If all of these were automatically fed into the computer, the solution would be erratic and unusable. Hunting in antiaircraft fire produces small errors, so AA systems (Mk25 radar for Mk37 GFCS for example) will use autotrack. Just not in surface mode.
I took a tour on the Iowa not too long ago I wanted to see the rangefinder so bad and know how they did it but they haven't restored it yet. Thank you for making this video
Please can you make a fire control playlist. I can not find your previous videos in this series. I found one, but that referenced a previous one which I can't find
Rather than just watching videos, Google "Principles of Naval Ordnance and Gunnery". Look for 1940s-1960s editions, they were designed to teach crewmembers how it works. Google Gene Slover, his website has copies. The Illustrations on visual salvo spotting and the use of the B-Scope radar displays of the Mk8 & Mk13 can teach you in a few seconds what hours of videos made by people who do not know the subject will never do.
31:56 Thats a great point. When looking through a telescope you get the "telecompression" effect, where its hard to judge distance because its all squashed together. You can see this in pictures though a very long camera lens.
I recently toured the USS Iowa in Southern California. Funny thing about the USS Iowa battleship.. when it was being recommissioned, they tried to update the fireing control electronics to 80 technology and found it had serious unreliable issues and it was decided to go back to the original fire control system from the 40's as it was a better system... A disabled US Army Veteran
Brilliant, thank you both for making this! At some stage, it would be great to see a summary of all the various big brass triggers around the ship that could actually fire the main guns. (Just to help us imagine the feeling of power that must come from a trigger that big!)
Now you have to do a Fire Control systems review on HMS Belfast. Then, yet a third video comparing the two systems. Battleship versus cruiser, or RN versus USN way of doing things. With the absolute dearth of material, Drach has released over the last few years. Im sure he has the copius time needed, to release my vid requests, in a timely manner :D. On a more serious note. Plot One does not look like a nice place to be, in anything but a flat calm. Knee, elbow and hard hat protection looks like it would have been very useful wedged in such a high up space, in any kind of sea state, never mind the gyration's for combat..
Drach - Most interesting but as I watched it, I wished that you had occasionally thrown in a sketch showing the location of the particular "room" was and the position within that was being discussed. Also, and this is very wishful thinking, it would have been neat to have seen the images that would have been displayed on the periscopes and radar screens.
I visited the North Carolina a long time ago and saw the range finder in one of the forward turrets. shorter range to the horizon but sufficient for back up in close actions as needed.
The thing boggles my mind is is maintaining cross calibration. Any one of 6 Directors can send data to 4 different Plotting stations, which can send data to 15 different gun stations. That is 360 different possible paths for data to travel. That's a migraine waiting to happen.
@@grimlock1471 And it's all done with relatively basic wiring and no real digital equipment or computers! And the sheer scale of all the infrastructure and detail of those systems is beyond insane. I loved that big mechanical "computer" box he showed in one episode. So cool.
@@El_Chompo Every component is just a tiny bit different. And how those differences stack up can do weird things. There have to be procedures to verify that a firing solution generated using Spot 1, Forward Plot, and Turret 3 is the same(accounting for the parallax he mentions in the video) as a solution generated by Spot 2, After Plot, and Turret 1. Now do that for the 359 other combinations. Every time you repair or replace something, you to revalidate at least part of the system.
10 дней назад
The Outtakes make it look like Drach accidentely made an "Inside the chieftains hatch" this time :) Thx for the Video
l served in the RAN as a warfare officer with the Mk22 director in River class Destroyer Escorts, It was a Dutch track while scan radar system from l guess the 1960s and was a precursor to the US Mk92 system seen in the OHP frigates. The system had an A Scope and a B Scope display. From memory, the A Scope tracked the target, while the B Scope illuminated the target and the two radars talked to each other within the system through the Fire Control Officer (usually a Petty Officer) to arrive at the fire control solution. The fall of shot could be observed for line by the B scope, The system only required two operators. A far cry from the dozens of operators required for the systems that are being shown here!!
I always wondered why so many people were required to aim the guns. I did not expect so many of them to be tasked with accounting for the differences of position and angle of the rangefinder from the gun crews or center of the ship.
This is something for you, Ryan, and any museum ship curators to consider. But would it be possible to set up a simulation of the fire control system on any of the ships?
I would say it would be possible, given enough money, but totally impractical, assuming you want to simulate the whole process. Assuming it was for museum visitors to use, you would have to get dozens of untrained people to not only understand their jobs, but also work together, without any preparation, to operate the whole system.
@@michaelsommers2356 You could probably have a physical copy of one of the range control stations, and have the others dealt with by the computer, I suspect. Alternately, have the full set up and make it a paid event to go through an hour or so of learning to use it then using it.
I've been looking for this video for a while... I did wonder why the helmet, after the last few scenes, I now very much understand. I do wonder how the crew did it, I doubt very much a standard issue naval head bonk/bang mk 1,2 or 3 would help much in operating all that complicated equipment in the middle of a battle.
