Without the Washington Naval Treaty, what would the British fleet of WW2 have looked like, which vessels would still be around that weren't there historically?
During the design work on the Neptune and Minotaur designs, how much did the Royal Navy know about the US Navy’s development of the auto loading 6-inch and 8-inch guns? Did these two projects have any influence over each other?
It's really interesting to watch naval engineers play a kind of rock-paper-scissors game with firepower, speed and armor and never quite get what they want.
Same thing with tanks - until the latest generation which has as much power as you can stand. I started on M60's with 600 hp and ended on M1's with 1500 hp
@@matthewyang7893 Oh boy, good luck indeed with that. I tend to put too much in the armour department in FTD then realise that the hull is way too small.
And yet it only ended up with 14 Oerlikons. Clearly our nations have very different interpretations of "as many as can be installed", as I'm sure an American designer could've squeezed in at least twice that number.
I always find the NB guides fascinating. A window into the what-could-have-been. I do have to wonder about why the sea-going admirals felt that the ship required such a heavy torpedo armament. With the engagement ranges increasing due to improvements in radar-guided fire control, torpedos would be less important on a cruiser, especially one entering into a world with far fewer battleships or other similarly heavy combatants. By all means, keep a quad launcher per side, but did they *really* think they'd need two per side?
my guess is if a cruiser got into a fight you wanted to have several salvos of torpedoes at the ready because reloading torpedo launchers under fire is quite dangerous compared to gun mounts, i don't think they intended to launch 16 torpedoes all at once, that would have been insanely expensive and they wouldn't have had many reloads on board
@@WALTERBROADDUS We are talking why British Admirals in '44/'45 would have wanted those torpedoes not if they would eventually turn out use full or not. As far as I am aware at that time torpedoes on cruisers were seen as a means of deterring larger Warships from engaging. As OP rightfully said the engagement range of these ships was increasing significantly due to radar and better fire directors. So my thought was that to pose the same threat at those longer range and thus provide the same deterrence, more Torpedoes would have been needed.
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A fascinating view of a "what might have been", aided and abetted by some stunning visualizations. These are really outstanding at giving us a picture of what would have been a class of mini - Vanguards.
@@silverhost9782 As far as I know all three are just as accurate as the Churchill cruisers has 8” and 9.2” gun designs with 4x2, 3x3, or 4x3 layouts with an additional 3x4 9.2” design, although all of the designs called for the 4”/45 Mark 16 DP secondary guns also used on the Town-class.
Excellent video about just how complicated designing a new ship can be, especially when technology and threats are changing so rapidly, Not to mention the even harder battles any Navy has with its own nations Treasury Department.
What’s interesting to note is the 6”/50 Mark 23 gun’s Mark 24 triple turrets were planned for the cancelled 1943 Minotaur-class (or Swiftsure-class) and were dual-purpose and had RPC, but the design was a bit cramped and was redeveloped into the Mark 25 triple turret for the Neptune-class’ Mark N5 6”/50 guns. Still bugs me that Wargaming has Neptune’s guns as the Mark 23 gun in Mark 25 turrets.
@@atdfbttl15 I know that. WoW should consider upping their game. WoW and WoT give players a distorted view of history, along with most of the other war games.
@@Driver-ur9mf Just looked up the ship specs, and Cleveland has one more turret than Helena (fewer 6" guns, but more 5" guns). What makes the Cleveland look like a turret farm are the 5" turrets placed down the sides of the ship. From the bow it looks like a porcupine.
Dedicated radar guidence on EVERY single AA mount, WG: no you don't shoot planes, long range do 52 dmg lol I think I could cook my steak with all those microwave then
Don't forget Vanguard. IRL the last and most advanced BB ever built, with radar controlled everything, taking on all the lessons learned in WW2. In game, a slightly different shaped Hood.
Seems an impressive design for its time...and seems like the engineers had major issues with wanting the latest and greatest to a point where they kept adopting new designs rather than sending the current design off to be built.
It must suck being a designer on something like this, working for years trying to get it right. Day in, day out, going to the office. Maybe working overtime to get that last thing just right. Then then government says, actually, naw, we don't need that.
Interesting to see these proposals grow into so many 6" calibre plus slightly smaller guns. Despite the firing rates, surely pentration capability would be limited against surface targets and the 6" calibre is bigger than needed for AA, so seems surprising use of a 15,000 ton displacement. Wonder what would have been built if the war had continued?
I love it when a ship can walk down the gun line at 18 knots or so, and just pulverize land targets. A ship with guns guns needs to just wade into the battle.
This reminds me ... why was the center gun on some (all? 3-gun) British cruisers slightly behind the other two? Most common answer I've seen is that it helped with dispersion...though it seems like a timed delay would have helped with that.
It increased the rate of fire from the turret by setting the centre crew further back and giving all the gun crews a little more elbow room. The reduction is dispersion was a happy accident.
@@calvingreene90 it only needs to be the depth of a human torso to make all the difference. Think about jamming nine abreast or staggering six and three.
I met a chap who worked at a Tyneside shipyard after the war and he told me the story of an 11 deck Cruiser which was transferred from the Clyde to Tyneside for completion. The ship was so big that workers could spend their whole shift doing nothing ( The foremen couldn't find them ) The ship was quickly obsolete. I don't know if it was completed.
I'm a little surprised the British were eager to continue ship-building so soon after the war, given the state of the economy and the glut of existing warships. True, there couldn't be MUCH of a pause, what with the development of the Cold War and the pace of technology, but the Soviets weren't much of a naval power, either.
We were operating under the expectation that the empire would continue to be the third superpower of the world post-WW2. That required new, modern warships to maintain the position. Of course, this was only the case for the 40s and some of the 50s before it became evident that trying to maintain a global, modern navy wasn't necessary anymore
Mwah, the Dutch Navy became bigger than ever post-war with the intention to be a major player in NATO and trying to secure influence in the post-colonial East. Don't forget the USSR was still 'planning' to build a major battleship fleet + supporting ships. Turned out it would become a submarine force mostly. Post-war was quite difficult to predict.
@@Tuning3434 the Soviets had the second largest surface fleet behind the USN for the majority of the Cold War. It was enormous especially in the 80s when the Soviets got the Kirovs, Keivs, Moskvas, Udalloys, and Sovermeneys into service. Had their economy not collapsed in the mid to late 80s they also would have added 3 more true carriers and had the largest carrier fleet beside the USN. With the 3 Kuznetsovs and the 3 Kiev Hybrids. The only reason the Soviets had a larger submarine force then the USN was because they kept a lot of obsolete old boats in reserve ready to go.
Another interesting doc. But maybe not building them was the right thing to do given the rate that technology was developing at the end of the war, jet aircraft and missiles etc, they would have been obsolete before they hit the water. The Navy could grow to what was needed post war to be ready for any future war duties by refitting some of the many wartime ships, so using less money and getting a bigger navy.
Friedman’s book on Battleships argues that because the ordnance ships had to survive was becoming so heavy, the amount of armour required to deflect or contain hits was making overall armour weight and displacement untenable. Hence removing armour to take overpens and punch-through instead. It was a nasty surprise when I read it...
@@mikereger1186 Not aware of that book, thanks' I will look for it. First Michelle showed ship vulnerability to aircraft and I would 'guess' that the A-bomb and H-bomb tests carried out by the US on their ships post war would have also caused a lot of rethinking the strategy of armour too. I would say the thing I have wondered about Armour is that; - while the new is being developed do they actual work in tandem to figure out the ways it can be defeated?
@@pingpong5000 it seems that ships - at least of the Royal Navy - were built taking into consideration the largest gun calbres they were expected to face. They kept trusting in the 14” maximum of the Washington and London treaties... fools! The problem was that even with water filled cavities, bulges, armoured belts and citadels, the thickness and weight of armour took up valuable displacement and loading weight. To maintain stability, it needed increased beam (ie width) or a larger hull altogether, in turn meaning more protection or sacrificing areas outside the citadel, of placing the armoured deck lower. All while being first limited by tonnage in treaties and then by available drydocks, slips and dockyards, not to mention the Suez and Panama canals... Basically with the materials of the time, the ships would have ended up the size of a small Death Star to repel the torpedoes and guided missiles coming into service. The damage the first generation Fritz-X did to Warspite was a sober awakening...
@@mikereger1186 Yes, I knew that and the RN pulled a bit of a flanker with getting the extra fuel and water they needed to carry because our ships protected our trade routes around the empire/commonwealth to not be counted against ships displacement. Now sort of back-to-basics cannonball style with kinetic weapons only hypersonic.
The Admiralty should have simply adapted (Adopted??) the US Cleveland class. Fast, long ranged, powerful with a superb AA suite, and tough (Cf Birmingham, Houston). The drawbacks being stability due to all the light/medium AA guns the class would still admirably fulfilled the two roles of trade protection and fleet service. In addition and far less important, to me they are a very graceful design.
By this date the Clevelands did not at all possess a superb anti-AA suite; quite the contrary; it was entirely pedestrian. At the date these designs were being finalized, jet aircraft were already in service; the Clevelands had absolutely no answer to them at all.
@@lukeueda-sarson6732 I don't fully agree with you. For the time and conditions, the AA suite on the Clevelands Was superb. A dozen 5/38s a dozen 40MM and 20 20MM is tough to beat. (Find a kamikaze pilot and ask him what he thought about it.) At the time, jets were a rarity and would be for another 7-10 years. Even so, many of the 40s were being swapped out for 3 inch semi automatics. Whatever you were flying, your life insurance company wouldn't want you to challenge either suite.
When the RN got Lend Lease Captain Class and Colony Class Frigates. They had unheard of luxuries like water coolers in every "mess deck", "cafeteria style" messing instead of table slung from the overhead where you slept, potato peelers (!), electric ranges rather than coal fired, a ship's switchboard with a phone in every compartment, a ship's laundry (only on big ships in the RN) replacing washing your clothes in a bucket, etc, etc. It was an eye-opener to the ratings and word got around about how great the Yanks had it.
The same reason Labour won the election - the majority of voters/ratings had finally realized they were being milked, and voted accordingly with their ballots/feet. Recruitment was incredibly difficult at this point. For example, the sole Dido class the New Zealand navy had at the end of the war could never be fully manned because nobody wanted to serve in such a cramped ship that was more or less a floating prison as far as crew conditions were concerned. And that's just a single ship. Why would anybody join up with the Royal Navy if they were going have to live like convicts, especially, as COL BEUSABRE points out, it wasn't exactly a secret that in the USN you didn't have to put up with such conditions.