As an engineering Nerd, it's fascinating to see all the redundant systems and what ifs on a 1940s era Battleship. Somebody's planning to take damage when they cross the T.
You should do this level of depth in how you do fire control on shore bombardment. Especially when the target is beyond the horizon. I remember learning about naval gunfire support in US Army Forward Observer school, and the big concern was lack of range accuracy. You didn’t want the shells to travel over your head because a “short” round was common and could ruin your whole day!
Another thing to note, for the kids out there (i'm old i can say that!), the fire control computer was an analog device, and quite a bit of it was mechanical. Yes, virginia, computers can be mechanical and definitely can be analog. In fact, there are areas of computer science that are looking into going back to some analog systems, simply because you can do some math that way easier than digitally. Even the engineers of the era designing these ships and system didn't typically have access to what we would consider a computer today. They were using slide rules. Your old school 4 function electronic calculators weren't even around back then.
Do you Navy vets want a blast of nostalgia? Look at the plastic, zip-top bags at 19:25. I could not tell you how many MAF copies I put in one of those things and taped it to the top of an ALQ-99 pod transmitter. Not to mention all of the other things we used to turn in for replacement. In 11 years working in AT shops I must have handled a thousand of those. We used these in the '90s. Are they still being used?
I believe that, although these ships might be obsolete when sitting next to an aircraft carrier, that a day will come that we will wish that we still had some battleships with their big guns & heavy armor! Especially if you consider that with the Des Moines having such success with the 8" semi-autoloaders that maybe they could have developed some semi- autoloaders with some battleship guns as well. Not so sure that they could have made 16" semi-autoloaders work or not. But even if they had to make them 14" or 15" so that the ship didn't have to be so huge, it would still be one of the greatest ships ever made! I am very happy that they were able to make USS Salem a museum ship, as well as all the fast battleships too! And I do think it's a shame that not even one of the standards were saved as museums. The only thing even close is a memorial & a grave, rusting away on the bottom of Pearl Harbor. 🎉❤😢 It was truly a shame what happened to those sailors!
USS Texas seems pretty close to the standards. USS Nevada was commissioned in 1916 as the first standard. USS Texas was commissioned in 1914 - only a two year difference. A lot of the specs for the two ships are similar. Some of the differences aren't going to be particularly obvious, so I'm not sure what you think we're missing in terms of things that are easy to see.
I very much hope we get to see more videos with the good Dr. talking about battleship fire control. It’s a truly fascinating subject and the complexity of the mechanical computers etc involved are just astounding. I’m curious about the control position in the conning tower. There is of course no stereoscopic range finder but can you use to periscopes to make range estimates in much the same way US Submarines made range estimates via periscope in WWII? Also perhaps it was discussed in another video and I’ve forgotten it but it would be interesting to hear further explanation of level and cross level and how those feed into the fire control computer. Range and bearing are pretty obvious values but level and cross level are less so.
This is some expensive, complicated stuff. The math alone, before the engineering. Circa 1930’s & 40’s - no super computers. One little detail not considered and it all goes to poopoo. Holy crap. The men and women that made this happen should be very proud.
The redundancy is amazing. The information being fed back and forth from the director, to the plotting room and to the turrets must create a wiring nightmare in case of battle damage. The question is which takes precedence to the "computers" in plot? They're getting information from the director and the conning tower. The director has the best view but the fire control officer may be in the conning tower while plot has the best information from the radars. Whose triggers will actually fire the guns or will all of them so you just keep your booger hooks off them unless you're in charge.
With all that work to be done first, it is somewhat amazing that they eventually get to fire a shot (let alone hit something). I mean, if I had done all that, I might well have reached retirement age or forgotten what it was for.
I find it interesting that there were so many different crew members throughout the ship, including in the turrets, who could be enabled to actually fire the main guns. Might be cool to just have a video about that and under what conditions a certain crew position would be given that authority. What was the established SOP or hierarchy?
I find it interesting the number of people needed to operate these electro-mechanical fire control systems. This applies to both the naval surface and AA systems and the army land-based AA systems. Truly an exercise in teamwork.
What is the manning requirement for the Gunnery Division on something like New Jersey? Where is the Gunnery Officer during all this? It is amazing how much they were able to identify and compensate for using mechanical computers.
I've got a question, what happened to all the ammo, live and training, for the big guns on Yomato, and Musashi, did they make or have shore battery guns or....
This is all incredibly complex and extremely fascinating. It is amazing when you decrease the numbers of guns on a ship and increase the range of the weapon how much more complex it is to hit a target. Talk about proprietary property.
It's interesting to compare this to the T-64BV tank fire controls on Shawshank redemption channel. Basically they do the same thing, but one is late fast battleship and another is late cold war tank.