@@lukeueda-sarson6732 I can remember that one RN officer writing he was amazed to find the ship's office came complete with a typewriter (!), carbon paper, a pencil sharpener, notebooks and huge supplies of pens, ink, pencils, etc on one small Lend-Lease vessel
There is an Alistar MacLean book (I believe his first) called HMS Ulysses that takes place during WWII Artic convoys, the book includes skematics for the Cruiser. Do we know what ship/story the book is based on? Is the skematic based on a real class of ship?
I believe (I haven't read the book for a few decades) HMS Ulysses is a modified Dido class. Further, the author served on a Dido on arctic convoys in WWII, which is one of the reasons its such a fabulous book - the author knew the subject matter inside and out.
@@silverhost9782 I think largest light cruiser design was the Soviet Project 84 cruiser (Alexander Nevsky in Wows) it was a 1954 design and likely the last artillery warship designed by a nation. It had 8 dual purpose 180mm guns. 21k tons weight. 140mm belt. I am sure if it was build, Western powers would call it a heavy cruiser while Soviets go with light.
@@silverhost9782 Neptune 18,700 tons full load, Minotaur 18,425 tons full load Worcester 17,997 tons full load. NOT significantly larger. I'd put them as equal, especially as British machinery was not as efficient as the US due to lower steam conditions and was, thus, heavier for a given output. The Worcesters didn't need to be as heavy, they were slightly smaller but packed 125,000 shp compared to Neptune's 106,000 shp
This would have been pretty bonkers for a light cruiser 12 6-in automatic guns the torpedo tubes and the AA batteries I on a somewhat unrelated note and as an American it makes me wonder if we should have retained more of the old big gun cruisers for gunfire support I mean yeah the usn kept the four isles around but if we could have kept some of the larger cruisers in the same state of readiness could have kept them in service possibly as long as today
@@maineiacman that's a good point on the Alaska class Yes the underwater protection was inadequate for all the fun that could be had in world War II but as technology progressed you had dedicated to tax submarines and dedicated ASW ships and honestly I don't think even the Adams class guided missile destroyers had extensive underwater protection or any of the guided missile cruisers as it became a case of it's better off to catch the submarine before it gets near the fleet as opposed to seeing how survival your ships were when the submarine got close enough I mean we could still be operating the Alaska class super duper cruisers today.
The USS Newport News Heavy Cruiser 148 might be a ship with an interesting history for research. If you haven’t already done so. The Alaska-class cruisers are another interesting one as well Sporting 12-inch guns that were an upgrade to the older 14-inch guns.🤔🙂
The E class cruisers had also carried 16 tubes. And their standard torpedo warhead contained 800 pounds of TORPEX (50 percent more powerful than TNT) which gave them the equivalent of 1200 pounds of TNT compared to the vaunted Type 93 "Long Lance" (a term not used by the IJN) and its 1080 pounds of TNT. Plus cruiser torpedoes had proved effective against the Scharhorst.
@@colbeausabre8842 yeah but those were pre war cruisers. By this time, priorities had changed considerably, nleast of which aircraft becoming the primary anti-ship weapon. And yet, the RN was still trying to plop in such a massive batery...
So after hearing people's feedback,you come up with a design. Most if not everyone agrees, maybe a few tweeks here and there. And just when you thought it's about to go into production. Suddenly someone else has a better idea. You ever the open minded one, decided to entertain such ideas. And so you apply the ideas, change the original design. And now the final product is completely different from the one you conceived. Now you ask yourself, how did we get here?
The Empire lost India August 1947. The Empire could no longer afford the cost. The value of the Pound Sterling was reset in September 1949, from $4.03 per £1.00 to $2.80 per £1.00 So to the Breaker's Yards went the fleet and to the dustbins went the plans. But still, What If?
Wacky Q of the day. Why torpedoes on a cruiser? I have read plenty about DDs and making torpedo runs. Did a cruiser use them, ever, and hit anything? I asking about real world, historical, usage, not a game.
All the time and money spent on these cruisers. .. Tiger and Blake. .. other nonsense... carriers rebuilt and rebuilt and discarded after rebuild.... they would have been better off just building frigates and retaining battleships.... you modify a cruiser its all or nothing. ... you want a missile launcher on a battleship you sacrifice a secondary mount... it's such a disaster that just keeping warspite around would have been better
Actually the money would have been spent better on what the actual threat was. Anti-submarine Warfare. Soviet surface forces was not the worry. It was their submarines. It's rather pointless to keep something like Warspite.
Pfff, costs of engineers, paper and pencils in this stage. There where companies that tried had to make a commercial bidding making the same costs. THG posted a video earlier this week comparing the funding needed to run NACA (a very capital intensive research institute compared to a design bureau with access to war time data) for a year with cost of running aerial operations in Europe for one night. Running a floating village, in peak condition, with 1000+ paid sailors doing nothing at best, spending more money if training, is not a free-bee even if you can keep using an existing ship. Just like a car, considerable costs are spend on keeping it running, having it staffed and keeping it maintained. I can advice to take a look into (friend of this channel) "Dr. Alexander Clarke's" video's on the Tribal class destroyers and Town class cruisers. The RN was always very keen on having many ships to have local presence instead of relying on battle-wagons that arrive too late at the place of conflict to really matter if shit hits the fan.
@@WALTERBROADDUS In the late 1940's the soviet surface fleet was a worry- Stalin was obsessed with building an enormous surface fleet and we did not know if American military support would be around long term, of course Stalin would die before his before his blue water fleet could be built, but for a time 35+ heavy surface raiders of the Sverdlov and Stalingrad classes were seen as a significant potential threat.
@@Lancasterlaw1175 they had no Logistics. They had no bases. Their surface ships rarely went in to the Atlantic or the Med. They were not that much a blue water threat then or now.
@WALTERBROADDUS I believe the large number of large soviet cruisers has been pointed out.. these ships turned up in the north atlantic etc and posed a severe risk to any force trying to move supplies to Europe... warspite would have been an ideal escort ship.. capable of keeping up with the convoy and destroying the soviet vessels with near impunity to conventional attack... she could also have provided 15 inch gun support for a number of likely scenarios and most importantly she is not as valuable a resource as many other platforms.. so could stand in harms way.. (as usual)
It's diedo just as it's Ajax with a J. Please use the names the RN called them at the time. Your video about the Dutch football team was so grating. You even justified pronouncing it wrong. Bad practice in a historian.
Pinned post for Q&A :)
In your opinion as a naval engineer just how effective and worthwhile were both the Neptune and Minotaur class designs?
Why do you call yourself a "histriographer" in your seal at the beginning of each episode, instead of "historiographer"?
Without the Washington Naval Treaty, what would the British fleet of WW2 have looked like, which vessels would still be around that weren't there historically?
Have you considered to stop taking Drydock questions in regular uploads and finish all questions from Patreon?
During the design work on the Neptune and Minotaur designs, how much did the Royal Navy know about the US Navy’s development of the auto loading 6-inch and 8-inch guns? Did these two projects have any influence over each other?
It's really interesting to watch naval engineers play a kind of rock-paper-scissors game with firepower, speed and armor and never quite get what they want.
Same thing with tanks - until the latest generation which has as much power as you can stand. I started on M60's with 600 hp and ended on M1's with 1500 hp
…and endurance. Ships need endurance.
The max speed, armor, and firepower they really wanted would have required nuclear propulsion which lay in the future.
I'm doing that in from the depths, wish me luck :)
@@matthewyang7893 Oh boy, good luck indeed with that. I tend to put too much in the armour department in FTD then realise that the hull is way too small.
"as many 20mm as could be installed"
The designers turned American for a second there
Somehow. LtCdr Mott’s suggestion for fitting every space on Enterprise with 20 mms found it’s way into the Royal Navy.
No he specified 'without rolling over', close but no cigar.
"Need more 20mm's"
American were looking for stability augmentation.
And yet it only ended up with 14 Oerlikons. Clearly our nations have very different interpretations of "as many as can be installed", as I'm sure an American designer could've squeezed in at least twice that number.
I always find the NB guides fascinating. A window into the what-could-have-been.
I do have to wonder about why the sea-going admirals felt that the ship required such a heavy torpedo armament. With the engagement ranges increasing due to improvements in radar-guided fire control, torpedos would be less important on a cruiser, especially one entering into a world with far fewer battleships or other similarly heavy combatants. By all means, keep a quad launcher per side, but did they *really* think they'd need two per side?
Perhaps as a secondary asw measure?
At longer range you need to launch more torpedoes to pose the same level of threat to the enemy..
@@postron5649 except that the threat turned out to be Soviet Subs. The surface force was never really much to worry about.
my guess is if a cruiser got into a fight you wanted to have several salvos of torpedoes at the ready because reloading torpedo launchers under fire is quite dangerous compared to gun mounts, i don't think they intended to launch 16 torpedoes all at once, that would have been insanely expensive and they wouldn't have had many reloads on board
@@WALTERBROADDUS We are talking why British Admirals in '44/'45 would have wanted those torpedoes not if they would eventually turn out use full or not.
As far as I am aware at that time torpedoes on cruisers were seen as a means of deterring larger Warships from engaging.
As OP rightfully said the engagement range of these ships was increasing significantly due to radar and better fire directors. So my thought was that to pose the same threat at those longer range and thus provide the same deterrence, more Torpedoes would have been needed.
I'm a relatively new subscriber but I've watched dozens of your videos, they are so educational, interesting and well put together. Thank you!
welcome from an old subscriber, you have discovered one of the best channels on YT.
Welcome to the collective.
@@Uncle_Neil Thank you.
@@lorenrogers9269 Thank you.
You do now belong to the Drach Legion, be proud of it, it is an international one, we do differ in our points of view but always with respect. Yes one of the top youtube channel 🙏
A fascinating view of a "what might have been", aided and abetted by some stunning visualizations. These are really outstanding at giving us a picture of what would have been a class of mini - Vanguards.
Some of the visualizations are from WOWs correct?
@@karlsenula9495 don't know. Somebody else might?
@@phaasch yes, that's a screen shot of my Neptune in port ;) Its definitely WOWS.
@@robertvmathews 👍
Exactly my thoughts
HMS Neptune, or as WoWs players would like to her, HMS Free Citadels
Ah, my first PR ship
Do you have Plans for a Video on HMS Drake or HMS Goliath? Would be interesting to see :)
Or Gibraltar, which i'm told is closer to the designs Churchill was actually looking at than Drake or Goliath
HMS Drake. Commissioning paper did they include a Letter of Marque?