![Noob To Max With DRAGON REWORK In Blox Fruits [FULL MOVIE]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/LnBMOinoOvA/mqdefault.jpg)
Pinned post for Q&A :)
if the Bismarck broken out into the Atlantic after fighting the battle of the Denmark straight what type of measures would the British take with their convoy escorts how much damage with the Bismarck and flicked on Atlantic shipping and what type scram of battles the Bismarck fight 163
What’s the best main battery fire control you could come up with combining the optics, radar, mechanical fire control system, and the electrical wiring from the 31 WWII-era big-gun capital ships?
Is this the longest 'Five Minute Guide (more or less)' to date?
In Drydock 321 part 2 you mention the theoretical possibility of building a fast battleship in the pre-dreadnought era, putting aside all the outside factors you outlined in the answer as to why this was never done, from a purely engineering perspective, what would such a vessel look like? And if some mad monarch overruled all logic and naysayers, how would the rest of the world react to such a vessel being built?
What were the major differences between the fire control systems using radar and range finders etc. between the various Navies in the WW2 period?
It's apparent that massive progress and fast iteration happened in a very short time and I wonder of any instances of convergent evolution happened in these systems.
"but one thing we haven't done in our quest to look round fire control systems is actually go up to the frontline"
Drach bouta pull up a Final Countdown and transport us to the Pacific Theatre of WW2 for this bit
Final Countdown! Now that was a fun film that ended about 20 minutes too early!
"As you can see, the 1980s the Tomahawks and CWIS are somewhat more effective than their WW2 counterparts."
Final Countdown! Now that was a fun film that ended about 20 minutes too early!
"As you can see, the 1980s the Tomahawks and CWIS are somewhat more effective than their WW2 counterparts."
What a strangely homogenous comment thread.
This video should be included with every copy of Friedman's Naval Firepower book. It is hard to put it all together unless you see this stuff. Thanks, Drach. This was a real service to the history community.
Yeah, Naval Firepower is not an easy read! I am lucky if I understand one word in three, but that's possibly just my poor biologist brain rebelling against this tech stuff trying to confuzzle it!
Now this right here is something I’ve been excited for. “Throw rock very far accurately” at near enough its highest level
Do space apogees count as at least a next step, or do they count as guided rock
@@chuck2998Throwing requires there to not be any propulsion after the rock has left the throwing device (or person). I don't think we have many devices capable to throw rock to the space
That sewer grate that was capping an underground nuke detonation left atmosphere, of course that wasn't the goal of the project
I love the mysterious arm in the background around 8min in 😅
I was about to say the same thing lol
It’s Thing.
stay after the credits :)
Thank you Thing. 😆
That poor kind old man suddenly finds himself in a horror movie lol
It’s disturbing that a huge number of people (including historians) believe the fire control radar is what actually calculates the firing solution (and also assume any ship without it thus were incapable of calculating firing solutions because they didn’t have a fire control system).
Yes because it's a time when history crosses path with modern technology and engineering.
Historians aren't engineers in general. It's not their job and it's fine.
@@sylvainprigent6234while I agree that it can be fine if they dont know something only partially related to their field it does still become an issue if they *think* they know something and as such draw false conclusions or spread incorrect information.
If you want to discuss the impact of german submarines in ww2 and you are looking at tonnage sunk and how much civilians could not get imported anymore its fine if you dont understand how a ww2 submarine works. But if you want to talk about submarine tactics and counter-tactics and you do not understand what submarines can and cannot do you are probably going to say something daft.
Some historical subjects are so deeply intertwined with another field that any analysis that lacks at least a basic understanding will at best be shallow and more likely than not actively misinformed. Ofc that doesn't make someone a bad historian if they do not know these things but it means that those topics are probably not ones they should cover in depth.
@@misterperson3469 - One of the major reasons, encyclopedias, including Wikipedia, get things wrong. And why those secondary sources are only for casual reference, and not for educational purposes, past middle school.
The same ones that think a 50 Cal is the same as 50 mm.
It's so difficult to retain and remember every minor detail that I would never expect any historian to "know it all." Just look at how many different crewmen are being used for these redundant postions, and then tell me how many personnel are on board the ship? Can we seriously expect one person to be intimately familiar with them all? I don't think so, so historians are probably going to be debating one another for a very long time!
😂
So... I think that it's good that they write things down so that they may be berated for their ignorance later by another, younger know-it-all.
🤣👍
Hey Drach, you are one of the best naval historian ever in my opinion, along with Ryan in Battleship New Jersey, you guys are the reason why my love for Warships, Modern or old, sparked again, thank you and have a wonderful start of the new year!!! Thank you for a great 2024
I've had the pleasure of going to the New Jersey, I highly recommend!
@@therocinante3443 awesome bro, hopefully I can visit her too someday
@@therocinante3443 It is so absolutely worth it, the team of BB New Jersey (Museum&Memorial) have done an incredible job of making you feel like you are on a naval vessel. There are a lot of interesting exhibits of course, but overall it feels less like a museum and more like you are on a warship and the sailors have just left.
While he is good, he knows when to step back to let the rather niche experts take over, this video is a case and point. It IS a skill that gets underrated these days.