Hms drake when mad: ok no more mr nice guy
@@silverhost9782 As far as I know all three are just as accurate as the Churchill cruisers has 8” and 9.2” gun designs with 4x2, 3x3, or 4x3 layouts with an additional 3x4 9.2” design, although all of the designs called for the 4”/45 Mark 16 DP secondary guns also used on the Town-class.
@@trentbyington5957
Leaves port. Circumnavigates
Just what the Royal Navy needed in 39.
Thank you, Drachinifel.
*"Finally a worthy opponent, our battle will be legendary!"* - a ship named Caligula.
Design "Y" was a very handsome design. A pity they were never built.
Excellent video about just how complicated designing a new ship can be, especially when technology and threats are changing so rapidly,
Not to mention the even harder battles any Navy has with its own nations Treasury Department.
At least it didn't end with "decommissioned and sent to scrap"
Is 'never built' _better?_ Change of pace, sure.
What’s interesting to note is the 6”/50 Mark 23 gun’s Mark 24 triple turrets were planned for the cancelled 1943 Minotaur-class (or Swiftsure-class) and were dual-purpose and had RPC, but the design was a bit cramped and was redeveloped into the Mark 25 triple turret for the Neptune-class’ Mark N5 6”/50 guns.
Still bugs me that Wargaming has Neptune’s guns as the Mark 23 gun in Mark 25 turrets.
2:31 - Interesting to see a British ship being worked on at a US shipyard. Was this the result of battle damage?
It is a screenshot from world of warships. In fact all the colored images you see are from there.
@@atdfbttl15 I know that. WoW should consider upping their game. WoW and WoT give players a distorted view of history, along with most of the other war games.
The Worcester class was built to the same operational requirement as the Neptune and came it at 14, 700 tons displacement.
The Worcesters got rid of the torpedoes, thus saving enough weight to add another gun turret.
Really glad that you use photos from WOWS. also, can you do a guide to the Minotaur class?
Wow, they had an almost American level of “ALLLLLLLL THE GUNS!!!!!” going on there. 👍
Oh, you mean the USS Turretfarm (sorry, Cleveland) class light cruisers.
@@nicholasconder4703 das funny, but my Helena seemed to have more turrets than my Cleveland if I remember, been a couple years now
@@Driver-ur9mf Just looked up the ship specs, and Cleveland has one more turret than Helena (fewer 6" guns, but more 5" guns). What makes the Cleveland look like a turret farm are the 5" turrets placed down the sides of the ship. From the bow it looks like a porcupine.
And thus, Her Majesty's floating Bren carrier was born
I just spent 6 minutes on a review of a ship class that didn't exist and enjoyed it..
For some odd reason, thinking that the Neptune would pack STAAG mounts brings a smile to my face
Dedicated radar guidence on EVERY single AA mount,
WG: no you don't shoot planes, long range do 52 dmg lol
I think I could cook my steak with all those microwave then
Don't forget Vanguard. IRL the last and most advanced BB ever built, with radar controlled everything, taking on all the lessons learned in WW2. In game, a slightly different shaped Hood.
Would be too op
I JUST researched and purchased this in World of Warships! Nice timing!
Awesome thanks drach
Ah yes, everyone’s favorite light cruiser made of wet paper armor in WOWS. Unless you are good with it, in which case everyone should be afraid of you
It's a beautiful ship ⚓
I just love how he casually uses screenshots from world of warships
Seems an impressive design for its time...and seems like the engineers had major issues with wanting the latest and greatest to a point where they kept adopting new designs rather than sending the current design off to be built.
It must suck being a designer on something like this, working for years trying to get it right. Day in, day out, going to the office. Maybe working overtime to get that last thing just right. Then then government says, actually, naw, we don't need that.
Interesting to see these proposals grow into so many 6" calibre plus slightly smaller guns. Despite the firing rates, surely pentration capability would be limited against surface targets and the 6" calibre is bigger than needed for AA, so seems surprising use of a 15,000 ton displacement. Wonder what would have been built if the war had continued?
An excellent video once more, sir! Carry on!
Design Y, British humor at its finest (when it's most likely involuntary).
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I love it when a ship can walk down the gun line at 18 knots or so, and just pulverize land targets.
A ship with guns guns needs to just wade into the battle.
Fellow WOWS players unite, all praise the floating tea bag
And the floating XP pinata. If it doesn't get devstruck in the first 5 minutes, it's not a Neptune.
@@paulernst5180 or it is a competent player in which case you are probably dead because a good Neptune/Minotaur player is everyone’s worst nightmare
More of a teapot. It smashes to pieces very nicely.
Can you do a video on the British V class destroyers? And maybe the HMS/RN/HMAS Vampire D68?
This reminds me ... why was the center gun on some (all? 3-gun) British cruisers slightly behind the other two? Most common answer I've seen is that it helped with dispersion...though it seems like a timed delay would have helped with that.
It increased the rate of fire from the turret by setting the centre crew further back and giving all the gun crews a little more elbow room. The reduction is dispersion was a happy accident.
@@mattbowden4996
The distance the center gun is back from the other two isn't enough to make much of a difference in elbow room.
@@calvingreene90 it only needs to be the depth of a human torso to make all the difference. Think about jamming nine abreast or staggering six and three.
@@lucidnonsense942 changing the barrel length doesn't change the action however. And aren't the gun partitioned in the turret?
@@calvingreene90 And yet, this why they did it and they were satisfied it made a measurable difference.
I met a chap who worked at a Tyneside shipyard after the war and he told me the story of an 11 deck Cruiser which was transferred from the Clyde to Tyneside for completion. The ship was so big that workers could spend their whole shift doing nothing ( The foremen couldn't find them ) The ship was quickly obsolete. I don't know if it was completed.
I'm a little surprised the British were eager to continue ship-building so soon after the war, given the state of the economy and the glut of existing warships. True, there couldn't be MUCH of a pause, what with the development of the Cold War and the pace of technology, but the Soviets weren't much of a naval power, either.
We were operating under the expectation that the empire would continue to be the third superpower of the world post-WW2. That required new, modern warships to maintain the position. Of course, this was only the case for the 40s and some of the 50s before it became evident that trying to maintain a global, modern navy wasn't necessary anymore
Mwah, the Dutch Navy became bigger than ever post-war with the intention to be a major player in NATO and trying to secure influence in the post-colonial East. Don't forget the USSR was still 'planning' to build a major battleship fleet + supporting ships. Turned out it would become a submarine force mostly. Post-war was quite difficult to predict.
@@Tuning3434 the Soviets had the second largest surface fleet behind the USN for the majority of the Cold War. It was enormous especially in the 80s when the Soviets got the Kirovs, Keivs, Moskvas, Udalloys, and Sovermeneys into service. Had their economy not collapsed in the mid to late 80s they also would have added 3 more true carriers and had the largest carrier fleet beside the USN. With the 3 Kuznetsovs and the 3 Kiev Hybrids.
The only reason the Soviets had a larger submarine force then the USN was because they kept a lot of obsolete old boats in reserve ready to go.
@@fullmontyuk "Is this what winning a war looks like?"
As we later found out…you stop ordering ships and you quickly lose your shipbuilding capacity.
Thanks for the video a pleasure as always
There’s a world of warships picture of a three twin 9.2 inch or 234mm guns with several twin 4.5 inch guns Mk 6. Cheshire I think it’s named.
Cheers Drach!
Another interesting doc. But maybe not building them was the right thing to do given the rate that technology was developing at the end of the war, jet aircraft and missiles etc, they would have been obsolete before they hit the water. The Navy could grow to what was needed post war to be ready for any future war duties by refitting some of the many wartime ships, so using less money and getting a bigger navy.
Friedman’s book on Battleships argues that because the ordnance ships had to survive was becoming so heavy, the amount of armour required to deflect or contain hits was making overall armour weight and displacement untenable.
Hence removing armour to take overpens and punch-through instead. It was a nasty surprise when I read it...
@@mikereger1186 Not aware of that book, thanks' I will look for it. First Michelle showed ship vulnerability to aircraft and I would 'guess' that the A-bomb and H-bomb tests carried out by the US on their ships post war would have also caused a lot of rethinking the strategy of armour too. I would say the thing I have wondered about Armour is that; - while the new is being developed do they actual work in tandem to figure out the ways it can be defeated?
@@pingpong5000 it seems that ships - at least of the Royal Navy - were built taking into consideration the largest gun calbres they were expected to face. They kept trusting in the 14” maximum of the Washington and London treaties... fools!
The problem was that even with water filled cavities, bulges, armoured belts and citadels, the thickness and weight of armour took up valuable displacement and loading weight. To maintain stability, it needed increased beam (ie width) or a larger hull altogether, in turn meaning more protection or sacrificing areas outside the citadel, of placing the armoured deck lower. All while being first limited by tonnage in treaties and then by available drydocks, slips and dockyards, not to mention the Suez and Panama canals...
Basically with the materials of the time, the ships would have ended up the size of a small Death Star to repel the torpedoes and guided missiles coming into service. The damage the first generation Fritz-X did to Warspite was a sober awakening...
@@mikereger1186 Yes, I knew that and the RN pulled a bit of a flanker with getting the extra fuel and water they needed to carry because our ships protected our trade routes around the empire/commonwealth to not be counted against ships displacement. Now sort of back-to-basics cannonball style with kinetic weapons only hypersonic.
The Neptune Adventure
still havent seen the IJN Yubari though :(
It might be a glitch for me, but the video has a youtube unlisted ion instead of the Neptune image on the search page.
I was wondering if you could do one on tboats brii subs from late 1940s to early 1960..my dad was co on silent service.
Favorite citadel popper
You should do the USS Vermont
Also referred to as 'Design Why Not?' or 'Design Why Indeed.'
Drach: "... designs V and W ..."
You Tube's algorithms: "Let's show ads for VW dealerships with this video!"
Uss iwo jima lph2 would be a great video
100,000 shaft hp is a lot.
It quick out of the hole, and that's a good thing.
Just awesome.
Great stuff!
The Admiralty should have simply adapted (Adopted??) the US Cleveland class. Fast, long ranged, powerful with a superb AA suite, and tough (Cf Birmingham, Houston). The drawbacks being stability due to all the light/medium AA guns the class would still admirably fulfilled the two roles of trade protection and fleet service. In addition and far less important, to me they are a very graceful design.
By this date the Clevelands did not at all possess a superb anti-AA suite; quite the contrary; it was entirely pedestrian. At the date these designs were being finalized, jet aircraft were already in service; the Clevelands had absolutely no answer to them at all.