Why Ryan never uses a drone is beyond me. I was so ready for outstanding video of the ship being moved to drydock, but those were some of the most disappointing videos Ryan has put out. I feel like we all missed a major opportunity. It wasn't until this video, by Drach, that I got to see how wonderful the ship really looked from a drone.
It's mind-blowing that all this was designed on drafting tables by guys with pencils, squares, and rulers, and it all went together perfectly in the shipyard.
"Perfectly." Riiiiiiight. Meanwhile, the ship builders are inventing new swear words while beating the hell out the "perfectly designed" component with his "problem solver" to get it lined up with the other "perfectly designed " components.
You have to add the iron workers et al cutting the actual plates and welding if you say the Uncertainty Budget for the physical construction was "0.0000"!
You do know the design ALMOST went out with Ordnance designed turrets and barbettes that wouldn't fit the Construction & Repair hull, cuz bureaucracy? That's why there's a knuckle in the hull at turret 1 that throws off an unintended second bow wave where the hull was redesigned to fit the redesigned, but still 'too large' barbette.
Hardly an indicator of 'fit perfectly'.
@@scooterdescooter4018 Ok. It went together reasonably well with skilled craftsmen doing the fine-work.
And slide rules. The engineers didn't even have digital calculators.
@@immikeurnot And tables of logs and trigonometric ratios that often contained errors.
Shout out to your gracious and knowledgeable host
Kudos to your guide; He's one of the most concise, easy to understand people you've recorded and didn't use a single filler word when presenting the fire director. His knowledge on the Mark 38 is truly comprehensive and the New Jersey is very, very lucky to have him. And all of that while this gentleman can't be a year younger than eighty; I can barely string half a technical explanation together without wandering off and I haven't even made thirty-five years yet.
I love the technology of this era. It's fascinating to see how much redundancy could be built into systems that were essentially electro-mechanical. One of the reasons I also like playing with pre-WWII toy trains.
Yes, modern day commercial enterprises should take note. Too many run on the assumption that nothing will go wrong.
@@jon-paulfilkins7820 redundancy in systems shows you aren't confident in your system
Plus business owners realized the engineers were working with their own margins (1+1=3 at most) and decided replacements were more profitable than something sold once
@@chuck2998 The amount of times I have had to crunch and work 12-16 hour days because the process failed, the plan turned out to be based on wishes and hope etc. Yet when someone like me points out a choke point where one thing goes wrong, all stops.. and I get told I'm "not a team player". Trust me, we need make the idea of "Have a back up" normal. And we are talking very big companies.
@@jon-paulfilkins7820 Yep. Got stuck last year because Delta airlines used 1 way and 1 way only to manage their flight and cabin crews. So when that computer snafu happened last year, everything was fine, except they didn't know where any of the aircrew were, had no way of notifying them, so nobody was going anywhere.
Had to be flown home a day late and on American (and i HATE that airline). No backup system, even though it should be easily enough done. Cost them plenty, but i bet they won't fix the issue.
Before range finders the most common range setting were Far AF, Reasonably Far, medium, worryingly close, and just fire you knave.
Light the cannon fuse at:
Half way up swell
Crest of swell
Half way down swell
AS SOON AS THE DAMN THING IS LOADED!!!!
Even _with_ range finders, I believe it was Admiral Somerville who noted that "the correct range for engaging in battle is 'point blank', at which range even a gunnery officer cannot miss".
I am always amazed at the totality ingenious engineering and technology that existed in the 1940s during World War II!
We've lost the fine art of clockwork mechanical precision by and large. electronics might be easier, less expensive, and more reliable to make, but its harder to love a digital computer. We can only marvel at the genius and skill that went into these units.
@ Well said my friend, and so true.
@@chrismaverick9828 for sure the main analog fire control computer. Like how does that even work? Cue the ICP magnets 😅
When one can just throw computing power at problems all is easy, when you have to do it with mechanics and optics alone, you have to be clever... 🤔😜
@@luisnunes3863 The idea that you can just throw computing power at problems and 'all is easy' isn't even remotely accurate for a lot of engineering problems we solve today. It's a common fallacy among people looking in from the outside, but it is a fallacy and not reality. In reality, if you're not both clever and experienced (knowledgeable), you're not going to be able to solve those problems.
In that respect, things haven't changed that much since the days when these ships were designed. They needed good engineering back then, and we still need it today. The technology has changed, and the reasons/details have changed, but the requirement for clever engineering certainly hasn't changed. People take technology for granted without having a clue about how much complexity and cleverness is responsible for that technology. Human nature I suppose.
That equipment still looks perfectly serviceable. Well done, Ryan.
It really does. No one goes up there tho so its always sealed and protected. he took us up there but the ladder to get into it was a bit daunting - looked so cool tho!
Some of this was so cramped that I imagined a Drachinifel version of The Cheiftain's "Oh no! The tank is on fire!" drill leading to elbows in stomachs and fingers getting stubbed in the mad scramble of what would be an "Oh no! the SHIP is on fire!" Imagine a mid-western US enlisted crewman fresh from basic training in the 1940s seeing the big ship for the first time, and then seeing the cramped space he would be assigned to.
This explains those weird Death Star gunner stations that look so very cramped and require the operator to be wearing a helmet. Similar, just without the with vast cinematic voids at your back.
Yes, there was massive WW2 influence on all the aesthetics in Star Wars.
In fact, the Death Star helmet props were modified US Navy Mk. II Talkers.
Fantastic video Drach, thanks for having such living wealth of information describe this using the actual equipment in a way a book just couldn't.
Last time I was this early to a new Drachinifel video, _USS_ New Jersey was leaving the Philadelphia Navy Yard for the first time! Great content and information about these old analog systems!
😊
Great episode. Great B Roll at the end. That B roll really shows how tight it is in the director.
One of the most fascinating things I’ve ever watched was a long video on the operation of the analog integrators of the Ford fire control computer.
With you brother. Are we nerds or what?!?
Yes!
To think that massive mechanical computer could be replaced by something as small as your thumb driven by a button battery today.
Thanks for doing these. I find them endlessly fascinating!
The system also included a bunch of trained human elements as well, of course!
@@alandpostthe human software and hardware is very well utilized to compute the range.
Very cool look at some neat tech. As an aside, it’s very neat to me how unchanged things are in the Navy today. The hand-darkened brass, the steel-braided cabling with 1/8” thick white paint on, all the places to bang your head on, all are found on ships today. Makes me nostalgic
While I'm sure there are old yellowed paper manuals explaining this somewhere, it's great to document it with an expert doing a hands on demonstration.
Amazing what the 1940 -45, USS Jersey Iowa battleship and her sister ships where capable of without 2024 computer. They are big, mean girls who could pack a punch.
Thankyou gentleman for a in-depth look on how to fire an Iowa battleship with big guns. much better than reading a pamphlets.
I see Drach, I see Iowa, I am a happy man.
I see New Jersey. Well, Philadelphia, actually.
All we need is Ching Lee!
More complex than I think any of us could have imagined. It's amazing that he can keep all that straight in his head.
The complexity of these systems completely blows my mind. Absolutely fantastic - thank you. Could you do a similar video on how surface vessels aimed and fired torpedoes?
?
Coincidentally, I've just been listening to a RUclips audiobook of Tom Clancy's "Red Storm Rising", specifically the part where a couple of Iowas "introduce themselves" to the Soviet forces who were occupying Iceland.....
I read that book while deployed onboard Saratoga 85/86. The 1st class in my shop and myself had quite a few discussions along those lines.
Coolest scene in the book!
If one of them was - The USS Wisconsin (BB-64) I hope she didn't get too annoyed with the Russians like she did with a Korean gun battery which she blasted off the face of Korea after they had the audacity to fire and clip her.
Huh. Need to do some 3d scanning and get solid models to fab some more handles for the control wheels. Looks like there has been some cannibalism happening.
To Roy and the crew, thank you for the hard work that y'all do to keep the channel going. I miss Paul and his Shatner-esque pauses. His wit and knowledge was truly outstanding. May y'all have a successful year, and I look forward to seeing what comes next.
Not only is the system extremely complex, but redundant and fault tolerant too! What a piece of work!
I finally was able to go visit the New Jersey recently and it was an amazing experience, unfortunately wasn't able to get to see all of it due to time constraints. Absolutely amazing experience and a gorgeous ship, highly recommend visiting a local museum ship, especially if it's an Iowa or other battleship.
So basically, the radar is not directly sending data to the plotting room... it is still the operator doing the same corrective action to keep a crosshair pointed to either the actual target, or on the 'rendering' of the target on the radar screen ? This is amazing and at the same time a very elegant 'upgrade path' from the legacyvto modern device
You have to realize at this time, those radars were finicky and prone to failure. You needed a system that would work when the radar set inevitably failed. Which was MUCH more likely if you were taking return fire. Electronic systems are much more robust today, and thus reliable enough that it's just not useful to have optical backups. Although i would not be surprised if even on a modern cruiser there isn't some manual backup.
The thing that killed big guns on ships was aircraft and anti ship missiles. Manual aiming of guns is just not possible on targets moving that quickly and that are able to maneuver. Guns are still necessary IMHO for dealing with small boats and boat drones. But you don't need big guns for those kinds of targets.
-All that was going on was that the fire control computer was taking range and bearing data from the radar Operators instead of the optical director Operator and optical range finder. Otherwise, the procedures were the same.
-Manual matching of the radar target "pip' for range tracking was not particularly accurate.
-It's far better to auto lock. For instance, if a target is 15km away which is 100 microseconds would initially set the pip on the target which then sets a 100 microsecond timer. The timer would gate the return pulse search for say 99.99 microseconds to 100.01 microseconds and only accept pulses within that +/-15m band. The timer would then reset to the new value so long as it wasn't for a target moving at more than say 60 knots or about 36 meters/second.