@@lukeueda-sarson6732 I don't fully agree with you. For the time and conditions, the AA suite on the Clevelands Was superb. A dozen 5/38s a dozen 40MM and 20 20MM is tough to beat. (Find a kamikaze pilot and ask him what he thought about it.) At the time, jets were a rarity and would be for another 7-10 years. Even so, many of the 40s were being swapped out for 3 inch semi automatics. Whatever you were flying, your life insurance company wouldn't want you to challenge either suite.
Crew amenities? Why did this all of a sudden become an issue?
When the RN got Lend Lease Captain Class and Colony Class Frigates. They had unheard of luxuries like water coolers in every "mess deck", "cafeteria style" messing instead of table slung from the overhead where you slept, potato peelers (!), electric ranges rather than coal fired, a ship's switchboard with a phone in every compartment, a ship's laundry (only on big ships in the RN) replacing washing your clothes in a bucket, etc, etc. It was an eye-opener to the ratings and word got around about how great the Yanks had it.
The same reason Labour won the election - the majority of voters/ratings had finally realized they were being milked, and voted accordingly with their ballots/feet. Recruitment was incredibly difficult at this point. For example, the sole Dido class the New Zealand navy had at the end of the war could never be fully manned because nobody wanted to serve in such a cramped ship that was more or less a floating prison as far as crew conditions were concerned. And that's just a single ship. Why would anybody join up with the Royal Navy if they were going have to live like convicts, especially, as COL BEUSABRE points out, it wasn't exactly a secret that in the USN you didn't have to put up with such conditions.
@@lukeueda-sarson6732 I can remember that one RN officer writing he was amazed to find the ship's office came complete with a typewriter (!), carbon paper, a pencil sharpener, notebooks and huge supplies of pens, ink, pencils, etc on one small Lend-Lease vessel
..."as many 20mm guns as could be fitted without making the ship roll over"... Ah, yes...lots of conferences with the USN by that point, obviously...
And the British Pacific Fleet
I still read "NB" as "nota bene" every time. At least that's not too far off. 😅
Nice use of WOWS screenshots to illustrate the ship's configuration
Speaking of merchant navy, thoughts on the merchant aircraft carriers?
Design Y or Design WHY?
There is an Alistar MacLean book (I believe his first) called HMS Ulysses that takes place during WWII Artic convoys, the book includes skematics for the Cruiser. Do we know what ship/story the book is based on? Is the skematic based on a real class of ship?
I believe (I haven't read the book for a few decades) HMS Ulysses is a modified Dido class. Further, the author served on a Dido on arctic convoys in WWII, which is one of the reasons its such a fabulous book - the author knew the subject matter inside and out.
Black Prince, a Dido derivative.
I see someone sunk the thumbnail to the video.
Not to be confused with today's shore establishment at Faslane...
Your affiliate link for the ship models is missing an "/" and you should definitely fix it before many more people have the opportunity to click it
Interesting
Oh yes let’s make a cruiser but give it the displacement of HMS dreadnought(nearly)
ditch the smoke screen , pick a radar and call it a memptune 🤣
great vodep
Didn't see a Thumbnail for this one. Just 3 dots.
Yes. One more in the long list of Ships That Never Were.
.
almost a "super" light cruiser class
Nah that's Worcester
@@b-17gflyingfortress6 Neptune is significantly larger, it fits the definition much better than Worcester or Minotaur tbh
@@silverhost9782 I think largest light cruiser design was the Soviet Project 84 cruiser (Alexander Nevsky in Wows) it was a 1954 design and likely the last artillery warship designed by a nation. It had 8 dual purpose 180mm guns. 21k tons weight. 140mm belt. I am sure if it was build, Western powers would call it a heavy cruiser while Soviets go with light.
@@silverhost9782 Neptune 18,700 tons full load, Minotaur 18,425 tons full load Worcester 17,997 tons full load. NOT significantly larger. I'd put them as equal, especially as British machinery was not as efficient as the US due to lower steam conditions and was, thus, heavier for a given output. The Worcesters didn't need to be as heavy, they were slightly smaller but packed 125,000 shp compared to Neptune's 106,000 shp
@@b-17gflyingfortress6 Des Moines class 9X8 inch (203mm) automatic guns, 20933 tons Belt 102 to 152mm AND Project 84 was a heavy cruiser
I want to know HMS Goliath~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
scam
Always loved the Navy, the Army and Air Force hold no attraction for me. I blame the Navy open days as a child.
Q: How many guns do you want?
A: YES
This would have been pretty bonkers for a light cruiser 12 6-in automatic guns the torpedo tubes and the AA batteries
I on a somewhat unrelated note and as an American it makes me wonder if we should have retained more of the old big gun cruisers for gunfire support I mean yeah the usn kept the four isles around but if we could have kept some of the larger cruisers in the same state of readiness could have kept them in service possibly as long as today
The Iowas machinery is worn out so its a shame the Alaska class didn't stick around since they were still pretty much brand new.
@@maineiacman that's a good point on the Alaska class
Yes the underwater protection was inadequate for all the fun that could be had in world War II but as technology progressed you had dedicated to tax submarines and dedicated ASW ships and honestly I don't think even the Adams class guided missile destroyers had extensive underwater protection or any of the guided missile cruisers as it became a case of it's better off to catch the submarine before it gets near the fleet as opposed to seeing how survival your ships were when the submarine got close enough
I mean we could still be operating the Alaska class super duper cruisers today.
The ship that never was!