The result is a far more consistent and accurate range track. The American chief engineer for the SCR-584 point blank refused the US Army for manual fall-back tracking. (MIT professors tend to have big ones) auto tracking was so much superior. The German FuSE 64 Mannheim FLAK radar had auto tracking and even in the height of allied jamming could follow an aircraft automatically even if it wasn't possible to see it manually.
-Once you have the range gate you can do autotrack (ie left right signal) easily.
-The German FuMO 26 and British Type 284P radar both had blind for control via lobe switching but the British radar managed 0.1 degree accuracy versus 0.25 degrees for the German radar mainly due to the electronic evaluation of the left right signal instead of visual. The Germans could do this but just didn't want the expense and maintenance of extra vacuum valves.
@@bernhardzunk7402 There is actually good reason NOT to autotrack surface targets by the radar. Firecontrol needs a smooth solution for target motion, as it generates the solution in just a few seconds. The way it works has a target detected and a tracked manually until the computer says it has a solution. The director is then shifted to automatic, and it follows the solution generated by the computer, as do the guns. In essence, the autotrack is the computer solution. The operator now watches to correct if the return deviates from the generated solution. This can be by errors from the initial solution, or by changes in target motion.
This is the same whether the input is visual or radar. Auto tracking radars tend to hunt all over large slow moving (less than 100kts) targets, now getting a strong reflection forward, now aft, now at the waterline, now in the superstructure. The apparent motion is far greater than the actual motion of the target. If all of these were automatically fed into the computer, the solution would be erratic and unusable.
Hunting in antiaircraft fire produces small errors, so AA systems (Mk25 radar for Mk37 GFCS for example) will use autotrack. Just not in surface mode.
I took a tour on the Iowa not too long ago I wanted to see the rangefinder so bad and know how they did it but they haven't restored it yet. Thank you for making this video
Thank you for this! Those fire control systems and computers are mechanical marvels. The engineering and evolution is amazing. Top Tier stuff!
Thanks!
Please can you make a fire control playlist. I can not find your previous videos in this series. I found one, but that referenced a previous one which I can't find
Rather than just watching videos, Google "Principles of Naval Ordnance and Gunnery". Look for 1940s-1960s editions, they were designed to teach crewmembers how it works. Google Gene Slover, his website has copies. The Illustrations on visual salvo spotting and the use of the B-Scope radar displays of the Mk8 & Mk13 can teach you in a few seconds what hours of videos made by people who do not know the subject will never do.
Happy Ching Lee noises.
I suppose that sounds like nine 16" rifles going boom?
@@ald1144 Yup
If all this stuff fails, Adm Lee can just eyeball it himself.
@@liberalsockpuppet4772 Or he'll get a rifle and pick off the opposing admiral on his own bridge.
"Stand aside, I'm coming through"
What a terrific video! I love watching and listening to experts talk about their passions! Great guest, top work Drach!
31:56 Thats a great point. When looking through a telescope you get the "telecompression" effect, where its hard to judge distance because its all squashed together. You can see this in pictures though a very long camera lens.
I recently toured the USS Iowa in Southern California. Funny thing about the USS Iowa battleship.. when it was being recommissioned, they tried to update the fireing control electronics to 80 technology and found it had serious unreliable issues and it was decided to go back to the original fire control system from the 40's as it was a better system... A disabled US Army Veteran
Loved this video Drach! Very informative, as always, but I really enjoyed the detail and "show and tell" in this one. Thanks for your channel!
If this guy was my dad, granddad, or any sort of ancestor whatsoever I would do my best to live up to his legacy. Excellent Role Model.
I can't imagine the absolute nightmare that repairing any of that equipment in Spot 1 must have been.
Fantastic video my man even though I don't understand any of the technical items this nice man is explaining.
+1 I am even more so.
just gorgeous diesel punk.
I visited USS Missouri a few years ago. It was interesting. The ship is so big. I also passed USS Iowa while on a short harbor cruise.
Brilliant, thank you both for making this!
At some stage, it would be great to see a summary of all the various big brass triggers around the ship that could actually fire the main guns.
(Just to help us imagine the feeling of power that must come from a trigger that big!)
Enjoyed the bit at the end!
Now you have to do a Fire Control systems review on HMS Belfast. Then, yet a third video comparing the two systems. Battleship versus cruiser, or RN versus USN way of doing things. With the absolute dearth of material, Drach has released over the last few years. Im sure he has the copius time needed, to release my vid requests, in a timely manner :D.
On a more serious note. Plot One does not look like a nice place to be, in anything but a flat calm. Knee, elbow and hard hat protection looks like it would have been very useful wedged in such a high up space, in any kind of sea state, never mind the gyration's for combat..
Drach, your relationship with BB New Jersey is wonderful and makes me very happy.
Fascinating technology. Great video Drach!
Drach - Most interesting but as I watched it, I wished that you had occasionally thrown in a sketch showing the location of the particular "room" was and the position within that was being discussed. Also, and this is very wishful thinking, it would have been neat to have seen the images that would have been displayed on the periscopes and radar screens.
I’ve been in North Carolina’s Mk38 - it’s on the “Hidden Battleship” tour. It’s a tight space.
I visited the North Carolina a long time ago and saw the range finder in one of the forward turrets. shorter range to the horizon but sufficient for back up in close actions as needed.
I'm glad I stayed for the "after credits" scene. I wondered why there was an arm behind the speaker!
This wonderful guy knows his stuff. I will put him on my fantasy battleship game crew any time.
Man, fire control on these old battleships will never not be the most fascinating thing in the world to me. Absolutely mind blowing.
The thing boggles my mind is is maintaining cross calibration. Any one of 6 Directors can send data to 4 different Plotting stations, which can send data to 15 different gun stations. That is 360 different possible paths for data to travel. That's a migraine waiting to happen.
@@grimlock1471 And it's all done with relatively basic wiring and no real digital equipment or computers! And the sheer scale of all the infrastructure and detail of those systems is beyond insane.
I loved that big mechanical "computer" box he showed in one episode. So cool.
@@El_Chompo Every component is just a tiny bit different. And how those differences stack up can do weird things. There have to be procedures to verify that a firing solution generated using Spot 1, Forward Plot, and Turret 3 is the same(accounting for the parallax he mentions in the video) as a solution generated by Spot 2, After Plot, and Turret 1. Now do that for the 359 other combinations.
Every time you repair or replace something, you to revalidate at least part of the system.
The Outtakes make it look like Drach accidentely made an "Inside the chieftains hatch" this time :) Thx for the Video
l served in the RAN as a warfare officer with the Mk22 director in River class Destroyer Escorts, It was a Dutch track while scan radar system from l guess the 1960s and was a precursor to the US Mk92 system seen in the OHP frigates.
The system had an A Scope and a B Scope display. From memory, the A Scope tracked the target, while the B Scope illuminated the target and the two radars talked to each other within the system through the Fire Control Officer (usually a Petty Officer) to arrive at the fire control solution. The fall of shot could be observed for line by the B scope,
The system only required two operators. A far cry from the dozens of operators required for the systems that are being shown here!!
I always wondered why so many people were required to aim the guns. I did not expect so many of them to be tasked with accounting for the differences of position and angle of the rangefinder from the gun crews or center of the ship.
I think I'm getting obsessed with fire control tech. Thanks.
Well that was a hefty amount of information to process
This is something for you, Ryan, and any museum ship curators to consider. But would it be possible to set up a simulation of the fire control system on any of the ships?
That would be awesome and educational but I’d imagine a lot of visitors would be frustrated by how hard it is to hit anything.
@@bkjeong4302 That and possible expense. But just an idea that may merit further investigation
I would say it would be possible, given enough money, but totally impractical, assuming you want to simulate the whole process. Assuming it was for museum visitors to use, you would have to get dozens of untrained people to not only understand their jobs, but also work together, without any preparation, to operate the whole system.
@@michaelsommers2356 You could probably have a physical copy of one of the range control stations, and have the others dealt with by the computer, I suspect. Alternately, have the full set up and make it a paid event to go through an hour or so of learning to use it then using it.
@@diabolicwave7238 If the former option were taken, how would targets be presented? There aren't many battleships on the Delaware River.
@Drachnifel you should make a video about the evolutions of lightning of naval ships from oil lamp to eletric LEDS a very view topic rarely covered
Glad to hear the old intro music again
I've been looking for this video for a while... I did wonder why the helmet, after the last few scenes, I now very much understand. I do wonder how the crew did it, I doubt very much a standard issue naval head bonk/bang mk 1,2 or 3 would help much in operating all that complicated equipment in the middle of a battle.
The ship was in dry dock during this - anyone aboard had to wear hard hats because the insurance company said so.
Wish you would have shown yourself climbing up the outside of the mast again. That first time was crazy how terrified you were.
Awesome vid, really interesting, thx! And cool to have someone who is familiar with how the whole system works.
As an engineering Nerd, it's fascinating to see all the redundant systems and what ifs on a 1940s era Battleship.
Somebody's planning to take damage when they cross the T.
The engineering and mathematics required to make this system work is truly breathtaking! And all before semiconductor computers!
You should do this level of depth in how you do fire control on shore bombardment. Especially when the target is beyond the horizon. I remember learning about naval gunfire support in US Army Forward Observer school, and the big concern was lack of range accuracy. You didn’t want the shells to travel over your head because a “short” round was common and could ruin your whole day!
It is amazing that anything actually got hit.
Wat a great video - what a depth of knowledge he has. Thank you.
How and why have I not gotten notifications for several, maybe a dozen or more now, of your recent videos?
Been following you religiously for years.
Another thing to note, for the kids out there (i'm old i can say that!), the fire control computer was an analog device, and quite a bit of it was mechanical. Yes, virginia, computers can be mechanical and definitely can be analog. In fact, there are areas of computer science that are looking into going back to some analog systems, simply because you can do some math that way easier than digitally.