The USS Newport News Heavy Cruiser 148 might be a ship with an interesting history for research. If you haven’t already done so. The Alaska-class cruisers are another interesting one as well Sporting 12-inch guns that were an upgrade to the older 14-inch guns.🤔🙂
HEADNOD
Notification crew
👍
Could have just copied the US Cleveland lights or Baltimore heavy.
*_16_* torpedo tubes?! What, did they went "all japanese"?!
The E class cruisers had also carried 16 tubes. And their standard torpedo warhead contained 800 pounds of TORPEX (50 percent more powerful than TNT) which gave them the equivalent of 1200 pounds of TNT compared to the vaunted Type 93 "Long Lance" (a term not used by the IJN) and its 1080 pounds of TNT. Plus cruiser torpedoes had proved effective against the Scharhorst.
@@colbeausabre8842 yeah but those were pre war cruisers. By this time, priorities had changed considerably, nleast of which aircraft becoming the primary anti-ship weapon. And yet, the RN was still trying to plop in such a massive batery...
Joffre class carriers
head nods
Wow, what an anti aircraft cruiser.
HAY! Don't talk down on USS San Diego.
So...ultimately Neptune and Minotaur were not made up bullshit by Wargaming...that's rather refreshing
So after hearing people's feedback,you come up with a design. Most if not everyone agrees, maybe a few tweeks here and there. And just when you thought it's about to go into production. Suddenly someone else has a better idea. You ever the open minded one, decided to entertain such ideas. And so you apply the ideas, change the original design. And now the final product is completely different from the one you conceived.
Now you ask yourself, how did we get here?
The Empire lost India August 1947. The Empire could no longer afford the cost.
The value of the Pound Sterling was reset in September 1949, from $4.03
per £1.00 to $2.80 per £1.00
So to the Breaker's Yards went the fleet and to the dustbins went the plans.
But still, What If?
The people of the UK have always preferred their National Health Service to the Royal Navy.
No, India wouldnt afford the Empire any longer. sadly nowdays you only can become Vice-King of Rockall.
The saddest words in Naval Engineering are these/It might have been...
Your thumbnail is still disobeying orders sir.
Wacky Q of the day. Why torpedoes on a cruiser? I have read plenty about DDs and making torpedo runs. Did a cruiser use them, ever, and hit anything? I asking about real world, historical, usage, not a game.
Without torpedoes, the ship is horribly vulnerable to anything with enough armour to keep out its 6" guns - such as a heavy cruiser for example.
@@jrd33 All fine and good and makes sense. Did any cruiser, that we know of, ever USE and HIT anything with it's torps?
@@philiplewis8213 Yes, look at the battle of Savo Island for example. Also, the British cruiser Dorsetshire sunk the Bismarck with torpedoes...
@@jrd33 And I learn a thing!
@@jrd33 lol....it has been proven that Bismarck was scuttled....not sunk
All the time and money spent on these cruisers. .. Tiger and Blake. .. other nonsense... carriers rebuilt and rebuilt and discarded after rebuild.... they would have been better off just building frigates and retaining battleships.... you modify a cruiser its all or nothing. ... you want a missile launcher on a battleship you sacrifice a secondary mount... it's such a disaster that just keeping warspite around would have been better
Actually the money would have been spent better on what the actual threat was. Anti-submarine Warfare. Soviet surface forces was not the worry. It was their submarines. It's rather pointless to keep something like Warspite.
Pfff, costs of engineers, paper and pencils in this stage. There where companies that tried had to make a commercial bidding making the same costs. THG posted a video earlier this week comparing the funding needed to run NACA (a very capital intensive research institute compared to a design bureau with access to war time data) for a year with cost of running aerial operations in Europe for one night.
Running a floating village, in peak condition, with 1000+ paid sailors doing nothing at best, spending more money if training, is not a free-bee even if you can keep using an existing ship. Just like a car, considerable costs are spend on keeping it running, having it staffed and keeping it maintained.
I can advice to take a look into (friend of this channel) "Dr. Alexander Clarke's" video's on the Tribal class destroyers and Town class cruisers. The RN was always very keen on having many ships to have local presence instead of relying on battle-wagons that arrive too late at the place of conflict to really matter if shit hits the fan.
@@WALTERBROADDUS In the late 1940's the soviet surface fleet was a worry- Stalin was obsessed with building an enormous surface fleet and we did not know if American military support would be around long term, of course Stalin would die before his before his blue water fleet could be built, but for a time 35+ heavy surface raiders of the Sverdlov and Stalingrad classes were seen as a significant potential threat.
@@Lancasterlaw1175 they had no Logistics. They had no bases. Their surface ships rarely went in to the Atlantic or the Med. They were not that much a blue water threat then or now.
@WALTERBROADDUS
I believe the large number of large soviet cruisers has been pointed out.. these ships turned up in the north atlantic etc and posed a severe risk to any force trying to move supplies to Europe... warspite would have been an ideal escort ship.. capable of keeping up with the convoy and destroying the soviet vessels with near impunity to conventional attack... she could also have provided 15 inch gun support for a number of likely scenarios and most importantly she is not as valuable a resource as many other platforms.. so could stand in harms way.. (as usual)
Talk about feature creep. Light cruiser....LOL.
:)
90th, 30 July 2022
It's diedo just as it's Ajax with a J.
Please use the names the RN called them at the time. Your video about the Dutch football team was so grating. You even justified pronouncing it wrong. Bad practice in a historian.
Obligatory comment for the algorithm