Even the engineers of the era designing these ships and system didn't typically have access to what we would consider a computer today. They were using slide rules. Your old school 4 function electronic calculators weren't even around back then.
love the outtakes at the end!!
Do you Navy vets want a blast of nostalgia? Look at the plastic, zip-top bags at 19:25. I could not tell you how many MAF copies I put in one of those things and taped it to the top of an ALQ-99 pod transmitter. Not to mention all of the other things we used to turn in for replacement. In 11 years working in AT shops I must have handled a thousand of those.
We used these in the '90s. Are they still being used?
Yay!
I believe that, although these ships might be obsolete when sitting next to an aircraft carrier, that a day will come that we will wish that we still had some battleships with their big guns & heavy armor! Especially if you consider that with the Des Moines having such success with the 8" semi-autoloaders that maybe they could have developed some semi- autoloaders with some battleship guns as well. Not so sure that they could have made 16" semi-autoloaders work or not. But even if they had to make them 14" or 15" so that the ship didn't have to be so huge, it would still be one of the greatest ships ever made! I am very happy that they were able to make USS Salem a museum ship, as well as all the fast battleships too! And I do think it's a shame that not even one of the standards were saved as museums. The only thing even close is a memorial & a grave, rusting away on the bottom of Pearl Harbor. 🎉❤😢 It was truly a shame what happened to those sailors!
USS Texas seems pretty close to the standards. USS Nevada was commissioned in 1916 as the first standard. USS Texas was commissioned in 1914 - only a two year difference. A lot of the specs for the two ships are similar. Some of the differences aren't going to be particularly obvious, so I'm not sure what you think we're missing in terms of things that are easy to see.
Thx Drach. We like rum rations. Keep it coming.
I very much hope we get to see more videos with the good Dr. talking about battleship fire control. It’s a truly fascinating subject and the complexity of the mechanical computers etc involved are just astounding.
I’m curious about the control position in the conning tower. There is of course no stereoscopic range finder but can you use to periscopes to make range estimates in much the same way US Submarines made range estimates via periscope in WWII?
Also perhaps it was discussed in another video and I’ve forgotten it but it would be interesting to hear further explanation of level and cross level and how those feed into the fire control computer. Range and bearing are pretty obvious values but level and cross level are less so.
Love your work, don't know where you find the time but keep it up. ❤👏👏👏👏
It's his job. Nice he has a job that he loves :>
Those last clips make me think of the genie in Aladdin “Phenomenal cosmic powers! Itty bitty living space!”
Have you done a video of powered gun mount control systems? Hydraulic, electrical? Amplidynes, syncros, etc. Love your work sir.
This is some expensive, complicated stuff. The math alone, before the engineering. Circa 1930’s & 40’s - no super computers. One little detail not considered and it all goes to poopoo. Holy crap. The men and women that made this happen should be very proud.
Super interesting thank you
The redundancy is amazing. The information being fed back and forth from the director, to the plotting room and to the turrets must create a wiring nightmare in case of battle damage.
The question is which takes precedence to the "computers" in plot? They're getting information from the director and the conning tower. The director has the best view but the fire control officer may be in the conning tower while plot has the best information from the radars. Whose triggers will actually fire the guns or will all of them so you just keep your booger hooks off them unless you're in charge.
Super fascinating
That was awesome. Thank you
With all that work to be done first, it is somewhat amazing that they eventually get to fire a shot (let alone hit something).
I mean, if I had done all that, I might well have reached retirement age or forgotten what it was for.
I find it interesting that there were so many different crew members throughout the ship, including in the turrets, who could be enabled to actually fire the main guns. Might be cool to just have a video about that and under what conditions a certain crew position would be given that authority. What was the established SOP or hierarchy?
If I recall, Ryan and crew have done that in a video on Main Battery Plot or on general fire control redundancy.
I find it interesting the number of people needed to operate these electro-mechanical fire control systems. This applies to both the naval surface and AA systems and the army land-based AA systems. Truly an exercise in teamwork.
great video thanks
It would be nice with some outside close up photos or drawings of the compardments, for the one of us, whom are still learning about the battleships.
What is the manning requirement for the Gunnery Division on something like New Jersey? Where is the Gunnery Officer during all this?
It is amazing how much they were able to identify and compensate for using mechanical computers.
Guess I should've waited until 26:45
This is so friggin wild!!
I've got a question, what happened to all the ammo, live and training, for the big guns on Yomato, and Musashi, did they make or have shore battery guns or....
This is all incredibly complex and extremely fascinating. It is amazing when you decrease the numbers of guns on a ship and increase the range of the weapon how much more complex it is to hit a target. Talk about proprietary property.
How does the equipment compensate for roll and pitch? Is there yaw also?
It's interesting to compare this to the T-64BV tank fire controls on Shawshank redemption channel. Basically they do the same thing, but one is late fast battleship and another is late cold war tank.
At around 8:00, is that the arm of the first man to fire the guns in anger, or the last?